4

The diner smelled like burnt coffee and bacon grease, and half the booths were empty except for one old man reading a newspaper nobody printed anymore. 

Cassian was already sitting in the back corner when I walked in, the seat faced the door and I understood immediately that wasn't an accident.

I slid into the booth across from him.

"You're late," he said, without looking up from the coffee he hadn't touched.

"Three minutes."

"Three minutes is late when you're the one who showed up begging."

"I didn't beg."

"You knocked on a locked gate with no code," he said. "That's a kind of begging."

A waitress dropped a menu in front of me and I waved it off. 

Cassian noticed and something almost like approval crossed his face before he buried it again

"Alright," he said. "Talk. Why ten days?"

"I can't explain that part."

"Then we're done." He didn't move to leave, which told me he didn't mean it, but he wanted me to know he could.

"There's stuff I know that I have no business knowing," I said. "I can't tell you how. I can tell you that in four days there's a seismic event off the coast, small enough that nobody worries about it, and two days after that there's an emergency broadcast test that isn't actually a test."

Cassian's jaw tightened.

"You could've read that off my message board rants," he said. "I said things like that for two years. Doesn't make you special, it makes you a good researcher."

"Then wait four days and tell me I'm full of shit."

"Maybe I will."

"You might," I said. "But if you completely thought I was wasting your time, you'd have shut that door in my face already."

He didn't answer that one right away, and I counted it as the closest thing to a point in my favor I'd get out of him.

"Why isn't the government hearing this," he said instead. "Why aren't you at a press conference, why aren't you calling in a tip, why is a Winslow sitting in a diner with the guy the city already decided was crazy?"

"Because nobody believed you the first time you tried telling them the truth," I said. "What makes you think they'd believe me?"

That landed. I watched it land, watched his eyes shift, some old, tired anger he probably didn't like other people seeing.

"Why do you look like you're already grieving something?" he said, quieter now, no edge to it at all. "You've got the face of someone who already lost. Not someone who's scared of losing."

I didn't answer that one right away either. 

My throat had gone tight and I hated it, hated that a stranger in a diner had found the one question that actually mattered before I'd even decided how much of the truth I was willing to hand him.

"I was supposed to get married in ten days," I said finally. "I'm not anymore. That's all you're getting out of me today."

Cassian studied me for a long moment, longer than felt comfortable, then pulled a napkin toward himself and clicked his pen.

"Fine," he said. "You said you've got a structure.

 Where?"

"Old Winslow research facility," I said. "Out past the industrial corridor, built after the earthquake scare thirty years ago and never finished. Family's forgotten it exists."

"How forgotten?"

"Forgotten enough that nobody's touched it in a decade. Forgotten enough that Emeric wouldn't think to look for me there."

 The way I said his name made Cassian's eyebrows lift slightly, and I regretted it immediately, but I didn't take it back.

"Boyfriend?" he asked.

"Not anymore."

"He's part of why you're sitting here."

"He's part of a lot of things," I said. "None of which are your problem yet."

Cassian let it go, which I appreciated more than I expected to. He wrote something on the napkin, then flipped it around so I could read it. A short list.

 Water, structural assessment, power redundancy, air filtration. Perimeter.

"This is the bare minimum," he said. "And I'm not saying yes to helping you build it. I'm saying I'll look at the place. That's it. If it's a joke, I walk. If it's real, we talk again."

"That's fair."

"One more thing." He leaned forward, elbows on the table, voice dropping low enough the old man with the newspaper couldn't have heard him even if he'd been listening.

 "If you're lying to me, if this is some game, some rich girl's idea of an adventure before her wedding, I will know. I've spent two years watching people not believe something real. I know exactly what it looks like when somebody's faking it."

"I'm not faking a goddamn thing," I said. "I wish to God I was."

He held my eyes for a second longer, then nodded once, sharp, like he was closing a file.

"Let's go look at your building."

The drive out to the old facility took forty minutes, most of it in silence, Cassian following my directions in his own truck rather than getting in my car, which told me exactly how much trust I'd actually earned so far.

 None at all, and I couldn't blame him for it.

The place looked worse than I remembered.

 Chain-link fencing sagging in sections, a service road half swallowed by weeds, the concrete face of the main structure streaked gray and green with decades of weather nobody had bothered pressure washing off. 

My father used to call it an embarrassment. I used to agree with him, back when embarrassment was the worst thing I thought a building could be.

Cassian parked and got out without waiting for me, walking the perimeter fence with his hands in his pockets, studying it the way I imagined a doctor studied an X-ray, looking for things I wouldn't know to look for myself.

"This is deeper than a shelter," he said, more to himself than to me. "This was built for something serious. Who designed it?"

"I don't know. My grandfather commissioned it.

 Everyone in the family always just called it the bunker and made jokes about it."

"People usually regret making jokes about things like this," Cassian said, and for the first time since I'd met him, there wasn't any sarcasm in it at all.

He stopped near the northeast corner, crouched down, and pressed his palm flat against a section of the foundation where the concrete had cracked in a long, spidering line.

"Shit," he muttered, mostly to himself. "This isn't weather damage.

 Somebody undersized the rebar here, or the original crew cut corners on the pour. This whole corner's been slowly failing for years."

"Is that fixable?"

"Everything's fixable if you catch it before it isn't." He stood, wiping his palm on his jeans. "But whoever built this place either didn't know what they were doing or didn't care enough to do it right.

 That's the kind of mistake that gets people killed in a real event, not a drill."

We reached the main access door, a heavy steel thing set into the concrete, rust streaking down from the hinges. 

I'd only been inside twice in my life, both times as a kid, both times bored out of my mind while adults argued about zoning permits.

I pulled out the old key ring my father kept in his desk, the one nobody had used in years, and found the key that still had a faded paper tag reading FACILITY B.

I slid it into the lock.

It didn't turn.

I tried again, harder, jiggling it the way you do when you're sure it's just stuck, not broken, and the key still refused to move.

"That's not rust," Cassian said, crouching down beside me, running two fingers along the seam of the lock housing. "Look at this."

I looked.

The metal around the lock wasn't corroded shut. It was scratched, fresh scratches, bright silver against the dull gray, the unmistakable marks of somebody trying to force this exact door open, and recently.

"Somebody's already been here," Cassian said quietly.

"That's not possible," I said, my voice coming out sharper than I meant it to. "Nobody knows this place exists. My own father barely remembers it exists.

"Well somebody remembered it well enough to bring tools out here," Cassian said. "Recently. Days, maybe. Not years."

DEVIATION DETECTED.

The words landed cold in my head at the exact same moment his sank in out loud, and for the second time in two days, I felt the ground shift under a future I thought I already understood.