The school's digital platform was called EduConnect — a centralised hub for attendance, assignments, parent communication, internal notes. Naina's login gave her access to her own dashboard and to Class 9-B's records. Standard substitute access. She could see what Kavitha Rao had done, which was part of how the handover was supposed to work.
What she should not have been able to see — what she only found because she was looking at the wrong thing at the right moment — was Kavitha Rao's last activity on the system.
She had been reviewing the class's assignment history on Tuesday night when she noticed, in the activity log at the bottom of the dashboard page, a line that said: Last modified: K. Rao, Tuesday 10:47 PM — Grade updated: Assignment 3, Dev Malhotra.
Tuesday. Yesterday. Three weeks after Kavitha Rao had supposedly taken personal leave. Someone, logged in as Kavitha Rao, had updated a student's grade at ten forty-seven PM on a Tuesday night.
The grade: Dev Malhotra's Assignment 3 — a literary analysis. Original grade: B+. New grade: A-.
Someone was logged into Kavitha Rao's account, accessing student records, and changing grades.
