I Can See the Expiry Date of Everything

Chapter 6

The subway tunnel felt like the throat of a dying god, echoing with the rhythmic, wet drip of condensation against rusted tracks. Kevin didn't wait for Miller to close the distance. He grabbed Megan and Daniel by their coats and shoved them toward the maintenance access port, a narrow, barred hatch that groaned as he pried it open.

"Go! Get into the maintenance crawlspace!" Kevin shouted.

"Kevin, your skin," Daniel gasped, his eyes fixed on the flickering violet luminescence bleeding from Kevin’s wrists. "You’re changing. We need to stabilize you."

"I don't have time for stabilization, Daniel! Keep her safe!" Kevin didn't look back as he kicked the hatch shut, the iron locking with a heavy, final thud.

He turned around, his chest heaving, to face Miller. But the tunnel was empty. Thomas Miller had vanished into the shadows, leaving behind only the oppressive, static-charged silence. Kevin stumbled, his legs feeling like leaden weights. The exhaustion wasn't just physical; it was an existential drain, a vacuum pulling the very marrow from his bones.

He scrambled into the crawlspace, his breath hitching as he felt his skin burn. The violet glow was spreading, crawling up his forearms like veins of neon ink. He needed to be alone. He needed to know if he could control the toll.

He left his friends huddled in the dry section of the maintenance tunnel and pushed deeper into the dark, eventually finding a small utility room filled with humming capacitors and flickering circuit breakers. He looked at his reflection in a patch of polished steel plating on a control box.

"Okay," he whispered, his voice raspy. "If I’m a battery, I need to see if I can drain the charge."

He reached out to a small, wall-mounted display that showed the telemetry for the subway’s power grid. Nestled in a corner of the screen was a small, flickering monitor displaying the pulse of a nearby hospital wing. He focused his eyes, forcing his perception to shift, to see beyond the cold circuits and into the ledger of lives.

There, in a ward only a few hundred yards away, he saw it. A young girl, barely seven years old, her ticker a frantic, jagged neon pink: 00y : 00m : 00d : 00h : 00m : 14s.

Fourteen seconds.

The horror hit him, sharp and absolute. He didn't think about Miller or the system’s rules. He didn't think about the debt. He reached out, his trembling, glowing hand pressing against the glass of the telemetry screen, visualizing the girl, pouring every ounce of his will into the numbers.

Don't go. Not yet.

The violet light from his skin flared, blinding and intense. He felt a searing, white-hot agony ripple through his chest, as if a thread were being pulled directly from his heart. The girl’s clock stuttered, hesitated, and then surged.

00y : 00m : 00d : 00h : 00m : 15s... 16s... 20s...

She was gaining time.

Kevin screamed, collapsing to his knees as the room spun. The cost was instantaneous. His vision grayed at the edges, and a wave of nausea so violent it left him gasping for air washed over him. He felt thinner, older, as if he had run a marathon in the span of a single heartbeat.

He crawled toward the corner of the room, his limbs trembling with a palsy he couldn't control. He was dying. He had paid for her life with a massive, terrifying chunk of his own vitality.

He pulled himself up, using a cold metal pipe for support, and staggered back toward the hatch where he had left Megan and Daniel. He could hear them talking, their voices small and muffled against the concrete walls.

"He shouldn't have stayed there, Daniel," Megan said, her voice strained with worry. "He’s doing this for me. He’s destroying himself to keep me here."

"I know," Daniel’s voice replied, heavy with regret. "But he thinks he’s a savior. He doesn't realize he’s just a fuse, burning out at both ends."

Kevin didn't want them to see him like this. He leaned against the damp wall, his skin mottled with pulsating purple light that seemed to be dimming, fading into a dull, sickly gray. He looked at his hands—they were skeletal, the skin loose, the veins prominent. He felt like an old man trapped in a young man’s shell.

He didn't regret the girl. He would do it again, a thousand times over, if he had to. But the math of the universe was relentless. For every second he gifted, the ledger demanded a harsher payment.

He needed to check his own time. He had been so focused on everyone else, so terrified of watching his friends fade, that he had never once looked for his own marker.

He fumbled in his pocket, pulling out a small, cracked hand mirror he’d kept to check for the glow on his own face. He held it up in the dim light of the tunnel, his breath fogging the glass. He wiped it clear with a shaking hand and focused on his own forehead.

The numbers appeared. They weren't like the ones he saw on strangers—they weren't chaotic or flickered. They were fixed, steady, and terrifyingly precise.

00y : 00m : 01d : 00h : 00m : 00s.

Twenty-four hours.

The mirror slipped from his fingers, clattering against the concrete. It shattered into a dozen pieces, each fragment reflecting a part of his own wide, terrified eye.

"Kevin?" Megan called out from behind the hatch, her voice muffled but distinct. "Kevin, are you out there? Please, we need to talk about this."

He stared at the shards of glass on the floor. In each jagged piece, the 24h count down pulsed like a slow, rhythmic drumbeat.

He wasn't fighting for her anymore. He was counting down to his own erasure.

"Kevin!"

He forced himself to stand, his body screaming in protest. Every movement felt like dragging his bones through liquid lead. He looked at the shadows at the end of the tunnel, where Thomas Miller had disappeared. He knew, with a sudden, freezing clarity, that Miller hadn't left. He was watching. The system was waiting for the final variable to align.

He wiped his mouth, his sleeve coming away with a smear of dark, metallic-tasting blood. He couldn't let Megan see this. He couldn't let them know that the cost of their salvation was his total deletion.

"I'm here," Kevin called back, his voice surprisingly steady, though he had to lean hard against the wall to keep from collapsing. "I’m coming, Megan. Just… give me a second."

He stepped away from the utility room, his shadow stretching long and distorted against the tunnel wall. The countdown in his head wasn't just a number anymore. It was a ticking clock, a countdown to the end of his reality.

He walked toward the sound of his friends, each step a struggle against the gravity of his own ending. He had twenty-four hours to change the system, to break the ledger, or to at least ensure that when his 00:00:00 finally hit, he didn't leave Megan behind to face the Auditors alone.

As he approached the hatch, the tunnel began to vibrate. Not with the rumble of a train, but with a deep, subsonic hum that made his teeth ache. The air grew cold, frosting over the metal surfaces.

They weren't just coming for him. They were coming to reset the entire block.

Kevin reached the hatch and pulled it open, his expression carefully composed, his internal agony masked behind a wall of grim determination.

"We need to move," he said, his eyes locking onto Megan’s. "I found a way out, but we have to be fast. We have exactly one day to change everything."

Megan looked at him, her eyes searching his face, picking up on the pallor of his skin and the unnatural sheen of sweat on his brow. "Kevin, you’re bleeding."

He reached up, touching the corner of his mouth, and looked at the blood on his fingers. He smiled, a jagged, broken thing.

"It’s just a tax, Meg," he said softly, closing the hatch behind him. "Just a small price to pay for a little more time."

He turned away from her, toward the darkest part of the tunnel, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. Twenty-four hours. He would tear the world apart before he let the clock reach zero.