AURA SIMULATION

Chapter 6: The Recording

“Elias,” Alex said quietly, not taking his eyes off Marcus. “Tell me you’re recording this.”

Kane’s hand was already moving inside his coat pocket, slow, careful not to draw attention, his fingers finding something small and cool along the seam. “Since the moment he walked in.”

Marcus’s calm flickered for the first time all night, not much, just a hairline crack, but Alex saw it and filed it away like evidence. “Doctor”

“You confirmed it,” Kane said, louder now, angling his body so the small device clipped inside his collar had a clean line toward Marcus. “On the record. No ships past the first ten million. You said it yourself, thirty seconds ago, standing in a room full of seven billion stolen minds, like it was nothing. Like it was math.”

“Turn it off.”

“No.”

Marcus’s men moved, hands finally coming out of their jackets, but Marcus raised a single hand, stopping them cold. He looked, for the first time all night, like a man doing math he didn’t like the answer to running numbers Alex couldn’t see, recalculating something in real time.

“You understand what happens to a recording device in a facility with signal dampening across every sublevel, Doctor,” Marcus said, each word measured. “It doesn’t leave this room any more than his drive does. Nothing does.”

“Maybe not tonight.” Kane’s voice was shaking now, adrenaline and fear bleeding through, but he didn’t back down, didn’t so much as shift his weight. “But you don’t actually know how many copies exist, do you? You don’t know if there’s a dead-man switch somewhere. You don’t know if I already sent something out before we came down here an hour ago, a week ago, a year ago. That’s the problem with people like you, Marcus. You’ve spent so long deciding who’s inventory and who isn’t, you forgot the inventory can still surprise you. You forgot we’re not just numbers on your projections. We think. We plan. We hide things.”

For a long, suspended moment, nobody in the hangar moved. Alex could hear his own pulse over the server hum, could hear the fog hissing faintly against the cold floor, could hear, somewhere very far away, what might have been Marcus actually considering the possibility that he’d lost control of the room.

Then Marcus smiled, small, cold, entirely without warmth, a man reasserting a fact rather than expressing an emotion.

“Take the drive,” he told his men, voice clipped now, all pleasantness gone. “Take the recorder. Bring me confirmation of everything they’ve sent, everyone they’ve spoken to since they entered this building, and everyone who helped them get this far. All of it. Tonight.”

Alex thought of Priya. Of her daughter’s lottery number. Of a woman who’d risked everything on the thin hope that proof might change something.

“Leave her out of it,” Alex said. “She didn’t do anything.”

“She opened a service elevator for two men who’d just stolen classified data,” Marcus said, already turning away, already treating the matter as settled. “I’m afraid that’s already something, Mr. Mercer. In this building, that’s already quite a lot.”

The men started forward, unhurried, certain.

Kane grabbed Alex’s arm and hauled him backward, hard, deeper into the maze of server racks, shouting something Alex didn’t catch over the sudden blare of a new alarm, not the building-wide klaxon from before, something sharper, localized, a containment signal built for exactly this room, exactly this situation, like it had been waiting years to finally be used.

“There’s a maintenance shaft,” Kane gasped, pulling him between two towering racks, fog swallowing them to the knees, “behind Bank Twelve — it feeds into the original construction tunnels, before they built this place over it”

Gunfire cracked somewhere behind them, sharp and enormous in the enclosed space, and one of the server units three feet from Alex’s head burst into a shower of sparks, the smell of burning plastic instantly thick in the air.

“They’re not trying to capture us anymore,” Alex said, chest heaving, legs burning.

“No,” Kane said, not slowing down. “I don’t think they are.”

Ahead of them, in the fog and the strobing red light, the shaft door Kane had promised came into view at last, and standing directly in front of it, arms crossed, was Priya.

She wasn’t smiling.

“I heard the alarm,” she said, already turning the wheel-lock on the door behind her. “Which means you’re both about to owe me a lot more than an explanation.”