23:57 PM | NPU Rooftop Helipad, North Metro
The night wind on the rooftop didn't blow it slashed. It was a cold, wet knife that made Adrian's eyes water and his skin tighten like shrink-wrap over bone.
Below them, Metro City hummed its oblivious nighttime song: the distant growl of trucks hauling tomorrow's problems, the lonely wail of a siren three blocks over, the murmur of a million people sleeping peacefully through the prelude to disaster.
Marcus moved like a man walking to his own firing squad slowly, reluctantly, with his hands jammed deep in his jacket pockets and shoulders hunched against the cold. Each step on the steel-grid helipad rang out with a hollow, final sound, like a bell tolling for someone who couldn't quite hear it yet.
Adrian trailed behind, his jaw a hard line, mentally rehearsing the plan for the hundredth time. His wrist gave a faint, ominous throb, like it was trying to remind him of better life choices he could've made.
The helicopter waited ahead, a matte-black insect under the harsh floodlights. Its blades turned in a slow, lazy whup-whup-whup that felt less like machinery and more like a countdown. Garrick was already in the cockpit, a dark silhouette flicking switches with the casual competence of a man who'd seen too much to be impressed by anything anymore.
His face was painted in the cool glow of instrument panels all angles and shadows and professional detachment.
Adrian watched Marcus's face as they got closer. Wide eyes, a bit of awe cutting through the fear like sunlight through storm clouds. Kid's first time in a chopper. Adrian almost smiled.
He remembered his first time white-knuckling the seat, trying to look cool while his stomach tried to exit through his shoes and his breakfast contemplated a dramatic reappearance.
"Quit staring at it like it's your prom date," Garrick's voice barked from the open cockpit door, tinny over the idle rotor noise. "It's a ride, not a damn rollercoaster. Get in before I leave without you."
Marcus muttered something that was probably anatomically improbable and involved Garrick's family tree in ways that defied biology. He tugged his jacket tighter.
Adrian leaned in close as the rotor wash tore at their clothes like invisible hands trying to push them away. "You'll get used to it," he said. Then, because he couldn't help himself: "Just don't puke on my boots. These are expensive. Well, they were expensive before I bought them on a detective's salary, so actually they're moderately priced, but still don't puke on them."
He got that look in return.the one that was half-annoyed, half-grateful for the distraction. Marcus ducked into the cabin with the careful grace of someone defusing a bomb while wearing oven mitts.
Just as Adrian moved to follow, a thought struck him, casual and dark, the way thoughts do at midnight when you're about to do something monumentally stupid.
He paused, one foot on the skid, and looked back at Marcus, who was fumbling with his harness like it was a Rubik's cube designed by a sadist.
"Hey. Random question. That serum. The Ascendant stuff. How much does a vial even cost?"
Marcus blinked, his fingers pausing on the buckle. "Why?"
"Humor me. Is it cheap? Mass-produced? Or is it 'sell-your-yacht' expensive?"
Marcus's brow furrowed, thinking. "It's… prohibitively expensive. The synthesis alone requires calibrated rare-earth elements, proprietary nano-bonding, temperature-controlled environments that cost more to maintain than most people's annual salaries… We're talking high six figures per dose. Maybe seven. It's not for the public. It's for governments. Private armies. Billionaires with something to prove and more money than sense."
A slow, cynical grin spread across Adrian's face the kind of grin that said he'd just solved a problem by deciding it wasn't his problem. He hauled himself into the cabin and dropped into the seat opposite Marcus with all the grace of a sack of potatoes.
"See? That's what I thought." He snapped his own harness closed. "So it's not a mass-market thing. It's for rich assholes and warlords with delusions of grandeur. So if the casualty rate is ninety-nine point seven percent…"
He shrugged, the picture of cold logic and self-preservation. "We're basically just… culling the obnoxiously wealthy. Darwinism for billionaires. Natural selection with a price tag. Why are we even risking our necks? Let them buy their own extinction. Saves the rest of us the trouble and the paperwork."
For a second, Marcus just stared at him. The kind of stare you give someone who's just suggested solving world hunger by eating the poor. Then his face changed
. The nervous tech vanished, packed away like equipment after a job. In his place was the man who'd seen the raw data, who'd decoded the hidden logs, who'd spent weeks staring into the abyss until the abyss started staring back and taking notes.
His eyes went flat and serious.
