Day two of the window.
Yuko sat at her desk, pretending to work. Lines of code scrolled past—behavior training scripts she'd written months ago, back when she still believed S-Corp was making the world better.
Now they were camouflage.
She'd spent the morning mapping the building. Badge readers at every junction. Cameras on fifteen-second rotations. Security guards who checked floors on the hour, except during lunch when they clustered in the break room watching soccer highlights.
Patterns. Everything had patterns. You just had to watch long enough to find them.
Her phone buzzed. Ellen.
Status?
Yuko typed back: Mapping. Need one more day.
You have until tomorrow night. Shift change at 11 PM. Don't be late.
Then, a second message:
Don't text again after this. They're monitoring my devices. If I go dark, assume the worst and run.
Yuko stared at the words. Ellen was risking everything—her career, her freedom, maybe her life. For strangers. For drivers she'd never met.
For people like Joel Smith.
She pocketed the phone and stood. Time for phase two.
The server room was on sublevel 2. Restricted access—but Yuko's credentials got her to sublevel 1, and the stairwell door between floors had a magnetic lock that clicked open every time someone exited from below.
She waited by the vending machine, pretending to deliberate between energy drinks.
Three minutes. A technician pushed through the stairwell door, badge dangling. The lock clicked. The door swung.
Yuko caught it with her foot before it closed.
She counted to ten, then slipped through.
Sublevel 2 was cold. Server racks hummed behind glass walls, blinking green and amber. The air tasted like recycled dust and ozone.
No cameras in the stairwell. One camera at the end of the corridor, fixed angle, pointing at the main server room entrance. Blind spot: the maintenance closet to the left.
She walked with purpose. Badge visible. Clipboard she'd grabbed from an empty desk upstairs. Anyone watching would see an engineer doing her job.
The maintenance closet was unlocked. Inside: cleaning supplies, a mop bucket, and a utility panel with exposed ethernet ports.
This was it.
She pulled a device from her pocket—a hardware key the size of a USB stick. She'd built it herself two weeks ago, soldering late into the night while her mother slept. The firmware was based on a design from Kevin Chen, her old AIT labmate who'd spent more time on hardware exploits than his actual thesis.
"This is super illegal," Kevin had said over Signal when she'd asked for help. "Like, federal prison illegal. What are you doing, Yuko?"
"Better if you don't know."
"Fine. But if you fry something, don't blame my design." A pause, then a follow-up message: "Firmware is just poetry that runs at 3.3V. Treat it with respect."
He'd sent the schematics anyway. No questions. Kevin had been in love with her since second year. She'd never encouraged it, never used it—until now. One more person she was dragging into her orbit. One more person who could get hurt.
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The device could clone network traffic and create a shadow tunnel. Illegal as hell. Perfect for what she needed.
Her hands were steady. Her pulse was not.
She plugged the key into an open port. The indicator light blinked red. Handshaking. Negotiating.
Footsteps in the corridor.
Yuko froze. The light was still red. Still connecting.
The footsteps grew louder. Closer.
She pressed herself against the wall, behind the door. If someone opened it—
The footsteps passed. Kept going. Faded.
Fear was there. She moved anyway.
She exhaled. Her father's watch pressed cold against her wrist—she'd started wearing it after the funeral. Cheap digital. Cracked screen. Frozen at 8:31.
The exact moment he died.
She touched it now, a reflex. Dad, I'm going to find out who did this.
The light turned green.
Connection established. The key would mirror traffic from the internal network to a dead-drop server she'd configured last night—egress disguised as backup telemetry, packets shaped to match the maintenance VLAN's cadence. Anything that moved through this node—purge schedules, access logs, internal memos—she'd see it.
She closed the utility panel. Checked the corridor. Clear.
Walking back to the stairwell felt like wading through cement. Every second stretched. Every sound amplified. The hum of the servers sounded like breathing. The click of her shoes on concrete echoed like gunshots.
Act normal. You belong here. You're just an engineer checking on a maintenance issue.
She passed a technician coming the other way. Young guy, headphones in, barely glanced at her. She nodded. He nodded back.
Her heart was trying to crack through her ribs.
But no one stopped her. No one even looked.
Back at her desk, she opened her laptop and navigated to the dead-drop. Data was already flowing. Internal ticket system. HR notifications. Maintenance schedules.
And there it was.
SCHEDULED PURGE — MTM DIAGNOSTIC ARCHIVE — 02:00 DAILY — RETENTION: 0 DAYS
They were wiping the Minerva logs every night at 2 AM. Zero retention. Nothing survived until morning.
But the purge only hit the main servers. The hardware key was upstream—it would capture the data before deletion.
She'd found the window.
Then something else caught her eye. An internal memo, flagged RESTRICTED, routed through a distribution list she wasn't supposed to see:
RE: MTM-BLACKSITE MAINTENANCE SCHEDULE
Location: 4712 Industrial Parkway South, Unit 7
Network: Connected via S-Corp backbone (VLAN-7 tunnel)
Security: Standard camera rotation; thermal sensors basement level only
The off-books site. Ellen knew it existed but had never been able to find the address—it wasn't in any company directory, any building registry, any map. But here it was, buried in a maintenance ticket about HVAC filter replacements.
And it was on the same network backbone as HQ.
Yuko's mind raced. If the off-books site shared the S-Corp network, then her hardware key wasn't just capturing HQ traffic—it had a tunnel into the facility's security systems. She could see their camera feeds. Their access logs. Their diagnostic schedules.
She could loop their cameras.
Not permanently—someone would notice eventually. But for a window? Four minutes, maybe five? She could feed the security system yesterday's footage while they walked through in real-time.
She pulled out the burner phone. One message. No names.
Found it. 4712 Industrial Parkway South. I can blind the cameras for four minutes. Tomorrow, 11 PM.
Thirty seconds later, Ellen's reply:
How?
Hardware tap. Same network backbone.
A long pause. Then:
You're either brilliant or insane.
Both.
Tomorrow. 11 PM. Don't be late.
For a moment, she just sat there, staring at the screen. Data flowing. Evidence accumulating. The address. The network access. The camera feeds. Everything she needed to get inside.
Somewhere in that warehouse were the names of other victims. Other families destroyed. Other fathers who never came home.
She thought of the Route 7 driver Ellen had mentioned. Single father. Two kids. Did they know why their dad died? Did they believe the company's lies about "transport accidents" and "driver error"?
Or were they lying awake at night, just like her, knowing something was wrong but unable to prove it?
I'll find the truth. For all of us.
Her phone buzzed again. Not Ellen this time. Markus.
Hey! Saw you were in the building late. Everything okay? Want to grab dinner?
She stared at the message. The manipulation tasted sour in her mouth now. But she needed him. One more day.
Rain check? Swamped with a deadline. But soon—I promise.
Three dots. Then:
No problem! I'm here if you need anything. Anything at all.
She closed the chat.
Tomorrow night. 11 PM. 4712 Industrial Parkway South.
The hardware key was live. The purge window was mapped. The off-books site was on the same network—she could blind its cameras from here. Ellen's badge would get her through the doors she couldn't open alone.
One more day of pretending. One more day of smiling at people who might have watched her father die.
She could do this.
She had to.
