Kane meets us at the junction of the south corridor. Flashlight in hand, face carved from the same stone as the walls, utterly unreadable. Behind him, Dylan. And behind Dylan, Sarah, carrying a laptop and a coil of ethernet cable.
"Report," Kane says.
"Primary systems are down. Communications, security, environmental controls." I list the damage the way I'd list casualties, each item carrying a weight that makes the next one heavier. "The cascade attack hit the central comm relay during the synchronization window. Marsh timed it to exploit the handshake protocol between primary and backup channels. When the relay went down, it triggered a cascading failure through every connected system."
"Can you bring it back?"
Willa's voice comes through the backup comm before Kane can respond. Calm. Clinical. The professional register of a doctor running triage in conditions that aren't designed for triage.
"Medical bay is on emergency power only. I've got roughly ninety minutes before the temperature-sensitive medications exceed viable storage range. The epinephrine and the broad-spectrum antibiotics will hold. The antivenoms won't. The surgical anesthetics won't." A pause, brief enough to be a breath and long enough to carry the weight of a calculation no one wants to make. "I'm moving what I can to the cooler in the communal kitchen. It'll buy time, not a solution."
Kane absorbs this without visible reaction, but his hand moves to the wall beside him, pressing flat against the stone, and the gesture is so uncharacteristic that I recognize it for what it is: a man grounding himself against the physical reality of his mountain while the systems inside it fail.
Then Khalid's voice. Thin and steady on the backup channel, broadcasting from somewhere deeper in the base.
"I'm in the east corridor. The blast doors sealed when the power dropped. I can't get through to the main section."
My chest tightens. The blast doors are designed to compartmentalize the facility during a catastrophic breach, isolating sections to prevent cascading damage. They sealed automatically when the power grid failed, which means they're functioning exactly as I designed them to, and the kid I've been teaching routing protocols is alone in a sealed corridor in the dark because my failsafe worked.
"Khalid, are you hurt?"
"No. I have a flashlight. And Odin." A pause. The sound of a dog's claws on stone, shifting weight. "How long?"
The question is steady. Controlled. The voice of a young man who has learned that panic doesn't open doors and patience sometimes does, and the composure in it is worse than fear would be because the composure means he's been in worse situations and survived them by staying exactly this calm.
"We're working on it," I say, and the words taste like every promise I've ever made to the people on the other side of my screens. True in intent. Uncertain in outcome. "Stay on this channel. I'll get the doors open."
"Copy."
The word comes back in the cadence I taught him. Willa's voice cuts through the channel again. "Tommy, Khalid's east corridor connects to the secondary ventilation loop. With the environmental controls degraded, the backup ventilation in that section is running on residual airflow only. If the primary system doesn't restore within two hours, the oxygen levels in that sealed section will drop below safe concentration."
The words land in my chest like a physical blow. My failsafe sealed the east corridor. My blast doors locked a kid in a section with finite air. The system did what I designed it to do, and what I designed it to do is suffocating someone I care about.
"Khalid, listen to me." I keep my voice level. Steady. The voice I use when Mercer's in a corridor and the contacts are closing and the margin between instruction and catastrophe is measured in seconds and tone. "The air in your section is going to get thinner. You're going to feel it in about an hour, maybe less. Headache first, then fatigue. When that happens, I need you to lie down. Flat on the floor. The freshest air in a sealed space settles lowest. Odin will lie down with you. You stay there until I get the doors open."
"Copy." The same cadence. The same steadiness. And underneath both, the faintest tremor that tells me Khalid understood the subtext of what I just said: the air is finite and the timeline is real and the man responsible for the systems that sealed him in is asking him to trust that the same man will get him out.
Dar's fingers accelerate on the keyboard beside me. I glance at her screen and see what she's doing: she's reprioritizing thesystem restoration sequence, moving the blast door controls and ventilation to the top of the recovery queue ahead of communications, ahead of security feeds, ahead of everything except the backup server itself.
She didn't ask. She heard Willa's assessment, calculated the priority, and started the work.
"Ninety minutes," she says without looking up. "That's my target for door control restoration. I need you to hold the backup server stable while I reroute power to the east corridor ventilation independently of the primary grid."
"Can you do that?"
"I can bridge the backup generator's output to the ventilation relay in the east section if you give me physical access to the junction box in the south corridor maintenance closet. It's a manual connection. Cables and switches, not code."
"That's a two-person job."
"Sarah can hold my offensive position for ten minutes. She can't run the full counter, but she can maintain the perimeter." Dar looks at me, and her eyes in the emergency red are dark and fierce and carrying a calculation that has nothing to do with systems and everything to do with the kid on the other side of a blast door whose air supply is counting down. "Ten minutes. We go to the junction box, bridge the ventilation, and come back. Khalid gets air. We get time."
I look at Sarah. She's already moving to Dar's console, her hands finding the offensive controls with the competence of a signals analyst who has been watching Dar work for weeks and absorbed enough to hold the line.
"Go," Sarah says. "I've got this."
Dar and I run.
The south corridor maintenance closet is four turns and a security door away, and we navigate it by flashlight and emergency strip, our boots loud on the stone. Dar runs ahead ofme, her beam cutting through the red-lit dark, and I follow with the toolkit I grabbed from under the backup server console.
