The first alarm sings like a polite doorbell. I don’t buy it. I’ve learned the tower’s moods—how the algae-lit glass tries to lower blood pressure while the floorplates hum secrets through my boots. The sublevel corridor feels wrong, the air a half-degree warmer than it has any right to be.
“False alarm,” a voice says over the PA, syrupy with reassurance. The wall glow slides toward calm green.
“That green is lying,” I tell Elias. I slide a hand to his spine and steer him toward the lab blocks where the predictive racks live. The hallway carries a faint scent of melted plastic under antiseptic. I used to smell storms before the weather apps did; I smell fires before the sprinklers admit them.
“Talk to me,” June says in my ear. Drone rotors chatter outside like cicadas doing overtime. “I lost three floor cams at once, Sub-B south. Your corridor.”
“Then we move,” I say. Elias doesn’t argue; his mouth thins into the straight line I’ve come to trust more than his words. We turn the corner and the polite alarm grows teeth. The PA cuts mid-sentence. The lights decide red is the fashion now.
Heat breathes from the vent slats like someone opening an oven. A curl of gray lifts near the ceiling by the door marked MODELING—C. I press my palm to the crash bar; it scalds. I pull a sleeve over my hand, push, and a wave of smoke folds out past my face, hot and bitter.
“Sprinklers should be—” Elias starts, coughing.
“—online,” I finish, looking up. The sprinkler heads sit there, perfect and useless, glass bulbs intact, no silver mist. A panel on the wall shines cheerful: SUPPRESSION: OFFLINE.
“June?” I cough my question into the mic.
“Server says a maintenance patch five minutes ago,” June says, voice clipped. “Someone told the system not to get wet. I can’t flip it. I can shove doors. I need sixty seconds.”
“We don’t have sixty.” I yank open a low cabinet and grab a red-painted wrench, heavy and honest. I drop to a knee by the manual bypass, a scabbed wheel behind wire mesh. “Elias, eyes closed. Shirt over your mouth. Count to twenty. If I don’t stand up by twenty, you drag me.”
“No chance,” he says, and he means he won’t wait for twenty.
I smash the mesh, twist the wrench onto the valve wheel, and pull until something in my shoulder grinds. The wheel laughs at me with rust. Behind me, the air whistles; fire finds oxygen and writes its name on the ceiling. I plant my feet, think of a locksmith’s stubborn lock, and yank like I’m stealing a door that owes me money.
The wheel screams, then jumps. A groan rattles through the pipe, old metal remembering a job it promised. The first sprinkler pops with a brittle crack, and water punches into the room in a sheet that turns the smoke into a choking soup. I keep turning until my forearms shake and the line pounds, a vein finally open.
“I’ve got door control,” June says. “Point me.”
“East hall—three doors, then the service stair,” I say, blinking water out of my eyes. The corridor ahead flickers; the exit light gives a feeble nod. “We’re going.”
A shape bolts from the black-to-red room down the side corridor: lab coat, hood up, mask on, clutching a matte hard case by the handle like a lifeline. The figure slips in the dirty water, recovers, never looks at us.
“Hey!” Elias shouts, instinct outrunning training.
I catch his sleeve. “No hero chase,” I say, stepping between him and the fleeing coat. “We live first, we hunt later.”
The figure slams an elbow into a crash bar and vanishes into the stairwell. For a second I see a lapel edge under the coat—neither Vance issue nor Palmetto House pin, something plain and careful. I log the gait, the height relative to the bar, the way the case pulls the shoulder low on the right. Details keep you honest when stories try to buy you.
A low thump rolls through the floor from a room too close. The heat snatches at my cheek like a temper. “We leave,” I tell Elias. “Now.”
We pivot into the widened corridor where MODELING—A and —B live like bookends. B’s door is ajar. Inside, I glimpse rack lights shivering through smoke like a dying constellation. The signs taped to a workstation bloom and crisp: EMPLOYMENT LOYALTY PREDICTION—BETA. Someone drew a smiley face in a corner with devil horns. Lila once texted me about a “model that mistakes care for friction.” I don’t smash that screen; I memorize it. My eyes water enough to make remembering feel like drowning.
“Mara,” Elias says, coughing hard, “those are—”
“I saw,” I cut in. “We can’t save them. We save us.”
