I crouch.
There’s a small impact mark in the flooring, easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. I rub my finger over it, feeling the roughness where something fast and violent kissed stone and kept going.
I straighten slowly, pulse steady despite the unease coiling tighter in my chest.
“He never misses a shot,” I say. “This was on purpose. I need to know what was here. What he was shooting at.”
“On it,” Grim says. “Going back.”
I keep looking anyway, circling, scanning, trusting my instincts more than the feeds. Grim rambles as he scrubs through footage, muttering about angles and shadows and compression artifacts.
Then my eye catches on something.
I can’t tell what it is at first. Just a flash of color against neutral tones. Something out of place. I step closer.
Grim comes back on the line. “It’s hard to tell,” he says. “Really dark, but?—”
I reach down.
“All I can see is a shoe,” Grim continues.
My fingers close around something small and smooth. Polished. Cool against my skin.
Blue.
Familiar.
I lift my hand and let it rest in my palm, the weight insignificant and devastating all at once.
A marble.
“A shoe,” I repeat quietly.
“Yeah,” Grim says. “I’ll send you a still frame.”
Seconds later the phone vibrates in my hand. I open the file.
Grainy. Black and white. Security footage, compressed just enough to lose faces and keep shapes. And there it is, unmistakable now that I know how to look. The edge of a shoe, caught mid-step, half in shadow.
It looks a lot like the photographs Alejandro deleted.
My thumb moves on instinct. I pull up the first image from two years ago. The one from September seventh. Alejandro in the corner of the frame, carpet pattern beneath him, and in the opposite edge, the tip of a man’s shoe intruding into the shot like an afterthought.
Then the second. More recent. Someone climbing into a helicopter. Bent knee. White pants. Black shoe. Same angle. Sameintrusion.
Different moments. Same ghost.
“Grim,” I say, keeping my voice level, “can you enhance this? And the photos Alejandro deleted?”
There’s a pause. Then a low sound of understanding. “Ahh. I see where you’re going with this. Yeah. Absolutely.”
The clicking of his keyboard fills the silence in my ear as I roll the marble between my fingers. It’s cool and smooth, almost soothing, which feels wrong considering where I found it.
“These cameras are insane,” Grim mutters. “High-end stuff. I can practically see the stitching.”
“Send it to me,” I say. “And do you have a way to search the feeds for that same shoe?”
A beat. “Nah,” he admits. Then, cheerfully, “But I can write one real quick.”
