The night before had been ordinary.
Ren had stayed late again—alone, as usual—cleaning up some final data strings, cross-referencing suspicious vendor codes. The lights above his cubicle buzzed in that faintly irritating way they always did after 10 p.m., and the hum of the servers provided a constant low drone that usually kept him grounded. But not tonight.
His hands trembled slightly as he inputted the final script.
The data was pointing to something. A funnel of project funds rerouted through fake departments, fraudulent vendor IDs, and a signature that didn't quite match the department head's. It was buried—cleverly so—but not enough to fool him.
The code didn't lie.
And he knew, without knowing how, that someone was watching. That someone knew he'd found the thread.
He packed up, double-encrypted the files, and sent a secured draft to the legal channel Aika had provided. She'd requested a full traceability map by the end of the week—but something in his gut told him there might not be a week left.
He couldn't explain the sense of closing walls.
It wasn't logic. It was instinct.
And his instincts had always screamed quietly before his panic did.
The next morning was unusually quiet.
Too quiet.
Ren noticed it the moment he wheeled into the lower server hallway. Usually, there was some sign of early shift engineers—an open toolbox, someone half-cursing a network delay, at least the scent of coffee.
But the hallway was silent.
Empty.
Too clean.
His hands twitched slightly as he tapped his keycard against the server room entrance. The light blinked green. He rolled inside, the door sealing behind him with its usual hydraulic hiss.
He didn't even notice the slight delay in the locking click.
He focused instead on the terminal screen near the server bay—and found some discrepancies.
He tried to resolve the issue which took him until late that night.
Then when he's about to leave, he heard a click…
The server room door.
The lights switched off.
He tried to enter the access code.
It didn't work.
And neither did the lights switched on.
The room dimmed.
Then he entered the override emergency code and tried to open the door again—it didn't respond.
Locked.
He pulled out his phone.
No signal.
No reception.
No WiFi.
A wave of cold swept through his body—not from the server temperature but from the unmistakable signs of a setup.
He wheeled back to the door, tapping the emergency override.
Nothing.
The lights above him buzzed once… then stilled completely.
A new kind of silence descended. The silence of disconnection. Isolation.
Ren's breathing stuttered.
This wasn't just an IT glitch.
This wasn't just maintenance.
This was deliberate.
His heartbeat surged.
His palms dampened.
He pressed himself back in the chair, trying to focus, trying to slow the breathing—but it was already starting.
The tremor in his hands.
The shortness of breath.
The pressure in his chest.
The wave of memory.
Dark rooms. Locked doors. Being pushed. Being shouted at. Middle school. Hospital ceilings. Metal rails. Cold.
He couldn't breathe.
Couldn't move.
He gripped the armrests of his wheelchair as though they were lifelines.
But his vision narrowed, and everything felt too loud, too silent, too close.
He gasped.
And then the blackness swelled at the edges of his mind like a tide he couldn't stop.
Outside the building, a van idled in the rear loading dock.
Three men—dressed in plain grey coveralls—walked purposefully down the corridor, their access already granted. The cameras in the hallway had been disabled—looped with an old footage string from a week ago.
The company wouldn't notice the discrepancy unless they were already looking.
And no one would be.
They reached the server room. One of them inserted a key override, the other scanned a bypass card, and the door opened.
Inside, the wheelchair was still.
Ren had slumped sideways in it, unconscious, head tilted, fingers loosely curled over the rim of the chair.
"He's out," one of them muttered. "Let's move."
They lifted him with practiced coordination—not gentle, not cruel. Just efficient. His head lolled slightly but didn't stir. The panic had taken its toll—and his mind had surrendered to the dark.
The wheelchair was wheeled away and locked inside a disused office closet in the server room—behind a false wall no one used.
No one would find it unless they were looking very hard.
And most people wouldn't be.
Not in this company.
Not unless they had a reason.