For ten minutes, nothing happened. Then, a silver sedan pulled up to the curb. A man stepped out, looked directly into the camera, and held up a digital watch. The time on the watch matched the timestamp on the video exactly. The man reached into his coat, pulled out a heavy manila envelope, and tucked it behind a loose brick in the wall of an abandoned bakery.

As the video reached its final seconds, the man in the silver sedan didn't get back in his car. He pointed toward the camera—or rather, toward Elias—and mouthed three words: "Your turn now."

Elias leaned in, his heart hammering. He knew that bakery. It was three blocks from his apartment.

Elias was a digital archivist, the kind of person who got paid to find things that were never meant to be found. The "PPV" tag usually suggested high-stakes sports or exclusive celebrity content, but the string of characters at the end— xvbfojlt9wp91 —wasn't a standard retail code. It was a cryptographic handshake. He clicked "Play."

The screen didn't show a boxing match or a concert. Instead, it was a fixed-angle shot of a rainy street corner in a city Elias didn't recognize. The timestamp in the corner was set to tomorrow .