THE PREVIEW

[Mission Complete: Reclaim Assets.] [Reward Preview Unlocking. Host, close your eyes.]

I didn't have time to ask what that meant before the kitchen dissolved.

The cold hit first, real cold, the kind that lived in your teeth, not the mild chill of an apartment with the AC running too high. Then the smell. Woodsmoke instead of lavender detergent. Gunpowder instead of peaches. Somewhere behind me, a generator coughed and caught, and the world went from black to the grainy orange of a single working bulb.

"You're doing that thing again," a voice said, low and amused, close enough that I felt it more than heard it.

I turned, and Ronan Vance was leaning in the doorway of somewhere that wasn't my apartment, arms crossed, a rifle slung easy across his back like it had grown there. He looked older now than I remembered him looking in the hallway of my old building. Harder. There was a scar through one eyebrow that hadn't been there before, and his eyes tracked me the way mine now tracked exits, fast, thorough, and already three moves ahead.

He was broader than I remembered, his frame carrying the kind of dense, functional muscle that didn't come from a gym but from a life spent carrying the weight of a dying world. His hair was a dark, unruly shock that shadowed a face chiseled out of rough-hewn stone and silver stubble. But it was his eyes that truly anchored the room. A piercing, crystalline blue that looked like a winter sky right before the storm breaks. They weren't the eyes of a neighbor anymore; they were the eyes of a man who had seen the bottom of the Abyss and decided to build a house there.

"What thing?" I asked, and my voice came out different here, steadier, like this version of me had said his name a thousand times already.

"Going somewhere else in your head." He pushed off the doorframe and crossed the room, and I noticed the way the others in the space, three, maybe four shapes I didn't have names for yet, didn't look up when he moved. Like his presence near me was ordinary. Expected. "You do it right before you're about to tell me something I'm not going to like."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Audrey." Just my name, and it landed different than it ever had in Jason's mouth. Not a request. Not a debt. Just a fact he was stating, the way you'd state the weather, or the number of rounds left in a magazine. "Whatever LUS just showed you. Whatever it's about to make you do. I'm not asking you to loop me in." His hand found the side of my face, rough palm, careful pressure, like he'd learned exactly how much of himself he was allowed to spend on gentleness these days. "I'm telling you I'm already in it. Wherever it goes."

I didn't remember deciding to lean into his hand. I just was.

[Preview Concluding. Host, was that sufficient collateral?]

"Wait," I said, out loud, to no one he could hear. "Wait, I don't even know how we..."

The orange bulb flared white.

I was standing at my kitchen island again. The knife still hummed in my palm. Cami's scream was still hanging in the air, half a second old, like the future had borrowed exactly as much time as it needed and not a moment more.

[Reward Preview Complete.] LUS's voice slid back into my spine, patient, unbothered, like it hadn't just shown me a man's hand on my face and called it collateral. [Current Objective: Resume. The interest does not pause for sentiment, Host.]

Cami had backed herself into the corner by the refrigerator, one hand braced on the counter, eyes darting between me and the door like she was doing math on how fast she could reach it. Jason hadn't moved. He was still staring at me with the particular horror of a man realizing, too late, that the woman in front of him was not the one he'd shoved onto the asphalt of 4th Street. That one was gone. He just hadn't been told yet.

"Audrey," he said, and for the first time since he'd walked in, my name came out of him sounding like a question instead of an order. "What did you do to your eyes?"

"Nothing," I said.

I set the knife down. Not because I didn't need it. Because I'd just been shown, with total clarity, exactly what I was building toward, and it wasn't something that got solved with a blade in my own kitchen over five hundred dollars.

[Mission Update: Assets Located. Safe combination required. Recommend negotiation before force.] LUS paused, and when it spoke again there was something almost like amusement threaded through the tide-drag of its voice. [You'll want your strength for later, Host. I have plans for you that don't end in this kitchen.]

"Cami. " I kept my voice level, the way Ronan's had been in that other kitchen, in that other life I hadn't lived yet. Steady. Already three moves ahead. "Sit down. We're going to have an honest conversation about the last three years, and then you and Jason are going to help me pack."

"Pack," Jason repeated, like the word didn't make sense in his mouth. "Pack for what?"

I almost told him. I almost said the words Grey S and forty-eight hours and everyone you love is about to become a math problem you can't solve, but I wanted to watch his face come apart a second time.

Instead, I smiled, small and harmless, the mask I no longer needed but still knew exactly how to wear.

"For the future," I said. "I found someone who's going to help me build it."