"You're sure you want to do this right now? There's no deadline. Hell, you don't even have to be in for work until Monday. You can afford another couple days to, y'know." Broots gestured expressively. "Grieve."
Reasoning that any suspicious activity traceable back to their own desks would have brought Lyle and his dwindling supply of flunkies down on their heads far too fast, Miss Parker and Broots had gravitated to Sydney's vacant workspace and scrounged up a PC.
"Spend less time thinking about my grieving process and more time typing," Miss Parker said.
With his heels, Broots pushed off from Sydney's desk. He sighed.
"There's nothing to type. Remember the data backup warehouse in Connecticut? If we're really going to go all scorched-earth on the Centre, we need access not only to all the top-secret data backups, but also all the routine, unclassified information too, like employee records. They keep the networks separate for exactly this reason, so one remote server wipe can't take the whole company down. I told you, if I'm going to access the off-site networks without leaving the premises I need a hard-wired, physical connection to the server for those networks, they're not connected to the main network at all."
"And I told you, I don't know what that —"
"It means I need to be in the room with the machines that are connected to the other Centre locations. And that's just the first step. I'm well-versed in retrieving information, not obliterating it. Setting up a remote server wipe will take time."
Miss Parker drew something from her pocket, a thumb drive.
"We're covered on that front. In my and — in our plan, I was always going to be the one to remotely wipe the servers, while…" A shaky exhale. Treading close to thoughts of Jarod felt like teetering on the edge of a precipice. "… While he took care of physical records." She wiggled the device between her fingers. "This was the salted bomb of the scorched-earth plan. As he explained it, it gets rid of all stored information on all connected machines. Vacation photos and all."
Jarod had explained it as an analogue to ant poison, all the affected ants taking the poison home to their nests. Thinking of that conversation now felt like watching a movie on a well-worn videotape.
Broots took the device from her, abruptly cautious. He'd noticed the shaky exhale.
"So when this is over, we still have the physical data to take care of? I hope we get that far. Also, we skipped the step where I have to get physical access to the server. In some ways that's harder than coding a salted bomb. We can't get into the server room, there's a lot of traffic through that sub-level and someone would definitely see, just a matter of who."
Miss Parker gritted her teeth in a facsimile of a grin. She felt as though she were play-acting at being 'Miss Parker'. The longer she play-acted, the longer she could put off letting the floodgates open again.
"I can make that happen," she said. After a generous pause, Broots's eyes widened.
"What? No, didn't you hear me? Someone would see!"
"So they see," she snapped. "So what?"
Broots boggled at her.
"There are so many answers to that question," he said.
Miss Parker spun his chair around to face her.
"C'mon, Broots. We'll head up together, it'll be fine. Haven't you ever really wanted to ruin Lyle's day?"
Broots frowned. "You don't think we'll get caught?"
"Not a chance," she said, without hesitation.
The truth was, she'd say pretty much anything to convince him, and she knew it. She was throwing Broots into the line of fire, and she knew that too. She hadn't even told him about Lyle killing off fleeing employees, knowing full well that he might pull out of the plan if he knew. Hell, he should pull out. All of this was too distant to acknowledge, too out-of-reach, that was the only problem. She couldn't see anything in front of her but the remote possibility of bringing this whole place crashing down, this ambling, bloated corpse which had killed Catherine Parker, had killed Thomas Gates, and had now killed Jarod.
The Centre needed to be euthanized.
Sub-level fourteen was a jack-of-all-trades floor, a floor that wore a lot of proverbial hats. Miss Parker and Broots passed the chemical labs and the gun range on the way to the server rooms, armed with a pair of outside contractor access key cards. The muffled pattern of crack-BANG retorts kept Broots twitching all the way down the main hallway.
"What do we say if we come across someone?" Broots asked.
"I'm head of security. I can go anywhere." She considered. "Almost anywhere."
"What about m — uh!"
She pulled him back around the corner he'd just rounded, and shushed him.
"Shut up. You were right, the server room is being guarded. Wynn and someone else, I don't recognize him."
Broots poked his head around the corner again, glimpsed the door guards, and ducked back into cover.
"Wait, but didn't you just say you could go almost anywhere?" he asked.
"Can't chance that they'll radio Lyle for confirmation that I'm allowed in. Hang on," she hissed. She pulled a walkie-talkie out of her suit jacket pocket and held it to her mouth. "This is Parker for Wynn, Parker for Security Officer Wynn, over."
Around the corner, a broad-set woman with a stony expression standing alongside the server room door picked up her own walkie-talkie.
