Chapter 13 - The Leverage Shift
Sofia stepped forward, her eyes locked on Harrison with a gaze so intense it made the superintendent momentarily hesitate.
"You think taking the drive saves you?" Sofia asked, her voice dangerously calm. "While you were waiting for us here in the dark, the backup script we initiated in the district basement finished its delayed upload cycle."
Harrison's confident smile faltered for a fraction of a second. His brow twitched. "That's a bluff. The firewall severed the connection at twelve percent."
"It severed the local feed, yes," Leo chimed in, realizing what Sofia was doing and stepping up to support her play. "Marcus routed the secondary proxy through an external cloud server outside county jurisdiction the second we left the IT room. The entire unedited ledger, including your personal transfer authorizations, is already sitting in the inbox of the state department of education's ethics committee."
The color drained entirely from Harrison's face. The corporate diplomat facade cracked wide open, revealing the panicked, cornered bureaucrat underneath.
"You're lying," Harrison snapped, taking a sharp step forward. "Check their pockets, Miller! Get that drive right now!"
Before Miller and the security guards could close the distance, the distant wail of police sirens began to echo across the quiet suburban night, growing louder and closer with every passing second.
Red and blue emergency lights flashed brilliantly through the broken upper windows of the old mill, painting the decaying machinery in shifting crimson and azure strokes.
"Did you call the police?" Miller hissed, looking wildly toward Harrison as the sound of cruiser tires crunched onto the gravel driveway outside.
"I didn't call anyone!" Harrison shouted back, his composure completely shattered as the heavy metal doors began to shake under a heavy pounding from the outside.
Sofia looked at Leo, a slow, triumphant smile finally breaking across her face as the sirens cut through the cold air, drowning out the last desperate gasps of a corrupt administration.
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"We didn't need to call them," Sofia said quietly, looking directly at the pale superintendent. "The automated ethics protocol triggers local law enforcement dispatch the moment an unauthorized data packet is flagged on an external state server."
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