Jane's phone buzzed three times against her hip, short-short-long, while she was standing in line for coffee.
She knew the pattern. She had been taught it five days ago, in a borrowed apartment with the curtains drawn, by a man who spoke very quietly and never told anyone his last name. Short-short-long meant close. It meant you're the nearest one. It meant go now.
She looked at the screen. There was no message, only a pin on a map, pulsing red. Halsey Street. The superstore. Eleven hundred meters from where she stood.
Under the pin, a single line of text, in the plain gray font the radar always used:
Spike. Strong. Very strong.
Jane looked at it for a second longer than she should have. Then she stepped out of the line and started to run.
* * *
She had been with the association for exactly five days.
They had found her on the third day after F-Day. She still didn't know how. She had been sitting on the floor of her bathroom with the door locked, holding a small black object in both hands and shaking so hard her teeth rattled, and her phone had lit up with a number she didn't know and a message that said only: You're not the only one. Open the door at nine. Bring it with you.
She had opened the door at nine.
Since then, she had learned a great many things very quickly. She had learned that there were others. More than anyone knew. That most of them were hiding, the way she had been hiding, terrified of the people who were starting to look for them. That some of those people wore uniforms, and some wore suits, and some worked for companies whose names she had never heard before last week, and all of them wanted the same thing.
And she had learned that the association wanted it too. Just more politely.
We find them before anyone else does, the quiet man had said. We find them, and we talk to them, and we give them a choice. That's the difference between us and them. We give them a choice.
She had believed him. She mostly still did.
She ran.
* * *
The superstore was quieter than it should have been when she came through the doors, out of breath, her coat flapping. People were standing in little clusters near the checkouts, talking in low voices. A woman with a toddler was holding her child very tightly. Nobody had called it in yet, or if they had, nobody had come.
Jane followed the cold.
That was the only way she could describe it, afterward. It was like walking into a room where someone had left a window open in winter. It wasn't on her skin. It was somewhere behind her eyes. And it got stronger as she went deeper into the store, past the cereal and the toys, toward the back, until by the time she reached the outdoor section the hair on her arms was standing straight up.
She turned the corner into the fishing aisle, and stopped.
A young man was lying on the floor in front of a glass case of hunting knives. Another young man, in a green store vest, was kneeling beside him with a phone in his hand and a face the color of paper. There was a knife under the shelf. There was a display stand on its side.
And the rack where the fishing rods should have been was completely empty.
Jane looked at that for a moment. She didn't know why. Then she put it out of her mind, and crouched down, and made her voice as calm as she could.
"Hi," she said. "I'm going to need you to tell me exactly what happened here. Can you do that for me?"
* * *
The employee's name was Devin, and he was in shock, and Jane felt a little bad about how useful that was.
He didn't ask who she was. He didn't ask for a badge. He just talked, in a fast, shaky stream, the way people do when the world has just done something it shouldn't. He told her he had found the guy on the floor like this, just now, when he came to stock the new delivery. He told her he'd called the police. He told her the guy was breathing, thank god, but he kept muttering something, and Devin couldn't make out what.
Jane bent down close to the man on the floor. His lips were moving. She listened.
"...still taking," he was whispering. "It's still taking. It's still taking..."
She straightened up slowly, and felt the cold behind her eyes deepen.
"Was there anyone else back here?" she asked. "Before you found him?"
Devin thought about it. He told her about a big guy in camouflage who had bought a crossbow around eleven. A couple of college kids who'd come looking for camping stoves. A guy with a beard and a tattoo on his neck who had stood in front of the hunting knives for ages and then left without buying anything. Jane wrote it all down in the little notebook she had started carrying, the one the quiet man had told her to always carry.
The big one in camouflage, she thought. Or the tattoo.
She had been trained for five days. She knew what she was looking for. Something big. Something that had come back from wherever it had been sent with its edges sharpened, its body hardened, its temper on a hair trigger. She had already met two of them in the past week, and both of them had looked like that: like they had walked out of a war and kept walking.
"Do you have cameras?" she asked.
* * *
The security office was a cramped little room behind the electronics counter, with a bank of monitors and a big guard with a shaved head who looked at Jane's face, and at Devin's, and let them in without a word. He looked like he hadn't been having a good afternoon either.
He pulled up the footage for her. The camera in the fishing aisle was useless. It was mounted on the wrong end, pointed down the main walkway, and caught nothing but the edge of the empty rack and a slice of the hunting case. Jane watched the big man in camouflage walk past with his crossbow at 11:04. She watched the tattooed man stand in front of the knives at 11:30, and leave at 11:41. She watched the young man in the gray hoodie arrive at 12:52, and stand, and stand, and stand.
Then, at 13:06, someone else came into the edge of the frame and stopped beside him, mostly out of shot. She could see a shoulder. An arm. Nothing else.
Thirty seconds later, the young man in the hoodie lunged out of frame. Then nothing. Then, at 13:08, the edge of the shoulder moved away.
"Who's that?" Jane said.
Devin leaned forward, frowning at the screen. "Oh. That's—" He stopped. "That's just the fishing rod guy."
"The what?"
"There was this guy," Devin said slowly. "Skinny. About my age. He came in looking for a fishing rod. I told him we were sold out." He hesitated, and something crossed his face, something Jane couldn't quite read. "He didn't answer when I talked to him on his way out. That's all. Kind of rude. I didn't think—I mean, look at him. He's just some guy. He'd hurt his arm or something."
