Page 70 of Code Name: Ember
As my gut told me, empty.All of it.
It doesn’t worry me, though.Plenty of other places she could be, as she has free range of the building, except for the command center down in the sub-basement.
The communal kitchen is empty and Reid’s the only person in the gym, hard at work on the rowing machine, although he tells me he hasn’t seen Tessa in a while.The training bay is dark, not that Tessa would be in there, but I’m looking for anyone who might know where she is.
I stand at the bottom of the stairwell and feel the first cold edge of anxiety settle into my chest.
I can’t find her.
I take the stairs down to the main level, two at a time, heading straight for Malik’s office.I push the door open without knocking, which tells him everything he needs to know before I say a word.He’s on his feet before I’ve fully crossed the threshold.
“Tessa,” I say.“I can’t find her anywhere in the building.”
Malik is moving before I finish the sentence, stepping out of his office and snapping his fingers twice in Josie’s direction.She’s up immediately, snagging her tablet off the desk without breaking stride, falling in behind him without question or reserve.
Reid materializes from the stairwell, and Malik points at him.“You.With us… now.”
We move to the secured elevator at the end of the north corridor—a brushed steel door set flush into the wall with no visible means to enter other than a sleek, obsidian rectangle to the right.Malik raises his hand to the biometric panel that reads palm geometry rather than fingerprint and it pulses once with a cool blue light as it scans, then shifts to white.
The door opens without a sound.
The elevator is compact and fast, dropping one level in under seven seconds, and when the doors open again, we’re in another world.The air is cooler, climate controlled to a precise degree, and you’re immediately surrounded by a faint electrical hum of serious computing infrastructure running at sustained capacity.
Sub-Level One.
I’ve been down here hundreds of times and it still does something to my baseline when the doors open.The space is enormous relative to what the building suggests from street level.It’s a full floor carved out beneath Pioneer Square’s historic foundation, ceilinged at fourteen feet.The walls are lined with glassed-in intelligence suites that glow with the cool blue-white light of active workstations.The floors are polished black concrete with recessed lighting strips running along the baseboards, throwing clean lines of illumination upward that make the whole area feel space age.
The centerpiece is the operations wall—forty feet of seamless LED displays running the full length of the north side, currently showing a tiled array of city feeds, satellite imagery, active case maps, and real-time data streams that Josie’s systems maintain around the clock whether or not anyone is down here.In the center of the room, a curved tactical console sits on a raised platform, its surface embedded with touch interfaces and secondary screens, surrounded by a semicircle of workstations that face the main display like an amphitheater.
Josie moves to the primary console before the rest of us have fully cleared the elevator, her tablet syncing to the main system as she pulls up the internal camera grid on the operations wall.The tiled display populates instantly—every common area, corridor, and stairwell in the building above us rendered in crisp high-definition feeds.It gives us eyes on the whole building at once, except for the agents’ private quarters and bathrooms.
We come to stand behind her chair, watching as Josie moves through the feeds systematically, fast but thorough, her eyes tracking across the wall with focused intensity.My eyes are scanning too, looking for any sign of Tessa.
Lobby.Empty.
Communal kitchen.Empty.
Second-floor corridor.Empty.
Training bay, gym, receiving area, garage level.
Empty.Empty.Empty.Empty.
The cold surge of anxiety spreads in my chest.
“Door logs,” Malik says.
Josie switches screens, bringing up the access log in scrolling columns of time stamps and entry points.She scans the data, far quicker than my brain can follow, and then she stops.
“Service exit,” she says.“East corridor.One fifty-four p.m.”Her fingers tap the keyboard.“Let me pull up the camera feed.”
And there it is.The service corridor footage with a time stamp one fifty-four p.m.
And there’s Tessa in her jeans and cute blouse that I told her looked beautiful on her this morning, moving through the frame with the deliberate unhurried walk of someone who doesn’t want to appear to be hurrying.She pushes the exit door without breaking stride and then she’s gone.
“Son of a fucking bitch,” I growl, my hands curling into tight fists.
“She planned it,” Reid says in awe.“She waited for the team meeting and walked right out the service exit.”
