The air changed when the ballroom doors closed behind them.
Upstairs had been perfume and polite laughter; down here, the scent of a sterile environment and metal hit like a slap. Felicia's heels clicked once on tile before she slipped out of them, padding silent across the service hall. Peter followed, trying not to look like someone who'd just left a chandelier world for a utility corridor.
Ethan's voice murmured in their ears, calm and low. "Left at the storage carts. Staff elevator will open in twenty seconds. You've got three minutes before the spoof resets."
Felicia smiled to herself. "Plenty of time."
They reached the elevator, its stainless-steel doors dull under fluorescent light. Peter pressed the call button. "You ever think about how every horror movie starts like this?"
Felicia arched a brow. "If a ghost shows up, I'll leave it to you."
The doors slid open. Inside: brushed metal, no mirrors, no music. A faint mechanical pulse thudded through the floor as the car began its descent. The gala noise above vanished. Only the hum of cables remained.
Felicia swiped her Class Two badge. Green light.
Ethan's approval hummed through the line. "Okay, the code is 6964. Alright, authorization confirmed. Sub-level C, research access. Two checkpoints, one camera blind spot. Keep your heads down."
Peter exhaled, glancing at her reflection in the metal panel. "You make this look easy."
"That's because it is," she said. "For me, that is."
Down in the service wing, Ethan sat hunched over a janitor's terminal, the room lit only by the green glow of code. He'd shed the maintenance jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and checked the portable display. Each camera feed blinked to life in small windows—ballroom, sub-corridors, elevator shafts.
"Vision achieved," he whispered, fingers dancing.
The building became a living map: guards pacing like clock hands, elevator rotations tick-marking in patterns he already predicted.
He patched their comms through the internal network, breathing slow, voice steady. "Your floor's clear. Move now."
The elevator jolted to a stop midway down.
A red light blinked above the panel—Security Verification Required.
Peter's stomach dropped. "Please tell me that's normal."
"Stay calm," Ethan said. "This is normal. Some guests are able to go to lower floors, for some shadier deals. So this is just a check of credentials. Don't engage."
The doors opened to reveal a uniformed guard with a tablet. "Evening. Badge check, please."
Felicia's expression shifted instantly—bored socialite, not cat burglar. She produced the forged ID, voice dripping with charm. "Oh, I'm sorry, darling. The gala said this floor was where they keep the private donations, correct? My partner and I insist we match contributions with a business rival, but it seems we might have gotten turned around and ended up in the wrong elevator."
The guard blinked, caught between suspicion and confusion. He scanned her badge. The reader hesitated—yellow light.
Ethan's fingers flew. 'Come on, come on.' He injected a false authentication ping into the server queue.
Green.
The guard handed it back, muttering, "You need to go one floor lower for that service, madam. However, I must insist that next time, that you both use the private guest elevators."
"Thank you," she purred. "You're a doll."
Doors closed. Peter exhaled so hard the metal walls fogged. "We almost—"
"Almost doesn't count," Felicia said lightly, fixing her lipstick with surgical precision. "Besides, you handled it well."
"I didn't do anything."
"Exactly. Perfect restraint."
They reached sub-level C: concrete floors, humming conduits, air cold enough to sting. The walls sweated condensation. Oscorp's polished façade was gone—only the raw machine underneath remained.
Ethan's voice crackled softly. "You're in. Corridor ahead branches left to R&D, right to prototype storage. Go left."
They moved, quick and quiet. Through glass panels, Peter glimpsed labs where pale fluids stirred in tanks, shapes floating like ideas half-born. Scientists worked behind sealed glass, oblivious to the two intruders gliding by.
Felicia's heels were back on—weaponized elegance. She scanned door labels, murmuring coordinates under her breath.
"Security station coming up," Ethan warned. "Camera loop running, but don't linger."
They turned the corner—and froze.
A guard. Alone, coffee in hand, staring directly at them.
"Hey!" he barked. "This area's restricted! What are you—"
Felicia moved before Peter could think. She grabbed him by the lapel and kissed him. Hard.
