Chapter 6: Five Minutes

I kept my finger on the intercom button for several seconds after he said my full name, the weight of it in his mouth making the entryway feel suddenly too narrow. Every calculation I’d made since waking in this second life rearranged itself around one fact: Damian Cross was standing three floors below me, asking for a conversation I’d never intended to grant this soon.

I released the button and stepped back, heart beating slow and heavy against my ribs while I weighed the only two options left. Ignoring him wouldn’t change anything — a man who could appear outside my window, send a warning that cut too close to the truth, and find my exact apartment within hours wasn’t going to walk away because a door stayed closed. Letting him up meant surrendering the first layer of distance I’d built around myself, and distance had already failed me once, back when the people I trusted most decided my life was worth less than their own.

The intercom buzzed again, shorter, almost impatient. I pressed the button and made my voice calmer than I felt.

“How did you find me?”

A pause, the kind that meant he’d already decided how much truth to give. “You’re not as invisible as you think, Ava. Not when you start moving large sums through new accounts and buying the exact equipment people only buy once they already know what’s coming.”

The accuracy of it settled over me like cold water. I’d been careful. He’d tracked the pattern in a single day.

“What do you want?”

“Five minutes. Inside — not in the street where anyone can watch.”

I almost refused. Ethan’s face on the hospital roof rose with sudden clarity, the way he’d looked at me and chosen to leave, and my hand tightened on the panel. But Damian had warned me instead of taking me, and the redacted file with my own initials was still glowing behind my eyes like an open wound. Five minutes of controlled danger beat staying blind.

I buzzed him up.

The elevator took longer than it should have. When the knock came, I checked the peephole, confirmed the same tall shape in the dark suit, and opened the door only wide enough to let him in before locking it behind him. Damian stepped into my apartment like he’d already mapped every exit — his gaze moving once across the room, the closed curtains, the false wall I hadn’t fully concealed — before settling on me with an intensity that made the air between us feel thinner.

He didn’t sit. He stayed near the door, hands visible, and spoke without preamble.

“You remember.” Not a question.

I kept my face blank even as something cold slid beneath my ribs. “Remember what?”

“The first time the world ended.” His voice stayed low, even, the same control he’d used at the intercom. “You woke up ninety days before it happens again. You’ve already started preparing. You deleted the heart next to your boyfriend’s name this morning and refused to see him. You spent three hours underground in the condemned hospital on the industrial side of the river. And less than an hour ago, you opened a file that shouldn’t exist — one with the initials A.S. on it.”

Each detail landed with deliberate precision, stripping away any illusion that I’d been moving in secret. “If you already know all that,” I said, forcing my voice steady, “why are you here?”

“Because the people who created EVA-9 know someone is moving against the timeline. They don’t know it’s you yet. I intend to keep it that way as long as I can.”

Hearing the virus’s name in my own apartment made the walls feel closer. I crossed my arms to hide the tremor in my hands. “What am I to them?”

Something shifted behind his eyes — a brief calculation, like he was measuring how much truth I could take without breaking. “An early trial subject. Four years before the official outbreak. The records say the trial failed and the subject died. The records are incomplete.”

The floor tilted under me for a second. Four years. I had no memory of a laboratory, an injection, a white room full of people in protective suits — but the vision that had struck me in the mansion, in a life that no longer existed, had shown me exactly that. “Why tell me this?”

“Because you’re already changing things. The more you alter the original path, the more visible you become to the people watching for deviations. I can slow them down. I can’t stop them indefinitely.”

A car door closed somewhere on the street below. Damian’s head turned a fraction toward the window, listening, then came back to me.

“Ethan Vale is downstairs. He’s been circling the building for twenty minutes. If he sees me leave, he’ll ask questions neither of us can afford right now.”

I went to the window and parted the curtain just enough to confirm the familiar shape of Ethan’s car — the same one he’d driven the day he left me to die. The sight sent a cold, old anger through my chest. I let the curtain fall.

“You still haven’t told me what you want from me.”

He held my gaze until the silence felt almost physical. When he finally spoke, the words were measured and absolute.

“I want you alive when the ninety days end. Everything else is secondary.”

The intercom buzzed again — three short, insistent bursts that could only be Ethan. Damian didn’t move toward the door. He just watched me, waiting to see which version of myself decided what happened next.

I walked to the panel, pressed the button, and answered in a voice that no longer belonged to the girl who used to trust too easily.

“I’m not home, Ethan. Stop coming here.”

The reply came back sharp with confusion and something darker underneath it. I released the button without listening to the rest, then turned to face the man still standing in my living room while the evening outside settled toward the first of ninety nights.