100%. The screen went black for a full ten seconds—long enough for him to see his own terrified reflection. Then the phone rebooted.

The icon was wrong. Instead of the generic green Android, it was a crimson gear with an eye in the center. The app name in his drawer was simply: in a font that didn’t exist on his system.

The file was called — a name so absurdly specific that it should have been a warning. But to Arjun, hunched over his dusty Redmi Note 9 Pro at 2:47 AM, it looked like salvation.