Jane looked at the edge of the shoulder on the screen. A thin arm in a plain jacket, wrapped from the shoulder down in something black, like a makeshift bandage. Somebody hurt. Nothing at all like a soldier.
She almost moved on.
"Is there a camera at the exit?" she asked instead.
* * *
There was.
The guard found it for her: 13:11, the main doors, a wide shot from above of the checkouts and the entrance and the gray light of the parking lot beyond. People coming and going. Carts. A woman with a toddler.
And a young man in a plain jacket, walking toward the doors.
Jane watched him come. He was thin, and pale, and unremarkable. Messy dark hair. One hand in his pocket, the arm above it bound in black cloth. He was walking neither fast nor slow, with an easy, rolling step, and there was nothing about him that she would have looked at twice on any street in the city.
Except that everyone else was getting out of his way.
She saw it, and then she couldn't stop seeing it. The woman with the cart pulling her child sharply aside. A man in a suit stepping back into an aisle. The big guard, the same guard who was standing next to her right now, opening his mouth by the electronics counter and closing it again and looking at his feet. None of them seemed to know they were doing it. They just moved, the way water moves around a rock.
Beside her, the guard shifted uncomfortably and said nothing.
"Can you slow it down?" Jane said. "Right there. Where he passes under the camera."
The guard slowed it down.
The young man walked toward the doors in slow motion, one step, then another. And just before he passed beneath the camera, just for a fraction of a second, he lifted his head.
Not toward the camera. Toward the light. As if he were checking the sky.
"Stop," Jane said. "Stop. There."
The guard froze the frame.
The young man's face filled the center of the screen, grainy and gray, his eyes turned slightly upward. And Jane, who had been trained for five days, and had met two of them already, and thought she knew what she was looking for, felt the cold behind her own eyes turn to ice.
It wasn't anything she could have pointed to. His eyes were an ordinary blue, in an ordinary young face. But the look in them was not ordinary at all. It was the look of someone standing on a cliff in the rain, looking out at an empty sea, and not expecting anything to come. It was a look that had been worn into that face by something very long, and very heavy, and very far away.
It was a very old man's look, in a twenty-year-old's eyes.
Jane asked the guard to copy it for her. All of it: the exit camera, the fishing aisle, every second from eleven o'clock until now. He found a memory stick in a drawer and did it without a word, the way people do things when they're in shock and someone calm tells them what to do next. Her hands were perfectly steady when she took it from him. She was a little surprised by that.
* * *
She should have called it in.
She knew that. That was the protocol, the first thing the quiet man had taught her: you find something, you report it, you wait. You don't approach. Not alone. Not ever, until we know what they are.
She stood in the cramped security office with the memory stick in her hand and the frozen face on the monitor in front of her, and thought about it.
She thought about the two she had already met: big, angry, obvious. The association had known what they were from the moment they walked through the door. And she thought about this one, who had walked past a dozen people in a crowded store and made every one of them step out of his way without once raising his eyes.
If she called it in now, with nothing but a grainy picture and a feeling, they would thank her and take it from her, and that would be that. Someone older would go. Someone who knew what they were doing.
And she would never find out what she had just seen.
Just to be sure, she told herself. Just to see. I'll look, and I'll report it, and that will be it.
She put the memory stick in her pocket.
* * *
Out in the store, very faintly, she heard sirens.
"One more thing," Jane said to the guard. "The originals. Delete them. Everything from eleven o'clock on."
He stared at her. "The police are going to want—"
"The police aren't the only ones on their way." She said it gently. She had learned in five days who wore uniforms and who wore suits, and which of them would come for a face like that one. "Please."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned back to the keyboard, and did it. The frozen face on the monitor flickered, and went black.
Jane turned to Devin and the guard, and smiled at them, the kind, tired smile she had been practicing in the mirror all week. Then she took the pen out of her coat pocket.
It looked like any ordinary pen. Matte black, a little heavier than it should have been, with a silver clip. She had been holding it in her hands on the floor of her bathroom on the third day after F-Day, shaking, and she still didn't entirely understand it. But she understood this much.
"Thank you both so much," she said. "You've been really helpful."
She clicked the pen, once, and touched the tip lightly to the back of Devin's hand, and then to the guard's.
It took almost no time at all. Their eyes went soft and unfocused, as if they had both just remembered something they had forgotten to do. For a moment they stood there, blinking slowly, a little puzzled, looking at the empty black screen.
By the time they turned around, Jane was already gone.
She went out through the stockroom and the loading dock, the way she had seen the delivery come in, and slipped through a gap in the fence at the back of the parking lot. Behind her, the sirens were very loud now. Two police cars were swinging into the lot with their lights flashing, and an ambulance behind them.
And behind the ambulance, quiet and unhurried, came a long black van with tinted windows and no markings at all.
Jane didn't stop. She didn't look back. She kept walking, with her hands in the pockets of her coat and her head down, the way the young man on the screen had walked. But at the corner, she glanced over her shoulder, just once.
The black van had stopped beside the store's doors. Its side door was sliding open. Three men in dark suits were stepping out of it, and none of them were in any hurry at all.
Jane turned the corner, and walked faster.
In her pocket, her hand was wrapped tight around her phone, and the face of a very old man in a very young body.