Volume 1 – Chapter 8: Unraveling Shadows

April 22 – 2:30 AM

The silence was suffocating.

I hadn’t seen Rika in what felt like hours. She paced the room, footsteps echoing against the cracked floor, the soft rattle of her breath punctuating the pauses in between. She was trying to figure something out, something she couldn’t articulate but I could feel in the tense of her jaw, in the twitch of her hands.

I was still sitting at the window, eyes glued to the street below. I was unable to let myself relax. Now every shadow loomed a threat. Everything could be a signal, but the streets were silent — too silent. The air became like a choking fit in awareness of what had just transpired.

The knock. The voice. The warning. Everything had changed.

I glanced at the clock. 2:30 AM. Meanwhile time had slowed, every second unfurling like an endless moment. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Every move seemed a potential overreach, chaque decision a gamble.

Rika stopped pacing, spins around to look at me with tense features. She was all cup of emotions, trying to hold it together, but I could see the cracks, the underlying panic just below the surface.

“Who we’re going to need to find is the person who sent the file,” she said, her tone steady but tense. “We don’t have time to waste. If they’re aware of the USB, they’re aware we’re here.”

I nodded slowly, my stomach roiling at the thought. That file — the one that had set us on this wild-goose chase — was no longer a discrete piece of information. It was a target. A beacon. Whoever had sent it had found us. Worse, they were watching us.

I looked away from the window, made my way across the room to Rika standing at the desk. She was looking at the computer screen, her fingers above the keyboard. He was still plugged in to the computer with the USB. Since then, we hadn’t dared touching it. The message on it — the one that unknown person had sent when they’d come to visit us — continued to echo through my mind.

I leaned in closer, the screen blinking. The Project Eclipse folder jumped against the blank desktop. It was taunting me, in a way, daring me to open it. I could feel Rika’s eyes on me, expecting me to do something.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, her voice tight.

I gulped, unsure of the answer myself. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t like this,” she said, scanning the room with her eyes. “We are now playing their game. Whoever that is, they really got us right where they want us.’ ”

“We don’t have a choice,” I said, softly, but the words rang hollow. “We have to look at what’s on that drive.”

She let out a big sigh and looked at me, irritated. “I know. But once we open it...”

“I know,” I cut in, my gaze fixed on the screen. The flashing folder. The uncertainty that was waiting inside. And it was like we were teetering over the edge of a precipice, and one footstep too far and we plummet.

You simply extrapolating in data as long as Oct of 2023. I could feel Rika’s eyes boring into my back, but there was no turning back now. If we didn’t open it, we’d always wonder. If we opened it … well, we’d crossed a line.

I took a deep breath and opened the folder.

فایلهایی در ردیف دندانه های مرتب A roster of names, documents and what looked like a dozen security reports. But scrolling all the way down, one of the files caught my attention. A video. And somehow I clicked on it before I had a chance to talk myself out of it.

The video opened with a burst of static. So I thought, for one second, that it was just the file starting and making a lot of noise, and then a shape appeared on the screen. His face was in shadow, a mere silhouette against the low illumination of what resembled a control room.

“The Project Eclipse,” the voice said, low but measured. It was the same voice I’d heard at the door. I froze. My pulse quickened.

“You think you’ve been selected,” the figure went on, “but you haven’t. Not yet. What you witnessed was just the beginning.”

The words were painfully cold; they made my spine tremble. I glanced at Rika. Her complexion had drained, her hand propped against the desk as if to hold herself down to something so she wouldn’t fall. She didn’t have to say anything; her eyes did — wide and bright with reading all I needed to know. She was as scared as I was.

The video continued.

“What we’re doing here… what you’re a part of…” The figure dropped its voice, freaking lowered its tone. “The meteor, the impact … it was no accident. It was orchestrated. And you — both of you — play a key role in putting a stop to it. If you live long enough to understand it.’ ”

The screen flickered dark for a split second, and when it returned, the figure was gone. But those words were echoing in my head. The meteor was no accident. It was orchestrated.

I sat back in my chair, stunned. The force behind those words, their hugeness, the sudden seriousness of their meaning, threatened to crush me.

“Rika,” I said, unable to continue. I didn’t know what to say. How could I have even described what I was feeling?

She shook her head, cutting me off. “We’re further in than I realized,” she said, her voice small. She swallowed, and went on, “They know we saw it. They know we’re in now.”

“Who are they?” I asked though it sounded like an absurd question. The more I considered it, the more it all felt like a lie. There was no discernible enemy, no discernible plan. Simple shadows, voices, and coded messages.

“We need to get out of here,” Rika suddenly declared. “Now.”

I looked at her, confused. “What?”

“We can’t stay here. They’ll come for us. They’ll track us down. We’re already too far in.”

She was right. As long as we stayed here, the more dangerous we became. I knew it, she knew it. We had both reached the point of being backed into a corner, and in order to get out of it, the next move needed to be made. But where could we go? Who could we trust?

I closed it, then got up to pick the laptop up again. The USB drive only remained connected, but I held no intention to retain the device. Whatever it held, whatever messages it contained, I had no doubt that it was dangerous. So, I took it out and put it in my pocket.

“What now?” I said, managing to keep my voice steady, but the dread roiling in my gut made it hard to pull in a breath.

“We find out who made that file,” Rika said, her eyes frigid. “We find them before they find us.”

But in here, I knew something we weren’t admitting. The world we had entered—Project Eclipse’s world—was not at an end. And whatever it was we had just uncovered, it was just the beginning.