And then she stops.
I sit forward.
She's stopped in the middle of the pavement, maybe fifteen meters from the warehouse. She turns around. Slowly. Not startled—deliberate. She's scanning the street behind her, and even through the low resolution of the night-vision feed, I can see the quality of her attention. She's not casually glancing over her shoulder. She'slooking.Systematically. Doorways, parked cars, the gaps between buildings.
She stands there for what the timestamp tells me is eleven seconds, though it feels much longer.
Then she turns back and walks on. Her pace doesn't change. She doesn't run. But there's something in the set of her shoulders—a tension that wasn't there before.
I replay the eleven seconds. Watch her scan the street. Watch her decide it's nothing.
But it wasn't nothing. She felt me. Not the camera—she can't possibly know about the camera. She felt theweightof being watched. Some animal instinct, some residue of a childhood spent cataloguing threats, fired a signal that made her turn around and look.
She didn't find anything. The camera is invisible. The street was empty. There was nothing to see.
But she looked. And the fact that she looked—that her body registered my attention from however many miles away, through however many layers of technology and distance—tells me something important.
Jess Rowe has instincts I can't account for. A perceptual sensitivity that goes beyond the ordinary, honed by years of hypervigilance that I understand intimately because I have the same thing, forged in the same fire of childhood threat.
She's going to be harder to stay invisible to than anyone I've ever watched.
I should find this concerning. It is concerning. It introduces a variable I can't fully control, which means my timeline for proximity will need to be more careful, my appearances in her world more natural, my cover story more airtight.
But what I actually feel, sitting in my dark apartment with her face frozen on my screen, mid-turn, eyes sharp and searching—what I feel is something dangerously close to admiration.
She's looking for me.
She doesn't know it yet. Doesn't know what she's looking for or why the air felt heavy on a dark street in Brooklyn.
But she's looking.
And some part of me—the part that my father couldn't kill and the Order couldn't train away and twenty years of controlled emptiness couldn't silence—some part of me wants to be found.
Chapter 5 - Jess
The sculpture is almost done, and I'm terrified.
Not of the work—the work is the one thing I'm never afraid of. The ribs are complete now, all twelve of them, curving upward from the reclaimed-wood base with a grace that still surprises me. The cross-braces are solid. The welds are clean. The whole structure stands almost six feet tall and hums with a tension I can feel when I stand close to it, like it's vibrating at a frequency just below hearing.
It's the gap that terrifies me. The space at the top where the ribs reach toward each other and don't touch. I've been staring at it for days, and I still don't know whether to close it.
Four weeks until the show. Four weeks to finish, to decide, to somehow become the kind of person who stands in a gallery and lets strangers look at the most honest thing she's ever made.
I'm working on the hand sculpture this morning—the second piece, the small one Nish asked about. I've cleaned up the wire base and refined the fingers, and now I'm adding texture to the forearm with a ball-peen hammer, dimpling the iron in a way that suggests effort. Strain. The surface of something that's been through pressure and shows it.
The studio is cold, as always, but I've made it more mine over the past few weeks. There's a sprig of dried eucalyptus in a jar on the workbench that I bought from a street vendor because I liked the smell. A postcard from Tess tucked into the frame of the pegboard—a Georgia O'Keeffe flower, bold and pink and unapologetic. A blanket folded on the crate where I sit to eat, because the concrete holds the cold and my legs go numb without it.
Small things. But they make the space feel like it belongs to someone, and that someone is me.
My phone rings mid-hammer. Nish.
"I'm coming to see the work," he says. "Today. No arguments."
"It's not—"
"If you say it's not ready, I'm going to reach through this phone and shake you. I need to see it, Jess. For the catalog. For placement. For my own peace of mind, because you've been describing this piece to me for weeks and I'm dying."
I laugh. I can't help it. Nish's enthusiasm is the purest thing I've ever encountered in the art world—there's no angle to it, no calculation. He just loves art the way some people love music or food or weather. Completely. Without reservation.
