One little mistake will kill you. You know it will, and your whole life is dedicated to the prevention of that mistake, to checking every room for bugs, to watching every stranger, to making sure you’re never caught in traffic where a good shot can snipe you off from the twelfth story of an office building from eight blocks away. And one day, you’ll brush against a stranger on the train and feel a little prick, nothing to worry about, and seven minutes and eighty- four seconds later you’ll be lying on the ground listening to your heart slow beat by beat and wondering when you slipped. Sometimes you didn’t even do anything wrong. Sometimes the dice just land wrong and there nothing you can do but go down swinging and hope to take some of them with you.

It happened to Kate. It happened to Tom. Eventually, it’ll happen to all of them. I’m just lucky— my number hasn’t come around yet. I’m playing a game of statistics, and for every breath I take the chance of my taking another drop.

My name is a number, and this is my story.