Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Gunfire erupts on the radio. Knight’s channel: “BRAVO’s engaged on the perimeter. Four guards, armed, coming from the western building. We’re holding but they’re organized.”
Diaz: “Stairwell’s secure but I’ve got movement on the first underground level. Someone’s coming up.”
Render: “I’ve opened the general holding area. Arrow, Gage, Ozzy, and Lark are here. Orchid’s not.”
Lark’s there. Knight’s on the perimeter fighting to keep the exit open, and the woman he loves is one floor below him being unchained by the man I love. The mix of tenderness and violence inside that building is almost impossible to wrap my head around.
“Poe?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. Even though the reason I’m asking is the reason the lock on his corridor is still sealed.
“Second level. Behind the door I can’t open.” His voice is controlled but the edge is sharper now. “Enley. The encryption.”
“I’m through the outer layer. Working on the rotating key. Sixty seconds.”
“You have forty. The guards Sawyer flagged are going to reach the stairwell in under a minute, and when they do the extraction route is compromised.”
Forty seconds. The key changes every thirty. I need to catch it at the exact moment of transition, in the tiny gap between the old key and the new one, when the system is resetting and the shell is briefly vulnerable.
I watch the cycle. Count the interval. Twenty-nine seconds. Thirty. The key rotates. The shell flickers.
I’m through.
The innermost layer is the simplest. I crack it in eight seconds.
The new fingerprint profiles are on my screen. I load them into the rebuilt system. Reconfigure the path. Test the handshake against the updated reader.
“System is rebuilt. Deploying now.”
The signal travels through the facility’s network. Reaches the reader on the second-level corridor. The reader accepts it. The lock opens.
“Door’s open,” Render says. And then he’s moving, his radio carrying the sound of boots on concrete and controlled breathing and the particular acoustic signature of a man heading down an underground corridor toward the last locked door between him and my brother.
I sit behind the shed with the tablet on my knees and the cold night air on my face and the guilt sitting in my chest like something heavy and sharp-edged and permanent.
The system worked. The door opened. The plan—damaged, improvised, held together with the digital equivalent of duct tape—is still moving forward.
But the reason it almost failed is me. The choice I made. The access pattern I created. The gap I opened in our own security that Serafina drove a countermeasure straight through.
When this is over, Render and I are going to have a conversation. But it won’t be the conversation we planned. It’s going to be about the cost of a decision I made alone and the consequences it almost had for everyone.
The radio crackles. More gunfire. Knight’s team engaging. Diaz holding the stairwell.
And underneath it all, steady and clear, Render’s voice: “I’ve got Poe. He’s alive. We’re moving.”
My brother is alive.
The tears I’ve been holding since the container finally come. I let them fall against the tablet screen where everything almost went wrong because of me, and I keep working through them because the extraction isn’t over and the guilt can wait but the radio can’t.
I keep working.
20
Render
Poe weighs less than he should. “Where’s Orchid?”
I get his arm over my shoulder and haul him up from the cot. The first thing that hits me is how light he is. Not just thin. Emptied out. The guy I grew up with, the one who could fireman’s-carry Arrow and Gage at the same time on a stupid bet, is down to bone and willpower held together by pure stubbornness and the kind of anger that keeps people breathing when their body wants to quit.
His face looks worse than the video. Both eyes swollen now. The cut along his hairline has been opened, half-treated, and opened again. Ross was methodical about it. Poe’s wrists are raw where the cuffs chewed into already torn skin.
But he’s on his feet. With my help, yeah, but he’s standing. “Render.” His voice is wrecked—cracked, dry, the sound of someone who’s done a lot of screaming and then gone silent for a long time. “Where is she?”
I stop. “We’ll find her. I don’t know where she is, but we’ll find her.”
Poe blinks at me. “Took you long enough to get here.”
“Traffic was bad.”
He almost smiles. The muscles try, but the swelling won’t let them. I still catch the attempt, and that’s enough.
“The crew?”
“Upstairs. Arrow, Gage, Ozzy, and Lark. Knight’s looking for Orchid. BRAVO’s locking down the outside.”
“Knight came.”
“Knight came. Sawyer too. Dean sent a full BRAVO squad.”
Relief hits him so hard his knees nearly buckle. I tighten my grip and keep him upright.
“Enley,” he says. Just her name, but the way he says it carries two weeks of not knowing if the person he’d been protecting with his silence was even alive.