Tangeni noticed the man following Lola about a week after they started training with Petrus, a figure who appeared in the crowds whenever she was out in public and disappeared whenever she looked directly at him.
At first he thought he was imagining it, seeing patterns where there weren't any because the training had made him paranoid about everything and Petrus kept telling them that paranoia was what kept runners alive.
But the man kept showing up in places where a random stranger wouldn't be, and after a few days Tangeni was sure it wasn't his imagination.
Near the market when Lola went to buy food, standing in a doorway across the street like he was waiting for someone who never showed up, outside the abandoned building where they'd been sleeping, watching from a car that sat there for hours with the engine off.
Watching from across the street when they left Petrus's training facility, always maintaining the same distance, never getting too close but never going away either.
Always watching, never approaching, like he was gathering information for someone else instead of acting on his own.
"We need to talk," Tangeni told Lola when they were alone in their building and he was sure nobody could overhear them through the thin walls or broken windows. "There's someone following you."
Her face went pale in a way that told him everything he needed to know about who the man probably was and what his presence meant.
"Describe him."
"Tall, thin, gray jacket, walks with a slight limp like he hurt his knee at some point and it never healed right." Tangeni had been paying attention because paying attention was what kept you alive, and Petrus had drilled that into them every single day of training. "He's been tracking you for at least a week, maybe longer, I only started noticing him a few days ago."
"Viktor," Lola said, and the name came out like a curse. "Beatrice's brother, he's the one she sends when she wants something found."
"He's looking for you."
"Of course he is." She sat down heavily on an overturned crate, her hands shaking slightly. "Beatrice isn't the type to give up on something she wants, she's got money invested in this marriage deal and she's not going to let me ruin it by running away."
"What do we do?"
"I don't know." Lola looked at him with eyes that had gone from scared to something closer to desperate. "Viktor is good at what he does, really good, and if he's found me then it's only a matter of time before he makes a move."
Tangeni thought about the man he'd seen, the patient way he'd watched and waited and gathered information without making any attempt to approach or confront, and he understood that this wasn't the kind of problem you could solve by running faster or hiding better.
Viktor was a professional tracker, and professionals didn't give up just because their target was difficult to catch, they just adapted their methods and tried again.
The thought of what might happen if Viktor caught Lola made Tangeni's stomach clench, not just because of what it would mean for her but because somewhere along the way he'd started caring about what happened to her in a way that surprised him.
"We need to know what he's planning," Tangeni said after thinking about it for a while. "If we know what he's going to do, we can figure out how to stop him or at least be somewhere else when he tries."
"How are we supposed to find that out?"
"By watching him the way he's been watching you."
It was a crazy idea, the kind of thing that could go wrong in a hundred different ways if Viktor noticed them or if they made a mistake, but Tangeni couldn't think of anything better and doing nothing felt like giving up.
They started that night, taking turns following Viktor while he followed Lola, keeping enough distance that he wouldn't notice them while staying close enough to see what he was doing.
It was nerve-wracking work, constantly looking over their shoulders, constantly second-guessing whether they'd been spotted, constantly fighting the urge to just run and keep running until the man was far behind them.
Viktor was staying at a cheap hotel near the edge of the city, the kind of place that rented rooms by the week and didn't ask too many questions, and he spent his days tracking Lola's movements and his evenings making phone calls that they couldn't overhear but could probably guess the content of.
He was reporting back to Beatrice, telling her what he'd found, probably waiting for instructions on when and how to grab Lola and bring her back to Swakopmund and the life she was trying to escape.
The waiting was the hardest part, knowing that Viktor was out there and could move at any moment, knowing that their window of opportunity was shrinking every day and there wasn't much they could do about it except keep preparing and keep hoping.
"We need more time," Lola said after three days of watching and worrying. "The dungeon break is in two weeks, and if we can make enough money from running we can leave the city, go somewhere Viktor can't find us."
"Two weeks is a long time when someone's hunting you."
"I know." She looked at him with something that might have been hope or might have been desperation. "But it's the only plan we've got, and it's better than sitting around waiting for him to make his move."
Tangeni nodded, because she was right and there wasn't anything better they could do except keep training and keep watching and hope that Viktor didn't move before they were ready to run.
They went back to Petrus's training yard that afternoon and worked harder than they ever had before, because now they had a deadline that felt very real and very close, and the thought of what would happen if they weren't ready made every exercise feel more important than the last.
"You two seem motivated today," Petrus observed as they finished their final set of sprints.
"We have reasons," Tangeni said, and didn't elaborate.
Petrus nodded like he understood, because he probably did, because everyone who came to him for training had reasons and most of those reasons weren't happy ones.
"Good," he said. "Motivation keeps you alive when talent isn't enough."
The next day they went back to watching Viktor, and the day after that, and the pattern continued until they knew his routine almost as well as they knew their own.
He ate breakfast at the same cafe every morning, made his phone calls at the same time every night, and followed Lola with the same patient persistence that suggested he was in no hurry to make his move.
That patience was what scared Tangeni the most, because it meant Viktor was confident that he had all the time in the world, that there was nowhere they could run that he couldn't follow, and all they could do was wait for the dungeon break and hope it came before Viktor decided to act.