Chapter 10: Ridge Road

I reached the overlook twelve minutes before midnight, parked two turns below the final rise, and covered the rest on foot so anything following the main approach would show its headlights before it reached me. The city spread out below in a grid of ordinary lights that had no idea how temporary they were. I stayed in the treeline, watching the empty road, until a dark sedan came around the lower curve without haste and Damian stepped out alone.

He didn’t call my name. He just turned his head slightly toward the trees, like he already knew exactly where I was standing.

“You came,” he said, when I stepped into the open.

“You said the timeline’s shifting. Explain. Fast.” I kept my distance and my eyes moving past his shoulder, down the road behind him.

“Tomorrow morning, a chemical spill was supposed to be reported at a Vallis subsidiary on the east side. Buried story, never connected to anything larger. Two hours ago, someone replaced the sensors that should have failed. Someone with access they shouldn’t have.” He didn’t waste time on the view. “Small change. But the people who track deviations already noticed it.”

“Is that someone you?”

“Some of it. Not all.” His eyes flicked once, briefly, past me toward the road below — a habit, not paranoia, I realized, which was somehow worse. “There are others moving in this same window. Not all of them want what I want. You need to move your supplies to the water plant faster than you planned. The longer it sits unsecured, the sooner it gets flagged like the hospital did.”

A branch snapped somewhere below the ridge.

We both went still. Damian’s hand moved to his jacket without looking away from me, and for three full seconds neither of us breathed. Then a pair of headlights swept low across the trees at the base of the road — not climbing, just passing, gone as fast as they’d come. Damian exhaled through his nose, but his hand didn’t leave the weapon.

“We don’t have long,” he said, lower now, faster. “If they get you intact, this isn’t a collapse anymore. It’s managed. They stabilize the strain using what’s in your blood and release a version that kills or converts exactly how they design it to. Controlled extinction instead of chaos. That’s worse, not better.”

“I won’t be taken.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here instead of them.” He stepped closer, close enough that I had to tip my head back. “Three days from now, a transport moves early-stage samples between facilities. If it reaches its destination, the timeline accelerates by eleven days. I can intercept it. Not alone.”

Another set of headlights, this time climbing.

“Go,” Damian said, already turning. “Now. Different car than the one you came in — that one was photographed at the base of the road twenty minutes ago, which means whoever’s driving toward us right now already knows exactly where to look.”

I didn’t wait for him to finish the sentence. I was moving before the words landed, cutting off the main path and dropping down through the trees on the steep side of the ridge, branches tearing at my sleeves, gravel sliding under my shoes. Behind me I heard the sedan’s engine turn over hard, tires biting asphalt, Damian putting himself and his car directly in the path of whatever was climbing toward us.

I didn’t look back to see if it worked. I ran, ducked low behind the guardrail at the second turn, and watched a pair of unmarked SUVs blow past the overlook without slowing — following Damian’s taillights, not my footprints in the dirt.

I didn’t move again until the sound of both engines had faded completely into the dark below, and even then my hands didn’t stop shaking the whole walk back to the rental.

Three days. A transport. A choice Damian was still waiting on.

The ninety days had stopped being a countdown. They’d become a field of moving pieces, and tonight I’d just found out how many of them were already in motion around me.