My mother’s words felt like a second blow to the head. She was actively trying to stem the flow of my blood with a monogrammed napkin, yet her primary concern was the optics of the situation.

I had been waiting for four hours. My muscles were screaming, the cold seeping through the layers of thermal insulation, but my mind was entirely clear. I was no longer the girl who had stood paralyzed in a wedding conservatory while her family debated the PR optics of her bleeding skull. I was the architect of my own survival.

At 1600 hours, the radio frequency I had tapped into using a police scanner crackled to life.

“Vanguard One, this is Point. The pass is a mess. Visibility is down to twenty meters. Reduce speed.”

“Copy, Point. Keeping a tight formation.”

Through the optics, I saw the headlights cut through the sleet. It was a three-car convoy. Two heavily armored black SUVs flanking a customized, reinforced transit van. The shadow server was inside the van.

I checked my windage, adjusted the dials on my scope, and chambered a round. I didn’t intend to kill anyone. I wasn’t a murderer. But I was an excellent shot, and a vehicle traveling on black ice was incredibly vulnerable.

I waited until the lead SUV hit the apex of the hairpin turn, the exact spot where the guardrail had been destroyed by a logging truck two weeks prior and had not yet been repaired.

I exhaled, holding my breath in the empty space between heartbeats, and pulled the trigger.

The rifle roared, kicking back against my shoulder. The heavy, armor-piercing round traveled the three hundred yards in a fraction of a second and slammed directly into the engine block of the lead SUV.

The vehicle shuddered violently. A massive plume of white smoke erupted from the hood as the engine seized entirely. The driver panicked, slamming on the brakes. On dry asphalt, they would have just skidded to a halt. On black ice, the momentum turned the heavy SUV into a spinning two-ton hockey puck. It careened sideways, slamming into the rock face of the mountain with a deafening crunch.

The transit van behind it swerved desperately to avoid the collision, fishtailing wildly. The driver overcorrected, and the rear tires caught the soft, icy shoulder of the road. The van tipped, sliding down into a shallow, snow-filled drainage ditch, effectively trapped.

The rear SUV slammed on its brakes, successfully stopping before the wreck.

I didn’t wait to admire my work. I scrambled back from the ledge, grabbed my duffel bag, and sprinted down the goat trail that led to the road.

By the time I reached the tree line near the crash site, four armed corporate contractors had piled out of the rear SUV, weapons drawn, scanning the ridges above them. The men in the lead vehicle were stumbling out, dazed and bloody from the airbag deployments, but alive.

“Sniper! Check the ridges!” one of the contractors shouted, his voice barely carrying over the howling wind.

I stayed low, using the blinding sleet and the thick brush for cover. I crept toward the transit van, which was resting at a sharp angle in the ditch. The driver was trying to reverse, the tires spinning uselessly in the deep mud and snow.

I pulled a smoke grenade from my duffel, pulled the pin, and lobbed it directly under the rear SUV. Thick, blinding white smoke instantly billowed out, mixing with the sleet to create an impenetrable wall of gray.

The contractors shouted in confusion, coughing as the smoke enveloped them.

I sprinted the last twenty yards, sliding down the snowy embankment and slamming into the back doors of the transit van. I slapped a magnetic breaching charge against the heavy locking mechanism, hit the detonator switch, and dove backward into the snow.

A sharp, concussive crack echoed through the pass. The lock shattered.

I ripped the doors open. Inside the dimly lit cargo bay, sitting bolted to a shock-absorbing rack, was the shadow server. A sleek, black tower humming with independent battery power. And sitting strapped into a jump seat beside it was Dr. Elias Thorne.

He was clutching a ruggedized laptop, his eyes wide with absolute terror. When he saw me climb into the back of the van, the snow swirling around me like a wraith, he shrank back against the wall.

“Maya,” he gasped, his voice trembling. “How…”

“Step away from the server, Elias,” I said, leveling a high-voltage stun gun at his chest.

“You don’t understand,” he pleaded, his hands raised. “Apex will kill me if I lose this data. They paid millions for it. It’s not just the algorithm, Maya. It’s your baseline. Without it, the filament in your head is useless to them. I can remove it! I can take it out of your head right now, I have a surgical kit in the back! Just let me keep the data!”

He was bargaining with my body, just like my father had.

“You don’t get to touch me ever again,” I snarled. I stepped forward, pressing the prongs of the stun gun directly against his shoulder, and pulled the trigger.

The electric charge dropped him instantly. He seized and collapsed onto the metal floor of the van, unconscious.

I turned to the server. I didn’t have time to extract the hard drives, and I certainly didn’t know how to navigate the encryption. But I didn’t need to read the data. I just needed it gone.

I unzipped my duffel bag and pulled out a heavy thermite canister. I set it directly on top of the server rack, pulled the ignition pin, and backed out of the van.

Thermite doesn’t explode. It burns at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It can melt through engine blocks, steel vaults, and military-grade hard drives in a matter of seconds.

A blinding, furious white light erupted inside the cargo bay. The heat hit my face instantly, melting the snow on my jacket. I heard the sickening sound of metal warping and silicon turning to liquid slag.

I grabbed Dr. Thorne by the collar of his jacket and dragged him out of the van, dumping him unceremoniously into the snowbank so he wouldn’t burn alive.