"Go for Wynn, over."
"Who else is stationed with you on Sierra-Lima-One-Four? Over."
"Brewis is here, over."
Wordlessly, Miss Parker ushered Broots into an open office off the main hallway.
"I need you and Brewis on Sierra-Lima-Twenty-Two, immediately," she said. "Over."
There was a brief pause, during which a muttered, indistinct exchange between Wynn and Brewis drifted down the hallway.
"Copy that, Sierra-Lima-Twenty-Two," said Wynn. "Should we wait to be relieved before we head down? Over."
"Negative, Wynn. Now. Over."
"Wilco."
"See you soon. Out."
Seconds later, Wynn and Brewis passed by the darkened office in which Miss Parker and Broots were hidden. Broots waited until their footsteps rounded another corner, eventually obscured by the distant, intermittent popping of gunfire. He breathed a sigh of relief and ducked out into the hallway outside the server room, pausing only to scan himself in at the door.
Miss Parker moved to follow him.
"Miss Parker!"
Willie was striding up the hallway in their direction. Thinking quickly, she closed the door to the server room after Broots and continued down the hallway towards Willie, trying to look as if she were only passing the server room, not entering it.
"Wha —" said Broots, cut off by the closing door.
"Willie," Miss Parker said in greeting. "What are you doing down here?"
"I'm relieving Wynn and Brewis, what do you think? It was my shift in twenty minutes anyway, I don't have anything going on. A 'thank you' would be nice." He frowned and gave her conspicuous once-over, his eye snagging on the key card in her hand. He paused. "Outside contractor access?"
Miss Parker didn't respond right away. Her mouth twisted, considering her subordinate. He was guessing, that was clear from his tone, but it wouldn't be a guess for long. Just as she'd done when smuggling herself in to see Jarod in his holding cell, she'd changed the permissions for outside contractor key card access to get them into the server room. Outside contractor key cards were not attached to an employee ID and were therefore more anonymous for getting into key card-locked rooms. She'd known at the time that there was a chance Willie would notice, since he had noticed the first time. If once was ostensibly a mistake, twice would look deliberate. There was no coming back from this.
She just hadn't thought it would be noticed so soon.
"I thought I switched your shift. I meant to when I got in this morning," she said, spit-balling on the spot. "I'd prefer you were up at the tower."
It wasn't the smoothest move, but it would give her grounds to shout him down if she needed to. Willie's mouth tightened in a dry smile.
"Works for me. Oh, hey," he said, with a cursory attempt at sounding casual. "Did you hear Sam is back on his feet? I guess it takes a couple days to shake off being brained with a vase. I had a chance to catch up with him, but." He exhaled through his nose. "Man, that vase shook something loose. I couldn't get him to shut up and let me leave. You ever know Sam to talk much? And now he does nothing but."
"I didn't hear, no," she said slowly. What was Willie getting at? Was this a threat? Watch yourself, or be the subject of Lyle's next random act of workplace violence?
"Yeah," said Willie. "Hell of a thing. You know, at the very least I could always count on this place for a steady pay cheque and job security, but you see that kind of thing happen to someone like Sam and… it's crazy."
"Hm!" said Miss Parker, an ambiguous noise of all-purpose support. He didn't seem to be threatening her, at least, but she couldn't see where he was going with this tangent.
Suddenly, Willie bent close.
"Don't think you can count on me to back you up if you get caught," he hissed in her ear. She froze. "But also… don't get caught, yeah? And good luck."
And he doubled back in the direction he'd come from, back towards the surface. Miss Parker watched him leave. On any other day, the news that Willie would passively support an attempt on Centre security might have rocked her world a little. Today, post-Jarod, life would have to work harder than that to get her world even slightly listing to one side.
Once she let herself into the server room, Broots was already hard at work with his bundle of wires and doo-dads. Miss Parker took up a post at the sliver of window above the doorknob, so she could watch the hallway for any further interruptions. Every second she expected Wynn and Brewis (or even Willie, second-guessing his usual instincts to narc to the nearest authority figure) to come stampeding back.
"Sub-level twenty-two," mused Broots to himself as he fiddled with his command line. Miss Parker caught the words, but only just.
"What?" she called, over the rows of server towers that stood between them. Broots paused.
"Sub-level twenty-two," he repeated, a little louder. "That was one of the black-out floors, right? Is that why you sent Wynn and Brewis there?"
This was the trouble with hanging out with Broots for too long at a time. He had difficulty gauging what other people knew, so occasionally he assumed everybody else was fluent in nerd.
