“It should have felt even more horrifying this way—targeted, stalked, hunted down—but it didn’t. If they had come after me specifically, for something I’d done or something I had, then I wasn’t just roadkill, not just some object to be mown down because it happened to be in their way: I was real, a person; I had been the crucial factor at the heart of the whole thing, rather than a meaningless irrelevance to be ignored, tossed aside. And if I was a person within all this, then I could do something about it.”