THE COUNTDOWN LIED

Ronan worked like a man who'd done this before, in some life or some version of this one, and it took me longer than I wanted to admit to stop watching him instead of the windows.

"You keep doing that," he said, not looking up from the frame he was reinforcing.

"Doing what."

"Studying me." He set the drill down and glanced at me, that same crystalline blue, patient, unbothered, cataloging. "You've got that look. Like you already know how this ends, and you're waiting to see if I catch up."

I didn't answer right away. File it, I told myself, an old habit now, useless here, because there was nothing to file. There was only the fact that I did know how at least one version of this ended, his hand on my face in a kitchen that didn't exist yet, and I had no intention of handing him that.

"I don't know how it ends," I said. "I know how it starts. That's different."

"Convenient distinction."

"It's the only one I've got."

He held my eyes a beat longer than the moment required, like he was deciding whether to push, and then let it go, which told me something. Not that he believed me. That he'd decided not to need to, not yet.

We worked in silence after that, boards over the east-facing windows, the ones LUS had flagged as failure points, and I found myself falling into a rhythm with him that had no business feeling as natural as it did. He anticipated where I'd need a hand steadied before I asked. I passed him nails before he reached for them. It wasn't chemistry, exactly. It was something colder and more useful than chemistry, two systems calibrating to each other, and it unsettled me more than any spark would have.

"How long have you had yours," I asked, mostly to fill the silence, mostly because I didn't want to think about his hands anymore.

"Eight months." He didn't look up. "Car accident. Should've been a closed casket."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I wasn't given a choice about coming back, same as you, I'm guessing. But I got good at this part." He gestured at the windows, the apartment, the whole grim architecture of survival. "The waiting. The knowing what's coming and having to just stand here and let the clock run anyway."

"That's not knowing. That's dread."

"Same thing, if you wait long enough." He finally looked at me directly, and there was something almost gentle underneath the flatness of it. "You get used to carrying it. Eventually it just feels like weather."

I thought of Flash, his hand on my face, and the total certainty in his voice. Wherever it goes. I thought about how easy it would be to tell him, to close whatever distance was left between the man boarding up my windows and the one who already knew my name like a fact instead of a question.

I didn't.

Instead, I picked up the next board and held it steady while he drove the screws home, and for a while that was the whole conversation, wood and metal and the small, domestic violence of turning a home into a bunker. It should have felt grim. Mostly it felt like the first honest work I'd done in three years: nothing performed, nothing owed, just two hands and a task that made sense.

"You're different than I thought you'd be," I said before I could decide whether I wanted to say it out loud.

"Different how?"

"Quieter. I expected someone LUS handed me to come with more noise."

He almost smiled at that, the ghost of it again, gone before it fully landed. "Give it time. I'm not always like this."

"Neither am I."

"I'm starting to gather that." He nodded toward the knife on the counter, then back at me, some private calculation finishing itself behind his eyes. "I think that might be the part I like."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't give him one. We finished the last board in a silence that felt less like distance now and more like something being built alongside the boards themselves.

By the time the sun began to dip behind the skyline, my apartment didn't look like a home anymore. It looked like a tomb.

"Hear that?" Ronan asked, stopping mid-motion near the living room window.

I walked to the one sliver of glass we hadn't covered yet.

I stilled. At first, there was nothing but the distant, rhythmic wail of sirens. Then, I heard it. A wet, tearing sound from the street below, followed by a scream that didn't sound like a human voice. It sounded like a soul being subtracted from a ledger.

Ronan's hand found the small of my back, not pulling me away from the glass, just steadying, the way you'd anchor someone standing too close to a ledge. Neither of us moved to cover that last window. Some part of both of us needed to see it start.

On the sidewalk below, a black sedan had jumped the curb. The driver's side door was hanging open, and a shape was hunched over the asphalt. It was rotting, gray, and driven by a hunger so complete it had become a personality.

It looked up. Even from three stories up, I could see the glassy, void-like eyes. It was the same one that had found me on 4th Street.

[Target Identified: Grey-S Scout.] [Wraith Pulse: READY.]

"Is it here? It's early," I whispered.

Ronan was at my shoulder in a heartbeat. He didn't reach for his gun. He reached for the knife I'd left on the counter and handed it to me, the handle warm from his grip.

"You said you weren't a passenger anymore," he murmured, his breath cold against my ear, a dark mirror of the future gentleness I'd felt in the preview. "Prove it. Show me what forty-five hours of interest looks like, Audrey."

The creature below let out a guttural roar that shattered the last of the evening quiet. Behind us, the front door, the one I'd just watched Jason and Cami walk out of, groaned under a sudden, violent weight.

Something was in the hallway.

[Mission: First Harvest Initiated.] [Reward: Apex Base Coordinates. 20 Strength Points.]

I gripped the knife, the obsidian blade drinking the last of the light. The "frightened girl" didn't just feel like a costume now; she felt like a ghost I'd finally laid to rest.

"Ronan," I said, not looking back.

"Yeah?"

"Don't get in my way."

I turned toward the door as the wood began to splinter, and for the first time in two lives, I wasn't the one doing the math. I was the solution.