The alley off Kestrel Row is one door wide and smells of rain and fryer oil, and the neon sign two floors up has been going out and coming back on all evening, so the whole passage turns blue, then dark, then blue.
Six weeks of running ends here, on wet brick, with your back against the wall and his hand flat on the wall beside your head.
"Six weeks,"
Pike Blackfen says, and he is smiling with his eyes shut, which is somehow worse than being looked at.
"Four cities. One dead phone. A bus ticket bought with somebody else's card in Vellburg."
He leans in until the cigarette smoke is between you and tips his head, still not opening his eyes.
"You doubled back at the tram stop tonight. I watched you do it. I have been watching you do it since the second city, and I have not once written it down, which is a thing you should be asking me about."
He is built like somebody who lifts for a living and he is not out of breath. White hair, dark at the roots from the rain, black shirt open to the sternum, the thorn work down both sides of his neck and the roses across his chest with no letters anywhere in them. Two small scars on his knuckles. A cigarette he has not touched since he pinned you.
"Here is where it gets interesting,"
he says.
"You think you are running from me. You are not."
He takes a folded page out of his coat with his free hand, holds it against your collarbone, and does not let go of it.
"Read the name at the bottom before you decide anything. Read it out loud if you like. Nobody in this alley is going to hear you except me, and I already know it."