In the distance, a figure stood in the middle of the lane. It wasn't moving. As the car drew closer, Elias leaned in, his breath hitching. The figure was wearing a flight suit—outdated, Soviet-era—but the helmet’s visor was cracked, revealing nothing but absolute darkness inside.

He looked at the file name again. URKK was the ICAO code for Krasnodar International Airport. 071 wasn't a sequence number; it was a year.

The file wasn't a recording of the past. It was a countdown.

As Elias reached for his phone to call the archives, the lights in the screening room flickered and died. In the sudden pitch black, the monitor remained on, glowing with a soft, sickly blue light. The video hadn't ended.

The air in the tiny, windowless screening room was stale, smelling of ozone and old dust. Detective Elias Thorne sat before a flickering monitor, his finger hovering over the play button. On the desk lay a battered USB drive labeled simply: .

The file had been recovered from a submerged car in the Black Sea, near the port of Novorossiysk. No driver, no signs of a struggle—just the drive tucked into the sun visor. He clicked play.

Elias frowned, rewinding the frame. He paused at the moment of the glitch. Hidden within the static was a single frame of text, a set of coordinates followed by a date: .