REBORN BEFORE ZERO: I already know how the world ends

WHAT BROTHERS KNOW

Orin Hux arrived at 6:30 on Thursday with a six-pack of beer he had clearly bought from the corner store two minutes earlier because the bottles were still cold from the fridge case and not yet sweating in the October air. He held them up when Zayden opened the door like a man presenting evidence.

"The price of entry," he said. "Also I'm starving. Tell me you have food."

"There's leftover rice."

"Rice is not food, Zayden, rice is the apology before food shows up."

He came in and dropped his jacket on the hook by the door the way he always did, the hook on the left side that Zayden had installed specifically for this purpose years ago. He had the easy movement of someone who had been in this space so many times that his body had its own memory of it. He went directly to the kitchen, found a bowl, and started serving himself rice while simultaneously looking around for whatever might go on top of it.

Zayden stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at him. Alive. Uninjured. Eyes crinkled with mock outrage at the rice. Twenty-eight years old with two years and four months left before the world tried to kill him.

"Stop staring at me like I'm a ghost," Orin said without turning around. "It's weird."

"You're right. Sorry."

Orin turned around and looked at him properly for the first time. He had known Zayden since they were eleven years old and had developed over those seventeen years the particular diagnostic ability of a person who has seen someone's face in every conceivable condition. He looked at Zayden the way a mechanic looks at an engine that is running slightly off.

"What happened?" he said. Simple. Flat. Not a greeting, an assessment.

"Something I need to tell you about."

"Right. Okay." Orin set the rice down. "Is it serious?"

"Yes."

"Are you in trouble?"

"Not yet."

"Not yet is a fun phrase." Orin pulled two beers out of the six-pack, opened them both, handed one to Zayden. "Sit down and tell me."

* * *

Zayden had spent a significant amount of time over the past two days thinking about how to have this conversation.

The direct approach, which was the one he had ultimately chosen, had significant drawbacks. The direct approach involved telling Orin Hux, a person of sound mind and reasonable skepticism, that Zayden had lived through three years of a manufactured global outbreak, been betrayed by his own allies, died in a basement, and somehow woken up in the past with the specific intention of doing everything differently this time. There was no framing of this information that made it sound like something a healthy person would believe on a Thursday evening in October.

The indirect approach had different problems. He could have started small. Mentioned that he had a bad feeling about things, maybe floated the idea of emergency preparedness as a general hobby. But Orin was not a person who responded well to being managed, and the clock was ticking, and there were things Zayden needed Orin to do that required a level of trust that the indirect approach would take months to build.

He did not have months for this particular relationship. He had weeks.

So he told him the truth.

He started at the beginning, which was waking up on the floor of this apartment eleven days ago, and he went through it with the steady pace of a man delivering a logistics briefing, which was the only tone he trusted himself to maintain without either falling apart or making it sound more dramatic than it already was. He told Orin about the outbreak and what it actually was. He told him about the first year, which was bad, and the second year, which was worse, and the third year, which was the kind of thing you described to people in careful, sequential language because the alternative was not describing it at all. He told him about Caelan Drath and what had been built and what had been planned and how it had ended.

Orin did not interrupt once.

When Zayden finished, the apartment was very quiet. The refrigerator was making its low background hum. Somewhere outside, a car horn sounded twice.

"Okay," Orin said.

"Okay?"

"I mean." He pushed a hand through his hair. "Give me a second."

He was quiet for about thirty seconds. Zayden let him have them.

"You're not messing with me," Orin said. It was not a question.

"No."

"Because you have a bit of a history with elaborate setups."

"This is not a setup."

Orin looked at him. The diagnostic look, longer this time. "No," he said slowly. "It's not. I can tell. You've been..." He paused. "Different since Monday. I noticed when you texted me. Something was off in the way you were talking, like you were being careful with your words. And you're looking at me the way you'd look at something you were afraid of losing."

Zayden said nothing.

