Lena Voss wrote the lockdown protocol herself. Six hours, no override, a heat curve climbing until every warm body clears the building. Simple. Clean. Except two people are still inside.

Freelance fixer Jax Harlan is already in Sector 4, toolkit open, wearing the same grin she fired ninety-three days ago. His badge shouldn't work. A sensor she personally approved is lying to the system, and the protocol she signed treats that lie like fire.

Glass cracks first. Then they're jammed into a service alcove barely big enough for one. Shared air. Old maintenance tickets. A March warning she buried under paperwork and called furniture. He calls her a control freak. She calls him a liability. The temperature keeps rising on a schedule only she can write - and can't stop.

Lena doesn't leave variables unnamed, not once, not ever. Jax only takes jobs that let him break whatever suits are calling a feature this month. Between them: a fried access board, a sealed clean-room door, and eight months of pretending the one thing neither of them could fix on paper simply didn't exist.

The lights flicker. Instinct grabs the nearest solid thing - him. The room hits the top of her curve, and pride turns into its own kind of lockdown. Want isn't a word she'd ever put in a report. He notices anyway.

Outside, the line hums, alone in the dark. Inside, two people who swore they'd never be the problem now have to survive a system built to punish exactly this. Dawn brings staff, questions, and a building that will look ordinary again by nine a.m.

Until then, the doors stay shut.

What happens when the very safeguard meant to protect the truth starts cooking the only two people who know it?

***

The machines run the production lines. Human chemistry, it turns out, runs everything else.

The Automation After Dark Series brings together five standalone romantic comedies set inside ultra-modern dark factories and high-tech automated facilities, where accidental lock-ins, system glitches, and close-proximity mishaps have a way of happening at the worst possible moment.

Strict control-freaks, stressed engineers, and chaotic fixers get forced into the shadows of unlit manufacturing floors. Advanced algorithms didn't model for this. The corporate professionalism that holds everything together during daylight hours does considerably less well in the dark.

Turns out automation can't fix every glitch. Especially the ones that happen between people.