"Don't guess," Sarah warned. "If you trip the secondary, the gas vents."

Elias started climbing. The clock had reset, but the game was the same.

The digital timer on the vault door didn’t tick; it hummed, a low-frequency vibration that felt like a second heartbeat against Elias’s ribs.

His fingers, slick with sweat, hovered over the copper wires of the bypass kit. Outside the heavy steel doors, the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of the security team’s boots was getting louder. They were two floors down, but in a building this silent, they sounded like giants.