She leaves two minutes before sunrise. Every day. Her face is masterfully concealed with make-up, making her look at least ten years older. Anyone passing by doesn’t notice though, because her hood is always up. It’s a bit odd in this heat. But nobody looks twice. She walks like she owns the city, or town, depending on where she is. It’s an odd mix with her stature, but it works well. She seems to repel attention, sending people’s eyes conveniently away. Even the most curious turn their gaze.

You’d think more people would notice the seven year old wandering the streets at sunrise, alone.

After twelve minutes, she takes a sharp turn and changes her route. She has no intention of returning to her sleeping spot. Every day she puts as much distance between where she slept the night before as possible. She’ll loop around, take unexpected turn offs and hop on a bus to nowhere. But her actions always have a method to them, a strange logic that she follows.

She has only spoken to somebody once since she got out. They got uncharacteristically suspicious of her. So she spoke to them first, acted like she was the one worried about them and played off a rather believable story that she waiting for her big brother to come pick her up. After that she stopped making eye contact with people. Nobody has gotten to see her pale green eyes narrow like a hungry cat while she passes the twentieth coffee shop of the morning.

She notices the police up ahead handing out pictures of her and takes another sharp turn. It’s been a month since she last got worked up about seeing them. She’s learned to not run or slow down or look away, but to act exactly how she was before. This time they don’t even glance in her direction. It’s really best for them; she slit the throats of the last cops to find her, and the ones before that, and before that, and... Well, you get the point.

When the sun reaches its peak, she glances behind her. She does it every day, at midday, exactly. But she never sees anything out of the ordinary. It’s what worries her the most. She sets back off, taking a left down a street, then the first right, then another left, going down past four streets then another left. She won’t take another right until an hour passes. She thinks that her little habit is difficult to track, but it’s just that, a habit. Her movements every single day have been the same.

Someone has been keeping an eye on her for a few days now. All that’s done is make her walk faster. She doesn’t look like she’s in a hurry, but the speed difference from a week ago is noticeable. She’s been on the run for two months now. She is bound to notice when someone starts following. The problem is that she thinks only one person is following her. Of course she never noticed when she first escaped, two months ago, that someone started follow her straight away.

The new follower has been risking getting close to her with every day. But it’s only made her fall into her half-panicked state. When she thinks she’s being followed, like she did back in December once, she’ll throw in several more twists and turns before the day is out. She finds large crowds and sifts through them, never quite going where expected. The first time she might go straight through the crowd. Another time she might veer off to a side. This time she’s decided to loop right to the edge then turn around and go back the way she came.

It’s a wonder that the new follower can keep up. Then again, decoding her habits doesn’t take genius, just patience. The new follower has plenty, but not nearly as much as she does. She walks right pass a policeman. He does take a second glance. And he looks back the way she came. His eyes immediately narrow on the new follower. There’s nothing suspicious about the woman; perhaps it’s just his intuition. He walks up to the woman and smiles. And in that moment, the woman loses sight of the smart kid.

I stifle a laugh while keeping my eyes firmly on her. When you track someone for two months, you tend to learn how they ditch a tail. And in a couple of weeks, I’m sure I’ll figure out how to bring her in too.