It was a genuine question. He was asking himself with the focused honesty of a man in private, which was a different kind of honest than the kind he used in public.
The answer was available but he didn't want it.
The answer was: 'because they can see you, and what they see isn't what you've been told you look like, and you've spent twenty-eight years building an image in mirrors held by people who needed to reflect something specific, and Millbrook doesn't have those mirrors, and the face you have in a real reflection is—'
"'Do you want credits?'"
Cassius's hand was at his dagger before the sentence finished.
He turned.
The alley was empty behind him.
Then — not empty.
The figure was there in the way of something that had been there before he looked and he simply hadn't seen it — a cloaked shape in the alley's shadow, at a distance that should have required passing him to reach, and yet there. Still.
