The air around the facility was razor-still—too still. Even the night insects refused to sing near the perimeter of Block Zeta, the government's fortified data and experimentation center. According to Nira's blueprints, it was designed like a heart—veins of corridors pulsing outward, guarded by artificial intelligence and men who didn't blink.
Kirion crouched in the shadows of a crumbled drainage pipe. Above him, two security drones zipped past, infrared scanning the ground. His breathing slowed. Then stopped. Just long enough to avoid the sensor sweep.
Across the trench, his daughter gave him the signal: two taps on the comm, then silence.
She was already inside.
Dressed in a stolen uniform, she moved through the complex like static in the system. She had looped the security feed. Bought them fifteen minutes.
Kirion emerged from the pipe and moved fast. Silent. Controlled. He bypassed the first fence with a pulse disruptor, shorting out the sensor strip. Then he climbed.
Inside, Nira was waiting. She handed him a maintenance badge and nodded toward the service lift. "Sublevel 3. That's where they keep the archives. And the experiments."
"Anyone else in?"
"Just the two of us. The kid's working the firewalls."
Kirion didn't like the odds, but he never had.
The descent into Sublevel 3 felt like a drop into hell. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Somewhere in the distance, metal clanged against metal—like someone, or something, trying to get out.
They moved quickly, evading guards, bypassing retinal locks. At the archive vault, Kirion inserted the decrypted key his daughter had coded just hours earlier.
The door hissed open.
Inside: rows of data cubes, each containing terabytes of classified intel. Genetic experiments. Surveillance algorithms. Names.
One file stopped him cold: Project Infinitum.
It had his daughter's name on it.
"Take everything," he told Nira, voice hard.
They loaded the cubes into encrypted drives and slipped out just as the internal alarms tripped. Backup systems had kicked in. The loop was failing.
On the surface, gunfire erupted. Drones swarmed.
But by the time security reached the archive vault, it was empty.
The ghosts had already vanished.