CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
They burst back into the lobby to find the young man at the front desk pacing back and forth in place, with the desk phone’s receiver pressed to his ear. He was relaying the lockdown order to someone on another line.
"Sublevel," Rachel said before she’d even come to a stop in front of the desk. "We need access now."
He didn't argue at all. In fact, he seemed to be locked in.
While still speaking on the phone, he reached into a drawer to his right and pulled out a spare keycard.
He pressed it into her hand along with his own badge, holding it up so the reader would register two credentials at once.
"It needs both to override after a lockdown call,” he said, moving his mouth away from the receiver.
“I just triggered it campus-wide like your partner said. "
"Copy that." Novak was already moving toward the sublevel corridor. "Stay up here. Keep everyone else out of that stairwell. And lock those front doors, too. Don’t open it for anyone other than EMTs or police."
The young man nodded, getting back to his conversation on the phone.
Rachel raced over to the elevator that led down to the sub-levels, using the cards she’d just gotten.
When the elevator came to a stop, the badge reader on the sublevel door blinked green before Rachel had even finished pressing her card against it.
The doors parted onto that same cold, clinical light she remembered from their first visit; the warm white glow of the upper floors gave way to something bluer and more sterile.
It almost made her feel like she was on a spaceship from a sci-fi movie out of the 1980s.
What she hadn't expected was the sound. A PA system somewhere overhead was still cycling through the same recorded message on a loop.
It was a calm, artificial voice instructing all employees to remain in their offices, to stay away from windows and common areas until further notice.
The words landed strangely and almost prophetically against what was waiting for them in the hallway just several steps away from the elevators.
Two bodies were down on the floor just past the entrance to the main server room.
"Novak…" she said, already moving toward the nearest one.
It was a man in his thirties, curled on his side.
Blood had soaked through his shirt at the ribs.
His eyes were open, glassy with shock, and his hand was pressed weakly against the wound.
He cringed at first when Rachel knelt by him, and then he tried to speak.
It came out in a gasped moan, forming no words.
The second man was a few feet farther in.
He was partially propped against the base of a server rack.
Blood was matting one side of his hair, and a laptop bag was looped over his shoulder.
It made her think this man had simply been walking through, on the way to some task or another, when he’d been blindsided.
He was conscious, but was blinking hard like he was trying to keep the room from tilting.
Novak dropped beside the stabbed man first. He removed his jacket and pressed it against the wound.
Rachel barely even saw it as he pulled out his phone with his free hand and placed a call.
It was done in quick, fluid motions that, quite honestly, impressed her.
"This is Agent Novak, FBI. I need an ambulance to the Apogee campus sublevel, two victims, one stab wound, one head trauma, both conscious. We also have one deceased victim on the fifth floor, one Elliot Sloan.”
Rachel crouched by the man with the head injury. "Can you hear me? I need you to focus. Who did this?"
He blinked at her, his pupils uneven, and for a second she thought she'd lost him. Then his hand came up, shaking, and pointed weakly down the length of the room. His finger pointed her past rows of humming server racks, toward the back wall.
"Kline," he said, the word slurring at the edges. "It was Kline. She went back there at a…sort of at a run."
“How long ago?”
He winced as his body started to tremble. “Not…not long. Five minutes maybe?”
"Stay with them," Rachel said to Novak, already rising, weapon coming free from its holster in one motion. "Keep him talking if you can. I've got her."
“You sure?” he asked with genuine concern in his voice. He barely even looked up from the pressure he was applying to the other man's side.
“Yeah,” she said and then, with a brief glance of appreciation to her partner, she headed back toward the rows of servers.
She moved deeper into the room, past the point where the emergency lighting gave way to something dimmer and more industrial.
The server room stretched farther back than she'd expected—a long, narrow space lined on both sides with black racks stacked floor to ceiling.
To the untrained eye, each one was just a lattice of blinking lights and looping cables.
The low electrical hum of it all pressed against her ears like a held breath.
The air was noticeably colder here, dry and metallic, circulated by some unseen system working to keep the machines from cooking themselves alive.
Thick conduit ran along the ceiling in bundles, disappearing into junction boxes every few yards.
She understood that this was the actual body of what Apogee had built.
It was the brain and the heart that kept the foundation of it all moving…
the glass offices upstairs, Sloan's whiteboard full of equations, all of it.
When she came to a T intersection at the back of the room along the last row of racks, Rachel looked to the right and saw Kline.
Tessa Kline was on her knees against the back wall, beneath a bank of monitors that looked to have gone dark.
Her shoulders were shaking with the kind of sobbing that came from somewhere past exhaustion.
Her hands were open in her lap, empty as far as Rachel could tell from this distance.
There was blood on the cuff of one sleeve that didn't look like it belonged to her.
"Tessa…" Rachel said. She drew her weapon and kept her voice even as she slowly closed the distance. "Don't move."
Kline didn’t move at all, so motionless that Rachel wondered if the woman had heard her at all.
