Reborn Before The End

CHAPTER 7: THE FIRST PERSON I CAN TRUST

Soren's Pov

“Explain,” I said.

Nadia didn’t answer immediately. She kept her eyes on the street below, watching the dark vehicle until its headlights flicked on and it pulled away from the curb. Only when it disappeared around the corner did she look back at me.

“I’m not the person you should be worried about.”

“That’s convenient.”

“It’s also true.” She nodded toward the window. “Whoever sent that last message wanted you to see the car. They wanted you to react. Maybe follow it. Maybe confront me. Either way, they get information about how you move when you’re under pressure.”

I hated that it made sense.

“You think this is a test.”

“I think someone is measuring you. And they’re using both of us to do it.”

I studied her face. The calm was still there, but underneath it was the same tight focus I had seen when she grabbed my arm. She wasn’t performing. She was calculating.

“What exactly do you know?”

Nadia exhaled and leaned against the edge of the table. “Fragments. I remember standing in a city that doesn’t look like this one anymore. Buildings half-collapsed. Smoke that never fully clears. I remember searching for food in places that used to be stores. I remember being hungry enough that it changed how I thought. And I remember meeting a man who looks like you.”

She met my eyes.

“But the memories cut off. I don’t get full scenes. Just pieces. Your face. A ruined street. The feeling that I already knew you somehow. I don’t know if they’re memories of the future or something else entirely.”

The timeline was drifting further than I had accounted for. In my first life Nadia had not appeared until the world was already broken. Now she was here early, carrying broken pieces of a future that might no longer be fixed.

Before I could press her further, my phone rang.

Elodie.

I almost let it go to voicemail. Then I answered.

“What.”

“You need to meet me,” she said. No greeting. No softness. “Today.”

“No.”

“Soren…”

“I’m not meeting you. I’m not meeting your father. We’re past that.”

A sharp breath on the other end. “Dad found out about the purchases. The water. The medical supplies. The batteries. He’s had someone looking into your accounts since you walked out of the office. He knows you’ve been stockpiling.”

My grip tightened on the phone.

I had been careful. Multiple locations. Different cards. Ordinary quantities. If Bennett had already connected the pattern, then either he was more thorough than I expected or someone had handed him the information.

“I don’t care what he knows.”

“You should. He’s angry. And when Dad gets like this, he doesn’t stop at words. He wants to talk to you. Face to face.”

“Tell him the answer is still no.”

Elodie’s voice rose. “You’re making a mistake. You think you can just cut us off and disappear into some apartment with maps and emergency supplies? You’re turning against the family that gave you everything. People notice that. People remember it.”

“I’m not turning against anyone. I’m refusing to keep being useful.”

“That’s the same thing to him.”

“Then he’ll have to live with the difference.”

She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again the anger had hardened into something colder. “You’re going to regret this. When things get difficult and they will, you’re going to wish you still had us.”

I keep getting this words, Boring. I ended the call.

Nadia had heard enough to understand the shape of it. She didn’t ask for details.

“They’re going to become a problem before the real problems start,” I said.

“Then we move faster.”

I looked at her. “We.”

“You don’t have to trust me completely. I wouldn’t. But I know enough to see that the world is already shifting. And you clearly know more than you’re saying. If someone’s targeting you, isolation makes you easier to isolate further. I can help move things. Watch the street. Ask the questions you can’t ask without drawing more attention.”

I didn’t answer immediately.

Trust was a currency I had already spent once and never gotten back. But Nadia had arrived with knowledge she shouldn’t have, reacted to the spatial ability in a way no ordinary person would, and so far had not asked for anything I wasn’t willing to withhold.

I needed another set of hands. And she was the only person who already understood that the future was no longer theoretical.

“Fine,” I said. “Help me move the rest of the supplies. Then we talk about boundaries.”

We worked in focused silence.

Box after box disappeared into the darkness. Nadia watched the first few vanish with open shock. By the tenth she had stopped commenting and simply handed me the next container. When the last of the visible stockpile was gone, the apartment looked almost ordinary again: sparse, temporary, easy to abandon.

Nadia stood in the cleared space, breathing a little harder from the work.

“How did you know what to buy? The exact things. The quantities. The timing.”

I considered how much to give her.

“I’ve seen what happens when society collapses. I know which systems fail first. I know what people run out of. I know what becomes valuable when money stops meaning anything. That’s all you get for now.”

She accepted the partial truth without pushing. That, more than anything, kept me from ending the cooperation immediately.

We turned back to the spatial space to organize what we had just added.

That was when I saw it.

Deep in the darkness, past the neat clusters of supplies, a faint structure had appeared. Not a random shape. A door. Simple. Featureless. Standing upright in a place that should not have supported architecture of any kind.

Nadia frowned at the empty air I was staring into. “What is it?”

“You don’t see it.”

“See what?”

“A door.”

She looked harder, then shook her head. “There’s nothing there.”

Only I could see it.

I moved closer inside the space. The ability reacted immediately; stronger pulses, a low pressure building behind my eyes. The door remained exactly where it was, waiting.

I reached toward the handle.

Before my fingers could close around it, the door opened by itself.

A cold wind pushed through the darkness, sharp enough that I felt it against my real skin back in the apartment. On the other side of the doorway was not more void.

It was a room.

Small. Dimly lit from no visible source. And sitting on a wooden table in the center of that room was something that looked exactly like an old photograph of me.

I stared at it, disbelief locking my breath in place.

Then the details resolved.

The photograph wasn’t showing me.

It was showing someone standing directly behind me.