#CHAPTER 141: Fallout

Sarah POV “I can’t take you anywhere,” Zane said from the doorway. I looked up from the teacher’s desk where I’d set up my laptop and burst into a smile. I hadn’t seen him for three days, though we’d been speaking on the phone frequently, and I’d missed him and the girls terribly. Travis had managed to gather up an educational taskforce of fifteen professors from the territory’s top two colleges, Mills and Cavendish, to descend upon the district’s schoolboard like a plague of mortarboard-wearing locusts. Students and faculty were being interviewed, and it was clear we had several cases of corruption, including in the scholarship oversight committee who had made up names of recipients so they could pocket the funds. “It’s the nature of teachers,” Dr. Preston had told me during a meeting three days ago while we were still trying to figure out just how bad things had gotten. “The profession attracts the best and worst kinds of people, the ones who are devoted to the students desp