2. The Poll of Predators

The words glowed on the screen like a taunt carved in phosphor. You see me now, don't you, Ivy?

She slammed the laptop shut, then immediately opened it again. Her hands were shaking so badly she mistyped her password three times. When the desktop finally loaded, the chat log was still there, the username CartWhisperer sitting at the bottom of the thread like a signature on a death warrant. He knew her name. Not her handle, not her IP address, not some anonymous identifier. Her real name. Ivy Hatch.

She checked every lock in her apartment. The deadbolt was secure, the chain hooked, the windows latched. The parking lot outside was empty except for her ten-year-old sedan. The streetlamp flickered once, twice, then steadied. Millwood was a town that went to sleep early. No one was watching. No one was waiting. And yet.

She called Detective Coleridge again. This time, she didn't let him interrupt.

“There's been another one. Midland MegaMart. A janitor. It was live-streamed, same as before. The same users were in the chat, the same person calling himself CartWhisperer. And at the end of the stream, he addressed me by name. My full name. You need to take this seriously.”

Detective Coleridge's voice was flat, worn thin by decades of filtering truth from noise. “Ms. Hatch, I received your email. The encrypted one with all the attachments. I sent it to our cyber unit for preliminary analysis.”

“And?”

“And they said the metadata is inconclusive. The stream you captured could have been generated after the fact, edited to look like a live event. The chat logs could be fabricated. Without corroborating evidence from the scene, we can't verify that what you saw was real.”

“The janitor,” Ivy said. “Call the Midland store. Ask if anyone named Elias works there or worked there recently. Ask if they had an employee who fits the description I sent.”

There was a pause. She heard the creak of a chair, the distant murmur of a police station at low volume. “Elias. That's the name the employee at the Millwood store gave you.”

“Yes.”

“And you think this Elias is CartWhisperer.”

“I think Elias is the person who pushed the cart, and I think he's moved on to bigger things.”

Coleridge exhaled. “I'll make inquiries. But Midland is outside our jurisdiction. That's three counties over. I'll need to coordinate with their department, and they're going to want more than a dark web video and a chat log.”

“Then get more,” Ivy said. “Get the security footage from the Midland loading bay. Get the employee records. Get something before there's a third stream.”

She hung up before he could respond. The bravado evaporated as soon as the call ended, leaving her hollow and trembling. She was a data analyst, not a detective. Her entire professional life had been spent behind a screen, finding patterns in spreadsheets, optimizing supply chains for corporations that didn't know her name. She had no training, no authority, no backup. Just a folder full of horrors and a name that had somehow found its way into the mouth of a killer.

The next morning, she drove three and a half hours to Midland. The MegaMart there was identical to the one in Millwood, part of a corporate template stamped across the American landscape. Same beige concrete, same red signage, same cavernous parking lot. The loading bay was at the rear, accessible by a service road that wound past dumpsters and idling delivery trucks. A yellow crime scene tape had been strung across the bay doors, but it was already torn at one end, flapping in the January wind.

Ivy parked at the edge of the lot and approached on foot. A man in a MegaMart manager's vest stood near the bay, talking to a uniformed officer. She waited until the officer walked away, then approached the manager.

“Excuse me. I'm a researcher looking into workplace safety incidents. Can you tell me what happened here?”

The manager, a heavyset man with a name tag reading “Gerald,” looked at her with exhausted suspicion. “No comment. Corporate sent a memo. We're not supposed to talk about it.”

“I'm not press. I'm just trying to understand the risks that overnight workers face. Was there an employee named Elias working here recently?”

Gerald's face paled. “Why does everyone keep asking about him?”

Ivy's pulse quickened. “Who else is asking?”

“The police. They came this morning, asking about a former employee named Elias Voss. But we don't have any record of an Elias Voss. Not in this store, not in the district.”

“Voss,” Ivy repeated. The surname settled into her mind like a key turning in a lock. Elias Voss. “What about Marcus, from the Millwood store? He said Elias worked there.”

Gerald shrugged. “I don't know about Millwood. But I ran the name through our HR portal. Nothing. No Elias Voss has ever worked for MegaMart in this state.”

The contradiction was wrong, deeply wrong. Marcus had described Elias in detail—brown hair, glasses, invisible. The kind of guy you see every day and never really notice. Someone had wiped Elias Voss from the system, scrubbed him from the records like a stain removed from linoleum. Or someone had created him, a phantom employee who existed only in the margins.

Ivy thanked Gerald and walked back to her car. She sat in the driver's seat, engine off, staring at the loading bay. A janitor had died here. Lionel Greer, sixty-two, a widower with grown children in another state. The local news had covered the story briefly, calling it a tragic industrial accident. There was no mention of a live stream, no mention of an audience watching from the shadows. The police either hadn't found the digital evidence, or they were sitting on it, waiting for a pattern to emerge before they admitted what was happening.

She opened her laptop and searched for information about Lionel Greer. A short obituary, a LinkedIn profile that hadn't been updated in years, a Facebook page with no recent posts. His wife had died of cancer five years ago. His children lived across the country. His coworkers described him as quiet, reliable, the kind of man who did his job and went home to an empty apartment. There were no photos of him with friends, no event invitations, no tags in group pictures. He had been profoundly, completely alone.

The same was true of Patricia Hembry. Ivy had researched her too, in the days after the first stream. A nurse who worked the night shift, divorced, no children. Her neighbors said she kept to herself. Her coworkers said she was dedicated but distant. She had moved to Millwood three years ago for a job and never quite found her footing in the community. She was still a stranger, even to the people who saw her every day.

Both victims had been invisible. Not just in death, but in life. They were the people who passed through the world without leaving a mark, the ones who sat alone in break rooms and ate lunch in their cars. They were perfect targets. And the killer knew it.

Ivy drove back to Millwood as the sun set, the highway stretching before her like a gray ribbon. The radio played static-laced oldies, songs about love and loss that felt like artifacts from a world she no longer inhabited. She thought about loneliness. Real loneliness, the kind that didn't announce itself with tears or melodrama, but settled into the bones like cold weather. She had felt it herself, in the months after her divorce, when she would go entire weekends without speaking to another human being. She had felt it when she moved to Millwood, a town where she knew no one, where her neighbors nodded politely and never asked her name. She knew what it was to be unseen. And she understood, with a chill that went deeper than fear, why someone might eventually decide to make the world see them, no matter the cost.

Back in her apartment, she found a response from Detective Coleridge. It was short and bureaucratic, the kind of email written to create a paper trail rather than communicate anything useful. The Midland police had reviewed the security footage from the loading bay. The camera covering the compactor area had malfunctioned that night, recording only static. The camera at the entrance showed Lionel Greer arriving for his shift at 10:00 PM. No other person was visible on any of the working cameras. The official cause of death was accidental crushing. The case was closed.

Ivy read the email three times. The camera had malfunctioned. Just like the blind spots CartWhisperer had described in the first stream. Just like the skipped frames Marcus had mentioned at the Millwood store. The killer wasn't just invisible; he was erasing himself from the record in real time, manipulating the surveillance systems that were supposed to catch him.

She opened the dark web forum where she had found the first stream. The page had changed. A banner now stretched across the top, rendered in blood-red text against a black background:

SEE_ME — SEASON 2 NOW PLAYING. SUBSCRIBE FOR EXCLUSIVE ACCESS.

Below the banner, a thread had been pinned. It was titled “Rules of the Game” and written by CartWhisperer.

“Welcome to See_Me. This is not a performance for the faint of heart. This is a referendum on visibility. Every episode features a person the world has forgotten. You, the audience, will decide their fate. A poll will appear at the beginning of each stream. Choose wisely. Choose cruelly. Choose to be seen, because that is what they never were. This is not murder. This is a mirror. And you are all looking.”

Ivy scrolled down. The thread had hundreds of comments, a mix of grotesque enthusiasm and performative outrage. Some users posted clown emojis. Others argued about whether the streams were real or staged. A few threatened to report the forum to the authorities, but their posts were drowned out by the chorus of anticipation. The poll for the next stream was already active.

She clicked on it. The question read: “Who deserves to be seen next?” The options were a series of anonymous profiles, each with a brief description:

Option A: A single mother working two jobs in a small town. No social media presence. No close friends. Last seen by anyone who cared: 2018.

Option B: A retired schoolteacher living alone in a rural farmhouse. Widowed. Estranged from his children. Only regular contact is the mail carrier.

Option C: A night shift security guard at a shopping mall. No criminal record. No visitors. Has not received a personal phone call in three years.

Option D: A data analyst who thinks she can stop what has already begun.

Ivy's blood turned to ice. Option D. She didn't need to read the description twice. It was her. She was on the board.

The poll results were displayed in real time. Option A was leading with forty-two percent. Option D was second, at thirty-one percent. Hundreds of anonymous users were voting, deciding who would die next. And Ivy Hatch was on the menu.

Her phone buzzed. A text message from a blocked number.

“You wanted to be seen, Ivy. That's why you kept digging. That's why you wouldn't let it go. Welcome to the show. The audience is already voting. Do you feel visible now?”

She threw the phone across the room. It hit the wall and clattered to the floor, screen still glowing. She pressed her palms against her eyes and tried to breathe. The killer had been watching her. Not just reading her emails or tracking her IP address. Watching. He knew she had driven to Midland. He knew she had spoken to Gerald. He knew she was alone.

The laptop chimed. The poll had updated. Option D was now at thirty-eight percent. Gaining.

Ivy retrieved her phone and called the FBI field office in Brightwater, the nearest major city. She navigated through three layers of automated menus before reaching a human voice, an agent named Dana Moreno who sounded young and overworked.

“My name is Ivy Hatch. I have evidence of two murders being live-streamed on the dark web. A third is being planned, and my name is on the target list. I need protection and I need someone to take over this investigation.”

Agent Moreno's tone sharpened. “Tell me everything.”

Ivy did. She described the streams, the chat logs, the poll, the text message. She described Patricia Hembry and Lionel Greer and the invisible man who had killed them both. She described the banner advertising a second season, as if murder were a streaming service producing original content. She described the option D that had her name written all over it.

When she finished, Agent Moreno was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Ms. Hatch, I'm going to be honest with you. We've been tracking chatter about something called See_Me for about a week. We thought it was a hoax, an ARG, some kind of dark web marketing stunt for a horror movie. But if what you're saying is true, this is something else entirely.”

“It's not a hoax,” Ivy said. “Two people are dead.”

“I understand. I'm sending a team to your location. Do not leave your apartment. Do not open the door for anyone except agents with verified credentials. We'll be there in two hours.”

Ivy hung up and sat in the dark, watching the poll numbers climb. Option D was at forty-two percent now, tied with Option A. The audience was choosing. And somewhere out there, in the vast and empty night, CartWhisperer was preparing his next broadcast. She could almost feel him, a presence just beyond the edge of the light, a pair of eyes that had been watching her for longer than she wanted to imagine.

Her laptop chimed again. Not the poll this time. A direct message, routed through the dark web forum, impossible to trace.

CartWhisperer: They won't believe you. They never do. That's the beautiful thing about being invisible. You can do anything. And no one sees a thing.

CartWhisperer: See you soon, Option D.