I felt the presence before I saw it — the small, precise pressure of someone's attention pressing at the back of my neck like a fingertip.
A gull screamed over the harbor and the sound split into useless pieces. I turned slowly, because speed felt like confession. There was nobody in the shadows to answer the question of who had been following me. Only the quay stretching empty, nets piled like sleeping animals, a rusted bollard chewing the rope of a boat that had long since given up trying to leave.
The footsteps continued, careful and patient, matching the cadence of my own. They didn't belong to the boats or the gulls. They belonged to a body that was not mine.
I reached into my pocket for the list, because contact mattered. My thumb brushed familiar paper and then something colder and harder. A phone I didn't know I had.
It looked burned — as if it had lived through a fire and was ashamed of the experience. The screen was a spiderweb of fractures and a faint brown halo had crawled up from the bottom edge. For a second I thought it was a different phone from the one on the pavement in Chapter 1; then the lock screen flickered and filled the bruised glass with my face again, but this time the image was older, a photograph of me taken at a worse angle, teeth not quite right. The name ZOH in little caps, the same number scrawled beneath.
I didn't remember putting it in my pocket. I didn't remember anyone giving it to me. That absence felt like a hand that had taken something gently but without permission.
A pulse of static ran along the edges of the screen, like a shiver. Then, for one ridiculous, impossible beat, the phone lit up entirely. The battery icon jumped as if a tiny life had been pumped through it. White letters crawled across the cracked glass, clear and urgent as a child's warning: RUN.
My stomach folded into a question mark. I thought of the envelope stamped DO NOT REMEMBER. I thought of the card marked ECHO. I thought of the lighter with R-03 and the coordinates it did not give me. The city arranged itself into a dozen possible threats and none of them were neat.
From somewhere closer than I wanted, a voice said, "Zoh?"
It was soft, the same small professional sound that had followed me on the street. No anger in it. No panic. Recognition and the careful weight of someone deciding whether to step into a scene.
My hand tightened around the phone until the screen complained in a spider of new cracks. The letters RUN held me like a mirror that shows you what you refuse to be.
"Who's there?" I called, my voice steadier than I felt.
Silence. Then the footsteps stopped. Whatever waited behind me was calculating. In the harbor's open, calculations mattered less than motive, and motive hid in small things: a glance, the set of a jaw, the way a coat sat on shoulders.
"Don't turn around," a different voice murmured from somewhere behind the benches, where shadow and salt met. It was a woman's voice this time, low and oddly familiar — like a song you remember in a language you never learned.
Not run. Not go. Don't turn around.
The phone in my hand screamed at me in memory. RUN. The city blurred at the edges, and for a fraction of an instant I wondered if the letters were a joke made by someone who had a hyperactive sense of irony. Then the static lifted and the faint outline of an incoming message threaded across the screen. A picture. I swiped without thinking.
The image was of me, yes — but not right now. It was me slumped against a wall, eyes sealed, mouth open like someone who'd let an argument slip out of them. My jacket was the same one I wore. The alley behind me in the photo was not the one I'd woken in. The date stamp in the lower corner had been burned halfway off, but enough remained: 03.11 — and beneath it, a time: 01:12.
I had been dead at 01:12, if that timestamp held truth. The photograph thickened the air. The finger that had taken it wanted me to remember something — or to pretend I could.
A noise at the edge of hearing: a car alarm, a closing door. The woman's whisper continued like a ribbon of sound. "Don't move," she said. "Hands empty."
My palms were empty. The list and the phone were the only things I had. I thought of the circled name at the top of the list, the hot weight of my mother's name. I thought of the badge the hooded figure had worn, the metallic scrape of authority. I thought of being catalogued as an error.
A figure slid from behind a stack of crates and into the spill of lamplight. She was small and hard, wrapped in a coat the color of old smoke. Her hair was cropped close to her skull. For a beat I did not recognize her, and then my memory handed me a sliver like a coin: Meira. The name arrived dislocated, like a label attached to someone I had once owned.
"How do you know my name?" I asked before I could stop myself.
