The Damaged (The Insiders Trilogy #2) - Tijan by Tijan

Miss Hayes was so formal. “Bailey. Please.”

“Bailey.” Her smile seemed a touch more genuine. “It’s lovely to meet you. After class, Hoda will show you to my office. We need to go over your program.”

I nodded. I had been expecting that.

A meeting with your advisor was normal. The rest of this was not.

“Sounds great. Thank you.”

Hoda started the tour with a bang. She marched ahead of me, and I had to hurry up, but she was already going.

“We have twelve students in our cohort. Three are half time. Nine are full time. There’s three females. You, myself, and Melissa make up those stats. The rest are guys, and we have two older adults, and when I say older, I’m meaning they’re middle-aged return students.” She passed an open classroom, nodding inside. “Classes on Monday start at nine thirty a.m. Classes on Thursday start at twelve thirty. Each is three hours long. Your advisor will go over the rest of your schedule with you. Here is our personal student lab.”

She went to a door and swept it open. It was a bricked room, no windows, just computers. Lots of computers. The printer was set up in the corner, and next to it was an attendant for the room.

“We do use the school’s library for extra studying, so if we’re not in here, more than likely we’ll be in the library. Most are graduate assistants, GAs, but loitering in the extra offices is frowned upon here. The IT department is stressing a cohesive and connected cohort with this program and so yes, that means we’re guinea pigs. There was more than the average number of student suicides last year. They’ve looked at the most isolated programs and the IT program rated high. So there you go. We’re being force-fed friends, not that you’ll be lacking.”

She paused before moving farther down the hallway. “Everyone knows who you are. And after your meeting with Ms. Wells, they’ll flock to you. Peter Francis is a god to us.” She narrowed her eyes, skimming me up and down. “If you had merited this program on your own, I’m sure you’d understand.”

Oh, snap.

My back straightened.

I felt the heat start first in my belly, and it was rolling up at a fast pace.

“Merited? On my own?” I narrowed my eyes. “You think I got in here because of who my father is?”

She went farther down the hallway, her back to a closed classroom door, and stood facing me. “I don’t think it. I know it. I work in the graduate office and I was there when Peter Francis called Ms. Busich about you last spring. I’m the one who answered the phone.”

That wasn’t—My stomach dropped.

Wait, though.

What did that mean?

I got in on my own. This was bringing up concerns from earlier, worrying if I got those scholarships because of me or because of my relation to Peter. I knew who I was. This girl, she didn’t. She had no clue who I was, which said more about her than me.

“If Peter called about me last spring, it wasn’t to get me a spot. I got early acceptance on my own.”

“Your name wasn’t even in the files until after that call. Daddy got you in. We have a B-average requirement. If you can’t hack it in the program, you’re out.”

Once she stopped insulting me, her eyes went past my shoulders, and this wasn’t the first time since we started the tour.

She stepped close, lowering her head. “You know that guy?”

I turned, seeing Erik bending over at the water fountain.

His backpack was on. The bulge was sticking out on his side, and he was watching us from the corner of his eye.

“He’s been following us this whole time.”

The jig was up.

But she didn’t say anything or wait for me to respond. Her hand went to the door and she was going inside.

I stepped behind her and turned.

Twelve sets of eyes turned my way.





THREE


They were gawking. They were whispering. They were staring.

I knew this would happen, so I ignored it all and settled in for my first class.

The professor came in, but he didn’t act any differently toward me than the rest of my peers. That was a relief. He came over to introduce himself to me. Brian Zerr. He told me right off the bat that he came from India. I wasn’t sure why he told me that, but I noted it and took a seat next to Hoda.

It was after class, after discussing advanced theories of coding systems, that it happened.

I was swarmed as soon as class was done.

I wasn’t going to remember their names. If they’d had name tags, I would’ve memorized them no problem, but they didn’t, and all the guys seemed to know each other. The university might need to rethink the idea that the IT department was one of the most isolated programs. These guys seemed like long-term buddies, asking about discord servers and if my dad was going to create the rumored AI forum.

One: that alarmed me. Slightly. It also excited me, too.

And two: artificial intelligence was unparalleled and unbarred. The possibilities of that … I was kicking myself for sticking to helping Cyclone with his robot rabbit when we could’ve been reading up on AI theories this entire summer. What the hell. Summer had been wasted, besides all the really great stuff that came out of it, like me getting a family, me getting a father, me falling in love with a scary and dangerous business guy, and you know, the whole other other world, like black markets and everything that Calhoun Bastian represented.