Read Chapter 35: Aftermath

The floorboard creaked under Jazz’s knee as she pried at the edge with a butter knife. Dust motes swirled in the weak morning light slanting through the flat’s single window. Tom hovered behind her, his breath shallow, his hands jammed into his pockets.

“You’re sure she said under the floor?” he asked for the third time.

“She said *if anything happens, check under the floor in the back bedroom.* That was three weeks ago, when she brought the USB.” Jazz wedged the knife deeper and felt the board give. “I thought she meant the spare key. Turns out she was being thorough.” She lifted the board. A black rectangle of hard plastic sat in the cavity, wrapped in a plastic bag with a folded note taped to the top.

Tom dropped to his knees beside her. “Is that—?”

Jazz pulled the drive out and turned it over in her hands. The scuffs on its casing told a story of hasty handling. She peeled the note free and unfolded it.

*Jazz, Tom—*

*If you’re reading this, I’m sorry. I’ve been a coward, but I couldn’t take the chance they’d find this before I had a plan. Everything relevant is on here. Full image of your server from the night before I left, plus our old shared drives and a few encrypted files I managed to pull from Shah’s network before they locked me out. I don’t know if it’ll help. I hope it does.*

*My mother doesn’t know what I did for Shah. I told her I’d found a generous sponsor. If you use the video, someone will have to tell her the truth before it’s on the news. I can’t do that alone.*

*I’m scared, but I’m angrier than I am scared. That’s the only reason I kept going.*

*Make them pay, but please—win first.*

*—P*

Jazz read it twice, her thumb tracing the edge of the paper. Tom leaned over her shoulder, silent for a long moment, then exhaled.

“She backed up our entire server,” he said, his voice rough. “That’s a full-system image. We can restore everything. The codebase, the features we were building, the user-testing logs—all of it.”

Jazz nodded, not trusting her voice. She slipped the note into her pocket and carefully lifted the drive out of its wrapping, handling it like it was made of blown glass.

“We need to check the integrity of the files,” she said, standing. “Then we restore.”

The next hours passed in a haze of commands and progress bars. Tom hunched over his laptop at the kitchen counter, his fingers flying across the keyboard as he ran integrity checks and mounted images. Jazz alternated between pacing and pulling up the note again to re-read lines she’d already memorized.

“She thought she was a coward,” Jazz said finally, breaking the silence. “She worked for Shah for two years, feeding him our roadmap, our code access, our vulnerabilities—because he threatened her mother’s treatment. And still, she left us this. That’s not cowardice.”

Tom paused mid-keystroke. “It’s more than I’d have done, honestly.”

“You came clean in a public blog post after years of lying to everyone we know. That took guts too.” Jazz crossed to lean against the counter beside him. “We’re all just doing our best with what we have left, I think.”

Tom’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. “Is that your professional product-designer take?”

“That’s my human take.” She nudged his shoulder. “How’s the restore going?”

He turned the screen toward her. The progress bar read 78 percent. “The image is clean. No signs of tampering, no encryption on the main codebase. The extra files from Shah’s network are encrypted, but Priya included a note with a passphrase in the image metadata. We can access them when we need to build our case.”

“So we’ll make the deadline.”

“We’ll make it comfortably.” Tom’s shoulders relaxed for the first time since they’d discovered the break-in. “We’ll have to rebuild the local environment and re-run the test suite, but that’s just time, not innovation. The features are all here.”

Jazz let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. The pressure in her chest eased by a fraction, enough to let the world back in. The flat was a disaster—drawers emptied onto the floor, papers scattered, the server rack stripped to its bolts. The burglars had cleaned them out, taken everything that looked like hardware, maybe expecting to destroy their livelihood in one brutal sweep.

“They’ll figure it out eventually,” she said. “That we got it back. Miles or whoever’s feeding them, they’ll know.”

“They’ll know we’re still standing,” Tom agreed. “That’s the point.”

They worked in shifts through the afternoon, restoring files, reinstating dependencies, running tests. The text messages poured in—supporters, investors who’d heard news of the break-in, a few journalists sniffing for a story. Jazz answered only the essential ones, leaving a generic *all systems nominal, we’ll have an official statement shortly* for the rest.

At five, they made tea and sat on the floor of the front room, their backs against the sofa, the restored laptop between them showing their local server running the full stack again. The green light blinked steady.

“We should call Priya,” Jazz said. “Tell her we found it.”

Tom nodded. “And confirm she’s still safe. Shah’s under investigation now, but that doesn’t mean he’s not watching her.”

Jazz pulled up her contacts and hit dial. The line rang four times before a voice answered—low, cautious.

“Hello?”

