On a wet Thursday, a chalk arrow appeared on the pavement outside the operations building, pointing toward our door but drawn backward, tail where the point should be. Beside it, a word: AGAIN. The arrow was traced three times as if to insist. Someone had drawn a small circle in the tail. When we went in that night, the hallway lights stuttered the way lights do when a building is briefly thinking of forgetting you. In the operations room, the mirror above the consoles was fogged with breath that wasn’t mine. In the fog, a finger had written a circle and, inside it, a dot.

At 03:17, Unit 14 lit up. She backed around the lamppost. She lifted her hand. I stood and walked to the mirror and looked at myself looking at her. The new hire asked me if I was okay. I said, “Don’t wave.” He said, “I wasn’t going to.” We stood there like two men in a museum refusing to discuss a painting.

She lowered her hand. She passed from Unit 14 to Unit 22, the pharmacy lot, then to Unit 19, the square, and so on, schedule intact. At 03:50 she reached the cul-de-sac with the boarded blue house. She backed along the curb and stopped in front of the one mailbox whose flag was always up though no one lived there. She turned her head—not turned; oriented—toward the lens. She opened her mouth. She formed a word that wasn’t again.

“Please,” she said.

We couldn’t hear it. We could read it.

“Please,” she said, and then, “Turn.”

The new hire said a word I won’t type because I want to keep it mine. I touched the console with both hands because touching something practical when your heart is becoming abstract helps. I stepped back and nearly tripped over a chair not where I had left it. I told myself to count something solid: monitors, breaths, rules.

She took a step backward toward the lens.

That was new. She had never approached a camera directly. She had orbited, taunted angles, rehearsed distance. Now she stepped backward toward the curve of the dome, toward us, toward our sterile rack of clocks.

“Please,” she said again, and lifted her hand so the dot in her palm was flush with the lens, so it became all the image was.

Then the monitor went white.

When the image returned, the cul-de-sac was empty. The new hire had his fists clenched so hard his knuckles looked like someone else’s. I put my hand on the mirror’s frame to keep from doing the arithmetic of how much of me was still mine. The mirror was warm.

We checked the cul-de-sac on foot at dawn, because the city still respects shoes on pavement more than pixels. The blue house’s boards were new. The mailbox flag was down. On the curb, chalk arrows pointed both ways at once. In the middle of the street was a circle with a dot.

We should have called someone whose job title includes the word extraordinary. Instead we filed forms whose drop-down menus did not have an option for what we had seen. The city prefers what it can invoice.

The last night I worked there, the system flagged motion on Unit 03—the footbridge over the canal no one uses since the new road opened. The feed had been dead for months, the fiber nicked by a backhoe and patched with tape at a junction box under a grate that swallows lighters and promises. Suddenly the image was clear: water black as an answer, bridge as thin as a thought, a figure backing across the span with her eyes on the lens. At 03:17:12 she stepped onto the bridge. At :30 she reached the midpoint. At :36 she lifted her hand. At :38 she closed it. At :40 she opened it again without the dot.

She mouthed a word. It wasn’t again, and it wasn’t please. It was my name.

Not the name I sign forms with. The name my grandmother called me when I was small and serious and insisting on watching the street through the screen door because the street was where answers came from.

I did what you do when a city asks you for something you don’t have permission to give. I turned off the monitor. I left the room. I walked the hallway that always smells faintly of burned dust. I took the stairs. I went out into the three a.m. city where the good ghosts work—the bakers, the bus drivers, the people whose labor keeps mornings from being empty performances. I crossed to the canal.

The footbridge was smaller than cameras make things. Cameras flatten courage and enlarge fear; it’s what they’re for. The water was a sheet of metal. The air had the taste of fog thinking about whether to commit. I stepped onto the bridge and did not look at the dome camera above the light. At the midpoint, I stopped. I lifted my hand. I opened it. My palm was my palm. It did not contain a hole. It contained lines that promised a younger version of me that work would make sense.

“Again,” I said, because maybe that was what the bridge wanted.

Nothing happened. The water kept its secrets. The streetlight hummed like a plan. I stepped backward, one pace, then another, watching my feet, then not watching, then watching again. When I reached the stairs at the far side, I turned around, because rules are only useful until they are cruel, and I went home.

The next morning my badge didn’t work. The red light on the reader stayed red as a stop sign. Inside, through the glass, the new hire looked at me with an expression I hope was concern. I shrugged the way people shrug when their wallet has rewritten itself. I went for coffee. The chalk arrow at the curb had been rinsed to a pale idea. Someone had hosed the circle and the dot until they were the same color as the rest of the world.

I quit by email because quitting in person felt like staring into a lens. HR replied with a form. My supervisor sent me a GIF of a cat. The city continued to be a schedule.

At night, sometimes, I wake at 03:17 without needing to. I go to the window and do not open the blinds. I sit on the edge of the bed and count to forty, the way Unit 03 taught me, then to fifty, the way the cul-de-sac asked, then to whatever number is large enough that numbers stop being useful. I say my grandmother-name once, quietly, so it stays.

On mornings when I’m not careful, I catch my reflection in the bus window and notice that it is a fraction late, as if it had to back up to get into position. When that happens, I look down. I study my hands. I trace the lines in my palm with a finger, not to know the future but to be reminded that a palm is not a hole, and neither is a city, and neither am I.

If you live here, you will hear about her from someone who doesn’t want to be the only person who knows. If you don’t, you will still see her, because she belongs to hours, not places. She will pass your street backward and make your porch light into a moon. She will hold up her hand as if to catch a snowflake that is the size of a dot. She will mouth words you can read without hearing. Again. Please. Turn. She will not blink. You may feel that she is looking at you and not at the lens. That is because she is.

The rules we didn’t write are for you now: do not wave. Do not follow. Do not turn around if she asks twice. If you must turn, do it slowly, the way you would when backing out of a decision you regret but can’t afford to reverse suddenly. Keep a mirror where you watch. Say your name so it belongs to you when she tries it on.

If you find arrows chalked the wrong way, step over them. If you find a circle with a dot, draw a second circle around it and go home.

And if one night your screen—phone, monitor, window—shows your street empty, and then shows you, backing into frame, eyes on your own lens, do the kindest thing you can. Blink. It will feel like forgiveness. It will prove that someone here remembers how to move forward, even if, for a little while longer, we are all rehearsing the other direction.