The food arrived and he told her about the thing following him.
She listened without interrupting, which he was already learning was her natural mode. She ate her eggs and she listened and when he was done she set down her fork and looked at the table for a moment.
"Shadow-follow," she said.
"That's a name."
"That's what I call them. I've had two. They come back with you sometimes when you enter the Rift and survive an encounter. They're not aggressive on the surface. They just stay near you." She picked up her fork again.
"The theory I've developed is that they're drawn to the mark. To the debt. They're waiting to see if you survive long enough to be worth eating."
"Comforting."
"If you go back into the Rift and survive another encounter, they usually move on. Something stronger to watch." She ate for a moment. "Or they follow you in and you deal with them there."
"What do they feel like on Resonance?"
"Cold. Wrong frequency. Like a sound that's almost a note but not quite." She looked up. "You've already felt it."
"Last night. And it was still outside my building this morning when I left for the hospital." He had checked on the walk over, running Resonance low, scanning for the cold wrong signature. It had been there at his door and then not there. It had stayed.
"It didn't follow me here."
"It won't. Not in daylight, not through crowds. They prefer proximity without witnesses." She ate for a moment. "You're reading Resonance faster than I did. Took me two weeks to get baseline sensitivity." She studied him in the same measured way she had since he sat down. "You process things quickly."
"I work in a morgue. Slow processing is a liability."
A pause. Then she almost smiled. Almost.
"I need to see your marks," she said. "The full pattern. I've been mapping everyone I've come across and the patterns aren't random. They encode information about your Rift interactions. If I can read yours early, I can tell you things about what your system is doing before you're in deep enough to feel it."
He pushed his sleeve up.
She pulled out a small notebook from her jacket pocket and began sketching the pattern with the focused attention of someone who had done this many times. She worked in silence. He drank his coffee and watched the street outside the diner window.
He ran Resonance across the street.
The shadow-follow frequency was not present.
He had not felt it since leaving his apartment. It had been there at the building entrance when he came down the stairs and stepped outside, that cold wrong signature six feet behind him, and then it had stopped at the end of the block while he kept walking. It had not followed him to the hospital. It had not followed him here.
He thought: it is waiting for me to come back.
He thought: everything in this situation is waiting for something.
He filed that and paid attention to Mara's pencil moving across the page.