I'd finished clearing the second pocket gate on instinct alone, moving through the last two crawlers without any real memory of deciding to, because Echo dropping me to one knee mid fight had scattered every thought in my head except one. Something massive had just deviated, somewhere close, and I didn't have the pieces yet to know what.I spent the walk back to the safe house running every scenario I could construct and discarding all of them, because none of them fit the specific shape of the signal. This hadn't felt like a monster. It had felt like a decision, somewhere in the city, made by someone who knew exactly what they were choosing.The Echo signal took until morning to make sense of. It wasn't the passive itself that told me what had happened, only that something had. The rest came from comparing pieces, the operator chatter already circulating through the safe house's borrowed radio, a gate report Maya had picked up secondhand from a trader passing through, and the specifi

Kira's words followed me the whole walk back from the warehouse district. Two people who know more than they're saying, standing in the same street, being polite to each other. She wasn't wrong, and the not being wrong was starting to weigh on me in a way I hadn't planned for when I woke up on Day 1 with a list and a plan.A Class B gate in week one meant the timeline wasn't just deviating. It was compressing, events arriving weeks ahead of where I remembered them. I ran the math the rest of the way home and didn't love the answer. If the first major surge, the one that flattened the Eastern District in Month 2 the first time around, was arriving on the same accelerated schedule as everything else, I might have days instead of weeks to get the building defensible. I thought about the eleven deviations I'd already logged, and wondered how many more it would take before the number stopped being a list and started being a pattern I actually understood."Is that a problem," Maya asked, wa

By morning, the deviation made itself known the hard way.I'd spent the hours before dawn turning the fragment from Echo over in my head, the vast wrong shape against a sky that wasn't this city's sky, gone before I could hold onto it long enough to understand what I was even looking at. I didn't have an answer for what it meant, and I hadn't slept enough to keep chasing one. What I had, forty minutes after sunrise, was a gate.A Class C gate had opened forty meters from the safe house's eastern perimeter, not on any schedule I remembered, not anywhere near where the original timeline had placed gate density this early. I didn't know yet if it was connected to whatever Echo had shown me in the dark. I filed the possibility anyway, because coincidences had stopped meaning anything to me somewhere around Day 3.Three Bonecasters and a pack of six Maw Hounds came through it. Fast, coordinated pack hunters, the kind I remembered from my old life punishing solo operators specifically for n

I didn't sleep much after Dorian left the roof. I lay awake running his eight years against my five, trying to find the seam where they diverged, and kept landing on the same unanswerable question. If the timeline had already been different before either of us regressed, how much of what either of us remembered could actually be trusted anymore. I hadn't told Kira any of it yet. I told myself that was strategy. Some nights it just felt like cowardice wearing a better name, the kind of quiet, patient cowardice that dresses itself up as protecting someone and calls it a plan instead of what it actually was. She arrived alone the next morning, sourcing the building's location from channels whose origin I didn't yet understand, and looked at the exterior of the place I'd claimed with the expression of someone confirming a decision already made rather than making one fresh. Selene Frost, twenty six, the kind of stillness that read as a person rather than a posture, the kind that made yo

I told myself I would wait for her. I told myself that all through dinner, through the hour after, through the point where waiting stopped being patience and started being something closer to fear of what the answer might actually be. She'd fallen asleep on the fourth floor sometime after midnight, exhausted from a day that had cost both of us more than either of us said out loud, and I stood outside her door for almost a full minute deciding whether to wake her. I didn't. I used it that night, alone, the room dark, the question I'd been carrying since Dorian told me about Year 8 finally ready to be asked. I knew what I was doing when I did it. I was making the exact choice Dorian had warned me about without saying it outright, protecting her by excluding her, the same mistake that apparently got repeated in every version of this story until someone finally stopped making it. I made it anyway, and told myself the difference this time was that I'd tell her everything in the morning,