The notification sat at the top of Elias’s phone like a dare: .

The video played one last second. The gloved hand didn't pull away from the window; it reached through it, the pixels of the glass rippling like water.

Elias turned around, but the room was empty. The only thing left was the sound of a new file being created on his hard drive: . He didn't want to know what was in that one.

Most people would have swiped it away. Elias, a night-shift data archivist with a habit of poking at digital bruises, tapped it.

He didn’t remember clicking a link. He wasn't even in any active Telegram groups. But there it was, 14.2 MB of data that had bypassed his filters and nestled into his "Downloads" folder.