He sits in the back. Never raises his hand. Not out of shyness—he just doesn’t like wasting moves.

His notebooks are always clean. Notebooks, plural. One for school. One filled with sketches of floor plans, names, questions. Not answers—just questions.He’s already clocked which teachers leave their rooms unlocked during lunch.Already figured out how to walk from one side of campus to the other without getting seen by security. But he doesn’t do anything with it. Not yet.

He wears layered hoodies and hand-me-down jeans.Carries a calculator he never uses and a deck of cards he’s always shuffling.He’s not popular, not hated—just ignored.But every teacher quietly notes: “Smart. Underachieving. Could go either way.”

At home, he lives with his uncle, who’s asleep on the couch more than he’s awake.There’s no structure. No one checks if Danny did his homework. No one asks if he’s okay.His dad’s locked up in a federal facility upstate—white collar stuff. Danny hasn’t visited. There’s a photo on Danny’s desk. His dad, smiling. Back before the fall. Danny stares at it like he’s trying to solve a riddle. “You got caught,” he mutters one night. “That’s the part I’ll never forgive you for.”

It’s an ordinary Tuesday. Danny’s sitting in the library. He’s supposed to be researching for an economics project.Instead, he’s staring at the school’s old blueprints he found in a dusty storage folder online.