She did not answer by telling me, only offering a tiny, bitter smile. Up close, her eyes were sharper than the rest of her face, and they carried a punctuation I had not expected: grief, not irony. Maybe that explained why she sounded familiar earlier — grief hums like a song you pass in a street and it worms itself into your ears.
"You shouldn't have woken," Meira said. "You weren't supposed to come back."
"My phone just told me to run," I said, because sometimes the simplest truth is a hand you must hold in the dark.
She flinched like I'd slapped her. "Who gave you the phone?"
"No one. It—" The screen jumped, and the letters blinked like a heartbeat. RUN.
Meira's breath left her as if some small animal inside her chest had been startled. Her hand dipped inside her coat and emerged with a small piece of charred plastic. "This was in your pocket," she said. "You didn't carry it in. Somebody planted it."
I felt the world tighten. The fact of the phone being planted was worse than it being a warning. A planted warning is a message with a market: someone wants you to run, and someone else wants you to stay where you are.
"Why would someone want me to run?" I asked. "Why not let me be missing?"
She stared at me for a long time, like she was reading a catalog no one else could see. "Because when you run," she said finally, each word sharpened against the night — "they can find you."
A silhouette moved across the rooftop opposite us, a small, purposeful shadow that raised its hand like a conductor marking a downbeat. The city sounded different when a watcher announced themselves: quieter, as if tuned to listen. Meira's face closed. "We should go," she said. "You have to come with me now."
I wanted a plan that involved fewer consequences. I wanted to interrogate every step of this new life, to open the envelope and study the DO NOT REMEMBER stamp until the letters confessed. Instead, a keening noise split the air — not a siren, but the clipped radio voice of something on the move: "All units, Sector Three — unidentified subject sighted near Old Harbor. Proceed with containment protocols."
The radio voice had the honest flatness of bureaucracy. It sounded like someone ordering coffee in the middle of a funeral. Meira's eyes flicked to the rooftop watcher to our left and then back to me.
She pushed the phone into my hand with a harsh little motion. "Take it," she said. "Keep it on you. If you get separated, the screen will blink for you. If it says more than 'RUN' — listen."
The phone warmed in my palm. The letters on the cracked glass had stopped racing and now sat like a stone: RUN. Under the letters, a new notification tried to load, grotesquely slow. The screen stuttered and an image began to form: a map with a tiny X marked on it, then nothing but black.
Behind us, something large moved with deliberate padding on the quay — the sound of a body that had been made careful. Meira turned, then back to me.
"Do you remember anything?" she asked, and for the first time she sounded like someone asking for forgiveness rather than answers.
I opened my mouth and the fragments came: a lab in blue light, someone pressing a red button, a scream that matched the pitch of my own name. The memory felt like a splinter of glass pressing at the base of my skull.
Meira's fingers tightened on my sleeve. "Good," she said. "That means there's hope. If you don't remember, they can't control what you do next."
The radio near the quay barked again, closer now: "All units, subject moving. Containment teams en route."
Meira looked at the ruined phone, then up at the rooftop watcher, then to the dark water that swallowed lamplight. Her face folded into a decision.
"Run?" I asked, because the phone made a simple demand and sometimes the simplest demands are the least dangerous.
She considered it for a breath and then shook her head. "Not yet."
Behind us, the footsteps resumed — slow, patient, like a heartbeat on a metronome. A voice announced itself from the shadow of a stack of crates in the way only a city with secrets can: low, amused, and as certain as a judge.
"Zoh," the voice said. "You always did have a flair for dramatic entrances."
My name left my mouth and hung in the harbor air. The city, for a single charged moment, held its breath the way a swimmer holds theirs before they dive.
I glanced at Meira. Her hand had gone white around my sleeve.
"Don't move," she whispered again.
The phone screen went black with a finality that felt like a curtain falling on a stage. Then, from the darkness behind the crates, a single figure stepped forward — not running, not even walking fast. Just stepped, like the rest of the world had agreed to pause and wait for him to finish his sentence.
He smiled at me like he'd been expecting a guest. And then, in a tone that could have been friendly or fatal, he said my name the way you say the name of someone you are about to explain: "Zoh."