The words looked back at him with brutal honesty. Morgan had killed before and would kill again today without thinking twice because they were threats to innocent people right away.
But this was not the same. This was hunting down people who hadn't yet committed their crimes and killing them for things that only one person remembered from a timeline that no longer existed.
The moral certainty he had felt earlier was starting to fall apart at the edges, showing how ugly it really was. He was turning into exactly what he was afraid of, using the same logic Murphy would use to explain why he was killing people. The only thing that was different was the math and the body count math that said Morgan's murders were noble and Murphy's were horrible.
Morgan's hands were definitely shaking now, and the tremor made his writing less steady. He felt sick to his stomach, which was a physical sign of guilt that no amount of math could completely get rid of. He let himself feel it for a moment, letting the full weight of what he was planning hit him without the safety net of strategic thinking.
Then he pushed it down, pushed the weakness away, and got back to work. Being guilty didn't change anything.
The math stayed the same. Even if Morgan let Chen live, he would still kill the two hundred people. Margaret would still set fire to her refugee camps. The others would still do their own terrible things. If Morgan wanted to save anyone, he couldn't afford to feel guilty.
He put a circle around Chen's name on the operational plan, wrote a date three days from now, and started to work out the last details. Chen was the most dangerous because he had killed the most people and was the least personally connected to Morgan, which would make it easier for him emotionally.
His death would send a message without making a pattern clear right away. It would also give Murphy more time to kill the others before he figured out what was going on.
This was the end of the road. Morgan couldn't go back to being who he was after Chen died. By any definition that mattered, he would be a murderer, someone who had crossed a line that kept him from the people he said he was protecting.
Morgan looked at the circled name, the carefully written date, and the operational details that would end a person's life. His finger followed the ink, feeling the small dip in the paper where he had pressed too hard with the pen. In three days, David Chen would die, and Morgan would be to blame.
His phone lit up again, and Claire's first message was still on the screen. "Murphy asked me to join the Council."
"Should I say yes?"
Morgan picked up the device and felt its weight in his hand like an accusation. He had been putting off answering and making the decision he knew he had to make, but now there was no time to wait. The answer to the text was crucial in determining whether Claire survived the impending event.
He moved his thumbs slowly and carefully over the keyboard, typing words that felt like poison. "Say yes to the invitation."
"I need you in there."
He looked at the message for a long time before sending it. The words disappeared from his screen and were sent across the city to Claire's phone, which meant she would have to do exactly what he had been trying to stop. He was sending her deeper into Murphy's group, using her as a spy and putting her moral safety at risk for a tactical advantage.
Claire died in year three in the original timeline. If things went wrong, her life expectancy would be even shorter as a council member.
Murphy would ask more of her and put her faith to the test in ways that would break or change her. Morgan was using her trust as a weapon to gain an asset into Murphy's inner circle by using their relationship as leverage.
He was treating her the same way Murphy treated everyone else, but he said he had different reasons for doing so. The manipulation was the same, and it was the same betrayal. Morgan told himself he was doing it for good reasons, but that didn't matter to Claire when she found out what he had done.
Morgan typed one last message but didn't send it. Instead, he left it in his drafts: "Forgive me for what I'm about to do to you."
The message that he hadn't sent lit up his screen. It was an apology for crimes he hadn't yet committed, a confession that would never be read.
Morgan put the phone down and closed the messaging app. He added it to the pile of evidence around him.
The walls seemed to be closing in on him, making the room feel smaller than it had before. There were papers all over the place, and each one showed how far he had fallen because he had to.
Lists of people to kill and plans for assassinations, timelines with deaths that hadn't happened yet, and calculations that turned human lives into numbers in an equation. Morgan looked at a picture he had buried under other papers.
It was from before the outbreak in his old life. The person in that picture was no longer recognizable.
They had once believed in clear moral lines and the difference between right and wrong. He had died at some point between seeing the world end and going back in time to stop it.
What was left was something else entirely. A killer who used math to justify murder, a manipulator who used relationships as weapons to get ahead, and a monster who told himself he was fighting other monsters while doing the same things.
The lamp kept burning, casting the same harsh shadows over a room that had become a grave for whatever humanity Morgan had once had. He sat by himself with his plans, his calculations, and the well-documented reasons for the horrible things he was about to do.
In the hours before dawn, the city was quiet outside. Murphy slept soundly in his bedroom down the hall, already thinking about his sermon for the next day and how to grow his power even more. Claire was probably awake, staring at Morgan's response, trying to figure out what it meant that he wanted her to take Murphy's offer.
And in the dark, David Chen was living the last three days of his life without knowing it. He was humming hymns and sure of his purpose, not knowing that someone was planning to kill him with the same calm efficiency he would have used to plan the deaths of two hundred other people.
Morgan took the pen one last time and wrote in big, clear letters across the top of his operational plans: "Twelve lives."
"Saved two hundred fifty thousand."
"Not another choice."
The words stared at him like a mantra, a prayer, or the kind of absolute certainty that made normal people do terrible things. He had become exactly what he was afraid of, backed up by numbers, convinced by math, and sure in a way that left no room for doubt or hesitation.
The math of sacrifice said that twelve people had to die to save hundreds of thousands. Morgan had done the math, double-checked his work, and made sure it was right.
The answer was clear, simple, and completely terrifying. He was a butcher doing math, and the math problem needed blood.