Elias realized then that "WD" didn't stand for Watch Dog. He looked at his webcam—the tiny LED was glowing a steady, menacing crimson. On his desk, his phone buzzed with a notification from his smart-lock app: Front Door Unlocked. He hadn't downloaded a tool. He had invited a guest.

In the dim glow of his dual monitors, Elias stared at the file he had spent three days hunting across the darker corners of the web: .

Elias lunged for the power cable, but before his fingers could reach it, the speakers crackled with a voice that sounded like a thousand voices speaking at once.

"Part one is curiosity," the voice rasped. "Part two is the floorboards creaking."

A text window popped open, but it wasn't WinRAR. It was a command prompt, lines of code scrolling faster than human eyes could track. In the center of the chaos, a single sentence remained static:

"Just ten more parts," he muttered, his coffee cold and forgotten.