Chapter 3 - Marlowe Hill

Emilia read the message a third time, and the words did not change, which was the only reason she did not throw the phone out of the window.

Only two people in the world should have known about the bridge, and one of them was dead in a version of time that no longer existed. She thought of Daniel's smiling face on the wall and Joss's fingers curled around his arm, and she knew with a bitter certainty that anyone who remembered the same night could be either her salvation or her next betrayal. The trouble was that she had no way of telling which.

The blue panel flickered in the corner of her vision.

Time remaining until the Red Event, 47 minutes. Suggested location: unknown. Probability of survival at current position, 31 percent.

Thirty one percent was a number she could not argue with. Her apartment sat in the middle of a dense district full of panicking strangers, and in her first life it had been overrun within the first hour. If she stayed, she would die again, and she had no intention of giving the world that satisfaction.

She put the car in gear and typed a single reply with her thumbs shaking against the screen. She asked who he was, and the answer arrived before she had even pulled away from the curb.

Someone who failed to save you the first time. Please hurry.

Emilia drove.

The road toward Marlowe Hill climbed through the northern edge of the city, and she kept her eyes on the mirror as the minutes bled away. The streets around her were still calm in the way that a lake is calm just before a storm, with people walking dogs and carrying groceries and tilting their faces toward the warm morning light. She noticed with a pang that a man outside a café was laughing into his phone, and she wondered whether he would still be alive by tomorrow night.

At twenty minutes the first strange thing happened. Birds began to rise from the rooftops all at once, hundreds of them, pouring into the sky in a dark and silent cloud, and she felt the hair on her neck lift as though the air itself had grown heavy.

At ten minutes the traffic lights stopped working, and the intersections turned to chaos, with horns blaring and drivers leaning out of their windows to shout at one another. Emilia swerved onto the sidewalk to bypass a stalled bus, scraping the paint along a brick wall, and she did not slow down even when a woman screamed curses at her from the curb.

At three minutes the sky began to change.

It started at the edge of the horizon as a faint blush of pink, like the first stain of wine soaking into a white tablecloth, and then the color deepened and spread with terrible speed until the whole heavens burned crimson from one side of the city to the other. People stopped in the streets and stared upward with their mouths open, and cars stopped in the middle of the road, and for a moment the entire world fell completely silent.

Then the sirens began, long and wailing and endless, and the silence shattered into screams.

Emilia pressed the accelerator to the floor.

The hatchback roared up the hill, and in the mirror she saw the first people collapse on the sidewalks, clutching their heads as red dust drifted down from the clouds like snow. She knew what came next, because she had watched it happen once already. Within minutes their eyes would cloud and their skin would pale and the clicking would begin deep in their throats, and the city she had loved would become a graveyard that walked.

A truck swerved into her lane from a side street, and she wrenched the wheel hard to the left. The hatchback skidded across the gravel shoulder, clipped a guardrail, and spun halfway around before she regained control, her heart slamming against her ribs. A pale figure staggered into the road ahead, a man in a delivery uniform with red dust crusted on his lips, and he raised his arms toward her car with a low and horrible rasp.

Emilia did not brake. She had learned in the dust and the dark that stopping to be gentle was how people died, and she drove straight past him with tears streaming down her face and the crowbar rattling against the passenger seat.

The old observatory appeared at the crest of the hill, a white domed building with a crumbling stone wall around it and a rusted gate hanging open on one hinge. She drove through it and slammed on the brakes in the gravel courtyard, then grabbed the crowbar and her backpack and spilled out of the car with her legs trembling under her.

The courtyard was empty and the doors of the observatory were shut. The sirens still wailed from the valley below, thin and distant now, and the red sky pressed down over the dome like the lid of a burning pot.

Emilia raised the crowbar with both hands.

A shadow detached itself from the wall beside the doorway, and she spun toward it with her pulse roaring in her ears. A tall man stepped into the light, dark haired and broad shouldered, wearing a long black coat that was far too heavy for such a warm morning. His face was sharp and pale and exhausted, and his gray eyes locked onto hers with an intensity that made her breath catch painfully in her throat.

She knew those eyes. She had seen them across a burning bridge, grieving in a way that made no sense, and now they looked at her as though she were a miracle he had stopped believing in.

He did not raise a weapon and he did not move closer. His hands hung open at his sides, and his voice came out rough, as though he had not spoken aloud in a very long time.

He told her his name was Kaelen Rhys, and that she had four minutes before the first wave of Hollows reached the hill. He told her that in the life they both remembered, the stronghold's commander had used her map to find every hidden depot in the region, and that Daniel and Joss had been paid with her life for it. He said he had spent eleven years watching her die in different ways, and each time he had lost her a little sooner.

Emilia lowered the crowbar by a single inch.

Eleven years was impossible, she wanted to say, since she had only lived forty three days of the end. But the look in his eyes told her that for him the time had stretched far longer, that he had fallen back through the same dying world again and again, and that she was the only thing that had ever changed.

Then he reached into his coat and drew out a folded piece of paper, creased and stained and soft with age, and held it out toward her with a hand that trembled slightly.

It was her own handwriting, the hand drawn map she had not yet drawn.