Page 46 of White Noise

It makes something inside me go colder.

Let him keep pretending those folders mean something.

For now.

He didn’t forget any of it.

That changes the shape of the irritation.

I leave the archive and slip into the apartment cameras instead.

His desk faces a wall covered in her.

For a second, I just look.

Printed photographs. Stream captures. Screenshots pulled from old sessions. A framed image of VioletHex staring straight into the camera. Purple neon spelling her username hangs above the whole display, throwing soft light over what is very obviously a fucking shrine.

Whatever amusement I had left disappears.

Marcus gets up and heads toward the bedroom, and I move with him through another camera.

It gets worse.

A shelf runs along one wall, crowded with merchandise, bottles, toys and things tied back to Saga in one way or another. Some still have packaging. Others are marked with private jokes, references to her streams, pieces of language he’s taken and turned into something for himself.

Then I see the doll.

Life-sized.

Dark hair. Makeup copied from hers. Clothes close enough to things she’s worn on camera that there’s no room to pretend it’s a fucking coincidence.

Marcus walks past it like it belongs there.

Like she belongs there.

My jaw locks.

Sick fuck.

I go deeper.

The search history strips away whatever little performance of harmlessness he’s built around himself. Reverse-image searches. Attempts to trace old accounts. IP lookups. Screenshots of reflections from windows behind her. Threads where strangers compare tiny details from her streams and try to work out where VioletHex lives.

He never found her address.

Not because he stopped looking. He kept trying.

Saga’s security couldn’t keep me out, but apparently it was good enough to stop this fucking creep.

For three years, Marcus played patient. Polite. Safe.

He sent coffee money. Remembered what she drank. Noticed when she was tired. Learned exactly how concerned to sound without making her suspicious.

None of that was sweet.

It was fucking calculated.

He figured out how close he could get without making her pull away, then stayed there and waited.