People want ghosts to be about the past. They want a tragedy with dates you can underline and say, “There—this is why.” I’ve worked municipal surveillance for eight years—first as a contractor, then as a city employee with a lanyard and keys to rooms that don’t have windows—and if I’ve learned anything from watching a city breathe in grayscale, it’s this: some hauntings are schedules, not stories.

We first logged her as a pattern, not a person. At 03:17 every night—give or take four seconds—Unit 14 at the Riverton underpass would show motion. The infrared would flare, the algorithm would raise a yellow box, and a figure would drift into frame moving backward, eyes level with the lens, as if the camera were a small moon and she were a tide. She never blinked. We checked. Someone on the night desk set up a script to count blinks across weeks of footage, because the human brain insists on being wrong about what it sees. Zero blinks. She pivoted around the base of the streetlight with a softness that suggested practice or gravity, then continued backward along the chalked bike lane, never glancing at the traffic that wasn’t there, never missing the cracks.

At first we assumed a prank. The night-shift cops joked about theater kids and TikTok. Someone called her Moonwalk Girl. Someone else said we were watching a dancer rehearse grief. The second week, she appeared on Unit 14 and, seven minutes later, on Unit 22 outside a pharmacy across town—same posture, same backward glide, same unblinking face aimed straight at the lens. No car could have made the distance in time, not at that hour, not with the roadworks. A subdivided city can still be larger than physics allows.

My job is less glamorous than the shows make it: I make sure feeds don’t die and that the motion detection doesn’t flag every moth as a felony. But the city pays extra if you’re willing to review anomalies, because anomalies lead to lawsuits, and they’d rather pay me than settle a case they could have prevented by ignoring reality harder. So I started a file.

Entry 1: Riverton underpass 03:17:12–03:17:49. Subject approximately 160–165 cm. Hair in a low ponytail; clothing indistinct; long skirt or coat. Gait: backward; frictionless rotation at lamppost base; no visible stumble. No blink.

Entry 2: Pharmacy lot 03:24:51–03:25:15. Same subject. No blink.

Entry 3: Hillsbridge elementary playground 03:17:06–03:17:37 the next night. The swing nearest the camera swayed a fraction of a centimeter before motion triggered, as if something exhaled. She backed across the sand, head turned—no, not turned; oriented—toward the camera. No blink.

By the ninth entry she had a map. By the thirteenth, a rhythm. Cameras are clocks with eyelids. If the subject obeys the clock, it feels like cooperation. That was when she started watching me.

The first time I felt it, I was alone in the operations room at 02:50 with a cup of coffee the color of a decision you regret later. Racks of monitors loomed like unlit houses. The system does not show you everything at once unless you ask rudely. It shows you motion, and then it shows you yourself asking for more. I dragged a window across Unit 14 and waited for the underpass to confess. At 03:17:10, a shadow at the far left; at :12, the edge of a shoe sliding backward into view. Her face was angled toward the lens, but not exactly. It was angled toward where I sat. I leaned left; on-screen, her chin ticked that way, as if she were correcting for parallax. I leaned right. She compensated. I told myself it was a trick of my neck and the cheap swivel of the chair. A few seconds later, she pivoted around the lamppost and retreated into the dark, and I told myself I’d dropped a pen and the linoleum had sighed.

There are rules in our office we don’t write down. Rule one: never watch live without a mirror. Sounds like a superstition because it is one. Mounted above the main console is a strip of glass tilted just enough that you can see your own face while you stare at other people’s lives. You’d be surprised how much damage that prevents. When you see yourself watching, you remember there’s a person at the end of your eyes.

The third week, she appeared on Unit 19—the town square by the granite statue of an unnamed soldier whose face the pigeons have erased. At 03:17 she slid backward up the courthouse steps, past the bronze dedication plaque, and circled the base of the statue, always keeping her eyes on the dome camera tucked under the cornice. When she reached the top step, she stopped, lifted one hand, and held it out, palm up, the universal gesture for waiting or mercy. She kept it there for ten seconds. Then she let it fall and continued backward out of frame. I rewound three times and watched her hand again. On the third watch, I saw something in her palm—a black dot the size of a seed.

