On the following Monday, Ryan Lam began what he privately called Operation Field Research.

It had a plan. It had a schedule. It had a small black notebook with a rubber band around it, on the cover of which he had written, in his neatest handwriting, FIELD RESEARCH: ROUTE DESIGN. Inside, on the first page, he had listed four names, four time slots, and four sets of observation goals, each with a bullet point so crisp it could have been used to open mail.

It was, in his professional opinion, an extremely reasonable plan.

[Objective: collect authentic behavioral data for route design,] said the otome part of his brain, in the voice of a very serious narrator at the start of a nature documentary. [Subjects: four. Method: covert observation. Risk assessment: none whatsoever.]

"Exactly," Ryan said, tucking the notebook under his arm. "No risk."

He walked into the lobby cafe at 8:40 in the morning wearing sunglasses.

This was, it must be said, an error. The lobby of the Moonquill building was a glass cube with floor-to-ceiling windows, and it was a gray, overcast morning. The sunglasses did not make him invisible. They made him look like a man who had recently suffered a minor personal tragedy and was handling it with style.

"Flat white, one sugar?" said the barista, a cheerful woman named Ines who had been making his order for three years.

"Yes. And, uh, can you stand a little to the left? I need to see the door."

"...Sure?"

He took his coffee to a small table behind a potted ficus, a tree so aggressively leafy that it might have been planted for exactly this purpose, and he sat down. He opened the notebook. He clicked the pen. At 8:45, the revolving door turned.

Victor Thorne walked in.

He did not walk the way other people did. He walked the way a ruler draws a line. His charcoal suit was perfectly pressed, his dark hair perfectly still, and behind him, at a distance of precisely three steps, followed the assistant in the navy blazer, a woman who might have been carved from a slightly disapproving block of marble. Victor crossed the lobby without looking left or right, reached the elevator, and pressed the button with one finger.

Ryan wrote: 8:45. Arrives. Does not look at anyone. Does not need to. Everyone looks at him.

The elevator was slow. Victor stood waiting, hands loosely clasped in front of him. He raised his left wrist and glanced at his watch, a movement so economical it barely registered, and as he lowered it, he tugged, very slightly, at his right cuff.

Ryan stopped writing.

Cuff. He had been right. It was a tell.

He bent over his notebook. Cuff adjustment: 1. Context: waiting. Possible emotion: impatience? Or something else? He watched. The elevator arrived. Victor stepped in, turned, and for one second, through the glass, the dark eyes passed over the lobby.

They stopped at the ficus.

Ryan froze. The sunglasses suddenly felt like a billboard. The ficus offered no further cover. A single leaf drifted down onto his notebook, and he did not move.

The elevator doors closed.

"That was fine," Ryan said. "That was totally fine."

[Subject noticed you,] said his brain.

"Subject noticed a tree."

[Subject looked directly at you for 1.4 seconds.]

"Subject has a hard time with trees," Ryan said, and wrote, in his notebook, under Victor: Watched me. Did not react. Possibly did not see me. Possibly saw me.

The assistant, hanging back at the lobby desk, turned her head and looked at him for exactly one second without blinking. Then she turned back.

Ryan took off the sunglasses.

The second subject was easier. Leo Hayes was, as Ryan had discovered, a creature of habit, and the habit was this: every day between 2 and 4 p.m., he sat at the long communal table on the fifth floor with a laptop, a sketchbook, and a snack. All Ryan had to do was sit next to him.

"Senpai!" Leo said, the moment he looked up. His whole face changed, the way a sky changes when the sun comes out. "You came to hang out with me!"

"I'm working," Ryan said. "On this side of the building. For the light."

"The light's better on the other side."

"I prefer this light."

"Okay!" said Leo, who clearly had no intention of questioning a gift. He scooted his chair an inch closer. "Do you want a rice cracker? They're the seaweed kind. I have a whole bag. I could share. I could give you the whole bag."

"One is fine."

Ryan settled in. He opened his notebook, ostensibly to review a script. He observed.

