Marcus and I spent the next two days pulling apart every connection we could find between victims. Sleep got pushed aside while we chased digital trails and cross-referenced data. What we uncovered was worse than I'd thought possible.
"Check this out," Marcus said around midnight on the second day, hunched over his laptop with his third energy drink. "These three people from the financial district cluster? They all joined the same online philosophy forum exactly two weeks before they died."
I leaned over his shoulder to look at the screen. The forum was called Truth Beyond Illusion, which yeah, that should've been an obvious red flag from the start.
"They posted constantly about freedom and reality and the fundamental nature of existence," Marcus continued, scrolling through pages and p
