Page 5 of Until the End

Her fingers found the cool steel lever. She depressed the handle, ducking into the freezing room that was kept cold to protect the hardware, and let the door hang open.

She wasn’t a hide-and-cower kind of gal. Yet here she was, pressed against the wall, wishing it would envelop her. The horror of what was unfolding washed over her.

Tim, Jeff, Marty, Lincoln…were all going to die. Her best friends. Her family.

Her insides roiled. She had to get out of there without being seen.

“Finish the program,” Bravo said, his tone icy, detached.

“But the keyboard…” Tim said. “It’s covered in blood and…”

“Brain matter, bits of skull,” Bravo said. “Unless you want yours added to it, I suggest you finish what Jasper started.”

The click-clack of fingers flying across a keyboard cut through the low hum of the surrounding machinery.

She shivered down to the bone. The loft was a three-minute drive. Charlie would search the apartment and tell Bravo she wasn’t there. Bravo would look for her everywhere.

Oh God. God.

What was she going to do? How could she save the others? How could she save herself?

She stared at the wall of backup hard drives linked to the workstations in the Lair. Her gaze drifted over the rows of blinking lights, up the thin handles of the drives, locking on the name of the system at the top: Sentry.

Jasper’s words rang in her head. Take the Sentry. Make it right.

He was misguided and power hungry, but he was clever enough to feed her a message: grab the backup hard drives and find a way to make these bastards pay.

She scanned the serial numbers of the hard drives. Each one corresponded to dates and individual workstations. The archive was vast, cataloging everything they’d worked on over the past six years. If those killers were going to cover their tracks, they’d destroy the backups as well. The Outliers’ life’s work would be eradicated.

Taking precious minutes to pull all the hard drives was suicide. Besides, there was no way for her to carry them all. But she didn’t know who had worked on what for Bravo’s deranged crew or which workstation harbored the data mother lode.

Whatever horror-gram video they wanted scheduled for broadcast was on Jasper’s computer.

Kit found the hard drive linked to Jasper’s station. It was a real-time mirror backup. If Tim wasn’t done loading the encrypted video, it wouldn’t save, and pulling it would send a pop-up alert. She needed to take Jasper’s hard drive last.

Whatever those terrorists wanted, the work had been divided between five hackers and multiple workstations. Think. Come on. Think.

Lincoln was brilliant, kind, a gentle spirit. A natural who found answers for the most complicated problems. Anything significant would have been given to him to execute.

She found Lincoln’s row.

Flipping the switch, she powered his current drive down and pulled it from the mainframe. Her gaze bounced to the doorway. It was a toss-up between Marty, Tim, and Jeff.

I’m glad she doesn’t know what Tim and Lincoln did, Jasper had said.

Another clue. She chose Tim’s drive and stuffed both in her bag.

The pop of gunfire pierced the drone from the air conditioner, echoing in the pit of her stomach. The gun had a silencer, but the sound was sharp, louder than expected.

She ached to do something, anything to protect the last people in the world she loved. But there wasn’t a damn thing she could do. Not against three men with guns.

Take the drives and get out. She hustled to Jasper’s backups and found the hard drive she needed and shoved it in her satchel.

Another gunshot snapped in the air. They were executing everyone. The familiar ache of loss cut so deep that her soul bled. But there was no time to grieve. She had to move.

Kit peeked around the threshold and glimpsed Tim and Marty. Both dead.

Instead of having qualms about guns, she wished she had an Uzi in her bag.