Chapter 10 Chapter 10
A low voice came from the shadows. “You shouldn’t be able to open that lock.”
Nina spun around. A man stepped into the cone of light from her phone—mid-thirties, narrow face, eyes too sharp. Not Adrian.
“I—I just found it,” she stammered.
He smiled without warmth. “People don’t find this place.”
“I’m looking for information.”
“You already have more than you should.” He took another step closer. “Whose key did you use?”
She tightened her grip on the disk. “It was given to me.”
“By who?”
When she didn’t answer, his smile faded. “Then you’re one of his.”
He lunged.
The phone slipped from her hand, clattering across the floor. Light swung wildly, catching on metal and water. She tried to run, but he caught her arm, gripping it iron-tight.
“Tell him his leash broke,” he hissed. “We’re not hiding anymore.”
Before she could speak, the lights snapped out. Total dark. A scuffle, the sound of impact, a sharp cry. Something heavy hit the floor.
A hand caught hers. “Move,” Adrian’s voice said, low, urgent.
She stumbled after him through a side passage lit only by his phone. The tunnel narrowed, water lapping around their boots. He didn’t look back.
When they finally emerged into the open air behind the fish market, rain struck her face like applause. She gasped, half-choked, half-laughing from shock.
Adrian released her wrist. “You disobeyed me again.”
“You were gone.”
“You were supposed to stay gone, too.” His tone was sharp, but the edge softened when he saw her shaking. “He could have killed you.”
“Who was he?”
“A reminder,” Adrian said. “That the Circle has eyes everywhere, even in places I built to keep them blind.”
He looked past her toward the river, jaw tightening. “They’ve started moving pieces. The spiral you followed—it’s a boundary. Inside it, no one is safe.”
“Not even you?”
For a heartbeat, something like a smile touched his mouth. “Especially not me.”
They stood in the rain until the market lights flickered on one by one. People drifted past, oblivious. To them, the two figures under the awning were just another couple arguing softly in the storm.
But Nina saw what the passers-by couldn’t: the exhaustion behind his calm, the way his hand trembled slightly when he lit a cigarette. He looked less like a hunter now, more like someone cornered by his own shadow.
“You built this,” she said quietly. “The network, the Circle. And now you’re hiding from it.”
His eyes met hers through the smoke. “Not hiding. Waiting for it to break.”
He dropped the cigarette into the gutter and turned away. “Go home, Nina.”
She didn’t move. “Will I see you again?”
“You already do,” he said, and disappeared into the mist.
That night, back in her apartment, she downloaded the security feeds she’d recorded from her phone before the lights died. Most were static. One, grainy but clear, showed Adrian stepping into the chamber seconds before the blackout. Behind him, another figure moved through the doorway—a woman this time, face hidden by a hood.
Nina paused the frame, heart racing.
The hooded woman’s wrist glinted with something metallic: the same disk she carried, the same scar of a circle split by a line.
The morning after the tunnel, Ljubljana looked different again.
The air was too clear, too bright, the kind of light that made every reflection sharp enough to cut. Nina couldn’t stop watching them — windows, puddles, the silver backs of tram doors. Somewhere, behind one of those panes, someone was always watching back.
She hadn’t slept. The images from the feed looped in her head: the underground room, the falling light, the woman’s hand glinting with the same metal disk she carried. Adrian had said the Circle had eyes everywhere. She hadn’t realised one of them might belong to that woman.
By noon, she had a plan. Not a safe one — but plans never were, lately.
The university photography club kept a public archive online: street shots, events, and city scenes. She combed through thousands of pictures, filtering for the date she’d been in the tunnel. Halfway down the page, she froze.
A crowd shot at the market: umbrellas, rain, faces blurred by motion. But near the edge, almost out of frame, stood a woman in a dark coat, hood drawn low. On her wrist—just visible where the sleeve lifted—gleamed a narrow band of metal.
The same reflection, the same angle.
Nina downloaded the photo and zoomed in until the pixels fractured. The background caught her eye: a van parked behind the stalls. Its side panel carried a faded logo she didn’t recognise — a stylised cage surrounded by a circle.
The Circle didn’t hide in shadows. It printed its mark in plain sight.
She took the photo to the café across from the market, ordered an espresso she wouldn’t drink, and opened her laptop. A reverse-image search on the logo led her to a defunct logistics company registered under a new name three months ago. The address listed was in the industrial zone near the train tracks — a district Adrian had once told her to avoid.
Her pulse quickened. Of course it’s there.
When she looked up, the reflection in the café window showed a man at the counter glancing at her laptop screen. He wasn’t trying to hide it. His eyes met hers in the glass; he smiled, slow and deliberate.
Nina snapped the lid shut and left without paying.