Blame my Shadow

The Pattern

"Residential area," I finally say. "Older man. Two days from now."

They leap into action.

The media explodes.

Sarah looks at me like I've just bled out part of my soul.

"You guessed," she says quietly in the car.

"I predicted."

"You forced it."

I don't answer.

Because she's right.

Two days later, the man doesn't die.

A young woman does.

Different pattern.

Different location.

Different timing.

Everything I said is wrong.

The police don't look at me like a prophet anymore.

They look at me like a liability.

The media doesn't call me Oracle that night.

They call me Unstable.

Delusional.

Misguided.

Sarah doesn't yell at me.

That's worse.

She just sits beside me in silence as the weight of what I failed to prevent settles into my bones.

"You can't keep tearing open your mind like this," she finally says. "You're not a machine. You're a person. And a broken one at that."

"I was sure," I whisper. "It felt... right."

"Or it felt familiar," she replies softly.

The words chill me.

That night, the nightmares aren't symbolic.

They're literal.

I see the detention facility.

The hallways.

The locked doors.

The other children's faces in the dark.

A boy stands apart from the rest.

Older than us.

Watching.

Smiling.

When I wake, my hands are clenched into fists so tight my nails have drawn blood.

There's a word written on the inside of my palm.

In my handwriting.

"SMOKESCREEN."

The next day, I return to the crime board alone.

The killer's pattern looks wrong now that I know the truth.

Too clean.

Too obvious.

Like someone wants it visible.

Wants me to see it.

And then I notice something that makes my stomach flip.

One name from the detention list is missing.

Not dead.

Not attacked.

Not even questioned.

The boy from my nightmare.

Older than the rest of us.

The one whose last known address is sealed under government redaction.

The one whose file is marked:

"Relocated."

A cold realization settles in my gut.

The murders are finishing off the witnesses.

But someone else is still alive.

Someone who never left that place the way the rest of us did.

Someone who learned there how to turn people into patterns.

And for the first time since this began, I understand something that terrifies me more than the idea that I might be the killer.

What if I'm not the murderer—

What if I'm the map?

That night, Sarah notices my silence.

"You're hiding something from me," she says.

I look at her.

At the one person still choosing to believe in me.

And I let myself lie again.

"It's just exhaustion," I say.

But when I turn away, all I can see is that missing name.

That sealed file.

And the certainty finally settles, quiet and deadly:

The killer isn't copying me.

They're following me.