The data center breathed like a sleeping animal—cold air on my knuckles, hot exhaust at my back—as I walked the aisle between black racks stacked with humming secrets. LEDs blinked in hard little rhythms, green when they lied, amber when they hesitated, red when they finally told the truth. The floor tiles shivered under my shoes, a raised-grid city where every step rang like a confession, and somewhere above the drop ceiling a fan whined the same tired note I’d heard in cheaper bars at closing time. I checked the badge on my coat like it could protect me from what I was about to find, then leaned in to the console glow, the blue light carving hollows under my eyes. Someone had been here—log files cleaned too neatly, timestamps shaved down, the kind of housekeeping that only happens when a body’s about to turn up. In a place built for uptime, the darkness still found a way to slip between packets, and as the aisle stretched out ahead of me like a long corridor in a bad dream, I realized the killer wasn’t hiding in the shadows; it was hiding in the noise.
