📍 The Observatory, Adewale Academy
🕕 6:00 AM
Warmth.
That was the first thing Maka registered—a solid, steady warmth along her back, and the gentle rhythm of breathing that wasn't her own. Not the frantic, anxious heat of a server farm or the stale warmth of a Surulere afternoon, but something entirely new. Something peaceful.
She opened her eyes to the pale, pre-dawn light filtering through the great glass dome of the abandoned observatory. Dust motes danced in the beams like tiny rebels. She was curled on their nest of smuggled blankets and pillows, and Bayo was asleep beside her, one arm draped loosely over her waist, his breathing even and deep.
His face, in repose, was stripped of all its calculated masks—the arrogance, the smirk, the strategic calm. The sharp, beautiful lines were still there, but they were softer now, relaxed. He looked younger. Human.
The memories of last night washed over her, not in a torrent, but in a warm, steady wave. The victory. The team's euphoric, disbelieving celebration in The Underflow, where even the humming servers seemed to pulse with triumph. The way Bayo had found her in the chaos, his hand slipping into hers, his voice a quiet murmur only for her: "Come on."
He'd led her here, to their sanctuary, high above the sleeping campus. They had talked for hours, the words flowing as easily as code once had, but this was different. They spoke about nothing and everything. The best agege bread in Surulere (her pick: Mama Chidi's by the roundabout). The first thing he'd ever sold as Lagos Underground (a custom-designed logo for a struggling band). The constellation of freckles on her mother's nose that only appeared in the dry season. They had fallen asleep to the sound of their own laughter, too exhausted for anything more, but more intimately connected than any passionate encounter could have achieved.
He stirred, his eyes fluttering open. Dark, sleep-softened, and instantly focused on her. A slow, real smile touched his lips, the kind that reached his eyes and carved faint, genuine lines at their corners.
"I've never seen you look peaceful before," he said, his voice rough with sleep.
"Maybe I've never been peaceful before," she replied, her own smile forming in answer, a reflex as natural as breathing.
He shifted, propping his head on his hand, his other arm still a comforting weight around her. He traced the line of her jaw with a feather-light touch, his fingers calloused from basketball and holding a stylus. "I could get used to this view."
The moment stretched, perfect and fragile, suspended in the quiet dawn. Then, the real world intruded with the aggressive buzz of Maka's phone on the dusty floor. Layo's name flashed.
Layo: You alive? Or did the Adebayo heir finally murder you in your sleep? Location pls. Bearing snacks. P.S. Dad got his full pension AND backpay! Told him it was all thanks to my brilliant campaigns 😎 He says thank you. We're good.
Maka showed him the screen, her heart lifting at the news. It was one less weight on all of them.
He groaned, dropping his head back onto the pillow with a theatrical sigh. "The dorm curfew was a small price to pay for last night," he grumbled. "I wasn't ready to share you with the world yet."
"Layo isn't the world. She's the keeper of the alibi," Maka said, typing a quick reply. She sat up, running her hands through her tangled hair. The spell was broken, but the warmth of it remained, a new, permanent layer between them.
---
📍 The Steps of Omega Wing
🕗 8:15 AM
The walk back to her dorm was a study in the new, unsettling reality. The campus, usually buzzing with the purposeful energy of students rushing to lectures, seemed to move in slow motion around them. Every head turned. Whispers trailed in their wake like persistent ghosts.
Is that them?
...saw them together last night...
...think it's real or just for show?
Maka kept her spine straight, the way her mother had taught her, but she felt the weight of a hundred stares like physical pressure.
"Are they always like this?" she muttered, her voice low.
"Only when you've just publicly dismantled a billionaire's legacy and then been seen holding hands with his disinherited son," Bayo said, his tone deliberately light, but his grip on her hand tightened almost imperceptibly. "They don't see us. They see the story. The scholarship student and the prince who chose love over legacy."
They reached the stone steps of Omega Wing. The 10 PM curfew had long since passed, and the morning exodus was in full swing. This was the arena of awkward, public goodbyes, and they were now its main attraction.
"So," he said, turning to face her, effectively ignoring the students flowing around them like a river around a rock.
"So," she echoed, a small, self-conscious smile playing on her lips.
He leaned in, and for a heart-fluttering moment, she thought he would kiss her right there, in front of everyone. But he stopped a breath away, his lips brushing her ear instead, his voice a private whisper that sent a shiver down her spine.
