“Save my wife first! She has a heart condition and won’t survive another shock!”

Before Gabriel could leave the room, Captain Lucía Ortega herself appeared in the doorway, still dressed in her tactical rescue uniform, her face smudged with soot and exhaustion. She held a manila folder under her arm.

“Mrs. Mendoza?” Lucía asked, stepping inside.

“Captain Ortega,” Valeria said, leaning forward. “Thank God. How did you know I was here?”

“I checked the triage intake logs,” Lucía replied, glancing at Gabriel, who offered a brief nod of professional courtesy. “I came because I reviewed the incident log from yesterday’s sweep. When we pulled you out, your husband was outside giving a statement to a local news crew. He told them he had conducted a thorough search of the perimeter and confirmed no one else was trapped before evacuating.”

Lucía opened the folder and placed a series of printed high-resolution stills onto Valeria’s bed.

“Our helmets are equipped with 4K wide-angle tactical cameras,” Lucía explained, her tone laced with contempt. “This is the footage from my helmet when I breached the beam thirty seconds after your husband left. The camera captured his face, his words, and his deliberate exit with the woman in the jacket.”

Gabriel stepped closer, examining the timestamp printed at the bottom of the still. “Does the audio track clearly record him denying the presence of his wife and son?”

“Crystal clear,” Lucía affirmed. “You can hear him say: *‘No. My son left earlier with his nanny. My wife is here with me.’* And the camera clearly shows Mrs. Mendoza pinned beneath the girder directly behind him, shouting for her son’s inhaler.”

Valeria felt a knot of vindication tighten in her chest. “Will you testify to this, Captain?”

“I took an oath to protect the citizens of this city,” Lucía said firmly. “I watched that man leave an asthmatic child to die in the dark so he could save his mistress. If you take this to a judge, my team and I will stand on the witness stand for as long as it takes.”

“This is golden,” Gabriel said, storing the digital copy Lucía provided on his secure drive. “However, the tactical footage only wins us the public relations battle and the custody war. We still need to prove the corporate fraud before Alejandro signs the municipal contract on Friday. If *Horizonte* executes the government contract, the city will lock the funds into escrow, and it could take five years of litigation to claw it back.”

Valeria leaned back, staring at the ceiling as memories of her company’s founding flashed through her mind. “The master algorithm… the one that calculates structural integrity during real-time seismic waves… Alejandro doesn't have the final compiled source code.”

Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “He transferred the patents, Valeria. The patents contain the source code.”

“No,” Valeria said, a faint smirk touching her lips for the first time in twenty-four hours. “The patents contain the *framework*. The proprietary neural network that calibrates the sensors—the engine that actually makes *Alerta Cívica MX* function without fatal server latency—was never stored on the corporate cloud.”

“Where is it?” Gabriel asked.

“My father was an old-school electrical engineer,” Valeria explained. “He taught me never to trust an enterprise server when millions of lives depend on the outcome. Six months ago, when Alejandro started demanding administrative override access to my repositories, I grew suspicious. I took the final compiled build offline. It exists on a cold-storage server inside my father’s old workshop in Coyoacán.”

Gabriel’s eyes lit up. “And what does Alejandro currently have on the *Horizonte* servers?”

“A dummy beta version that simulates functionality for forty-eight hours before its mathematical logic crashes from uncalibrated data overflow,” Valeria said. “He thinks he stole the crown jewels. What he actually stole is a digital time bomb.”

Just then, Valeria’s phone buzzed with an incoming text from an unknown number. She clicked it open.

It was a screenshot of an internal memo sent to all seventy employees of *Alerta Cívica MX*.

*“Effective immediately, all personnel, payroll assets, and operational duties are migrated to Horizonte Respuesta Estratégica under the direction of CEO Alejandro Mendoza and Vice President of Operations Renata Salgado. Valeria Mendoza has resigned due to personal and medical reasons. Any employee attempting to contact former management will face immediate termination and non-compete litigation.”*

Beneath the text was a photo of Alejandro and Renata toasting champagne glasses in the newly furnished Polanco boardroom.

Valeria’s hands clenched into fists. “He’s moving faster than we thought. He’s already shifting the staff.”

“Then we strike before he can solidify the board,” Gabriel said, grabbing his coat. “Valeria, can you walk?”

Valeria swung her legs over the side of the hospital bed. Her left leg was wrapped tightly in an orthopedic brace, throbbing with a dull ache, but she planted both feet firmly on the linoleum floor.