"What are you talking about, Broots?" she asked, though she wasn't sure she cared to know.
"The floors where you have the security footage looped, all the floors below SL-20."
It took a moment for the words to sink in. When they did, they sent a tendril of unease through the heavy fog obscuring Miss Parker's mind. She wound around the maze of server towers until she found Broots, sitting in an untidy heap with his nest of wires and cables.
"What do you mean, the floors that have security footage looped? I've seen live footage from SL-25 while J — while Jarod was there." Again, she'd almost lost her breath, only to push through it.
Broots looked up from his work.
"You mean you didn't set that up? Jarod didn't set that up? I spotted it when you asked me to shut down security measures on SL-25 the night before… uh, you know."
"I do know, yes," Miss Parker snapped, a solar flare of grief escaping her gravity for a fraction of a second. She wrestled it back under control with a gasp of effort. "Get on with it."
"Sorry," he stammered. "Like I said, I spotted it at the time but I figured that was your doing. You didn't do that, then? Yeah, all of the security surveillance inputs from sub-levels twenty-seven, twenty-six, and twenty-one through twenty-four are being spoofed."
It was so out of left field, Miss Parker was tempted to ignore it and carry on. What if it changed the course of the plan, though? She couldn't afford mistakes. All the dominoes had to fall just so.
"Why would —" she started, but was interrupted by a voice from over her shoulder.
"This keeps happening lately, doesn't it?"
Miss Parker whipped around, one hand flying to the holster under her suit jacket. Lyle had let himself into the server room.
"I keep stumbling upon the two of you chumming around, as if I haven't assigned you both to separate projects. I understand you two will want some time to mourn our dearly departed Pretender, but, well. The server room for the off-site networks seems like a strange place for a wake."
For three suspended seconds, Miss Parker and Broots were a pair of deer caught in headlights. Miss Parker knew what she wanted to do. She could see it in her mind's eye. She would grab Lyle by the ears, swing his head down nose-first into her knee, then for good measure, she'd bash him in the temple with the butt of her gun. Out like a light. Ostensibly, she couldn't do that.
…
But after all, why not? No time like the present. She'd kicked her brother's ass twice already in the past week, what was one more time?
A dozen floors down, another match flared in the dark.
Lyle was on the floor before he could get out a word of protest. The swing at his temple had missed and the gun had glanced off his ear instead, still managing to hit the side of his head pretty damn hard. He groaned, momentarily blinded by spots swimming in his vision.
"So we're burning all the bridges, huh?" said Broots once he'd managed to collect his dropped jaw.
"You're complaining? If that was even half as satisfying to watch as it was to do…"
"No, it was great." Broots let out a gasp of laughter.
"You're welcome. Do you have anything that could shut him up for a while?"
Broots rooted around in his computer networking kit until he emerged with something round and black.
"How's electrical tape?"
"Perfect."
She wound the roll around Lyle's head, blocking his mouth and leaving his nose unobstructed. Broots's kit turned out to also include several yards of ethernet cable and a sheaf of zip ties. As it turned out, computer networking kits work pretty well as restraint kits. Who knew?
Miss Parker stepped back to admire her handy-work, a thoroughly trussed-up Lyle. He'd recovered from the blow to the head and was glaring up at his sister, doing his best to shout through layers upon layers of sticky black tape.
Broots looked up from his work.
"I'm connected to the off-site networks," he announced. "Do — do you still want to go through and back up any information we can use?" He looked sideways, over at their new guest. Lyle howled with rage, thrashing like a shark on dry land. Broots averted his eyes. "It would take some time."
Here was her new, more reckless philosophy biting her in the ass almost immediately. They no longer had any time. It couldn't take more than an hour before someone noticed Lyle was missing.
She'd jumped over several of the original plan's key steps to get here. It had been necessary, without Jarod providing backup. One step had involved mining the Centre for any data they could squeeze from it, before wiping all native, on-site traces. If they skipped the former step and jumped to the latter, one hard fact presented itself: this would be the end of any answers from the Centre. Any remaining threads could only terminate in a question mark.
Over the last six years, her waking hours had been divided more-or-less evenly between tracking down Jarod and investigating the Centre, with the lion's share of the latter spent on the mystery of Catherine Parker's death. From one angle, writing off her pursuit for answers as a lost cause felt like she was betraying her own time and hard work, not to mention the memory of her mother. From another angle, it was the only form freedom could ever feasibly take.
She shook her head.