We zoomed in the next night to catch the dot. The grain turned the air to snow. She slid into frame. At the top step, she held out her palm again. The dot was a hole. Not a shadow. Holes and shadows look similar until they don’t. The hole was so black it rearranged the pixels around it. It might have been nothing; the mind loves to build cathedral doors into smudges. She closed her hand. When she opened it, the dot was gone. She left.

That morning I took the footage to my supervisor, who wore stress like a second necktie. He watched, then watched again, then said, “Stop bringing me art projects.” I told him about the times, the impossible distances. He told me the answer is always properly maintained sidewalks. He liked solutions in which concrete cured overnight into good behavior. “You want overtime?” he asked. “We’ve got a panhandler situation at the East Market. That’s a problem I can write an email about. This?” He tapped the screen where her palm had been. “What is it, ‘ghost with object permanence’? Go drink water.”

I printed the entries anyway. I printed until the paper tray squealed. I mapped the times. Patterns stop being mysterious when you can predict them. They start being terrifying. If she was at the underpass at 03:17, she was at the pharmacy by 03:24, the square by 03:31, the playground by 03:37, the bus depot at 03:43, and the cul-de-sac with the boarded blue house at 03:50. You could set your watch by the way she rewound the city.

Someone in Maintenance chalked over the bike lane arrows at Riverton because a truck had carved a rut and the city wanted to pretend it was intentional. The chalked arrows pointed the wrong way for a week. Every night that week, she lined her heels with those reversed arrows as if standing in a diagram. I started seeing reversed arrows other places—on construction plywood, on mailboxes stripped for repainting, on the paper placemats at a diner where I ate eggs at 4 a.m. after my shift. The city was full of instructions pointed toward outcomes we weren’t ready to reach.

The first report came from a resident on Whitcomb. “There’s a girl,” the voicemail said. “She walks backwards at night, staring at my door. I can’t tell if she’s fifteen or forty or a bad photograph. My porch light goes on, she keeps going. My dog won’t bark. Could you send someone to ask her to stop?” We sent a patrol car. The dashcam recorded an empty street, and the officer’s voice, and the sound of a human throat deciding not to say the obvious.

A week later, we got a second call: a man at the bus depot complaining that a woman had backed straight through the benches. Not around them. Through them. He demonstrated for the officer by walking backward himself and tripping over his own feet, because the physics of imitation remain immune to fear.

I started keeping my watch set five minutes slow at night. It made me feel like I was cheating on the schedule we shared. If I left the operations room at 03:15, I could cross the corridor to the vending machines and not be in front of a screen when she passed. It didn’t matter. The feed would be waiting when I came back, the software’s yellow box framing her like a portrait of a saint. The difference between a saint and a ghost is who gets to tell the story.

The first time she spoke, it wasn’t through sound. Security cameras don’t do sound unless someone pays extra, and nobody wants to hear the city at three in the morning unless they don’t have a choice. It was on Unit 05, the alley behind the old print shop where the murals peel in long curls and kids take graduation photos at noon. She backed into frame, eyes on the lens. She lowered her chin the way people do when they’re reading something carved high on a building. I remembered a trick a guy from IT taught me: if you tilt the dome housing with a screwdriver from the outside, you can skew the angle four degrees and catch more of the sky or more of the curb. I sent a text to a friend in Maintenance who owed me a favor, and the next day the dome was tilted just enough that when she came the following night, we could see her lips.

She said one word. We couldn’t hear it. We could read it.

“Again,” she said, and kept walking backward.

I told myself a mouth can make any word if you want it to—love, leave, help. I told myself that the right answer is always to check the conduit, reseat the cable, reseal the housing, pray over the ethernet. I told myself to stop naming the things I was watching.

Some nights she wasn’t alone. That’s not right; she was always alone, but the city wasn’t. A man would appear in a window behind her at the same second every third night and take his phone out and, in one draft of our timeline, call someone he shouldn’t. A bus would glide through the depot without stopping, the route number a word instead of figures, and no one would stand to board. A woman in a long coat would open her car door and sit without keys until the keys appeared in her hand because she decided that they had. These were ordinary hauntings, the kind you get in any town where sleep is a rumor. But their seconds aligned with hers, and the alignment made me feel like I’d been caught cheating on something I hadn’t realized I’d married.

