SEVERAL MONTHS LATER.KAIThe new apartment was on the fourteenth floor.Floor-to-ceiling windows. Open plan kitchen with appliances I didn't know how to use. A couch that cost more than my old monthly rent sitting in the middle of a living room that was clean and quiet and smelled like fresh paint and absolutely nothing else.I'd picked it because it was as far from the old place as money could get you while still being in the same city. Different neighbourhood. Different kind of street. The kind of block where people walked small dogs in the evening and the garbage was always collected on time and nobody had ever heard of underground fighting.I'd moved Mom and Mira in three weeks after Mom was discharged from the hospital, she was now better and out of coma.Mira had stood in the doorway of her new room — her own room, not a corner sectioned off with a curtain but an actual room with a door that closed — and she hadn't said anything for a long time. Just looked at it. The window wi

KAI.She left.I locked the door. Went back to the window. I looked out at the city.The nothing held steady. Didn't even flicker.The paranoia started small.Little things. Noticing exits when I walked into rooms. Sitting with my back to walls in the rare moments I was somewhere public. Checking the street before I got into my car. Watching faces.I told myself it was the system. Predator's Instinct made me hyper-aware of threat patterns, it was just that bleeding into my daily life, nothing serious.But it got worse.I started changing routes. Never the same way twice between the same two places. I stopped going to the gym at the same time every day. I varied when I left the apartment, when I came back, which entrance I used.I stopped telling Ricky where I was. I had confessed to him and told him everything about the system, several months back after I killed the detective. That was the one that mattered. Because Ricky had been my anchor. The one person I'd told the truth to, or m

KAI.The jaw healed on the system's timeline, not the doctor's. Seven hours, not three weeks. I knew it would. I went to the next booking anyway. I Won in the second round. Zhang was pleased. The crowd was pleased. I felt nothing except the clean mechanical satisfaction of a system performing exactly as designed.I filled the prescription anyway. Took the anti-inflammatory with food, like she'd said. Something real, not just coffee.I didn't go back to the clinic.I thought about it twice and both times went through the same calculation and both times arrived at the same answer and left it alone.The mission came on a Thursday morning.I was in the kitchen when the system pinged. Six AM. Grey light coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Coffee in my hand, actually eating breakfast for once, a piece of toast with peanut butter because Mira had called the night before and asked directly whether I was eating properly and I'd said yes and she'd said prove it, tell me what you had to