The archive opened with a temperature all its own—folders named in shorthand, thumbnails that teased without revealing. The first file was a short video: grainy, handheld, sunlight soaked into the edges. The camera followed two silhouettes moving through the after-hours of a city that felt both familiar and wrong. They laughed too loud, whispered too carefully. The sound cut out and cut back in, like the footage itself was fighting to stay. You watched because you couldn’t not. The scene ended on an abrupt close-up of a rusted key and a date stamped into a phone screen: 04/—nothing else; the rest was scrambled.