Four weeks after the numbers started, there were eleven cases in Mara's notebook. Four of them were dead.
On Monday, in the rain, she found a twelfth, and he didn't fit anything she'd written down.
The count of the dead was simple. Everything else in the notebook kept changing on her. Older people usually had longer numbers, but not always. A number that ended in an accident showed up late, with only a little time left on it. A number that ended in an illness showed up early, with a lot. She had no idea why. She wrote it down anyway.
These days, she saw the numbers in glass first. A shop window, a bus window, the black screen of a phone lying face up on a table. The number showed up in the glass a moment before it showed up in the air.
Inside the front cover, she'd written three rules. She only trusted the first one.
'Eleven cases and three rules. How am I supposed to find a pattern in that?'
The rest of her life went on as normal. The shelter model she and Dina were building had fourteen shelters in it now. Dina was talking to her in whole sentences again, and still hadn't asked a single question about where Mara kept disappearing to. Mara knew how hard that was for her.
***
The week before, on Tuesday, Mara had gone to the Medical Service library with Dr. Ward's name on a slip of paper.
The library was above a booster clinic. A PROTECT THE LINE poster was taped to every landing, the same poster four times, going up.
"The Director is at the Annex today," the clerk said.
"I don't need him. I need the dose tables."
"Those are in deep store." The clerk slid a form across the counter. "Fill this out and we can bring them up. Two weeks, maybe."
Near the bottom of the form was a box marked Related material, if known.
Mara wrote Helix Adaptive Systems in it.
She stared at the three words. Her own neat handwriting, on a government form with her name at the top. She crossed them out and asked for a new form.
"Mistake?" the clerk said.
"Spelling," Mara said.
'Who reads these forms? And what happens if somebody does?'
At the back of the notebook was a page with Theo's week on it. She'd drawn it up three times, because football practice kept moving.
***
Two days later, on Thursday, she took the last tram home from the Section.
The car was nearly empty, and the windows were black mirrors. She checked the man by the door. Nothing. She checked the two girls at the back. Nothing.
Her own face was in the glass beside her, tired, with her hair coming down. Out of habit, she checked above her own reflection, the way she'd checked above ten thousand other people.
There was a line of thin white numbers, and they didn't move.
'That's over me. That's over ME!'
[00:00:00]
She put her hand up over her head. There was only air. A street lamp slid past the window and washed the glass white, and when the dark came back, there was nothing above her reflection at all.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
She took out the notebook, held the pen over a clean page, and put both away again. She wasn't ready to see that number in her own handwriting.
'A zero over my own head... what is it counting to, if I'm still sitting here?'
She got off at her stop and walked home under the street lamps without looking at a single window.
***
On Monday, it rained.
Mara came out of the faculty at seven, after a late lab, into the crowd going down the hill to the trams. The street was all headlights and wet stone. The storm drain at the bottom was already backing up, because somebody had made it too small.
She checked the crowd one person at a time, the way she always did now. The line at the bus stop. A woman crossing with a child. A courier with a parcel under his coat.
That was when she saw him.
He was coming up the hill while everyone else was going down. Dark hair. A black jacket with a gray stripe on the sleeve. No umbrella, in this weather. His hands were in his pockets, and he wasn't hurrying, and people moved out of his way without seeming to notice they'd done it.
Mara didn't take in any of that at first. What she saw first was above his head.
[00:00:00]
She stopped walking. Somebody bumped her shoulder, muttered a short word, and went around her.
'It's the same line. The same zeros as mine!'
Four days ago it had been over her own head, in the tram glass. She still hadn't written it down. Now here it was over a stranger in the street.
It wasn't counting. Every one of her eleven cases had moved. That was the only thing all eleven had in common. This one sat still, like a broken clock on a wall.
And the man under it was alive. He looked more alive than anyone else on the sidewalk. He stepped over a puddle without glancing down. A bus went by and threw a sheet of water at the curb, and he was already a step to the left of where it landed.
'Zeros don't mean dead, then... so what do they mean?'
She checked him in the nearest shop window. He crossed the glass, and the zeros crossed it with him. She checked him in the side of a parked car. Zeros.
He got close enough for her to see his face. He glanced up and caught her staring.
Mara knew what came next. She'd watched boys do it a hundred times. A young man saw a girl staring at him in the street, so he checked his sleeve, and then his shoes, for whatever she'd seen.
He checked his sleeve. He checked his shoes. He met her eyes properly, and his face went blank, like he'd forgotten what he was checking for.
He walked past her.
Mara turned around on the hill and followed him.
'Every one of my eleven cases moved. This one doesn't, and I'm not letting him walk away.'
He stopped at a kiosk and bought a bottle of water and a snack wrapped in foil. He paid with a card that had the same gray stripe as his sleeve. He stood under the kiosk's awning to eat.
Mara stood in a shop doorway across the road and watched him for eleven minutes by her watch.
The zeros didn't change.
He didn't sway. He didn't put a hand to his chest, or sit down suddenly on the curb. He finished eating, folded the foil into a neat square, and dropped it in the trash can.
'He folded it! Who folds a wrapper before he throws it away?'
'What if his number isn't counting down to a death? What if it already ran out, and he just kept walking?'
Things that died and kept moving were monsters, and Hunters were paid to kill them.
She couldn't make that fit a man who folded his litter.
He took the next tram east. Mara let it leave without her. She had a brother to get home to, and the stripe on his sleeve would tell her where to find him.
***
On Tuesday morning, she went in to the Section early.
The corkboard outside Mr. Barrett's office was mostly old fire drills and a lost umbrella. There was one new sheet, pinned at an angle, with his initials in the corner.
QUARTERLY PYLON CHECK. EAST CORRIDOR.
SATURDAY, 07:00. EAST GATE.
ESCORT PROVIDED. SURVEYOR REQUIRED.
Mara read it on the way in. She had nothing to do with pylons.
In the afternoon, she asked Dina about the stripe.
They were in the drawing room at the Polytechnic, with shelter fifteen on the screen between them.
"What's a gray stripe on a black sleeve?" Mara asked.
"Provisional Hunter. First season." Dina typed in a width. "My cousin had one for about a month. Why?"
"I saw one on the hill."
"They're all over the hill. The intake finished two weeks ago, and they've let them out." Now Dina did turn her head. "They report to the depot at the east gate. Why, Mara?"
East gate. Mara saw the sheet on the corkboard, pinned at its angle, as clearly as if it were on the screen in front of her.
"I wondered," she said.
Dina studied her. She'd been careful with Mara for more than a week now, and Mara could see what it was costing her.
"Is it one of yours?" Dina said. "One of the ones you're early to?"
Mara hadn't known that Dina thought about it in those words. She didn't answer.
Dina saved her file, and saved it again.
"Take your phone," Dina said. "Keep it on. If I call, you pick up. I'm not asking."
"Okay."
"Say it like you mean it."
"I'll pick up, Dina."
Dina went back to the model. Ten seconds later, Mara's phone buzzed on the desk.
--Dina-- test
Mara glanced across the desk. Dina kept her eyes on the screen.
--Mara--
Picked up.
--Dina-- good. keep doing that
Mara didn't tell her where she was going on Wednesday.