In the drawer, under the Nexus’s charging cable, was a sticky note he didn’t remember writing. On it, in his own handwriting:

Then, at 12:34 AM, the screen turned on by itself.

The terminal cleared. New text appeared:

Alex reached over and unplugged the Ethernet cable from his workstation. The Wi-Fi router sat two feet away. He hesitated. If whatever was on that phone had already bridged to his local network, everything—his NAS, his laptop, the lab’s build server—was already compromised.