The abandoned municipal building was six levels below the city. The air was thick with the smell of old paper and ozone. It was a graveyard for files that the digital world had forgotten. This was the perfect place for a man like the Archivist to hide.
"This is it," Marcus whispered. He knelt by a heavy steel door. A faint purple light pulsed around the keycard reader.
"They're using military encryption. They aren't just protecting data. They're protecting him."
Tanya adjusted her grip on the shock pistol Marcus had given her. Her hands were clammy, but her heart was steady. A few weeks ago, she was just a mother. Now, she was a hunter. The fear had turned into a cold focus. She was the only person left who remembered that her daughter, Angie, existed.
"The Archivist," Tanya breathed. That was the name they gave the man who had deleted her life. "Is he in there?"
"The signal says he's active," Marcus said. His fingers flew across a small decryption pad. The purple light flickered, then turned green. "He's doing a mass clean-up. They're purging the last records of you and Angie. They want to make the lie permanent."
Marcus kicked the door open.
Beyond the door, the room was a shock. It wasn't dusty or old. It was a bright, modern data gallery. Black floors shined like glass. Fiber optic cables glowed like blue vines along the walls. In the center of the room, a man sat in front of a bank of servers. He was wearing an augmented reality headset, his hands moving through the air as if he were touching invisible strings.
The Archivist didn't even look up.
"You're too late," his voice came through the room's speakers. It was calm and cold.
"The deletion is 98 percent complete. Your efforts were brave, Tanya. But they were useless."
Marcus rushed forward with his gun raised. "Don't move!"
The Archivist didn't flinch. "Don't bother, Detective. You can't shoot a ghost."
Suddenly, the floor lit up. A high-frequency sound blasted through the room. It wasn't loud, but it felt like needles pressing into Tanya's brain. Marcus screamed and fell to his knees, clutching his ears. His body began to shake.
Tanya felt the pain, too. Her vision blurred, and her stomach turned. But she thought of Angie. She thought of Roman, who thought she was dead. She forced her legs to move.
"Where is she?" Tanya yelled, pushing through the vibrating air. "Where is my daughter?"
The Archivist finally stopped. He slowly took off his headset. He looked ordinary. He had a plain face and a professional smile. That made him even scarier.
"Angie Christine Blackwood was a data error," he said. "She didn't fit the plan. We didn't hurt her. We just moved her to a Zero-State Archive. She exists, but the world can never find her."
"Where is it?" Tanya demanded. She raised the shock pistol, her hand trembling from the sonic pulses.
The Archivist smiled. "That's the beauty of the Protocol. You are the last mistake, Tanya. As long as you remember her, the record is incomplete. So, we are going to fix that."
He tapped a button on his desk. The servers began to strobe with an intense blue light.
"This light is a pattern," he explained. "A few minutes of this, and the parts of your brain that remember Angie will simply… fade. You won't forget her name, but you will believe you made her up. You will finally be at peace."
Tanya felt a wave of doubt. The strobing lights made her feel dizzy. Was I crazy? Did I imagine it all?
Then she saw it. A small red light blinking on the side of the server bank. It was an access panel. A manual override.
The Archivist turned back to his screen, thinking he had won.
Tanya didn't go for him. She ignored the pain in her head and the noise in her ears. She lunged toward the server bank.
"NO!" the Archivist screamed, his calm face shattering. "The override is manual! Stop!"
Tanya slammed the base of her pistol into the panel. The plastic cracked. The wires sparked.
Suddenly, the room went black. The sound stopped. The lights vanished.
The silence was absolute.
Tanya stood in the dark, gasping for air. Her heart was pounding. She felt the cold metal of the drive the Archivist had been holding earlier—he must have dropped it when the power cut. She reached down and felt the floor until her fingers closed around the silver thumb drive.
She walked toward the Archivist. She couldn't see him, but she could hear him breathing in the dark.
"The Protocol is stopped," Tanya said. Her voice was sharp and dangerous. "Now, you're going to tell us how to use this drive. Or I'll leave you here for the Agency to find. And we both know they don't like failures."
In the corner, Marcus let out a rough cough as he struggled to his feet.
The Archivist was silent. He knew he was trapped. For the first time, Tanya held the power. She had the key to her daughter's life, and she wasn't letting go.