Chapter 3: The Man With the Answers

The warehouse doors exploded inward, and Mia seized my arm and shouted for the rear of the building. Adrian was already firing back through the doorway when one of the men outside shouted an order that made my stomach drop.

“Take her alive!”

“They want us alive,” I whispered.

“They want me alive.” He corrected it without looking at me, closing his hand around mine and pulling me deeper into the warehouse, past stacks of boxes and skeletal machinery. “There’s another exit. I’ve been here before.”

Of course he had. Nothing about this man had made sense since he’d appeared with a rifle and an expression that never revealed a single thing he was thinking — and now armed strangers were hunting us because of me, specifically.

We reached a metal door onto a narrow alley. He fired covering shots into the dark behind us as Mia and I sprinted out. We turned corner after corner until my lungs burned, and Adrian dragged us both into a recessed doorway, hissing at us to stay quiet. Footsteps thundered past and faded.

“Who are those people?” I asked. “Why do they know my name?”

His jaw tightened before he finally answered. “You’re connected to something you don’t remember. You need to start trusting me.”

“You pulled me out of an exploding university, put me in a vehicle, and led me straight into men hunting us through the streets. You never gave me a choice.”

“I didn’t kidnap you. You had two options — come with me, or die.” I had no honest way to argue with that.

A crash echoed from the alley’s far end. An infected leapt from behind a dumpster; Adrian dropped it in one shot, then another appeared, and another, until we were running for the SUV with a growing wave behind us. He fired the whole way. We made it, and the pursuing figures vanished into the smoke behind us.

For a long time nobody spoke. Then Mia asked if we were going to survive any of this.

“If we reach the safe house.” When she asked what happened if we didn’t, he said nothing at all.

“You’re hiding something,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“Not now.”

“When?”

“When we’re safe.”

I let it go, for now, as the city thinned into open land and thick trees. We turned onto a private road that ended at an iron gate. Adrian entered a code, and it swung open onto a mansion behind high walls, cameras, and electric fencing.

“That’s a mansion,” Mia said. “Whose is it?”

“Mine.”

“You’re rich?”

He looked at me like the question was almost funny. “You didn’t know?”

Something that was almost a smile touched his mouth and vanished. The gate closed behind us with a solid, final sound, and for the first time since the outbreak began, I let myself feel something like safety.

It didn’t survive walking through the front door.

Armed men trained their weapons on me the second we stepped inside. Adrian moved in front of me and ordered them down, and one hesitated, calling him sir, saying they’d received orders.

“From who?”

“The company.” The man glanced at me. “If she arrived here, we weren’t supposed to let her leave.”

My blood ran cold. “What company?”

Adrian went silent long enough that I said his name twice before he answered with two words that meant nothing to me and somehow carried the weight of something long buried.

“EVA-9.”

Pain lanced through my skull the moment he said it. Fragmented images flashed behind my eyes — a laboratory flooded in white light, figures in protective suits, a glass container of dark liquid, a man’s voice giving the order to begin the trial. I gasped as it collapsed and the present rushed back in, and Adrian was watching me with an intensity that told me he’d seen something change on my face.

“You saw something.”

“I don’t know what it was.” My voice broke. Mia’s hand settled on my shoulder, asking if I was okay, and I nodded even though the gesture felt hollow. I’d seen that laboratory before. I just didn’t know when.

Adrian ordered the men out. Once the room was empty, he said, “Tomorrow morning. The virus, EVA-9, and you. I’ll tell you everything.”

My stomach twisted with the promise, and I was searching his face for any sign he was lying when every light in the mansion died at once and the security alarm began to scream.

Adrian raised his rifle. Mia’s scream rose beside me. And a voice I’d never heard before came through the speakers with perfect clarity, and something in it made the hair rise on my arms — not because I recognized the voice, but because of what it called me.

“Welcome back, Ava.”

I froze. It was my name — but no one in this building had any right to know it, let alone say it like we’d met before. I had never set foot in this mansion in my life. I would have remembered a place like this.

Adrian’s gaze locked on mine, and for the first time since I’d met him, the mask slipped enough to show real fear — because whoever was speaking through those speakers didn’t just know who I was. They knew me from somewhere I couldn’t remember, and Adrian clearly hadn’t expected them to say so out loud.