Page 27 of Reaper
"Finish your work." He's already turning for the hall. "I've got the perimeter."
Gone before I can breathe.
I press my back against the shelf and stare at the water-stained ceiling.
Seventy-two hours.
I pick up my mug and walk back to the terminal.
Riot's voice comes over the internal radio a few minutes later, flat and unhurried. "Weather service just issued a tornado watch for the county. Effective eighteen hundred hours through 0600. System's moving faster than forecast."
Frost's response: "Copy. We stay on timeline."
The radio clicks off.
Outside, the timber has gone still in the wrong way — that held-breath quiet that comes before the pressure drops. The light through the windows has turned the color of old bruises.
The audit will be ready tonight,I told him.Then this part is over.
I pull up the audit file and get back to work.
Three keystrokesfrom done when the alarm tears through the building.
Every overhead light dies.
The corridor goes pitch-black.
The emergency strobe — brutal, red, relentless — kicks on a half-second later, strobing the walls in blood-colored pulses.
0247 hours. I'm supposed to be asleep. I'm not.
The tornado watch.That's my first thought. The system moved faster than forecast. The watch became a warning and nobody came to get me and?—
"Breach." Frost's voice erupts over the internal PA, all calm stripped from it. "Multiple thermal signatures. Perimeter is compromised. All hands."
Not the storm.
Boots on concrete — heavy, fast, the entire team slamming out of rooms.
I lunge for the terminal. The audit package — fourteen months of forensic work — is three keystrokes from complete. I execute the final export, pushing the full evidentiary file to the encrypted remote server before the connection can drop. If this building burns to the ground in the next ten minutes, the work survives. The chain of evidence survives.
Then I grab the hardshell drive and move.
The door to my left explodes inward. Flint comes through it low and fast, dragging me back from the main room as a burst of automatic fire tears through the wall above the terminal.
"They're on the south fence." Flint covers the main room entrance. "Six at minimum. Moving fast."
Wyatt is in the hall in three seconds.
He doesn't ask if I'm alright. He reads me — drive in hand, on my feet, not bleeding — and moves past that in an instant. He puts himself between me and the main room doorway, sidearm up.
Gunfire rolls through the walls in short, punishing bursts.
Frost comes out of the east corridor, assault rifle raised, blood streaking down the left side of his face. He locks on Wyatt.
One look. The same compressed exchange I've clocked a dozen times in three days — everything unsaid between them, filtered down to what the situation requires.
"Storm cellar." Frost's voice is flat iron. "Tunnel exit into the timber. Fifty meters. Take her. We'll hold them here."
