Page 11 of Prey

She heads south first, then cuts west. I give her the distance she’s earned—sixty meters instead of forty—and follow.

The file I pulled myself since I can’t explain this to Ezra is thin, which means she has no family contacts active. No lease in her legal name. Employment record starts three years ago. Thepharmacy job is cash-adjacent, an overnight shift, the perfect schedule for someone who wants to move through the city when the city isn’t paying attention.

She passes the Con-Ed van without looking directly at it. Her gaze goes left, then right, then forward, but there’s a fractional pause in the leftward sweep that means she’s already noticed the van.

I take a slow sip of cold coffee.

The collection currently holds nine. Three are spoken for at the next auction—two to a buyer in Dubai who pays in clean wire transfers, one to a private collector in Munich who has specific requirements I find tedious but lucrative. The remaining six are generating return interest. It’s a healthy inventory.

That’s the ledger. That’s what The Labyrinth sees when it looks at me—a collector with clean wire transfers and a waiting list, the best in the business at turning a person into a line item. They’ve believed it for fifteen years. I’ve spent fifteen making sure they keep believing it, because the belief is the door I walk through to reach everything behind it.

What the ledger doesn’t say is who the nine are.

Not women pulled out of quiet lives for matching a buyer’s preferences. Every name in the collection signed something once. Requisitioned a child. Ran a conditioning block. Mixed the compounds, kept the schedules, walked the halls of a facility while children learned what I learned—then collected a pension and a clean new name and slept through the nights I don’t. The women I’m holding now ran the conditioning wings. Somewhere in Ezra’s files are their own notebooks—careful, clinical—logging how many days it took to teach a child to stop crying for its mother, technique graded in the margins like coursework. So when the wire clears from Dubai, I don’t lose a second’s sleep over it. I’m selling them the exact future they built for the rest of us, and letting them learn from the inside how it feels to bemerchandise. To exist solely for the whims of another with no chance of escape. Ever.

I find them. I take them. And I sell them into the exact machine they built their lives on, to men who want to own a living thing and will keep it for years and call it devotion. The women who turned children into property become property themselves. There’s no court for what they did. I’m the only sentence on offer, and I’ve made sure it echoes the litany of their atrocities.

The cleanest justice I ever found. I stopped looking for a cleaner one a long time ago.

Jenna was never involved in any of it, and yet I can’t stop following her.

She stops at the crosswalk and turns.

It’s a casual turn—adjusting her jacket collar, glancing back. Her eyes do a full sweep of the block in under two seconds, and for one moment they pass directly over me.

I’m already looking at my phone. She registers a man on a bench and moves on.

The light changes. She crosses.

My thumb is still on the dark phone screen.

She turns the corner, and I stand, drop the cup, and follow.

The thing is—shelooked. Not because something specific spooked her. Because looking is her default state. Because somewhere in her history, staying alive required that the looking never stop.

I understand that particular education. She crosses the next intersection, varying her pace.

She turns left off Wabash, and I already know she’s heading for the overnight shift. I cut through an alleyway too.

The pharmacy is across from a twenty-four-hour coffee shop—Intelligentsia, glass front, good sightlines—and I take a corner table before she’s even unlocked the staff entrance. Order anAmericano that I likely won’t finish. Open my laptop like a man with work to do.

She appears behind the counter within ten minutes, a blue lanyard around her neck, hair pulled back. She starts counting blister packs into their bins with the focused economy of someone who has learned to keep their hands busy while their head does something else entirely.

A coworker—female, friendly body language. I can’t hear what’s said through the glass. But I can guess the exchange: the offer, the soft refusal, the way Jenna keeps her eyes on the bins all throughout it. The coworker leaves.

I write nothing in my notebook.

There’s a man at the far register. They work a parallel shift for an hour, barely speaking. Around two, he says something, and she answers in one syllable, and they return to their separate silences like it was almost enough.

He clocks out before three.

After that, it’s just her and the fluorescent lights and a camera with a sweep at twenty-two seconds before I even think about why I’m timing it.

She restocks a shelf that doesn’t need restocking.

I order a second coffee I don’t want and stay in the chair. By the time she is finished and steps out of the pharmacy, she’s changed her clothes. Different shoes, different jacket, the adjustment that passes for invisibility if nobody’s looking for it. Most people aren’t.

I am.