AURA SIMULATION

Chapter 9: Nine Minutes

“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, the one that actually got a minister removed instead of just trending for a day and disappearing.”

“You know her?”

“I audited a story she was working on once. She’s careful. She verifies everything twice before she runs it, which is exactly what we need, someone who won’t publish garbage, because garbage gets debunked in an hour and this needs to survive the first news cycle intact.” Alex was already composing the message. “If I send this to someone flashy, someone chasing clicks, they discredit her by lunchtime and the story dies with her credibility. Dana’s boring. Boring is what keeps a story alive long enough to matter.”

“How long do we have?”

“I don’t know.” Alex hit send on the file transfer, video files, financial records, the smear-campaign memo, everything Priya had bled for two floors below the city. “However long it takes them to realize we’re not still in that corridor.”

Somewhere above them, a helicopter passed low enough to rattle loose gravel off the loading dock roof, the sound settling into Alex’s chest like something physical.

“That’s not traffic,” Kane said quietly.

“No.”

“Alex” Kane’s voice cracked. “Priya. We just left her.”

“I know.” Alex’s throat tightened around the words. “I know what we did.”

“Do you? Because I keep seeing her on that floor, and I don’t know how to carry that and keep moving at the same time. I’ve never had to before.”

“You don’t get to stop and figure it out right now.” Alex’s voice was harder than he meant it. “You get to carry it and keep moving, because if we stop, everything she bought for us stops with it. That’s the deal now. That’s the only deal there is left to make.”

The phone buzzed. Message delivered. Then, twenty seconds later: three dots, pulsing, and a reply.

Is this real? Who is this?

Alex typed back fast, thumbs clumsy with adrenaline. Auditor, Federal Oversight. I have the servers, the financials, an internal memo planning a smear campaign against whoever leaked this. I have eleven minutes before I think they find me. Verify whatever you need. Then run it.

Eleven minutes to what?

To live, probably.

The dots pulsed again, longer this time.

I’m calling my editor. Don’t go dark on me.

“She’s biting,” Alex said, and something in his chest loosened for the first time in hours.

Then the loading dock door behind them opened. Not with a shriek of metal. Quietly. Almost politely, the way a door opens when the person on the other side already knows they’ve won.

“Mr. Mercer.” A voice Alex didn’t recognize, calm in the same practiced way Marcus’s had been upstairs. “You’ve had a very busy night.”

Alex turned, and there were three of them this time, guns lowered but not holstered, the posture of men who’d already decided how this ended.

“Whatever you’re about to offer me,” Alex said, “I already know it’s not real.”

“Then you understand there’s nothing left to negotiate.” The man’s eyes flicked to the phone in Alex’s hand. “Delete the message thread. Now, and this ends quickly. For you, and for Dr. Kane.”

Kane’s breath caught beside him.

Alex thought of Priya’s face in the strobing light. He thought of Derek Oyelaran’s name scrolling past on a registry that updated in real time. He thought of two billion people asleep in their beds right now, still believing a lottery number meant something.

Then he thought about the nine minutes it would take Dana Okafor to verify a data drive, and about how nine minutes was exactly the amount of time he needed to buy, whatever it cost him to buy it.

“No,” Alex said.

The man’s expression didn’t change. “That’s unfortunate.”

“Kane, run,” Alex said, already backing toward the container stack. “Whatever happens to me, you get that phone somewhere safe”

The first shot came before he finished the sentence.