The laptop screen flickered, casting a blue glow over her face.

A prompt popped up immediately, demanding a twenty-eight-character security certificate.

“A bit overkill for a charitable foundation,” Nora whispered.

Her fingers flew across the keyboard, tapping out command lines.

I watched the rain slide down the windshield, my eyes darting to the entrance of the parking lot.

Every pair of headlights made my stomach tighten.

“Eleanor called me,” I said. “They’re coming for Clara.”

“We have to work fast then,” Nora said, her eyes fixed on the code scrolling down her screen.

She bypassed the first security wall, her software cycling through thousands of algorithm combinations.

“It’s an enterprise-grade lock,” Nora said, squinting. “But they used a standard commercial wrapper to hide the directories.”

“Can you crack the wrapper?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But it’s going to leave a digital footprint. If they have active monitoring on this drive, they’ll know someone is looking at it.”

“Do it anyway,” I said. “We don’t have time to be polite.”

Nora hit a sequence of keys.

A progress bar appeared in the center of the screen.