Leo, he soon realized, was a remarkably expressive worker. When he was concentrating, his tongue poked out the corner of his mouth. When he made a mistake, he made a small, offended noise, like a cat who had been startled by its own reflection. When a line came out well, he kicked one foot under the table, a tiny, private, completely involuntary celebration. Ryan wrote: kicks foot when happy. Tongue out when focused. Hums when he thinks no one can hear.

He was fascinated by the humming. It was a different tune every ten minutes, all of them tuneless and unselfconscious, drifting out of the boy like steam.

At 3:15, he realized that Leo had stopped drawing.

He looked up. Leo was watching him.

Not smiling. Not performing. Just looking, chin on his fist, with an expression that Ryan could not quite file. It was warm, and it was steady, and it lasted about a second too long. Then it shattered into a grin.

"You're really focused, senpai," Leo said. "You look so serious when you write."

"I'm just reviewing."

"You've been looking at me for a really long time, too."

"I have not."

"Eleven minutes," Leo said cheerfully. "I counted."

Ryan's ears went warm. "That's... I was thinking."

"About what?"

"Your... workflow."

"Oh," said Leo. His smile widened until it was almost unbearable. "Okay! You can look at my workflow whenever you want."

He turned back to his sketchbook, humming. Ryan stared at his own notebook and found that he had written, without meaning to: The puppy counts. Leo counts everything.

He crossed out the second sentence. Then, after thinking about it, he wrote it again.

Subject three was a different matter entirely.

He found Celeste on the second floor, in the corridor outside Studio A, leaning against the wall with a paper cup in one hand and a phone in the other. She wore dark sunglasses, a long camel coat, and the sort of casual elegance that suggested she had never once in her life been caught off guard. Ryan, who had been planning to observe her from a safe distance, was approximately forty feet away when she spoke, without lifting her eyes from her phone.

"Mr. Writer. You're hovering."

He stopped.

"I wasn't hovering."

"You were hovering with a notebook." She lowered the phone and looked at him over the rim of her glasses. Her mouth curved. "Am I in your notes?"

"No."

"I think I am."

"You are not in my notes."

"Let me see."

"It is a private notebook."

"Then it must have something interesting in it." She pushed off the wall and took one step toward him, and then another, and he became suddenly and acutely aware of what a very bad idea this was. "Come now. A man with a notebook watches a woman for ten minutes in a corridor. A woman has a right to know what she's being accused of."

"I'm doing research," Ryan said, with a dignity he did not feel.

"What kind?"

"Voice acting best practices."

"Ah." The smile deepened. "And what, precisely, does a voice actress do that deserves best practices?"

"She, uh. Holds a cup. In a... professional manner."

For a long second, Celeste simply looked at him. Then she laughed. It was not the silken, practiced laugh from the recording booth. It was short and startled, a little rough, a sound that surprised both of them. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, as if she could push it back inside.

"Best practices for holding a cup," she said, when she had recovered. "That's the most elaborate lie I've ever heard, and I once talked my way out of a speeding ticket in four languages."

"It was not a lie."

"It was a very bad one." She tapped the notebook with one fingernail. "You can write whatever you want about me, Mr. Writer. I'll only ask that you spell my name correctly."

She walked away. Ryan stood in the corridor with his heart doing something unpleasant, and wrote, with a hand that was not entirely steady: Celeste. Real laugh: short, startled, rough. Covers her mouth. Said "you can write whatever you want." Why does that feel like a threat?

He looked at that last line. He underlined it.

By Wednesday, he had a system. By Thursday, he had a problem.

The problem was Victor Thorne, who kept turning up.

It was entirely coincidental, of course. The seventh floor was a shared space, and the conference rooms were shared, and Victor, as the fund's representative, had a desk in a glass-walled office near the stairwell. It was only natural that Ryan, passing through the corridor at 4 p.m., would find him standing near the vending machine, reading a document with a frown.

It was also only natural that Ryan, standing at the water cooler with a paper cup and no real need for water, would glance at that frown, and at the shoulders, and at the right wrist, and at the sleeve.

