“One more incident with that child, and you’re finished.”

The stairwell of Rainier Crest Tower was an endless concrete spine winding upward through the skyscraper. With the ventilation systems offline, the air quickly became thick with the scent of ozone, warm concrete, and distant smoke.

Andrew ran.

He didn't think about his aching knees, his damaged minivan, or his thirty-dollar bank account balance. He thought about Leo sleeping soundly at Betty's house, and he thought about Emma sitting in a dark closet holding a stuffed animal with a torn ear.

Ten floors.

His breathing turned into rhythmic gasps. The beam of his flashlight bounced off the concrete steps and yellow steel railings.

Twenty floors.

The building swayed. High above, the storm was roaring like an express train, vibrating through the massive steel girders. Andrew could hear the groan of glass panels flexing under immense pressure forty stories above the ground.

Thirty floors.

He reached the boundary where his keycard had been restricted just days before. The heavy fire door was locked down, its magnetic seals engaged due to the power failure. Andrew pulled his master physical override key—a tool given only to senior maintenance staff for structural emergencies—and inserted it into the manual override box beside the frame.

With a heavy metallic click, the latch disengaged. Andrew pushed through.

Forty floors.

The air grew noticeably colder. The sound of wind was no longer a distant rumble; it was a screeching howl. Rain was seeping through the joints between the precast concrete panels, creating slippery patches on the steps.

Finally, Andrew reached the landing for the forty-seventh floor.

The heavy steel door leading to the executive archives was warped. Heat radiating from the inner hallway suggested an electrical fire had broken out near the primary server bank.

Andrew wrapped his sleeve around his hand, grabbed the door handle, and pulled.

The door screeched open, revealing a corridor filled with rolling gray smoke. Emergency sprinklers were sputtering overhead, spraying a fine, misting rain across the plush carpet.

At the far end of the hall, the massive glass wall of the northern conference room had failed. A giant sheet of tempered glass had cracked under the wind pressure, creating a massive vacuum that was sucking loose papers, insulation, and ceiling tiles out into the screaming black night above Seattle.

"The red box..." Andrew muttered to himself, dropping low to stay beneath the rising plume of gray smoke.

He crawled along the hallway, holding his flashlight close to the floor. He knew this floor layout intimately; he had memorized every fire extinguisher and utility layout during his night shifts over the past two years.

He reached Daniel Kane’s private secondary study—a room hidden behind the primary executive suite.

The door was locked with a heavy keypad lock, but the power failure had left it jammed in its default failure mode. Andrew braced his shoulder against the wood and slammed into it with all his weight.

The frame cracked. On his third attempt, the lock gave way, and the door swung open.

The study was in chaos. Framed photographs of Daniel, Celeste, and Emma lay shattered on the floor. Books had been blown off shelves by the air pressure differential.

In the corner, bolted beneath a built-in teak desk, was a small, fireproof red steel dispatch box.

It was locked with a four-digit mechanical combination lock.

Andrew dropped to his knees in front of the box. He pulled out his phone—no signal, five percent battery remaining—and held the light close to the dial.

"A combination..." Andrew whispered, his heart sinking. "I don't know the code."

He paused, remembering the paper Emma had held in the lobby.

Account 904.

Andrew placed his fingers on the worn chrome dial.

He turned the dial to 0-9-0-4.

Click.

The heavy locking bar retracted with a satisfying metallic snap.

Andrew pulled open the lid. Inside lay a leather-bound notebook, a set of encrypted flash drives, and a series of original inspection logs detailing fraudulent safety certificates for Northstar’s international cargo fleet—certificates signed off by Richard Vance and a syndicate of investors attempting to bleed the company dry before driving it into bankruptcy.

Daniel Kane hadn't died of a random heart attack on Mount Rainier. He had been poisoned with a slow-acting synthetic agent designed to mimic cardiac arrest after discovering the fraud—a secret he had confided to his young daughter hours before his fatal hike, giving her the red box key and hiding the ledger note inside her favorite toy.

Emma hadn't stopped speaking out of simple grief. She had stopped speaking because the last thing her father told her was: If you speak about this to anyone in the office before your mother is safe, they will hurt you too.

Andrew grabbed the contents of the box and stuffed them inside his heavy water-resistant canvas work jacket, zipping it tightly up to his chin.

As he turned to leave, a shadow blocked the ruined door frame.