The coordinate pointed to the sanatorium. He had driven past its rusted gates as a child and heard stories about experiments and disappearances. Those stories had teeth: a woman who walked into the grounds at dawn and never left; children who learned to speak backwards. He was not a superstitious man—he kept a toolkit in the trunk, a camera on his dashboard—but he felt old fear like static at the base of his neck.
He told himself he would go; of course he would. The promise of an answer is its own narcotic. The night he left, the city seemed to yawn and compress behind him. The road unrolled, empty and indifferent. When he arrived, the sanatorium's gates were unlatched, as if expecting him. The building slouched on a hill, windows like teeth dark against the sky.
He put the ledger back, shut the reel down, and walked out into an open night that smelled like cooling brick. The file on his laptop waited like an ignited fuse. He could upload the ledger, the footage, the coordinates. He could make a public record, force the world to choose between remembering and living.