The screen threw its blue light up at him from a thousand miles away, and Narco Reyes watched a pair of wire-rimmed glasses catch it, two small moons floating in the dark of a room he'd never set foot in. He'd paid for the view in a way he couldn't quite explain to anyone who'd ask — a favor traded to a guy in the Revival server who knew a guy who sold screen-share access to compromised channels, seventy bucks and a burner card, no questions. The feed ran through a cracked window he'd wedged open on a laptop he kept under the desk, angled so the webcam in the corner of his own monitor couldn't see it. Paranoia was a habit. Habits were the only things he kept.

She was scrolling. He could see the log move under her cursor, line by line, the way a hand moves down a list it already knows it can't unsee. He leaned in until his nose was six inches from the glass. His fingers found the pack of Newports without looking, tapped one loose, and he didn't light it. Just held it. The filter tasted like the inside of his own mouth.

There. She'd stopped.

The timestamp sat there on her screen in a font he knew by heart — he'd stared at the same audit interface for two weeks while he figured out which mod account to wake up. 3:14 AM. Eleven minutes before he'd posted the pinned message. The test ping. His test ping, technically, though the account hadn't been his until the night he'd traded for it. But the ping had been his idea. A dry run. Make sure the corpse still twitched before you dressed it up and walked it into the room.

Her breath caught. He saw it in the small rise of her shoulders, the way the webcam's grain shifted when a body held still wrong. Then her hand came up off the desk and found the trackpad, and her thumb settled on it, and stopped.

Narco grinned at the screen. The grin didn't reach his eyes — it never did, hadn't since he was maybe fifteen, when he'd figured out that a smile was a tool and tools didn't need feeling behind them. He leaned back, kicked his heel up on the edge of the desk, and watched the thumb not move.

She was good. He'd give her that. Most people, the moment they saw the timestamp, they'd have started typing. The accusation would've been out of their mouth before their brain caught up. Maddie Chen sat there in the dark with the audit log glowing at her and did nothing, and the nothing was the most interesting thing she'd done all night.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. The Revival server could wait. Right now he had a better channel.

On the screen, her cursor moved again. Not to the log. To the corner of the window — the DM tab, the one she'd had open since he'd started watching, hours ago, when the feed first came up and he'd seen her sitting there with a blank message box and a name in the recipient field. He hadn't been able to read the name then. The resolution was garbage and the webcam angle cut off the top of the box.

But he knew the name. He'd typed it himself, once, into a form that asked who the account belonged to, back when the account was still breathing and he was still deciding what to do with it.

The box already had something in it. One word. He could just make out the shape of it — four letters, a question mark at the end. Why? It had been sitting there, unsent, since before he'd started watching. She'd typed it and never pressed enter, and the cursor had been blinking at the end of it for hours, patient as a heartbeat.

Now her fingers came off the trackpad and found the keys. Narco sat up. The cigarette he'd been holding rolled off his knuckle and dropped to the desk, and he didn't pick it up.

She typed. Slow. Deliberate. The way she did everything, he imagined — like a person who'd learned early that words cost something and you paid for them one at a time. He watched the letters land in the box below the first line.

I know it was you.

Narco's mouth went dry. He hadn't expected that. Not the words — the words were obvious, the words were the only thing anyone would type — but the fact that she'd typed them and then done nothing, again, and the cursor had just moved down to the next line and sat there blinking, waiting. She wasn't going to send it. He could see it in the still of her hands, the way her fingers lifted off the keys and hovered an inch above them like she was afraid the keyboard would bite. She was going to leave it there. She was going to sit in the dark with a loaded sentence and not fire it, and the not-firing was going to eat her alive, and Narco knew that feeling better than he knew his own face.

He picked the cigarette back up off the desk. Rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. The nicotine stain on his skin caught the red light from the safelight he kept on in the corner — the one he'd bought off a photography forum because it made the room feel like something was developing in it, even when nothing was. Cheap trick. He liked cheap tricks.

The feed flickered. He cursed under his breath and jiggled the cable, and the picture steadied. When it came back, she'd moved. Not much — just her head, tilted down, reading something off the desk. He couldn't see what. The camera angle cut off the surface in front of her. But her shoulders had come down a notch, and her hand was flat on the wood now instead of hovering, and he could see the shape of her breathing change. Slower. Steadier.

That was worse. He didn't know why it was worse, but it was. He'd wanted her rattled. He'd wanted the thumb shaking over the trackpad, the breath catching, the whole animal panic of a person who'd just realized the ground under them was rotten. He'd built the whole thing for that — the twelve accounts, the months of waiting, the careful slow burn of the dormant mod account waking up just long enough to say still here before he'd pulled the plug on it. He'd wanted her to feel it land.

And she'd felt it. He'd watched her feel it. But now she was doing something else, and he couldn't see what, and the not-seeing put a small cold hook under his ribs.

