Arlo jerked back. His chair scraped the floor. “What the—”

His Switch’s fan roared. The .bin file on his desktop flickered, its name changing.

He double-clicked the last file: WolfLink_20Hearts.bin .

From the closet, the wolf whined low—a lonely, hungry sound.

Arlo slammed the laptop shut. The room went dark. His heart pounded for ten, twenty, thirty seconds.

The door creaked open. Two golden eyes floated in the blackness.

And from the laptop, still running despite being shut, a single file began to copy itself onto his hard drive, again and again.

Arlo reached for his phone. The screen was already on. A text message from an unknown number, timestamped three minutes from now, read:

Then the wolf howled. Not from the computer. From his closet.

Then the laser sight turned on.

WolfLink_20Hearts.bin → Not_A_Game_Asset.bin → You_Let_Me_In.bin

He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe.

The wolf took a step forward. Then another. The pixels on his monitor seemed to shatter , as if the wolf’s nose pressed against glass from the other side. The air in his room turned cold, reeking of wet earth and pine needles from no forest he knew.