Chapter Text
The first thing Jane noticed was that the floor wasn’t still.
It wasn’t shaking, not the way people expected shaking. There was no sharp jolt, no impact that demanded attention. Just a slow, rolling movement underfoot, subtle enough that if you weren’t already tuned to it, you might blame your balance instead of the building.
She shifted her weight deliberately and felt it again. Sideways. Controlled. Wrong.
“Do you feel that?” she asked.
Weller had been leaning over the table, one hand braced on the edge as he watched Patterson’s screens. He paused, straightened, and planted his boots flat against the concrete.
“Yeah,” he said. “I thought that was just me.”
Patterson didn’t look up. Her eyes were locked on the power graphs, jaw tight. The lines weren’t spiking. They weren’t even climbing. They were holding steady in a way that made her skin crawl.
“It’s not you,” she said. “It’s the building.”
Another roll passed through the floor, longer this time. The overhead lights trembled, a faint metallic rattle echoing through the room like something dragged slowly through a vent.
Tasha felt it in her ribs before she really understood what she was feeling. The vibration settled low, deep enough that it bypassed her ears and went straight to bone. She pressed a hand to the nearest rack without thinking, grounding herself as the motion eased.
“That’s not normal,” she said.
“No,” Jane agreed. “It’s not.”
Afreen rolled her chair back from the console and stood, eyes scanning the secondary readouts. Power was moving through the system in smooth, deliberate patterns. Too smooth. The draw wasn’t concentrated anymore. It was spread.
Her stomach dropped.
“It’s cumulative,” she said. “Not a surge. A load.”
Patterson finally turned away from the monitors. “Load on what?”
Afreen hesitated, eyes flicking to a different overlay. Not servers. Not racks.
Infrastructure.
“On everything,” she said carefully. “It’s dumping into the grounding paths. Conduits. Structural steel.”
The words landed heavy.
Patterson’s pulse kicked hard. “Those aren’t rated for this.”
“No,” Afreen said. “They’re not supposed to carry it at all.”
As if on cue, dust sifted down from a seam near the ceiling tile above the far rack. Not a lot. Just enough to notice. It drifted lazily through the light before settling on the equipment below.
Weller looked up at it, then back at Jane.
“You thinking structural?” he asked.
Jane was already moving, stepping toward the hallway, tipping her head back to study the ceiling. The lights swayed again, slightly out of sync with one another.
“Yes,” she said. “And it’s already started.”
The building rolled beneath them once more, the motion slow and sickening, like a ship settling into rough water. Somewhere overhead, metal groaned—not a snap, not a crack, but a strained, heated sound that made Tasha’s stomach clench.
Patterson’s fingers flew back to the keyboard. “The system isn’t escalating,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. “It’s stabilizing its draw.”
“That’s worse,” Rich muttered.
Another vibration rippled through the room, stronger now. A keyboard skidded across a workstation before Rich caught it, swearing as he shoved it back into place.
Weller braced himself against the table, eyes tracking the ceiling as another rattle shivered through the fixtures.
“At what point,” he asked, “do we worry this place doesn’t stay standing?”
No one answered.
The floor rolled again, longer this time, as if the building were drawing in a breath it couldn’t release.
***
Footsteps hit the stairwell hard enough to register through the floor.
Not careful. Not slow.
Jane felt the shift immediately. The rolling motion sharpened, the added vibration feeding straight into a structure already under load.
She turned toward the door just as it banged open.
Cross came through first, shoulder-checking it out of reflex, dust streaking his jacket like ash. Devlin followed half a step behind him, coughing as he waved a hand through the air, eyes already tracking the ceiling.
“The stairs were moving,” Cross said. “Tell me that’s not just me.”
“It’s not,” Jane said.
Mick stepped inside with easy familiarity. He’d been here before. Knew the space. Knew where to stand without getting in the way. He stopped just inside the threshold, half-turned back toward Cross, like he was about to make some dry comment about their timing.
Another slow roll passed through the floor.
Tasha felt it immediately, deeper now, the vibration crawling up her spine. “Mick,” she said. “Why are you here?”
He blinked at her. “You called.”
The room went still in the way it only ever did right before something broke.
“I didn’t,” Tasha said immediately. “I didn’t call anyone.”
Mick frowned and pulled out his phone. He didn’t rush. He didn’t expect this to be complicated. He turned the screen toward her.
The call log was short.
Her name sat at the top.
“That’s not me,” Tasha said, sharper now. “I haven’t had my phone on.”
Cross’s attention snapped to Patterson. “You?”
Patterson shook her head once. “No.”
The building rolled again, longer this time. The overhead lights swayed out of sync, the rattle deepening into a groan. Dust spilled more heavily now, catching in Jane’s hair and on the shoulders of Cross’s jacket.
“This place is carrying the load,” Jane said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Cross let out a humorless breath. “Yeah. That tracks.”
Patterson turned back to the monitors, fingers flying, trying to isolate the flow, break the path, force the draw somewhere safer.
The numbers refused to spike. Refused to give her a clean failure point.
“It’s not just routing through the servers,” she said, voice tight. “It’s using the building itself as the circuit.”
The floor lurched sideways.
Tasha grabbed the nearest rack as the motion threw her off balance, the metal biting into her palm. The surface beneath her hand felt warm. Hotter than it should have been.
Something shrieked overhead—metal under stress—followed by a sound like a bolt tearing loose.
“That’s too much,” Weller said. “That’s—”
The sound cut him off.
Not a bang.
A tearing.
Power went where it had no business going.
Structural steel expanded, anchors failed, and something massive gave way. Stored energy released all at once as the ceiling collapsed inward, pressure slamming through the room.
Everyone was thrown.
The floor dropped.
The world tilted.
Lights exploded.
Heat and dust swallowed everything.
Sound fractured into something sharp and meaningless as the building screamed around them.
Then—
Nothing.