The frost patterns from the elevator haunted me, etching themselves behind my eyelids every time I blinked. I kept seeing them—geometric, precise, impossibly complex—as I walked to work the next morning. My fingertips still tingled with phantom cold, as if my body remembered what my rational mind struggled to accept.

  I'd barely slept. Every shadow in my apartment had seemed alive, every reflection suspect. After three hours of tossing and turning, I'd given up and spent the rest of the night researching "frost patterns," "spontaneous ice formation," and finally, desperately, "hallucinations caused by ancient artifacts." The internet had offered me everything from quantum physics to demonic possession. None of it helped.

  The city streets blurred around me as I cut through my usual shortcut down Pike Street. Seattle's morning fog clung to the pavement, diffusing the weak spring sunlight into something ghostly and uncertain. My coffee scalded my tongue—I'd forgotten to wait for it to cool, too distracted by the shapes that seemed to form and reform in the steam rising from the cup.

  You're losing it, Reeves. Get a grip.

  I nearly walked into traffic, saved only by a car horn that jarred me back to awareness. As I stopped short at the curb, I caught movement from the corner of my eye. A flash of gray suit across the street.

  A man stood directly opposite me, partially obscured by a newspaper stand. He wore an impeccably tailored light gray suit, crisp white shirt, and thin black tie—the kind of anonymous business uniform that was designed to blend into any corporate setting. But nothing about him blended in. Not the way he stood, perfectly still amid the bustle of morning commuters. Not the clinical detachment in his posture. And certainly not the small camera he raised to his eye, lens pointed directly at me.

  I froze. Our eyes met across four lanes of traffic. He didn't look away, didn't pretend to be photographing something else. Instead, his gaze intensified, studying me with the dispassionate interest of a scientist observing a lab specimen.

  The pedestrian signal changed. People moved around me, but I remained rooted to the spot, locked in this bizarre staring contest with a stranger who seemed to find me fascinating.

  Does he know? Did he see what happened in the elevator?

  The thought sent ice through my veins. There had been no security cameras in that elevator—I'd checked, paranoid even then—but what if there had been witnesses I hadn't seen? What if the maintenance worker had noticed more than he let on?

  The suited man lowered his camera but maintained eye contact. His face betrayed nothing—no curiosity, no hostility, just methodical observation. He tilted his head slightly, as if adjusting his perspective might reveal something new about me.

  A bus passed between us, momentarily blocking my view. When it cleared, he was gone.

  I scanned the street frantically, finally spotting the gray suit moving efficiently through the crowd half a block away. Without thinking, I stepped into the crosswalk, dodging through gaps in traffic to the sound of more angry horns.

  By the time I reached the opposite sidewalk, he had disappeared around a corner. I jogged after him, coffee sloshing dangerously close to the rim of my cup, and turned onto Pine Street.

  There he was, twenty yards ahead, walking unhurriedly as if certain I would follow.

  My heart hammered against my ribs. This was insane. I was chasing a stranger who'd taken my picture, based on nothing but paranoid speculation that somehow connected him to the impossible things happening to me. Yet I couldn't stop myself. After days of questioning my own sanity, here was something tangible—someone real who might have answers.

  We approached another crosswalk. The suited man stopped at the corner, waiting for the signal. I slowed my pace, maintaining distance, watching him from behind a group of tourists.

  A sudden, irrational impulse seized me. I wanted to test something, to prove to myself that I wasn't completely unhinged. I deliberately loosened my grip on my coffee cup, letting it slip through my fingers to the sidewalk. The lid popped off on impact, sending dark liquid spreading across the concrete.

  "Damn it," I muttered convincingly, crouching to pick up the empty cup.

  Across the street, precisely one second later, the suited man's coffee cup slipped from his grasp, splashing across the pavement in a perfect mirror of my own action.

  My blood turned to ice. He hadn't been looking at me. There was no way he could have seen what I'd done. Yet he had replicated my movement exactly, down to the angle of the spill.

  The suited man didn't bend to retrieve his cup. Instead, he turned his head slowly, meeting my gaze again with that same clinical interest. His lips curved in what might have been a smile on anyone else, but on him looked more like an acknowledgment—a confirmation that yes, I had seen correctly, and yes, it meant exactly what I thought it meant.

  Whatever "it" was.

  The pedestrian signal changed. He crossed the street, moving away from me rather than toward me. I remained frozen in place, unable to process what I'd just witnessed.

  By the time I collected myself enough to continue to work, I was twenty minutes late and thoroughly rattled. I swiped my keycard at the museum's staff entrance with shaking hands, dropped my bag twice at the security checkpoint, and nearly walked into a display case of Mesopotamian pottery.