"I've wasted so much time chasing after the next Centre mystery, and the next, and the next. It's a sinkhole, and I've had enough." It demanded more than five minutes' consideration, but they didn't have five minutes. "Wipe it all."
Lyle screamed with rage. He flopped and thrashed even harder, pausing only to groan when he managed to whack his own shoulder against the knobbly surface of one of the server towers.
"Ooh, that had to hurt," said Miss Parker with an exaggerated wince. She was flying high, and she aimed to stay in the air as long as she could, because the crash down to earth would be a painful one. "He whacked that same shoulder when I tripped him on Jarod's basement stairs the other day. Dislocated it."
Lyle's eyes widened and he hollered something unintelligible.
"Oh, come on, you put together that Jarod didn't kidnap me but it didn't occur to you that I might have been the boogie man under the stairs? You're slipping."
"Done," said Broots. "Well, mostly. It will take some time to format everything, but there's nothing else I need to do on my end. That takes care of the off-site networks. Everything in the main office is still intact. I can get to work on that, but the most thorough wipe I can pull off will also delete every non-default security parameter. Like when you do a hard reset on your phone, everything goes back to factory default settings. Same thing here."
"Good, fine. Will it affect those black-out floors you mentioned?"
"Yep. No more spoofed input."
A plaintive groan from Lyle. Miss Parker knelt down next to him.
"What are you hiding down there, huh? Must be bad. I've seen a lot of Centre dirty laundry in the sub-levels and you've never bothered to mess with the security feeds before."
At least as far as I know, she thought. For all she knew, it could be standard practice for him.
Broots piped up. "I think it's a who," he said. "One of the changes made to the system since… well, since whenever these measures were put into effect, is that none of the land-line phones on floors below SL-20 are capable of calling out. They can't call to lines on other sub-levels, they can't call off-site. They're all restricted to within-department calls. Why do that unless they didn't want someone calling for help?"
A buzzing like some incensed insect caught under a drinking glass caught Miss Parker's ear. It came from over by the server room exit. She followed the sound, leading her to her abandoned walkie-talkie designing small circles on the floor as it buzzed and hissed. It must have slipped out of her pocket during the fight with Lyle and skidded across the floor. Between pops and spurts, she caught the words 'Lyle' and 'responding'. She shut it off and stuffed it back in her pocket, her thoughts whirring. They were running out of time.
When she came back, Broots was sitting back from his laptop, the glow of accomplishment brightening his tired features.
"Miss Parker! The feeds are back. You gotta see this."
She crouched next to him, the better to view the screen.
He blew up one of the security feed grids such that the security feeds for one floor filled the screen.
"Which sub-level is this?" she asked.
"Not sure. Apparently the labels we usually use to indicate which input is coming from which floor and room is customized information, it's all been replaced by generic placeholders."
Miss Parker squinted at the grainy figures criss-crossing from room to room. It didn't look like any Centre sub-level she'd ever seen. Granted, there were many departments of the Centre that she simply never concerned herself with.
"So we have no idea what we're looking at?" she said. "This could be anywhere."
"Yeah, pretty much," said Broots. "There're some tables and chairs, something that looks like a treadmill. But hang on, look at this." He zoomed in on one frame, which showed someone lying in bed. Another figure sat next to the bed with their back to the camera. This second figure appeared to be trying to persuade the first to get out of bed. The bedridden someone was bald, and the shape of his head and ears looked remarkably like those of…
"Raines," Miss Parker breathed. She looked over at Lyle, who had gone still. "He's alive? All my money was on him being six feet under, along with the Triumvirate."
Lyle said something unintelligible and wiggled his jaw back and forth in an effort to free himself from the electrical tape. Miss Parker made no move to free him, but casually shoved him with the heel of her shoe.
"The guy with him…," said Broots.
Miss Parker squinted at the man sitting by Raines's bed. She knew who she wanted him to be, but she didn't quite dare hope until she had some concrete proof. As she watched, the man stood and turned away from the bed, and the camera got a passable angle on his profile.
"It's Syd," she whispered. "Right? That's Sydney!"
She laughed, an unexpected wave of joy washing over her. After all she'd lost in the last few days, at least Sydney was still kicking.
Broots leaned forward and squinted, too.
"I, I think so? I think so. It's so hard to see anything. The security cameras are terrible, I'm not even getting any audio. No offence."
"Hey, I didn't install them," she said. He wasn't wrong, though. The quality was terrible. An idea struck her. "Can you back out? I want to look at another floor."
