Ninety Seconds

Mara Voss has spent eight years planning the score of her life. She's told her crew it's one last job: crack a five-hundred-year-old vault that isn't on any map, reachable only through a crack in a Coventry underpass that opens for exactly ninety seconds — and never longer. What she hasn't told them is why. Eight years ago, Mara tried to prove the vault's owners — a dying remnant of a secret banking cabal — had exiled a client unjustly. She lost. They didn't call the police. They amberized her younger sister instead, sealing her in stasis as quiet collateral against a debt Mara never agreed to owe. Now Mara has a physicist who can read the vault's ninety-second windows, a forger with eighteen years of insider paperwork, a man who's never once been lost, and a former customs officer who knows exactly how the vault's living-audit guardians think. What none of them know is that the vault isn't full of gold. It's full of people — and getting Mara's sister out clean stops being possible the moment the crew finds out what else is down there. The vault's chairman isn't chasing them with violence. He's chasing them with paperwork, and he's very good at his job.