Speedrunning the apocalypse

CHAPTER 1-The Last Thing I Heard

"You really thought I wouldn't figure it out."

That was the last thing Viktor said before the blade went in.

Not a question. A statement, delivered quietly, almost gently, the way you say something to a man you have already decided is finished. He was standing over me with the handle still in his hand and the expression of someone who had been waiting a long time for this specific moment, and the worst part, the part that stayed with me across five years and one death, was that he looked relieved. Not triumphant. Relieved. Like he had been carrying something heavy and had finally put it down.

I was on the floor of the Apex Gate's inner chamber with a blade through my lung.

Around me, the raid was finished. Fourteen operators who had followed my plan into that chamber were down because Viktor had fed our positions to the gate's interior defenses three minutes before we breached. Three minutes. Four years of work, four years of trust, four years of a man standing at my right shoulder while I built something worth protecting, and it cost three minutes to take it apart.

I did not think about the apocalypse in the thirty seconds it took me to bleed out.

I thought about a woman named Kira Knight and a radio that went silent in Month 47 and a choice I made that I would have given everything to make differently. I thought about all the things I had planned to say and never said, because I kept deciding the timing was wrong, and how the timing was always going to be wrong if you kept letting yourself believe there was more of it coming.

I closed my eyes.

I opened them in my apartment.

September 4th. 6:47 AM. My alarm screaming on the nightstand like it had no concept of what had just happened to me.

I sat up and looked at my hands for a long time. No scars. No gate burns on my knuckles. Twenty-three years old, soft-handed, five years younger than the body I had just died in, and every single memory still sitting exactly where I left it.

I picked up my phone. Looked at the date. Put it back down without saying anything.

Then, quietly, to an empty room: "Okay."

Not relief. The sound a man makes when he's handed the best and worst news of his life at the same time.

I had fourteen hours before the sky cracked. I knew that the way I knew my own name. I got up, found a pen, and started writing.

Gate locations, ranked by the order they would open. Surge zones for the first waves. The names that would matter and the ones that would need to be handled before they could matter to someone else.

I wrote Viktor's name at the top of its own page and underlined it twice. I left the rest of the page blank. Some things did not need writing down twice.

By the time I finished, the light outside had shifted from grey to something closer to actual morning, and my coffee had gone cold without my noticing I had poured it.

At the bottom of the last page, underneath everything tactical and planned and necessary, I wrote a name.

I stared at it for a while.

I crossed it out.

I wrote it again.

This time I left it, because my phone buzzed on the nightstand, and when I picked it up there was a message from a number I did not recognize. No greeting. Just coordinates.

I knew the location before I finished reading it.

Caldwell Tower. Second floor stairwell. Six blocks east.

The text had been sent at 6:46 AM. One minute before my alarm went off.

Someone knew I was here before I woke up.

I checked the time. Almost two hours gone, most of it spent bent over a notebook I would need every page of before the day was finished. I put it in my coat pocket, grabbed what else I would need, and went down the hall to knock on Adrian's door.

He opened it looking like a man who had been awake maybe four hours, which was accurate since he worked nights. He took one look at my face and whatever he saw there pushed the sleep out of his expression faster than any alarm could have.

"You look like you've seen the end of the world," he said.

"Not yet," I said. "Get dressed. We have to move."

"Tristan, it's not even seven—"

"I know. Get dressed anyway."

He looked at me a moment longer. My brother has always had the specific talent of reading me faster than I intend to be read, and whatever he saw now made him step back and reach for his jacket without another question. That was Adrian. He trusted me before I had earned it, and I had spent five years failing to deserve that, and I was not going to fail again.

He was ready faster than I expected, and we spent the next hour and a half doing the unglamorous work of preparing for a day neither of us could have explained to anyone watching — packing bags that made no sense yet, checking locks on an apartment I already knew we were not coming back to, me checking the coordinates one more time while Adrian pretended not to notice how many times I checked my watch.

At 8:47 AM, four hours and thirteen minutes earlier than I remembered, the sky cracked open. Not at midnight, the way I had prepared for. Morning light, orange-white bruising spreading across the atmosphere like something forcing its way through a wound.

I was already moving.

My phone buzzed again. Same number. Actual words this time.

*The stairwell. Second floor. She is already there. Go fast.*

I ran.

I made it four blocks before the phone buzzed a third time, and this one I almost did not read, because I did not have the seconds to spare. I read it anyway, because some instinct in me already understood this was not going to be more coordinates.

*I know about Month 47. I know about the radio.*

I stopped running.

Six words. That was all it took to turn a stranger with useful information into something I did not have a category for yet. Nobody knew about Month 47. I had never told anyone, not in five years, not even the people I trusted with everything else, because some griefs you do not hand to another person, you just carry them until they finish carrying you. The radio going silent. The two hundred meters I had been standing when it happened. The specific, unbearable shape of a loss I had never once said out loud to a living soul.

Someone knew it anyway.

Which meant they had not simply come back with knowledge of gates and surge patterns and class assignments. They had come back with knowledge of me. Of exactly what I had lost, and exactly when, and exactly how it had broken something in me that never fully reset even when the rest of the world did.

I started running again, faster now, because six blocks away a woman named Kira Knight did not yet know any of this had already happened to her once, and I was not going to let the six words sitting in my chest slow me down before I reached her.

But I did not stop thinking about them either. Not once, the entire way there.

Somebody out there had watched Month 47 happen. Or lived it. Or caused it.

I was going to find out which.