Юлия Авилкина – Survivors Bias (страница 5)

“Elena, get to the elevator shaft at the end of the row!” Leo’s voice in my ear was drowning in a sea of static. “They’re at my door... I’m starting the wipe protocol... don’t let them—”

The connection cut out with a sharp, final beep.

I didn’t hesitate. I leveled the injector pen—the only thing I had that even looked like a weapon—and lunged forward, moving by muscle memory alone. The heavy thud of tactical boots hammered against the concrete behind me.

“Got a heat signature! Left flank!” one of them barked.

I dove under the rusted chassis of a mothballed bus in the depot. A red laser sight traced a line through the air just an inch from my shoulder. Marcus’s pulse-taser slammed into the side of the bus, the metal groaning under the electric discharge.

“Marcus, stop!” I screamed, rolling behind a concrete pillar. “You fire that thing again and the vial breaks! You have any idea what’s in here? It’s a bio-toxin for your precious AI. One leak and Clara turns into a heap of zeros and ones!”

I was bluffing. I had no clue how fragile the vial was, but it made them freeze. In the gloom, I could see the three red HUD lights on their helmets stilled like the eyes of waiting predators.

“You won’t break it, Lisa,” Marcus’s voice came from terrifyingly close. “You want to live too badly. You’ll hand it over, and maybe—just maybe—I’ll let you walk.”

“You already let Maya ‘walk,’” I spat back.

My hand found a heavy piece of rebar on the floor. With one desperate swing, I smashed the valve of a nearby fire hydrant. The antique steel couldn't handle the pressure; a geyser of ice-cold water blasted toward the ceiling, drenching everything in seconds.

For their thermal optics, it was game over. The sudden temperature spike turned their screens into a useless white-out.

“Damn it! I’m blind!” a voice yelled from the dark.

Taking the opening, I bolted for the elevator shaft. I grabbed the greasy cable and slid down, the friction searing my palms. Down in the maintenance tunnels, it was quieter, but Leo’s voice was still hammering inside my skull like a warning bell.

“They’re at my door.”

I scrambled out onto the street through a ventilation grate three blocks from the terminal. Queens was dead to the world, nobody suspecting that in the basement of an old laundromat, the fate of the only person who’d stood by me was being decided.

I couldn't just charge in there. If I showed up empty-handed, they’d kill both of us. But I had the notebook.

I flipped to the very last page. There, beneath a long list of names, was an address. Not a digital one. A physical location. “Aurora Relay Station. Manual Override.”

Maya hadn't just left a virus. She’d left a way to deliver it straight into the heart of Clara’s system, bypassing every firewall she had.

Chapter 5

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