Chapter 2: Don't Follow Me (She Followed Him)

"Twenty-six hours," Skylar repeated, staring at the number hovering in her vision like it might change its mind if she glared hard enough. "It was three days an hour ago. What happened to three days?"

[System: Timeline integrity: 91.4%. Deviation accelerating. Cause: unresolved.]

"That's not an answer, that's a shrug with extra steps."

Zane had gone very still beside her, dark eyes fixed on the patch of sky that had flickered wrong moments ago, now stubbornly, mockingly normal. "The Rift shouldn't be able to move its own schedule," he said, mostly to himself. "Not without a trigger."

"A trigger like what?"

He looked at her the way a man looks at a crack in his ceiling — like acknowledging it out loud might make it worse. "I don't know."

"You don't know, or you don't want to say?"

"Both," Zane said, and started walking again, faster this time.

"Hey—" Skylar hurried after him, ancient knees complaining loudly about the sudden pace. "We're having a conversation!"

"I finished it."

"I didn't."

Behind them, Corin let out a small, tired laugh — the first genuinely amused sound she'd heard out of him — before quickly disguising it as a cough when Zane shot him a look.

Zane rounded a corner sharply, clearly hoping the sudden turn would shake her off, the way you might lose a persistent pigeon. Skylar rounded it right behind him, using her newly unlocked Probability Sight to step neatly around a patch of loose gravel that flashed red in her vision half a second before her foot would've landed on it.

[68% probability of ankle injury avoided.]

"You're welcome," she told the floating text, pleased with herself.

Zane noticed. Of course he noticed — the man seemed to notice everything, cataloguing the world for threats with the tired vigilance of someone who'd been burned by it too many times to stop. His eyes flicked to her feet, to the spot she'd just avoided, and something like suspicion crossed his face.

"How did you do that."

"Do what?"

"You didn't even look down."

"I have excellent instincts," Skylar said, which was true in the sense that the instincts were currently a system feature and not remotely her own doing.

Zane didn't look convinced, but he also didn't press it, which she decided to count as a small win. He kept walking, and she kept following, matching his pace with the sort of stubbornness that had gotten her banned from two different gyms in her actual, twenty-six-year-old life.

"Don't follow me," he said again, somewhere around the fourth street.

"I'm not following you."

"You are directly behind me."

"I'm going the same direction. It's a public street. You don't own the pavement."

"I might," Zane said, with the flat, humorless conviction of a man who had, at some point, genuinely considered buying real estate purely to avoid people.

"Fine. Buy the pavement. I'll walk on the grass next to it. Still the same direction."

Zane stopped so abruptly that Skylar nearly walked into his back. He turned, and up close, without the adrenaline of a collapsing wall between them, she could see the faint shadows curling restlessly at his collar, like smoke that hadn't decided whether to become fire.

"Why," he said slowly, like each word cost him something, "are you doing this?"

"Because the system told me to claim you," Skylar said honestly. "And also because you saved my life an hour ago and then immediately tried to ditch me like a bad first date."

Something flickered across his face again — that same strange, unwilling recognition from the mill, gone before she could name it. "I don't need to be claimed. I'm not property."

"Nobody said you were property. I said you were mine. Different thing."

"It is exactly the same thing."

"It's really not, but I can see we're going to be here a while if I try to explain nuance to you." Skylar crossed her arms, ignoring the ache in her elbows that came with the gesture. "Look. I don't fully understand what's happening to me either. I woke up old, insulted, and assigned a quest to babysit two men who don't want babysitting. But that countdown just dropped from three days to twenty-six hours, and something tells me none of us have the luxury of arguing about semantics."

For a moment, Zane said nothing. The shadows at his collar stilled.

"Fine," he said finally. "Walk. I don't care. But when something tries to kill you, don't expect me to—"

He didn't get to finish the sentence.

The ground didn't shake this time. It dropped — a sudden, sickening lurch, like the street itself had briefly forgotten it was solid. Skylar staggered, Corin grabbed a lamppost to steady himself, and Zane's shadows exploded outward on instinct, curling protectively around all three of them a half-second before the pavement beneath their feet cracked into a spiderweb of glowing, unnatural fissures.

[Warning: Localized spatial rupture detected.]

Light — wrong, violet-tinged light — began seeping up through the cracks like something underneath was waking early.

[System: Rift Event has not yet begun. This is not scheduled activity.]

"Then what," Skylar said, voice tight, "is that?"

Zane's jaw was clenched, shadows writhing faster around his fists. "That," he said grimly, "is something that shouldn't exist for another twenty-six hours."

The cracks split wider, and something on the other side of the light began to move.