Inside, the lobby was still and clean, the air so oxygenated it felt like I was breathing plastic. No sign of the front desk woman with the perfect hair. No sign of Victor, or Heller, or any of the other ghosts who’d paraded through my life the past week. Only the soft glow of security lights and the faint hum of the heating system.
Dante’s hand was on my arm, guiding me, but I didn’t need it; I went straight for the elevator, thumbed the button, and waited through the world’s longest thirty seconds. When the doors slid open, we stepped inside. I keyed the access pass Heller had given me yesterday. It still worked. Either she’d forgotten to revoke it, or she wanted to see what I’d do.
As we ascended, Dante leaned in, lowering his voice to a vibration I felt in my bones. “As soon as we’re in, you go to the server room and start the process. I’ll handle the other end.”
“The other end being…?”
He looked straight ahead at the mirrored elevator wall, his reflection a mask of intent. “Whatever’s waiting for us.”
I wanted to argue, to ask what he’d do if they came in shooting, but I knew better. He was in his element, and I had to be in mine.
The elevator chimed and spat us onto the research floor. I expected alarms, or at least a receptionist, but there was nothing. The lights above the glass hallway flickered.
I cocked my head, listening for the click of heels or the hush of lab shoes on tile. Nothing. The place smelled like ozone and old coffee, the same as always, but the silence was wrong. Even the servers in the side room didn’t whine. Every light was on, but I felt like I was seeing a set on a TV show, staged for someone else’s performance.
I didn’t waste time. I bee-lined for the server room. The pass beeped green on the first try. I ducked inside, half expecting to find a dead body slumped over the RAID array, but it was empty—just the steady blue LEDs blinking in the dark, quiet as a church. Dante said, “Go,” and closed the door behind me.
The routine was muscle memory. I found the main terminal, logged in with the root credentials I’d memorized off Heller’s desk, and started the data transfer. While it decrypted, I plugged in the thumb drive I’d palmed from Marco’s kit in the car. It was a bot, custom code, designed to slipstream the real files to my cloud and then nuke the backups in a single recursive cascade. It would take ten minutes, max, to get what I needed and salt the earth.
I heard footsteps—slow, deliberate—on the hallway tile outside. I froze. The footsteps passed, then came back, then stopped justoutside the door. I waited for the handle to turn, for the crash of a boot and the raze of a gun barrel, but nothing happened. I heard muffled voices, two men, speaking in that clipped, careful way that said they’d already rehearsed the violence.
I hunched over the keyboard, sweat prickling my spine. The bot was three-quarters done, files flying so fast the progress bar was a blur. I started a second process—a fork that would fake the logs and make it look like the system was still running normal. Maybe Heller would check; maybe she wouldn’t. Either way, I was on borrowed time.
The voices outside faded, then surged again. I heard a bang—a sharp one, like a fist on glass—and then a scream I recognized: Heller. The scream ended quick, cut off mid-syllable. I felt all the blood drain from my hands, but I didn’t stop typing. I watched the log dump roll across the screen, each page a tiny coffin for the work I was about to erase.
I heard another crash—closer this time, like someone had thrown a chair against the wall. I risked a glance at the security feed in the corner of the monitor: four camera angles, three empty, one flickering with static. In the fourth, I caught a blur of motion—two men in black, moving with the coordinated ease of people who did this for a living. The face of the second one, pale and close-cropped, made my lungs seize: it was the same security goon I'd glimpsed during the tour. His hands were gloved. His eyes were dead.
They were coming for the server room next.
I counted the seconds as the transfer ticked up: 91%. 93%. 95%. My hands hovered, ready to yank the drive and run, but I forced myself to wait. If I pulled the plug early, the fail-safe wouldn'tcomplete; I'd have all the proof, but leave the project alive for the next Jade-who-didn't-get-away. I couldn't let that happen.
The handle turned. I dropped into a crouch behind the server rack, clutching the thumb drive and my own wrist, counting my heartbeats. The door hissed open, and in the blue-black light, I could see one man enter, a gun drawn, silencer fat and ugly at the barrel. He swept the room—top, bottom, left, right—then paced to the main terminal. He was fast, but not a scientist. He didn't notice the progress bar, didn't see the tiny green LED still blinking above the keyboard.
I held my breath. He started to pull up drawers, moving methodically, looking for something. He found a box of gloves, a bottle of disinfectant, but nothing that interested him. I heard more shouts in the hall—Dante, definitely Dante, voice pitched and loud enough to make the walls shake. The guard flinched at the sound, then moved to the next workstation.
The window was closing. I watched the bar tick over to 100%, watched the prompt flick up: "Transfer complete. Erase?" I clicked Y, and the system stuttered, then launched into its own private apocalypse. The whir of the drives changed pitch, a whining crescendo like a death rattle. The guard spun, attention finally caught, but by then it was too late—the screens all blinked to black, and the air filled with the scent of melting plastic.
Now or never. I crawled along the floor, keeping the bulk of the rack between us, then launched myself at the door while he was still staring at the dying console. I hit the hallway running, nearly colliding with Dante in the process. He had a gash on his cheek, bright and angry, but he was grinning. In his hand, he held a bloody keycard.
“Go!” he shouted, dragging me by the arm past the broken glass and toppled chairs. We sprinted for the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. Somewhere above us, someone fired a gun—just once, then silence. I didn't know if it was aimed at us or someone else, but I didn't care. I just ran.
Dante didn’t stop until we hit the parking garage. The cold air stung my lungs, blasting the sweat off my skin. I half-expected to see Marco gone—an empty car and a cold ignition, the last card played—but he was there, engine running, hands locked at ten and two, eyes flicking between the mirrors and the stairwell.
Dante shoved me into the backseat, slamming the door so hard the window nearly shattered. “Go,” he barked.
Marco hit the gas like he was driving a stolen ambulance, tires shrieking over wet concrete. He didn’t speak, not even to ask if we were alive. He just drove, steering with the cold, surgical focus of someone who knew the exact distance to every red light and cop car in the city. I ducked low, clutching the thumb drive so hard the plastic bit into my palm.
Dante turned, checked me for blood, then checked again. He was still smiling, but his eyes were glassy, wild. “You got it?” he asked, voice sharper than the cut on his cheek.
I nodded, tried to swallow, and found I couldn’t. I was shaking, both hands, but the drive was safe—still warm from the computer, still pulsing with the last gasp of my research and the proof of what they’d done upstairs.
“Fuck,” Marco said, the first word out of him in a minute. “That was a lot more than two guys.”
Neither Dante nor I contradicted him. I twisted to see out the back window, just in time to catch a black SUV punch out of the garage ramp, headlights dead but grille gleaming with intent. They’d found us fast. Too fast.
“We’re made,” I said, like the others hadn’t already guessed.
“Yeah,” Dante muttered. “They’ll chase, but they won’t shoot. Not on the street.” He grinned again, a flash of wolf under the mask. “They need you alive.”
