Lily nodded, but she looked at Marin. "You bring my dad back." Marin's answer came without hesitation. "I will."
Everett wanted to tell his daughter not to put faith in rich strangers, not to trust anyone whose world had nearly swallowed theirs whole, but he had seen Marin in the bus, shielding Lily with her own body. Sometimes trust began not as certainty, but as the absence of another choice. Ray drove them to Cicero in an old gym van with rust over the wheel wells and a cracked decal of boxing gloves on the side. He said nothing on the way except to tell Everett there was a burner phone in the glove box and a first aid kit under the seat.
Marin changed in the back behind a hanging towel into spare gym clothes that swallowed her frame, gray sweatpants, a black hoodie, and a pair of boxing shoes one size too large. Without the dress, she looked less like a CEO and more like someone's exhausted sister on the worst morning of her life. Yet, when they reached the records depot, her spine straightened. The building sat between a frozen food warehouse and a tire recycler, a low concrete block with no sign except a faded unit number and a security camera tucked beneath the roof line.
Trucks groaned past on the wet frontage road. Everett watched the entrance for six minutes, counting cameras, exits, and the rhythm of the guard who stepped outside to smoke beneath a metal awning. "Once we go in, he knows," he said. "He already knows."
Marin held up her phone. "My access to the main board portal was revoked twenty minutes ago. He's moving." Everett looked at the depot and felt the old familiar narrowing of time before a bad decision. "Then we move faster."
They crossed during the guard's second drag. Marin placed her thumb on the side door scanner. For one terrible second, nothing happened. Then the lock clicked.
Inside, the air smelled of damp paper, machine oil, and dust. Rows of storage cages stretched under fluorescent lights. Somewhere deeper in the building, servers hummed behind a locked room, pretending to be an electrical closet. Everett found it by sound.
Marin's badge opened the outer door, but the inner keypad required a code. Everett removed the panel with the small screwdriver on his keyring, exposing wires and a cheap bypass board. Marin watched him work. "Auditors usually know how to do that?" "Fathers with old cars and broken appliances learn a lot."
"And soldiers—soldiers learn which doors matter." The lock released. Inside the room, three server towers blinked in a metal rack beside a desk holding a monitor, a keyboard, and a paper shredder with fresh strips inside. Everett sat, cracked his knuckles once, and began.