The digital clock on the microwave flipped to 8:40 PM.
Lila was wearing a literal trench into the cheap laminate flooring of her cramped apartment. She paced from the narrow kitchen to the edge of her living room window, chewing violently on the thumbnail of her right hand. Every few seconds, she'd stop, peek through the plastic blinds at the dark street below, and then resume her frantic pacing.
Her phone was clutched so tightly in her left hand that her knuckles were entirely white.
She hit redial for the twenty-fourth time.
She pressed the phone to her ear, her heart hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm against her ribs. The line didn't even ring. It clicked instantly over to an automated, robotic voice.
"The cellular customer you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please leave a—"
Lila ended the call with a frustrated, terrified scream, throwing the phone onto the cheap suede sofa.
"Damn it, James," she hissed to the empty room, burying her trembling hands in her hair. "Where the hell are you?"
She was completely spiraling. The adrenaline that had kept her hyper-focused and moving for the past eighteen hours was crashing hard, leaving behind a cold, sickening layer of pure paranoia.
Everything had been meticulously planned. The handoff was supposed to be simple. James had given her incredibly specific instructions before he went to secure Ebony on Friday night. If he didn't check in by Saturday evening, it meant things had gotten complicated, and Lila was supposed to initiate the backup protocol. She was supposed to go into the university, clear out Ebony's research, and wait for James to send a secure extraction point.
Lila looked at her kitchen counter. Sitting next to the coffee maker was a heavily insulated, medical-grade thermal transport bag.
She had done her part. She had risked everything.
Lila closed her eyes, the memory of the early morning hours playing behind her eyelids in a terrifying, high-definition loop.
It had been 3:15 AM on Sunday morning. The university campus was entirely dead, blanketed in a thick, humid darkness. Lila had parked three blocks away, keeping her hoodie pulled up low over her face as she slipped through the side entrance of the science building using her authorized keycard.
She had been terrified, her pulse pounding so loudly in her ears she thought it would set off the alarms. But the building was practically a ghost town.
When she reached the main lobby security desk, her stomach had dropped. Otis was on duty. But as she crept closer, hugging the shadows of the marble pillars, she realized the elderly security guard was slumped completely back in his rolling chair. His feet were propped up on a space heater, a half-empty cup of stale coffee sitting next to his elbow, and he was snoring loud enough to rattle the plexiglass partition.
Lila had slipped past him without making a single sound.
She knew the security grid in the basement genetics lab perfectly. James had made sure of it. He had provided her with the exact blueprints of the camera blind spots. She had hugged the cinderblock walls, crawling under the lens of the primary hallway camera before swiping into Ebony's private lab.
Once inside, she hadn't wasted a single second. She had bypassed the physical lock on Ebony's desk drawer using a specialized tool James had given her, pulling out three heavily encrypted, solid-state backup drives containing years of Ebony's private genetic sequencing data. Then, she had gone straight for the sub-zero cryogenic freezers.
Her hands had shaken violently as she carefully extracted four specific, highly classified biological samples from Ebony's secure racks, placing them gently into the thermal bag.
Before leaving, she had sat at the main terminal. Her fingers had flown across the keyboard as she ran a specialized wiping script, completely erasing her digital footprint from the lab's entry logs, altering the timestamps so it looked like the door hadn't been opened since Friday afternoon.
She had covered her tracks perfectly. She had stolen a brilliant woman's life's work right out from under the university's nose.
Lila opened her eyes, staring at the thermal bag on the counter.
She had done everything right. So why wasn't he answering?
The silence was absolutely deafening. James wasn't the kind of man to just go dark. He was meticulous. He was professional. And he owed her a massive amount of money and a new identity in Europe. But now, his phone was dead. It was going straight to voicemail.
A sickening, terrifying thought clawed its way up her throat.
What if he burned me? What if he took Ebony, got his payday, and left me holding the stolen assets so I'd take the fall?
Lila choked back a sob of pure panic. She was an accessory to corporate espionage and kidnapping. If the university realized the drives and samples were missing, they would call the FBI. If they found a single flaw in her digital wipe, she was going to federal prison for the rest of her life.
Suddenly, the phone on the sofa buzzed.
Lila physically jumped, letting out a sharp gasp. She scrambled across the living room, practically diving onto the cushions to snatch the phone up.
The screen glowed in the dark apartment.
Private Caller.
It wasn't James's designated burner number, but he used encrypted lines all the time. She didn't even hesitate. Her thumb swiped the green icon instantly, pressing the speaker tightly to her ear.
"James?" Lila breathed, her voice cracking with desperate, terrified relief. "James, oh my god, where the hell have you been? I did it. I have the drives, I have the samples. Everything is in the bag. I've been calling you all day, why is your phone off?"
There was a long, heavy pause on the other end of the line. The silence didn't sound like static. It sounded like a hollow, echoing void.
Then, a voice spoke.
It wasn't James Knighton's smooth, charming, Southern cadence.
It was a cold, perfectly measured male voice with a heavy, distinct Asian accent. The tone was entirely devoid of human emotion, sending a violent spike of ice straight down Lila's spine.
"No," the man said softly. "James is dead, but you have something that I need."