"I told you, they aren't —"
"Labelled, I know. You know what the communications department looks like, right? Show me the communications department."
He did so, pulling up a security grid showing a long corridor lined with offices, a larger hall filled with cubicles, typical Centre office decor. Nothing unexpected. She nudged Broots.
"Does that look clearer to you?"
Broots considered, then nodded slowly.
"Yeah. Yeah, it does. So… what, they've got better cameras in the communications department?"
"Go back to Raines's room."
"You got it." He switched back.
The visibility was definitely worse wherever Raines and Syd were camped out. Like they were looking through a fog. A fog or…
"Smoke," she said, voicing the thought aloud.
"What?"
"I think there's smoke. It looks like smoke is obscuring the camera, wherever Raines and Syd are." And that was odd, wasn't it? If there were smoke, wouldn't the fire alarms be going off? Maybe the alarm was confined to the sub-level, just as calls inside and out of each of the blackout floors had been restricted. "Maybe that's why Syd is trying to get Raines out of bed. Check the other sub-levels, see if anywhere else has smoke, too."
"Well, that's part of the problem. I didn't regain access to all the sub-levels' security feeds, just a couple. I don't know which, but at the very least we have SL-21 and two others. I don't see SL-27, but that's not a shock. I don't see the holding cells, either."
To illustrate his words, he pulled up another unlabelled security grid and showed her: instead of footage loops, they were now reading back errors.
"Syd's alive," she said. "That's something. I don't know why he wouldn't just take the elevator up to the surface, though. Maybe the elevators are locked, to trap him and Raines within the sub-level? Or were locked. They wouldn't be locked now, right? If you hard reset everything."
"Right!" said Broots, with a look of pride which suggested he was impressed by the logical leap. "There are no codes for elevator use by default. So they should be able to get back to the main floor on their own, but they won't know they're free to try."
"I need to get down to the lower levels, then," said Miss Parker. Keep moving, that was the only thing to do. Keep moving and grief couldn't catch her.
"'I'?" Broots echoed. He moved to close his laptop lid and get to his feet. "We can go down together."
"No." Miss Parker pushed Broots back to the floor by the tips of her fingers.
"No?"
"Someone needs to stay and keep an eye on Lyle."
A look of horror swept over Broots's face.
"You mean someone needs to stay and be found with Lyle when what loyal employees he's got left find us!"
"Broots, think it through," she said, with what passed for patience in her idiolect. "That's true regardless of whether you come with me. You think he won't name both of us as soon as he's found? At least this way, we can put that off as long as possible. Here —" She crouched and reached behind Lyle's back, emerging with a handgun. Lyle did his best impression of a netted carp again. "Now you can keep an eye and a gun on him. Unless you want to be the one to go meet Sydney?"
"I'd love to, we —"
"You want to be the person who tells Sydney the boy he raised from the age of four is dead?"
Broots froze. From the expression on his face, Miss Parker guessed that in all the excitement, Jarod's death had all but slipped his mind. Meanwhile, it was a constant, painful thrum at the back of Miss Parker's skull.
"I —" Broots broke off, looking uncomfortable.
"Yeah, that's what I thought. See you later."
The bitch of it is, I don't want to be the one to tell Syd either, Miss Parker mused to herself as the elevator pulled her deeper into the bowels of the Centre. Sydney wouldn't blame her, she knew. Even with all the facts lined up, he wouldn't. Even knowing she'd been the one spotted near the house in the Teton Wilderness, giving the game away to Lyle. Even knowing she'd been the one to move the plan forward, pushing him to rush his escape from SL-25. Still, Sydney wouldn't blame her. He'd pull some switcheroo so it was his fault the whole time, that was just the sort of bullshit he'd pull.
And he'd be right, said a little voice in her head. Sydney had had a hundred thousand chances to free Jarod from the Centre, but he'd never gone through with it. She could throw all the excuses she wanted at it — Sydney's life had been on the line, after all! But it wasn't enough. Not for someone who was what Sydney had been to Jarod.
The elevator stopped with a jerk which sent Miss Parker careening sideways into the wall. A stubborn beep emitted from the button panel and the display above the doors scrolled through a repeating message: OUT OF ORDER.
Oh, fantastic. This was all she needed. What was it about this damn elevator? She scanned the more neglected buttons towards the bottom of the panel. One was labelled 'Pull Emergency Stop', another 'Emergency Alarm Press Button', but she wasn't quite ready to press either. She didn't want to signal to the entire Centre staff where she was, not unless she was really up a creek. There was a keyhole labelled 'Door Release', but Miss Parker had no such key.
