Page 1 of Prey

1

NIKOLAI

The financial district empties fast after nine. Suits catch trains, bars fill up, and the streets belong to doormen, delivery drivers, and people who don’t want to be seen. I belong to that last category tonight.

Jay Weiss walks like a man who stopped being afraid years ago. Shoulders back, unhurried, the leather briefcase swinging at his hip. He took the same route from the parking garage on Wacker two Thursdays in a row. Habit is a leash, and I’ve had Weiss’s wrapped around my fist for two weeks.

I keep forty meters between us, enough that I blend into the reflected neon and the thin foot traffic still moving along LaSalle. I breathe slow and even, the cold air tasting like exhaust and the river two blocks west.

He stops at a crosswalk.

I stop at a storefront window, pretending to check my phone. In the glass, I watch him glance left and right, checking for traffic. Weiss wasn’t an operator. He never held a child down, never mixed a dose, never stood in a bright white room and watched the lights go out behind a seven-year-old’s eyes. He scheduled shipments. He signed invoices. He made sure the right children arrived at the right facilities on the right dates.And then he drove home to a house with a lawn and slept through the night without a care in the world. That’s the part people never understand about the machine that built me—it doesn’t run on monsters. It runs on men like Weiss, who found a way to file their screams under logistics.

The light changes. He crosses.

I follow.

The route bends south toward the parking structure on Adams, where his car sits on level three. He’ll never reach it. I’ve already mapped every camera blind spot between here and there, already noted the loading dock cut-through between the two glass towers where foot traffic drops to zero and the nearest camera points the wrong direction.

Forty meters becomes thirty.

A cab blows through the intersection, and Weiss flinches at the horn. I don’t. They conditioned that out of me so thoroughly I sometimes wonder what else went with it.

Twenty-five meters. The cut-through is just ahead on his left, and he’ll pass it—unless something redirects him.

I pull out my phone and dial the burner number linked to the fake parking authority message his assistant received this afternoon. The one that says his vehicle has been flagged for towing from level three, and he should use the Adams Street entrance to resolve it.

His phone buzzes, and he slows, pulls it out, and reads it before turning left.

The cut-through swallows him whole. No overhead lights, just the ambient glow bleeding in from both ends, and Weiss moves faster now, the parking authority text doing exactly what it was supposed to do. He’s focused on his phone, typing a reply to nobody, and I close the gap to fifteen meters.

Then Ezra’s voice crackles through my earpiece.

“Statistically speaking, you’ve been in that alley long enough to have completed the acquisition, filed the paperwork, and taken a light nap.”

I keep my eyes on Weiss. “I’m building tension.”

“You’re building a scheduling conflict. I have a probability window that closes in eleven minutes.”

“Then stop talking and let me work.”

“I’m multitasking.” A pause, the faint tap of keys in the background. “Also, I ran the numbers on yourbuilding tensionapproach, and it has a negative expected result.”

Weiss stops walking.

I stop. Press into the shadow beside a dumpster, one shoulder against the brick, and watch him turn his head. He heard something, or thought he did. His breath has changed—I can see it in the vapor puffing out in front of him, shorter and faster now.

“He spooked?” Ezra asks.

“Thinking about it.”

“That’s a yes. What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Your nothing has a distinct footstep signature, Nikolai. I’ve told you this.”

Weiss makes a decision. He breaks into a jog toward the far end of the cut-through, briefcase banging against his thigh.