Attention, he learned, had weight.
Not the crude weight of pursuit or accusation, but something subtler—distributed, measured, patient. It pressed against him through delays in crosswalk signals, through cameras that lingered half a second longer than their programming justified, through the faint repetition of coincidences that stopped feeling accidental.
Gotham did not watch like a village watched. There were no shared glances, no whispered warnings. The city observed through systems—layered, impersonal, and relentless. Awareness here did not look at you. It modeled you.
He felt it now.
Not locked on. Not hostile.
Circling.
He adapted without conscious decision.
Routes bent. Timing fractured. Shelter became temporary again. He ate when necessary, slept when exhaustion outweighed risk, and abandoned both without regret. Patterns were liabilities. Comfort was an invitation.
Old instincts—older than names, older than nations—reasserted themselves, stripping movement down to essentials.
Survive unseen.
Observe without imprint.
Leave nothing repeatable.
Still, the pressure followed.
It was not criminal. Not police.
It was trained.
The realization came as he crossed a bridge at dusk, the city folding beneath him into steel and reflection. The river below swallowed light rather than reflecting it, thick and patient, like something that remembered every body it had taken.
He stopped midway.
Not abruptly. Just enough.
The pressure shifted.
Someone else had paused.
Across the span, a figure leaned against a lamppost that hadn't yet come alive. Too still. Too composed. Clothing neat in a neighborhood that devoured neatness. A silhouette that did not belong to the chaos around it.
A watcher.
They weren't looking at him.
That was the tell.
Professionals never did.
He let himself sag slightly, shoulders loosening, breath uneven. A boy out of place. Tired. Directionless. Harmless in the way the city preferred its victims to be.
Inside, awareness sharpened.
He counted heartbeats.
On the third, the figure shifted weight.
On the fifth, a brief electromagnetic pulse brushed the edge of his senses—disciplined, clean, vanishing before it could echo.
A camera.
Not municipal. Not civilian.
Interesting.
He resumed walking.
Not faster. Not slower.
They passed without acknowledgment. The watcher's gaze slid past him, cataloging without engagement, attention distributed elsewhere even as it tracked him. Whatever system this was, it did not rely on certainty. It relied on elimination.
He turned three streets later.
Not sharply. Not suspiciously.
The city helped.
A bus disgorged commuters in a burst of noise and motion. A fight flared near a corner store, drawing eyes and intent like a flare. Sirens rose somewhere distant enough to matter.
He flowed with the disruption.
Not vanishing.
Diluting.
Presence shed piece by piece until the pressure that had circled him found only interference—data without coherence, movement without continuity. The system reached for him and closed on nothing.
Behind him, cameras adjusted.
Feeds recalibrated.
Algorithms hesitated.
A tracking thread flagged, re-evaluated, and quietly dissolved into statistical noise.
No heat spike.
No blind spot.
No anomaly loud enough to justify escalation.
Just… absence.
Somewhere in the city, a file failed to resolve.
Not deleted.
Not corrupted.
Simply unfinished.
He did not look back.
He did not need to.
The pressure faded—not gone, but repositioned, like a predator deciding patience was the better strategy.
He walked on as night settled fully over Gotham, crowds thinning, shadows deepening into something more honest. Whatever had noticed him had learned something important.
So had he.
Being seen was inevitable.
Being understood was optional.
And far above streets that would never know how close they had come to consequence, something old enough to recognize inflection points paused in its turning.
Not yet, it decided.
Below, the city continued to breathe.
And the boy—still nameless, still unclaimed—moved through it with a door inside him that remained closed.
For now.