Sarah Burks's Arc

Chapter 11 of 13

Sarah watched the leader lock her field notes into the cabinet and felt the weight of what she'd just committed to. Complete transparency meant no control over what came next. The security logs sat in the leader's possession now, timestamped records of every patrol route, every perimeter check, every moment the Cats had eyes on the factory district. If someone had been tracking Sarah's movements, those logs would show when the surveillance started and whether the watcher had crossed paths with the Cats' patrols. The leader pulled a weathered clipboard from the truck's cab and flipped through pages of handwritten entries. Sarah recognized the format immediately—military-style duty logs with precise timestamps and grid coordinates. The kind of documentation that left no gaps. The leader spread the logs across the truck hood beside Sarah's field notes and started matching timestamps. Sarah pulled out her notebook and began cross-referencing. Her first monitoring session at the factory's east wall showed 0347 hours. The security log showed a patrol passing two blocks west at 0352. Five minutes later. She checked the warehouse photograph again—the angle suggested the photographer had been positioned on a rooftop three blocks north. The leader tapped a different entry. A patrol had reported movement on that same rooftop at 0405 hours, but found nothing when they investigated. Sarah's throat tightened. Whoever had been photographing her had also been avoiding the Cats' patrols. They knew the security patterns. Sarah pulled out a blank page and started sketching. She drew lines connecting her monitoring locations to the camera positions from the photographs, then overlaid the patrol routes from the security logs. The pattern emerged immediately. Every time the Cats sent a patrol near one of Sarah's sites, the photographer had already moved to a different vantage point. But the leader found something else. Three separate log entries mentioned the same rooftop surveillance tower being accessed outside patrol schedules. Each entry matched a time when Sarah had been at a monitoring location. The leader's expression hardened. Someone had been using Cats' equipment to track Sarah. But another set of entries showed that same tower being approached by an unauthorized person fifteen minutes after each surveillance session. The timestamps were too precise to be coincidence. Sarah laid out the two trails side by side on a metal chart the leader retrieved from the truck. Red lines marked her movements and the photographer's positions. Black lines showed the unauthorized tower access attempts that followed. The security logs revealed two separate surveillance operations running simultaneously. Someone had been tracking Sarah. Someone else had been tracking the tracker. The leader studied the chart in silence, then pulled out a locked drawer from the cabinet. Inside sat a faded notebook filled with surveillance sketches and coordinates that matched the unauthorized tower access times exactly. One of the Cats had been investigating the photographer independently, documenting every move without reporting it through official channels. Sarah met the leader's eyes and saw the calculation shift. The question wasn't just who had been watching her anymore. It was who among the Cats had known about it and why they'd kept it hidden.