Chapter 10
The progress bar on Clara’s phone screen crawled to one hundred percent just as the beam of a heavy-duty flashlight swept across the drywall panels hiding her. Transfer Complete.
With a silent prayer, Clara clicked the button to wipe her local device clean, ensuring that even if they captured her, the encrypted keys were safely out of their reach and already downloaded onto David’s secure receiver.
"There!" Miller shouted, pointing directly at the stack of drywall.
Clara leaped up from her hiding place, darting through a maze of uninstalled cubicle partitions just as a heavy boot kicked the drywall panels aside. She scrambled toward the far side of the floor, where a large plate-glass window overlooked a secondary service alley several stories below. The window was labeled Emergency Exit - Break Glass in Case of Fire.
Miller’s heavy footsteps closed in rapidly behind her. "Give it up, Clara! You have nowhere left to run!"
Clara grabbed a heavy steel wrench resting on a toolbox nearby, turned around, and smashed it directly against the center of the reinforced glass pane. With a deafening shatter, the glass cracked into a thousand spiderweb patterns, giving way to the howling night wind outside. A metal maintenance ladder hung suspended just a few feet away from the ledge, leading down to the loading docks below.
Without stopping to look down at the dizzying height, Clara climbed onto the window sill, her wire-rimmed glasses nearly slipping from her face as the wind caught her bun and whipped her hair across her eyes. She reached out and grabbed the cold rungs of the maintenance ladder just as Miller lunged forward, his fingers grazing the hem of her blue-and-white striped shirt before closing on empty air.
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Clara scrambled down the ladder as fast as her shaking limbs would carry her, the metal rungs vibrating under her weight. Above her, Miller leaned out of the broken window, cursing into the wind, but he made no move to follow her down into the dark abyss of the service alley.
Moments later, Clara hit the asphalt of the loading dock, her legs buckling slightly from the adrenaline crash. She didn't look back. She sprinted into the shadows of the neighboring warehouse district, blending into the labyrinth of brick buildings and industrial loading bays where Victoria’s corporate reach was finally broken by the messy, unpredictable sprawl of the real city.
