The data center hummed like a city that had learned to keep its secrets in rows of blinking lights, each rack sweating blue through the dark as if it knew what it was hiding. I stood between the aisles with my collar up and my conscience down, watching the monitors glow like dead eyes in a rainstorm, though there wasn’t any rain here—just the dry, electric air and the low steady growl of fans turning the night into a machine. Somewhere in that maze of steel and fiber, a file had gone missing, and with it a name that could ruin a mayor, bury a whistleblower, or get me buried first if I played it wrong. The server lights pulsed in coded rhythms, a confession nobody wanted to hear, and when the alarm finally chirped from the far end of the floor, soft as a gun being cocked in another room, I knew the truth was still running hot.
