Soren's PovI closed the bedroom door and stood in the hallway, listening to Elodie’s soft breathing through the wood.Ordinary. Peaceful. The kind of morning that used to mean coffee, work, and the quiet resentment I swallowed for years.My hands were still shaking.I walked to the kitchen, ran cold water over my wrists, and let the ghost of the chain fade. The empty lot. The scarred woman’s eyes. Elodie’s silence.I dried my hands and checked my phone again.The date hadn’t changed.Three months.News app: local traffic, weather, a buried story about west-coast supply delays no one was taking seriously. Banking app: same balance, same joint accounts. Old messages: Tobin’s late-night demands, Bennett’s clipped orders, Maribel’s polite expectations, Elodie’s soft replies that always sided with them in the end.Everything lined up.I set the phone down and stared at the wall.This was real.I had died in that lot, traded like a crate of supplies, and woken up three months earlier with

Soren's PovThe knocking stopped the moment I focused on it.One second the three measured strikes were deliberate and close. The next, silence. Complete. As if whatever made the noise had sensed my attention and gone still.I stayed pressed against the far wall, breathing too fast, staring at the empty air where the boundary seemed to sit. Nothing moved. No further sound. No pressure change. No shift in the supplies I could still sense in neat clusters.I reached out again, slower. Probed the edges of the darkness with the same focused intention I used to retrieve objects.Nothing.No second presence. No hidden shape. No residual vibration.Whatever had knocked was either gone or choosing not to answer.I pulled my awareness back and forced myself to stand.Unnecessary risks had already killed me once. I was not going to die a second time over a sound in a pocket of space I barely understood.Preparation first. Mysteries later.I cleared the table, spread every map I had bought, and

Soren's PovI stood frozen a few feet from the door, listening to the woman on the other side.“Soren. Open the door. We need to talk.”The voice was exact.Nadia Kessler.In my first life I had heard that voice only once, thin and strained over a dying radio in the final weeks, broadcasting coordinates for a survivor group that no longer existed by the time I reached the location. I had never seen her face. According to every memory I carried, Nadia Kessler did not appear until long after the cities had already fallen. She was a post-collapse survivor. Not a pre-collapse stranger standing in my hallway three months before the end.Yet the voice was hers.And the spatial ability inside my mind was reacting to her presence. The darkness trembled in irregular pulses, supplies shifting at the edges of my awareness like loose objects on a vibrating table.I did not open the door.“Who sent you?” I asked through the wood.A short silence. Then: “No one sent me. Not exactly.”“That’s not an

Soren's PovI spun around.Nothing.The apartment was empty except for Nadia standing a few steps behind me, watching my face with sharp concern. No one else. No footsteps. No shift in the air. Only the low hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic that still pretended the city was normal.Inside the spatial space the photograph remained exactly where it was, resting on the wooden table in that impossible room. I forced myself to look at it again, slower this time, fighting the instinct to pull away.The image showed a ruined street. Collapsed buildings leaned against each other like drunks. An ash-gray sky pressed down without mercy. In the foreground stood a figure that looked like me: older, thicker through the shoulders, face carved into something harder and colder than I currently wore. And directly behind that figure, close enough that it should have been impossible to miss on the first glance, was another presence. Partially obscured by shadow and angle. Same gen