The Apocalypse Emperor

Chapter 11: The woman who signed my death

The first person Adrian called after finding his own death certificate was the woman who had signed it.

She answered on the fourth ring.

"You have thirty seconds to explain your signature."

Silence. Through the burner, his ability gave him nothing, only the sound of her breathing.

"Where did you get that?" Evelyn asked.

"That's not an answer."

"Neither is your question."

"Twenty seconds."

"Are you counting down like this is a negotiation?"

"It becomes one when you start lying."

"Adrian." Her voice sharpened. "Are you alone?"

"Why?"

"Because if that certificate is genuine, someone made a mistake letting you see it. Not over the phone. The old ferry terminal, twenty minutes. Come alone. Don't bring the drive."

The line went dead.

Adrian photographed the certificate, sealed the paper in a plastic sleeve, and locked it in a compartment beneath the warehouse desk. Claire's copied files went into a different drawer. He had learned in the dead world never to keep everything in one place.

Outside, a forklift beeped between stacks of crates. Nobody on the docks knew they were living in the last month of something.

The ferry terminal had been closed since a fire gutted its passenger hall. Rust ate the railings, and weeds pushed through the concrete. Beyond it, dark water slapped at empty slips.

Evelyn stood near a row of dead ticket machines, coat buttoned to the throat.

Adrian stopped ten feet away. He reached for her mind and found the same flat silence, with a thin metallic taste behind it.

"You came," she said.

"I wanted to see if you'd run."

"Would you have followed?"

"Until I got tired."

She almost smiled. "Show me the certificate."

"No."

"Then I can't tell you whether it's real."

"You signed it, Evelyn. September twelfth, eleven forty-seven. Eight hours before I woke up in my apartment."

Her jaw tightened. "Where did you find it?"

"The port archive."

"Did you meet someone there?"

"Claire Bennett."

The color left her face.

"Claire is dead," Evelyn said. "She disappeared eighteen months ago. Her record was closed and her death entered into the system."

"She copied the records and handed me the device herself."

"Then either the record is false, or someone is wearing her name." Evelyn looked toward the water. "Did she hand anything to anyone before she left?"

"A silver sedan. She passed something small to the driver."

Evelyn closed her eyes briefly. "Then the person who arranged your appointment at Meridian wasn't trying to pull you back into the project."

"Then what were they doing?"

"Checking whether you were still the same man."

The words dropped between them like a stone into water.

"Explain that."

"The project kept two records on one participant. One tracked the original subject. The other tracked what came after."

"What came after what?"

"I don't know." She said it quickly, then slower. "I don't know what COLE-01R is. I know the public records were altered."

"Yet you signed my death certificate."

"I signed a document confirming that the original subject had no measurable vital signs." Her voice was steady, but her hands weren't. "I did not write deceased."

He stared at her. "The certificate says deceased."

"Then someone added it above my signature."

"Who?"

"Whoever needed you officially dead."

The wind off the water carried the smell of diesel and salt. Adrian made himself breathe through the pressure building behind his eyes.

"You told me my file wasn't a failure," he said. "Claire told me it was an exception. What does that mean?"

"The first trial produced subjects who remembered things they'd never lived." Evelyn finally met his eyes. "Whole lives that belonged to other people. Faces they'd never seen. We couldn't tell if it was damaged memory, outside data, or something we'd never identified."

"You think I'm one of them."

"I think you might be the reason the trial ended."

He laughed, short and bitter. "You signed a paper, and now you're telling me you don't know whether I'm the man who died."

"I'm telling you the evidence doesn't give a simple answer."

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Somewhere down the pier, a gull screamed and went quiet.

Then Adrian asked the question he had been circling.

"Did I volunteer?"

She didn't answer.

"Evelyn."

"I never saw a consent form with your signature."

"That wasn't my question."

"No." Her voice cracked on the word. "It wasn't."

He took one step toward her. The ache behind his eyes flared white, and a fragment slid through the silence that had held all day, just one, faint as a breath on glass.

...I should have stopped him...

Adrian froze.

Evelyn had gone very still. She had felt something, he realized. She was looking at him the way Ren had looked at him in the warehouse, like she'd seen something she shouldn't have.

"Stopped who?" he asked quietly.

"What?"

"You thought it. I should have stopped him. Stopped who?"

"I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to."

She stepped back, and her hand came up to her mouth. For the first time since he'd known her, he didn't need to read her thoughts to see she was afraid.

"I can't tell you," she whispered. "If I do, they'll know I did."

"Who?"

"The same people who made you."

The words hit like a blow. "Made me?"

"Adrian, listen." She kept her voice low, and her eyes flicked toward the rusted door beyond the ticket machines. "On September twelfth, there was one body on that table. I signed for it. I told myself it was you."

"Wasn't it?"

"There was also a man standing beside the table. Alive. Calm. Watching me write." She swallowed. "He had your face. He asked me not to put his name on anything."

The terminal went very quiet.

Adrian heard the water. He heard his own pulse in his ears. He didn't hear what he said next, or whether he said anything at all.

Because he had finally understood what the second record meant.