Word traveled at Delhi Elite the way monsoon did through narrow streets — fast, total, and leaving nothing dry in its wake.

By the following morning, every department knew. Scholarship girl had stood up to Arnav Singh Raizada. First day. Main auditorium. In front of eight hundred people.

The reactions split cleanly along two lines.

Half the campus thought she was either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid — and couldn't quite decide which. The other half, who had spent years carefully avoiding Arnav's attention, went with stupid and didn't bother debating it.

Khushi, who had spent her first evening figuring out the library system, the tutoring schedule she planned to set up, and which of her professors had office hours on Thursdays, found out about her own campus fame from Rohan at breakfast on day two.

"You're trending," he said, setting his tray down across from her with the gravity of someone delivering a medical diagnosis. "In the group chats. There's a poll."

"A poll about what?"

"Whether you'll last the semester."

Khushi looked up from her notebook. "What are the odds currently running at?"

Rohan winced. "Sixty-forty. Against."

She went back to her notes. "Well. That gives me something to prove."

Arnav's first move came on Thursday.

Khushi's Commerce faculty had a presentation in the departmental seminar room — a first-year orientation exercise where freshmen were supposed to pitch a basic business idea to a panel of second and third-year students. Low stakes, meant to be encouraging. Professor Mehra had specifically said so: "This is just to get your feet wet. Don't be nervous."

Khushi had spent three evenings on her pitch. She had researched the microfinance landscape for women entrepreneurs in tier-two cities, built a model, referenced three case studies, and prepared notes on three different color-coded cards.

She arrived at the seminar room fifteen minutes early.

The projector was off. The clicker was missing. And when she plugged in her USB drive, nothing — her presentation file had been corrupted. Not just missing. Corrupted and replaced with a blank document with her name on it.

She stood there for a moment, looking at the screen.

Then she put the USB in her bag, walked to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and presented her entire business model by hand. Charts. Numbers. Flow diagrams. All from memory, drawn in clean lines while her peers watched, slightly stunned, and the panel of senior students looked back and forth between the board and each other.

She finished with four minutes to spare.

Professor Mehra gave her a B-plus and the kind of long look that said more than the grade.

In the corridor afterward, she ran into Arnav Singh Raizada for the second time.

He was leaning against the wall outside the seminar room, hands in his pockets, watching her walk out with an expression she couldn't entirely read. Two of his friends flanked him on either side — tall, well-dressed, wearing the comfortable expressions of people who had never had to try particularly hard at anything.

"Heard your projector had some technical difficulties," Arnav said.

Khushi stopped walking.

She looked at him. He looked back, completely neutral, not even bothering to pretend.

"Did you," she said.

"Unfortunate timing. First real presentation and all."

"Mm." Khushi tilted her head slightly. "It was inconvenient, yes. I ended up presenting from memory." She paused. "Got a B-plus. Professor Mehra seemed to think it was the most prepared delivery she'd seen from a first-year in three semesters."

Something shifted in his expression. The neutrality didn't break exactly — but it flickered.

"Must be nice," he said, "having nothing to lose."

Khushi looked at him steadily. "I have everything to lose, actually. That's why I prepared for contingencies."

She walked away.

Behind her, she heard one of his friends say something low. She didn't look back.

She didn't let herself think about the fact that her hands were shaking again until she reached the bathroom at the end of the corridor and pressed her palms flat against the cold sink.

Stop it, she told herself. He's just a boy with too much power and too much time. You have handled worse.

She thought about her father's hospital bills. About the scholarship renewal deadline. About the children she tutored on Tuesday and Thursday evenings who were counting on her to show up.

She thought about all the things she was not going to let Arnav Singh Raizada touch.

And then she dried her hands and went to her next class.

— ✦ —

Arnav watched her walk away and felt, for the second time in a week, the unsettling sensation of having planned something that hadn't worked the way he expected.

"She just — presented from memory?" his friend Karan said from beside him, sounding somewhat impressed despite himself.

"Don't," Arnav said.

"I'm just saying—"

"Don't," he said again.

But he turned back toward the corridor where she'd disappeared, and the thought that moved through him wasn't irritation, exactly. It was something else — something with more edges to it.

She hadn't broken.

He'd expected breaking. Everyone broke, eventually, when they understood who they were dealing with.

But she had stood at that whiteboard and drawn her own charts in front of a room full of people watching to see her fail, and she had done it like it cost her nothing. Like she was simply solving a problem.

It was, he thought reluctantly, extremely irritating.

And he wasn't done.