The Ark

18.5

Delta kept up the charade. Continuing to rant past the remaining offices until we reached the faux marble foyer. As the elevator doors closed behind us, she blew out a relieved sigh.

"Strippers?" I raised an eyebrow.

She grinned, keeping her eyes on the numbers that were ticking by on the over-door projection. "No one is going to argue with an angry stripper."

I followed her gaze to the increasing levels and spotted a security camera behind the projection. "Ah Delta?"

"Already running cloned footage from yesterday over them," she replied without missing a beat. "No one can see us."

I stared at her in shock. Maybe she wasn't as unprepared as I had thought.

The lift stopped at the one hundred and sixtieth floor. Delta held my arm as the doors opened and a polished, middle aged woman stepped in. At the same moment she entered, Delta and I exited. The woman was in the middle of a MR call and didn't even seem to notice us leaving. 

I followed Delta in silence across the foyer, which was a copy of the one we had just left on the ninetieth floor, and through a door marked as an emergency exit.

The stairwell was dimly lit, the faint emergency lighting somehow making the raw concrete walls even more grey. Delta and I took off the moment the door swung shut behind us. The power I felt in my legs as I took the stairs two at a time was almost addictive. I wasn't even breaking a sweat by the time we reached the two hundredth floor. In fact, I probably would have burst straight through the door and kept running had Delta not stopped me.

I took in a couple of deep breaths and tried to calm my jittery muscles as Delta shared a projection of the penthouse layout. "There shouldn't be anyone working up here tonight," she said with confidence. "Guards do a round on this level and the one below, taking a total of twenty minutes to circulate. I'm going to set a shared timer, we meet back here in fifteen minutes, clear?" Delta was looking through her projection at me.

"As plexi-glass," I assured her.

She inclined her head toward the blueprint. "You take the EA's desk first, download whatever you can onto this." She passed me a tablet. "Once you've checked there, you may as well check your Dad's office, but I doubt he would have left anything there for them to find."

"And you?" I asked, even though I already had a hunch.

Her eyes glinted, "I'm going to take Zenith's wing. The business manager and CEO's offices will be last for the both of us if we get time."

I nodded.

"If something goes wrong, use the shared panic alert in your Lens to notify me and hide." Delta nudged open the door a few inches and peeked through. "The guard is just leaving," she whispered, "starting the timer now."

A fifteen-minute countdown began in the top left corner of my vision and it remained there when I shut off my MR. Delta no doubt had the same.

We slipped through the door and I was hit by the silence of the level. The few times I had been here in the past, this floor had been bustling with people rushing to meetings and PA's taking calls. Now it was so quiet that even my light breathing seemed to echo. The vacancy somehow made the space seem even grander than it already was.

The floors running through the penthouse were concrete, polished to a porcelain white. At the centre of the room was a ring-shaped, opaque glass desk that belonged to the executive assistants.

Delta and I split up, I headed for the EA's desk, while she jogged off toward one of the five doors spaced evenly around the perimeter of the room. Each door led to a private office, housed in each of the lotus petals. Something I knew, only because Dad's office was the first door on the right.

As Delta slipped into Zenith's office on the far side, I scampered around the entry gap in the circular EA's desk and spotted an interface that could possibly get me access to files.

Delta had given me a pair of gloves that could still operate touch holograms and screens without leaving fingerprints or DNA touch points. I pulled them on and got to work. A password override was already built into Delta's tablet, so all I had to do was use a zone connection between the two and it would do the rest.

Coding flickered across both screens as Delta's programming worked to override the EA's password. While I waited, I rummaged through the other things on the desk. There wasn't much to see, everything was stored on the network. A couple of baskets at my feet contained Lens cases, each emblazoned with the ZenTech lotus motif. I pocketed one and glanced back at Delta's tablet.

It had cracked the code and was downloading files. Since it was a zone connection, I figured I could pocket the tablet and let it run the download while I checked Dad's office.

The office was exactly the same as the last time I had been there. It was a room several times deeper than wide, made completely of glass. During the day the view felt infinite, but now the glowing purple light strips that illuminated the petals in the night sky were impossible to see past. My skin took on a lavender hue as I walked the length of the transparent walls, toward the only piece of furniture in the room. Dad's desk. 

I could tell it had been searched simply because of how neat it was. Dad was a whirlwind of mess wherever he went, and work was no exception. His interface was perfectly central to the desk, a neat stack of three tablets in the top left corner and on the right—a photo projector.

My breath caught in my throat as the photo changed from one of Dad and his colleagues, to a picture of him holding me as a baby. My eyes welled as I let out a surprised sniffle, wiping my nose on my sleeve and swallowing back a rising wave of emotion. 

It just didn't feel real, he couldn't be gone.

Sooner than I would have liked, the photo transitioned to another and suddenly I was staring at a picture of Dad and Fabia laughing. She had her arm around his shoulders and her forehead on his cheek as she smiled. I blinked away some of my tears, remembering the shock of seeing them together at the gala. The shock of finding out he'd kept something that huge from me.

Rapid flashing flooded my vision and I stumbled backward clutching at my eye. My stomach plummeted as I realised what the sudden visual assault meant.

Delta had activated the panic alert.