She crammed her fingertips into the meeting of the two doors and tried to pry them apart, to no avail. As long as the elevator had power, the doors could not be opened manually. What she needed was a remote door release, or maybe a power cut to the elevator, neither of which would be too hard to request from CentSec. The problem was, such a request would invite questions and attention focused on the elevator. Already, people must be looking at their watches and wondering what had happened to the elevator. She didn't need more eyes on the blackout floors below SL-20 before she'd assessed the situation herself.
Smoke, she remembered. There had been smoke obscuring the security feed.
She took out her walkie-talkie.
"This is Parker for Harvey," she said.
After a few seconds of dead air, Harvey responded.
"Go for Harvey, over."
"Is there a delay initiating the fire drill? Over."
Another pause.
"Fire drill? Over."
"Is there an echo? Today's fire drill. It should have started fifteen minutes ago. Tell me you're prepped for the fire drill, Harvey. Tell me you informed the Blue Cove Fire Department. Tell me I'm not shouting into the ether when I send you these memos, Harvey. Over."
These words had undoubtedly sent the guys up on SL-9 into pandemonium. It was a solid minute before another word came through the walkie-talkie.
"Copy that, Miss Parker. Fire drill proceedings will begin in five minutes. Out."
Objectively, Harvey was probably the best person for the job of running CentSec. He was a people person, where by all accounts Miss Parker was anything but. Miss Parker had left the department in shambles when she moved on to corporate. At the time, she'd been fresh out of college with a chip on her shoulder the size of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. She'd resented the idea of coming back to work at the place where her mother had died, and she'd made her resentment everyone else's problem. Harvey, on the other hand, had wrangled the department into a much more respectable place to work, had even given it a shiny new rebranding. He had the kind of work ethic that could organize the logistics of a building-wide fire drill in less than five minutes. But, he didn't have nepotism on his side, so here they all were.
True to Harvey's words, in five minutes' time a distant klaxon began to sound. Seconds later, the elevator jerked and whined like a car stuck in mud, beeped, and opened its doors. As the doors opened, they made a maddening scraping sound of metal on metal, revealing a darkened hallway beyond. The number 20 was embossed in brass lettering on the threshold: sub-level twenty.
The elevator doors were not perfectly aligned with the exit onto SL-20. The elevator had dropped a few feet past SL-20 when some unidentified fault had stopped its progress. Miss Parker pulled herself up through the exit with a grunt and swung her legs clear of the threshold as quickly as possible, keen not to give the elevator any undue opportunity to suddenly drop and crush her legs into paste.
SL-20 was dark and still; it would be completely quiet but for the insistent caterwauling of the fire alarm. This sub-level hosted the defunct Centre infirmary. No current patients were housed here, not since Medical had moved up to SL-12 a couple of years previous. It was not the floor where they'd seen Sydney and Raines, that much was obvious. Miss Parker bee-lined for the door to the stairwell. Sydney was somewhere between sub-level 21 and sub-level 27, inclusive. Not for the first time, she cursed Broots for not being able to narrow down the scope of her search. She needed to find Sydney before some fire drill evacuee came across her and thought to ask why she wasn't headed for the exits.
Two things struck her as she emerged into the stairwell. The first was the noise above: floor upon floor of Centre employees were following their prescribed routes to the fire exits, chatting cheerfully among themselves as they piled out of their offices and into the stairwell, making for the ground floor.
The second was the smell of smoke.
She and Broots had seen smoke on the security cameras. To find Sydney, it made sense to follow the smell of smoke, which appeared to be coming from the very lowest sub-levels.
At the next floor down, Miss Parker grabbed the doorknob to SL-21… and paused. Where there was smoke, there could be fire — what if she was walking into an inferno? But the knob was cool to the touch and turned under her hand. When she poked her head through, she almost ran into a short man in a safety vest marshalling the last of the communications department out to the fire exit route. The man in the safety vest gave her a skeptical glance and looked ready to admonish her, then averted his eyes once recognition dawned.
"Miss Parker," he mumbled deferentially, ushering the last of the employees past the both of them.
This couldn't be where Sydney and Raines were being held. It didn't look anything like the security footage Broots had identified, for one. Miss Parker pushed her way back through the doors and set off again, downwards.
