Macon saw the number for the first time on a Tuesday morning.
He was on the metro, line 4, standing because there had been no seats left since Montrouge. He held his phone in one hand, his coffee in the other, scrolling through notifications without really reading them. A nine o'clock meeting. A message from Amine asking if he was coming Friday. A weather alert for rain later in the day.
Nothing unusual.
The train stopped at Vavin. People got off, others got on, and that's when he saw the man.
Mid-forties, gray suit, black briefcase. He slipped through the passengers with the particular efficiency of someone who had taken this same route every day for years. He found a standing spot near the doors, grabbed a rail, exhaled briefly like someone who had just been running.
Completely normal.
Except for the number above his head.
97%
White. Sharp. Floating in the air about twenty centimeters above the man's skull, as readable as a road sign. Macon stared at it for two full seconds before looking away, convinced his lack of sleep was messing with him.
He looked elsewhere.
A woman with a stroller. Nothing above her head. A teenager with headphones. Nothing. An old woman reading a paperback. Nothing.
He looked back at the man in the gray suit.
97%
Still there. Still just as clear.
Macon told himself he needed a vacation.
He wasn't the type to panic. Seven years managing crises at a consulting firm had cured him of that. When something unusual happened, he set things down mentally, analyzed, looked for the rational explanation before considering anything else.
Possible causes: sleep deprivation, he'd had four hours. Accumulated stress, plausible. Ocular migraines, he'd had one at twenty-two, it could look like this from what he'd read.
He rubbed his eyes with one hand.
The number didn't disappear.
He noticed something else then. Below the 97%, in smaller but equally sharp characters, another display. A thin bar running horizontally, like a gauge. Almost full. And next to it, something that looked like a countdown, except the numbers were changing too fast for him to read properly.
Like time was running out.
The train slowed at Saint-Placide. Macon looked at the man. The man was looking at his phone, oblivious, with no idea there was anything above him. He looked tired. He looked like someone with an ordinary day ahead of him.
97%.
Macon couldn't help thinking about what that meant.
He pushed the thought away immediately.
He arrived at the office ten minutes late, sat down in front of his screen, and tried to work normally. For an hour, it went fine. The numbers in his report's spreadsheets didn't float in the air. The colleagues walking past his desk had nothing above their heads. Everything was normal.
He was starting to convince himself that line 4 had just been a bad morning when Karim stopped by his desk.
Karim from HR. Thirty, always smiling, the kind of person everyone liked without quite knowing why.
12%
Macon looked at the number. Looked at Karim. Looked at the number again.
12%. Not 97. Not anywhere close to 97.
"You look terrible this morning," said Karim. "Bad meeting?"
"No," said Macon. "Bad night."
Karim nodded, said something about the coffee machine on the third floor being better than the second floor's, and left.
Macon sat motionless in front of his screen for a full minute.
The numbers were different for each person.
He went home at seven, taking the same route as the morning. He counted. Not the people, the numbers. He saw seventeen in the car, ranging from 3% on a young woman to a man in his sixties with 71% above him who was coughing into his sleeve without noticing.
Nobody above 80%, this time.
He got off at his stop, came up into the open air, and stopped on the sidewalk in front of the metro entrance.
He thought about the man in the gray suit from that morning. 97%. That countdown below the number that he hadn't had time to read properly.
He took out his phone. Searched: line 4 Paris incident today.
Nothing came up.
He exhaled. Told himself maybe 97% didn't mean what he thought it meant. Maybe it was something else. Maybe his brain had invented a system with no logic, no rules, no meaning.
He was about to put his phone back in his pocket when a new notification appeared.
A local news alert. Serious accident on rue de Rennes, 2:32 PM. Pedestrian struck by a hit-and-run vehicle. Life-threatening condition.
Macon looked at the time on his phone.
He was two streets away.
He stood on the sidewalk without moving for a long time, people flowing around him, the noise of the city surrounding him, and in his head a single question that wouldn't go away.
Which direction had the man in the gray suit gone when he left the metro?