Download: File El- J5fg9ud.zip

His heart skipped. He hadn't entered his name anywhere. He scrolled up through the extracted data. There were logs of his keystrokes from three years ago. There were audio files of conversations he’d had in private. There were photos taken from his own webcam—images of him sleeping, working, and staring at this very screen.

The scrolling stopped instantly. A single line of text remained at the bottom: CAUTION: DATA ARCHIVE UNLOCKED. SUBJECT: ELIAS THORNE. Download File el- J5FG9UD.zip

But it was the last file in the folder that froze his blood. It was a JPEG titled current_view.jpg . His heart skipped

The progress bar crawled with agonizing slowness. 1%... 5%... As the file grew, his computer began to labor. The fans kicked into a high-pitched whine, and the temperature in the small office seemed to drop. When the download finally hit 100%, the file icon appeared on his desktop—a simple manila folder icon, zipped tight with a silver buckle. Elias right-clicked and selected Extract All . There were logs of his keystrokes from three years ago

Elias opened it. The image showed the back of a man’s head, illuminated by the blue light of a computer monitor. In the reflection of the monitor within the photo, he could see a dark shape standing in the corner of the room—the corner directly behind him.