Part 11
Forty floors below, the core server room was a canyon of flashing blue lights and the roar of thousands of cooling fans.
Maya stood at the central terminal, her hands shaking as she managed the data transfer.
Beside her, Lily stood perfectly still.
Her small hand was placed flat against the cold glass casing of the primary mainframe housing.
Her eyes were wide, but they weren't looking at the room. The pupils were fully dilated, almost swallowing the irises, reflecting the rapid, erratic blinking of the server lights.
She wasn't singing anymore.
She was whispering.
A continuous, unbroken stream of letters and numbers, moving so fast her lips could barely form the sounds.
"Data packet sixty percent complete," Maya whispered into her headset, her eyes darting between the progress bar and the heavy security doors of the server room. "Ethan, the encryption is breaking apart. The files... they're opening."
Upstairs in the penthouse, Ethan kept his eyes on Gerald.
The billionaire had reached into his desk drawer, his hand emerging with a small, silver revolver.
He didn't point it at Ethan. He pointed it at the ceiling.
"You think you're saving her?" Gerald laughed, his voice breaking with a touch of madness. "The moment that data reaches eighty percent, the neural load will collapse her brain stem. I told you, she's an archive! You don't download from a living brain without killing the host!"
Ethan didn't hesitate.
He didn't reach for a weapon. He lunged across the desk, his massive frame colliding with Gerald before the man could pull the trigger.
The gun fired once, the bullet shattering a glass case on the wall.
They went down together behind the desk, Ethan's hands locking around Gerald's wrist, twisting the weapon away with brutal, mechanical leverage.
Crack.
Gerald screamed as his wrist fractured. The silver revolver clattered across the floor, sliding into the dark corner of the room.
Ethan pinned him down, a knee pressed firmly into Gerald's chest, cutting off his breath.
"Stop the transfer," Gerald choked out, blood trickling from his lip. "If she dies... the data dies anyway. You lose everything."
Ethan tapped his earpiece. "Maya. Status."
"Seventy percent," Maya's voice came through, filled with panic. "Ethan... Lily’s nose is bleeding. She's shaking. The server load is too high. I try to cancel the sequence, but the interface won't let me lock it out! It's a one-way street!"
Ethan looked down at Gerald, whose face was twisting into a triumphant grin despite the pain.
"I built the system, Cole," Gerald gasped. "The only way to stop the download is to kill the source terminal. Me. Or her."
Ethan’s grip tightened on Gerald’s throat.
"There's a third way," Ethan said, his voice chillingly calm.
He reached onto the desk, grabbed the heavy, metal challenge coin he had taken back from Lily earlier, and slammed it directly into the main fiber-optic junction box embedded in Gerald’s desk console.
The connection sparked violently, blue electricity arching across the wood.
"Maya!" Ethan shouted. "The desk line is fried! Did it sever the link?"
A long, agonizing pause through the static of the earpiece.
Then, Maya’s voice came through, sobbing with relief.
"The connection broke. Transfer halted at seventy-four percent. The servers are dead."
Ethan let go of Gerald's throat, standing up slowly.
Gerald lay on the floor, gasping for air, his empire shattered in a matter of minutes. Three-quarters of the darkest secrets in the world were now floating freely on the public internet, anonymous and irreversible.
"You... you ruined it," Gerald hissed, clutching his broken wrist. "You destroyed forty years of work."
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Ethan didn't look back at him.
"I didn't destroy it," Ethan said, walking toward the express elevator. "I just opened the door."
