Panicked, she searched through thousands of old emails. Finally, in a folder named "Legacy," she found it:
But the ghost in the bubble seemed to be staring at the letter .
The machine stopped.
Riz never told anyone why he chose . But when they looked up the old answer key for the 1995 Physics paper, the answer to their question 40 wasn't about the speed of light.
From that day on, every that Cikgu Fatimah printed came out perfectly clean. No ghosts. No watermarks. Just forty empty bubbles, waiting for the living to fill them.
He rubbed it. The smile grew wider.
Cikgu Fatimah zoomed in on the digital scan. For every other student, the bubbles were normal. But for Riz, and Riz alone, the 40th bubble had turned into a tiny, perfect portrait of a girl in an old school uniform—the same uniform worn by a student who had disappeared in the 1990s, on the day of a final exam.
A red light blinked. The software displayed: "Answer key mismatch. Question 40: 100% incorrect pattern."
She clicked it. The PDF opened perfectly. Forty neat bubbles, A to D, in ten rows of four. Standard. Boring. Perfect.
