Chapter 21
Twenty-One
The blast doors hit hard enough to shudder through the floor.
Magnus caught the steel with the flat of his hand a fraction too late. The impact jarred up his arm as the locking mechanism engaged with a deep hydraulic thunk that echoed through the vault, sealing them inside.
He kept his hand there anyway.
Cold metal pressed into his palm. Grace’s footsteps faded on the other side, swallowed by concrete and server racks and too much rock for him to break through.
Then there was nothing but the equipment hum and the people behind him, waiting for him to move.
Grace was gone.
His mouth still tasted like her.
The realization hit with sickening clarity. The sharp warmth of her breath. The desperate way her fingers had twisted in the front of his vest when she kissed him like she was trying to memorize something she was about to lose.
“She locked us in.” Gunnar’s voice landed flat and hard in the silence.
Magnus closed his eyes briefly.
“She took the Key, sealed the vault, and walked out.” Gunnar took another step closer. “Tell me again how she was trying to help us.”
Magnus lowered his hand from the door and turned.
The room felt smaller now. The server lights blinked steadily down narrow aisles, green and white reflections flickering across steel racks and polished concrete. Grace’s compact terminal still sat on the central console.
Astryde stood with her arms folded tightly across her chest. She wasn’t looking at Magnus. That bothered him more than Gunnar’s anger did.
Davis brushed past Magnus to the door, checking seams and hinges with grim efficiency even though they all knew what he’d find. Magnus could tell by the expression on his face before he even spoke.
“Sealed,” Davis confirmed quietly. “No internal override.”
Bj?rn exhaled through his nose and leaned back against one of the server racks, tablet hanging loose in his hand. “Perfect.”
Gunnar wasn’t done.
“You froze.” The accusation came sharper this time. “That’s how she pulled it off. She kissed you, hit the override, and walked out while you stood there staring at her.”
The words cut because Magnus had already asked himself the same question.
Had she known exactly what that kiss would do to him?
His brain kept replaying the moment in fractured pieces. Grace grabbing his vest. The tremor in her breathing. The look in her eyes right before the doors came down.
And underneath all of it, the thing he couldn’t reconcile:
She’d looked devastated.
Whatever else Grace was, the woman who’d locked them in that vault had looked like she was ripping herself apart to do it.
Could someone fake that?
Probably.
Grace Carter had built entire identities out of lies.
But the crack in her voice when she said I’m sorry hadn’t sounded calculated. Neither had the way her mouth trembled against his for half a second before she shoved him back. Magnus hated that he couldn’t tell whether that made him a fool or not.
“She played you,” Gunnar said.
“No,” Magnus snapped automatically.
The room went still.
“I don’t know. I just—” Magnus scrubbed a hand across his jaw and forced himself to breathe before speaking again. “I don’t know what she’s doing yet.”
“That’s the problem.”
A metallic click interrupted them.
Everyone turned.
Tiikaan had bent over Grace’s terminal. He tapped one gloved finger lightly against the screen, studying it with the same unnerving stillness he brought to everything.
“She left this running.”
Magnus crossed the room immediately.
The compact terminal glowed against the dim vault lighting, lines of active processes scrolling rapidly across the screen. Not random code. Structured operations. Timers. Routing windows.
A countdown dominated the upper corner.
22:41
Below it, active scripts flashed in clean labeled blocks.
ENTRY CORRIDOR — GHOST CYCLE
SENTRY ROTATION OFFSET
VENT PURGE WINDOW
EXTERNAL OVERRIDE
Bj?rn pushed off the server rack and moved beside Magnus fast enough to nearly shoulder him out of the way. “She left us a route.”
Astryde stepped closer, eyes narrowing at the display. “Or she wants us to think she left us a way out.”
“She could’ve taken the terminal with her,” Bj?rn said.
“She could’ve left false routing.”
“She could’ve wiped everything,” Davis added quietly.
The timer continued counting down.
21:30
21:29
Magnus stared at the screen.
Not because of the scripts. Because of the terminal itself.
Grace had carried this thing through the entire facility. Through checkpoints and locked systems and every obstacle between the docks and the vault. He remembered her crouched in corridors with the glow of the screen reflecting across her face while she cracked security doors open in seconds flat.
And she’d left it behind.
Like she knew they’d need it after she was gone.
A cold knot formed beneath Magnus’s ribs.
Not relief.
Something worse.
Hope.
Gunnar folded his arms. “This could still be a setup.”
“Yes,” Magnus said immediately.
Nobody argued with that.
A fake corridor. False timing. A manipulated route that walked them straight into a kill box while Grace delivered the Key to Lars. Every possibility spun through Magnus’s head fast and ugly while the countdown kept ticking lower in the corner of the screen.
But if Grace had truly betrayed them, why leave the terminal?
Why leave operational windows at all?
Why not lock the vault and disappear?
Tiikaan tilted the screen slightly, scanning the active processes. “Vent timing matches the geothermal purge cycle we crossed earlier.”
Bj?rn was already pulling data from the terminal onto his tablet.
“Ghost cycle’s masking movement through the eastern corridor.” He glanced up sharply. “If this holds, she built a blind spot.”
Astryde’s expression hardened. “Or bait.”
No one dismissed it.
Magnus appreciated that more than blind agreement. They were all thinking the same thing he was. Every route Grace left behind carried the possibility of a knife hidden inside it.
The problem was that doing nothing guaranteed failure anyway.
The countdown hit 18:58.
Gunnar looked at Magnus then, anger cooling into something more dangerous.
Expectation.
The room had shifted without Magnus realizing it. Everyone was watching him now, waiting to see whether he was still capable of leading after this.
After her.
Magnus looked back at the terminal.
At the active scripts.
At the evidence of Grace still fighting from somewhere inside, whatever impossible decision she’d just made. Then he straightened.
“Bj?rn, copy everything off the terminal just in case it goes black.”
Bj?rn nodded immediately and got to work.
“Davis, prep exfil gear. Fast.”
“On it.”
“Tiikaan, verify every timing window independently before we trust any of it.”
Tiikaan gave a single nod.
Magnus looked at Astryde last. “I want every possible failure point.”
For a second, he thought she might refuse outright.
Then she pushed off the wall and stepped toward the security console. “You’ll probably get several.”
“That’s why I asked you.”
That almost earned him the hint of an expression before she buried it again.
Around them, the vault shifted into motion. Controlled. Efficient. Tense as a wire pulled too tight.
Gunnar stayed where he was. “You really think she’s helping us?”
He thought about Grace’s face right before the doors closed. The way she’d looked at him like she wanted him to understand something she couldn’t say out loud.
“I think she walked straight toward Lars knowing exactly what he’d do if she failed,” Magnus said quietly.
Gunnar’s jaw tightened. Neither of them said Oliver’s name. They didn’t need to. Magnus glanced at Grace’s terminal again.
16:08 remaining on the countdown.
In sixteen minutes and eight seconds, he’d find out if his trust was in the right place.