The rain had stopped sometime before dawn. Chase woke to the thin grey light that made the world look undecided, neither day nor night.

The guitars were still hanging where he had left them — silent witnesses to time he wished he had.

From the other side of the bed came the steady rhythm of his wife’s breathing. Down by her feet, Singe stirred, stretching in a slow ripple before hopping to the floor. Chase smiled at the sound of claws on the wooden floorboards covered by a low pile carpet, the faint thump of a tail – small proof that the world, for now, was still working.

He stood at the window, watching condensation ghost across the glass until the heating clicked on. Behind him, the cat gave a single questioning meow, as if to ask whether the day had started yet. Chase wasn’t sure of the answer.

He poured the tea, English breakfast, even though the name had little to do with England, he drank it anyway. It tasted like habit.

The news bulletins were already circling the story – “University professor found dead in campus laboratory” – no foul play suspected, pending investigation. That last phrase always meant someone higher up had decided what version of the truth the public could manage before breakfast. He’d heard that kind of wording all his career: polite language that hid panic behind procedure.

He dressed slowly – dark trousers, grey shirt, the same coat that still smelled of wet air and dusted concrete. The phone rang before he had finished lacing his shoes.

“Chase,” he said.

Tess’s voice came through, bright but sleep-roughened. “Morning. Got the surge protector on the bench. You were right to bag it. The internal trip wasn’t natural.”

“Define not natural.”

“There’s a residue on the copper contacts – a kind of carbon shadow. It looks like the spike came from two directions at once, as if the circuit was fed both ways. I’m running a scan to see if it matches any known interference signatures. Could be someone used an induction loop or even a field disruptor. Not something you pick up at Currys.”

Chase pictured the bench in her lab: wires like veins, coffee rings on the metal. Two directions at once meant power fighting itself — an engineered surge, not an accident.

He rubbed his temple. “So, not an accident.”

“I’d stake my iced coffee on it,” she said. “Also – you asked about the hash I traced last night? The root label still checks out as local, but the device that signed it doesn’t match any on the university’s network registry. It’s like a ghost machine plugged in just long enough to rewrite the rules.”

That image sat with him – a phantom computer that appeared, changed reality, then vanished. The kind of trick that made digital forensics feel like chasing smoke.