He knew the official version of Dead Estate was well past this iteration. This wasn't an update; it was a ghost.

The monitors went black. In the silence of the room, the low-bitrate breathing continued, but it wasn't coming from the speakers anymore. It was coming from right behind his chair.

Suddenly, the screen flickered. The "rar" file on his desktop hadn't just unpacked the game; it had unpacked something else . His webcam light clicked on. On the monitor, Jules turned around and pointed toward the back of the room—the room Elias was sitting in.

Elias tried to Alt+F4, but the keyboard was dead. The text box scrolled one last time: