Page 10 of Prey

The commuter crowd moves in one direction—into the mouth of it, into the trains and lobbies and revolving doors—and I move against the current, toward sleep while everyone else wakes up. A man in a good coat checks his phone without breaking stride. Two women share earbuds, laughing at something. A kid in a school uniform drags his backpack along the pavement like a punishment.

Normal. All of it is so straightforwardly normal that a part of me goes quiet looking at it.

They’re going somewhere. Toward something. Probably a dozen small somethings—a desk, a coffee, a person who’ll ask how they slept and actually want an answer.

I watch them for a half-block, and then I stop watching, because the watching isn’t useful.

I know what I am. I made myself this way on purpose. The logic still holds.

I take the first turn, and the crowd thins immediately—a side street, quieter, lined with delivery trucks starting their rounds. I run the usual route variation without thinking: two blocks south before I cut west, then north again, adding seven minutes to a walk I could do in forty-one.

But somewhere around the third block, the feeling arrives.

It’s nothing I can point at. More like a change in air pressure. The sense of a room shifting when someone enters it, except I’m outside and there’s no room and there’s no one I can identify.

I stop at a crosswalk and use the wait to turn casually, scan back down the block.

A delivery driver offloading boxes. An older woman with a cart. A car idling at the curb—silver, a Camry or something close to it—engine running, no one visibly getting in or out.

I’ve seen a silver Camry. My mind starts reaching for the specific memory, only to find it blurred. I can’t be sure. Silver Camrys exist everywhere.

The light changes. I cross.

I run the checks the rest of my journey home. Window reflections. Stopping to tie a lace that doesn’t need tying. Taking the long entry to the building, through the back, pausing in the stairwell to listen before going up.

Nothing. Nobody.

You always feel this way.

I do. That’s the honest answer. The hypervigilance doesn’t take days off, doesn’t distinguish between a real threat and an empty street at six in the morning. It fires on everything, or it fires on nothing, and I’ve long since lost the calibration that would tell me which is which.

The apartment is exactly as I left it. Both bags are undisturbed. Both locks are intact. The tape on the window: still unbroken.

I do the full check anyway—closet, bathroom, under the bed—and then I shed the jacket and sit on the edge of the mattress and let the familiar weight of the space settle around me. Four walls I chose. Locks I installed. A life I can fold up and move in under an hour.

Safe.

I go to the window, stand to the side of it, and look down at the street.

The silver Camry isn’t there.

I let the curtain fall back.

The feeling doesn’t leave

4

NIKOLAI

Iclock her from the southeast corner of the block, forty meters back, seated on a bench with a paper coffee cup I stopped drinking from an hour ago. She comes out the side exit—not the front, never the front—and pauses half a beat on the step before committing to a direction. Most people don’t pause. Most people are already somewhere else in their heads before their feet hit the pavement.

She’s not like most people.

I’ve been watching her for eleven days.

The silver Camry on rotation is Theon’s. I take the bench, the bus stop, or the delivery position depending on her route. She varies it—not randomly; there’s a logic to the variation that I learned by day four. She isn’t avoiding surveillance so much as practicing the reflex, maintaining it the way you’d maintain a muscle, because the day you stop is the day it fails you.

Interesting.