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A laugh escaped him—nervous, hollow. “Nice. A prank file.”

Arjun blinked. He checked the timestamp. 00:00. Then the numbers began counting down.

10.0

Plenty of time to close the window.

34.0

“You have 34.1 seconds to close this file.”

She was looking at the camera. No—not the camera. At him . Through the screen. Past pixels and light and the cheap plastic bezel of his laptop, straight into the dark of his room.