Then he saw the post.

He ignored it.

Warning, his gut screamed.

But then the second monitor flickered. A new window opened—a terminal he hadn't launched. Text scrolled by in white on black:

He stared at the black screen. Outside, the rain stopped. The hallway fell quiet. The families downstairs would never know how close they came to the edge. And somewhere in the digital deep, a ghost had just used Arjun's own hardware to launch an attack on the very encryption company that had blacked him out.

It was buried in a thread from 2018, hidden behind three layers of CAPTCHA on a dark-web archive. The title read: