Episode 10 — "Face to Face"
Cold Open
Rain again. Because of course it's fucking raining.
A city bus hisses to a stop at the edge of Ravenwood, doors folding open like a throat. Only one person gets off: Mara Ellison (29), grad student, adjunct who never gets office space, hair matted to her cheeks. She clutches a tote bag to her chest and hustles toward the science annex—the one with the flickering corridor where the motion sensors are slower than grief.
Her phone buzzes.
UNKNOWN: You left your thesis on the 3rd floor printer. Come get it before it gets… wet.
Mara frowns. She didn't print anything.
But the printer light on 3rd is blinking. A fat stack sits in the tray, warm, fresh. Her name is on the cover. She flips pages and realizes it's not a thesis. It's police photos. Amanda's broken body. Nate at the bottom of the stairs. Gordon folded between steel and steel like a love letter from a god. Knox's throat. Her breath fogs the plastic sleeve.
"Who—" she starts to say.
The hallway motion sensor wakes, lights blooming slow as sunrise. At the end of the corridor, a figure in a raincoat lifts its head. White porcelain. Crack down the cheek. The mask tips as if saying hi.
She runs. Of course she runs. She slams through the stairwell door, shoes scraping metal, lungs turning to knives. The exit bar at the ground floor is cold under her palms. She shoves.
Doesn't budge.
Her phone buzzes again.
UNKNOWN: Tap, tap.
Someone taps the mask on the glass from the other side of the locked exit. Twice. The sound is light, intimate, wrong.
Mara backs away, hand slapping the wall for purchase. The stairwell lights die with a click like a tongue against teeth.
Dark. The smell of rain and copper.
"Please," she whispers, just to be a person one last time.
The white oval floats closer in the little rectangle window. The crack glints. A gloved hand lifts, places something against the glass: a laminated photo. It's Jason Hale. It's always fucking Jason.
The last thing Mara hears is her own name, conversational, from the dark behind her—like someone greeting a coworker in a break room.
"Hey, Mara."
Cut to black.
Title Card: THE STALKER.
⸻
Act I — Shrapnel Morning
Jason Hale hasn't slept in so long that sleep is a rumor. His dorm room is a wreck of dried blood (Knox's), burned drywall (Ryan's bomb), and ash (Jason's cigarettes) pretending to be decor.
Ryan hovers in the doorway, backpack on, eyes bruised. "You're… going to class?"
Jason shrugs into a jacket and doesn't answer because the word class feels obscene. Elena, sitting on the bed tying her boots, cuts Ryan a look that says don't start. Still, Ryan starts.
"We're not Avengers, man. We're fucked-up college kids with trauma and a crowbar."
"Correct," Jason says, flat. "And a plan."
Elena straightens. "What plan?"
Jason fishes a Ziploc from his jacket and drops it on the bed. Inside: a keycard with a blue stripe. The Ravenwood Security Access logo winks from the corner.
"Where'd you—" Ryan begins.
"Loaner," Jason says. "From a guard with a gambling problem and a soft spot for cash that isn't traceable."
Elena's eyes narrow. "We're stealing camera access."
"We're borrowing camera access," Jason corrects, deadpan. "Then we wipe the loan."
He's joking. He isn't joking.
They move.
⸻
Act II — The Crawlspace
The security hub is in the bowels of the admin building: one bland door, a laminated "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" sign that has never once stopped a determined idiot, and a coffee machine with church social energy.
Inside, two rows of monitors show Ravenwood from angles students pretend not to exist: stairwell eyes, cafeteria ceilings, the quad's cruel vantage where people are patterns. One monitor is black, a "NO SIGNAL" box drifting screensaver-slow. Jason notes it. He notes everything.
Elena keeps the guard busy with a perfect journalist blend of flirt and righteous complaint about broken emergency phones, while Jason slips the blue stripe across the card reader, slides onto a stool, and starts scrubbing.
He hunts the last twelve hours. Library annex. Science building. Dorms. Theater skeleton, still smoldering. He runs it like a chess engine: input, filter, flag.
Then there—science annex, 02:13 a.m. A figure in a raincoat enters with a university facilities badge, flashes it half-assed at the camera like muscle memory. Height medium, left knee slight hitch, right shoulder favoring. The mask isn't on yet; hood is. The camera catches one clean angle of the jaw—a scar along the mandible, old, pale.
