Eryx Draven

He is a man who notices things. A drone whose patrol path has not deviated by a meter in eleven days. The half-second a stranger's smile lingers after the rest of their face has stopped meaning it. The way an old neighbor told him the same story twice in the same week, with the same pause in the same place. He has trained himself to look away from these things — to file them under the small, harmless oddities of a city that mostly works.

He has noticed that he is noticing more. He has noticed that the looking-away takes more effort than it used to.

Some mornings he thinks the city is watching him notice. Some mornings he thinks the city has been watching him for a very long time.