Chapter 19
Nineteen
The vault door peeled back, and Magnus moved.
He cleared the doorway eight feet in, rifle up, eyes sweeping the corners. The pattern his brothers had drilled into him ran on its own, his body doing what his head couldn’t keep up with, every sweep a borrowed instinct from people who lived in rooms like this.
Empty.
Server racks along the far wall, console island in the center, monitoring stations ringing the perimeter in a horseshoe of dark screens for the analysts who normally ran this room. Climate hum at fifty-five degrees. Grace’s intel had been right down to the temperature.
She was already past him.
He watched her cross the room. Third rack from the left. Second shelf from the top. No pause for labels, no check of the array. She’d been walking this path in her head for eight years.
The thing she pulled from the housing fit in a vest pocket. Matte black, no markings, completely unremarkable. That was, presumably, the point.
The Aegis Key.
Magnus knew the weight of his son. The way Oliver’s elbows dug in when he climbed up next to him on the couch, the way his sneakers thudded on the deck of the Stormchaser when he ran, the way he buried his face against Magnus’s chest when something scared him.
That weight against this. The Key fit in Grace’s palm.
It fit in a vest pocket. The man who had Oliver had built an empire on something Magnus could lose in a backpack pouch.
“That’s it?” Gunnar said behind him. Quiet. He’d taken up position by the door they’d come through, weapon trained back down the way they’d come.
“That’s it.” Grace was already moving.
She set the Key on the console and plugged in her terminal. The screen woke to a green prompt, her hands moving fast and steady across the keyboard. She never hesitated.
Not once.
“Evidence pull’s running,” she said, mostly to the screen. “I need three minutes.”
“Take three minutes.” His own voice came out steady.
He filed that somewhere — that he could still keep his voice flat with his pulse moving the way it was.
The team was distributed across the room without anyone giving an order. Davis was on the gear, already running a hand check of the ascenders they’d need going back up the lava tube, the way an operator did when the next phase was the one that killed people.
Astryde pulled herself up to one of the monitoring stations and woke the screen with a tap — corridor cameras, patrol feeds, the facility’s interior network glowing green under her hands.
Bj?rn moved along the racks with the methodical, lined-up attention he gave a pre-flight check, scanning the room against whatever schematic he was holding in his head.
Tiikaan didn’t move. He stood within reach of Grace’s shoulder, weapon angled low, eyes on the door across from where Gunnar was holding.
Magnus looked around the vault, at everybody still standing, and took a deep breath. Three minutes. He gave himself permission to take them.
The transfer bar started filling. Grace pulled a small drive from a pouch at her hip — silver, no bigger than her thumb — and slotted it into the terminal. Files began copying.
Magnus didn’t read the labels. They’d mean something to lawyers and to people in offices that didn’t exist on any organizational chart, and tonight he didn’t care about any of them. Tonight, what those files meant was that Lars Eriksson would wake up tomorrow inside a closing fist.
None of it gave him Oliver.
Somewhere, in a room Magnus hadn’t seen, his son was waiting. Eighty hours since the van. Magnus didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know if Oliver had eaten or slept or cried himself out.
He didn’t know if the hand he’d watched stroke Oliver’s hair on a recorded video had touched him again since.
What he knew, because a dead seven-year-old wasn’t leverage, was that Oliver was alive somewhere. That was the only thing about Lars Eriksson he could rely on right now.
The rest he’d been keeping behind a door. The version of his kid that came out of that room when the room finally opened. Magnus didn’t know what would be on the other side of that. But he was going to be the one who walked through it.
The transfer bar climbed. Sixty-eight percent. Eighty.
Grace’s shoulders had the set he’d come to know — inside the work, nothing else getting through. Her thumb passed over the silver drive on the casing once, barely a touch, checking it was where she wanted it before she stowed it.
The transfer finished with a quiet chime. Grace pulled the silver drive from the terminal and tucked it inside her vest in a single unbroken motion. The pocket closed against her ribs. The shape of it disappeared.
She pulled the Aegis Key from the console and slipped it into a pocket in her cargo pants. He had stood beside her in the staging room while she’d geared up. He had thought, then, that she looked too small for what they were about to do.
She didn’t look too small now.
She turned toward him.
The vault was still cold. The hum of the racks was still steady.
Astryde’s monitoring station glowed green against the wall.
Tiikaan was still on Grace’s flank. Magnus took her in — the line of her shoulders, the lift of her chin, the look on her face — and felt the last knot inside his chest loosen for the first time since they’d left the staging room.
They were going to get out of this room.
For the first time since the van disappeared from the harbor, Magnus let himself believe they might actually get Oliver back.