I went to Vera Callum’s apartment because she knew what I was.
Not suspected. Knew. She’d said it in front of the collection team, and she’d looked at me when she said it. In eight years I had never given anyone cause to look at me that way.
The screeners who get noticed are the ones who never find anyone. A screener with nothing to show is a screener someone starts asking questions about. Every positive identification I put in a file was proof of my reliability. Every flag was cover.
I had built an eight-year career on the logic that my job and my survival were the same thing, and I had been very good at the job.
Vera knew what I was. That made her a loose end. And I do not have loose ends.
She answered the door on the second knock.
I don’t know what I expected. Surprise, maybe, or alarm, or at least the performance of both. What I got was Vera Callum stepping back to let me in, already wearing her coat, like she’d been waiting for me to arrive before she packed the last of what she was taking.
“I wondered if it would be you,” she said. “The screener. I thought the screener might come.”
“Collection has forty-eight hours,” I said.
“I know how it works.” She gestured at the small couch and I sat. The apartment was sparse, already half-stripped. Books gone from the shelves, gaps in the kitchen where things had been removed. She’d been preparing for a while. “Do you want tea? I have tea.”
“No.”
She sat across from me and looked at me the way nobody ever looks at me. Not performing toward me. Just looking.
“How long?” she asked.
“Since I was four. My mother told me.”
“Mine too.” She was quiet for a moment. “I’ve been doing this for six years. Moving. Staying ahead. This is the first time I’ve been caught.”
“You said us,” I said. “At the station. You said you’re one of us.”
“There are more of us than you think. Not many. But more than one.”
I had known there were others. I’d been flagging them for eight years. What I hadn’t known was that they’d found each other. That was different. Isolated people getting caught one at a time was the system working. A network was something else, something that had been trying to survive as a whole, not just in pieces.
If there was a network, I hadn’t just been doing my job. I’d been taking it apart without knowing it was there to take apart.
She stood and went to the kitchen table, where a cardboard box sat that I hadn’t noticed because it looked like everything else she was packing. She brought it over and set it between us. “I’ve spent six years finding this.”
Inside the box there were photocopies and handwritten notes and printed records that had the look of things pulled from databases that no longer existed.
I’m a careful reader by training. I’ve processed thousands of files. I know how documentation ages and what it looks like when it’s been assembled by someone working without institutional access, piecing things together from fragments.
Vera had been thorough.
“The screening program is eighty years old,” she said. “You know this.”
“Everyone knows this.”
“Everyone knows the official history. The program was created to protect the population from people like us. The Hollowed. The threat identified, the infrastructure built to contain it.”
She pulled out a photocopy, census data with certain columns circled in red pen. “What nobody talks about is the identification rate.”
She walked me through it. I’m good with numbers. It took me less than a minute to see what she was showing me.
The rate had been dropping for decades. Not by a little. By a factor that, if you extended it backward, suggested the Hollowed had once made up a significant percentage of the population. Not a small dangerous minority. A sizable portion of everyone.
“What happened to them,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“What’s still happening. What you and I both know happens at the end of forty-eight hours.”
I looked at the numbers for a long time. She let me.
“That still doesn’t explain what everyone else is,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.” She reached back into the box. “This part I haven’t fully worked out. But there are accounts in here. Old ones, from before the program started. People describing their neighbors, their families, the way they changed. Gradually. Over years. The accounts use different words but they’re describing the same thing.” She handed me a stack of photocopied pages, handwritten, the originals clearly decades old. “Read the descriptions of the eyes.”
I read them.
Something cold moved through me that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room.
“I saw it,” I said. “Yesterday. At the station. When the collection team took you out, I was watching through my office door. The lead collector. I’ve seen that man a hundred times. But standing that close, in the light, I finally…”
“You finally saw it,” Vera said.
“I’ve been surrounded by it my whole life and I never—”
Then someone knocked on the door.
We both went still.
The knock came again. Three even strikes, spaced exactly the same. The collection team has a specific pattern because people are supposed to recognize it, supposed to understand that cooperation is the expected response. I have heard that knock from the other side of the door many times. It sounds different from here.
Vera looked at me. Something shifted in her face that wasn’t performance. It was real. I recognized it because I’ve seen it in mirrors.
“The closet,” she said quietly. “Behind the coats. Don’t come out.”
“Vera—”
“They don’t know about you. If they take me, you walk out afterward and you still have your life.” She picked up her bag from the couch. The one she’d already packed. “Forty-eight hours isn’t up.”
They came early.
I went into the closet. Pressed myself against the back wall behind the coats and stood in the dark and listened to the door open, to the voices, to the practiced language the collection team uses that is designed to sound gentle. Vera said all the right things. She did not give me away.
The door closed. The apartment went quiet.
I waited five minutes before I came out.
The box was still on the coffee table. Vera had taken her bag and left the box because the box was too big to carry and drawing attention to it might have raised questions. Or maybe she left it for me. I don’t know. I’ll never know now.
I stood in the middle of a stranger’s empty apartment and I picked up the box and I made myself look inside it one more time before I decided what to do.
At the bottom, underneath all the photocopies and handwritten notes, there was a folded piece of paper. A list of names. Not Hollowed people who had been identified and collected. A different kind of list. I unfolded it and read down the column.
Mine was the third name from the top.
Someone had been watching me for a very long time.