A Text From My Own Number

At 4:07 in the afternoon, a text arrived from Yasmin Qassem's number — to Yasmin Qassem's phone. She was the only person on earth who owned it.

*Don't drink that coffee.*

She looked at the cup in her hand, then at the sender. Her own number. She didn't laugh, not the way she'd later think she should have. She just stared at the screen and set the cup down with more care than a joke deserved.

She typed: *Who is this?*

No reply.

Six minutes later, the cup tipped over on its own — a stray elbow — and soaked the report she was due to hand in tomorrow.

She pulled up the message-monitoring system from her desk — the one genuinely useful privilege of working Network Ops at Nabd Telecom — and searched for the text. Nothing. Not in any log, any gateway she knew. She sent herself a test message to be sure the system worked. It landed instantly, logged everywhere it should be.

The strange one alone had left no trace at all.

At 6:30, the second arrived.

*You're late for the meeting. The elevator's going to break. Take the stairs.*

There was no meeting tonight. But tomorrow at nine, there genuinely was one — one she herself had forgotten until that exact second.

In the morning, she really was late. She hit the elevator button. The floor light climbed to 3, then stopped. A small red panel: TEMPORARY FAULT — USE STAIRS.

She stood there five long seconds before turning for the stairwell.

She told no one. At lunch, she filed a security ticket, wrote *likely number spoofing* in the description, and knew even as she typed it that the explanation didn't cover what she'd felt.

That evening, curtains drawn, the third text arrived: *Look at the street.*

She pulled the curtain back a few centimeters. Empty street. One car under a lamppost, engine off. No one visible inside — at least not from this angle.

She watched a long time. Nothing moved.

Back on the couch, the fourth: *Delete this the second it lands. Someone is watching you right now.*

She didn't delete it. She sat still.

A full minute later, the phone lit with an incoming call.

Her own number. Her contact photo — the selfie she'd used for a year — flickered, for one frame, into something else entirely. She couldn't describe it precisely afterward. A room, maybe. A shape with no features. Then it was her own face again, as if nothing had happened.

She told herself her eyes were tired.

Her thumb hovered over the screen.

She hadn't decided yet.

Next Episode: The First Ring — Mazen knows more about Point Zero than he's willing to say.