The Wall

POV: Nadia's POV 

The first thing Sable does when she walks in is stop dead in the middle of my living room and stare at the wall.

Not the window. Not me. The wall.

I watch her face go through five different emotions in about three seconds — confusion, recognition, something close to horror — and I already know what's coming before she opens her mouth.

"Nadia."

"Morning."

"What is this."

Not a question. The way she says it is not a question.

I went to sleep at four and woke up at six and spent the two hours between then and now doing what I always do when I can't afford to fall apart — I worked. The wall is colour-coded. Red string connecting the portrait dates to the death memories. Blue for the bloodline documentation. Yellow for everything I've pulled on the living man, the current iteration, the one with the glass tower and the grey suits and the nine AM meeting I have in two hours and forty minutes.

It takes up the entire left side of my living room.

Sable is standing in front of it with her coat still on and her keys still in her hand and a coffee carrier with two cups that she has completely forgotten she's holding.

"I brought you coffee," she says faintly.

"I can see that."

"I was going to say good morning first but then I walked in and..." She gestures at the wall. All of it. The whole thing. "Nadia, this looks like something from a serial killer documentary."

"It's organized."

"There is red string."

"The red string is the death timeline."

She turns and looks at me slowly. "That's not the reassurance you think it is."

I take one of the coffees from the carrier and sit down on the couch and let her have the moment because she needs it and because I've had eight months to get used to the wall and she's had approximately forty-five seconds. She turns back to it. Steps closer. Her eyes move across the portraits first — I know because that's where everyone's eyes go, the row of faces that spans six centuries, all the same jaw and the same eyes in different frames and different centuries.

She finds the most recent one. The profile piece photo. Dorian in the grey suit.

Her voice comes out quieter. "This is him."

"Yes."

"He's..." She stops.

"What."

"He looks normal, Nadia. He looks like a regular person."

"They always do."

She's quiet for a moment. Just looking at his photo with her coffee going cold in her hand and that expression she gets when she's trying to find the version of what she wants to say that won't start a fight. She's been making that face at me since we were kids. It never works. We always fight anyway. We just do it after she tries.

"Tell me the plan again," she says.

"You know the plan."

"Tell me again."

I pull my knee up onto the couch. "I go in this morning as the genealogist. The case is real — I built it properly, he'll have no reason to question it. I establish contact. I let him get comfortable. The soul pull will do most of the work — it always does on his side, he just doesn't know what it is. Within three months he'll want to see me regularly. Within six—"

"You marry him."

"Yes."

"You marry the man who has killed you twelve times."

"Yes."

She finally turns around. Her eyes are doing the thing they do when she's actually scared — not wide, the opposite, like she's narrowing them against something bright. "And then what? What happens after you marry him?"

I don't answer immediately. Not because I don't know — I know every step of this, I've mapped every contingency, I have a folder on my laptop that is essentially a manual for how to dismantle a six hundred year soul cycle in one lifetime. I don't answer because the answer is the part Sable has never fully accepted and this morning, two hours before I walk into his building, is not the time for that argument.

"I end it," I say.

"By doing what."

"By being the one who decides how it ends. Not him. Not whatever is driving him. Me."

She stares at me. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer I have right now."

"Nadia..."

"Sable."

She presses her mouth together. Looks back at the wall. I watch her eyes stop on the bottom left corner where I've pinned the research on the previous iterations — the women who reached their thirteenth life and tried. Four of them. Four different approaches. Four of them dead before they finished.

She knows about those too. I told her six months ago when I found the files.

"Those women all thought they had a plan," she says quietly.

"I know."

"They all thought they were ready."

"I know."

"What makes you different from them?"

And this is the question. The one that lives at the centre of everything, the one I asked myself every morning for eight months while I built this wall and this case and this version of myself that can walk into his building without her hands shaking.

I look at my sister — at her scared eyes and her cold coffee and the way she's gripping her keys tight enough that the metal has to be cutting into her palm — and I tell her the truth.

"They didn't know about each other. I know about all of them. Every mistake they made is documented. Every moment they hesitated, every time they trusted the wrong person, every place the plan broke down — I have it. All of it." I pause. "They were working blind. I'm not."

Sable looks at me for a long time.

Then she walks over, sits down next to me on the couch, and puts her coffee on the table. She doesn't say anything for a moment. Just sits there close enough that our shoulders are touching, looking at the wall together, at the six centuries of the same face doing the same thing across different rooms in different countries.

"I hate this," she says.

"I know."

"I hate all of it. I hate that this is your life. I hate that you have to do this."

"I know."

"If something happens to you..."

"Nothing is going to happen to me."

She turns her head and looks at me sideways. "You don't know that."

"No," I agree. "But I know that doing nothing is the guarantee I die again. So."

She picks her coffee back up. Takes a long sip. Stares at the wall.

"He's annoyingly good looking," she says finally.

I almost choke on my coffee. "Sable."

"I'm just saying. For a murderer." She tilts her head at the photo. "He's got a face."

"Please stop."

"I'm coping."

"Cope differently."

She almost smiles. I almost smile back. And for a second it's almost normal — just the two of us on the couch the way we've been a thousand times, except for the wall behind us and the coffee going cold and the meeting in two hours that will either be the beginning of the end or just another ending.

My phone buzzes on the table.

A calendar reminder.

Ashvale Meridian. 9:00 AM.

The almost-smile drops off Sable's face.

She reaches over and grabs my hand. Squeezes once, hard, the way she's been doing since we were little — our version of be careful, come back, I love you all compressed into one grip.

I squeeze back.

Then I get up, straighten my coat, and pick up my portfolio.

"Lock up when you leave," I say.

She doesn't laugh.

"Nadia." Her voice stops me at the door. I look back. She's still sitting on the couch, hands around her coffee, looking at me with everything she's not saying written all over her face.

"Come home," she says.

I hold her gaze for exactly one second.

Then I walk out.