Nadia's POV
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The car alarms stop.
All of them, at the exact same second, like someone cut a wire running through the entire street. The silence that replaces them is so sudden and so complete it feels louder than the noise was.
I stand in my kitchen with coffee soaking into my socks and my phone in my shaking hand and I read the text again.
Don't go to work today.
Unknown number. No contact. No name. Sent at 6:47 AM, which means someone sent it while I was sitting right here at this table, while Marcus was kissing the top of my head, while I was pretending to be a woman who didn't know the world had an expiration date.
Someone knows I'm back.
That thought moves through me like ice water and I grip the counter and force myself to think instead of panic. Panicking is what I did last time. Panicking is what made me trust too fast and plan too slow and end up on the wrong side of shelter gates with teeth in my throat.
Not again.
I put the phone face down on the counter. I grab paper towels and clean up the broken mug slowly, piece by piece, giving my brain something to do with its hands while it works. By the time the floor is clean I have made three decisions. First - I am going to work. Whoever sent that message either wants to help me or wants to slow me down, and I cannot afford to be slowed down by either. Second - I am going to find out who has this number. Third - I am going to act like everything is completely normal until I know which kind of enemy I am dealing with.
I change my shoes and I leave.
-
Marcus calls me on my way to the hospital. I answer on the second ring because a woman who answers on the first ring is a woman waiting for the call, and I am no longer that woman.
"Hey," he says, warm and easy. "Left my gym card on the counter, can you grab it before you head out?"
"Already left," I say. "Sorry."
A small pause. "Oh. Okay. No worries."
He hangs up. I drive.
The pause was three seconds too long. In my old life I never would have noticed. In this life I count every second of silence like money.
-
At the hospital I go straight to Felix Okafor's office before my shift starts. He is eating a breakfast sandwich over a patient file and barely looks up when I knock. Felix is the best doctor in this building and also the most aggressively unbothered human being I have ever met, which is exactly why he survived longer than almost anyone in my last timeline before the outbreak took him in month four.
Not this time.
"I need to talk to you about emergency preparedness," I say, sitting down across from him without being invited.
He looks up. "Good morning to you too, Nadia."
"I'm serious. The hospital's supply chain for trauma cases has three critical gaps and if we hit a city-wide emergency situation in the next few months we will run out of blood products within seventy-two hours."
He puts down his sandwich. "Did something happen?"
"I've been reviewing the records," I say, which is true enough. "Will you look at what I put together if I send it to you?"
He studies me for a moment with those careful doctor eyes that don't miss much. "You seem different today."
"I haven't had enough coffee," I say.
He picks his sandwich back up. "Send me the file. I'll look."
It is a small thing. A seed. But seeds are how forests start, and I am trying to grow something that will still be standing when everything else falls down.
-
I spend my shift working and watching and remembering. I know which supply closet gets forgotten during emergencies. I know which hospital administrator will start hoarding resources for himself in month two of the outbreak and needs to be removed from the chain of command before that happens. I know which security guard, a quiet man named Darnell who works the night shift, will become one of the best people I have ever seen in a crisis. I stop by the security desk at lunch and ask him how his daughter is doing and he looks so surprised that someone remembered he had one that he stands up straighter for the rest of the afternoon.
People remember the ones who see them. I know that now.
After my shift I drive to the storage unit. I add to the supplies. Medical gloves, sutures, bottled water, three flashlights, batteries. I lock it and sit in my car in the parking lot and pull out my notebook - a physical one, not my phone, because phones can be checked by people who hum cheerfully in kitchens.
I draw two columns.
Assets. Liabilities.
Under Assets - my medical skills, the storage unit, Felix if I can convince him, Darnell, my salary for the next three months before everything stops mattering, and the dark electric thing in my chest that I still don't fully understand but that has stayed quiet and watchful all day like a dog that has been told to wait.
Under Liabilities - Marcus. His three-second pauses. His gym card he never actually forgets because he goes every single Tuesday without fail and I have been married to him for two years and I know his habits better than he thinks I do.
He didn't forget his gym card.
He wanted to know if I was still home.
I write Jessa's name under Liabilities and I press so hard the pen tears through to the next page.
Then I take out my phone and call the divorce lawyer and make the Thursday appointment and feel nothing about it except a clean, quiet sense of something clicking into place.
I drive home. Marcus is already there, which is early for him. He is standing in the kitchen holding his phone and when I walk in he looks up and his smile comes exactly one second too late.
"Hey," he says. "How was your shift?"
"Long," I say, dropping my bag. "Yours?"
"Good," he says. And then, casually, the way people say things they have been practicing - "Jessa stopped by today. She was looking for you."
The ability at the base of my spine detonates like a flare.
I keep my face completely still.
Because Jessa lives forty minutes away. Jessa never drops by without texting first. And Jessa has not set foot in this apartment in three weeks - a fact I know because I have been counting, without knowing why, the way you count things you sense are important before you understand how.
"That's sweet," I say. "I'll call her later."
I walk to the bedroom and close the door and stand with my back against it.
My phone buzzes.
Same unknown number. New message.
She already knows you're back. She's known since this morning.