Elias opened it. There was only one sentence: "Don't forget to check the metadata."
The email arrived at 3:14 AM, the quietest hour of the night when the only sound in Elias’s apartment was the rhythmic hum of his PC tower. He was a freelance video editor, used to receiving large files from anonymous clients, but the subject line on this one felt different. It was just a string of text: Ghost Face.zip. There was no body text, no signature, and the sender's address was a scrambled mess of alphanumeric characters that looked like a digital scream. Ghost Face.zip
He spun around, his heart hammering against his ribs. The wall was bare. No lens, no hidden hardware, nothing but the shadow cast by his chair. He looked back at the screen. In the video, the "Elias" on camera hadn't moved. He was still staring at the monitor, frozen in the act of watching the footage. Elias opened it
The footage was high-definition, shot from a static perspective. It took Elias a moment to recognize the location. It was a bedroom. A messy desk, a spinning chair, and a man sitting with his back to the camera, illuminated by the blue glow of two monitors. Elias felt a cold spike of adrenaline hit his stomach. The man in the video was him. He was watching a live feed of himself, from a camera mounted somewhere on the wall behind him. It was just a string of text: Ghost Face