“Priya, it’s Jazz. We found it. The drive under the floor. We’re back up and running.”

A long pause. Then a hitch in Priya’s breath, almost a sob. “You got it? You’re restored?”

“Fully. All of it. You pulled a safe image the night before you left?”

“Working until three in the morning,” Priya said, her voice steadier. “Kept a second running backup on the personal drive I used for my mother’s medical paperwork. Shah never checked it. He thought I didn’t have the nerve.”

“You had more nerve than any of us,” Jazz said. “What you did—testifying at the press conference, giving us the drive—that all took a kind of backbone most people would crack under.”

“Let’s wait until the hearing ends before we start handing out medals,” Priya said dryly. “But thank you. I needed to hear that today. My mother asked about the news coverage this morning. She knows something’s happening but not the details. I told her I’d explain when I got home tonight.”

“You’re going to tell her everything?”

“She deserves the truth before the papers get to it. I just don’t know how she’ll react. The medical bills—she thinks Shah’s foundation has been covering them out of generosity. Finding out it was leverage, that her health was a bargaining chip for my silence…”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Tom said from beside Jazz, leaning closer to the phone. “He weaponized her illness. That’s on him, not you.”

Priya was quiet for a moment. “When you meet him in the hearing, remember that. He’ll try to make himself look like the victim of a bitter ex-employee. He’ll have lawyers who sculpt narratives. Don’t let him shape yours.”

“We won’t,” Jazz said. “Listen, we’re going to go through the encrypted files on the drive tomorrow, build a timeline of his coercion tactics. Anything you want to flag for us first?”

“The email I sent Shah’s counsel two days before the press conference—the one with the attachments? That was his idea of a test. He wanted to see if I’d leak anything to you before he made his move. I sent him an innocuous file about pipeline projections, nothing real. But the attachments embedded a monitoring script that pings when accessed. If you open any of those, he’ll know.”

“Good to know. We’ll steer clear.”

“And Jazz?” Priya’s voice dropped. “Watch your back tonight. The break-in wasn’t a random robbery. Shah’s people will assume you have copies now, or they’ll suspect it. Either way, you’re not safe in that flat.”

Jazz glanced around the ransacked room. “We’re a bit past safe at this point. But we’ll be careful.”

“Don’t be careful. Be paranoid. It keeps you alive.”

They ended the call. Jazz sat back, pressing her palms into her eyes. Tom handed her a mug of tea, and she took it without opening her eyes.

“We’ve got a working product, a witness willing to testify, and evidence of systematic coercion,” he said quietly. “We’re closer than we were yesterday.”

“We’re also broke, about to lose the flat, and running into a hearing with a man who has a department of lawyers and a funded grudge.” Jazz opened her eyes and took a sip of tea. “But you’re right. Closer.”

Tom leaned his head back against the sofa, looking up at the water-stained ceiling. “The lease ends in six days. After the hearing, if we survive, we need somewhere to work. And we need money.”

“I checked listings this morning. There’s nothing under the budget that isn’t a shed or a scam.”

“Eleanor Vance is still waiting for that private response to her deadline,” Tom said. “She sent a follow-up this morning. The hearing will definitely attract coverage. If she covers us fairly, it could shift public perception.”

“If she digs into your patent history, she’ll destroy us.”

“She would have done it already if that was the story she wanted,” Tom said. “She always responds to candidates who engage, not hide. Maybe we should give her something: an exclusive interview about the handling of the patent confession, no spin.”

Jazz swirled her tea, considering. It was a gamble. But their entire existence was a gamble now. The server hummed quietly in the restored environment, a testament to Priya’s foresight and their resilience. Outside, the London dusk gathered grey and heavy.

“Let’s draft a response,” she said. “We’ll keep it honest. We’ve survived this long on honesty—might as well keep going.”

Tom smiled, the first real smile she’d seen in days. “That’s been my whole pitch for the last few months.”

“And look how well it’s turned out.”

“We won an award, got publicly vindicated, and saved our company from a hard drive theft in under twenty-four hours, thanks to an ally we didn’t know we had.” He lifted his mug in a mock toast. “I call that winning.”

Jazz raised hers. “I call that not losing yet.”

“We’ll take it.”

They sat in comfortable silence for a while, the glow of the laptop painting their faces blue, the city humming beyond the thin walls. Jazz’s pocket still held Priya’s note, creased from rereading. She pulled it out and smoothed it flat, reading the final line again.

*Make them pay, but please—win first.*

She tucked it back into her pocket and set her mug down. “Right,” she said. “Let’s draft that response to Eleanor. We’ve got a story to tell, and we should tell it before Shah gets the chance to tell his.”