The industrial district of Miller's Creek felt like a ghost town that had been left to rot. Massive, windowless warehouses loomed over the cracked pavement like sleeping giants. Here, the streetlights didn't hum, they flickered and died, unable to fight off the heavy, salty fog rolling in from the coast.
Sam skidded to a halt two blocks away from Warehouse 7, his chest heaving. The e-bike's motor was whirring softly, hot to the touch from the miles of high speed sprinting. He leaned the bike against a rusted dumpster and looked at his phone.
Transfer: 94%
The "God Key" was a freight train that couldn't be stopped. Once it hit 100%, he would be useless to the kidnappers. He had six percent of a miracle left.
He looked toward the warehouse. It was a fortress of modern surveillance. Red pinpricks of infrared light marked the locations of high definition cameras mounted on every corner. If he stepped onto that asphalt, his face would be on a monitor inside the office pod before his second foot hit the ground.
"Think, Sam," he whispered, his back against the cold brick of a neighboring building. "You designed the firmware for those cameras. You know their weakness."
Infrared cameras were designed to see heat. In the dark, a human body was a glowing white silhouette. But he also knew about "sensor blooming" the way a camera's eye could be blinded by a direct reflection of its own light.
He looked around the alleyway. In a bin of industrial waste, he found exactly what he needed a roll of reflective Mylar insulation used for shipping temperature, sensitive electronics.
With frantic, trembling hands, Sam tore the silver foil into long strips. He used duct tape from his work bag to secure the material around his torso, his legs, and his arms. He looked like a silver-clad ghost, a man made of mirrors. He caught his reflection in a puddle, he looked insane, but he knew the science. The Mylar would trap his body heat and reflect the camera's IR beams straight back at the lens, creating a white out "glitch" on the security monitors.
The Pulse
Sam crept toward the perimeter fence. The razor wire at the top was impassable, but he wasn't looking to go over. He found the electrical junction box for the street's high pressure sodium lights.
He didn't want a blackout that would alert the watcher. Instead, he opened a terminal on his phone and accessed the municipal grid's maintenance port. He'd found the password in a NexaShield "Smart City" audit three years ago.
He ran a script to "Pulse" the voltage.
The streetlights began to flicker at exactly 60 hertz—the same frequency as the camera's frame rate. To a human eye, the lights just looked slightly unstable. But to the digital sensors in the cameras, it created a "Rolling Shutter" effect. Thick, black bars began to crawl across the video feed inside the warehouse, effectively hiding any movement on the ground.
Under the cover of the digital strobe, Sam crawled toward the loading dock.
His phone buzzed. A text from Sarah's phone.
UNKNOWN: 98%. I can see the finish line, Sam. Are you close? I'd hate for you to miss the celebration.
The "celebration" was a death sentence. Sam didn't reply. He reached the heavy steel rolling door of Warehouse 7. It was locked with a magnetic bolt—a "fail-secure" system.
He didn't hack it. He reached into his bag and pulled out a can of compressed air he used to clean keyboards. He turned the can upside down and sprayed the liquid nitrogen coolant directly into the seam of the lock.
The metal groaned, turning a frost-bitten white. Sam pulled a small hammer from his bag and gave it a sharp, clinical tap.
CRACK.
The frozen internal bolt shattered like a porcelain tea cup.
He slid the door up just six inches—just enough to crawl through—and slipped into the belly of the beast.
The air inside the warehouse was stagnant, smelling of old oil and ozone. In the center of the vast, hollow space, a single prefabricated office pod stood bathed in a pale, clinical blue light.
He heard it then. A soft, jagged sob. It was Leo.