AURA SIMULATION

Chapter 8: The Price Priya Paid

The shot cracked through the corridor before Alex even saw Priya raise her arm, and for one terrible second he thought she’d been hit until the mounted light down the tunnel exploded in a shower of sparks and went dark.

“Move!” she shouted, already backing toward them. “That bought us maybe ten seconds, not ten minutes”

“Transfer’s not done,” Alex said, eyes locked on the screen, the bar crawling past sixty percent.

“Then it needs to finish fast, because they can still hear us even blind.” Priya ducked as a return shot sparked off the rack beside her head, dust and shredded insulation raining down over both of them. “Elias, is there another way out of this corridor or did you two just walk us into a dead end with extra steps?”

“There’s a grate,” Kane said, already moving, scanning the wall with his hands more than his eyes in the near-total dark. “Ventilation shaft, should connect to the old loading dock”

“Should?”

“I’ve read the schematics once, Priya, I haven’t lived down here”

Another shot, closer. Alex flinched, and the transfer bar ticked past seventy percent with agonizing slowness, like the drive itself understood exactly how much was riding on it and had decided to make him suffer for every byte of it.

“Here,” Kane said, wrenching a grate free with a shriek of old metal that seemed, in the moment, loud enough to bring the whole ceiling down on them. “It’s tight. It’ll fit one of us at a time.”

“Then Alex goes first,” Priya said, not looking away from the darkness where the shooters were.

“No.” Alex didn’t look up from the screen. “Not until this finishes. If I run now and lose the drive, everything in this room was for nothing, your sister, Derek Oyelaran, all of it, for nothing.”

“And if you die in the next thirty seconds standing there, it’s also for nothing,” Priya snapped. “Proof doesn’t leak itself, Mr. Mercer.”

Eighty-five percent.

A voice echoed down the corridor not Marcus, someone else, sharper, closer to the ground, the voice of a man used to giving orders to people who couldn’t see his face. “We know you’re in the old bank. There’s nowhere left to run. Put down the device and we discuss terms.”

“They always say discuss terms,” Kane muttered, pressing himself flatter against the rack. “It’s never terms.”

Ninety percent.

“Elias, get in the vent,” Priya said. “You’re the one who actually understands what’s on that drive if it comes down to explaining it to someone afterward. I’m not losing both of you to a corridor tonight.”

“I’m not leaving Alex”

“You’re not leaving the truth,” Priya said, hard enough that Kane actually stopped moving, his hand still on the grate. “There’s a difference tonight. Go.”

Kane’s face did something complicated, and then he was climbing into the vent, boots scraping metal, disappearing into the dark ahead of them.

Ninety-six percent.

“Your turn,” Priya told Alex, without turning her head.

“Not until it’s done.”

“Alex”

“Ninety-six percent, Priya.” His hands were shaking on the drive, sweat making the casing slick against his palm. “I am not walking away from four percent. Not after everything it cost to get here.”

Footsteps now, close, deliberate, the same unhurried certainty Marcus’s men had carried in the hangar upstairs. Priya raised her weapon toward the sound, and Alex saw, for the first time all night, that her hands weren’t quite steady either.

“You should’ve had kids of your own,” Alex said. “You’d have been good at this. Protecting people. It’s obvious, watching you.”

“I have a daughter,” Priya said, eyes still on the dark. “That’s exactly why I’m doing this.”

The transfer bar hit one hundred percent, and the screen flashed green COMPLETE.

“Go,” Priya said instantly. “Vent, now, I’m right behind”

The first shooter came around the corner as Alex was halfway into the vent shaft, and Priya fired twice, driving him back into cover, and for one suspended half-second Alex let himself believe she was going to make it.

Then the return fire came, three shots in fast succession, and Priya went down against the base of the old server rack.

“Priya!” Alex twisted back toward her, and Kane’s hand closed around his arm from inside the shaft, hauling him backward.

“You can’t,” Kane said, voice breaking. “She bought us this, don’t waste it”

“She’s still alive, Elias, I can see her breathing”

“And she’ll die faster if they catch you standing over her.” Kane’s grip didn’t loosen. “Move. Now.”

Alex looked back one last time, Priya’s eyes open, finding his across the corridor, her mouth shaping something he couldn’t hear over the alarms, and then Kane pulled him fully into the dark, and the last thing Alex saw before the metal swallowed the light entirely was a pair of boots stepping slowly into view over her.