I knew that countdown sequence.

Kane’s programmers designed it to fry the hard drives and release a small thermite charge inside the casing.

Dante didn’t panic.

He pulled a heavy knife from his belt and jammed the blade into the side of the terminal casing.

With a hard twist of his wrist, he popped the plastic cover off, exposing the copper wiring.

He found the blue wire connected to the internal detonator and sliced it clean.

The countdown timer froze at twelve seconds.

Dante wiped a smudge of grease from his cheek and looked back at the screen.

The blinking message was gone, replaced by the scrolling lines of the cipher I had learned to fear.

It was a shifting Vigenère cipher, using a keyword that changed based on the date.

Dante stared at the characters.

He tried our mother’s name.

Nothing happened.

He tried my name, *Isabella*.

The screen flashed yellow, then green.

The master files began to decrypt, unfolding like a map of veins across the dark screen.

It was a blueprint of the old municipal tunnels built beneath Chicago during the early twentieth century.