We move deeper into the facility.
The air drops colder alongside a stronger smell of rust.
We pass through a heavy steel door onto a catwalk overlooking the main processing floor. A cavernous space, lit by floodlights. Trucks idle below while men move crates.
It’s a staging ground.
The soldier shoves me toward a small room at the end of the catwalk. It’s a glass-walled office, suspended over the drop, acting as the foreman’s observation deck.
He opens the door and shoves me inside.
“Sit.”
A metal desk anchors the room alongside a chair. A cot resides in the corner, holding a thin gray blanket.
He places a ruggedized laptop on the desk, connecting a thick satellite cable to the back.
Then he does something that drops my stomach to the floor.
He reaches to the side of the chassis, flipping a physical toggle switch disabling the network interface card, then locks it in the ‘OFF’ position with a tiny barrel key strung on his dog-tag chain.
The tags swing loose as he leans across me. The little brass key winks on the chain, and his throat, the soft hollow beneath his ear, sits a hand’s width from my face.
Go for the eyes, Iris. Or the throat.
My father’s voice, from a parking garage a lifetime ago, the night he first threaded my keys through my knuckles and told me what to do with them. I run the triage in a single heartbeat. Fifty feet of open air. A dozen armed men on the floor below. No door I could reach before they cut me down. A strike buys three seconds and costs me everything.
So I don’t take the throat.
I take the key.
The rake-and-palm he drilled into me a hundred times, the one I never landed in that garage because Boyd caught my wrist first. Two fingers, the slack of the chain, a flick of the wrist I have owned since I was sixteen. The barrel key lifts into my fist. The soldier straightens, oblivious, the tags settling back against his chest.
“Mercer’s orders.” He doesn’t look at me again. “The uplink stays dead until he comes up here to watch you type. Prep your code locally. No outbound signals until the boss watches over your shoulder.”
He walks out. The lock clicks.
I’m suddenly alone.
I rush to the door and try the handle. Locked. I press my face against the glass. The entire facility stretches below, the entrance where the SUVs are parked, and the tunnel mouths descending into darkness.
I sit trapped in a glass cage, suspended fifty feet above the ground.
I turn to the laptop. My hands shake so badly I barely hit the keys.
If I wait for Mercer to unlock the network, he’ll stand right here. He’ll see exactly what I type. He’ll realize in five seconds that I’m not pinging an encrypted server in Switzerland, but just typing nonsense into a local command prompt. The bluff dies, and so do I.
I need the network live now so I can build a fake server interface looking authentic before he walks through that door.
I open my fist. The barrel key sits in my palm, warm from the soldier’s skin, a stubby cylinder of cheap brass.
The kind of small, stupid thing that decides whether people live. My father knew that. He spent his nights teaching a teenager to turn her keys into a weapon, and for fifteen years, I thought the lesson was about the eyes and the throat. It wasn’t. It was about taking the one piece of metal that opens the door before anyone notices it’s gone.
I fit the key into the lock on the network switch. My hands tremble. I force a breath, regulate, find the same stillness I find with a scalpel poised over an open chest.
It turns.
I slide the switch to the ‘ON’ position.