“Door one,” June says in my ear. The corridor’s first steel slab clicks. “Door two—working. Three is fighting.”
We sprint. The sprinklers I bullied into life spit in uneven rhythms, hissing like snakes over the fire’s animal breathing. The floor lurches slick under my boots, chemicals and heat turning the water into skin. Acrid sweetness rides the smoke—burned plastic, melted insulation, hot sugar.
“Door three,” June says, teeth in her voice, “say please.”
“Please,” I say, not to the door.
The lock thunks. We shoulder through and collapse into a utility hall that tastes like dust and decade-old mops. The air here is thin but breathable. Elias braces on the wall and makes a sound that scrapes. I put a hand flat on his chest. His heartbeat bangs against my palm, fast and righteous.
“We take the service stairs,” I say. “Not the main.”
“Agreed,” he rasps. He straightens and tries to hand me authority he wishes were a weapon. “I’m okay.”
He’s not. The smoke has his lungs cracking. I hook his arm over my shoulders and move us like a two-person animal, a rhythm I learned in other corridors with other wars. He doesn’t fight me; his pride has learned the geometry of survival because I hammered it into shape.
The service stair door resists like a stubborn child. June sighs in my ear and coaxes it open. We start climbing. Each landing throws back heat from behind us like some heavy thing is following and breathing down our necks. A floor above, a different alarm takes up a meaner pitch—deeper, closer to the bone. Somewhere, a pipe pops and screams; somewhere else, a voice yells “clear out!” and coughs hard enough to make the command honest.
“Talk to me,” June says. Keys clack under her voice, the small percussion of someone fighting code with hands that know where the traps sit. “Your elevator bank is dead by design. The main lobby is already turning green again for cameras. They’re trying to keep feeds pretty.”
“We’re at Sub-A stairs,” I say. “Where’s the thief?”
“No eyes,” June says. “Stairwell cams are ‘down for maintenance.’ I can make a guess based on badge ghosts.”
“Don’t,” I say. “Not yet. Don’t burn a good guess for a bad chase.”
We hit a landing where the stairwell widens and a window looks out through reinforced glass into the world that pretends not to be on fire. The city yawns blue-green and algae-clean. Across the marina, the tide clock flashes three minutes ahead, busy being wrong. I taste metal, smoke, and the salt that blows in through a hairline leak.
“Hey,” Elias says, voice hoarse. “You saved the sprinkler.” The sentence stumbles, then stands.
“I bribed antique plumbing into doing its job,” I say. “It’ll send me flowers later.”
He tries to laugh and coughs instead.
“We’re almost up,” I tell him. I set him down on the landing to give my legs a quiet scream of their own. I tuck his hood tighter against his neck. I wipe soot from his cheek with my sleeve and don’t think about my hand doing that on roofs without smoke.
“Door ahead opens to the maintenance crossover,” June says. “Left at the ‘Authorized Personnel’ sign that means ‘press,” she snorts, “and right at the vending machine that never worked. You’ll land in a service lobby. Heads up: PR is staging lines at the front. They’re already telling a story about a ‘localized incident quickly contained.’”
“We’re writing a different story,” I say. My ribs quiver from the work of breathing hot air.
“I’ll keep the doors honest,” June answers. “Hurry.”
We shoulder through the crossover. My eyes burn raw. The air heats less, but the smoke has turned meaner, thinner—new plastics from a new room. I swallow it and it scratches its name down my throat. The vending machine stands where June promised, full of snacks no one wants in a crisis. I shoulder right. The service lobby beyond doesn’t deserve its name; a haze hangs ankle-high, and the emergency lights turn faces into masks.
We pass a window where the algae facade ripples with calm like a liar with good hair. Between swirls of green, I can see the hurricane barrier arches in the distance, that public park for brave selfies. The thought of the blind zone there steadies my hand: a place where we can speak without dressing our voices for court.
“Last door,” June says. “I’m going to make it look like it failed open so Security doesn’t flag the override. You’ll pop into a side corridor one level up from the front lobby.”
“Do it,” I say.
The handle drops with a grateful sigh, and we spill into cooler air and noise—sirens from outside, voices in the lobby like bees. I loop an arm under Elias’s knees, another behind his back, and stand. He startles, then settles. He weighs what a man who runs daily should weigh, but smoke adds something to a body—regret, maybe.
