Chapter 6

The auctioneer had barely called the first increment when she smiled into the camera. "Noah has been collecting canned food and old houses lately. I hope this place helps him forget some unpleasant things."

Comments scrolled fast across the screen.

I raised my paddle. Eight million.

Damian went straight to eight and a half.

I bid nine, he took it to nine and a half. Every time he moved by the smallest allowed step, because he did not actually want the property, and he wanted everyone in the room to see that he was driving up my price.

Past fifteen million, I set the paddle down.

The room went quiet.

Damian turned his head. "Out of money already?"

"An old house with a leaking roof is not worth more than that."

What he feared was never that I would match him. It was that I would not care.

"Twenty million." Damian raised his own paddle, loud enough for the livestream to pick up. "Noah, if you do not bid again, then admit in front of everyone that you are nothing without the company."

His family's financial advisor bent over to say something in his ear. Damian pushed the man away without looking and kept his eyes on me.

I waited three seconds.

"Twenty-eight million."

A low intake of breath went through the room.

"That is the last one." I laid the paddle across my knee. "Add one dollar and the estate is yours."

Damian's hand stopped in midair.

He did not know that I really had prepared a second site, a shut-down data center on a headland in the North Bay. It was not as safe as Northridge, but it had diesel reserves, cooling water, and a satellite communications array. If Damian wanted to spend thirty million to buy Northridge instead of me, I would switch to the backup plan that same hour.

This was not about ego. It was the cost of keeping my options open.

Selena lowered her voice. "Let it go. We already bought the estate next door, and we still have a wedding to pay for."

Damian's face darkened. He wanted me bankrupt, but he did not want to tie up any more of his own cash. The auctioneer asked three times and he never lifted the paddle.

The gavel came down.

"Twenty-eight million dollars. Sold."

The applause was thin, and most of it was people enjoying themselves at my expense. The livestream title changed soon after: a new way to burn a fortune, twenty-eight million for a grave on a hilltop.

Damian got up and walked over to me.

"Congratulations. When you find out the repairs cost more than the house, I might consider buying it at cost."

"Keep your cash for the wedding." I glanced at his financial advisor. "You need it more than I do right now."

His face went darker still.

The transfer closed that afternoon. Title to every building, the land, the cistern, and the service tunnels passed to me, and I had Emma start work at once.

She spread the plans across the underground control room.

"Five days." She tapped the drawings with her pen. "Even if you hired every contractor in the Bay Area, you could not finish what you have listed."

"It does not all have to be finished. Do the parts where failure kills people first."

I struck out the interior finishes and the repairs to the house above ground and kept only the intake, the deep well, the outer wall, access control, isolation and independent power.

Every old vent was sealed. The real intake moved to the sheltered face of the hill, with lead shielding and high-grade filtration added. The underground garage became a double-door isolation zone, with a clear airlock behind the outer visitor door. The estate's existing diesel gensets, solar and flywheel systems were each overhauled, and the critical controllers went into a Faraday cage.

We plated the outer walls in steel, buried hydraulic bollards in the mountain road, and installed thermal imaging, sonic deterrents, and a drone station in the woods.

Emma read the new priority list and her expression eased slightly.

"That gets us to sixty percent."

"Sixty percent is enough. Everything left over goes into the underground storerooms."

In practice, the steel plate, the precast concrete blocks, the spare piping and the machine parts would go into the vault whenever nobody was watching. They did not have to be installed before the end of the world. They only had to appear in the right place at the right moment.

Less than four hours into the work, the county inspector arrived.