Story

Prologue

The sky is a pitiless steel gray on the day you receive the first cryptic message from The Watcher - the kind of sky that gazes at your anxieties, your achievements, and your tenuous dreams with the same indifference.

You’re making your way across the bridge to Conrad Grebel for jazz ensemble practice, numb fingers clutching a rapidly cooling cup of coffee.

The icy wind is a knife, stabbing you anywhere it finds a vulnerable patch of skin: your ankles, your cheeks, the sliver of flesh between your parka and your jeans.

Your thoughts, occupied with a tricky couple bars of Rhapsody in Blue, are abruptly interrupted when your right foot hits a slick patch of ice and slides out from under you. You go down with a cry, your coffee cup flying out of your hands.

Swearing, you pick yourself up gingerly, cursing the ice, January, and every decision that led you to this moment. Why didn’t you go to Stanford? You could be sitting under a palm tree right now.

Your coffee is a seeping brown stain in the dirty snow. “Like a bloodstain,” comes the thought, unbidden and unwanted.

As you bend to pick up the cup, wincing at the new soreness in your knees, you see a flash of crimson in the corner of your eye, bright and strange against the dull landscape. Probably a discarded Tim Hortons cup from some other unlucky soul, you think, but no.

There, wedged between two rocks on the riverbank, impossible to see except from where you are crouched, is a red envelope. You shuffle over and carefully pick it up. It’s made of heavy, quality paper, strangely unblemished despite the snow and the mud.

You turn it over, and feel a stab of ice in the pit of your stomach that has nothing to do with the now-forgotten wind.

Written on the envelope, in an uneven scrawl, is your name.

With shaking hands, you break the envelope’s seal, and reveal the contents...