The panel scanned the card. A quiet chirp. Orange light.
She punched in the code Marshall had given her. Green light.
The lock disengaged.
Norah slipped into the narrow corridor that led to Summit’s digital heart.
The temperature dropped instantly—heavy air-conditioning humming around racks of servers like a mechanical pulse. The overhead lights cast long, sterile shadows across the floor. She’d walked past this area a hundred times during the day.
Now she was trespassing on a level that would get her fired, blacklisted, sued, or...possibly killed.
She forced that thought away. Later. She could panic later.
Just slide the drive into any open port, and I’ll take care of the rest. Don’t touch anything else. Don’t linger.
The server room was a metal forest—towering racks lined in neat rows, each blinking with tiny LED constellations. The low, constant drone of cooling fans made the air vibrate.
She inhaled deeply.
Save the world? No. But she could help. She could do this.
She moved down the row until she saw a vacant connection slot exactly where Joey said it would be. Her fingers trembled as she pulled the flash drive from her pocket—a slim silver device that shouldn’t have been capable of doing more than storing spreadsheets, yet somehow was about to hand Joey the digital equivalent of an unguarded vault door.
She hesitated.
Just one second.
A flicker of guilt twisted through her. If she was wrong—if this really was a misunderstanding buried in too many layers of bureaucracy—then she was betraying a man who had shown her nothing but respect.
Richard Hale didn’t seem like the kind of person who would knowingly feed money into something violent or corrupt. He didn’t act like the men Marshall described, the ones who hid knives inside handshakes.
She still believed that. Shehadto believe it.
But belief didn’t change the numbers. And it wouldn’t save her if she guessed wrong.
If she walked away from this—if she pretended she hadn’t seen the patterns, the anomalies, the mathematical fingerprints of something rotten—then what was the point of all the years she’d spent believing numbers meant something? That truth could be measured, proven, exposed? The Syndicate wasn’t arumor anymore; the data told a story, and she was the only one who’d bothered to read it. If she didn’t act, the harm that followed would live on her conscience as surely as on theirs. It wasn’t heroism. It wasn’t faith. It was simple math. If no one intervened, people would get hurt. And if she turned her back now...she’d be choosing to be part of the problem.
She’d built her whole life on the premise that truth lived in the data—that if you followed the numbers long enough, they would take you somewhere solid. And they had. They’d taken her straight into the rotten machinery NorthBridge was wired into, straight toward the Syndicate’s shadow. But tonight, standing in this empty building with Marshall’s warnings still vibrating in her ribs, she felt the limits of her equations. The numbers told herwhatwas happening. They couldn’t tell herwhy. They couldn’t tell her how to survive it. They couldn’t promise that doing the right thing would matter, or that anyone would ever know she tried. For the first time, she felt the fault line between certainty and conviction—between what she could prove and what she might have to trust anyway.
She wished numbers were enough here. Numbers she could audit, verify, force into truth. But this—this shadowed world Marshall had opened—wasn’t something she could solve with a formula. For the first time in years, she felt the edge of something she couldn’t measure. Something that might require faith in something or Someone...more. And she didn’t know what to do with that.
She slid the drive into place. There was no dramatic sound, no alert. Just a tiny blink of light and a soft hum as Joey’s backdoor program latched onto the network.
Norah exhaled shakily. One step done.
She pulled out her phone, typed the single pre-agreed message, and hit send.
Norah: Package delivered.
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
Marshall: Confirmed. Get out clean.
Clean. Right.
Norah glanced back at the servers, their light pulsing like the heartbeat of a giant. She forced her legs to move. Careful not to brush anything, careful to leave no sign she'd ever been here.
She slipped out and gently shut the door.
