Elias, a freelance data recovery specialist, should have deleted it. His job was to find lost wedding photos or corrupted spreadsheets, not to open unsolicited archives from the void. But the name——tugged at a memory he couldn't quite place. It sounded like a vintage starlet or a missing person from a cold case file.

Elias didn't look back at the screen. He didn't look at the corner. He reached for the power cable and yanked it from the wall. But as the monitor flickered to black, he saw the reflection in the glass. The woman in the yellow dress wasn't in the computer anymore. She was standing right behind his chair.

Finally, Elias opened IMG_0001.raw . The image was a high-resolution shot of a living room. It was his living room. The furniture, the coffee mug he’d left out, the stack of mail. But in the corner of the frame, standing where his bookshelf should be, was a woman in a pale yellow dress. Her face was a blur of static, except for her eyes, which were clear, blue, and fixed directly on the camera lens.

Elias froze. He looked toward the corner of his actual room. The bookshelf was there, solid and real.

The email came from an address that was just a string of thirty-two zeros. There was no subject line, only a single attachment: Download File Vanna Grace.zip .