  "Rough morning?" James Okafor, the security guard, raised an eyebrow as he handed me my bag.

  "You could say that," I managed, trying to look more composed than I felt.

  James studied me for a moment longer than seemed necessary. "Dr. Chen was looking for you. Said to send you to her office when you arrived."

  Great. Just what I needed—a lecture about punctuality on top of everything else.

  "Thanks," I said, heading for the administrative wing.

  Dr. Chen's office door was ajar, voices filtering into the hallway. I raised my hand to knock, then hesitated as I recognized one of the speakers.

  "—displaying any of the expected markers?" A man's voice, precise and measured.

  "Nothing conclusive." Dr. Chen's voice, familiar but somehow different—crisper, more formal than her usual academic drawl. "The pendant incident was promising, but isolated. We need more data before—"

  I leaned slightly, angling for a view through the gap in the door. Dr. Chen sat behind her desk, glasses perched on her nose, expression serious. Across from her, his back to me, sat a man in a light gray suit.

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  My stomach dropped. It couldn't be coincidence. The same man who had been watching me, following me, somehow mimicking my actions—now here, speaking with my boss about "expected markers" and "data."

  "Ah, Marcus." Dr. Chen's voice made me jump. She was looking directly at me through the gap in the door. "Come in."

  I pushed the door open, heart pounding. The suited man turned, and any doubt vanished—it was him, the photographer from the street. Up close, he was even more unsettling. His features were pleasant enough, conventionally handsome in a forgettable way, but his eyes... they didn't match the rest of him. Too sharp, too aware, too calculating.

  "This is Mr. Gray from the acquisition department," Dr. Chen said smoothly. "He's conducting an audit of our recent acquisitions, particularly the Mediterranean shipment you've been cataloging."

  Acquisition department? In three years at the museum, I'd never heard of such a division.

  "Nice to meet you," I said automatically, not extending my hand.

  Mr. Gray—if that was really his name—smiled without warmth. "Likewise, Mr. Reeves. Dr. Chen speaks highly of your work."

  His voice was exactly as I'd heard it through the door—precise, measured, revealing nothing. He studied me openly now, his gaze lingering on my silver streak, on my hands, on the shadows under my eyes.

  "I should get to work," I said, desperate to escape that analytical stare.

  "Of course." Dr. Chen nodded. "But first, has there been anything... unusual about any of the artifacts you've been processing? Anything worth special notation?"

  The pendant. The restricted files. The symbols that matched my dreams. The frost patterns that appeared when my blood touched certain objects.

  "No," I lied. "Nothing unusual."

  Dr. Chen's expression didn't change, but something flickered in her eyes—disappointment? Relief?

  "Very well. Please continue with the inventory in section four this morning."

  I nodded and backed out of the office, feeling Mr. Gray's eyes on me until the door closed.

  For the rest of the day, I felt watched. Every time I looked up from my workstation, someone seemed to be glancing quickly away—a security guard, a docent, a visiting researcher. Twice I caught glimpses of the gray suit moving through the museum's galleries. Once, I found Dr. Chen standing silently in the doorway of the research lab, observing me for who knows how long before I noticed her.

  By closing time, paranoia had settled onto my shoulders like a physical weight. I declined Tara's invitation to happy hour for the second day in a row and slipped out through a side exit, hoping to avoid any further encounters with Mr. Gray.

  The side street was empty except for a delivery truck and a homeless man sleeping in a doorway. I exhaled slowly, some of the tension draining from my body as I turned toward home.

  Then I saw him.

  Mr. Gray stood at the corner, hands in his pockets, watching my apartment building with the same clinical interest he'd shown me. He hadn't noticed me yet—I'd emerged from a different exit than usual—but there was no mistaking his purpose. He was waiting for me.

  I ducked back into the museum doorway, pulse racing. What the hell was going on? Who was this man, and what did he want with me?

  More importantly, how had he known where I lived?

  I waited ten minutes, then chanced another look. He was still there, patient as a spider. It was fully dark now, the street lamps creating pools of sickly yellow light. In one of them, Mr. Gray stood perfectly still, his shadow stretching toward my hiding place like an accusing finger.

  There was no way I could go home, not with him watching. I considered my options: a hotel would require ID, friends would ask questions I couldn't answer, and the museum would lock up soon, leaving me without shelter.

  Think, Reeves. I'd spent half my childhood exploring abandoned buildings, finding secret passages and hidden rooms. I knew this city's forgotten spaces better than most. There had to be somewhere I could go, somewhere I wouldn't be followed.

  I took a deep breath and made my decision. Pulling my jacket collar up against the evening chill, I stepped onto the sidewalk and walked deliberately away from my apartment, away from Mr. Gray, heading deeper into the city's shadowed heart.

