Chapter 3: Silent Observers

The office hummed with routine, but Faiza felt the weight of unseen eyes pressing against her. The presence of the man from the bus lingered in her mind, his blank ID badge a puzzle she couldn’t solve. 

She wasn’t the only one who sensed it.

“Faiza, are you even listening?” Mehreen’s voice cut through her thoughts. Faiza blinked, refocusing. Mehreen stood beside her desk, arms crossed, impatience flickering in her sharp gaze. 

“Sorry, what?” Faiza murmured, her fingers still pressed against the file that had appeared mysteriously that morning. 

Mehreen sighed, dropping a file onto the desk. “Uzair wants the client reports finalized by noon. Also, Nimra was looking for you. Something about the security footage.”

At that, Faiza sat up straighter. “What about it?”

Mehreen shrugged. “She didn’t say. Just that she found something weird.”

A sharp knock made them both turn. Nimra stood in the doorway, her expression grim. She held a flash drive between her fingers like it was burning her skin. 

“I need to show you both something,” she said, her voice tight. 

Faiza and Mehreen exchanged a glance before rising from their desks. 

They followed Nimra to a small, unused conference room. She shut the door behind them and plugged the flash drive into the laptop. The screen flickered to life, showing grainy security footage of the fifth-floor hallway from the previous night. 

“What am I looking at?” Mehreen asked, leaning in.

Nimra fast-forwarded the video and then paused. The timestamp read 2:43 AM.

The hallway was empty. Then, without warning, a shadow flickered at the edge of the screen.

Faiza’s breath caught. It wasn’t a person. It was a distortion, like the camera itself was glitching—but the shadow moved, stretching toward Room 17.

Nimra rewound the footage. Played it again. The shadow was closer this time.

“That’s impossible,” Mehreen whispered.

Nimra nodded, her fingers digging into her arms. “I checked the other angles. There’s no source for this shadow. It just... appears.”

The three of them stared at the screen, the weight of something unseen pressing against them.

Then the laptop screen glitched.

For half a second, a single frame flashed across the display—

Uzair’s office. A figure standing by the window. Watching. No face. No features. Just a hollowed-out silhouette.

The video cut to black.

The laptop powered off on its own.

Silence. Thick. Suffocating.

Faiza’s fingers trembled as she reached for the flash drive, but Nimra snatched it away. “No,” she said quickly. “We don’t tell anyone yet.”

Mehreen exhaled shakily. “Then what do we do?”

Nimra stared at the darkened screen, the ghostly afterimage of the faceless figure burned into her mind.

“We find out who—or what—is watching us.”