RONAN

The knock came before I'd even decided what to do with Jason and Cami still standing in my kitchen. Three raps. Even. Unhurried. The knock of someone who already knew I was going to answer.

[Intervention: LUS spoofed the request.] The system hummed in my marrow. [Strategic Placement initiated. The Dividend has arrived early. Don't waste the opportunity, Host.]

"Dividend," I repeated under my breath. Something in my chest went tight and warm at the same time, the way debt does right before it turns into profit.

"Are you expecting someone?" Jason asked. There was an edge in his voice now, thin and territorial, the tone of a man who had lost his footing and wanted it back by any means available. It was almost funny. An hour ago he'd shoved me into the street. Now he sounded like a man guarding a door that had never belonged to him.

"I wasn't," I said. "But I think I am now."

I opened it.

Ronan Vance stood in the hallway looking exactly like the man from the future and nothing like him at all. No rifle. No scar catching the light. Just a neighbor in a gray T-shirt, hands loose at his sides, the picture of ordinariness. But his eyes gave it away the second they found mine. That same crystalline blue. That same stillness underneath. A man doing math three moves ahead while his face remained perfectly calm.

"I was told to find you," he said. Not a question. A fact, stated plainly.

"Told by who?" I asked, even though I already knew.

"Something that talks like it's collecting on a loan I didn't know I took out." A corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "You know the type?"

I felt the recognition pass between us like a current, quiet and total. He knew. He'd known before he knocked. Whatever his system called itself, it spoke the same language mine did: debts, dividends, and targets, and it had sent him here for the same reason mine had given me a countdown and a knife.

"Who is this?" Cami's voice came from behind me, sharper now, threaded with fear dressed up as suspicion.

"A friend," I said.

"A friend?" Jason repeated. He stepped forward, trying to use his height to reclaim the space, to be the man who decided who got a seat in the car. He reached out as if to shove past me, to confront the man at the door.

Ronan didn't move an inch. He didn't even raise his hands. He just looked at Jason.

It wasn't a look of anger. It was the way an apex predator looks at a piece of debris in its path. I watched Jason's hand freeze in midair. The air in the hallway didn't just get colder. It got heavier, a physical weight that seemed to press Jason's shoulders down. Ronan didn't acknowledge Jason with a single word. He simply existed in the space with a lethal, quiet authority that turned Jason's bravado into a joke.

Jason physically recoiled, his jaw snapping shut as he stumbled back a step. He looked at Ronan, then at the smoky gray void in my eyes, and he finally understood. He was no longer the one doing the math.

"Forty-eight hours," Ronan said to me, his voice dropping to that subsonic baritone that made the water in the glasses on the counter shiver. "That's what your countdown says too."

"Forty-six now," I said. "Give or take."

Jason looked between us, his face going the color of old parchment. "What countdown? Audrey, what the hell is going on? The cash... you said you had the cash for the car."

I turned to Jason, and the "trembling girl" he'd known was gone so completely I couldn't even remember the feel of her.

"I lied, Jason. There is no cash. Not for you."

"You can't do that," he wheezed, his voice thin and pathetic. "We had a deal."

"We had a math problem," I corrected him. "And I've already subtracted you from the equation. You have thirty seconds to leave this apartment before the System decides your presence is a delinquent debt it needs to settle."

[Hostility Level Rising,] LUS hummed, almost eager. [Recommend immediate liquidation of Liability.]

Jason looked at Ronan, who was now leaning against the doorframe, watching him with the bored patience of a man waiting for a fly to leave a room. Jason didn't argue. He didn't ask about the water or the supplies. He didn't even look back at Cami. He just bolted, his footsteps echoing down the hall in a frantic, desperate rhythm.

Cami didn't hesitate either. She grabbed her purse and vanished after him, the door slamming shut with a finality that made the LUS chime in my head.

[Liability Discarded. Asset Integration: 100%.]

Ronan turned back to me, the hallway suddenly very quiet. He stepped over the threshold, unhurried, his presence filling the kitchen until the bread knife on the island seemed to hum in recognition.

"So," he said. "Dividend."

"Apparently."

"I've been called worse things by worse systems." He looked at the locked door, then back to me. "You want to tell me what forty-six hours looks like on your end, or do we start boarding up the windows?"

I heard a siren in the distance.

"We start with the windows," I said. "I'm not losing my investment twice."