3

Cassian Drell didn't have a website or a listed office.

 What he had was a handful of old message board posts, arguments really buried under a username nobody had bothered to delete and half the replies underneath calling him unhinged.

I read every single one twice.

"You people have no idea what's coming and the city council has no idea either. I told them, but they laughed me out of the meeting. Fine. Laugh. See where that gets you."

I knew the name already, actually. I just had never bothered to care about the man behind it. 

My father had called him a paranoid lunatic at a dinner party once, years ago, and I'd laughed along with everyone else at the table without giving it a second thought.

I found an address eventually, buried three pages deep in an old permit filing, an industrial unit out past the shipping yards, the kind of place developers usually gutted and flipped into overpriced lofts.

 This one hadn't been touched.

I told my father I was getting my nails done. He didn't ask twice. That used to bother me. 

Today it worked in my favor, and I hated how easily I'd slipped back into using it.

The unit sat behind a chain-link fence with a hand-painted sign that just said PRIVATE. I parked across the street and sat there for a full minute, hands on the wheel, asking myself what exactly I thought I was doing showing up at a stranger's building because a voice in my head that wasn't a voice told me the world was ending in ten days.

Then I remembered the sound the church roof made coming down.

I got out of the car.

The gate wasn't locked. I walked up to a metal door with no handle on the outside, just a keypad and a small camera bolted above it, and knocked anyway, because I didn't have a code and I sure as hell wasn't going to just stand there.

Nothing happened for almost a minute. I was about to knock again when a voice came through a small speaker I hadn't even noticed.

"You're on private property."

"I know," I said. "I'm looking for Cassian Drell."

"Congratulations. You found the property. Now leave it."

"I need five minutes."

"You need to read the sign."

"I read the sign," I said. "I'm still standing here."

A pause. Long enough that I started to think he'd simply walked away.

Then the door unlocked with a heavy metallic clunk, swinging open just far enough for one man to fill the gap. Tall, built like someone who did actual physical labor and not gym labor, dark hair pushed back like he hadn't thought about it in days, and an expression that made it very clear he'd already decided this conversation was a waste of his time.

"You're a Winslow," he said, before I'd even opened my mouth.

"How did you..."

"The car. The shoes. The way you knocked like you expected someone to answer eventually because someone always does for you." He crossed his arms. "What do you want?"

"I need help reinforcing a structure," I said. "Water filtration. Long-term food storage. Structural integrity for something built decades ago and never finished."

Something flickered across his face, gone almost as fast as it came.

"You need a contractor," he said. "I'm not a contractor."

"You're the only person in this city who's been saying, for years, that something like was coming."

"And everyone laughed at me for it," he said.

 "Including, I'm guessing, everyone at whatever dinner table you grew up at."

I didn't have a good answer for that, because he was right, and we both knew it.

"I'm not laughing," I said instead.

"No," he agreed. "You're panicking. There's a difference. Panic burns hot for a week and then people go right back to thinking their money will protect them." He started to close the door. "Good luck, Ms. Winslow."

"Ten days," I said.

He stopped.

"What?"

"You have ten days before you're right," I said. "I don't think you should know how I know that but just do. And I'd rather spend every one of them being laughed at by you than live through the tenth day the same way I already lived through it once."

His hand stayed on the door, not closing it, not opening it either.

"That's a very strange thing to say," he said slowly.

"I know."

"You want to explain it?"

"No," I said. "I want you to tell me what a shelter needs that money alone can't buy, because I've got the money, and apparently that's never been enough for anything that actually matters."

He studied me for a long moment, the kind of look that made me feel like he was cataloging every detail of my face, deciding whether I was worth the risk of being wrong about.

"There's a diner two blocks down," he said finally. "Ugly coffee. Worse pie. Be there in twenty minutes and I'll listen. That's the whole offer."

"Fine."

"And Ms. Winslow."

I turned back.

"If this is some rich girl's idea of an interesting hobby before the wedding," he said, "don't waste my time twice. I don't have patience for it a second round."

He shut the door before I could answer.

I stood there on the wrong side of it, in the cold, and thought about how he had no idea he'd already told me something important.

 Two years of being laughed at hadn't stopped him from building something behind that door. 

Two years of nobody believing him hadn't made him quit.

I checked my phone.

 Eighteen minutes to get to the diner.

I was halfway back to my car when the System spoke again, flat and cold as ever, and this time it stopped me dead on the sidewalk.

DEVIATION DETECTED.

CURRENT EVENT DOES NOT MATCH HOST MEMORY.

I stood very still.

"What does that mean?" I said out loud, to the empty street. "I never met this man before today. You already knew that."

THIS INTERACTION HAS NO PRECEDENT IN HOST MEMORY.

FUTURE OUTCOME: UNPREDICTABLE.

My stomach dropped somewhere past the pavement.

"So you're comparing everything I do against what I remember?" I asked slowly, working it out as I said it. "That's it. That's all you're doing. You don't actually know what happens next any more than I do."

The System didn't answer that, which was answer enough.

If meeting a man I'd never once spoken to in my entire first life counted as something worth flagging, then whatever I thought I knew about the next ten days wasn't a script I could just follow line by line.

It was a starting point. Nothing more.

I got in the car and drove to the diner anyway.