TOEFL

When Nadia Osei's coursework mark comes back nine points below her own careful calculation, she discovers her lecturer rewrote the marking scheme in week nine and applied it to work already submitted. What begins as a spreadsheet error becomes a formal appeal, with a placement offer, a visa and a supervisor's goodwill all riding on three documents and three dates.

Nadia Serrano, a junior analyst at an environmental testing lab, notices that every mercury reading from the Vance Creek monitoring wells ends in a suspiciously tidy decimal. Reconstructing a quarter's worth of samples, she discovers eighty-three quiet downward edits that keep a plating works inside its discharge permit — and finds that the man who made them is the man who hired her.

Three days before a make-or-break engineering deadline, Nadia's group discovers that their fourth member has withdrawn — and that the software he promised was never written. With a city water engineer coming to the panel and a paid summer pilot on the table, the remaining three must decide what can still be built, what must be abandoned, and what they owe each other.