Speedrunning the apocalypse

CHAPTER 6 - Maya Reed

The university library basement looked like a war room run by someone who'd had three hours, no military training, and had still somehow gotten it right.

Eleven students. One psychology postgraduate named Maya Reed, who'd assigned door rotation, identified the load bearing walls without being told which ones they were, and rationed the vending machine contents she'd broken open with a fire poker that was still sitting on the table beside her like a tool she intended to use again. In the life I remembered, Maya was background. Kira's friend, warm and present, gone by Day 4. I'd written her down as a variable to route around, nothing more.

This Maya was infrastructure wearing a person's face.

She crossed to Kira the moment we came down the stairs and held on for three seconds, the kind that count, the kind that confirm the other person is actually still solid and not just a voice on a phone that could still turn out to be wrong. Then she pulled back and looked at me, at Adrian, at Greg standing awkwardly behind us like a man who'd wandered into the wrong meeting and was too polite to leave.

"He got me out of Caldwell Tower," Kira said.

"Tristan Asher," I said.

Maya studied me the way a clinician studies a patient who came in complaining about one thing and is obviously there for another. "You're not scared," she said.

"No."

"Everyone in this room is scared. Why aren't you."

"Because I know what comes next."

I meant it as a deflection wearing the shape of preparation. It came out as the confession it actually was. Kira went very still beside me. She'd heard the same five words I had. I was starting to understand she heard something different in most of what I said than what I meant to give her.

Maya held my gaze a beat longer than the conversation required. "Interesting."

A pause.

"You said what comes next, not what to do next. Different sentences." She went back to her inventory before I could decide whether to correct her.

I didn't correct her. She was right, and she knew she was right, and at least one person in this basement was going to make me work for every inch of ground instead of simply trusting me the way Adrian did.

I looked at the room properly for the first time since we'd come down the stairs. Eleven people, most of them younger than me, arranged along the walls with the specific discipline of a group that had already decided panic was a resource they couldn't afford to spend twice. Maya had done good work. She'd also missed something, and in the life I remembered, the thing she'd missed was exactly what let three crawlers into this basement on Day 3.

"Your southern wall," I said. "The one behind the returns desk."

Maya's eyebrows rose slightly. "What about it."

"There's a service door back there. Painted over, probably hasn't been opened in years, but it connects to the loading dock on the far side of the building." I could see the layout in my head the way I could see everything else, five years of a life nobody else remembered pressed flat against the inside of my skull. "If something gets into the loading dock, that door is the fastest way in. Faster than the stairs."

She looked at me for a long moment, then walked to the returns desk and pulled it away from the wall.

The door was there. Old, painted the same beige as the wall around it, easy to miss if you weren't looking for it and impossible to miss once you knew. One of the students made a small sound that wasn't quite a word.

"How did you know that," Maya said, and her voice had lost the clinical distance it carried a minute ago.

"I've spent a lot of time in this building," I said, which was true in a way that answered nothing.

She didn't push. She turned instead and started giving orders, two students to barricade the door properly, one to check for any other access point she might have missed with fresh eyes now that she knew to look. The room reorganized around the new information without anyone needing to be told twice. I had made these people safer without spending a single ability I didn't have yet.

Kira had her notebook out. I watched her write something, quick, economical, the kind of note that would mean nothing to anyone who found it and everything to her.

"You're building a file on me," I said.

"I'm building a file on the situation," she said, not looking up. "You happen to be most of the situation right now."

"Fair."

She closed the notebook and looked at me properly. "The service door. Was that a guess."

"No."

"Then how many other things do you already know about today that the rest of us haven't found out yet."

I opened my mouth to give her the answer I'd been giving everyone all morning, something short, something that closed the conversation instead of opening it further. I looked at her face instead, at the quiet patience she was extending me even now, and found I didn't have it in me to spend it carelessly.

"More than I know how to tell you yet," I said. "But I promise you'll know before it costs you something you didn't agree to lose."

She held my gaze, weighing that, and whatever she found in it seemed to satisfy her for now, because she nodded once and put the notebook away.

Three blocks away, the System pushed a second regional notification into every operator's vision at once, sharper than the first, more urgent.

GATE DENSITY THRESHOLD EXCEEDED. SURGE EVENT PROBABLE WITHIN 4 HOURS.

I went cold reading it.

In the timeline I remembered, that warning hadn't fired until Day 4. We were eighty some hours ahead of schedule, and the gap between what I knew and what was actually happening was widening faster than I had any way to measure. I looked around the basement, at eleven students. Maya. Kira. Adrian and Greg, all of them safer right now because of one door I remembered and one door Maya had already found on her own.

It wasn't going to be enough. Not if the timeline kept moving like this.

My notebook belonged to a future that no longer existed. I needed a new plan, and I had less than four hours to build it.