Page 73 of Silent Bones
McKenzie snorted. “Guy was off his rocker.”
Callie didn’t look up. “Or closer to the truth than we thought.”
The silence that followed was brief but sharp. Noah closed the notebook, tucking it under his arm as his phone buzzed.
“Rishi,” he said, answering.
“Tell me you’re sitting down,” Rishi said. “Because things just got weird.”
“Weirder than what we’ve already got?”
“Yeah. I got into Miles’ cloud backup.”
Noah started walking, Callie and McKenzie falling into step.
“And?”
“There’s a last-seen timestamp at 12:06 a.m. Monday morning. Which means he was still alive after the festival.”
“Same night Ed did the competition.”
“Exactly. Miles started a backup upload around 12:07, but it never completed. Something interrupted it.”
“Was it deleted?”
“Yes. But whoever did it, didn’t scrub it right. I’ve got fragments. And a partial temp file.”
“Can you pull it?”
“I’ll need the night. Maybe longer. But it’s there, something he uploaded before he died.”
“Good,” Noah said. “Stay on it.”
He hung up, mind already moving.
Callie looked at him. “He uploaded something?”
“He tried. Didn’t finish. Someone pulled the plug, but not clean enough.”
“Same way they staged the scene,” McKenzie said. “Sloppy but nottoosloppy.”
Noah didn’t reply. He was already thinking about the timeline.
Miles had left the festival. Gone home. Uploaded something.
And then silence.
The tech labwas dark except for the glow of two monitors and the low hum of a backup drive spinning on the desk. Rishi sat hunched at the keyboard, earbuds in, fingers flying across shortcuts and scrub tools. Noah paced behind him, arms folded, watching each fragment of recovered data slowly stitch itself into something coherent.
“It’s messy,” Rishi warned, not looking up. “Compression’s wrecked. Audio’s warped in places. But I’ve got ninety seconds. It’s a rough cut.”
Noah stopped pacing. “Play it.”
The screen flickered, then flashed to black before a grainy image stabilized.
Miles, lit only by a single desk lamp, stared into the camera. His face was half-shadow, pupils wide, breath audible. His voice, when it came, was quieter than usual, no performance, no podcast tone. Just fear.
“I think they’re watching me,” he whispered. “Not Bigfoot. Someone else. Human.”
