“Run!”Alex Mercer didn’t stop to ask questions. He ripped the data drive from the server port, and his legs were moving before his brain caught up.Alarms tore through the underground facility. Red light strobed off metal walls. Behind him, boots hit the floor in a rhythm he recognized from every nightmare he’d never had fast, coordinated, closing.“He’s heading for Sector Seven!”“Cut him off!”He took the corner too hard and slammed his shoulder into the wall. Pain lit up his arm. He didn’t slow down. Three hours ago he’d been a government auditor with a badge and a coffee going cold on his desk. Now he was, apparently, the most wanted man on Earth, and the only weapon he had was a drive full of numbers that weren’t supposed to add up.His tablet buzzed. ELIAS KANE CALLING.He answered without breaking stride. “You lied to me.”“I know.” Kane’s voice was thin, cracking.“That’s it? That’s what you’ve got?”“You have to listen”“I’m being hunted by armed security teams, Elias!”“I

The alarms didn’t stop this time.Alex was already moving, phone still pressed to his ear, drive shoved deep in his jacket pocket. “Elias, talk to me. Talk to me right now.”“Sector Four has a service stairwell behind the west server bank. Take it down two floors, there’s a maintenance corridor that isn’t on the building schematics anyone outside my department has access to.” Kane’s voice was steadier than it had any right to be. “I’m the one who requested your Level Nine clearance be expedited, Alex. I need you to understand that before anything else happens.”Alex stopped dead in the hallway. “You did that?”“I’ve been trying to get someone — anyone — inside that file for six months. Every internal channel I tried got buried. You were the fourth auditor I steered toward HCI-EXO. The other three got reassigned before they finished reading it.”“And you didn’t think to warn me?”“Would you have believed me? A scientist on the project telling you it was worse than fraud?” A door slamme

“It’s not Priya,” Kane said.The man who walked through the hangar doors moved like he owned the room, which, Alex supposed, he probably did. Not Hayes, someone younger, in a suit too clean for a server farm, silver cufflinks catching the strobing red light, flanked by two men who kept their hands near their jackets without quite drawing anything. Nobody in the room was in a hurry. That, more than anything, told Alex how this was going to go.“Dr. Kane.” The man’s voice carried easily across the humming racks, pleasant, almost warm. “I’ll admit, I’m disappointed. I thought you’d learned your lesson after the last one.”“Marcus.” Kane’s voice had gone very careful, very flat. “This doesn’t need to go anywhere.”“It already has.” Marcus’s eyes settled on Alex with something between curiosity and pity, the way a man might look at a stray dog that had wandered somewhere it couldn’t survive. “Mr. Mercer. You’ve had quite a night.”Alex kept his voice steady through sheer will, though his p

“Move, move, move—” Priya hauled the wheel-lock the rest of the way and shoved the shaft door open, and Alex went through first, Kane half a step behind him, both of them dropping into a crouch as another round of gunfire chewed through the rack they’d just abandoned.Priya came through last and slammed the door, spinning a second lock Alex hadn’t even seen. “That’ll hold maybe ninety seconds. Maybe less. It wasn’t built to stop bullets, it was built to stop rats.”“Where does this go?” Alex’s voice bounced off concrete, close and low-ceilinged, nothing like the cathedral hum of the server hangar.“Pre-Exodus construction tunnels. This whole facility used to be a research campus before they built the black-budget wing over it. Half the maps got classified, half just got lost.” Priya was already moving, flashlight cutting a narrow cone through the dark. “I only know this section because I ran cable through here two years ago and nobody ever bothered updating the schematics to erase it.

“This is insane. This is actually insane.” Kane was pacing the length of the loading dock, phone clutched so tight his knuckles had gone pale. “We can’t just walk into a newsroom, Alex, they’ll have facial recognition flagged at every media building in the district by now”“Then we don’t walk into one.” Alex was crouched behind a stack of shipping containers, drive in one hand, Kane’s phone in the other, thumbing through contacts with fingers that hadn’t stopped shaking since the tunnel. “We send it first. From somewhere they can’t trace back fast enough to stop it.”“Send it to who? A government press office? They’ll bury it before the first reporter finishes their coffee.”“Not a press office.” Alex found the name he was looking for, a contact from three years back, a woman who’d broken half a dozen stories nobody else would touch. “Dana Okafor. Investigative desk, used to be with the Federal Times before they folded. She did the piece on the water rationing scandal two years ago, t