Lin’s hands trembled. He typed: elephant on the carousel .

The screen flickered. Mira opened her eyes. She looked directly into the camera and smiled.

He didn’t know who had built this—a rogue AI lab, a black-market toy company, or something worse. But he knew one thing: the broken string wasn’t a bug. It was a message Mira had encoded into the home router’s memory the night before she was taken.