The hub-bub above quietened to a distant hum as the building steadily emptied. The growing quiet rang in Miss Parker's ears. Then, as she drew level with the access door to sub-level twenty-two, she heard a sound from below. A door opened and quickly closed. The sound of the door slamming into its hinges was quickly followed by the sound of a man erupting into a fit of dry, rattling coughs. Some straggler, left behind on one of the lower levels? The straggler bounded up a flight of stairs and then — Miss Parker strained her hearing — they seemed to be trying to break down one of the sub-level access doors. Miss Parker bent over the railing and peered down through the gloom. She could see movement down on sub-level twenty-four, two floors down, though couldn't make out any distinct shapes. The door to SL-24 gave way with an almighty crash, and the sound of running footsteps signaled the departure of the unseen straggler.
But no, it couldn't be a straggler, could it? Any employee left behind would do their best to rejoin their group up on the ground floor. This man had made it to the stairwell, then left it one floor up. Like he was searching for something. Miss Parker frowned. Running through all the possibilities in her head, she couldn't fathom who the not-straggler could be. One way or the other, she needed him out of the way. She descended the stairs two-by-two, down to sub-level twenty-four.
Sub-level twenty-four was on fire.
The door was ajar, letting a sliver of warm, dancing light escape into the stairwell. The handle was dented and, when Miss Parker reached out to push the door wide, warm to the touch. She pushed it open anyway, revealing a roiling mass of black smoke pouring out across the ceiling of a long hallway. Flames licked their way up the walls, the air filled with the crackling and spitting of a merry hearth fire. Miss Parker crouched and edged her way forward, reluctant to stray too far from the relative safety of the concrete stairwell. She thought she could still hear the man moving from room to room, opening and closing doors as he went. What was he looking for?
"Hello?" she called out. Hot air and smoke rushed into her lungs the moment she opened her mouth, sending her reeling and coughing. She fell to her knees with her elbow over her mouth and nose and peered through the smoke, eyes screwed up and stinging.
A repeated thumping off to her right made her look over. The noise came from a closed office door; the door was made of glass, but smoke fogged the surface and obscured the office beyond. The disembodied heel of a palm banged on the glass over and over, accompanied by a muffled moaning. The door was blocked from the outside by the threshold, which had buckled inwards as flames consumed it. Miss Parker adopted a kind of three-legged crawl over to the office door, still shielding her mouth and nose with the crook of one elbow. She looked around, and her gaze fell on a decorative vase, once home to an artificial fern. The fern had long since melted, but the vase remained untouched.
"Step away from the door!" she barked. Her voice was hoarse and muffled by the arm crooked around her face, but the person inside seemed to hear. They stopped pounding on the door and sounds of shuffling inside suggested they had moved away. Miss Parker picked up the vase and hurled it clumsily through the door. Vase and door mutually shattered. The office occupant shrieked and burst into tears.
After a moment to collect herself, a woman in a rust orange hijab tottered out of the office, picking her way through the minefield of glass shards and muttering all the while. It was Yameena, one of the interviewees from Miss Parker's investigation of the missing employees. As Yameena drew close, her words became more distinct: "Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you," over and over like a mantra. She gave Miss Parker's hands a quick squeeze and, on wordless agreement, they headed back to the door to the stairwell. The smoke had grown thick and dense across the ceiling, such that if Miss Parker were to stand up to her full height, smoke would consume her head to chin height. Miss Parker and Yameena half-fell through the door, pulling it shut behind them.
"Oh, thank you, thank you," Yameena said again. She looked up and took in Miss Parker's familiar face, and her eyes went wide. "Miss Parker! Oh, thank you. I thought I was going to die, thank you."
"Don't mention it," Miss Parker grunted. She fell backwards against the door and slid into a sitting position, taking great heaving breaths. Now that they'd escaped the smoke, her head cleared along with the air. "Did you see anyone else in there? A man?"
Yameena frowned.
"No, no. I didn't see anyone. If there was someone else in there…." She looked back through the narrow window to the fire-ravaged SL-24. "I doubt they could survive. Carbon monoxide would poison anyone in there for too long. I already have a bitch of a headache. Will you… will you be alright?"
Miss Parker swallowed and nodded wordlessly. She gestured up the stairs.
"Go on," she said. "I'll catch up."
Yameena appeared to take her at her word, and set off up the stairs. Miss Parker blinked, and abruptly the sound of footsteps over her head was impossibly distant. She'd lost time. How long had she been sitting here? The carbon monoxide must be getting to her.
The door behind her back buckled inwards and Miss Parker went skittering crab-like across the landing, away from the door. The fire was breaching into the stairwell — but no, that wasn't it. There was nothing in this concrete tube to catch on fire. Someone had opened the door from the inside. How was that possible? As Yameena had said, the smoke in there would kill anyone in a few short minutes. Miss Parker looked up.
