She reached the elevator doors and pulled a master key card from her pocket—one she had lifted from a careless orderly weeks ago and conveniently forgotten to return. She swiped the card. The light turned green.
As the elevator began its slow, grinding ascent, Harper checked her makeshift weapon. She didn’t have her standard-issue Sig Sauer. She had a heavy, twelve-inch iron pipe wrench she’d found in the janitor’s cart. It wasn’t a rifle, but in close quarters, against a human knee or collarbone, the physics of blunt force trauma remained undefeated.
Ding.
The doors slid open on the fourth floor.
The atmosphere shifted instantly. The fourth floor was the executive wing. The air up here smelled of lemon polish and expensive air freshener. The floors were lined with plush carpet that absorbed the sound of footsteps, and the walls were decorated with framed portraits of past board members.
Harper moved fast, keeping her head down, pushing a mop bucket ahead of her as a prop.
She reached the heavy oak door marked ARCHIVE & DATA LOGISTICS. It was locked. A red light blinked on the electronic keypad.
She didn’t have the code.
“Open the door, Kinsley,” Harper whispered, pressing her lips to the crack in the doorframe, praying the young nurse was inside and hadn’t already been intercepted by Preston’s men.
Silence. The hum of the HVAC unit was the only response.
“Kinsley, it’s Bennett. I know you’re in there. I saw your login active from Overwatch. I know about the black file.”
For ten agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Harper’s grip tightened on the wrench. She calculated the force needed to breach the lock, but the noise would bring the contractors running.
Then, the electronic lock buzzed with a sharp clack.
The door cracked open.
Nurse Kinsley stood there. The twenty-three-year-old looked as though she had aged ten years in the last two hours. Her bright pink scrubs were wrinkled. Her face was deathly pale, and her eyes were bloodshot from crying. She was shaking so badly that her ID badge rattled against her chest.
Without a word, Kinsley reached out, grabbed the sleeve of Harper’s jumpsuit, and yanked her inside, slamming the door and engaging the deadbolt behind them.
The server room was freezing. Rows of black metallic towers hummed with the collective processing power of the hospital’s entire medical history, blinking with a constellation of blue and green LED lights.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” Kinsley sobbed, her voice barely a whisper as she backed away from Harper. “You’re all over the news. Sterling Preston has men sweeping the floors. He told the staff that you have a weapon. He said you were a violent fugitive.”
“I do have a weapon,” Harper said, tapping her head. “I have the truth. And so do you.”
Kinsley wrapped her arms around herself. “I… I can’t help you, Bennett. I’m just a data entry nurse. If they find me talking to you, I’ll lose my nursing license. Preston will ruin my life.”
Harper stepped closer, her tone softening. She recognized the look in Kinsley’s eyes. It was the same look the young privates had when the mortars first started falling. Paralyzing, suffocating fear.
“Kinsley, look at me,” Harper said, taking off her cap. “You got into nursing to help people. I know you did. I watched you sit with that little girl in the oncology ward for three hours past your shift last week just so she wouldn’t be scared.”
Kinsley swallowed hard, a fresh tear rolling down her cheek.
“You know what Silas Preston is,” Harper continued, her voice steady and grounding. “You’ve seen the records. You’ve seen the bodies he’s buried. The mistakes. The amputations. The overdoses. If we don’t stop him today, someone else dies tomorrow. Maybe a kid. Maybe a mother. Are you going to let that happen because you’re scared of a rich man in a suit?”
Kinsley looked at the floor, her shoulders heaving. “I tried,” she whispered.
“Tried what?”
Kinsley pointed to the main administrator workstation at the center of the room. On the large dual monitors, a massive red progress bar was moving slowly across the screen.
SYSTEM PURGE INITIATED. OVERWRITING ARCHIVAL DRIVES… 85% COMPLETE.
“They’re wiping it remotely,” Kinsley choked out. “Sterling called the IT desk ten minutes ago. He ordered an ‘emergency security update.’ But it’s not an update. It’s a total purge of the last ten years of surgical and pharmaceutical logs. Once that bar hits one hundred percent… the proof of Silas’s mistakes, the hush-money payments, the altered death certificates… it’s all gone forever.”
Harper stared at the screen. The number ticked up. 86%.
“Can you stop it?” Harper asked, moving toward the keyboard.
“I tried! I’m locked out of the admin controls,” Kinsley said, panic rising in her voice. “Sterling has the master key. I can’t abort the script. It’s writing zeroes over all the data.”
Harper looked at the towering racks of servers. If the software was compromised, there was only one solution. Physical extraction.
“Which drive holds the master backups?” Harper demanded.
