You see yourself on day thirty-five.

Not in a mirror — you've been avoiding mirrors since the greenhouse, since the supplements started working and your body started recovering from shifts that cost days instead of hours. Mirrors show you things you're not ready to catalogue. Mirrors have opinions.

The screen in the shop window doesn't have opinions. It has footage.

You're walking past a commercial strip in the western edge of District 7, scrambler on, coveralls zipped, HENG on the pocket. Normal route, normal pace, normal everything. Then your peripheral vision catches movement on a wall-screen and your feet slow before your brain catches up, because the movement is yours. Not you now — you from weeks ago. The dashcam clip, the one from the fence, eight seconds of a girl in an oversized T-shirt doing something no untrained civilian should be able to do.

But that's not what stops you.

What stops you is the image next to it. A composite — someone has taken the blurry dashcam frame and run it through enhancement software. The girl on the screen is sharper now. Clearer. Dark hair. Bare feet. A face caught mid-sprint with an expression that sits somewhere between terror and calculation.

Below the enhanced image, text scrolls:

GREMLIN WATCH: 42 DAYS — STILL UNIDENTIFIED — WHO IS SHE?

And below that, a carousel of user-generated content. Fan art. Memes. A cartoon version of you stealing boots from a stick-figure soldier. A conspiracy thread with seventeen nested replies arguing about whether you're a rogue Evol, a government experiment, or an alien. Someone has made stickers — your silhouette mid-vault, with text that reads "GREMLIN MODE" in blocky lettering.

They've branded you. They gave you a brand.

You look at the enhanced image. At the girl on the screen. She's thinner than you remember being. Sharper in the jaw. There's something in her eyes that wasn't there before — not hardness exactly, but a distance. A wall behind the pupils.

You look at your reflection in the shop window, superimposed over the screen. The girl on the glass is thinner than the girl in the footage. Sharper. The coveralls hang differently than they did a month ago. Your hands are leaner. Your cheekbones have opinions they didn't have in your old life.

You don't recognise yourself. Not fully. Not the way you used to recognise yourself in bathroom mirrors at home, in the reflection of the microwave door while you waited for your coffee, in the car window when he picked you up from work. That girl — the one with the soft jaw and the clean hair and the ring on her finger — she's somewhere behind the glass, behind the footage, behind forty-two days of running and shifting and eating whatever the greenhouse produces and sleeping in boots.

You're looking at what survival made.

You walk away. You don't look back at the screen. You adjust the scrambler's range and you keep your head down and you think: forty-two days and they still don't have a name. Keep it that way.

---

The problem with being public property is that everybody owns a piece of you.

You track it through your network tap. The feeds are constant now — not just the original clip, but an entire ecosystem built around eight seconds of blurry footage. There are forums dedicated to identifying you. Fan accounts that post daily updates on Hunter Association activity in District 7, looking for patterns, trying to predict where you'll appear next.

Someone has mapped your known movements onto a city grid. It's wrong — the data points are too old and your scrambler keeps you off the recent feeds — but the methodology is sound. These people are doing open-source intelligence on a girl in coveralls and they're not terrible at it.

There are theories:

She's a test subject from Gaia Labs, escaped during a containment breach.

She's a foreign agent from the Northern Federation, conducting asymmetric warfare.

She's an AI construct. Nobody real moves like that.

She's just a girl who got unlucky and got good at running.

The last one is closest. The last one is also the most dangerous, because it makes you sympathetic, and sympathetic means more people looking, more people paying attention, more people treating your survival like a spectator sport.

The Hunter Association has noticed the attention.

Your network tap catches the update on day thirty-seven: the incident file has been upgraded. Not just the bench incident — the whole thing. All of it. Someone in the Association's intelligence division has connected the dots. The barefoot girl from the dashcam. The unidentified Evol from the bench. The Wanderer fight in the metro. The electromagnetic anomaly from the intersection on day twenty-nine.

D7-2048 — CONSOLIDATED — EVOL(CONFIRMED) — POLYMORPH(SUSPECTED) — THREAT: ELEVATED — STATUS: PRIORITY

Priority.

You read the word three times. You read the classification: polymorph suspected. They have a word for what you are. Or what they think you are. You don't know if they're right — you don't know what a polymorph is in this city's taxonomy, what it means for classification, what it means for how they hunt you.

You know what priority means. Priority means more patrols. More scanners. More resources allocated to finding a girl in coveralls whose face is on every screen in the district.

Ever Group's involvement is new. You catch their signature in the data — not public, not visible, but woven into the Hunter Association's resource allocation like thread in fabric. Additional drone coverage over District 7. Enhanced scanning protocols for electromagnetic anomalies. A funding line that doesn't have a public justification.

