doesn’t matter. listen.

Leo’s laptop fan spun into a whine. The cursor drifted left, then up, then traced the outline of a door that hadn’t been there a second ago—right on his wallpaper.

The messages came faster than fingers should move. Fragments. Coordinates to an abandoned server farm in Nevada. A string of hexadecimal that resolved into a single JPEG: a cracked mirror reflecting a room Leo recognized as his own bedroom—except the mirror’s cracks spelled “Fr33thy” in reverse.