Cuff. One.

He looked away. He looked back.

Cuff. Two.

He drank some water. He was not thirsty. He looked, again, at the cuff.

"Lam."

He jumped so hard that water slopped onto his shoe.

Victor had not moved. He still stood at the vending machine, document in hand, head turned a precise forty-five degrees. His expression was perfectly flat. It was also, somehow, the most attentive expression Ryan had ever seen.

"You have looked at my cuff three times in the past ninety seconds," Victor said.

There was nothing to say to that.

"Occupational habit," Ryan said, after a long moment, which was true in the least helpful possible way.

"Of a scriptwriter."

"I notice things. Details. It's part of the job."

"And what have you noticed?"

It was not a hostile question. It was a quiet one, carefully, almost clinically level. But it hung in the corridor between them with a weight that made Ryan's mouth go dry. He had the distinct sensation of standing on the edge of something, a small cliff he had not known was there, with a clear and perfectly neutral view of the drop.

"That you adjust it before you say something you didn't plan to say," Ryan said.

He had not meant to say it. It came out in the clear, plain voice he used when he was too tired to be clever.

Victor said nothing.

For three seconds, four, five, he simply looked. His dark eyes did not move. Nothing in his face changed. But his right hand, the one holding the document, tightened very slightly on the paper. It was such a small movement that anyone else would have missed it. Ryan, who had spent five days training himself to see exactly this kind of thing, did not.

"I see," Victor said.

"I don't mean it as..."

"Keep your eyes on the document, Lam."

He said it evenly. Then he turned, folded the paper in half with a precise crease, and walked toward the stairwell. At the door, he paused. He did not look back. His left hand rose, and, with great deliberation, tugged at his right cuff.

The door closed behind him.

Ryan stood alone by the vending machine, soaked to the ankle and extremely warm in the face.

He took out his notebook with a shaking hand and wrote: Victor. Did not deny it. Did not tell me to stop.

He read it over.

Then, in smaller handwriting, he added: Why didn't he tell me to stop?

On Friday afternoon, he made a mistake.

It was a small one, the kind you only notice later, and the subject was the last one on his list. He had held off, deliberately, for four days. He told himself it was because her schedule was complicated. In reality, he had been avoiding it with the careful, elaborate cowardice of a man who knows he will not like the results.

Amber Song sat at her glass-walled desk, reviewing a spreadsheet, the afternoon sun making a pale square on the carpet beside her feet. She was wearing her round glasses and a gray cardigan. She had a cup of tea at her elbow, as always, and a pen in her right hand, and she was frowning very slightly at a cell near the bottom of the page.

Ryan sat at his own desk across the floor, forty feet away, with his notebook open on his knee. He told himself he would simply note her routine. Hours. Habits. Meals. Standard fieldwork.

He wrote: Amber.

Then he wrote nothing at all.

He watched her. He watched the way she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear without noticing, the way her mouth moved slightly when she read numbers, the way her tea steamed in the afternoon light. He tried to think what to write. Observation, specifically. Something quotable. Something useful for design.

What he thought, instead, was: she has a little ink on her thumb.

It was nothing. A smudge. And he could not think of a single reason why the sight of it should make something in his chest tilt, slightly, like a picture on a wall.

"You're staring, Ry."

He jumped. The notebook slid off his knee and hit the floor.

Amber had not looked up from her screen. She had said it in the same calm, even voice she used to ask for budget reports. But when he looked over, he saw that the corner of her mouth was lifting, and there was a small, bright, amused flush at the top of her cheekbones.

"I was not staring."

"For six minutes."

"I was thinking."

"About what?" She finally raised her eyes. Behind the round glasses, they were warm and steady and slightly curious. "You've been odd all week. You wore sunglasses indoors on Monday. Ines told me."

"Ines is a gossip."

"Ines is an observer. It's why I like her." Amber got up, walked across the floor with her usual unhurried grace, and bent to pick up the notebook before he could move. "You dropped..."

