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James Longey learned early that watching people was easier than knowing them, and that getting close enough to be caught was part of the pleasure. The basement job at Hobart Police gave him a salary for the same instinct; his cousin Sarah's death gave him permission to stop apologising for it. He still works for Tasmania Police. He also, after hours, takes the credentials a faceless employer pays him in and walks through the lives of people who once stood close enough to touch — and the closer he gets to being caught, the less he is able to stop.
James was the kind of child who took things apart, and by twelve he understood that people came apart the same way if you watched them long enough. He never got caught.
Tasmania Police gave him a basement and a salary for the same instinct, and the chair stayed his after the building emptied — faces from the edges of his life, observed from distances close enough that nearly being seen was part of the pull. Then Sarah brought him a hard drive without paperwork, and weeks later she was dead, and the only intimacy he could survive was the kind on a screen.
The offer came online, late, from a name that never resolved. He did not hesitate. The pay was access — credentials he should not have owned, systems that turned the city into glass. The lid he had spent decades holding down was gone.
Then one night, in a system only he had touched, a fingerprint surfaced that was not his, left by someone who worked the way he worked, and had been there longer than he wanted to know. He told himself, calmly, this was the moment to stop, while his hand was already on the next feed.
