Dev was quiet for a moment. Then: "She stayed late two weeks before all this happened. Just me, that evening. She was on her laptop and she got very quiet and then she called me over and showed me something. A spreadsheet. She said: 'Dev, what do these numbers tell you?'"
"What did they tell you?"
"That the six students on Iyer's list — their internal assessment marks had already been adjusted. The original marks, from the previous year's teacher, were lower. The adjusted marks were what was in the current system. Someone had gone into the system and changed the baseline." He looked at Naina. "Ms. Rao said whoever had changed the historical marks had done it carefully — small adjustments, not dramatic. But she had the original mark sheets, printed, from the previous academic year. She had kept them. She compared them." He paused. "The system records had been changed. The paper records hadn't."
"Paper records that she kept."
"She kept everything. She was very careful about documentation. She said—" He almost smiled, a shadow of something. "She said, 'Dev, the value of a paper record is that no one can log into it and change it at ten-forty-seven PM.'"
Naina was very still. No one can log into it at ten-forty-seven PM. The grade change. Last Tuesday. Kavitha Rao had logged into the system at ten-forty-seven PM and changed Dev's grade. And Dev had just told her — Kavitha had told Dev about the unauthorised late-night system changes. She had used the specific time as an example. And then someone, maintaining her digital ghost, had used exactly that time.
"Dev," she said. "That grade change on Tuesday night. I don't think Kavitha did it."
He stared at her. Then: "Someone has her login."
"Someone in the school. And they used the specific time she mentioned to you as a signature. Or a mistake. Or a message." She paused. "Where are the paper records? The ones she was keeping?"
"Her classroom desk," he said. "Locked bottom drawer. She had the only key." He paused. "I think she still has it. She would have taken it with her."
"Then the drawer is still locked," Naina said. "And whatever is in it is still there."
They looked at each other across the table. A substitute teacher and a thirteen-year-old boy, both of them in possession of different pieces of the same picture, both working out what the picture showed.
"What do we do?" Dev said.
"You go home and be a normal student," Naina said. "You don't tell Ananya we talked. Not yet." She paused. "And I go back to school and find out what's in that drawer."
