As the months progressed the files got longer and more frequent.
Mackenzie had been collecting this footage for a long time. Was this for her job?
Kori didn’t even have any contact information for someone at Mackenzie’s work that she could ask.
The footage was all she had to work with right now. If she looked hard enough, she could probably find something.
Kori selected the oldest file and pressed Play.
It showed an empty trail. Nothing moved for eight seconds. Then a squirrel crossed the frame before disappearing.
She clicked to the next one.
It was the same trail but a slightly different angle. Two people walked through the frame without stopping. Hikers, by the look of them. They had day packs and trekking poles. They didn’t look up at the camera.
She kept going.
File after file. Hours of footage compressed into short clips—the camera triggered by motion, capturing whatever moved through its frame and then going still again.
She watched a deer pick its way along the trail edge.
She watched leaves fall.
She watched the light change from morning gray to afternoon white and back to gray again across a dozen different days.
Then she watched three men walk through the frame in single file.
She sat up straighter.
They moved differently than hikers. They didn’t have packs or poles. Instead, they carried large boxes with them.
The last one in the line glanced up. As he did, Kori caught a half second of his face before he moved out of frame.
She rewound it and watched it again.
The face told her nothing. The man was middle-aged and bearded, wearing a dark jacket with the hood pushed back. She didn’t recognize him.
But the jacket . . .
She leaned forward and squinted at the screen.
On the sleeve of his jacket, there was a circle. Something was inside it that she couldn’t quite make out at this resolution.
She pressed Pause and stared at the frozen frame.
Her pulse ticked faster.
It was the symbol, the one she’d seen time and time again.
She clicked to the next file. And the next. She moved faster now, her exhaustion forgotten and her instincts fully awake.
More hikers. More empty trail. A fox. Two women hiking.
Then a file from six weeks ago.
She almost missed it.
The camera had triggered on a bird landing in the branches above the trail, and the movement in the lower left corner of the frame was easy to overlook.