  I didn't look back, but I could feel him following—a prickling awareness between my shoulder blades, a whisper of footsteps just barely audible beneath the urban soundtrack of traffic and distant voices.

  At Pike Place Market, I disappeared into the crowds still lingering among the closed stalls. I moved quickly, changing direction frequently, using every trick I knew to lose a tail. Down the main arcade, through the lower levels, out onto Western Avenue, then doubling back through the tangle of shops and restaurants.

  When I emerged onto First Avenue, I allowed myself a quick glance behind me. No gray suit. No clinical eyes. I'd lost him, at least for now.

  Rather than relief, I felt a surge of reckless anger. This man—this stranger—had invaded my life, my workplace, had stationed himself outside my home like some kind of sentinel. And for what? What possible interest could I hold for someone like him?

  I knew I should find somewhere to lay low for the night, but instead, I found myself heading home by a circuitous route, determined to reclaim at least that much normalcy.

  The city opened its secret pathways to me as it always had. I cut through the service alley behind the art museum, climbed a fire escape to access a rooftop shortcut, descended through an abandoned department store that developers had forgotten existed. The route would have been incomprehensible to anyone watching a map or tracking a straight line from point A to point B.

  Which is why my blood froze when I emerged onto my street and saw him waiting.

  Mr. Gray stood directly across from my apartment building, exactly where he had been two hours earlier. He didn't look surprised to see me, didn't look triumphant at having somehow predicted my return. He simply looked... expectant.

  I stopped twenty feet away from him, fists clenched at my sides.

  "How?" I demanded, the word escaping before I could think better of it.

  Mr. Gray tilted his head slightly, studying me with that same detached interest. For a moment, I thought he wouldn't respond. Then he spoke, his voice as precise in person as it had been in Dr. Chen's office.

  "You'll only make this harder," he said, the words carrying clearly across the empty street. Then he turned and walked away, his movements as measured and deliberate as everything else about him.

  I watched until he disappeared around a corner, then stood for several more minutes, waiting to see if he would return. When the street remained empty, I finally entered my building, taking the stairs rather than risking the elevator again.

  My apartment was exactly as I'd left it that morning—dishes in the sink, bed unmade, Vesper curled on the windowsill. Nothing seemed disturbed. Nothing except my sense of security, of privacy, of sanity.

  I checked every room, every closet, behind every door. I examined the windows, the vents, the electrical outlets. I found nothing unusual, no cameras, no listening devices, no explanation for how Mr. Gray had known where I would be.

  As I hung my jacket on the hook by the door, something caught my eye—a tiny irregularity in the collar, a thread that didn't quite match the others. I ran my fingers over it and felt something hard and small, no bigger than a pinhead.

  With shaking hands, I found a pair of tweezers and carefully extracted it: a minuscule black disc, barely visible to the naked eye. A tracking device, sewn into my jacket collar with precision that would have made it virtually undetectable if not for that single mismatched thread.

  My first impulse was to crush it, flush it, destroy the intrusion. But a different idea took shape as I stared at the tiny tracker.

  Ten minutes later, I stood in the alley behind my building, holding out a piece of jerky to a mangy stray dog that often slept there. The dog approached cautiously, nose twitching at the scent of food.

  "Good boy," I murmured, attaching the tracker to his collar with a small dab of adhesive as he gobbled the treat. "Take our friend on a little tour of the city, would you?"

  The dog wagged his tail once, then trotted off into the night, carrying Mr. Gray's surveillance device with him.

  Back in my apartment, I pulled up the tracking app I'd installed on my phone—a generic program for finding lost devices that had proven compatible with the frequency the tiny disc transmitted on. A small dot moved erratically across the city map, already several blocks away and heading toward the waterfront.

  I smiled grimly, imagining Mr. Gray's confusion as he followed the signal to a dirty stray dog instead of to me. But the satisfaction was short-lived as darker questions crowded in.

  How had they accessed my jacket in the first place? What were they looking for? And most disturbing of all—what connection did this surveillance have to the impossible things happening to me? To the frost patterns, the reflections, the dreams, the woman with amber eyes like mine who kept telling me to remember?

  I closed the tracking app and pulled out my journal, flipping to the newest drawings of the geometric patterns. They seemed to pulse on the page, as if trying to communicate something just beyond my comprehension.

  The game had changed. I was being watched, evaluated, tracked. And I still had no idea why, or by whom. But one thing was becoming increasingly clear—the answers I needed wouldn't come from running or hiding.

  They would come from remembering. Whatever that meant.

  I traced one of the patterns with my fingertip, feeling a now-familiar tingle as my skin made contact with the ink. Somewhere across the city, a dog carried my tracker toward the ocean, buying me time.

  Time I intended to use.