The video cut to black.

Leo’s stomach turned over. Sana had transferred to a school in Manchester last December. Her dad got a new job. They’d promised to keep in touch, sent three texts, then nothing. He hadn’t thought about her in months. But here she was, walking past the water fountain that always tasted like rust, on a date that hadn’t happened yet.

When it finished, he opened it.

Leo shrugged, clicked it. He’d downloaded worse things from deeper corners of the internet. Pirated copies of films still in cinemas, screeners with Korean subtitles burned into the bottom. This was small. 1.8 gigabytes. He let it run.

The file ended.

He watched Sana borrow his pen. Watched Mr. Davison confiscate her phone in fourth period. Watched the two of them walk home together—same route Leo still walked every day—except in the video, they stopped at the corner shop and bought two slushies, and Sana’s was blue and his was red, and she said something that made him laugh so hard he snorted.

Then a girl walked into frame. Sana. Year 10 Sana, with her too-large blazer and the fringe she’d cut herself two weeks into term. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking at someone off-screen, laughing at something Leo couldn’t hear. She looked happy. She looked alive.

The camera wobbled. A voice behind the lens—low, familiar, wrong —whispered: “Testing. Yeah, it’s rolling.”

Leo stared at the frozen last frame for a long time. Then he opened his messages. Scrolled past the group chats, past the spam from the sixth-form college he’d applied to, past the three-year-old thread with Sana’s name at the top.