"You're wrong," Marcus said, his voice low but cutting cleanly through the rising engine whine. "Dead wrong. It's not about the buyers dying."
The helicopter lurched, then lifted. The rooftop fell away beneath them like a bad memory. The city became a map of light below them beautiful, fragile, doomed.
"They're buying it worldwide," Marcus continued, leaning forward, his knuckles white on his knees. "Not just here. Everywhere. Tokyo. Berlin. São Paulo. Moscow. Everywhere there's money and stupid people with access to it, which is basically everywhere."
He took a breath. "And you read the files. The VX-7 'Goliath' strain. The HX-13 'Reaper'. These aren't stable serums. They're volatile. Prone to mutation. They're designed to alter human biology, and biology doesn't like being altered it fights back, adapts, changes."
Adrian's cynical smirk faded like morning fog. "So?"
"So what happens," Marcus said, his words precise and heavy as bullets, "if one of those 'rich assholes' injects himself in a penthouse in Tokyo, or a bunker in Berlin, and the strain mutates just enough? Just one genetic transcription error. One cellular miscommunication. What if it stops being a contact poison and becomes… airborne? Or vector-based? A bite. A sneeze. A scratch. A handshake."
He held Adrian's gaze. The city lights reflected in his glasses, making his eyes look like they were full of fire, or maybe just the reflection of a world burning
"One buyer turns into a zombie. Or a 'Goliath'. And that thing doesn't just die in a gilded cage. It gets out. It breathes on someone. Security. A maid. A driver. And that new strain? It's contagious. Now it's not a rich man's suicide. It's rabies with a 99.9% fatality rate. It's the common cold that liquefies your organs. It's influenza that turns you into a walking nightmare."
He paused.
Let the words settle like sediment.
"It's not a massacre, Adrian."
He let the word hang in the shuddering air of the cabin, suspended between them like a guillotine blade.
"It's an apocalypse. And we're the only ones who know the recipe is sitting in filing cabinets in the building over there, alphabetized and cross-referenced for easy access."
The truth landed in Adrian's gut like a block of lead. The casual cynicism evaporated, leaving behind a cold, professional dread the kind that makes your hands steady and your heart quiet because there's simply no room left for anything except the job.
He'd seen it as cleaning up a corrupt company.
A big, ugly crime.
Corporate malfeasance with a body count.
Marcus saw the tipping point of human extinction, filed neatly under "Ongoing Projects."
Adrian looked out the window. Nexo's distant towers glowed with a soft, toxic blue beautiful, really, in the way poisonous things often are.
"Right," Adrian said, his voice quiet. All the humor was gone, packed away with his illusions about this being a simple extraction. "An apocalypse. You, uh… you might have mentioned that part a little louder in the files. Maybe used a bigger font. Bolded it. Added some exclamation points."
Marcus leaned back, the intensity draining slightly, replaced by weary resignation. "I thought it was implied. My bad. Should've included a PowerPoint presentation. Maybe some charts."
Adrian let out a short, sharp breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "Implied. Yeah." He ran a hand over his face. "Good talk. Really clarifies the motivation. Really puts the 'fun' in 'fundamental threat to human survival.'"
00:52 AM | Airborne, En Route to South Metro
The cabin smelled like fuel and old leather and something vaguely metallic that Adrian had never quite identified and had decided was probably better left mysterious. Marcus finally peeled his forehead from the window, leaving a small fogged patch on the glass like a ghost's fingerprint. The city beneath them was now a grid of shadows and sodium-vapor gold the clean lines of North Metro giving way to the jagged, smoking teeth of the South.
Adrian leaned back, trying to let the steady thrum of the rotors sink into his bones, become background noise, become anything except the countdown clock in his head. His wrist still twinged. The new knowledge sat in his chest, cold and heavy, like he'd swallowed an ice cube whole.
This wasn't a raid anymore.
It was a quarantine.
"Focus." Elias's voice crackled through his earpiece, calm and grim, the voice of a man who'd made peace with sending people into danger because the alternative was worse. "Garrick drops you at 01:03. Marcus enters first. Adrian, you wait for the all-clear. No improvising. No heroics. No 'I had a better idea.' Just stick to the plan."
"Sure thing, Captain," Adrian muttered, the edge in his voice worn smooth by fatigue and the certainty that he was absolutely going to improvise at least once tonight.
