Maya sat with the principal out of basic courtesy. She kept a polite expression in place and offered the occasional nod to signal she was still listening, while quietly watching the last stragglers leave the cafeteria.
The old man talked for a while — stories from earlier years, the way schools used to work, the neighborhood as it had been. Maya's interest was minimal, but she managed a response every few sentences and let him talk. He seemed to need it.
Eventually, his gaze drifted toward the small sports field beyond the window. Something in his expression changed.
"Maya," he said, "do you know who Frank Gardes is? Bloody Rose — the man who runs this neighborhood's underworld." He paused. "He was one of my students."
Maya went still.
"And you're not the first student council president to wage a drug campaign in this school."
Wait. Maya's thoughts started moving on their own. Frank Gardes, tragic backstory — misunderstood rebel, righteous kid who fell? An undercover cop who waited years and years until he couldn't remember which side was real—
She pulled her thoughts back from the drama.
"So Frank Gardes was also a student council president?" she asked. "He ran an anti-drug campaign too?"
The principal laughed — warm, faintly sad. "You're young — always jumping to dramatic conclusions." He shook his head. "No. Frank wasn't the president. He was the one who ruined the president."
The laughter faded.
"This was before you were born. The student council president that year — sharp kid. Scholarship to the city magnet school already in hand, six months from a completely different life. He ran a serious anti-drug campaign. Hard line, no exceptions. Anything he found got confiscated and destroyed."
The principal paused.
"The first week, Frank brought a small bag of weed to school and let himself get caught. The president confiscated it and disposed of it properly. Nothing unusual. Second week, Frank did the same. Third week. Fourth. Every week, one offering, one confiscation."
Maya listened carefully.
"Then Frank arranged for someone to wait near the president's home, paying above market rate for anything that came out of the school."
A beat.
"In the second month, the president stopped destroying what he confiscated and started selling it to Frank's buyer instead." The principal's voice had gone very flat. "Third month, he was using. Fourth month—"
Silence. The cafeteria hummed quietly around them.
"Fourth month, the boy's body turned up on the Hudson riverbank. He'd been in the water three days."
Maya said nothing.
"Frank's hands were clean throughout. They always were. He never touched the product himself. Never spoke to the president directly. Never left anything that could be traced." The principal paused again. "He received the only A he earned in his entire academic career in my history class. History really does sharpen a person's wits." He smiled, and it was the most joyless expression Maya had ever seen on him. "A shame he sharpened his against his own classmates."
He paused again, and when he spoke it was with a specific kind of weight.
"Bloody Rose Frank Gardes. A very significant figure in New York's underworld now. Even the mayor of this city will not confront him directly." He let that land. "I suppose you could say he's the most successful individual I ever taught. It's a distinction I carry with nothing but shame."
"After it happened, I resigned my teaching position and became exactly what you see now — a rubber stamp in an office, a face at graduation ceremonies." He looked at her. "Until you."
He reached over and patted her shoulder once.
"You have that boy's righteousness, without his weakness. You have Frank's instincts, without his poison." He chuckled softly. "Though I'll say this — that pivot of yours just now? A little rough around the edges. Lucky for you, you had an old man around to feed you the lines at exactly the right moment."
He pushed himself upright and walked out of the cafeteria with a noticeably lighter step than he'd arrived with.
Maya watched him go.
Early-onset senility, she decided. That's the simplest explanation. I'll go with that.
The biology lab after school was quiet.
Maya had set up at the back workstation: white lab coat, rubber gloves, surgical mask. On the table beside her sat a large water tank, dark with a mass of small black specks. A frog watched her from a corner of the tank, half-submerged, unblinking.
The specks were frog eggs.
What Maya was about to perform had a particular significance in the history of Chinese science. In 1930, a Chinese biologist named Tong Dizhou had successfully completed the perivitelline membrane removal procedure — stripping away the gelatinous outer layer surrounding a frog egg without damaging the cell inside — under conditions that were primitive even by the standards of the day, at a time when European laboratories had been struggling with the same procedure for years. (TL: In Chinese textbooks, Tong Dizhou's achievement is remembered primarily as a story of perseverance and courage — a young scientist from a country with fewer resources going to Europe and accomplishing something the Europeans couldn't.)
Even with modern lab equipment, a trained biologist might spend several hours on a single egg. The success rate, even in well-equipped facilities, was far from guaranteed. The procedure demanded microscopic precision and a genuinely steady hand.
Maya had actually done this once before — the normal way, hunched over a glass slide under the school's old optical microscope, working millimeter by millimeter until she got one egg cleanly separated after nearly an hour of sustained concentration. It had drained her thoroughly.
Today was different.
Maya closed her eyes.
She picked up her steel forceps — a pair she'd fabricated herself, filing a kunai down to the right gauge over several evenings — and reached into the tank.
To her chakra-enhanced perception, a rice-grain-sized frog egg loomed like a small mountain.
She felt the membrane's texture, its tension, the precise location where the gelatinous layer separated from the cell wall beneath. She split the membrane in two clean halves and drew the egg free.
She reached for the next one.
By the end of the session she was moving in a continuous rhythm — silver flashed, a soft snip sounded, another finished egg was set aside. Maya cleared in under thirty minutes what would take a professional researcher half a day of focused work. One hundred percent success rate. Eyes closed throughout.
This wasn't because she'd somehow transcended human limits. Her chakra perception simply made the operation feel like sorting large stones by hand. The throwing-technique training had given her the precision. The perception had given her the map.
Not surgery practice, she reminded herself, setting the last egg aside. Chakra fine control. Just that.
She freed the frog into a cloth collection bag. "Sit tight until after school, then you're going home. Don't cause trouble." She tipped the unused eggs carefully down the drain — apologies, apologies — and began washing her equipment.
The school's conditions were what they were. No sterile cabinet, no temperature-controlled chamber, no tissue culture media. The frog had come from the riverbank. The forceps she'd built herself. The only piece of original school equipment was the old optical microscope gathering dust in the corner.
Get to high school, she told herself. Better lab. Better conditions. Then the real experiments.