How Do We Get In?

When Cane and I stepped through the heavy steel door, Viper was hunched over a rusted map table that looked like it had been salvaged from a naval scrap heap. The table was covered in hand-drawn blueprints and scribbled notes. Surrounding him were three of his most trusted scouts.

“...impossible to hit from the street,” one of the scouts, a man known as Rat, was saying.

His finger tapped a specific point on a blueprint of a waterfront estate.

“The security at the perimeter is Aegis Zenith tactical. If you try to go through the front, you’ll be dead before you see the door.”

Cane moved past me. He leaned over the table, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of the metal.

“Give me a reason why we’re staring at blueprints instead of riding to the Glades,” Cane growled.

“Every minute we sit here in this hole, Silas is killing my Pack. I can feel them, Viper. I can feel their pain.”

Viper slowly straightened up, a silver flask in one hand and a cigar in the other. He took a long drag, glowing a bright orange in the dim light, and blew smoke toward the ceiling. He looked Cane dead in the eye.

“We found it, Cane,” Viper said.

“My boys have been running the drainage pipes for seventy-two hours. They followed the chemical runoff to a specific cooling outlet. There’s a submerged server farm sitting under a private marina. A shell company owns it, but the shell leads back to Thorne.”

Viper leaned forward, the smoke curling around his tattooed neck.

“It’s not just data down there, Cane. It’s a manufacturing hub, the scouts are calling it. It’s the kitchen where they’re cooking that Amber shit. We’ve located the central vault.”

Cane’s jaw tightened.

“I don't care about documents or blueprints. I care about Jax and the others. We hit Zone 4 in the Everglades tonight, or I go alone.”

“Cane, wait,” I said, stepping into the circle of harsh light.

I had to be the anchor. I had to be the Thorne who knew how Thornes thought.

“If we go to Zone 4 now, we’re dead,” I said, my voice steady.

“I know my father. He wouldn't leave a site that important, protected by just soldiers. We’d be going in blind, and we’d be dead within ten yards of the perimeter.”

“She’s right,” Viper added, leaning back against the table and crossing his fully tattooed arms.

“Rat here saw a shipment of reinforced canisters being moved into that marina vault an hour ago. That’s the source, Cane. If we hit that vault, we get the antidote. We get the leverage we need to shut them down from the inside. We stop them from making more of those things before the Iron Claw becomes an army.”

I walked up to Cane, placing a hand on his chest. I could feel the scars beneath his shirt, pulsing with a faint warmth.

“Cane, look at me,” I whispered.

“My father doesn't keep his most valuable secrets in a swamp. He keeps them where he can see them, where he can touch them. That vault is his pride. We need those serums to level the playing field. We need to know what we’re fighting before Silas turns more men into those monsters.”

Cane looked from me to Viper, then down at the blueprints.

“How do we get in?” he asked.

The scouts immediately leaned back in, the atmosphere shifting from a confrontation to a tactical briefing. Rat pulled a secondary map from a tube, a cross-section of the marina’s sub-structure.

“The marina is built on a series of reinforced concrete pylons,” Rat explained, his voice energized.

“Directly beneath the main pier, there’s an old drainage bypass from the 1920s. It was part of the original Everglades reclamation project before the city grew over it. It’s too narrow for a car, and the tide cycles make it a death trap for divers. The water moves through there with enough force to pin a man against the grates until he drowns.”

I leaned in, tracing the line of the pipe. It led directly into the lower levels, bypassing the weight-sensitive asphalt and the gates above.

“It’s a slipstream,” I realized, my mind racing through the mechanical specs of the bikes.

“The intake for the server’s cooling system is massive. It creates a vacuum effect. If we hit that pipe at exactly the right speed during the high-tide peak, the suction will actually help pull us through the narrowest sections. We bypass the surface security entirely and emerge directly into the server’s primary cooling tank.”

Viper grinned, showing a row of white teeth that made him look like a shark.

“So, what you’re saying is... to get in, you have to ride a flooded pipe with three feet of clearance, pitch black, with the water pressure trying to crush your skull and drown your engine. Sounds like a Friday night to me.”

He looked at me then, his gaze softening for a fraction of a second, a flash of genuine concern.

“You’re sure about this, Eloise? This isn't a joyride. If your father catches you in that vault, he won't see a daughter. He’ll treat you like an enemy of the state.”

“I’ve been his enemy since the day I fucked up his image, Cane,” I said, looking up at him.

“Let’s go piss him off some more.”