"You said I died," Orin said.

"Yes."

"How?"

Zayden told him. It was quick. He did not elaborate on the details that did not need to be elaborated on.

Orin nodded once, very slowly. Then he picked up his beer and took a long drink and stared at the kitchen wall.

"So," he said. "You're telling me that in roughly three months, something is going to happen that ends the world as we know it, you know about it in advance because you lived through it and died at the end of it, and your plan is to spend the next hundred days preparing for it while also secretly working against the people who caused it."

"That's an accurate summary."

"And you're telling me now because you need my help."

"Yes."

"And in the other timeline I apparently kept seven people alive for two months on my own, which I have to say is incredibly on brand for me."

Zayden felt something loosen in his chest. "You were remarkable," he said. "I should have told you that when it would have meant something."

Orin was quiet for a long time. "I believe you," he said finally. "I don't fully understand why I believe you, because it's objectively insane, but I do. I think it's because you're the most practically minded person I know and practical people don't make up things this inconvenient."

"That's the most accurate reason I've heard."

"Okay." Orin stood up. He paced once across the kitchen and came back. "What do you need from me?"

* * *

They talked for four hours.

Zayden had the list. He walked Orin through the relevant sections: the priority acquisitions, the storage facility, the cover story he was building to explain the bulk purchasing, the timeline mapped against Day Zero and the events he knew would occur in sequence after it.

Orin asked good questions. He was a quick processor once he committed to accepting a premise, and he had a practical intelligence that he chronically underestimated in himself. He caught two problems in Zayden's planning that Zayden had not seen.

"Your cover story for the bulk buying," Orin said. "You said you're going to claim it's for a community preparedness consulting business?"

"That's the plan."

"That only works if there's a visible business. Website, maybe a couple of clients, something to point to if anyone checks. Who's going to do that?"

Zayden had planned to do it himself. Looking at it now, he saw the gap. Building a convincing paper business took time he had allocated elsewhere.

"Can you do it?" he said.

"I build websites for extra money, Zayden. We've had this conversation. I will never stop being offended that you keep forgetting."

"I'm sorry."

"I'll build you a beautiful preparedness consulting website. Very professional. Lots of authoritative language about supply chain resilience. You'll look very legitimate."

"I need it in two weeks."

"Then you'd better compensate me appropriately for the rush order."

"I will."

"In actual money, not rice."

"In actual money," Zayden confirmed.

The second thing Orin caught was the problem of Seraphine Kael.

"You're going to approach a stranger," Orin said carefully, "and somehow convince her to be part of this without telling her what you know, because telling a stranger you're a time traveler is presumably worse than telling your oldest friend."

"I'm not going to tell her the whole thing."

"Right. So you're going to build a relationship with a specific person under false premises while knowing things about her future that she doesn't know. Have you thought about how that lands when she finds out you knew?"

Zayden had, in fact, not fully thought about this. He picked up his beer and put it down again. "One problem at a time."

"Right. Okay. One problem at a time." Orin pointed at the notebook. "Add it to the list though. Under problems that will bite you if you don't address them."

Zayden added it to the list.

They ordered delivery at ten o'clock because Orin had stopped pretending to be interested in the rice an hour earlier. They ate sitting on the floor of the living room with the list spread out between them, talking through scenarios the way two people talk when they are trying to solve something that actually matters. Not with the energy of excitement, which is easy, but with the steadier energy of commitment, which is what remains after excitement runs out.

When Orin left at midnight, he stopped in the doorway and turned around.

"Hey," he said.

"Yeah."

"I'm glad it was you who came back. Whoever got the short straw in the other version of the universe and got stuck being the one who didn't. I'm glad it was you."

Zayden stood in the open doorway and did not say anything for a moment.

"Get home safe," he said.

Orin went down the hall. Zayden listened to his footsteps descend the stairs and heard the outer door close, and then the building was quiet.

He went back inside and sat down with the list.

One hundred days.