Someone with money wants to find you. Not just the Association, with their open files and their incident reports. Someone behind the Association, with deeper pockets and quieter methods.

You upgrade the scrambler. You change your route to the warehouse. You stop using the gallery shortcut — the painting is a luxury you can't afford anymore.

---

Day thirty-nine. You're coming back from the warehouse at two in the morning, pockets heavy with Dao's cash, scrambler humming, boots quiet on the pavement. Normal night. Normal route — the new one, the longer one that avoids the commercial strip and the cameras and the particular intersection where the Gremlin Watch forum has placed three observation posts.

The alley is a shortcut. Not your usual shortcut — you rotate them, never the same one twice in a week. This one runs between two industrial buildings, narrow, dark, no cameras. You've used it four times. It's clean.

Your scanner goes amber.

Not red — not a Wanderer, not an Evol. Amber. Proximity alert. Multiple signals, moving in formation, converging from the south end of the alley.

You stop. Listen. The city hums. The industrial buildings hum. And underneath both hums, something else — footsteps. Coordinated. The particular rhythm of people who've trained to move together.

Hunters.

Not a patrol. A patrol is two people walking a route, checking boxes, filing reports. This is a team. You can hear the difference — the spacing between footsteps, the absence of conversation, the way they move with purpose instead of routine.

They're not here by accident. Someone flagged this alley. Someone mapped your rotation pattern and got close enough to predict which shortcut you'd use tonight.

You turn. North end of the alley — your exit. Three steps and you freeze.

More footsteps. Coming from the north. Same rhythm. Same spacing. Same absence of conversation.

They've boxed you.

Your body starts the calculation before your brain finishes panicking. The alley is six metres wide. The walls are smooth concrete — industrial, no handholds, no fire escapes, no drainage pipes wide enough to fit through. There's a loading dock on the east wall, metal shutters locked. Above you, the gap between buildings shows a strip of dark sky and the underside of a drone — small, quiet, the kind that runs on batteries instead of protocore cells.

The drone isn't yours.

Your scrambler is on. Your scanner is amber. Your body is offering options — the pulling sensation in your calves, the electromagnetic hum under your skin, the menu of things you could become if you let your cells make the choice.

You clamp down on all of it. Not here. Not now. The last shift cost you three days. Another shift in a narrow alley surrounded by Hunters with scanners would light up every detection grid in the district. Even if you escaped, they'd have your energy signature. They'd have proof.

You need a different way out.

The footsteps get closer. South end — four, maybe five people. North end — at least three. Your scanner is counting signals and the numbers aren't good. Eight operatives for one girl in coveralls. That's not a search party. That's a takedown team.

Then the world goes white.

Not your vision — the alley. The actual alley fills with light. Pure, blinding, the kind of white that doesn't come from a flashlight or a flare or anything battery-powered. It's too clean. Too complete. It fills every corner and casts no shadows and it lasts exactly two seconds.

Two seconds is enough.

The Hunters shout — you hear them, south and north, voices breaking formation as the light hits. The drone overhead stutters, its sensors overloaded. Your scanner flashes wildly, cycling through colours it doesn't have classifications for.

And in those two seconds, the loading dock shutter clicks.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a small, mechanical sound — the lock disengaging, the shutter lifting three inches off the ground. Enough to see darkness on the other side. Enough to fit under if you flatten yourself against the concrete.

You don't think about it. You drop. You roll under the shutter. Your coveralls scrape against concrete and the shutter edge catches your scrambler and for one horrible second you're stuck — half in, half out, the light already fading, the Hunters already recovering.

You rip free. The scrambler's casing cracks but the device holds. You're through.

Inside: a loading bay. Dark. Cold. The shutter drops behind you with a sound that's too soft to be gravity alone. Someone closed it.

You run.

Through the loading bay, through a service corridor, through a fire exit that opens onto a parallel street. You run for six blocks before you stop. You crouch behind a delivery van and you breathe.

Your hands aren't shaking. Your nose isn't bleeding. Your body didn't shift. Whatever happened in that alley — the light, the shutter, the two-second window — it wasn't you.

Someone else did that.

You check the scrambler. Cracked casing, but the circuitry is intact. You'll need to repair it. You check the scanner. The amber is gone — no signals in range. The Hunters are six blocks south, probably still standing in a bright alley wondering what just happened.

You sit behind the delivery van and you think about the light. Pure white. No source. No shadows. Two seconds of perfect blindness for everyone except you — because you weren't blinded. The light didn't touch your eyes. It was aimed at them. Specifically, precisely at them, and specifically, precisely not at you.

