They call it tailing when the second shadow keeps pace with yours without stepping into the light. They call it stalking when it happens to other people. I call it a problem set with breathing. The first time I noticed the presence it was a mistake on his part — a footstep that lingered half a beat too long behind mine on the subway stairs, the only discordant measure in an otherwise precise rhythm. After that, the variable smoothed into a pattern. Patterns are problems you can solve.
I start the day with coffee that's too bitter and a mind already enumerating options. No theatrics. No paranoia. Things worth worrying about announce themselves politely: messages without signatures, deviations in guard rotations, sudden interest in otherwise empty addresses. This one had been patient. Patient, and stupid. Stupidity is useful. It reveals itself.
"Pierce," my handler says when the burner vibrates, voice flat as a stone in a river. "We picked up chatter. You know the drill."
"I know," I reply. Saying less sharpens it into a fact. "He's been following me for a week. Not me, exactly. My pattern."
"Keep your head down. Don't engage unless necessary. If you can lose him, lose him," the handler says.
"And if I can't?" My words are a measured blade.
A pause. "Contain, then eliminate. Preferably the first. If not—then ensure deniability." He doesn't need to explain what deniability looks like. I've practiced that vocabulary my whole life.
I hang up. Conversation points filed. I make a plan that isn't a plan so much as a set of constraints: where I will be, what timeframes are safe, what sounds I'll allow into my world. Then I move through the day like a prism, letting light fall where it will and reading the spectrum.
At school Ryan notices my sharper jaw. "You look like you swallowed a dictionary," he jokes, then winces because his jokes are half prayers and full of noise.
Claire slaps his arm. "Don't be an asshole. Pierce, you okay?"
"Fine," I say. Watching her, I keep count of the freckle on her wrist, the way she tucks hair behind her ear when she's nervous, the cadence of her laugh. Small things matter because later they're anchors. She leans in. "Promise you'll come to the party Friday. No killing each other. Just karaoke and bad decisions."
"You like bad decisions," Ryan says. "Save one for me."
She grins at him. "Only the best for you."
There's comfort in their uselessness. It sticks to me the way a coat clings to shoulders in damp weather. I tuck it away with everything else, then leave for the afternoon with the knowledge of a shadow that has been following me for days.
The first attempt to flush him out is conversational. I arrange to meet someone at a public café, in a corner where the windows present a thousand tiny reflections. He appears five minutes after I do, shiny jacket, standard haircut, eyes polite. Not a professional's face — too soft, too eager — but confident enough to wear complacency like an accessory. He thinks tailing is an art of proximity. He's wrong.
A conversation begins without hotspots: a compliment here, a shrug there, laughter to fill the space. My companion in the café is a contact who knows how to be boring, and boring is a kind of weapon. We speak of weather, the silly new coffee trend, a teacher's annoying habit. Small talk is often the cleanest place to watch for tremors. The man's eyes flick to me like a metronome. He's keeping tempo. He's waiting for something — for the moment I look away, for a phone call that confirms, for an error in my pattern that lets him close the distance.
I let him wait.
After we leave the café I split from my contact on purpose, a simple crossover that should frustrate and confuse him. He follows, of course. A tail is most confident when it believes itself unseen. I test the distance, I vary my pace, I let a public bus create noise that erases small sounds. He adjusts. He mimics. The psychology of mimicry is always telling — when someone copies, they're not leading; they're responding.
I stop at a crosswalk and pretend to tie my shoe. He hesitates a beat and steps to cover the side I just vacated. Predictable. But the world is full of predictable things waiting to be used. He slips a phone from his pocket and keys a message. He's a man who thinks in signals and confirmations.
A hand on my shoulder. The touch is light, deliberate. "You shouldn't be alone," a voice murmurs at my ear. Not the tail's voice. I spin, not in panic but in crisp, rehearsed motion. The man is there now, close enough that I can see the pattern of his irises. There's a steadiness to him, a patience like steel spun slow. He expected that reaction.
"You always bring friends?" he asks, breath warm with cologne.
"We prefer noise," I reply.
His laugh is a knife with an edge of amusement. "You're disciplined. I like that. Too bad you're interesting."
"I prefer not to be," I say.
The exchange is a dance and in that dance he reveals his hand: a smirk that is part recognition and part invitation. "We should talk," he says.
Which is how it starts. Conversation becomes the bait. He wants a dialogue that will let him learn my cadence, my pauses — to construct my silence into a map. I oblige, not because I need to, but because every player in this city likes to hear themselves speak when they think they're safe.
We end up at the mouth of a parking garage to talk. Conversation under fluorescent lights is flatter, more honest. My voice is even. "What do you want?"
"I want to know why you're efficient," he says. "I want to see how someone like you thinks."
"You want to study me," I say.
"You fascinated me," he says. Then, softer: "And I need to know what you're doing in our spaces."
"Our spaces overlap," I say. "That happens."
"Do you enjoy it?" His eyes sharpen. "The kill?"
