Speedrunning the apocalypse

CHAPTER 2 — Fourteen Hours

The sky did not stop at the crack.

It kept peeling back, orange-white bruising spreading wider across the atmosphere like the wound was still deciding how big it wanted to be, and the sound that came with it was low and constant, something between a hum and a groan, the sound of a world figuring out it had just changed and had not yet decided how to feel about it.

Adrian stood beside me on the sidewalk and looked up at it with his mouth slightly open.

"What is that," he said.

"The beginning," I said. "Move."

We moved.

I walked us through the city the way I had walked it in my head for five years. Not the direct route. The route that avoided the two intersections that would be completely blocked by noon. The route that kept us close to the buildings still standing in Month 6. Adrian kept pace without complaint, and I could feel him cataloguing every turn I made without checking a map, every half-second I slowed before a light changed and sped up again right after.

"You explained three things in five years," he said, somewhere around the second block. "That's a low average."

"I know."

"Is now a good time to raise my average?"

"No."

"Didn't think so." He said it easily, no real complaint in it, and that was the thing about my brother that I had spent five years underestimating. He did not need the explanation right now. He needed to know I still had one, eventually, and that eventually was a promise I intended to keep this time.

We were three blocks from the Meridian building when the first proper gate opened.

Not the sky-wide bruising. A tear, close and specific, in the wall of a parking structure to our left — orange-white light spilling out of a rip in the concrete that had no business existing, edges pulsing like something breathing on the other side of it. I had read about this moment in after-action reports for two years. I had never stood in front of it.

It was worse than the reports.

The sound coming out of it was wet and low and continuous, and the light did not flicker the way fire does, it pulsed with an intention that made the hair go up on the back of my neck even though I already knew, in the dead certainty of five lived years, exactly what was going to come out of it and roughly how long I had before it did. Knowing did not make it smaller.

A woman near us dropped her coffee and did not seem to notice. A man on a bicycle put both feet down and simply stared, the stillness of someone whose brain had not yet located the file marked *this is real.*

Adrian did not stare. He looked at me instead.

"You're not surprised," he said.

"No."

"How long have you known this was coming."

"Long enough," I said, and started walking again, because it was Day 1 and I did not yet have a version of the truth that would not sound insane, and because somewhere in this city a woman I had already lost once was six blocks away and about to meet two crawlers she did not know were coming.

My phone buzzed as we turned onto Ashton Lane.

*BUILDING ON MERIDIAN. SUBBASEMENT ELECTRICAL. YOU KNOW THE ONE. DAY 6. — D.*

I stopped walking long enough to read it twice. Someone had known my target building before I left my apartment. Someone had a plan running alongside mine, and they had been running it long enough to already know where I was going.

Adrian read my face instead of the phone. "Same person as before," he said. Not a question. I had not told him about the coordinates. He had simply watched me check my phone twice in one morning with the exact same expression both times, and filed it, the way he filed everything about me that did not add up yet.

"Yes," I said.

"Are they a problem."

I thought about that honestly, for the first time since 6:46 AM. "I don't know yet," I said. "I think they might be the opposite of a problem. I haven't decided if that's better or worse."

Adrian nodded slowly, like that answer, incomplete as it was, actually satisfied something in him. "Okay," he said. "Then I trust you on this one too."

We kept moving, and something in my chest went tight and warm at the same time, because that was the second time in one morning my brother had handed me trust I had not earned yet in this timeline, and I understood, walking fast toward a woman who did not know she was about to be saved twice in one life, that I was not going to spend this version of things treating that trust like something owed to me by default.

Two blocks out, I caught the deviation.

It was small. Easy to miss if I had not spent five years memorizing this exact stretch of road. In the life I had already lived, the eastern grid's first overflow did not hit until closer to ten, well after the assessment centers opened. The pressure in the air here, the electric quality that preceded a surge, was already building now, at not even nine o'clock.

Early. Everything was running early.

I said nothing. I didn't have anything useful to tell him yet. But I filed it the way Kira would later teach me to file things — not dismissed, not acted on, just noted, a single loose thread in a plan that I had built assuming the fabric would hold the shape I remembered.

It might not.

Caldwell Tower came into view at the end of the block, and I felt the cold clarity of a man closing the distance on something he had been carrying in his chest for two years of a life that no longer existed.

"Tristan," Adrian said quietly, catching something in my pace. "Whatever's about to happen in there. I'm not going to ask you to explain it right now."

"I know."

"I'm just going to stand wherever you tell me to stand, and trust that you know what you're doing." He looked at me. "Because you do. I don't know how yet. But you do."

I did not have an answer for that, so I did not try to give him one. I put my hand briefly on his shoulder instead, and he understood it the way he understood most things about me without needing the words spelled out.

We reached the corner across from the tower's entrance. Somewhere on the second floor, behind glass and old brick, a woman named Kira Knight was about to find out what kind of world Tuesday had become, and I had thirty seconds, maybe less, to become the kind of man who arrived in time.

"Corner," I said. "Stay here. Do not follow me in."

Adrian stopped exactly where I told him to.

I ran.