Jason freezes the frame. Enlarges. The pixels hate him. He writes scar right jaw on a scrap.
Two minutes later, the same cam shows Mara hitting the stairwell at speed, shoving the exit bar. Jason feels the denial wash his bloodstream: don't be her, don't be anyone. It is always someone.
The next angle—stairwell cam—goes to black for exactly forty-five seconds. When it returns, the door is propped with a wedge and wet footprints wander out like a child's game. Jason tracks them across feeds: down the hall, past a motion sensor that wakes late, out the east exit that somehow wasn't locked for the killer.
He rewinds, checks, runs it again.
"It's a patchwork," he mutters. "They don't own the system, they just… stitch through it. Kill the right cams, spoof the right doors. A string of small cheats."
Vance appears in the doorway like a weather front, raincoat dripping, eyes saying I haven't slept and I will pretend I can. She clocks the keycard in Jason's hand, the paused feed, the guard laughing at something Elena said, and doesn't explode. That's growth.
"You two adopt a security hub?" she asks.
"Borrowed," Jason says mildly.
Vance's jaw works. "Mara Ellison. You saw?"
Jason nods once.
Vance's voice goes softer than he's heard. "She TA'd for me last fall. Ran attendance because I can't be arsed. She liked shitty peppermint coffee and bad true-crime podcasts."
Elena stares at the paused frame—jawline, scar, cheap raincoat. "We can find him."
"Maybe," Vance says. She points at the NO SIGNAL monitor. "What's that one?"
"East quad lamppost," the guard says from the doorway, apologetic. "Been dead a week. We put in a ticket. Budget."
The killer doesn't own the system; the system gives itself away. The voids are where he chooses to move.
Jason pockets the keycard, replaces it with a fresh fifty on the desk. "We're done," he says.
"You are not done," Vance returns. "You are citizens who will go to class and cry in bathrooms like God intended while I do the job the city pays me for."
Jason is halfway into a comeback when his phone buzzes. It's not the Unknown number.
It's Ryan.
RYAN: It's him.
RYAN: In the dorm.
RYAN: Bathroom mirror fog. "Knock knock."
Jason is out the door before anyone else's body remembers how to be legs.
⸻
Act III — Knock Knock
Second-floor men's bathroom, tile that never remembers clean, fluorescent lights with terminal illness. Ryan stands shaking by the sinks, a hunting knife in his hand that looks like it belongs to a braver version of him. Over the large mirror, words written in fog, fat and childish:
KNOCK KNOCK
Jason's chest hollows. "You didn't touch it?"
Ryan's laugh is a bark. "Do I look stupid?"
Elena squints. "He writes in fog, not blood, because fog erases itself. No trace. No DNA. He wanted you to see it before it's gone."
Vance is on the way—Jason hears her on the radio, barking room numbers like bullets. He knows what she'll say when she gets here: back away, let the lab, let procedure. He has thirty seconds before authority arrives and closes doors.
Jason studies the mirror's edges. Along the top lip, barely visible except at a slant, a smear. He drags a fingertip—grease. He smells it—petroleum jelly. The kind you rub on a surface to make condensation cling in patterns.
"He stenciled it," Jason says. "He designed the moisture. The words aren't just breath. He prep'd the glass, came in early, came back later to… write."
"To watch," Elena says.
A stall door creaks. They all pivot—Ryan raises the knife like a kid who has never raised a knife. A toilet refills on its own; a paper square flutters onto tile. No one breathes right for five seconds.
Then the fire alarm howls and the building shudders. Corridor screams. The world goes red strobe.
Jason's phone buzzes.
UNKNOWN: Time for class.
He runs. Not toward the stairs everyone else is pounding, but the service corridor that maintenance uses when systems fail—the one he found when the heat detector lied in Rare Books.
Elena curses and follows. Ryan calls them both insane and follows anyway.
⸻
Act IV — Auditorium
The fire panel map in the service hall blinks three zones: NAT SCIENCE 2, ADMIN WEST, AUDITORIUM. Three different buildings. Either a real fire is playing hopscotch or someone wants people where people will be easy to choreograph.
Jason picks Auditorium, because the killer loves a stage and Jason knows the smell of inevitability.
They hit the side doors and shoulder in.