“Put me down,” he whispers. “Optics.”
“Optics can write their own apology,” I say, moving. “Breathing beats optics.”
We hit the last bend and step into an atrium with too much glass. The algae-lit walls glow health. PR handlers already line the space like stylists—sleek suits, neutral shoes, tablets up. Cameras pivot with insect patience. Security corrals employees into shot-friendly clumps. The air here smells like citrus cleaner dumped on top of fear.
A handler sees us and lights up with relief and calculation. “Mr. Vance,” she calls, making his last name sound like an event. “Are you okay? We have a statement ready.”
Elias looks to me, and I tilt my chin half an inch—our yes/no. He nods once to her and shakes his head to me, tiny, a Morse of defiance and deference. Good. He can refuse and still breathe.
“We had a malfunction,” she continues without waiting. “Localized. Contained. We’ll emphasize our commitment to safety and resilience. Harbor Eleven knows how to bounce back.” She gestures toward the windows where the seawall arches stand like a promise made of concrete.
“Your sprinklers were offline,” I say. My voice carries that roughness that makes people listen. I lower Elias onto a bench and squat to his level, stealing his eyes from the handler. “Slow breaths. In through teeth.”
“Maintenance cycle,” the handler says, teeth in a smile. “Terrible timing.”
“The best timing,” I answer, standing and stepping between her and his line of sight. “If you’re scrubbing.”
Her smile doesn’t move. “Your name?”
“Mara,” I say. “I’m the one who’s going to keep him off your talking points until the humans finish counting heads.”
She nods as if I’ve volunteered for the same mission she has. “Wonderful.”
Security pushes through the glass doors with wind and iodine on their jackets. Outside, sirens braid with the whirr of drones. The noise vibrates in my teeth.
“June,” I say, tapping my earbud. “Tell me what burned.”
She exhales a line of curse words and a prayer. “Modeling—B and C. I’m pulling scrape from the last autosave. Labels match what you saw—neural prediction models tied to employee loyalty. Also a queue named CALIBRATION—FRICTION. You’ll love this: change log last touched by—redacted. I’ll un-redact later.”
“And the case?” I ask.
“If I were a thief,” June says, “I’d be holding the clean export of weights and a few keycards they’ll call souvenirs. I’m tracking the starfield of badge ghosts, but whoever that was knows stairwells.”
The handler bends toward Elias. “Can you say something about our resilience? The board is—”
“The board can wait,” Elias says, voice sand. He looks at me. Under the soot his eyes have that bright, wrecked light of someone who almost didn’t get to leave a room. “We need to secure the remaining racks.”
“We need to secure you,” I say. “Then we go after the racks.”
He nods, because he knows I won’t lose the second point. He reaches for my hand without thinking, fingers ash-warm, and squeezes once—scorched gratitude and a promise not to be noble in dumb ways. I squeeze back, because I’m not noble either.
The handler pretends not to see our hands. Security pretends the smoke isn’t still curling off my jacket like a confession. The algae wall keeps pretending calm. The tide clock in the marina keeps announcing the wrong minute to anyone who needs an alibi.
“We’re going to the clinic to clear your lungs,” I tell Elias. “Then we circle back under the arches. Blind zone. You tell me who had reason to kill those models tonight.”
He swallows a cough. “Same list as always,” he says. “Add one more.”
“Who?”
“Whoever ran,” he says, and the word lands between us like a weight with a handle.
I look at the glass doors where rain freckles the skin of the day and sirens comb the air. Somewhere in the concrete veins, water finally runs like a conscience waking late. Somewhere in the stairwell, a thief shifts a case to a different hand and doesn’t look back.
“June,” I whisper, “tell me you caught one license plate.”
“I caught three,” she says, wicked and tired. “Only one bothers me.”
I wait for the line that will decide our next move.
“It belongs,” June says, “to a car registered to the Palmetto House concierge.”
I look at Elias. The handler talks about resilience behind us, turning fire into a hashtag. I taste ash and salt. The city records everything, but the only evidence that matters is the piece the thief carried out. I plan my route back into the smoke and let the question burn a clear hole through the noise: did I just watch Lila’s last clean breadcrumb leave in a case I didn’t chase?