Chapter 7 - The Midnight Audit
At 1:15 a.m. on Thursday, the Northstar headquarters was dark, its glass facade reflecting the distant lights of the city skyline.
Claire, Mason, and Lucy—who refused to be left with a babysitter because "Tuesdays are over but Thursdays are for detective work"—stood inside the deep service tunnels beneath the main assembly floor.
Mason was tracking the thermal signatures of the high-voltage lines using his phone's infrared camera attachment. "The load is shifting," he muttered, pointing the screen toward a false concrete wall behind the main cooling pumps. "Look at the heat bloom. There’s a three-hundred-kilowatt draw behind that structural pillar."
Claire rolled forward, her fingers pressing against the edge of the concrete panels. She found the seam—a hidden hydraulic access door that had been omitted from the official architectural layouts she had signed off on two years ago.
"The keycard override code should be the master facility bypass," Claire said, typing a string of digits into her tablet.
With a low, mechanical hiss, the panel slid back, revealing a narrow, air-conditioned vault filled with stacks of black, humming server towers. The blue LED lights flickered like small, malicious eyes in the dark.
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"It’s beautiful," Lucy whispered, staring at the lights.
"It’s evidence," Claire corrected, her fingers already connecting her tablet directly to the vault's main switch. "Mason, capture the physical serial numbers. Every single one."
