Chapter 2 - The Ten-Minute Window
The seconds began to bleed together with the rhythmic ticking of the digital clock on the dashboard. Ten minutes. Six hundred seconds to pivot from being a willing instrument of corporate destruction to something entirely undefined, dangerous, and exposed.
My heart hammered against my ribs, a stark contrast to the cold, calculated environment of the investment firm where I had spent the last eight years climbing the ranks. They called me "The Scalpel." I cut away unprofitable assets, liquidated failing portfolios, and never once looked back at the collateral damage. But collateral damage usually didn't have a face, didn't sound like breaking glass, and certainly didn't leave a cracked iPhone in my passenger seat broadcasting my every move back to an unknown mastermind.
I shoved the car door open, the heavy German metal clicking outward into the cool, exhaust-heavy air of East Los Angeles. The street was dim, lit by the amber glow of failing sodium-vapor streetlights that made the pavement look greasy and wet.
Across the asphalt, the woman—whose name I didn't yet know, though the system probably cataloged her as an uncollectible liability—was kneeling in the dirt beside her son. The boy’s body had gone rigid, his lips turning a terrifying shade of bluish-gray.
I didn't think about my job. I didn't think about the executive committee waiting for the encryption key to sign off on Daniel Reed's eviction. I reached into the glove compartment, grabbed my emergency medical kit—a relic from my days as a field auditor in rural construction sites—and bolted across the street.
"Move!" I yelled, dropping to my knees beside them.
The woman flinched, her eyes wide and feral, like a cornered wolf protecting its cub. She threw her body over the boy, trying to shield him from me, from the car, from the entire hostile world.
"Don't touch him!" she screamed, her voice tearing through her throat. "Just leave us alone! Haven't you taken enough?"
"I have an inhaler in my kit—wait, no, that's for adults, the dosage is wrong," I muttered, my mind racing through protocols that suddenly felt hopelessly inadequate. "Listen to me! I'm not with them. I'm the one they sent, but I'm stopping. Look at his lips—he’s hypoxic. If we don't clear his airway right now, he's going into cardiac arrest."
She looked at my face, searching the expensive cut of my suit, the panic in my eyes, and finally the way my hands hovered over the boy without malice. Something shifted in her desperate gaze. She didn't trust me, but she trusted death even less. She pulled back slightly.
"Leo," she choked out, cradling the boy’s head. "His name is Leo. Please..."
I ripped open the medical bag. Inside was an ambu-bag and a portable pediatric nebulizer attachment I kept for emergencies during site visits. It wasn't a standard prescription rescue inhaler, but it had a saline mist function that could buy us ninety seconds if I could force it past his clenched teeth.
"Leo, buddy, look at me," I said, my voice dropping into a steady, hypnotic cadence I didn't know I possessed. "Stay with me, man. We're beating the clock."
I jammed the mask over his face, squeezing the manual valve to force oxygen into his collapsing lungs. For three agonizing seconds, nothing happened. The chest remained stubbornly still. The woman let out a sound that was half-prayer, half-shriek.
Then, with a wet, rattling gasp, the boy arched his back, air rushing violently into his system. He let out a piercing, ragged cough, his small eyes flying open in sheer terror.
"He's breathing," the woman sobbed, collapsing forward until her forehead rested against the pavement. "Oh, God... he's breathing."
I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding since I read the file on Daniel Reed.
That was when the passenger seat of my Mercedes—half a block away—flashed brightly. The cracked iPhone was still recording. And the screen changed from a live feed of my car interior to a bold, flashing text box:
9 minutes remaining. The target is moving.
May you like
I looked up from the sidewalk, my eyes locking onto the second-story window of the apartment building directly across the street. A single, amber light flickered off inside a dark room.
Daniel Reed was watching us. And someone else was watching him.
