Speedrunning the apocalypse

CHAPTER 7 - The Evaluation Center

Maya stayed behind. Someone had to hold the basement, and she'd already proven she was the right person for it, so when I told her the evaluation centers were opening and the assessment window had a clock on it, she didn't argue. She just nodded once, the way she did everything, and told me to come back and tell her what class I got, like this was a normal thing to ask a stranger she'd known for two hours.

"I will," I said, and meant it more than I expected to.

She was already turning back to her students by the time I finished the sentence, calling out an instruction about the second floor windows before I'd even reached the stairs. That was Maya. She didn't need to watch us leave to know we'd left. She just needed to know the building would still be standing when we came back.

The System had built the evaluation center overnight in the Breslin Avenue convention hall. Not constructed. Inserted, the way the System did everything, fully formed with no explanation owed to anyone. We saw it from three blocks out, a building that had not existed yesterday sitting exactly where a parking structure used to be, and Adrian made a sound low in his throat that wasn't quite a word.

"That's not supposed to be there," he said.

"No," I agreed. "It isn't."

I used the walk to give them what I could. Not everything. I didn't have the time or the language yet to explain five years of a life nobody else remembered, but I had enough to be useful.

"The assessment reads intent, not information," I told Kira and Adrian both. "It's going to ask you things that don't feel like questions. Answer honestly. Don't try to guess what it wants to hear. It already knows if you're guessing, and guessing wrong costs you more than an honest answer ever will."

"How do you know that," Kira said, not accusing, just filing it the way she filed everything.

"I've been paying attention," I said, which was as close to true as I could afford right now.

She let it go, though I could see her deciding not to forget it. Adrian just nodded and asked what I thought his class would be, and for one block the three of us were almost ordinary, three people walking toward something uncertain and talking about it the way anyone might.

I told him one more thing before we reached the doors, because it was true and because I owed him something more useful than reassurance. "Whatever it gives you, don't fight the assignment for the first week. Classes settle into their real shape once you start using them. People who spend their first days resenting what they got waste time they don't get back."

"You sound like you've watched a lot of people get this wrong," Adrian said.

"I have," I said, and left it there.

Three separate calculations were running under all of it the whole time.

First, Viktor. In my old life he found me during week one and spent four years building toward a blade in my ribs. He had to be close enough to monitor and never close enough to trust, and I hadn't decided yet exactly where that line needed to sit today.

Second, D. Whoever they were, they'd known my target building before I told a living soul, and they'd told me not to go northwest before Day 6. Boundary or warning. I still didn't know which.

Third, the surge warning. Eighty hours early. Which meant the timeline wasn't just different from what I remembered. It was compressing, and I didn't yet understand what was doing the compressing.

We reached the entrance. Viktor Parrish was already there.

Twenty four years old, broad shouldered, the kind of handsome that photographed well and read as trustworthy in person. He laughed easily. He made eye contact like he was handing you a gift instead of simply looking at you.

I'd spent four years believing all of that was real. I knew better now.

He saw me and his face did the thing, instant, warm recognition, like we were already friends and I just hadn't caught up yet. In my old life, our meeting was a genuine accident he'd leveraged into something else later. This Viktor didn't look surprised to see me at all. He looked like he'd been expecting me.

"You look like someone who knows what he's doing," he said, extending a hand. "Not many people do today."

"I know enough."

"Viktor Parrish."

"Tristan Asher."

The handshake ran one second past casual. We were both running the same assessment on each other. The only difference was that he didn't know I was running mine.

Adrian materialized at my shoulder and introduced himself with the social grace of a golden retriever meeting a new person at a party, and Viktor received him with exactly the right amount of warmth. Securing the brother was securing leverage, and he knew that instinctively, before he even had a class to formalize the instinct into something with a name.

Kira said nothing. She stepped sideways, putting herself where she could watch both our faces at once, the same posture she'd used in the stairwell before she'd known either of us well enough to trust her own read.

Viktor leaned in, just below the group's hearing. "I heard about the crawler clear near the Eastern Gate. Four of them, one operator, no class active." He said it with something that sounded like admiration. "Word travels."

I kept my face even and felt something go cold and precise underneath it.

Someone had reported my fight to Viktor within the hour. He'd arrived with intelligence on me before we'd ever spoken.

In my old life, I'd believed our meeting was chance. It never had been. He had been watching me from the very first hour, the same way something had been watching me from a rooftop, and I had no idea yet whether those two things were connected or simply two separate threads pulling on the same day.

Kira caught my eye over Viktor's shoulder, just for a second, and I understood exactly what she was asking without her needing to say it. I gave her nothing back. Not because I didn't trust her with it, but because I hadn't finished deciding what it meant myself, and handing her half a theory felt worse right now than handing her nothing at all.

Behind us, the evaluation center's doors opened for the first group of the morning, and the line began to move.