Above the reflection of the man's head, there were white numbers.
[00:06:18]
Mara Vance stared at them. It was Tuesday morning, and she was on the tram to work.
The numbers were in the dark tram window, thin, with clean edges. The stone wall beside the tracks ran right outside, so the glass worked like a mirror. In it she could see the man by the doors, his shoulder and the back of his head. The numbers sat just above his head.
[00:06:17]
She turned to the real man.
Above his real head, there was nothing. A handrail. An ad for the autumn booster shot.
Back to the glass.
[00:06:15]
"No," she said. Out loud.
The woman next to her glanced up from her book. "Sorry?"
"Nothing. Sorry." Mara touched her ear, like she'd been on a call.
The woman went back to her book. She also moved her bag to her other side.
'Wait... is that real?'
The 7:52 tram from Harbor Road was four minutes late. If she missed her connection at Cut Bridge, she'd be eleven minutes late, because it left on time whether anyone was on it or not.
A thin rain was coming down sideways, and the tram car smelled like wet coats and somebody's coffee. Mara stood where she always stood, by the second door, with her back against the pole. The first door stuck. Everybody who got on at Harbor Road knew that. Everybody who got on later found out the hard way.
The man by the doors was about fifty. Gray jacket, thinning hair, phone held close to his face with the brightness turned up way too high for that hour. He had a paper cup of coffee in his other hand. The torn end of one sugar packet was still sticking out of his jacket pocket.
At the stop before, he'd pushed the first door. Nothing. He pushed it again, harder, and frowned at the handle.
"It sticks," Mara had said.
"Every morning." He gave the door a little slap. "Four years on this line, and every morning I forget."
"It's the second one that opens."
"I know it's the second one." He smiled at her. "My hand doesn't know."
She'd smiled back and turned to her window. That was when she saw the numbers.
Now the count was lower.
[00:06:02]
She did what any engineer would do with a reading she didn't trust. She checked it against a thing she did trust.
First, she held her phone up beside the glass, like she was checking the time. She watched its clock next to the numbers. Her phone ticked over a second. So did the count.
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Next, she took two steps down the car to change the angle. A reflection of a screen inside the tram would have slid across the glass when she moved. The numbers didn't slide. They stayed above the man's reflection, like they were glued to him.
Last, she pointed her camera at the man and the window together, like somebody taking a picture of the view.
On her screen: a man, a window, the stone wall.
No numbers.
She lowered the phone. The numbers were still in the glass.
[00:05:42]
'So the tram isn't doing it. I am.'
There was one more thing to check. She ran her eyes along the window, one reflection at a time. The woman with the book. A boy in a school blazer, asleep with his head on the glass. Two men in work boots, sharing a newspaper.
Nothing over any of them. Only him.
'Why him?'
'Okay... okay. Five hours of sleep and no breakfast. Fine. If it's just my eyes, the numbers won't follow him when he walks away.'
That was a test she could run.
Her phone buzzed in her hand, again and again. Only Theo, her little brother, texted like that before eight.
--Theo--
my science notebook is GONE
you took it didnt you!!
Under it was a message from Dina, her project partner at the Polytechnic, about their topic form. It was due Friday. Mara studied civil engineering, and the topic she wanted was how fast people get down stairs in an emergency. She hadn't told Dina yet.
She put the phone away without answering either of them.
The tram slowed for Cut Bridge. The man put his phone in his pocket, walked to the first door, and put his hand flat on it.
He caught himself. He turned to Mara and laughed, mostly at himself.
"See?" he said. "Doesn't know."
He went out through the second door, right past her. He smelled like rain and a little like cigarettes.
"Sorry," he said, squeezing by.
Mara got off behind him. Her connection was waiting across the platform with its doors open. Two steps and she'd be on it.
The man walked along the tram. His reflection moved from window to window, and the numbers moved with it.
[00:05:06]
[00:05:05]
'Stop it. Stop it right now. You have a stair survey. You are never late!'
She was due at Shelter 131 this morning to measure its stairs. Four hundred people would have to get down them if the sirens went. Mr. Barrett would be waiting for her there.
He ran the interns at the Shelter Section. That was the city office in charge of the shelters. Last Thursday he'd signed off her stair survey, peering at her over his glasses. Nobody asked for stair surveys. She had. "You're never late," he'd said, and after that, "Bring your own tape measure. The Section's ones lie."
The man was almost at the end of the platform.
'If I get on that tram... I'll never know what it was.'
She didn't take her connection. She followed the man down the platform instead, and bumped her knee on a bench doing it.
Behind her, the doors hissed shut. She heard her connection pull out without her, wheels squealing on the curve like always. She didn't look back.
Cut Bridge was an open-air stop, and the wind came up cold and wet from the tracks. Out here there was nothing above the man's head. No glass, no numbers. He was just a man walking to work, swinging his coffee cup a little as he went.
He passed an advertising screen that was switched off, a tall black rectangle, and his reflection crossed it. The numbers crossed it with him.
[00:04:29]
Mara wiped her sweaty hands on her jeans and kept walking.
She followed him up the steps to the street, staying what she hoped was a normal distance behind. Halfway up, he stopped to let an old man with a cane go by. Mara stopped too and pretended to read the schedule on the wall.
The old man reached the bottom. The man with the coffee went on up, and Mara went after him.
At the top, a green sign on a pole showed a little running figure and a distance. SHELTER 140 m.
For two years, Mara had checked signs like that one. She counted her steps to check the distance, and she reported the wrong ones to the Section. Four had been wrong. One of them pointed people to a steel door that had been welded shut since before she was born. Nobody had written back about that one.
This morning she walked past it without counting.
Up on the street, the rain had turned the sidewalk dark. People hurried past under umbrellas, and nobody looked up at anything. The man walked fast, and he never once looked back. He stepped around a puddle and nodded to a man pulling up the shutter of a newspaper kiosk, like they saw each other every morning. Every shop window on the bridge road caught his reflection, and the count went along with him.
The pharmacy window.
[00:03:48]
The shoe store window.
[00:03:31]
The side of a parked van.
The count never skipped.
Somewhere between the pharmacy and the van, Mara stopped worrying about her eyes. She had a new question, and it was much worse.
'What happens when it reaches zero?'
So she searched the street for anything that could kill this man.