She simply stayed where she was, folded in on herself, her breath coming in wet, uneven pulls.
When she finally lifted her head, her face was raw and blotched.
Mascara tracked down both cheeks, and for a moment she looked less like a killer than like a woman who'd just watched a loved one die.
"He deleted it," Kline said, the words barely holding together.
"Do you understand what that means? He didn't just turn it off like he said in that…
that masturbatory little speech he gave.
He didn't just suspend it. He went into the source repository himself and deleted it!
All of it. Three years of my work, gone in thirty seconds, because he decided he couldn't live with what it was telling people. "
"Tessa, I need you to put your hands where I can see them." Rachel kept her voice soft and as unthreatening as she could. As far as she could tell, Kline didn’t even know she was holding a gun.
"They are where you can see them." Her voice cracked upward, something brittle and unhinged threading through it now.
"He killed it. Do you understand? Not suspended.
Not paused. Deleted. Down to the source.
Every version, every backup he could find access to.
Like it was nothing, like it hadn't kept people alive, hadn't told them the truth about their own bodies when nobody else would.
" She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye, smearing more mascara across her temple.
She pressed her hand in hard, like someone trying to stave off a massive migraine.
"That's not a business decision. That's not corporate liability management.
That's sacrilege. He built something true, and the second it stopped being convenient for him, he burned it down like it never mattered at all. "
Rachel kept her weapon trained, close enough now to see the tremor running through Kline's shoulders. But she was also close enough to think, for one dangerous second, that this might actually end quietly.
And that was when Kline moved.
She moved quickly, with speed borne of desperation and anger.
Her hand came up from beside her thigh in a short, sharp arc, and the light caught something metal—a slim blade that Rachel registered a half-beat too late wasn't a knife at all but a letter opener.
It was ornate and thin, the kind of thing that sat decoratively on a desk and was likely never used a single time.
Kline lunged with it more than swung it.
It was an awkward, untrained motion that told Rachel everything she needed to know about who she was actually dealing with.
This was a woman who was angry enough, sure, but had never been in a fight in her entire life.
Rachel sidestepped and caught Kline's wrist on the follow-through, twisting hard enough to send the letter opener clattering against the concrete floor, and drove her forward into the nearest server rack with her forearm braced across her shoulders.
Kline hit the metal frame with a grunt and went down, more from the shock of it than from any real force Rachel had needed to use.
That was when Kline began to scream.
It wasn't words at first, just sound, high and raw, tearing out of Kline in ragged bursts as she thrashed against the floor.
One arm flailed back toward Rachel while the other clawed uselessly at the base of the rack.
Rachel got a knee into the small of her back and reached for the cuffs at her belt, but Kline bucked hard enough to throw her off balance, still screaming.
She yelled something about corrections and thresholds, and how numbers didn't lie.
Her whole body was seizing with a strength that had nothing to do with size or training and everything to do with whatever had finally cracked open inside her.
It was the equivalent of an adult temper-tantrum, fueled by raw energy and reckless emotion.
"Kline. Kline! Stop fighting me." Rachel pinned one wrist and reached for the other, but Kline twisted free again, nails raking across the back of Rachel's hand hard enough to draw blood. "I don't want to hurt you, but you need to stop."
But Kline didn't stop. If anything, the sound coming out of her climbed higher, less human by the second, something closer to grief than rage, though it hardly mattered which it was with a wrist still slipping out of Rachel's grip.
Rachel adjusted her hold and drove her weight down harder than she liked.
When Kline's free hand came swinging back toward her face, she caught it and used the momentum of the swing to put Kline's head against the concrete floor. It wasn’t too violent, but it got the job done.
The fight went out of her all at once, her body going slack beneath Rachel's knee. Her screaming dropped into a low, broken moan and her breaths came out hard and ragged.
Rachel got both wrists cuffed behind her before Kline had fully recovered her breath. Her chest was still heaving, tears and mucus streaking her face as she stared up at nothing in particular.
"Get up," Rachel said, hauling her upright by the arm, no gentleness left in her voice for it. Kline came up unsteadily, legs barely holding her, and let herself be walked back down the length of the server room. She didn’t resist any more.
Her head hung and her shoulders were slouched.
She continued to mutter something under her breath that Rachel didn't try to make out.
By the time they reached the front of the room, Novak had the man with the head injury sitting fully upright against the rack.
He was still pressing a wad of fabric against the stabbing victim's side with his free hand.
They were both very much out of it, but still alive.
He looked up as Rachel came around the last row of servers, Kline stumbling along beside her in cuffs, her face a wreck of tears and smeared makeup.
"EMS is four minutes out," Novak said, taking in the state of both of them. He looked back and forth between Rachel's bleeding hand and Kline's hollowed expression. "You good?"
"I'm fine." Rachel tightened her grip on Kline's arm as the other woman swayed slightly. The last of whatever had driven her moments ago was finally burning itself out. Much like the work she had grieved in the worst possible way, it seemed that Tessa Kline had finally come to the end of herself.