**Part 2** Not all the lights. The emergency strip along the floor flickered to life two seconds later, painting everything amber. =
**Part 2**
Not all the lights. The emergency strip along the floor flickered to life two seconds later, painting everything amber. The overheads were dead. The panel indicators. The digital temperature display on the walk-in door.
Then the sound. A soft metallic *shunk* from above them. Once. Deliberate.
Kais moved first—back through the door, into the hallway, to the stairwell. He tried the door. Locked. Deadbolted from the outside. His phone: no signal. The compound’s interior communications ran through a central router. Someone had just killed the hub.
He came back into the walk-in. On the backup screen, the temperature had already begun to drop. Not idle fluctuation. A hard plunge.
“They’ve engaged the override on the cooling system.” He said it the way a man reads a weather report. “This room will be below minus fifteen within twenty minutes. They’re turning it into a freezer to eliminate Odell.” A pause. “And us.”
Eta was already looking at the ceiling. “The evaporator drain line runs through the wall to the exterior housing. The access panel beside it was installed incorrectly. I noticed it on my third day. Wrong bracket gauge. The screws don’t anchor into the stud. Friction fit into insulation foam.” She was already moving toward the back wall. “The panel is about sixty by ninety. If we pull the shelving, we can reach it.”
Kais looked at the floor-to-ceiling unit loaded with roughly two hundred kilos of product.
“We’ll lose everything on it.”
“You can restock a kitchen.”
She was already pushing, thick shoulder braced against the upright, heels dug into the floor-drain grating. The unit did not want to move. Kais got beside her. They worked it together, grinding it across concrete with a sound like a ship running aground. Vacuum-sealed packages avalanched. Bags split. A season of expensive stock scattered. Neither of them stopped.
The panel behind it was white-painted plywood, poorly fitted, screws proud of the surface. Kais worked a multi-tool blade into the seam.
“We need to talk about who’s on the other side of that door,” Eta said. Her breath was beginning to show. “Three people have the code for the backup deadbolts. You. Your head of security. Your facilities coordinator.”
“Aldren or Brenner.”
“Brenner went to the mainland at four for supplies. I watched the boat leave.”
Kais went still for exactly one second. “Aldren.”
“He’s been chewing nicotine gum for three days. The kind you buy when you’re quitting cold turkey before something you can’t be impaired for. Yesterday he wore waterproof boots inside all morning. Forecast was clear. Fifteen and sunny. He knew the generator relay was going to fail. He dressed for a walk to the backup panel in the dark.”
Kais looked at her. “You noticed his boots.”
“I notice everything.” No pride in it. “When you’re the largest person in any room, people stop registering you. You become furniture. Furniture gets to watch.”
The plywood cracked. A section gave. Beyond it: a narrow service corridor. Mechanical smell. Warmer air.
“Where does this come out?”
“Mechanical room on the east side. One floor up. Directly adjacent to the generator housing. Which sits directly below your study.”
He looked at the opening, then at her.
“You go first. I’ll be right behind you.”
“I know,” Eta said, and she went.
The crawl was the worst ninety seconds of her adult life, and she had grown up in a Scarborough apartment with six people, one working radiator, and a landlord who answered on alternate Tuesdays, so the bar was not low. Her shoulders scraped both walls. She kept her face forward and her breathing controlled. She thought about the mechanical-room layout she had memorized three months ago because she memorized every room she was responsible for being in. She thought about what would be waiting on the other end.
Kais’s hand brushed her ankle twice in the dark. Just to confirm he was still there.
She did not know why that helped.
It did.
