Page 58 of Stay Scared

He enlarges the image of me asleep at my desk. My laptop sits open in front of me with the editing timeline across the screen.

“What am I looking at?”

“The connection window behind your editing software.”

I lean closer. “I don’t recognize it.”

“You probably never saw it.”

Owen searches the unauthorized folder by timestamp. A text file appears beside the photograph, and his expression hardens.

“An unknown device connected to your laptop through your home network at 2:15 that morning.”

The picture came a minute later, and the message followed two minutes after the connection.

“Could it be one of mine?”

“Your usual device identifiers are in the earlier records. This one does not match any of them.”

Ash stands close behind my shoulder. “Why did you have her network records?”

Owen keeps his eyes on the screen. “I was checking whether the man outside her building connected to local devices.”

Ash says nothing.

I point toward the monitor before the argument can restart. “What could the connection access?”

“Potentially files, remote-control software, stored credentials. It depends on what privileges they obtained and how long they had them.”

The unpublished review. Private messages. My current number. Everything that never belonged to the channel.

A tone sounds in the surveillance room.

Owen moves immediately, passing close enough that his sleeve brushes the torn edge of my jacket without looking down.

Ash notices.

We follow him into the surveillance room.

The central monitor has changed.

The fake ride-tunnel feed still shows an uninjured Evan dropping from the rig, but a diagnostic window now exposes the source supplying the footage.

Owen opens the directory.

Its structure mirrors his own archive, including the folder labels, camera names, abbreviations, and even the order in which his authentication keys refresh. Whoever copied it altered only the places where the original pattern would expose the intrusion.

“He copied all of it,” Owen says.

“Your cameras?”

“My architecture.”

Ash stops behind me.

I turn enough to catch him looking at the damaged shoulder of my jacket again. “You enjoyed that.”

His eyes come back to mine. “Be specific.”