Page 132 of Glitched Fates & Stolen Mates

The first pass came back encrypted. Of course it was.

I cracked my knuckles and got to work. XOR encryption with a rotating key—took three attempts with different cipher algorithms before the data unfurled across my screen.

Current Location Coordinates: 46.5347° N, 9.8156° E

Transfer scheduled: 2026-12-15 02:15:00 CET

Twenty-seven hours and fourteen minutes from now.

Below that, three words that made my blood freeze: Verification footage follows.

Then a link to an encrypted partition.

My hands shook as I copied the coordinates into Google Earth. Grisons mountains, Switzerland. Middle of nowhere, Switzerland. Nothing marked on satellite imagery.

I stared at the timestamp again. Military format. Someone was telling me Kit was there. In bloody Switzerland. Would be transferred from there in twenty-seven hours and fourteen minutes.

But why tell me? Why embed a message this sophisticated in Transport for London’s CCTV system?

The link sat on my screen like a loaded weapon. Part of me didn’t want to click it. Didn’t want to see whatever proof they were offering.

But I needed to know.

The decryption took three minutes. Three minutes of watching progress bars crawl across the screen while my heart threatened to explode from pounding so fast.

When the video file opened, I saw Kit.

Kit’s unconscious form being dragged from a van by two men in tactical gear, a black hood pulled over his head. But I’d know that frame anywhere—the broad shoulders, the familiar grey cardigan beneath his dark coat, those battered brown boots he refused to replace. Kit’s body limp against zip-tie restraints as they hauled him across the screen, into a van.

The timestamp in the corner read Wednesday 22:43:17.

Many hours after he’d entered Clapham North at 19:20.

I watched the footage loop three times before the reality hit me properly. Someone with serious cryptographic skills had deliberately left this breadcrumb trail. But they’d hidden it so deep, encrypted it so thoroughly, that only someone with my exact skillset would ever find it.

They’d chosen me specifically.

Why? What? How?

My brain almost crashed completely.

Almost crashed completely.

Because Kit needed me.

I forced myself to keep working, to push through the panic and terror clawing inside me. The van’s number plate wasn’t visible—the camera’s angle meant the vehicle was half off screen. But the footage itself… I could work with this.

I ran the video through my geolocation software, cross-referencing the background architecture against satellite imagery. The timestamp metadata showed the original source camera designation: HARGY_CCTV_EXT_07.

Twenty minutes of analysis later, I had it. External camera seven from Haringey Council’s traffic monitoring network, mounted on a council building exactly 0.7 miles northwest of Oakwood station. The angle matched perfectly—lamppost height, concrete wall texture, even the distinctive red post box in the corner of the frame.

This had really happened. Kit had really been taken from that exact spot on Wednesday night.

My hands shook as I reached for my phone. Seb was out of the hotel, but my legs felt like jelly anyway; there was no way I could’ve managed the spiral staircase to his office.

He answered on the second ring. Traffic noise rumbled in the background.

“Magpie?”