Page 370 of Primal

Deleting source files …

A blinking alert.

[UPLOAD INTERRUPTED – FAILSAFE SYSTEM PURGE INITIATED. DETONATION IN 09:57]

Of course—the bastard wouldn’t leave it to chance. If the upload fails, the laptop cannibalizes itself. If he couldn’t control the story, he’d torch the proof. Leak it—or lose it all.

“Fuck.”

Payton leans in. “What is it?”

I dive back into the command line, fingers trembling.

Her hand’s over mine. Correcting. Steadying.

ps aux | grep remote_trigger

There. A hidden script piggybacking on the purge process.

/etc/remote_access/dollface_trigger.sh

Figures.

kill -9 23098

My finger slips, hits 9 twice. She fixes it.

rm -rf /etc/remote_access/dollface_trigger.sh

One less leash for Derek to yank.

“He rigged a bomb.”

Her face goes slack. “What? Where?”

“My guess? The control room. Employee files, backup logs, payment records—all the shit that ties him here. If the footage leaked, the owners would get smoked first. Not him.”

“The laptop’s not enough?”

I glance down. Code floods the screen.

“It’s self-destructing. Auto-purge. He built this to go nuclear. Frame the owners, walk away clean.”

She swallows. “The bomb—it’s not in here too, right?”

“Hey, man. What’s the holdup?”

The timer ticks to 08:43. I shut the laptop.

Wesley exhales, shoulders dropping. “Okay. Good. Let’s go.”

“There’s a bomb in the control room,” I grit out. “We need to stop it.”

“A … what now? Hell no. We need to get the fuck out.”

“The key to the gates might be there too,” Payton whispers.

“Or we could wait at the exit. The staff should be here by morning. They’ll let us out.”