Peter's brain short-circuited. His eyes flew wide, then half-closed in reflex. Her perfume hit him like voltage. His hands didn't know what to hold.
The guard stopped dead, face contorting between outrage and embarrassment. "Seriously? Not in the labs, people. This isn't that kind of—" He groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. "God, rich people and their kinks… Just go back upstairs."
He keyed his radio. "Yeah, Control? Just a couple of donors making out in the service wing. False alarm. You guys need to leave."
Felicia smiled a charming smile and, with a wink, pressed the elevator button. "Sorry for the disturbance."
When his footsteps faded, Felicia released Peter. He stood frozen, pulse hammering. "Was that—uh—really necessary?"
She smirked, eyes glittering. "No. But it was more fun."
Before he could answer, she brushed a quick peck against his cheek. "Come on, lover boy. We've got work to do."
In the earpiece, Ethan's dry voice drifted through. "Subtle as a flashbang, you two."
Peter muttered, "She started it."
Felicia grinned. "He didn't stop me."
Back in his cramped wiring room, Ethan couldn't help the ghost of a smile as he scrubbed the last sixty seconds of corridor footage from the security logs. The feed blinked, replaced by an empty hallway. Ethan used the voice changer and the walkie-talkie to radio in another disturbance so that the guard would leave the area, giving Peter and Felicia the time they needed.
"Camera loop clean. The guard will be back in a few minutes, so proceed," he said.
He rerouted his attention to the R&D hub schematic—dozens of server racks aligned like pews in a sterile church.
Felicia and Peter slipped inside the server room.
The air was colder, thinner, filled with the low, rhythmic hum of thousands of machines thinking. The light here wasn't fluorescent but digital—rows of LEDs blinking in alternating blues and greens.
"I'm usually used to what I'm after being shiny, but there's nothing to be done about this," Felicia murmured.
She approached the central node and drew the harvest ring from her clutch: a silver band no larger than a bracelet, etched with faint circuitry that glowed when she powered it on and connected it to a sever. It emitted a soft chime, the sound of the extraction beginning.
"Ethan, initiating extraction," she whispered.
"Confirming connection… We're live," he replied.
Felicia placed the ring against the server port. The device adhered magnetically, the LEDs forming a pulsing spider-web pattern that spread across the metal surface. Streams of data shimmered across the display in her purse—thousands of encrypted files unraveling into mirrored copies.
Peter watched, mesmerized. "Is that it? Are we getting what we need?"
"Tech is a bit out of my ballpark, Peter," she corrected with a grin. "You should ask the kid."
Ethan's voice remained all business. "Yes we're getting what we need. I had to keep our download brief, prioritize the flagged directories—financials, R&D logs, certain projects, anything tied to overseas shipments. We don't need the entire vault, just the incriminating evidence."
The ring pulsed faster, a quiet heartbeat against the humming servers. Felicia's gloved fingers danced over her wrist screen. "Download's at forty percent. Sixty. Almost—"
Her words cut off.
Ethan's display flashed red. "Hold on. Someone's there, I'm getting movement."
Across the camera feed, a lone maintenance technician appeared at the end of the corridor, scanning his keycard. He hesitated, frowned, and tried again.
"Damn, one of the guards must have called him in. He's doing a badge revalidation request," Ethan hissed. "Basically, he was checking the logs—to make sure you are who you said and that you both got off on the right floor. Since he's here, he must know that you didn't and probably called it in, meaning in a minute or so you'll have half the floor security on top of you."
Felicia froze, crouched low beside the rack, the harvest ring still pulsing faint blue.
Peter whispered, "What do we do?"
Ethan's voice came through, clipped and calm. "Don't move. Don't breathe. I'll try to fake an error in the system and spoof the data… just give me—"
Static crackled in their ears. The technician's scanner beeped. Footsteps echoed closer.
Felicia pressed a finger to her lips. The glow from the ring lit her eyes like molten silver.
The hum of machines filled the silence. Data streamed in as footsteps drew nearer.
And above them, the gala music kept playing—sweet, oblivious, and miles away from the cold breath of the underworld.