"Today, we try to be normal students," he murmured. "Meet you at the library after Economics?"
She nodded, her cheek brushing against his. "Try not to be late."
He pulled back, his eyes sparkling with a challenge that was now fond, not fierce. He gave her hand one last squeeze before turning to leave. Maka turned to face the dorm doors, taking a deep breath.
"Get a room!" a familiar voice cackled from above. She looked up to see Layo leaning out of their third-story window, grinning maniacally. "Preferably one without a curfew! Now get up here, I have puff-puff and all the gossip!"
The spell was well and truly broken. But as Maka climbed the stairs, the ghost of his touch still warm on her hand, she decided she didn't mind.
---
📍 Campus Café
🕚 11:00 AM
"Normal," Maka decided, was a relative term.
Sitting with Bayo at a small table in the bustling campus café, she felt like a specimen under a microscope. The clatter of cups and the hiss of the espresso machine seemed unnaturally loud, a stark contrast to the observatory's sacred silence.
"This was a mistake," she murmured, staring into her cup of tea as if it could offer an escape.
"No, it wasn't," Bayo said, his voice calm as his eyes performed a slow, strategic scan of the room. He met the stare of a Legacy Club member from a nearby table, holding the boy's gaze until he flushed and looked away. "We can't live in the observatory forever. We have to own this. Otherwise, they win. They force us back into the shadows."
Just then, a shadow fell over their table. Temi stood there, her smile a perfectly calibrated weapon, her designer bag slung over one shoulder like a shield.
"Bayo. Maka," she said, her voice dripping with a honeyed venom. "So brave of you to be so... public. The campus gossip is just fascinating lately. So many questions about... priorities and distractions." Her eyes, cold and assessing, flicked between them. "But I'm sure it's all just chatter. You both are far too... pragmatic for that."
She glided away before they could form a response, leaving a trail of expensive perfume and implication in her wake. The air at their table had gone cold.
"See?" Maka said, the familiar dread coiling in her stomach. "It's starting. They'll use 'us' to get to me. To undermine everything."
Bayo's hand tightened on hers, his grip firm and grounding. "Let them try." His phone buzzed on the table. A preview of a news alert flashed: Global Finance Leaders Convene Emergency Session on "Digital Asset Regulation." He flipped it over without a second glance, the gesture dismissive and final. "They're fighting the wrong battle. They think our relationship is a vulnerability." He leaned forward, his gaze intense, blocking out the entire café. "They have no idea it's our strongest piece of armor."
---
📍 The Okoro Living Room, Surulere
🕡 6:30 PM
Bayo stood in the middle of the Okoro living room, looking more out of place than a peacock in a chicken coop. He'd traded his academy blazer for a simple, dark shirt, but his posture, the way he held himself, still subtly screamed "Ikoyi."
Maka's father watched him, arms crossed, from his worn armchair, his expression unreadable. Her mother bustled about, offering Chapman and chin-chin with a nervous energy that filled the small room.
"So," her father began, his voice a low rumble that demanded attention. "You are the one causing all the trouble for my daughter."
"Baba!" Maka hissed, her cheeks burning.
Bayo, to his credit, didn't flinch or look away. He met her father's gaze squarely. "I like to think we're causing the trouble together, sir."
A flicker of something—amusement? respect?—crossed her father's face. The standoff was broken when the old television flickered and died with a pathetic fizzle, the evening news anchor cutting off mid-sentence.
"Not again," her father sighed, heaving himself up.
"Let me," Bayo said, already moving. He knelt before the set, his long fingers probing the back panel with a natural curiosity. "Do you have a screwdriver?"
Maka fetched her personal toolkit, the one she used for repairs at Bello's shop. For the next twenty minutes, Bayo was absorbed in the guts of the television. Maka's mother watched, her initial suspicion giving way to quiet, focused observation. He asked her father for help holding a wire steady, and the two men's heads were bent together over the circuitry, a silent, focused collaboration.
Maka watched his long, elegant fingers—the same ones that designed for Lagos Underground and wielded a multimillion-naira stylus—fumble with a rusty screw from her father's old toolkit. A shadow of frustration crossed his face, so brief she almost missed it, a remnant of a life where things were replaced, not repaired. This was his life now. And he was choosing it, screw by stubborn screw.