He reached for his own keyboard. His fingers moved before he'd decided anything. That was how it usually went. The DM window on his screen was already open — the account he'd used to send her the friendly check-in three days ago, the hey, how've you been, thinking about you that had made her type back a smiley face and a paragraph about her week. He'd read that paragraph four times. He'd read it looking for the seams.

He didn't type anything. He just looked at the box. The cursor there blinked too, patient as hers, and for a second the two cursors felt like they were staring at each other through two windows in two rooms a thousand miles apart, and neither of them was going to move first.

On the feed, Maddie leaned back in her chair. The webcam caught the underside of her chin and the soft line of her throat, and the wire-rimmed glasses slid a little down her nose. She pushed them back up with one knuckle. Then she did something Narco hadn't seen her do all night: she reached off-screen and came back with a mug, and she took a sip, and she set it down on the oak with a small click he couldn't hear but could feel in his teeth.

She was drinking tea. In the middle of the worst night of her online life, she was sitting in the dark drinking tea and not sending the message, and Narco felt the hook under his ribs turn a quarter-inch.

He'd done this before. Not this exact thing — not the twelve accounts and the dormant mod and the months of waiting — but the shape of it, the slow crush of a person who'd built something and thought it was safe. He'd done it to a guy in a gaming clan who'd kicked him for being an asshole in voice chat. He'd done it to a girl on a forum who'd called his posts cringe. He'd done it to a streamer once, a small one, and the streamer had cried on camera and Narco had watched the clip maybe fifty times. The crying was the point. The crying was always the point.

Maddie wasn't crying. She was drinking tea and staring at a grey avatar and not pressing send.

He pulled his heel off the desk and sat forward, elbows on his knees, the cigarette forgotten between two fingers. The grey avatar on her screen — he knew that avatar. He'd stared at it himself, back when he was figuring out which account to wake. It was a default. No photo, no bio, just a grey silhouette and a username that had been inactive for two years. The kind of account everyone forgets. The kind of account that sits in the member list like a piece of furniture until someone needs a chair.

He'd needed a chair. He'd found one. And now Maddie Chen was staring at the place where the chair used to be, and the chair was gone, deleted an hour after he'd posted, and all that was left was the name in the audit log and the timestamp and the test ping at 3:14 AM and the four-letter question she'd typed and never sent.

The feed flickered again. This time when it steadied, her hand was moving. She'd picked up her phone. He watched her thumb swipe, watched her face change in the blue light — not much, just a small tightening around the mouth, the kind of thing you'd miss if you weren't looking. He was looking. He was always looking.

She set the phone down face-first on the desk. Then she put both hands flat on the oak, pushed back from the laptop, and stood up. The webcam caught her midsection and then nothing — she'd walked out of frame. Narco stared at the empty chair in her dark room and felt something he didn't have a word for. Not panic. Not exactly. Something closer to the feeling you get when you're telling a joke and you realize halfway through that the person you're telling it to isn't going to laugh.

He lit the cigarette. Finally. The smoke curled up into the safelight and turned red.

On the screen, the empty chair sat in the glow of her monitor, and the DM box was still open, and the two lines were still there, unsent:

Why?

I know it was you.

Narco took a long drag and held it, and the smoke sat in his chest, and he watched the cursor blink at the end of the second line and thought about how easy it would be for her to come back to the desk and press enter. How one keystroke would put those words in his inbox, in the inbox of the friendly account he'd used to check in on her three days ago, the one that had asked how've you been and gotten a paragraph back.

He wanted her to send it. He realized that with a clarity that surprised him. He wanted her to press enter, because then it would be real, then the thing he'd built would have a face on the other end of it, and he could write back, and the writing back would be the next move, and the next move was where he lived. He didn't know what he'd say. He never knew until his fingers were already moving. That was the fun of it.

But she didn't come back. The chair stayed empty. The cigarette burned down between his fingers, and the safelight hummed, and somewhere in the apartment above him a floorboard creaked, and Narco Reyes sat in a dark room watching a dark room a thousand miles away and waited for a woman he'd never met to make a decision he'd already made for her.

The feed cut out. He cursed and jiggled the cable again, harder this time, and the picture came back for a second — just long enough to show her walking back into frame, sitting down, her hand reaching for the trackpad — and then it died for good, the window going black, the little connection icon in the corner flipping from green to a flat grey nothing.

Narco stared at the dead window. Then he laughed. One short, flat sound, the kind that didn't come from anywhere warm. He stubbed the cigarette out on the edge of the desk and left it there, and picked up his phone, and thumbed into the Revival server where the others were waiting for a report he hadn't decided how to give yet.

The grey avatar was gone from his own screen too — the account he'd woken and killed, the chair he'd borrowed and burned. But the name was still in her audit log. The name was still in her head. And somewhere in the dark of a room he couldn't see anymore, a woman he'd never met had typed two lines she hadn't sent, and was sitting with them, and the sitting was the part he couldn't watch.

He typed into the Revival chat: she knows.

Then he put the phone down and looked at the dead feed and waited to see what the room would say back.