The junction box is a steel panel on the corridor wall, one of dozens I installed during the second year of construction. I know every one by location and function, and this one controls the power distribution for the east wing environmental systems. Dar holds the flashlight while I open the panel, and the interior is exactly as I left it: clean, labeled, organized with the precision of a man who knew that someday he might need to rewire his own facility in the dark.
Today is someday.
I work the connections while Dar feeds me cable from the toolkit. Her hands are steady. Fast. She anticipates which gauge I need before I ask for it, reading the wiring diagram from the panel label and calculating the load requirements in her head.
Seven minutes. The bridge connection seats. I throw the manual switch, and somewhere in the east corridor, a ventilation fan spins up from a power source that bypasses every damaged system between here and the primary grid.
"Khalid." My voice on the backup comm. "You should hear a fan."
A pause. Then: "I hear it. Odin's ears went up."
The relief hits me like a physical release, my shoulders dropping, my hands pressing flat against the cold junction box panel while my body processes the chemical aftermath of a threat that just stepped back from the edge.
Dar's hand finds my arm in the dark. Grips once. Brief and hard and carrying the specific pressure of a woman who just helped me save a kid from a flaw in my own design.
We run back to the backup server room. Sarah yields the offensive console to Dar without a word, and the transition is seamless, two women who trust each other's competenceexchanging positions in a crisis with the efficiency of a system handshake.
"The backup server is intact. I can run diagnostics, assess the damage, and start rebuilding. But the weapon isn't finished. Marsh's attack was multi-phase, and the cascade was designed to clear the field for the final component. Whatever comes next, it's coming at a system with no defenses."
Kane absorbs this with the stillness of a man who has received worse news and survived it. "What do you need?"
"Time. Access to the backup server. Dar." I don't look at her when I say it. Don't need to. Her presence beside me is the one variable I'm certain of in a room full of uncertainty.
"And I need the team to know that the framing evidence deployed with the attack. Sarah intercepted the distribution before comms went down. Fabricated data is being pushed to every institutional contact we have, designed to look like I'm the source of the breach."
The silence that follows is different from the silence of dead systems. This one has a human texture. Kane processing implications. Dylan's jaw going tight enough that I can hear his teeth grind. Sarah's hands stilling on the laptop she's carrying.
"Understood," Kane says. "Sarah, get the backup server online. Tommy, Dar, start the diagnostic. Dylan."
Dylan steps forward. His eyes find mine in the red emergency light, and what I see in them is unexpected.
Steady. Unflinching. The presence of a man who has lost everything once and made a vow to never lose anyone else.
He moves to a position behind me. Not beside. Behind. The tactical placement of a soldier covering someone's six, protecting the back of someone who needs to focus forward.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. In Dylan's vocabulary, physical positioning is a language more precise than words, and he just told me that whatever the framing evidencesays, whatever the Committee is pushing through whatever channels they still control, he believes me.
The backup server room is small. A repurposed storage space in the south corridor, lined with the minimal hardware I installed as a fail-safe because building redundancies is what I do.
What I've always done. Sarah plugs in. The server spools up with a sound that's a pale imitation of the hum I've lost, tinny and thin, but it's power and processing and it's enough.
Dar takes the offensive console. I take diagnostics. We work by flashlight and screen glow, our keyboards the only sound in a mountain that has gone as quiet as the inside of a coffin.
"Damage assessment," I say after twenty minutes of the worst diagnostics I've ever run.
"Seventy-two percent of primary systems compromised. Communications dead. Security feeds dead. Environmental controls degraded to backup. Biometric access scrambled. The cascade didn't just hit the relay. It propagated through every system connected to the comm hub, and in this facility, that's nearly everything."
"How long to rebuild?" Kane's voice comes from the doorway. He hasn't left.
"Full rebuild? Weeks. Operational minimum? Twenty-four to forty-eight hours if nothing else goes wrong."
"What's still coming?"
I look at Dar. She's been running trace analysis on the weapon's attack pattern since the backup server came online, and her face in the pale light of the screen is focused to a point that makes her features sharp enough to cut.
She is the most competent person I have ever watched work. The thought surfaces with the clarity of a system notification, urgent and undeniable, and the timing is absurd because the world is collapsing around us but the truth doesn't care abouttiming. I have watched operators breach buildings and medics save lives and Kane hold this team together through impossible odds, and Dar fighting through code in a dying mountain is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen.
"The cascade was phase two," she says. "Phase one was the diversionary assault. Phase three is the payload delivery. Marsh designed the cascade to strip the defenses, and now the weapon's core component will deploy against an unprotected system. Based on the timing patterns I've observed, we have hours. Not days."
