"You really thought I wouldn't figure it out."That was the last thing Viktor said before the blade went in.Not a question. A statement, delivered quietly, almost gently, the way you say something to a man you have already decided is finished. He was standing over me with the handle still in his hand and the expression of someone who had been waiting a long time for this specific moment, and the worst part, the part that stayed with me across five years and one death, was that he looked relieved. Not triumphant. Relieved. Like he had been carrying something heavy and had finally put it down.I was on the floor of the Apex Gate's inner chamber with a blade through my lung.Around me, the raid was finished. Fourteen operators who had followed my plan into that chamber were down because Viktor had fed our positions to the gate's interior defenses three minutes before we breached. Three minutes. Four years of work, four years of trust, four years of a man standing at my right shoulder wh

The gate was already fully open by the time I reached the tower.Not the slow tear-and-expand process I remembered from the first days of the timeline I had already lived, where gates took four or five minutes to stabilize before anything came through. This one had opened fast, the membrane already solid, orange-white light steady against the brick. Faster meant the timeline was still running ahead of itself. Faster meant whatever was inside had already had time to move.The street outside the entrance was chaos in the specific, disorganized way a city becomes chaos when nobody has agreed yet on what the correct reaction is supposed to be. Someone was filming with their phone held sideways. Someone else was shouting a name into a crowd that did not seem to contain the person they were looking for. I did not stop for any of it.Most people were running the other way. I went through the lobby at a dead sprint, past two civilians frozen flat against the wall behind the reception desk, an

We had gone maybe half a block toward the university when Adrian stopped walking."Do you hear that," he said.I did. Screaming, two streets over, coming from the direction of the Eastern Gate's overflow zone — not the panicked, directionless noise of a city reacting to the sky cracking, something more deliberate, more sustained, the sound of people who were currently losing a fight they had not chosen to be in. My side still burned faintly where the crawler in the parking structure had caught me, and I filed that discomfort away along with everything else this morning had decided I didn't have time to feel yet."That's not our problem," I said, already knowing it was a lie the moment it left my mouth, because it had never once been that simple where my brother was concerned.Adrian was already moving."Adrian—"He didn't stop. That was the thing about him I loved most and could least afford. In the life I had already lived, that exact instinct got him killed in Month 3, a crawler wav

Maya stayed behind. Someone had to hold the basement, and she'd already proven she was the right person for it, so when I told her the evaluation centers were opening and the assessment window had a clock on it, she didn't argue. She just nodded once, the way she did everything, and told me to come back and tell her what class I got, like this was a normal thing to ask a stranger she'd known for two hours."I will," I said, and meant it more than I expected to.She was already turning back to her students by the time I finished the sentence, calling out an instruction about the second floor windows before I'd even reached the stairs. That was Maya. She didn't need to watch us leave to know we'd left. She just needed to know the building would still be standing when we came back.The System had built the evaluation center overnight in the Breslin Avenue convention hall. Not constructed. Inserted, the way the System did everything, fully formed with no explanation owed to anyone. We saw

She didn't tell me. She told Maya, low, in the corridor, her back half turned to the room like she wanted the words to reach one person and nobody else. I caught enough of it anyway. Maya's eyebrows went up in the specific way of someone receiving a piece that finally completed a picture they'd already half built.I already knew Kira's class from my old life. Surgeon of Thresholds. Rare, non combat, built around the spaces between things. Living and dying. Truth and concealment. It had taken months to develop the first time around. Whatever it was doing in her right now, it was already active, and it was reading me."Your class is running," I said, when she came back over."How do you know that.""You're looking at me differently than you were an hour ago.""I look at everyone the same way.""No. An hour ago you watched what I do. Now you're watching what I am."She didn't answer that, which was its own kind of answer. I watched her decide, in real time, whether to push me on how I'd