The place is already half-full of panicking students herded by an RA with a reflective vest as useful as prayer. The house lights are up. The curtain hangs crooked. On stage, under a spotlight, stands a single chair with a black duffel on it and a piece of paper taped to the backrest:
JASON
"Don't," Elena says. "It's a bomb."
"It's a message," Jason says, and walks down the aisle.
Vance hits the far door in time to see him hit the front row. "Hale! Stop!"
Jason climbs onto the stage. The duffel hums—low, a mechanical purr. He opens it. Inside: not explosives. Projectors. Three of them. Portable, battery packs rigged to run hot. All aimed at the scrim behind the curtain.
He looks at Vance. "He wants us to watch."
Vance swears in a way that makes two freshmen cover their mouths.
Jason hits PLAY.
The scrim wakes, the fabric becomes a screen, and a video floods the room. Three panels side by side, triple nightmare:
Left: Jason and Elena in the auto shop last night, bodies lit by fire, his hands red, her mouth open in a scream he didn't hear then.
Center: Ryan sleep-walking into the closet, eyes open and wrong, candles guttering sideways.
Right: Knox, young, in 1975, standing in grayscale in front of the library with three other kids. The killer has colorized only the blood on the tarp at their feet. It glows.
Gasps ripple the hall. Whispers: that's him, that's the transfer, that's the freak, that's the hero, that's the reason people die. Jason feels the room turn like a tide.
Then the panels flicker to live.
Left goes to the auditorium itself, camera somewhere high behind the house, showing the audience watching themselves. Students point, wave at their own tiny figures like the dumb animals we are.
Center goes to Elena—not here Elena, but a feed from her dorm, her bedroom, the lens inside the air vent, angled at the door. The room is empty. The bed is neatly made. The door begins to open on its own.
Right goes to Jason's dorm room. The closet. The words on the inside of the door visible: WELCOME TO RAVENWOOD. The camera is low. Someone breathes close.
"Shut it down," Vance says.
Jason doesn't. He can't. The hook is in too deep.
A figure in a raincoat steps into Elena's room on the center panel. Hood up. Mask on. Head tilting, that mocking bird motion. It lifts something and places it on her desk. A little music box. It begins to turn. The sound is tinny, sweet, psychotic.
Elena's hand crushes Jason's sleeve. "We left it locked—how—"
"Because doors are ideas, not barriers," Jason says, hating that he admires the craft. "Because he lives in the space between rules."
On the right panel, Jason's closet door creaks. A shape moves from inside: Ryan, eyes open, gagged again, rope dark with water. He tries to speak around the cloth. The feed's mic picks up the world's smallest help.
"Ryan's with us," Elena whispers.
Jason's blood runs cold. "He left us. When the alarm hit. He—he said he had to piss—"
Vance is already on the radio, voice clipped. "Dispatch, I need units at Hale's dorm, at Elena Cruz's dorm, now now now."
The left panel—the auditorium POV—pulls back. Not a camera. A drone. It lifts soundless toward the ceiling and points down. On the stage, next to the projector array, sits a case Jason didn't notice. It hums on a different frequency. The screen cuts to a graphic:
CHOOSE:
• SAVE HIM
• SAVE HER
• SAVE THEMSELVES
A three-way button glows on the case. The audience murmurs like a flock.
"Step away," Vance says, gun at low ready, eyes flicking between Jason and the case like she's choosing which child to catch. "It's a riddle with a death at the end, and I am out of funerals."
Jason reads the mechanism in one pass: three circuits, all live; two decoys that would detonate—what? The case? The projectors? The sprinklers maybe, bleached into gas? The third routes to… something else.
"He wants me to freeze," Jason says. "He wants me to carry the weight of picking who dies until I snap in half."
Elena, voice raw: "We aren't playing his fucking quiz."
"Correct," Jason says, and kicks the case off the stage.
It explodes.
Not shrapnel. Not fire. Ink. Black viscous slurry geysers up, sheet-coating the first three rows. Students scream. The drone swoops and smears. The screens are drowned. The three panels go black, then text appears in white, handwriting familiar as a scar:
GOOD BOY. NOW RUN.
The side exit blows as if something just outside has been waiting its whole life to enter. Smoke rolls in, dense and grey. The fire alarm cuts again; strobe lights turn the world into frames for a murder.