She stopped.

The notebook had landed face-up. The cover, with its neat black letters, was clearly visible. FIELD RESEARCH: ROUTE DESIGN.

Amber looked at it for a long moment. Her hand, which had been reaching for the book, stayed in the air, half curled, frozen at the very edge of touching it.

"Research," she said quietly.

"For the route," Ryan said, too quickly. He took it from her, a little more abruptly than he intended, and closed the cover against his chest. "You said to write about real people. Observation. I'm just, you know. Observing."

"I did say that."

"So I'm doing it."

"Yes." Amber straightened. Her face had gone very still. It was not unfriendly. It was not anything, in fact. It was only the face of a person who has been told something very ordinary and has heard, underneath it, a sound she did not expect. "Who have you been observing?"

"Everyone," Ryan said. "Anyone. It's... general."

"I see."

She did not ask anything else. She did not smile. She stood there for a moment longer, with her hands folded in front of her and her eyes lowered, and then she gave a small, polite nod, the kind she used at board meetings.

"Don't forget to eat," she said. "And Ry?"

"Yes?"

"Be careful what you write down about people." It was said softly, almost lightly. "Some things are easier to see than to be seen."

She went back to her desk. She sat. She picked up her pen. And Ryan, standing in the middle of the floor with a notebook clutched to his chest like a shield, had the unmistakable and baffling impression that he had just done something wrong without having the slightest idea what it was.

That evening, in his apartment, with the lamp flickering and a bowl of ramen cooling in front of him, he went through the week's notes.

It was a ridiculous amount of material. Four subjects, five days, and pages of tiny handwriting that looked, in the lamplight, like the confession of a very organized stalker. He read slowly, tracing the patterns with the tip of his pen. And as he read, a pattern emerged that he had not been expecting.

Victor had been sending him fewer corrections, and the ones he did send came with brief, almost courteous explanations.

Leo had begun bringing him things: rice crackers, a sticker, a tiny paper crane folded from a rejected storyboard.

Celeste had texted him three times, each time with a pretext: a script question, a schedule question, a photo of a cat she claimed looked like him.

Amber had left a cup of ginger tea on his desk every morning. She always did. But on Tuesday, there had been a second cup, a small paper bag of almond cookies beside it. On Thursday, a sticky note. On Friday, nothing, and he had noticed the nothing more than any of the rest.

He sat back.

It was obvious. It was perfectly clear. Every one of them had become warmer, more attentive, more responsive, since he had started paying attention. He had not changed his behavior at all. He had only watched.

[Hypothesis,] said his brain.

"Yes," Ryan said slowly. "I see it too."

[Observation improves relationships.]

"Exactly. People respond to being noticed. It's a basic principle of human psychology. When a person feels seen, they open up. That's what's happening. That's all."

[That is one interpretation.]

"It's the correct one," said Ryan, who had never in his life been so confident about something so wrong, and he wrote it down in the notebook in bold, underlined letters: Observation improves relationships. Use in route design.

He closed the notebook. He felt, for the first time in several days, pleased with himself.

It did not occur to him that the four people in question might have arrived at a different conclusion. It did not occur to him that attention, to certain people, is not a design principle. It does not occur to a person who has never been the subject of it.

His phone buzzed.

It was an email, sent at 10:47 p.m., from an address he recognized. No greeting. No sign-off. One block of plain text.

Lam. Act One is due Monday. I will read it the day it arrives. I do not sleep. V.T.

Ryan read it twice.

Then, because there was no one in the apartment to see it, and because the lamp was flickering in a way that suggested sympathy, he put his hand over his face and made a small, helpless, entirely involuntary sound that was not quite a laugh.

"He does not sleep," he said to the empty room.

[Noted,] said his brain.

"Don't," said Ryan. "Don't make it weird."

But it was already weird. He could feel it, in the quiet pulse behind his ribs, in the strange warm hum that had settled somewhere beneath his collarbone. Four people had begun to look back at him. And for the first time in his life, he had no script for what came next.