[A/N: Night operations allow for faster flight speeds due to reduced air traffic and visual concealment. The helicopter is traveling at approximately double the speed of the daytime reconnaissance flight in Chapter 1-2, cutting the usual 32-minute journey to roughly 16 minutes. Physics is occasionally convenient.]
01:03 AM | South Metro Landing Zone
The helicopter descended in a tight, gut-swooping spiral that made Adrian's recently-settled stomach reconsider its life choices. Garrick set them down on a deserted rooftop parking structure with a touch so light Adrian barely felt the skids kiss concrete the kind of landing that spoke of too many hours in too many hot zones.
This part of South Metro was quiet in a corporate, dead-eyed way. No bustling markets here. No life. Just wide streets, dark windows, and the distant, glowing monolith of Nexo Pharmaceutical rising like a tombstone for the future.
"Eyes up," Garrick growled, not looking back. "That's your playground. Try not to die in it. I just cleaned the cabin and I don't want to do it again."
They disembarked into air that tasted like rust and wet concrete and broken promises. Marcus straightened his jacket with deliberate, almost ritual slowness smoothing away the fear the way you smooth wrinkles from a shirt.
He adjusted his ID badge. Checked his phone. Became, through sheer force of will, just another tired drone heading back for a late shift.
He gave Adrian one last, unreadable look something between goodbye and good luck and please don't let me die in there.
Then he vanished down the stairwell.
Adrian watched him go. The logic was sound. One person could slip through unnoticed. Two would trigger questions, suspicion, the kind of attention that got people killed. Logic didn't make it feel less like sending a lamb into a slaughterhouse with a name tag and a smile.
01:07 AM | Nexo Pharmaceuticals, South Metro Gate
Marcus's heart was a frantic bird trying to escape his ribs, battering itself against bone. The Nexo building loomed, a cliff face of blue-tinted glass that caught the streetlights and turned them into something cold and alien.
He flashed his ID at the scanner. The guard a man with the tired eyes of someone who'd worked too many night shifts and stopped caring about anything except his paycheck and his coffee didn't even look up from his phone.
"Long night," Marcus offered, his voice carefully bored, the vocal equivalent of elevator music.
The scanner beeped green, cheerful as a death knell.
"Floor?"
"Two. Data analysis. Someone broke the backup server. Again."
A grunt. A wave. The universal language of "not my problem."
Marcus was through.
His shoes squeaked on the polished marble a traitorous sound in the vast, silent lobby that seemed to echo forever. The elevator doors sighed open like a mouth. He stepped in, alone. The doors closed with the finality of a coffin lid.
As it rose, he pressed his back against the cool metal wall and closed his eyes, counting his breaths. In. Out. In. Out. Like they'd taught him in the stress management seminar he'd attended after his first panic attack.
The seminar hadn't covered "infiltrating a pharmaceutical company that's accidentally working on the apocalypse," but the breathing exercises still helped.
01:22 AM | Exterior, Nexo Pharmaceuticals
Adrian crouched in the ink-black shadow of a service alley, the grapple gun cold in his hands like a promise waiting to be kept or broken. The building was a silent fortress, all glass and steel and secrets.
"Inside," Marcus's whisper filled his ear, intimate as a confession. "Floor two. Access terminal in five. Patch in five."
"Copy."
The wait was agony. Adrian hated waiting. Hated the stillness, the vulnerability, the way your mind filled the silence with everything that could go wrong. Action was clean, simple, binary. This was just cold dread and second-guessing and the taste of copper in your mouth.
Four minutes.
Five.
Six.
"Alright." Marcus's voice was tight as a wire about to snap. "Patch is active. SentinelGrid recalibrated to 200 pounds. You're clear. Window's open. Don't make me regret this."
"Finally."
Adrian raised the grapple gun. Aimed. Fired.
The hook clanged against the third-floor window frame and slid off with a screech of metal on metal.
"Shit."
Second try. It bounced, clattered down the wall.
Sweat beaded on his temples despite the cold.
Third try. Come on, you bastard.
The hook caught. The line snapped taut. He tested it, putting his full weight on it.
It held.
Thank you, physics.
He climbed, hand over hand, muscles burning, boots scraping against glass, trying to be quiet and failing.
01:22 AM | Floor 3 Window Access
He swung his body, built momentum like a pendulum, and drove his boots through the window.
