The Shadow Code

Chapter 1: The Message

The rain hadn’t stopped for two days.

It came down in thin, endless sheets against the glass walls of Ethan Cross’s apartment, the kind of rain that turned the city into a smudged watercolor all gray skies, flickering traffic lights, and distant sirens. Seattle always looked like it was mourning something. Tonight, it felt personal.

Ethan sat in front of his laptop, an empty coffee mug beside him, half a cigarette burning in the ashtray. His desk was a battlefield newspaper clippings, photos pinned to a corkboard, and sticky notes scrawled with names and dates.

At the center of it all was one face Claire, his wife. Her photo was slightly crumpled at the edges, taken on a beach three summers ago. She was smiling, hair in the wind. Ethan couldn’t look at it without something tightening in his chest.

He rubbed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.

He had written a dozen exposés in his life on corporate fraud, political laundering, digital blackmail but none had ever drained him like this one. The story he was working on now wasn’t for publication. It was personal.

Two years ago, Claire had died in a car accident on the I-5 highway. The police called it a brake failure. Case closed. But Ethan never believed it. She was a software engineer for NeuroSys Technologies, a company knee-deep in defense contracts and artificial intelligence projects.

And the night before she died, she’d called him voice trembling saying, “If something happens to me, Ethan, don’t trust anyone at NeuroSys.”

Then the line had gone dead.

Since then, Ethan’s life had split in two: before that call, and after.

He was about to shut down his computer when a ping echoed from his inbox.

New email. No sender. Just an address of random characters.

He hesitated, then opened it.

Subject: She didn’t die by accident.

Ethan’s heart gave a dull thud. He blinked, reading it again, making sure he wasn’t hallucinating. The body of the message was empty except for one attachment a zipped file named “Echo_47.zip.”

He stared at it for a long time.

Scams, hoaxes, fake leads he’d seen them all. But something about this felt different. His fingers hovered over the trackpad. He double-checked his firewall, ran a malware scan, then clicked D******d.

The progress bar crawled across the screen. When it finished, the folder opened to reveal a single file an image.

He clicked it.

A photograph appeared grainy, taken at night. A black sedan parked by the waterfront. Two figures standing beside it. The timestamp in the corner read: June 12th, 11:47 p.m.

The night Claire died.

Ethan’s throat tightened. The car looked familiar the same make, same license plate. But it wasn’t the image that froze him. It was the person standing beside the car. The figure’s face was half-hidden in shadow, but the outline, the height, the tilt of the head it looked like Claire.

He zoomed in.

The pixels blurred, but he was certain that was her. Or someone who looked impossibly like her.

He exhaled shakily and checked the metadata. The image was geotagged near the Pier 19 docks a restricted zone owned by NeuroSys Technologies.

His pulse quickened.

Was it a coincidence? A setup? A ghost?

He grabbed his phone and dialed a number.

“Marcus,” he said when his old friend picked up.

“Tell me you’re sober.”

A low chuckle. “You call me at midnight and that’s your first question? What’s going on?”

“I just got something an image. From an unknown sender. It’s about Claire.”

Silence on the line. Marcus was a former police detective, the only person Ethan still halfway trusted. “You sure you want to open that door again?” he finally asked.

“It’s already open,” Ethan said. “Meet me at the old pier in an hour.”

The waterfront was a maze of shadows when Ethan arrived. Fog hung over the water, rolling between the piers like slow-moving ghosts. The streetlamps flickered in patches, their orange glow catching puddles on the cracked pavement.

He parked two blocks away and walked the rest of the distance, the sound of waves slapping against the wooden posts below.

His coat was soaked by the time he reached Pier 19. The gate was half-rusted, padlocked but easy enough to slip past. He checked his phone no signal.

Figures.

As he stepped onto the pier, the boards creaked beneath his boots. The air smelled of salt, oil, and something faintly metallic. Ahead, a storage warehouse loomed dark windows, no visible guards. But a light was on somewhere inside, faint and flickering.

He pulled out his camera and started recording.

“Alright, whoever you are,” he muttered, “you’ve got my attention.”

Then he heard it, footsteps behind him.

He spun around, heart thudding.

Nothing. Just the echo of water and wind.

He exhaled, forcing himself to calm down. Probably a loose plank or an animal. But then, a voice came from the shadows.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

Ethan froze.

A man stepped out from behind a shipping container tall, wearing a hooded coat, his face half-hidden. His voice was deep, steady. “If you’re looking for answers about your wife… stop now.”

Ethan swallowed hard. “Who are you?”

The man didn’t respond. He looked around nervously, then slipped a small object onto the ground a folded piece of paper before backing away.

“Read it,” the man said, “but don’t come back here again. They’re watching you.”

And before Ethan could speak, the man disappeared into the mist.

Ethan bent down and picked up the paper. His fingers trembled as he unfolded it under the weak light of a streetlamp.

Inside was a single line, written in blocky handwriting:

“Project Umbra – She tried to stop it.”

Ethan stared at the words until they blurred.

He didn’t know what “Project Umbra” meant, or who “they” were. But one thing was certain Claire had been right all along.

And whoever sent that message… wanted him to finish what she started.