Chapter Seven

"How," Damian says, "did you know Celeste's name so fast."

We're still parked on the shoulder, sun coming up gray and thin over the warehouses behind us, and his voice has gone careful in a way I don't like, careful the way you get careful around something you're no longer sure you can trust.

"I told you. I overheard her on the phone."

"You told me you overheard someone talking about pulling files before an audit. You didn't tell me it was your stepsister, and you gave me her name in about half a second flat, no hesitation, like you'd already had it loaded and ready." He's not accusing me, exactly. It's worse than accusing me — it's the flat, patient tone of a man laying facts on a table one at a time to see how they land. "You've known who's involved in this since before we got in the car."

"I've known who's involved in this since three months from now," I say, sharper than I mean to. "That's the whole point, Damian. I'm not hiding pieces of a puzzle from you. I'm just choosing which pieces to hand you first."

"Why."

"Because you kept a source hidden from me for a full day before you told me his name mattered." I turn to face him fully, and I'm surprised by how steady my own voice comes out, steadier than I feel. "You don't get to be suspicious of my caution when you've been just as careful with yours."

That lands. I watch it land, watch something in his jaw ease very slightly, and for a second neither of us says anything at all, just two people who met yesterday morning over a padlock, sizing each other up in a car on the side of an empty road at dawn.

"Fair," he says finally.

"Fair," I agree.

"Tobias texted me last night," he says, quieter now, and pulls his phone out, thumbs it open, hands it across the console without looking at me. "Before you found me at the warehouse. I didn't mention it because I didn't think it connected to anything yet."

The message is short. Someone's been asking about the containment memo. Not Marcus. Someone from outside. Be careful who you talk to.

"When did he send this."

"Eleven forty last night." Damian takes the phone back, jaw tight again, different tension this time. "About four hours before Celeste told you someone was auditing files she pulled."

"You think he knows about her."

"I think," Damian says slowly, "that a man feeding data to two different people who don't know about each other is a man who's about to get caught by one of them, and I don't think it's going to be gentle when it happens."

My phone buzzes in my pocket before I can answer that.

It's Reyna. Reyna, who I haven't spoken to in this life yet since the morning I woke up, who I haven't warned about anything, who doesn't know she's about to become the only person outside of a title office lobby who I trust completely.

Are you up? Weird night at the hospital. Probably nothing but I keep thinking about you for some reason, don't ask me why.

My stomach drops before I've even finished reading it.

What kind of weird, I type back, fingers cold.

The reply comes fast, the way it does when someone's been sitting with something and just needed an excuse to say it out loud.

Had a patient come in around 2am. High fever, disoriented, some aggression once he started to crash. We ran the standard panel, nothing matched. Attending's calling it an outlier. I don't know. Something about it felt wrong. Reminded me of that outbreak documentary you made me watch last year, don't laugh at me.

I haven't made her watch any documentary. Not in this life. Not yet. That's a year from now, or was, in the version of this year I already lived through once, back when the world hadn't ended yet and Reyna and I still had lazy Sunday afternoons to waste on things that felt like fiction.

Two a.m. I do the math without wanting to. The outbreak isn't supposed to start for weeks yet. Not days. Weeks. I built my entire timeline around weeks, around a countdown I thought I understood down to the district, and now Reyna is describing patient zero symptoms on a random Tuesday almost a full month ahead of schedule, in a hospital I never told her to watch, describing a documentary I haven't shown her yet in a life where none of this is supposed to have started this early.

"What's wrong," Damian says. He's watching my face, and whatever he sees there makes him go very still.

"It's starting," I say, and my voice comes out strange even to my own ears, too flat, too far away. "It's starting early."

"How early."

"I don't know. Weeks, at least. Maybe more." I look up from the phone, and the gray dawn light through the windshield suddenly feels like the wrong kind of light entirely, too thin, too fragile, over a city that has no idea what's coming for it a full month sooner than I ever accounted for. "Damian, I built everything on a date. I bought land on a date. I moved money on a date. If the timeline's already different—"

"Then everything you know might be starting to come apart," he finishes, quiet, grim, already reaching for the ignition. "Which means whatever you changed already changed more than you meant it to."

"What did I change?"

"I don't know." He pulls back onto the road, faster now, headed back toward the city instead of away from it. "But three days ago you didn't own four parcels on Route 9, Celeste wasn't panicking about an audit that hadn't been moved up yet, and Tobias wasn't getting nervous enough to text me in the middle of the night. You've been in this timeline for two days, Ivy, and it's already moving faster than the one you remember."

I stare out the window at the city coming up gray and ordinary in the distance, full of people who have no idea that somewhere in a hospital across town, a man is running a fever that shouldn't exist for another month, and I understand, with a cold clarity that settles into my chest like something physical, that I am no longer racing a clock I know the shape of.

I am racing one I built myself, without meaning to, and I have no idea how much time I actually have left.