Chapter 4 - What The Map Remembered

Emilia stared at the paper in his hand, and every sensible instinct she owned told her to run.

The lines on it were hers, the same slanted numbers she used when she was nervous and the same tiny star she drew beside the abandoned grain mill outside Calder Ridge. She had not drawn this map yet, not in this life, which meant that either she was looking at proof of everything he had said or at the cleverest trap she had ever walked into.

The blue panel flared in the corner of her vision.

Hollow wave approaching from the south. Time until contact: 3 minutes and 10 seconds. Trust assessment of Kaelen Rhys: unknown.

She laughed once, a thin and cracked sound, because even her own survival system had no idea what to make of him. Then she snatched the map from his fingers and looked at the corner where she always wrote the date. It was in her handwriting, and it was dated eleven years from now.

Kaelen did not flinch as she searched his face. He simply stood there in the red light with his coat stirring around his boots, and the quiet patience in his posture was somehow harder to bear than any argument would have been.

She told him that if he was lying, she would put the crowbar through his skull before the Hollows ever reached her. He nodded as though that was a perfectly reasonable arrangement, and he turned and pushed open the heavy observatory door.

Inside, the air smelled of dust and cold stone. A spiral staircase wound down into darkness beneath the great telescope, and Kaelen took the steps two at a time with the ease of a man who had walked them in his sleep. Emilia followed with her backpack hugged against her chest and her boots ringing on the iron, and behind them the first distant clicking began to rise from the hillside like rain beginning on a tin roof.

The basement was larger than she expected. It held shelves of sealed crates, a hand pumped well in the corner, and a narrow cot beneath a lantern that Kaelen lit with a match while she watched his hands. They were scarred and steady, and she noticed that he had positioned himself so that the door stayed within her reach rather than his.

He bolted the heavy hatch above them and slid a steel bar across it. A moment later the courtyard gravel crunched under dozens of dragging feet, and the entire door shuddered as something pale struck it from the other side, then another, and another, until the sound became a slow and horrible drumming that she felt in her teeth.

Emilia sank onto a crate and made herself breathe. She had survived a hundred nights like this, but never with a stranger who seemed to know her better than the people she had loved.

Kaelen sat across from her and told her the story plainly, without decoration, which was the only reason she kept listening. He said that in the first life he remembered, he had been a soldier in the stronghold's guard, a quiet man who followed orders until the night he watched them sacrifice a crowd of innocents at the gate. He had seen Emilia on the bridge, and he had seen Daniel point, and he had understood far too late what kind of people he served. When he died in the Hollows' siege a few weeks later, he woke up in his barracks bed on the morning before the sky turned red, and every memory came with him.

He had lived the apocalypse seven times since then. Each time he tried to find her early, and each time something went wrong, because Daniel and Joss were always one step ahead of him.

Emilia's skin prickled. She asked him what he meant, and he held her gaze for a long moment before answering.

He said that Daniel had never been the man she thought he was. In every single life Kaelen remembered, Daniel had been working for the stronghold's commander for months before the Red Event, long before the world ended. He had been feeding the commander details about Emilia's job and her research and the mapping software she built for a surveying company, because the commander had known the sky would burn and had wanted her skills for the world that came after.

The engagement had never been love at all. It had been recruitment.

Emilia heard the words, but they did not land the way grief should have landed. They landed like a key turning in a lock she had never known was there. She thought of every date Daniel had planned around her work and every careless question about her routes and her files, and she thought of Joss encouraging her to trust him whenever her instincts flickered. She had always called it intuition, the small cold voice that told her something was wrong, and she had silenced it for years.

She said quietly that she wanted to hear the rest.

Kaelen opened his mouth to answer, and her phone buzzed against her hip.

They both went completely still.

The screen glowed in the lantern light with a message from Joss. It said she was so relieved Emilia had gotten out of the apartment safely, that she and Daniel were already on the road, and that they would find her soon. It ended with a little heart, the same one she had sent a hundred times, and under it came a second message that made the blood drain from Emilia's face.

We are so close to the observatory now. Stay exactly where you are, Em.

She had never told Joss where she was going. She had not told anyone.

Kaelen reached across the space between them and gently took the phone from her shaking fingers, and she saw something terrible settle behind his gray eyes as he turned the device over and pried open the case. A tiny black disk, smaller than a coin, was stuck to the battery beneath the plastic.

He held it up to the lantern light, and when he spoke his voice was very low.

He told her the tracker had been on her phone since the day Daniel gave it to her as an engagement gift. Above them, over the endless drumming of the Hollows, came the unmistakable growl of an engine climbing the hill, and a pair of headlights swept across the narrow basement window and painted the walls  in pale and merciless white