Fred’s voice was clinical in her implant. Professional. She hadn’t turned off the visual feed on her lens, so he had to know what they’d been up to in the closet.
Yeah… she’d think about that later. Much later. Preferably never.
The corridor forked to the left, and Raaze moved, putting himself between her and the opening ahead before she’d even registered it. His larger body shielded her from view as they passed.
Twenty meters. Service door on your right.
Another junction and another gap, but this time she was watching. Raaze did it again… that smooth pivot and move alongside that looked casual but wasn’t.
Almost there, Fred said. The door is marked with a yellow maintenance stripe. Turning left in ten… nine…
Focus. She could unpack whatever was going on with Raaze later.
They turned, and it was right there. Yellow stripe across the center, access panel glowing a soft amber, indicating it was locked but not alarmed. Beyond it, according to the schematics Fred had pulled, was the archive’s inner security checkpoint. And after that?—
This is as far as my route takes you. The inner door is on a separate system. Isolated from the main network. You’re going to have to do this one yourself.
“Yeah,” she kept her voice low. “That’s why I brought tools.”
Raaze positioned himself at the corner, watching both approaches. His posture had shifted the moment they’d stopped moving… looser through the shoulders, weight balanced on the balls of his feet. Ready. For what, she didn’t want to think about. But whatever it was, he was ready.
Her knees hit the cold floor, and she pulled a thin, flexible multi-tool from her kit. Her hands were steady despite the adrenaline racing through her system.
The outer panel came off easily. Just four screws with standard threading, not at all what she was expecting from an alien installation. Shouldn’t they have something more exotic than screws that could have been made in any human factory?
She sat back on her heels as she pulled the panel off and looked inside. Yeah… this was going to be fun. The Healer’s Hall security wasn’t residential garbage like V’Teth’s door had been. This was proper encryption and proper hardware. Which meant it was going to be a proper pain in her ass.
The checkpoint guard is due back in eleven minutes.
“Got it.”
The lock fought her. It wasn’t just a tumblers-and-pins game; it was a digital handshake wrapped in a physical deadbolt. She slid the probe in, waiting for resistance. The first pin clicked, and she almost smiled. Almost. She knew better than to tempt fate.
The bypass she tried got rejected, and she hissed between her teeth as the mechanism clicked back to neutral as if it were personally offended. The second attempt made it further, the tumbler shifting against the probe, but then the failsafe kicked in and reset the whole sodding thing.
Her hands were sweating, so she wiped them on her thigh, and tried again.
Seven minutes.
“Fred. I swear to?—”
“He’s not wrong.” Raaze’s voice was low and calm. He hadn’t moved from his post at the corner of the corridor. “But you’ve got this.”
She didn’t answer as she kept working. The third bypass was working. She felt the mechanism respond to the probe’s frequency, which meant she was close. The tumbler shifted. Applying pressure to the secondary catch, she held her breath, and?—
Click.
The door slid open in front of them.
Raaze glanced back at her, one eyebrow arched. “Useful skill set.”
She grinned, packing up her tools and sliding them into a thigh pocket. “I have layers.”
“Clearly.”
The archive stretched out ahead of them, rows of storage units arranged in precise geometric patterns. Emergency lighting cast everything in a dim blue glow, the kind that made shadows pool in corners.
She moved between the rows until she found the secondary door Fred had marked on her lens display. It was smaller than the outer entrance, tucked into an alcove like an afterthought.
