Kieran's POV
Her name is on the folder.
Not the name she uses when she's married. Not the doctor, the wife, or the woman who has been living a normal life in this city for two years.
Her real name is Her whole name. The day she was born. The type of blood she has.
And underneath all of that, in red letters that make my ability to wake up so hard that I have to hold on to the steering wheel to stay steady, it says, "CLASSIFICATION: RETURNED. ASSET STATUS: PRIORITY ONE."
I took four screenshots of the feed. My hands are perfectly still. When you've already died once, fear stops living in your hands and goes somewhere deeper, quieter, where it just sits and burns.
I leave the parking lot and drive.
-
Ro picks up the phone on the second ring.
"I need a trace," I say. "Folder for the government. Logo of a medical subcontractor on the tab. "Right now, I'm sending you a picture."
"Good morning to you too," she says. "Ro."
A break. Clicking keys.Sending now or after you say you're sorry for waking me up at eight in the morning?
"Sending now." I hit send and attached the screenshot. "This is urgent."
"Everything with you is urgent." More clicking. Then there was silence-the kind of silence that comes from someone who has just seen something on their screen that changed the course of their morning. "Kieran." "I see it."
"This is a secret division header." "I know this logo." She lowers her voice. "I thought this program was just a theory. Something they were modeling, not doing.
"It's working," I say. "How long?"
Clicking again. This time, longer. I drive and count the seconds while she works.
"Eight months," she finally says. "The date the file was made on the division is eight months ago." A breath. "Kieran. In her timeline, she died six months ago. This program was around for two months before she died.
For a moment, the road is blurry. I blink it back.
They didn't start watching Nadia again because she came back.
They were keeping an eye on her even before she left.
-
When I get home, I put everything on the table. All of the maps. Every time line. Every note I've made in the last fourteen months of surviving, planning, and moving carefully toward this exact moment. I stand over everything and make myself look at what I've been missing.
While I'm standing there, Ro texts me that the Moonborn Initiative did not make this file after Nadia woke up three days ago. They made it before. That means that someone in that program made a guess about the returns. They were able to predict them well enough to make separate files on people who hadn't come back yet. People who were still alive, still normal, and still had no idea they were being cataloged.
I take my pen and write a question at the top of a blank page.
How did they find out?
I look at it. My ability is doing something it has never done before. It's not the structural-weakness reading I was born with in the last timeline. It's the new thing, the thing that came back with me, the one that makes me feel pressure behind my eyes when something important is close. It is now pressing. Difficult.
I feel like the answer to that question is already in this room, but I just can't see it yet.
I go back over everything.
After Nadia went to see her lawyer, Marcus called twice. I followed them using the timestamps on the building's cameras. First call: four minutes. Second call: 11 minutes. He wrote something down after the second call.
I look at the footage again and watch how he moves. The way his shoulders change from call one to call two. Call one-he's talking to someone who is on his level. Asking questions and getting answers is a fair trade. Call two, and his posture drops. He lowers his chin. Someone above him is telling him what to do.
This is not the top for Marcus Voss.
He is not even close to being the best.
-
Forty minutes later, Ro calls back.
"I found the head of the division," she says. "Commander Helene Strait is her name. She leads a government medical task force, but I can't see the whole thing. The parts I can read say-" She stops. "Ro."
"Kieran, the mandate says that we need to find potential Returned people ahead of time based on their behavior and how close they are to infection zones." They made a system that could predict things. They've been doing it for more than a year." A long pause.They have information on forty-three people. They thought that forty-three people from all over the country would come back before any of them did.
My pen has stopped moving.
43.
Not only Nadia. Not only me. There are 43 people walking around in this country right now. Some of them are already back, and some of them are not yet back. They are all already classified and numbered and given an asset status in a program run by a woman named Helene Strait. She decided before any of us returned that we would be resources instead of people.
"Send me everything you can get to," I say. "Already sending." Keys are clicking. "Kieran. In the auxiliary contacts section of Nadia's file, there is a name for Marcus Voss. For six months, he has been listed as a "cooperative informant.""Since one month before she died." A beat.
The room gets very quiet.
Marcus didn't just happen to join this program after Nadia came back. In the last timeline, he was hired for it a month before she died. That means that when he told someone where she was in the last timeline, when Jessa built the case against her and the shelter kicked her out, it wasn't just a cheating husband trying to save himself.
That was a guy who worked for the people who wanted her to be classified.
He didn't just help her die.
He gave her to them.
-
I put Marcus's name at the top of the list of threats. I cross out everything I had written next to it before and write a new line.
He has always known who she is. He was put there to keep an eye on her.
I sit back, look at the ceiling, and let myself feel what it means that Nadia Voss has been living in a trap for longer than either of us thought for thirty seconds.
Then I grab my phone and call her.
The call doesn't go through.
I give it another shot. Nothing.
I open the feed from the building camera.
The feed is broken. The screen is black. Not connected.
I test the second camera. Gone. I try the third one.
Every single one of them. I put every single camera I had around her building, all at once, in the last four minutes.
Someone just stopped talking to me.
Nadia is still in that building.