Chapter 4 - UNLIKELY ALLIES
The freezing spray of the sprinklers masked their escape, but Chloe knew it was only a temporary shield. Thermal optics would cut through the mist in seconds. She dragged Julian, feeling the terrifying, sticky warmth of his blood seeping through his ruined turtleneck and onto her own clothes. He was heavier than he looked, a solid wall of muscle beneath the tailored fabric, and every step he took was accompanied by a suppressed hiss of agony.
"Where... are we going?" Julian gasped, stumbling over a thick root in the dark.
"Maintenance hatch," Chloe replied, her voice barely a whisper above the torrential artificial rain. "There’s a utility tunnel that runs from the gardens to the underground parking structure. I ran cables through it yesterday."
"You... you're the tech," he muttered, his mind fighting through the shock and blood loss. "The teleprompter."
"Save your breath, Mr. Vance," Chloe said, hauling him forward.
They reached the far wall of the dome. Chloe felt her way along the damp, moss-covered concrete until her fingers grazed the cold metal of a service door. She fumbled for the keypad. Her hands were wet and shaking, slipping on the buttons. She punched in the code: 7-2-9-1-Enter.
The lock buzzed a harsh red. Access Denied.
"Damn it," she hissed. "Marcus changed the security clearance levels. The whole campus is locked down."
Behind them, the roaring sound of the sprinklers suddenly cut off. The sudden silence in the dome was deafening. A blinding white beam of a high-powered flashlight pierced the darkness, sweeping through the trees just fifty yards away.
"Over here! The sprinklers were manually triggered!" a voice echoed through the damp air.
Julian leaned against the metal door, sliding down slightly as his legs threatened to give out. "Leave me," he said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "They want me. Without me slowing you down, you can climb the trellis to the ventilation shafts."
Chloe stared at him in the dim, sweeping light. The great Julian Vance, the man whose face was on the cover of every magazine in the world, was offering himself up so a junior tech could escape.
"I didn't hack a teleprompter, risk my job, and get shot at just to leave you in the dirt," Chloe snapped, a sudden, fierce anger overriding her terror. "And besides, Marcus knows I have the tablet. He'll kill me anyway."
She pulled the cracked tablet from her pocket, wiping the water from the screen on her pants. She didn't have time to write a bypass script. She needed a brute-force entry.
She knelt beside the keypad, pulling a small, multi-tool from her cargo pocket. She wedged the flathead screwdriver under the plastic casing of the keypad and wrenched it hard. The casing cracked off, exposing a mess of wires and the circuit board.
"What are you doing?" Julian asked, his eyes half-closed.
"Shorting the mag-lock. Close your eyes."
Chloe found the primary power wire and the ground wire. She jammed the metal head of the screwdriver across both connections. A bright blue spark erupted with a loud POP, showering her hand with hot sparks. She cried out, dropping the tool, but the heavy metal door clicked open with a satisfying metallic thud.
"Go! Go!" she urged, hauling Julian to his feet and shoving him through the doorway.
She pulled the door shut behind them just as a flashlight beam swept over the spot they had been standing. The heavy door clicked shut, plunging them into the absolute blackness of the utility tunnel.
The air here was dry and smelled of dust and ozone. It was a narrow, concrete corridor filled with thick bundles of fiber-optic cables and heavy water pipes. Emergency strip lighting flickered weakly along the floor, casting long, grotesque shadows.
Julian collapsed against the wall, sliding down to a sitting position. He clamped a hand over his right side, just below his ribs. "I need... a minute," he wheezed.
Chloe dropped to her knees beside him. In the flickering light, she could finally see the extent of his injuries. His face was covered in a layer of gray dust and dried blood from a nasty gash on his forehead. But the real problem was his side. A piece of shrapnel from the stage—a jagged shard of metal about three inches long—was embedded deeply in his obliques. Blood was steadily soaking his shirt, dripping onto the concrete floor.
"You're losing too much blood," Chloe said, panic rising in her throat. "We can't stay here. If they find this door..."
"I know," Julian gritted out. He looked at her, his eyes shockingly clear despite the pain. "Who are you?"
"Chloe. Chloe Adams. I'm a junior AV technician."
"Chloe Adams," he repeated, committing the name to memory. "You saved my life, Chloe. Why?"
"Because Marcus Thorne is a psychopath," she replied simply, pulling off her dark outer jacket. She bundled it up and pressed it hard against the wound on his side.
Julian let out a sharp cry of pain, his hands grabbing her wrists. "Don't pull it out," he gasped. "The metal is acting as a plug. If you pull it out, I'll bleed to death in minutes."
"I know," she said, keeping the pressure firm. "I'm just trying to slow the bleeding. Hold this. Hard."
He pressed his hands over hers, taking over the pressure. He looked up at her, studying her face. "You saw the messages. Marcus set the bomb."
"I saw his tablet. The lead sound engineer left it on the console. Marcus orchestrated the whole thing. He wanted you dead, and he wanted it to look like a terrorist attack. Why?"
Julian’s jaw tightened. "Genesis," he said, the word dripping with bitterness. "The AI we were unveiling tonight. It's... too powerful, Chloe. It's a predictive algorithm capable of mapping out human behavior, global market trends, even military strategies with ninety-nine percent accuracy. I wanted to open-source it. To put limiters on it. To make it a tool for education and medicine."
"And Marcus?"
"Marcus has been holding secret meetings with private military contractors and foreign defense ministries. He wanted to sell exclusive, weaponized access to Genesis for billions. I found out yesterday. I told him I was firing him after the launch and destroying the weaponized code." Julian coughed, a wet, horrible sound. "I underestimated his ambition."
"He didn't just want you dead," Chloe realized, the pieces falling into place. "He wanted you to die on stage during a highly publicized attack. That drives up the fear, drives up the stock prices for defense contracts. And with you gone, he takes over as CEO and signs the deals."
"Exactly," Julian whispered. "He's going to present himself as the grieving successor. The board will give him full control by morning."
"Not if we expose him," Chloe said fiercely. "I have the tablet."
Julian shook his head weakly. "A stolen tablet isn't enough. Marcus will claim it was faked. He controls the servers, the security footage, the internal logs. By morning, he will have wiped every trace of his involvement. He’ll frame someone else. Probably you."
Chloe felt a chill run down her spine. "So what do we do?"
"We need the master logs," Julian said, his voice gaining a desperate strength. "The raw data from the Genesis core. It tracks every keystroke, every message, every command sent within the company network. It’s unalterable. If we get that, we have Marcus’s digital fingerprints on the assassination order."
"Where is the core?"
"San Francisco. The offshore data center." Julian tried to push himself up, grimacing in agony. "But I can't get there like this. I need a hospital."
Chloe looked at the tablet, tuning back into the security comms.
“...seal all exits. Medical teams, be advised. We have unauthorized movement in the utility tunnels. Send a medical transport unit to intercept at the parking structure exit. Vance is severely injured. He needs 'immediate medical assistance'.”
The way the security chief said "medical assistance" made Chloe's blood run cold.
"We can't go to a hospital," Chloe said, pulling Julian to his feet. "Marcus is sending a fake ambulance to the parking garage. They're going to pick you up, put you in the back, and you'll never be seen again."
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Julian leaned heavily against the wall, his face ashen. "Then we're dead."
"No," Chloe said, a sudden, crazy plan forming in her mind. She looked at the heavy power cables running along the wall, then at her tablet. "I told you, I run the AV for this place. I know how to make a lot of noise. Come on."