That's not technology. That's not a malfunction. That's a person. An Evol with a light-based ability and the control to weaponize it in a six-metre alley without catching the target in the blast.

The crosses. The shutter. The flash. Someone has been watching you for weeks — warning you about sweeps, leaving marks in condensation, and now, when the warnings aren't enough, stepping in directly. Still invisible. Still anonymous. Still refusing to show a face.

You should be grateful. You are grateful. You're also calculating: whoever this is has been close enough to track your alley rotation, close enough to unlock a loading dock at exactly the right moment, close enough to aim a light blast with surgical precision in a narrow corridor full of armed operatives.

That's not distant surveillance. That's someone standing right there. Three metres away, maybe less, close enough to smell the blood on your coveralls and the nutrient paste on your breath, and you never saw them.

You add a note to your steno:

Day thirty-nine. Light. Loading dock. Not mine. Same person as the crosses? Flash — Evol ability — light-based. Controlled. Precise. Protected me without revealing themselves.

Three warnings. One direct intervention. Pattern: escalation matches threat level. They're adapting to my situation in real time.

I need to find them before someone else does.

You don't sleep that night. You repair the scrambler, upgrade the scanner's detection range, and start building a new tool — something that can trace residual light signatures. Not to find whoever is helping you. To make sure nobody else can find them either.

---

Day forty-one. The news feeds update.

The Hunter Association releases a public statement: the Gremlin investigation has been transferred from District 7 local command to the Association's central intelligence division. Dedicated task force. Enhanced resources. Public cooperation requested.

Your face — the enhanced composite, sharper than the dashcam blur but still not quite right — appears on every wall-screen in the transit system. Not as a meme this time. Not as entertainment. As a wanted notice.

UNIDENTIFIED EVOL — SIGNIFICANT PUBLIC INTEREST — INFORMATION REWARD OFFERED

They're offering money. Not a lot — the amount suggests caution, not urgency, a government agency testing whether crowdsourced intelligence can find what their own teams can't. But money is money, and in a city where everyone has a wrist-screen and everyone watches the news, money turns civilians into cameras.

The street vendor who sold you the waterproof jacket might remember your face. Dao at the warehouse might connect the girl on the screen to the girl who lifts boxes at night. The people at the restaurant skip might notice that the food disappears at three in the morning and put two and two together.

You've been invisible because nobody was looking. Now everybody is looking.

You sit in the greenhouse, in the dead section, with your boots laced and your scanner humming and your steno notebooks stacked against the wall, and you calculate how long you have before someone puts it together. The scrambler protects you from cameras, not from eyes. The coveralls make you anonymous in a crowd, not in a neighbourhood where the same girl walks the same streets at the same hours.

Your options contract.

Option one: run. Leave District 7 entirely. Find a new district, a new nest, a new warehouse job. Start over. You've done it before — the metro tunnel, the scrapheap, the greenhouse. You can do it again.

Option two: go deeper underground. Stop the warehouse job. Stop scavenging from the restaurant skip. Live entirely off the greenhouse plants. Reduce your surface area to zero. Become a ghost.

Option three: keep doing exactly what you're doing and hope the scrambler, the coveralls, and the particular anonymity of a maintenance worker named HENG are enough to keep you invisible in a city that's actively looking for you.

None of these options are good. Option one loses you the greenhouse — the food, the supplements, the stability that's keeping your body functional. Option two loses you the warehouse — the cash, the contact, the thin tether to something that feels like a normal life. Option three is gambling, and gambling with people who have drones and scanners and a dedicated task force is the kind of gamble that ends in a cell.

You stare at your steno. Six notebooks. Forty-one days of learning, building, surviving. Everything you know about this city, compressed into spider-ink shorthand that nobody in this world can read.

There's a fourth option. It's been sitting in your notebooks for weeks, growing in the margins like mould, and you've been ignoring it because it requires something you don't want to give.

Trust.

The person leaving crosses. The person who lit up an alley to save your life. The person who unlocked a loading dock at exactly the right moment and closed it behind you and never showed their face. They have resources. Access. The kind of infrastructure that could shelter you from a dedicated task force — or deliver you to one.

You don't know which.

You close the notebook. You lie down. Your boots are laced. Your scanner hums.

Forty-one days. Somewhere in this city, someone is watching you through a spectrum you can't detect, leaving warnings you can't trace, and saving your life with a light that casts no shadows.

You don't trust them. You can't afford to trust them. Trust is a currency you spent a long time ago, on a bench with a dying woman, and the exchange rate in this city is worse than anything you've ever seen.

But the alley. The light. The two seconds.

You add one more line to the steno:

Fourth option: let them find me. On my terms.

You underline it. Then you cross it out. Then you underline it again.

Day forty-one.