# Digital Shadows

The hum of ten thousand servers filled the cold room like the whisper of electronic ghosts, and I stood there in the dim emergency lighting, watching the blinking LEDs paint Marie's face in shades of red and amber. She'd called me down to rack forty-seven at three in the morning, which meant trouble—the kind that didn't show up in log files or ticket systems. "Someone's been here," she said, her voice flat as a flatline, gesturing to a panel that hung open like a wound, cables spilling out like viscera. I knelt down, ran my fingers along the fiber optic lines, and found what I was looking for: a network tap, small and gleaming, a mechanical leech sucking data into the darkness. The question wasn't just who put it there—in this business, there were always too many suspects with too many reasons—but what they'd already stolen, and whether the bodies would be digital or real. Outside, through the reinforced windows, the city slept while its secrets hemorrhaged through that tiny device, one packet at a time, and I knew before morning someone would pay the price for looking where they shouldn't have looked.