Vance throws herself between the smoke and the nearest aisle, bellowing: "MOVE! OUT THAT SIDE! HANDS UP! DON'T FALL!"
Jason grabs Elena and hauls. People crush people the way people always do. The drone dips low and clips an RA in the ear; blood paints a stripe across a cheek that will scar. Jason bats it away with the duffel, and it pinwheels into the curtains and dies spitting sparks.
They spill into the loading hallway—the one with the cold concrete and the smell of mop water and old plywood. Someone cries, "He's there—" and points.
He is.
The mask is at the end of the corridor, backlit by the red strobe, raincoat dripping, one hand resting casual on a metal service cart. The other hand holds a taser with a blue arc that tastes like pennies.
Elena says, "Jason—" and doesn't finish because Jason is already moving.
"Police!" Vance roars behind, weapon up.
The mask doesn't run. It waits. When Jason is ten feet away, it taps the cart with two fingers—tap tap—and shoves.
The cart rolls toward them. It hits a seam in the concrete and lifts just enough to show the underside—packed with glass, glue, and something that looks like dog whistles welded to CO₂ cartridges. A sound bomb in a suicide vest for furniture.
"DOWN!" Jason shouts, and takes Elena with him.
The cart detonates. Not fire. Sound. A pressure wave blows their ears inside out; the hallway becomes a bell swallowed by a gun. Jason's vision whites. Vance's shout goes silent; her mouth moves, her body keeps moving—a pro who has had her hearing stolen before.
The mask walks through the fog of falling glass like a Sunday aisle. Jason forces himself upright on a vertigo deck, swings a punch at a world that wobbles.
The masked figure catches his wrist.
They are face to face.
Up close, the ceramic has hairline webbing. The crack over the cheek is deeper than he realized. Behind the eyeholes, a human eye blinks—brown, steady, amused. A smell leaks from the hood: bleach, rain, and a cologne that wants to be expensive and isn't.
The figure leans in, helmet-soft voice barely audible through the ringing: "Hi, Jason."
It's not a distortion. It's a human speaking like humans do. The voice is… familiar adjacent. Not a stranger's cadence. A campus cadence. Someone who has waited in lines, handed in forms, said thanks to baristas like a costume.
Jason slams his head forward, catching ceramic. The mask cracks another inch. The figure laughs—not hurt, delighted. The taser kisses Jason's ribs. Pain climbs his spine, claws into his jaw, drags his body to the floor in a seizure that doesn't end until it decides to.
The masked figure kneels, sets the taser down like a gift, and speaks low for only Jason.
"Every time you choose, you become me. Every time you refuse, I become you. That's the lesson Knox failed to teach."
A boot steps between them.
Vance, up, eyes murderous, gun aimed at the mask's heart. Her voice is thunder now, audible through the after-ring: "Hands where I can fucking see them."
The masked figure looks up at her. Then at Elena, kneeling over Jason, eyes riot-bright. Then back to Jason. A gloved hand rises—slow, theater—and finds the chin of the mask.
Jason forgets to breathe.
The hand tugs. The mask lifts… a millimeter. Stops.
The figure's head tilts. A smile lives under there; he feels it even without skin. The hand leaves the chin and moves to the side of the mask, where a thin wire disappears into the hood. A tiny red LED blinks like a heartbeat.
"Don't," Vance says. She means don't pull, she means don't leave us another fucking bomb.
The figure obeys.
It doesn't pull.
It presses.
A sharp pop from the mask's cheek. A puff of powder white as lies. The ceramic flakes like dandruff. The wire goes dark. Whatever dead-man cheap trick was rigged into the mask's reveal is now… disarmed? Burned? Useless.
The figure holds Jason's gaze another long beat, as if saying: See? I could have died to deny you. I chose not to. Because this only works if you know I'm touchable.
Then it moves.
Not a run. A sidestep. A twist through a knot of kids. A palm on a fire door bar. Rain explodes into the hall and the figure is gone into it, like it rehearsed water as a second skin.
Vance launches after, shoulders through, slips, almost eats concrete, catches herself with a curse that invents a new tense. By the time she clears the door to asphalt, the hood and the white are a rumor accelerating into night.
Jason lies there breathing glass and rage. Elena's hands are on his face, pulling him back to earth. "Stay with me, idiot. Hey. Hey."