I let the silence answer. He misreads it. Most people do. They think silence is a void. For me it's data.
"You're evasive," he says. "That's… disappointing. I like people I can pin down."
"That's not the same as liking a man alive." Confession stripped of warmth. Useful as a warning. He smiles like a man accustomed to victories.
We trade information that means nothing and everything: safe houses he's scoped, rumors he's heard, a name that flutters loose and lands in my lap like a warning. He isn't just a tail; he's a student of movement. He knows the kinds of violence that don't leave bruises on buildings, and he respects craft. There's a professionalism in his tone that I appreciate even as I despise his audacity.
"You could disappear," he says finally. "Or you could let me teach you methods that actually matter."
"Teaching implies consent," I reply.
He steps closer, and for a moment the garage reorders itself — the distant rumble of traffic, the clipped echo of our words, the concrete pillars like sentries. He's testing the line between bravado and threat. "What do you say? We could be useful to each other."
"Useful is contextual," I say. "To me, usefulness comes with a cost."
That is the one part of the conversation that matters. He nods slowly, calculating the price. "We both trade in shadows," he says. "Maybe we can learn to trade in the same currency."
"I don't partner," I say. The refusal is a clean cut.
He smiles then, and it isn't kind. "You're boring," he says. "You're predictable."
"You just don't like predictable," I say.
It's a small taunt and I watch as anger flickers in his eyes. He lunges, not with a wild swing but with a studied, practiced movement — a man who's practiced violence as a language. The air rearranges. I move the same way, but I'm not reacting; I'm answering. Every parry is a sentence, every step a clause. Conversation has mutated into choreography.
We trade blows that are quiet and precise — no grand flourishes, only necessary contact. He presses, testing my defenses, trying to find a rhythm beneath my stillness. I offer him one: a misdirection, a pivot, a hold at an angle he can't quite square. The hit I take is a calculated bruise. His technique is aggressive but a touch sloppy in the cadence. He expects a fight of fury; I give him a fight of mathematics.
"You enjoy this," he breathes at one point, blood at the corner of his mouth.
"I enjoy perfection," I reply. "Not the spectacle."
His expression fragments; pride is a brittle thing. He overreaches, and I take it. There's a movement he leaves open for a fraction of a second — the smallest aperture — and I exploit it. The motion is precise, detached: an intersection of pressure and angle that stops a man. He collapses like someone who's had the lights slowly turned out.
I don't linger. There's a coolness to the aftermath, not sorrow but a clinical inventory: breath, pulse, time. He has very little. The world outside keeps its indifferent rhythm. Sirens become another layer to catalog, nothing more. I check his pockets for identifiers, then strip enough to remove immediate traces. There will be questions. There will be narratives spun by men who prefer stories where they can be heroes. They will not write this version.
A call from my handler cuts the hush. "Status."
"Resolved," I say. My voice is flat; the words are tools.
"Good. You handled it," he says. There's relief in his tone and something like approval. "We'll sanitize logs and routes. Keep a low profile. And Pierce… you did well."
I fold the broken conversation into memory, file it under performance metrics. The satisfaction is small and clean. That's the truth: the work yields no triumph, only metrics. A line crossed, a problem removed. I head home and let the city reacquaint itself with the absence of another man's steps.
Later that night Ryan texts: You okay? You left early. Weird vibe. I reply with an emoji that reads as nothing and everything. Claire calls; she laughs about some trivial thing and I listen, letting the sound reset something inside me that prefers warm chaos to cold order. Her laughter is a soft instrument whose frequencies I catalog and, for reasons I don't immediately own, cherish.
I sleep in small increments, waking with the mechanical clarity of a machine that has completed a cycle. There is no celebratory champagne, no inward collapse into guilt, no fevered adrenaline. There is an inventory: what went right, what almost went wrong, where the sensors failed.
A new message arrives in the morning. We heard you handled the tail. Good work. Be aware: others will now be curious. You left a line. Thread carefully. No signature. The tone is neutral but the implication is clear: closure is merely another beginning.
School that day is noisy with rumors and gossip — the harmless kind I navigate with practiced distance. Ryan insists I eat more than granola, Claire insists I tell her what's really wrong, and Aria — radiant and undisturbed — moves through the room with the same effortless command she always had. She notices my presence for a beat and gives me a small, casual smile that belongs in a classroom, not in a parking garage. It is ordinary. It is absurdly ordinary. It is the most dangerous thing I know.
I file that smile away, not because it softens me — it doesn't — but because it becomes another datum in a life measured in edges and shadows. There will be consequences; there will be changes in the map of who watches whom. For now, however, there is a pizza to split with friends and a voice on my burner that says, simply, "Good work."
Conversation keeps happening. People will keep talking. I will keep listening. I will keep answering when necessary. The city is noisy; that is where I live. The work is clean. The stakes are real. And hidden in the middle of all of it, in the mundane exchange of laughter and bad jokes, I let myself be a part of something approximating normalcy for a little while longer.