31. Elena
ELENA
The timer was the first thing I saw when I came around the corner into the east corridor, and for a second I honestly thought I was hallucinating from lack of sleep.
It was taped to the outside of Sergei's office door at eye level, a cheap plastic kitchen timer with a hand-lettered sign beneath it that read, in Ash's blocky all-caps handwriting, DO NOT TOUCH.
TIME REMAINING UNTIL WREN RUINS EVERYONE'S WEEK.
"Please tell me that's not counting down from what I think it's counting down from," I said.
Ash appeared from the server room doorway holding a second timer in his hand, apparently a backup.
"Ninety-five hours, eleven minutes," he said.
"I set it the second the intel came in. I've been recalibrating it against my phone every twenty minutes because I don't trust the internal spring on cheap plastic, and this feels like the kind of moment where precision matters. "
"You could have just used your phone."
"My phone doesn't have the same emotional impact." He tapped the sign with two fingers, grinning like a kid who'd gotten away with something. "Tank hates it. Tank hating it is basically a second confirmation that I've made the correct choice."
Tank walked past us at that exact moment carrying a crate of cabling, glanced at the timer without breaking stride, and said, "Steve doesn't like it either."
"Steve is a plant," Ash called after him. "Steve doesn't have opinions."
"Steve has opinions," Tank said, already gone around the corner.
I laughed, actually laughed, for the first time in what felt like days, and it startled me a little, how much I needed it.
An hour ago the words ninety-six hours had felt like a verdict.
Right now, with Ash bouncing on his heels next to a timer with a hand-drawn skull doodled in the corner of the sign, it felt almost survivable.
That did not last.
By the time I made it down to the main floor with a stack of drives under one arm, the whole building had shifted into a gear I had never seen before, not even during the worst of the federal audit scare.
People moved fast and quiet, and the quiet unsettled me more than any amount of shouting would have.
Screens were being wiped and re-imaged in the server room. Someone had physically disconnected two of the older backup units from the network and was carrying them out on a hand truck like they were made of glass.
I found Sergei in the security office, standing over a table covered in printed floor plans of three different buildings I didn't recognize, talking low with two men I only knew by sight.
"You said the compound east of the river was already staffed," Sergei was saying, not looking up.
"Staffed as of an hour ago," one of the men answered. "Full rotation, two on the gate, two interior, one roaming."
"Good," Sergei said. "I want a third at the gate by tonight. Not because I doubt the two. Because I want redundancy built into every part of this before Wren moves, not after."
I stood in the doorway a second longer than I needed to, just watching him work. There was something in the precision of it: the total absence of panic in a man surrounded by people who were, underneath their professionalism, quietly terrified. That steadied something in my own chest.
"Elena," he said, without turning around, somehow always knowing when I was there. "Give me two minutes."
"Take your time," I said. "I've got my own fires."
I did. I had a laptop full of the raw data logs Ash and I had pulled the night before, the ones that proved exactly how Wren's man had gotten as far into Halcyon's internal servers as he had, and I was trying to get them copied, encrypted, and physically off the premises before anyone with the wrong kind of access could touch them again.
I was also, at the same moment, trying to keep Jaz from setting off what I could only assume was some kind of alarm.
"Jaz, what is happening right now?" I said, walking into the break room to find her crouched over an enormous canvas duffel bag she had unzipped across the entire length of the table where Tank's basil plant usually sat in solitary dignity.
"I packed a go-bag," she said, not looking up, elbow deep in the thing. "The second you called me sounding like that, I knew we were past normal-friend-crisis territory and into actual-crisis territory, so I did what any reasonable person would do."
"Which was?"
"Prepared for the worst." She pulled out a first aid kit the size of a toaster oven, set it down, then a coil of paracord, then three protein bars, then a battery pack with enough cables coming off it to charge a small aircraft.
"I have water purification tablets. I have a whistle.
I have," and here she reached to the very bottom of the bag and came up holding something long and blocky and orange, "this. "
"What is that?"
"I brought a flare gun."
I stared at it. "Why do you own a flare gun?"
"Why doesn't everyone?" Jaz said, entirely serious, setting it on the table next to Tank's basil plant like it was the most natural object in the world to bring into a corporate break room.
Tank walked in just then, took one look at the flare gun sitting an inch from Steve's terracotta pot, and said, without any change in his expression at all, "If that thing goes off near my plant, I will have questions."
"It's for signaling," Jaz said. "In case we get separated. In case we're on a roof. I don't know your emergency protocols, Tank. I'm a civilian. I'm improvising."
"We have radios," Tank said.
"Radios don't have the same emotional impact," Jaz said, and I nearly choked laughing, because it was almost word for word what Ash had said about the timer twenty minutes earlier, and Jaz had no idea.
The laugh was still half out of me when the front door chimed and Odette came through it sideways, both arms wrapped around a stack of insulated grocery bags that clearly outweighed her by a significant margin, refusing anyone's offer to help before she'd even set the first bag down.
"Don't you dare," she said to the security guard reaching for the top bag. "I have a system. If you touch it out of order I will have to start over."
"Odette," I said, "how did you even get past the gate?"
"Sergei put my name on that gate list years ago, sweetheart.
The gate and I have an understanding." She began unloading containers onto the break room counter with the brisk efficiency of a woman conducting a small military operation.
