Chapter 7 - The Fire Door
"Everybody down!" Ortiz shouted.
The sprinklers drenched us, but the smoke kept coming. Something burned beyond the archive wall, and the door we'd entered through wouldn't budge.
Adrian braced a shoulder against it. "Locked from outside."
"There's a maintenance stair," I said. "Dad showed me when I was twelve."
I led them through the dead server racks, counting the rows as he'd taught me. In the third aisle I found a dented vent cover. Behind it stood a steel ladder.
"You remember a hidden ladder from seventeen years ago?" the patrol officer asked.
"My father made adventures out of every boring repair."
I climbed first. At the top, a hatch opened into the greenhouse, where rain slapped the glass roof. We hauled ourselves through one by one, coughing hard enough to hurt.
Ortiz called for the fire department. The smoke stopped a minute later, almost as if someone had tested how close they could come to killing us.
Adrian held out the flash drive. "Tell me you copied it."
"The recorder was enough," I said. "And I have the envelope."
"Evidence needs a chain of custody," Ortiz reminded us, sealing everything in bags.
I looked down at my soaked uniform. The Sterling mansion rose above us, all warm windows and polished stone. Somebody inside had watched us almost die under its floors.
At the hospital, Tessa brought me dry clothes and news that Vanessa's edited video had already circulated online. In one version I looked like the aggressor. In another, her first kick was visible.
"People are arguing about whether you should've kicked back," Tessa said.
"They can argue. I want Noah off campus."
"He's at my place with the deadbolt on."
Ortiz approached carrying the preliminary fire report. "The smoke machine was wired to the old alarm panel. Intentional. No sign of a person going down there after us."
"The system was controlled remotely?" Adrian asked.
"That's what we think."
He rubbed his face. "Then someone with credentials could've done it from anywhere."
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A nurse called my name. She held a sealed envelope delivered to the reception desk minutes earlier.
Inside was a photograph of Dad at a diner with a woman whose face had been crossed out in red. On the back, someone had written: LARK IS STILL ALIVE. ASK ADRIAN WHO HIS FATHER PAID TO DISAPPEAR.