It was a man, tall and broad-shouldered and wearing a firefighter's self-contained breathing apparatus mask. That explained how he had escaped the smoke alive, though it created new questions. There was no way the fire department had arrived yet, especially since everyone above ground was under the impression that the alarms were only going off due to a fire drill. So who was this man, and how had he got his hands on a firefighter's mask? The man held out his hand. Miss Parker looked at the hand warily.
"Why are you here?" she said, once she'd found breath to speak. "Did you set this fire?"
The man let his hand drop. His shoulders tensed, then slumped.
"Guilty," he said. "It's gotten a little out of hand."
That voice. It was incredibly, wonderfully familiar, never mind how. She didn't dare put words to the thought, for fear that it would vanish in a puff of smoke. She couldn't give herself that hope, because if it ended up being for nothing, the crush of disappointment would ruin her.
Using the nearest hand railing, she pulled herself to her feet. She gave the man an assessing glance and stepped towards him. Without conscious thought to guide them, her hands raised to the mask strapped to the stranger's face. The stranger flinched, then stilled. Miss Parker's fingers closed on the strap that ran around the back of the man's head. And pulled. The mask came away into her arms, and a grime-streaked face grinned back at her.
"Jarod," she whispered.
Impossibly, it was him. The same brow, the same mouth, the same jaw. The same angle to his nose. How…?
She let the mask fall from her hands. It clattered to the floor, unheeded. There was no fanfare, no acknowledgement, no pithy quip. Unceremoniously, her mouth was on his, her fingers hanging on for dear life to the back of his skull. Distantly, she heard him make a muffled noise of surprise, felt him tense, felt him relax. She paid this not the slightest bit of attention, focusing instead on Jarod's mouth, Jarod's lips, Jarod's breath, Jarod… is alive. She thought she might consume him whole out of sheer relief.
She felt Jarod's mouth split into a wide smile. Her head jerked back. An uncharacteristic flutter of doubt made her throat close like a trapdoor.
"Are you — are you laughing at me?" she said. Jarod's smile dipped a fraction. "Don't you dare. I thought you were d —" She took a stabilizing breath. "I thought you were dead. Everyone said you were dead, I saw your ashes. How could you let me think you were dead? God, I could slap you. Lyle said —"
"Oh, Lyle said. And you believed him?" said Jarod, but he had the grace to look chastised. "I'm not laughing at you, Miss Parker. I'm just… happy. I couldn't — it's so good to see you."
"Yeah," she said, her voice breaking. She cleared her throat. "Yeah, you too."
Having the full force of Jarod's smile — uncomplicated and sweet and newly risen from the grave — directed at her was like standing under a spotlight with an audience of one. She wasn't about to let the matter of his so-called death go, but the questions could wait. For now, Jarod was standing in front of her. Fire safety be damned, she was going to take advantage.
Before she could dive back in for more, Jarod reached out and brushed her hair away from her face. She must look like a wreck after diving into SL-24, but he didn't seem to mind.
"Over twenty-five years now since our first kiss. I was beginning to think I might not get a chance to return the favour," he said.
Miss Parker's lip quirked.
"You still haven't 'returned the favour'. That was all me."
Jarod opened his mouth to reply, laughter in his eyes. Distracted, his eyes were drawn to her mouth. His thumb swiped along her bottom lip as he studied her expression. There was a question there: am I allowed to have this? Do you want this, or were you just relieved I'm not dead?
Miss Parker sniffed impatiently. "Are you gonna take a picture or are you gonna — mmph."
Closing in, he cradled her face in his hands, at first delicate, then fevered and greedy and deliriously hungry as he leaned in and took and gave and there was nothing in the whole wide world but this. It was just a kiss — they didn't have time for more — but it was everything because it came from him, who she thought she'd lost forever. There was an inferno raging just steps away, but for the moment the fire's heat was Jarod and the sharp smell of burning was Jarod and the static pop and snap of the flames was a white noise backdrop to… to this. Jarod's mouth on hers was slow and confident, his tongue pushing and sliding against hers. She stumbled back against the railing; in answer, his hands abandoned their path down her neck and curled around to brace her lower back. She grew restless and began pulling herself up, pulling him down, fingers around the nape of his neck, around his shoulders, using his ears as inadvisable hand-holds. This last made Jarod grin again and he came up for air, leaning his forehead against hers as he breathed.
"Not laughing at you, just happy," he reminded her.
