Nadia's POV
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I don't sleep.
After Marcus's smile comes one second too late and Jessa's name sits in a text from a number I don't recognize, I lie in the dark beside my husband and stare at the ceiling and count every single thing that can go wrong if I move too slow.
The answer is everything.
I get up at 4 AM without making a sound. I sit at the kitchen table with my phone face down and my notebook open and I rewrite the timeline. Faster. Everything moves faster now. If Jessa already knows I'm back - whatever back means to whoever is watching me - then I don't have the luxury of being careful and slow. I have to be careful and fast, which is a completely different thing and much harder to pull off.
I close the notebook when I hear Marcus shift in the bedroom.
I smile at him over coffee at 6 AM like a woman with nothing on her mind.
He almost smiles back.
-
I get to the hospital forty minutes before my shift starts.
Most people don't notice the forty minutes before. That's exactly why I'm here for them. I go straight to the supply records room - a small office that smells like old paper and forgotten budgets - and I sit down and I start reading. Not the current inventory. The patterns. Which supplies get reordered late. Which departments quietly borrow from each other when things run thin. Which items disappear from the records in months seven and eight of a bad season, when people start panicking and stop filing paperwork.
I have seen what this hospital looks like when the world outside it is ending. I know exactly which shelves go empty first.
I take photos of three pages and put my phone in my pocket and walk out before anyone arrives to wonder why I was there.
By the time my shift starts I have a list of twelve specific items the hospital will desperately need in ninety days and currently has less than two weeks of backup stock for. I fold the list and put it in my coat pocket and go save some lives, because that part hasn't changed - I am still a doctor, and people still need me, and taking care of them costs me nothing except time I was going to spend here anyway.
Felix finds me at 9 AM between patients. He leans against the wall with his arms crossed and says, "I read your file."
I keep writing in the chart I'm holding. "And?"
"And you're not wrong," he says, like it costs him something to admit it. "The blood product gap is real. I checked it myself after you left yesterday."
I look up. "Will you help me close it?"
He is quiet for a moment. Felix is a man who takes his time deciding things, which is one of the reasons he is the best doctor in this building. "Let me think about it," he says.
"Think fast," I say. Not urgently. Just as a fact.
He gives me a look that says he noticed the difference. I go back to my chart.
-
Lunch break. I drive across town to the storage facility and I don't take the same route twice. Old habit from the last life, learned too late. I learned a lot of things too late in the last life. That's the whole point of this one.
The unit is cold and smells like concrete. I add to yesterday's deposit - more medical supplies, a hand-crank radio, three weeks of water purification tablets, another envelope of cash. I organize everything against the back wall with the focus of someone building a lifeboat before the ship knows it's sinking.
I lock the unit and sit in my car in the parking lot for exactly four minutes, which is how long it takes me to make sure no one followed me here. Nobody did. I pull out and head back.
I'm two blocks from the hospital when I see the crowd.
Maybe thirty people clustered outside a coffee shop on the corner, all of them looking at something on the ground that I can't see from the car. Someone fell, maybe. Or someone is sick. I slow down automatically because I am a doctor and slowing down for bodies on the ground is as natural as breathing.
And then my ability wakes up.
Not the slow warm pulse I've been feeling all morning. This is different. This is like something reaching through my chest from the inside and pressing its hand flat against the window of my ribs and pushing. Toward the crowd. Toward something in or near or behind the crowd that my body recognizes even though my brain hasn't caught up yet.
I press the brake too hard. The car behind me honks.
I scan the crowd through the windshield - thirty faces, none of them familiar, all of them looking down at whatever is happening on the pavement. I look past them. Behind the coffee shop. Across the street.
Nothing.
The ability is still pushing. Straining. Like a dog on a leash that has caught a scent and will not stop pulling no matter how hard I hold on.
I breathe. I count to three. I drive.
But my hands are tight on the wheel all the way back to the hospital and the pushing feeling doesn't stop - it just gets quieter, like something settling back into its corner, patient, certain it will get what it wants eventually.
I park and sit in the car for a moment.
My phone buzzes.
I look down.
Same unknown number. Third message in two days.
You felt it, didn't you? That was me. I needed to know if you were ready. You're not. Not yet. But you will be. Come to Heron Street tomorrow morning. 7 AM. Come alone. Don't tell Marcus. Don't tell Jessa. Don't tell anyone you trust, because right now the people you trust are the most dangerous ones in your life. You already know I'm right. That's why your hands are still shaking.
I look at my hands on the steering wheel.
They are shaking.
I haven't noticed until right now. The ability in my chest pulses once - not warning me away from the message. Not pulling me back.
Pushing me forward.
And the worst part - the part that should scare me more than it does - is that every single word in that message is true, and whoever sent it knows things about my life that I have never said out loud to anyone.
Which means they haven't just been watching me since I came back.
They've been watching me for much, much longer than that.