The thing about living the kind of life Je-oh had lived was that you developed a sense for when something was wrong before you could explain why.

Je-oh had been feeling it for about three blocks.

He didn't change his pace. Didn't look around. He had learned a long time ago that the worst thing you could do when you thought you were being followed was to let whoever was following you know that you knew, because that changed the timeline of whatever they were planning and usually not in your favor. So he kept walking, hands in his pockets, shoulders relaxed, the particular brand of unhurried ease he'd perfected over years of needing to look like someone who had nowhere important to be.

He ran through what he knew.

He'd left your place an hour ago for something unremarkable, a contact who had information, a handoff that had gone cleanly, nothing that should have flagged anything. The contact was reliable. The location had been familiar. He had taken his usual route back, which in retrospect was the first mistake, but he'd been tired and it was the middle of the afternoon and the street was public and busy and he had calculated the risk as low.

He was revising that calculation now.

There were two of them. Possibly three, there was a third presence he kept catching at the edge of his awareness that he wasn't fully certain about yet. They were good enough to stay out of his sightline but not good enough to account for reflections

That was either reassuring or more concerning depending on who had sent them.

Je-oh thought about that as he walked.

The street was thinning out. He'd turned without entirely meaning to onto a road that was less busy than the one before it and he felt the shift immediately, the air changed, the noise dropped, the buffer of other people reduced in a way that altered the math of the situation considerably. He thought about turning back but the third presence had solidified behind him and turning back now would funnel him toward it.

He kept walking.

He thought about you, who didn't know where he was right now because it had been an unremarkable errand and Je-oh didn't report unremarkable errands. he thought about his phone in his jacket pocket and whether he had time to-

The gap in the buildings to his left opened into a narrow side street and Je-oh had approximately one second to register the movement in his peripheral vision before the calculation became irrelevant.

He got an elbow into someone's ribs on the way down.

It wasn't enough.