He sits up, stomach turning, vision ghosted with white gnats. He looks at the mask powder on his chest. He scoops some. It's chalky, cheap ceramic, not museum-grade. He rubs it between thumb and finger until it becomes nothing. His ribs throb where the taser wrote its name.
Vance returns from the rain, fury disciplined back into cop posture. "He had a blast-mask," she says. "He rigged it to blow if anybody else unmasked him. Then he… turned it off in front of you." She looks at Jason like he is the second bomb.
Jason's mouth is a line. "He wants me chasing a person, not a symbol. He wants to be a he now."
"Or he wants you to think he's a he," Elena says, voice rough. "How many people own a jaw scar and a discount cologne?"
"All the ones who matter soon," Vance answers, and for once the gallows line doesn't land.
Screams ebb. Sirens approach. Sprinklers finally cough to useless life in a room that no longer burns. The projectors on the stage sputter ink and die.
Jason stands. He sways. He stands anyway. Rain blows in through the open door and paints his face, cleans nothing.
His phone buzzes on the stage where he dropped it. He limps up steps he doesn't remember seeing and picks it up with fingers that don't deserve fine motor control.
UNKNOWN: Face to face. Feel better?
Jason stares through the screen like it could bleed.
He types with both thumbs, careful, slow, surgical.
You turned off the dead-man. You want me to see you.
The dots appear. Stop. Appear.
UNKNOWN: I want you to understand. You were born for this. Knox was supposed to teach you. He choked. I won't.
Jason's laugh is a blade. He types: You're sloppy. Right jaw scar. Right shoulder favoring. Left knee hitch. You smell like bleach and a $30 bottle trying to be $100. You walk like campus staff. You pushed a service cart like you've done it for years.
A beat. Then:
UNKNOWN: Good boy. Keep up.
Jason's thumbs hover.
Next time I pull the mask.
UNKNOWN: Next time, you won't need to.
Three dots. Gone.
Jason lowers the phone and finally lets the shake through. It rides him like weather and leaves him colder.
Elena steps beside him, shoulder to shoulder, not touching, touching everything. "We have features now. Scar. Gait. Smell. Job. We can narrow this to a list."
"Yep," Jason says, voice empty and iron at once. "We make a list. We visit every name on it. We learn their lives and break their alibis and empty their closets."
Vance, from the aisle, watches them both like they are a team she didn't draft and can't bench. "And when you land on the wrong one and ruin a life?"
Jason's eyes finally meet hers. They are beyond soft now. They are beyond hard. They are a new thing.
"Then I apologize to the living," he says. "And bury the right one."
Vance opens her mouth. Shuts it. The job teaches you when to argue and when to pick up bodies. She holsters, rolls her shoulders like pain is home. "Fine. We do it together. No more cowboy shit. You go nowhere without me or a uniform. Your phones stay on. You sleep in a place with a camera I control. If you ghost me, I will actually arrest you for fucking obstruction."
Jason nods once. "Deal."
Elena blows a seething strand of hair off her face. "We start with facilities. Scar. Height. Schedule. Guys who push carts like they're part of their skeleton."
"Custodial rosters, maintenance payroll, contractor sign-ins," Vance lists. "I'll subpoena. You two will read. Slowly. With snacks. And showers."
Ryan appears at the side door, soaked, pale, holding his stomach. "I puked," he announces, then adds, small, "but I'm not leaving."
Jason almost smiles. Fails. "Welcome to class."
Onstage, the scrim still holds a ghost of the three panes, ink drying into patterns that won't quite be black tomorrow. The house smells like chlorine, rain, cheap cologne, and a foam of fear that will stick in the vents for years.
Outside, the rain is downshifting to drizzle. The campus exhales as if that matters.
Somewhere, in a window Jason can't see yet, a person with a right-jaw scar strips off a ruined mask and sets it gently in a sink. They wash their hands until the water runs colder than good sense. In the mirror, a face looks back that could pass on a quad and ask for directions. The mouth smiles without reaching eyes.
They text one more thing before bed.
UNKNOWN: Midterms are coming.
Jason's phone pings.
He doesn't write back.
He just picks up the crowbar he left on the apron, and this time when he closes his fist around it, it feels like shaking hands with an old friend.