Page 52 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

The silver casing clatters against the rusted steel, sharp against the low hum of the generator.

Cipher stops typing, fingers hovering above the keyboard. He looks at the compass, brow furrowing.

"What is that?" Ivy leans closer, scanning the engravings on the casing.

"Arthur Masters's compass." I lean my palms against the edge of the workbench. "Lily gave it to me. Her father told her to never take it off. Said if she was ever lost, it would point her in the right direction."

Cipher picks up the compass and turns it over in his hands. The metallic sheen is dulled by years of wear, but the craftsmanship is undeniable.

"It's heavier than it should be." He runs his thumb over the hinge. "The density is wrong for a standard magnetic compass."

"It's a dead drop." Ivy reaches for a set of precision tools in a canvas roll. "Arthur Masters was one of the Consortium's lead accountants. He wasn't going to leave his daughter a sentimental trinket. He'd leave her an advantage."

Cipher slides a micro-screwdriver into the hairline seam along the back of the casing. A sharp twist produces a quiet snap. The back plate pops loose, exposing the internal mechanism.

There's no magnetic coil inside.

A high-density, military-grade USB drive rests in the hollowed-out cavity, shielded by the silver casing.

"Son of a bitch." Cipher exhales, a rare smile breaking across his face. "He hid a hardline data cache inside a piece of antique jewelry."

"Crack it." I straighten, the tactical distance returning. The mission is viable again. We're done hunting a ghost in the dark. We have a vector.

Cipher extracts the drive with tweezers and plugs it into an isolated terminal. The screen flickers, then locks down with a harsh red prompt demanding an encryption key.

"It's wrapped in a localized, air-gapped firewall." His fingers fly across the keyboard, executing brute-force protocols. "Polymorphic cipher—the encryption key changes every three seconds. Arthur didn't want anyone stumbling onto this."

"Can you break it?" Rook steps up to the workbench.

"I can break anything." Cipher's focus narrows to the screen. The hacker is in his element. "But it's going to take time. The architecture is hostile. If I trigger the failsafe, the drive wipes itself."

The screen flashes a violent yellow. A countdown timer appears in the upper right corner, the numbers bleeding away in milliseconds.

"Shit. It's a localized logic bomb." Cipher's hands blur across the keyboard. "Arthur Masters wired a counter-measure into the primary firewall. It's actively purging the sectors. We have ninety seconds before it burns the coordinates to ash."

"Ivy." I look at her. "Help him."

Ivy pulls up a chair and drags her laptop against Cipher's terminal. "I'll run a tandem decryptor. I can isolate the purge protocol in a sandbox while you attack the primary cipher."

"Isolate it now, Ivy." Sweat forms on Cipher's brow.

The timer bleeds down from ninety. Two keyboards hammer in counterpoint, fighting a war measured in milliseconds.

"The protocol just forked." Ivy's jaw tightens. "It's running two purge threads."

"Sandbox both." Cipher's fingers never slow.

Sixty seconds. There's nothing for me to shoot, nothing to breach. Arthur Masters's last message is dying on a screen, and our only road to Andrea—to ending this—burns with it. My hand curls around the edge of the workbench.

Rook stops pretending to check his gear. Bronco sets down the bolt.

Forty. The red counter carves through the numbers. Ivy mutters a curse and reroutes, her screen fracturing into cascading windows.

"Thread one contained." Her voice is a wire pulled taut. "Thread two is⁠—"

The screen floods crimson.

Twenty.