Around Entry 40, the eyes started following me even when the monitors were off. I’d sit on the bus home at dawn and check the window and see my face and, behind it, a shadow with different intent. I’d stand in line at the pharmacy behind a man who bought bandages and a magazine and feel a pressure between my shoulder blades, like someone rehearsing putting a hand there. I avoided mirrors. I avoided the glass door at my building that throws your reflection back at you with the sound of keys. I learned to sleep with the hallway light on, then with all the lights off, because every compromise felt like a pledge I didn’t remember making.

The file filled. I took three days off, because the city mandates it when you report exposure to incidents with “compromised ordinary perception.” I spent those days on the couch eating food that came wrapped in cellophane and watching other cities where every crime solves itself in forty-two minutes. On the third night, I woke at 03:17 to the hum of my refrigerator learning a new trick. I went to the window. Across the street, on the stoop of the building that used to be a bakery and now is a space for lease with a dying plant, a girl was walking backward. She kept her eyes on my sixth-floor window. She kept her head level as she descended the four steps, then slid along the sidewalk, heels finding the cracks.

I didn’t move. I did not wave. The unspoken second rule of our office: never acknowledge a forecast that has noticed you.

She stopped directly under the streetlight. The light flared like a thought. She lifted her hand and held her palm up. In the middle of it was that small black dot. From six floors, I could tell it wasn’t a shadow.

I closed the blinds and stood with my forehead on the cool metal slats and thought of the word again until it lost meaning, then found it again. I waited two minutes. I opened the blinds to a quiet sidewalk and a plant that had remembered how to die a little more convincingly.

The next time she spoke to me, she used the only channel I couldn’t pretend to misunderstand. A week later, at 03:17, the operations room was staffed by me and by a new hire who loved the job the way people love scuba diving: for the pressure and the quiet and the illusion that you can breathe somewhere you shouldn’t. I had Unit 14 up on the main screen and Unit 19 on the secondary and Units 05, 22, 07, 12, 33, and 04 in a grid on the lower shelf of monitors. She appeared in six frames at once as if divided by math, each version a fraction of the same person. She backed around the lamppost in Unit 14, around the statue base in Unit 19, across the playground in Unit 07, through the bus depot benches in Unit 12, past the pharmacy trash corral in Unit 22, and along the cul-de-sac curb in Unit 04. In all six, she kept her eyes on the lens. In all six, she lifted her hand at the same second and opened her fingers. The black dot sat in the center of each palm, pixels refusing to arrange themselves into anything else.

The new hire said, “What is that?”

I said nothing, because I had another rule, one I made just then without telling myself I had. The rule was: if you say it out loud, it can put on your voice and use it.

She closed her hand. She lowered it. She kept walking backward. On Unit 05, the alley, she passed a wall someone had tagged with spray paint: DO NOT FOLLOW ME. The next night the wall said: DO NOT WATCH ME. The third night it said: DO NOT TURN AROUND.

That was when the missing persons started.

The first was a nurse who took the late bus and whose boyfriend said she came home and laughed at a video and made tea and then turned off the lights and said she was going to the bathroom and did not arrive at the bathroom or any other room again. The second was a man who slept in the park and who told a volunteer that he’d woken up to the sound of footsteps, his own, and that he’d decided to follow himself to see where he was going, and when he reached the bench where he slept, he lay down, and then he wasn’t the one lying there anymore. The third was a kid—sixteen, smart, mouthy, jacket patched with bands whose names are positions you can fold a body into—who texted a friend a picture of a street taken through a window and a caption that said, simply, AGAIN, and then turned off read receipts out of habit and did not turn them on again, ever. We checked cameras near all three. At 03:17 they showed empty streets. At 03:24 they showed a blur of motion that could be moths. At 03:31 they showed the absence of a person like a hole held up for inspection.

I stopped bringing the entries to my supervisor. I started checking doors twice, then three times. I learned to let the kettle boil and cool without pouring, because heat makes you decide. I slept with a chair against my door, not because it would stop anyone but because it would tell me how far I was willing to walk in my sleep.