The heavy atmosphere in the boutique felt suffocating. The cold metal of the golden key burned against the young worker’s palm. His name was Leo—an underpaid, overlooked employee who had spent the last two years scrubbing fingerprint smudges off glass display cases while rich patrons looked right through him.

"We need to get out of here!" Leo shouted, looking around the subterranean chamber for an escape route. "There has to be a back door!"

"There is no back door, Leo," Eleanor said quietly. "This vault was built to be a tomb for whoever holds the truth. But we aren't running."

BANG!

The obsidian doors cracked open, splintering into heavy fragments. Tactical smoke grenades bounced down the stairs, filling the vault with dense white mist. Red laser sights cut through the smoke, scanning the room for targets.

"Target acquired!" a harsh voice yelled through a gas mask. "Eliminate the boy! Secure the hard drives!"

Before the mercenaries could raise their rifles, Eleanor pressed a red button on her armrest.

ZZZZZT!

High-frequency sonic emitters hidden in the vault walls detonated with a glass-shattering hum. The mercenaries screamed, dropping their weapons as blood trickled from beneath their helmets. They collapsed to their knees, disoriented by the agonizing resonance.

"Move!" Eleanor ordered, tossing a heavy leather briefcase into Leo's arms. "That case contains the digital encryption keys to the Sterling global bank accounts. $40 billion. If you escape with that, their empire crumbles by midnight."

Leo grabbed the heavy case. "I'm not leaving you!"

"I am an eighty-year-old woman tethered to a life-support system inside this chair, Leo!" she shouted over the blaring alarms. "My time ended decades ago. Yours begins now! Take the lift behind the main server!"

Leo looked at the server rack. Hidden behind the blinking blue towers was a small, high-speed pneumatic elevator tube.

BOOM!

A second wave of mercenaries charged down the stairs, led by Victoria herself. She was holding a silver pistol, her eyes manic and bloodshot. "Kill him! Don't let him leave with that briefcase!"

Victoria raised her weapon and aimed straight at Leo’s chest.

THWACK!

Eleanor whipped her mechanical wheelchair around, slamming it full-speed into Victoria’s legs. Victoria shrieked as she fell hard onto the steel floor, her gun skittering across the ground.

"GO, LEO! RECLAIM WHAT YOUR GRANDFATHER BUILT!" Eleanor roared.

Leo gritted his teeth, tears burning in his eyes. He lunged into the elevator tube, pulled the glass door shut, and slammed the activation button.

As the pneumatic tube shot him upward at terrifying speed, the last image he saw through the glass was Victoria rising from the floor, pointing her gun at Eleanor, and pulling the trigger.

FLASH.

The elevator launched Leo out into the night air. He hit the cold asphalt of a dark alleyway behind the shopping complex, rolling hard onto the pavement. The briefcase remained locked in his grip.

Above him, the night sky was clear, but in the distance, sirens were blaring across the entire city. His phone buzzed violently in his pocket. He pulled it out.

An emergency news alert flashed across the screen: