"I'm not the Watcher. But I know who is. And if your cops grab me, you'll never find out."
She looked at him. At his hands — pocketed, non-threatening. At his face — tense, scared, the face of someone doing something that required more courage than they had.
"Dev, hold," she said into the earpiece. "Raghav, hold."
"Isha —" Dev's voice, urgent.
"I said hold." She looked at the man. "Talk."
"Not here. Too many cameras. The Watcher monitors public CCTV. That's how they find subjects — they don't walk around photographing people randomly. They tap into the city's CCTV network and identify targets from surveillance feeds. The street photography is just the final confirmation."
"Who are you?"
"My name is Rohan Suri. I'm a software engineer. Six months ago, I was hired freelance to build a facial recognition algorithm for a startup. I didn't ask what it was for. Two months later, I found the Watcher's List, and I recognised my own code." His voice tightened. "I built the tool they're using to select victims."
The world narrowed. The CP crowds, the traffic, the golden afternoon light — all of it receded, and there was only this man, this confession, and the implication of what he'd just said.
The Watcher wasn't just a photographer. They had technology. Facial recognition. Access to city surveillance feeds. The ability to scan thousands of faces and rate them algorithmically before ever setting foot on the street.
This wasn't a lone predator with an Instagram account.
This was a system.
"Who hired you?" Isha asked.
Rohan looked at her with the eyes of a man who'd been carrying a secret that was too heavy for one person and had finally found someone to share it with.
"That's the part you're not going to believe."
"Try me."
"It's not a person. It's a company. A startup. They call themselves Curator Labs. And they're funded by people you've heard of — venture capital, angel investors, the usual Silicon Valley pipeline. Except their product isn't a dating app or a food delivery service."
"What's their product?"
"Content. Human content. They capture people, film their psychological breakdown in controlled environments, and sell the footage to a private streaming platform. Deep web. Subscription-based. Paying audience."
The ground tilted. Not literally — Isha was standing still — but her understanding of the case rotated on its axis, and the new angle showed something so much darker than a lone stalker or a disturbed individual.
This was commercial. Industrial. A business model built on human suffering, packaged as entertainment, distributed for profit.
The Watcher's List wasn't a person.
It was a company.
And Isha was their most valuable upcoming content.
