The call should have saved him. Instead, it opened a door Jonathan couldn’t close. A trembling dispatcher, a symbol that shouldn’t exist, and an object on a cliffside that broke every rule he thought he knew.
His inbox turned hostile overnight—threats, coordinates, and messages from sources long vanished. Each carried the same mark. Jonathan faced a choice: retreat into safety, or chase a kind of truth people rarely survived.
He stared at the jagged red symbol until his eyes burned. The pixels seemed to pulse, not with light, but with rhythm—something alive, something absent from the original recording.
Every instinct screamed to delete the folder, to blame corrupted footage and forget the dispatcher who went silent mid-sentence. But the disappearances in his old notes aligned too cleanly to ignore.
Stories killed without explanation. Witnesses who stopped answering calls. Locations erased from follow-ups. Different cases, same ending. The same symbol. The same vanishing points. The same quiet.
Jonathan printed nothing and wrote nothing down. He trusted only what he could carry in his head, knowing paper had a way of betraying its owner.
Outside, the street felt wrong—too many parked cars, too few faces. A drone hummed somewhere overhead, unseen but intentional, as if the city itself had shifted its attention onto him.
He understood then: the real discovery wasn’t the object beneath the cliff. It was how quickly the world rearranged itself to make sure he never reached it.