"Three days of dinners. Stroganoff, the chicken with the peppers Sergei likes, and a soup that will keep you upright even if you haven't slept, which, looking at your face, you haven't. "
"We don't really have time for soup right now, Odette."
"Everyone is always a little busy," Odette said, not slowing down. "That is not a reason to fall over from not eating. I am not leaving this kitchen until I watch one of you put actual food into your actual mouth. I have all day."
"You don't have all day. There's a countdown clock taped to the wall upstairs."
"Then you'd better eat quickly," she said, and handed me a bowl of soup with a spoon already in it. She stood there with her arms crossed until I took a bite and did not look away once, and I understood in that moment that arguing with her would cost more time than just eating the soup.
It was, I had to admit, very good soup.
I was still holding the bowl in one hand and the laptop bag in the other twenty minutes later, moving fast down the stairwell to meet the courier who was going to carry the drives to an off-site location Ash trusted, when my foot caught the edge of the last step and the laptop bag swung wide out of my grip and hit the concrete floor with a crack that made every person in the stairwell freeze.
I dropped to my knees so fast I felt it in both kneecaps, unzipping the bag with hands that weren't entirely steady, bracing for a shattered screen, a bent chassis, something.
Instead the laptop lid clicked open clean, the screen flickered, and the login prompt came up exactly as it should have, undamaged, entirely fine.
Nobody said anything for a second.
"That," Ash said finally, from halfway down the stairs where he'd apparently been watching the entire time, "is the single nicest thing that has happened to any of us all week."
"It's a laptop that didn't break," I said, still on my knees.
"Exactly," he said. "Do you understand how low that bar is right now? A week ago I would have said, sure, laptops don't break, that's a normal day. Today that laptop surviving a concrete floor is the best news I've had since the intel came in."
He paused. "I'm choosing to take it as an omen."
"You're choosing to take a plastic countdown timer seriously and a surviving laptop as a cosmic sign," Tank said, appearing above us on the stairs with his arms crossed. "Your instincts need recalibrating."
"My instincts are fine," Ash said, but he didn't sound entirely convinced, and something in his voice had gone quieter than it had been an hour before, like the joke had used up its last good run and he knew it.
By the time Mateo's convoy pulled out of the underground garage that afternoon, I understood exactly how far Sergei had gone without me having to ask him for any of it twice.
There were two vehicles, not one. A black SUV would carry Mateo himself, flanked by two of Sergei's men I recognized from the compound, and a second car would run fifteen minutes ahead of it on a completely different route, a decoy that would take the direct highway path while Mateo's actual car looped east through side roads and crossed the river on the older bridge that had almost no traffic cameras on it.
Sergei had pulled the safehouse's staffing roster up on his tablet and shown it to me without my asking, walking me through it like a man laying out proof rather than making a promise: four men on rotating shifts, food and supplies already stocked for two weeks, a landline in addition to cell coverage in case anything got jammed.
"He'll be there by dinner," Sergei said, standing beside me at the garage exit as the first car pulled out.
"Full comms check every two hours until he's settled, and then every six after that.
Nobody touches that house without going through me first, and I mean nobody, not federal, not anyone claiming to be federal. "
"You didn't have to do all of this," I said, watching the second car's taillights disappear up the ramp.
"Of course I did," he said, simply, like it wasn't even a decision he'd had to make. "He's your brother. That makes him mine to protect. I don't need you to ask me for that a second time, Elena, not now and not ever."
I didn't trust my own voice enough to answer him right away, so I just reached over and took his hand, and he let me, right there in the garage with two of his men still watching the exit ramp, which for Sergei was tenderness of a kind he never bothered to hide.
It was late, the timer somewhere north of eighty hours and still counting down, when I found myself alone with him in the quiet of his office, the door shut, the noise of the building's scramble muffled to a low hum through the walls.
He was reading something on his tablet, but he set it down the moment I walked in, the way he always did, like nothing on a screen mattered more than whatever I'd come to say.
I sat across from him and made myself say it before I could talk myself out of it.
"I have to go back to Renner," I said. "I have to tell him the truth about Wren."
Sergei went very still. "Elena."
"I know what you're going to say." My hands were shaking a little and I pressed them flat against my knees to stop it.
"I know he's dangerous. I know he's not the mastermind here but he's still the one holding federal leverage, and I know that walking back into a room with him alone is the single worst idea I've had since this whole thing started. I know all of that."
"Then don't do it."
"I have to." My voice cracked on the word and I let it.
"Nobody else can put this in front of him the way I can.
I was there. I have the data. I know exactly what he doesn't know he's been used for, and if I don't say it to his face he's going to keep believing he's the one in control of something that stopped being his the day Wren picked him, the same way it stopped being mine. "
Sergei didn't answer right away. When he finally spoke his voice was low and rough in a way I'd only heard a handful of times.
"Then you won't be alone the way you think you will be," he said. "But you're right about the room."
I nodded, because he was right, and because I had just said out loud, finally, the one thing I had been avoiding since the moment Ash taped that sign to his door. There was no version of what came next that did not put me back in a room, alone, with a man who was already dangerous.
I had said the hardest sentence of the night out loud. Sergei had not agreed to it yet, and I knew the argument would follow us home. Tomorrow, I would go back to Renner.