Desmond studied her a moment, but the young woman wouldn’t look at him.

“Hey.”

She turned toward him.

“Before…” he said. “What was our relationship?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not sure it matters to me anymore.”

Before Desmond could say another word, William stopped in the path and whispered for them to be quiet. The administrative building loomed.

In the building’s lobby, they each swiped their magnetic access cards; Carl swiped his own, and Desmond, William, and Avery used cards they had taken from residents of the bungalows—people they had verified had access to the building and critical areas. The people attached to the access cards looked vaguely similar to each of them in their disguises, but they certainly wouldn’t fool anyone who actually knew those residents. Desmond just hoped they could get by the guard at the desk—and not be noticed by the staff manning the security cameras.

To his relief, the front desk guard barely looked up. In seconds, they were past the lobby, at the elevator bank, and Desmond finally exhaled.

The building was four stories. Carl led them to the server room on the second floor, in the interior. It was expansive, at least a hundred feet long and seventy feet wide, and extended to the two floors above.

The place buzzed with the sound of countless servers. Rows of metal cabinets and cages stretched out. Some enclosures lay open, cords spilling out like the entrails of a mechanical monster that had been gutted by a tech. Some of those techs were in the room. They stood at carts piled high with server parts, worked on laptops, and typed on keyboards below fold-up flat screens that extended from the racks themselves. The room was windowless, lit by fluorescent lights, and cool. Air conditioning blew down on them, an artificial breeze from above. Plastic tiles formed a raised floor in a gridded metal framework, and the space underneath the floor allowed conduits and wiring to reach all areas of the data center. Their feet thumped as they walked across the tiles.

The scale of the data center was far beyond what Desmond had expected. What are they doing with this much computing power?

At various points, Avery attached a small camera to the end of a row of servers. The cameras had magnetic bases and snapped right onto the metal frames.

Carl stopped at a rack and punched in some numbers on a keypad next to a small door. The door opened with a click, and Carl pulled out a laptop. He attached an Ethernet cord to a port on a switch above the servers.

“This terminal has administrative privileges on the network.”

He stepped aside, and Avery took his place. She set a tablet next to the laptop and brought up a view of all the security cameras she had placed. Thus far, no one was following them.