I’m watching back.
8
Aaron
Location: Perimeter — Lisbon Safehouse
Time: Late Morning
You don’t hear a city wake.
You feel it.
The shift in background noise. The way footsteps become less purposeful and more habitual. The way engines stop idling and start commuting. The way randomness increases.
Randomness is where mistakes hide.
I move the perimeter on foot, not in a loop, not in a pattern. Rooftop sightlines first. Then reflections. Then the blind spots that look too boring to matter.
Those are the ones that get you killed.
Ronan’s voice comes in low. “Traffic picked up. No spikes, but I’ve got three soft anomalies in the last forty minutes.”
“Define soft,” I say.
“People who don’t belong anywhere long enough to be noticed. Then disappear.”
That’s not nothing.
That’s casing.
“Send me the overlays.”
My lens fills with ghosted movement tracks—civilian flow in gray, anomalies in faint red. It’s subtle. Too subtle for amateurs.
“They’re not closing,” I say.
“No,” Ronan agrees. “They’re mapping reactions.”
They’re waiting to see what we do.
Which means the clock is already running.
I pause near a bakery window, using the reflection instead of the street. A woman laughs with the clerk inside. Someone drops coins. Normal life continues at full volume while a quiet war rearranges itself in the margins.
I hate that.
“Any chance they don’t know she’s here?” I ask.
Ronan doesn’t answer immediately.
That tells me everything.
“They didn’t follow her directly,” he says. “But the moment we tripped the network? The moment the list came online? They knew the center of gravity moved.”
“Which means they’re not hunting a location,” I say. “They’re hunting behavior.”
“Yes.”
