4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
Close Enough to Leave a Note
The most unsettling thing about being watched isn't knowing someone's there—it's discovering they were there all along, and you never noticed. Luke fell asleep on his couch in a house he thought was empty. He woke to find something on his kitchen bench that hadn't been there before: glossy paper, black felt-tip, five words that transformed his home from sanctuary to crime scene. Whoever left it had stood close enough to watch him breathe.
Luke needs Cody. Cody has answers about Joel, about Guardians, about whoever slit a boy's throat in what might have been a case of mistaken identity. But Cody doesn't leave contact information—not even with Gladys, the woman he's supposedly been seeing for months. No phone number. No address. Nothing that could be traced back to him.
The call to Gladys yields nothing. Luke's exhaustion finally wins, pulling him under on a leather couch still damp with Clivilius river water.
When he wakes, the brochure is waiting.
Camping equipment. Tents and sleeping bags and portable stoves. The kind of catalogue you'd toss without reading—except this one has a message scrawled across the cover in thick black ink. Five words that turn every shadow in the room hostile, every creak of settling timber into potential footsteps.
Someone was here. Someone knows exactly where Luke sleeps.
