Hidden Beneath the Stormline!
Jonathan had been staring at the screen far longer than was reasonable, long enough for the glow to dry his eyes and turn the room into a cave of blue light and shadow. The symbol remained frozen at the center of the frame: jagged, red, imperfect, as if drawn by something that understood geometry but rejected elegance. It should have been nothing more than corrupted data, a glitch produced by storm interference or compression artifacts. He had explained away worse anomalies during his years in investigative analysis, dismissing them as coincidence, noise, or human error.
The longer he stared, the more the symbol seemed to breathe. Not literally, of course, but the pixels pulsed with a subtle rhythm that did not belong to any known encoding pattern. He zoomed in, then out, checked metadata, scrubbed frame by frame. Nothing explained why the dispatcher’s voice cut off at the exact moment the symbol appeared, or why the timestamp didn’t match any official incident log. The silence that followed in the audio track was worse than static. It felt intentional.
He hovered the cursor over the trash icon more than once. Deleting the file would have been the rational choice. The safe choice. He could have blamed corrupted satellite footage, blamed the stormline that had torn across the coast that night, blamed overworked emergency systems. He had done it before. Everyone in his field had. Some stories died quietly because the world functioned better when they did.
They came in waves, flooding his encrypted inbox from anonymous relays routed through private networks that cost more per month than most people’s rent. Whoever was sending them knew exactly how to get his attention. The coordinates matched places he had written about years ago, cases that never quite closed, incidents that ended with phrases like “no bodies recovered” or “search suspended indefinitely.” He pulled out an old notebook from the bottom drawer of his desk, its pages yellowed, its spine cracked from disuse.
Every mark lined up.
Same coastal geometry. Same atmospheric conditions. Same pattern of disappearances that never reached national headlines but quietly inflated local insurance claims and emergency budgets. And now, unmistakably, the same symbol.
Jonathan didn’t print anything. He didn’t take screenshots. He had learned the hard way that physical evidence had a habit of vanishing when certain systems decided it should. He trusted only his memory, trained by years of high-pressure work and forensic reconstruction. He shut down his workstation, wiped temporary caches, powered off the router, and waited a full minute before standing.
Not surveillance in the cinematic sense—no dark sunglasses or earpieces—but something quieter, more efficient. Infrastructure watching infrastructure. Algorithms nudging probability. A system designed not to confront, but to delay. To reroute. To exhaust.
He locked the door behind him and started walking anyway.
The coordinates pointed to a stretch of coastline several hours north, where cliffs rose sharply from black water and storms rolled in without warning. A place with poor cellular coverage, limited satellite visibility, and jurisdictional overlap that made accountability a bureaucratic maze. He understood immediately why it had been chosen. Nature provided cover. Paperwork provided denial.
As he drove, the weather shifted faster than forecasts predicted. Cloud layers stacked unnaturally, compressing the sky into a dull, metallic ceiling. His navigation system recalculated twice without explanation, attempting to reroute him onto roads that would add hours to the trip. He ignored it, relying on memory and old topographic maps downloaded long ago.
