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Elias turned around. The blue light wasn't coming from his router. It was coming from a small, palm-sized device tucked into the vent duct above his bed—a device that shouldn't have been there, broadcasting a signal to someone waiting in the parking lot below.

To anyone else, the photo was a blurry mess of dark shadows and a single, piercing blue dot from a router across the room. But to Elias, it was evidence. He had been staying in Room 328 of the Oakhaven Inn for three nights, and every night at exactly 1:43 AM, that blue light didn't just blink—it pulsed in a sequence. Long. Short. Short. Long. He pulled up a Morse code translator on a separate tab. The next night: S. IMG_20230131_014326_328.jpg

Room 328 wasn't where he was. He was in 32B. The "8" was a smudge on the brass plate. Elias turned around

He picked up his phone. The screen’s glare was a physical weight against his tired eyes. He opened the camera app, the lens struggling to focus on the frost patterns crystallizing on the windowpane. Click. was saved to his cloud. To anyone else, the photo was a blurry

The floorboards in the hallway creaked. Heavy, deliberate steps stopped right outside his door. Elias looked back at his phone. The photo he just took—ending in —wasn't just a filename. It was a countdown. The doorknob began to turn.

X. S. S. It made no sense. He scrolled back through his gallery, looking at the metadata of the previous shots. He realized he had been reading the "328" in the filename as his room number, but looking at the photo again, he saw it. In the reflection of the window, just behind his own ghostly silhouette, was a floor plan tacked to the back of the door.