The glass shattered with a crash that sounded like the end of the world or at least the end of stealth. He froze, listening, heart hammering against his ribs.
No sirens. Just the sound of his own ragged breath and tinkling glass settling onto carpet.
He slipped inside, into an office that smelled of lemon cleaner and emptiness and the particular sterility of corporate spaces after hours. Desks in perfect rows. Screens dark. A monument to nothing, to the illusion of productivity.
He moved to the interior stairwell. The door creaked of course it did, because nothing could be simple tonight.
He winced, slipped through, and started up to four.
Every step echoed like a gunshot.
Every breath felt too loud.
Every second stretched like taffy.
01:32 AM | Floor 4, Archives Room
Marcus's duplicated keycard slid home. A soft click. A green light the most beautiful thing Adrian had seen all night.
Adrian pushed the door open. The air was colder here, humming with server noise and the particular chill of climate-controlled data storage. The room was a cathedral of secrets tall, black filing cabinets standing like tombstones, orderly and silent and waiting.
He pulled open the first drawer.
Seven thick folders. Nexo insignia.
Edges worn from handling.
"Seven files," he breathed into the mic. "Like they gift-wrapped them. Like they wanted someone to find this."
"Don't get cocky," Marcus shot back, tension vibrating in his voice like a plucked string. "Grab them and go. You've got—"
Static crackled, eating his words like white noise eating sanity.
"Marcus? Say again?"
More static. "—server interference—frequency—"
The comm died into electronic mush.
Adrian cursed. He should've expected the interference—server rooms were notorious for it. He shook it off, flipping a folder open with hands that wanted to tremble but couldn't afford to.
Classified reports. Signatures he recognized.
Politicians.
Cops.
Executives.
CEOs.
Enough corruption to sink a continent, documented with bureaucratic precision.
"You're quiet," Marcus's voice suddenly cut back in, clearer but strained.
"Just thinking," Adrian replied, scanning page after page of damning evidence, "how easy it'd be to torch this place. One lighter. One match. Poof. Problem solved. Very simple."
"Don't." Elias's voice, sharp as a blade. "Extraction. Now. We need that evidence."
Adrian shut the file, hefted the stack. They were heavier than he expected the weight of proof, maybe, or just really expensive paper. He had no idea how much time was left. The cold made it feel eternal.
He turned for the door.
That's when Marcus's voice erupted in his ear, frantic and breaking apart like glass.
"Adrian—time limit—AI detection—patch compromised—"
Adrian's blood turned to ice. "What? Repeat!"
"—GET OUT—NOW—"
01:38 AM | Archives Room - ALARM ACTIVATION
The world turned red.
For one heart-stopping second, Adrian just stood there, files clutched to his chest, brain refusing to process the strobing hellscape that had replaced reality.
Then the sirens hit a deafening, mechanical shriek that drilled into his skull like it was trying to bore through bone and reach brain.
Boots. Heavy, pounding boots in the corridor, getting closer.
"Fuck."
He bolted for the door.
A security guard exploded through it like he'd been fired from a cannon. They collided. The impact drove the air from Adrian's lungs in a whoosh, sent the files scattering. He recovered first muscle memory, training, desperation and drove his elbow up into the man's jaw.
A sickening crack. The guard's head snapped back.
They grappled. The guard was bigger, heavier, younger. He caught Adrian's bad wrist and twisted.
White, blinding agony exploded up Adrian's arm. He gasped, vision swimming, stars bursting behind his eyes.
He rammed his knee up, felt it connect with something soft. The guard grunted, stumbled back.
Adrian didn't wait. He scooped up the scattered files and ran.
"Reckless!" Elias roared in his ear. "Get out NOW!"
"Working on it!" Adrian shouted back, sprinting down the corridor, lungs on fire, legs screaming.
He hit the stairwell, took the stairs three at a time probably tearing something but who cared and dove back through the shattered window.
01:42 AM | Exterior Escape
He landed hard on the adjacent rooftop, rolled badly, files flying again and kept running. Searchlights raked the walls behind him like fingers trying to grab him. Voices shouted over radios, coordinating, closing in.
He vaulted from roof to roof, impacts jolting up his spine, reminding him he wasn't twenty anymore and his body kept very detailed records of every stupid thing he'd ever done to it.
Finally, a narrow gap between buildings. No time to think. He pressed his back to one wall, boots to the other, and slid down like he'd seen in movies and regretted immediately.