When the screen crackled back to life, the news anchor reappearing as if nothing had happened, Bayo sat back on his heels, a smudge of grease on his cheek. Her father clapped him on the shoulder, a solid, approving thump that spoke louder than words.
"Good hands," he grunted.
It was the highest praise Maka had ever heard him give. As Bayo looked up at her, his face breaking into a triumphant, slightly bashful grin, she felt a surge of something so powerful and profound it stole her breath.
---
📍 The 24-Hour Library
🕘 9:00 PM
They found a carrel in the very back of the library, hidden by shelves of dense philosophy texts that smelled of old paper and forgotten arguments. The "normal" study date.
Maka was buried in an economics textbook, the concepts of market elasticity feeling abstract and distant. Bayo was sketching in his pad, the Lagos Underground stylus moving with its usual quiet grace. Her foot was tucked under his leg, a point of contact, a steadying current that connected them in the silence.
She looked up from a complex equation and found him watching her, not with the calculated, analytical focus of their early days, but with a warm, unwavering tenderness that made her stomach flutter. She remembered the boy on the pristine pavement, all sharp lines and unspoken challenge, a fortress of privilege and pain. She marveled at the man he was becoming here, surrounded by the quiet, tangible evidence of a world built on something real and earned.
"What?" she whispered, a soft smile tugging at her lips.
"Nothing," he said, his own smile mirroring hers, effortless and true. "Just... this."
And in that perfectly ordinary moment, surrounded by the quiet rustle of pages and the faint, dusty scent of knowledge, Maka understood. The revolution had been fought in lines of code and strategic whispers. It had been won with Poison Pills and digital antibodies. But this—this quiet, unremarkable happiness, this deep, quiet partnership that had become her source of strength—was what they had truly been fighting for. The right to be bored together. The right to be unremarkable and in love.
Her quartz bracelet, which had been silent all day, pulsed once, a gentle, warm thrum against her skin, as if Alimotu herself was nodding in approval of where Maka had finally found her anchor and her power.
---
📍 Outside Omega Wing
🕙 10:00 PM
They stood once more on the worn stone steps, the dorm matron a silent, watchful statue by the heavy doors, her arms crossed.
"This is ridiculous," Bayo muttered, eyeing the matron with a mix of irritation and amusement. "I feel like I'm sixteen."
"Rules are rules, 'Adebayo heir'," Maka teased, bumping his shoulder with hers, savoring the solid feel of him.
He turned to her, his face serious in the yellow glow of the porch light. "Today was... good. Despite everything."
"It was," she agreed, meaning it with every fiber of her being.
He leaned in, and this time, he did kiss her. It wasn't desperate or fierce, but soft and lingering, a promise of more mornings, more quiet libraries, more of this.
From three stories up, a familiar, piercing whistle cut through the night. They broke apart, laughing, the sound echoing in the quiet courtyard.
"GOODNIGHT, LOVE BIRDS!" Layo's voice echoed, followed by the definitive slam of their dorm window.
Bayo rested his forehead against Maka's, his laughter mingling with her own, their breath misting in the cool night air. "I really don't like your roommate."
"You love my roommate," she corrected, her voice soft.
He sighed, the sound full of mock resignation and genuine contentment. "I do. She's part of the package." He was part of her world now, all of it.
He kissed her once more, a quick, firm press of his lips that held the weight of a vow. "Tomorrow. Library. Don't be late."
"You either."
She watched him walk away, his silhouette merging with the shadows between the pools of campus light until he was gone. Then she turned and climbed the steps, the matron holding the door open with a faint, unexpected smile that felt like a small, hard-won victory.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Not Layo this time, but an official email from the Office of Academic Scholarships and Grants. The subject line was stark and impersonal: "Meeting Request Regarding Your Academic Status." The warmth from the bracelet on her wrist seemed to cool for a second, a silent, metallic echo of the challenge waiting for her in the morning.
But then she pushed the heavy door open and saw Layo waiting for her inside, holding out a bag of greasy, golden puff-puff like a peace offering, her face alight with shared secrets and unshakable loyalty. The warmth in the bracelet returned, steady and strong.
Whatever storm was coming, she wouldn't face it alone.
For the first time since she'd stepped through the academy gates, the silence that settled around her as she entered the dorm didn't feel expensive or threatening.
It felt like coming home.
And as she traced the path he had taken in her mind, she realized, with a certainty that settled deep in her bones, that home wasn't a place anymore.
It was a person.