Elara didn't wait for dawn.
She packed a burner phone, a switchblade, and Amara's final transcript. No goodbye. No plan. Just direction.
The voice had said: "Where it all began."
That could only mean one place.
The dorm.
The one where Amara had last lived. The one where she died.
The building was mostly abandoned now. Yellow tape still clung to the stairwell like a ghost that refused to leave. The lights inside buzzed dimly, barely alive.
Elara moved fast.
Third floor. Left wing.
Room 317.
The door was ajar.
Inside, dust floated like memory. Amara's old posters had been torn down, but one corner remained a torn image of a firebird, wings outstretched.
Elara ran her hand along the baseboard.
Nothing.
Then she checked the closet.
A loose panel.
Behind it, wrapped in a plastic bag, was a small black flash drive.
Taped to it: one word in red ink.
"FOR HER."
She didn't listen to the file there. Not in that room. Not with the ghosts.
She drove instead, all the way to the coast to the cliffs they used to visit as girls, where Amara would climb too high and scream just to hear her own echo.
Elara sat on the hood of the car, sea wind in her hair, and pressed play.
Amara's voice came through not shaking. Not afraid.
But furious.
"They took everything from me, Elara. My body. My voice. My future."
"But I'm leaving them nothing clean to bury."
"This isn't just about me anymore. It's about the system. The council. The name."
"I need you to do what I couldn't."
"Not survive it."
"Destroy it."
Elara listened until the waves swallowed the sound.
Then she looked up at the horizon and whispered, "I will."
When she returned to the safehouse, she didn't flinch at the headlines.
Didn't react when two more newspapers labeled her "a risk to national healing."
She sat at the table and spread out every file they still had raw, corrupted, redacted.
Then she drew a map.
Names. Connections. Lies.
Khalid watched her.
"You're not just fighting back anymore," he said.
"No."
She looked up at him, calm.
"I'm rebuilding the fire."
The final lines of her plan read like scripture:
Find the council's banker.
Expose the private server.
Turn allies into witnesses.
Let the world watch it burn one name at a time.
Khalid leaned back. "You're not Elara anymore."
She smiled. Just barely.
"I'm what's left of her."