Friction screamed. Leather smoked. Heat seared through to his skin like someone was holding a blowtorch to his spine. He clenched his teeth, jaw popping, smelling burning leather and something horribly like his own flesh cooking.
He hit the ground, rolled, gasped. His back was a sheet of raw, screaming pain. His jacket hung in charred ribbons, still smoking faintly.
"Fantastic," he wheezed, touching his stinging back. His hand came away wet."There goes two hundred dollars. And probably several layers of skin."
01:48 AM | South Metro Streets
Chaos. Guards herded confused workers outside the night shift, roused from their stations, looking annoyed and frightened in equal measure. Marcus stood among them, hands raised, head down. Just another scared employee caught in a security drill.
Then he looked up.
His eyes found Adrian's in the shadows across the street.
Their gazes locked for one second one eternal, impossible second.
Marcus shook his head. A tiny, desperate motion.
Don't.
His voice was a faint, steady crackle in Adrian's dying earpiece. "Leave me. The AI flagged my patch. They know. I'll message when I'm clear. Just go."
Adrian's chest seized. "Like hell I—"
The line went dead. Marcus had cut him off.
Adrian stood frozen, files clutched tight against his ruined jacket, watching as guards closed in around Marcus. Every instinct screamed to move, to fight, to do something.
But he couldn't. Not without getting them both killed and losing everything they'd risked everything for.
So Adrian Cole did the only thing he could.
The only thing that made sense.
The thing he'd hate himself for.
He ran.
And hated himself more with every step, every breath, every second that carried him farther away.
01:52 AM | Extraction Point Approach
Salvation came in the form of a public electric bike dock the kind city planners installed to promote green transportation and never imagined would be used for black-ops extraction.
He fumbled with the lock, swearing, fingers clumsy with adrenaline and pain, until it finally clicked. He mounted and pedaled, weaving through dark alleys, his body a symphony of pain performing its greatest hits.
"Stupid," he spat between gasps. "Stealing a public bike for a black-ops extraction. Real subtle. Very professional. They're going to charge my credit card."
The extraction tower loomed ahead. On its roof, Garrick's helicopter, rotors spinning a furious promise of escape.
02:01 AM | Extraction Rooftop, South Metro
The helicopter thundered above him like the voice of an angry god. Garrick leaned out, face grim. "Get in here, you menace!"
Adrian had no breath left for wit, for banter, for anything except survival. He leapt, caught the skid, and hauled himself into the cabin with the last reserves of strength his body hadn't already spent.
He collapsed into the seat as they lifted away.
Everything hurt. His wrist was a throbbing lump. His back felt flayed. His lungs burned. His soul ached.
"Rough night?" Garrick asked, not looking back.
Adrian shot him a glare that could curdle milk and possibly cause permanent psychological damage. "Drive."
02:07 AM | NPU Rooftop Helipad, North Metro
The helicopter settled back onto the pad where the night had begun the same metal grid, the same floodlights, the same city sprawled below.
But nothing was the same.
Adrian staggered out. The city skyline was unchanged. Metro City hummed on, oblivious.
He was not.
He'd never be the same again, or so he thought at least. Probably correctly.
Garrick followed, muttering about hazard pay and idiots and why he didn't just become a commercial pilot like his mother wanted.
Adrian tilted his head back. Sirens still echoed in the distance, a fading scream. Marcus was in the belly of the beast. Elias was silent processing, planning, probably drafting the after-action report in his head. The seven folders, heavy with proof, were tucked under his ruined jacket, warming against his ruined back.
His earpiece crackled.
Static.
Then a voice, faint, strained, barely there—like someone speaking from the bottom of a well, or the other side of a wall, or from somewhere they shouldn't be speaking from at all.
It was Marcus.
The line was open.
"Take care..."
Marcus muttered, his voice barely a whisper, before the line went—
Dead.
Adrian stood there, hand touching his earpiece, the night wind cutting through his destroyed jacket, staring at nothing.
Take care.
Two words. A farewell. A blessing. A prayer.
Or a goodbye.
He didn't know which.
The city below continued its song, uncaring, unknowing.
And Adrian Cole, for the first time in a very long time, didn't know what to do next.
So he just stood there.
In the cold.
In the dark.
Holding files that might save the world.
And mourning the man who'd helped him steal them..