NADIA'S POV
-
"Dr. Voss. Don't hang up."
Nadia doesn't hang up.
Not because she's afraid. Because the voice on the other end of the line is calm in the specific way that means the person holding the phone has done something terrible before and felt nothing afterward. She recognizes that calm. She has been on the wrong end of it.
She presses the phone harder against her ear and says, "Who is this?"
"I already told you. Opposition."
"That's not a name. That's a label." She keeps walking down the hospital hallway, slow and even, because standing still when someone is watching you is the fastest way to tell them they have the upper hand. "Try again."
"Names aren't important right now." A pause. "Roman Vael is."
Her chest does something she doesn't give it permission to do. That dark thing - the one that has been humming since Roman's wrist was under her fingers - goes sharp and alert like a dog that just heard a sound outside the door.
She ignores it.
"I'm listening," she says.
"Roman belongs to an organization called the Watchers." The voice is measured, careful. Like someone reading from a document they memorized. "They monitor people who come back from death changed. People like you, Dr. Voss. They have been monitoring you since the morning you woke up."
Nadia rounds a corner. Nods at a passing nurse. Smiles like she is having a completely ordinary phone call.
"Keep going," she says.
"The Watchers don't just watch. That's the part Roman won't tell you." Another pause. Longer this time. Designed to let the next words land hard. "When a returned subject becomes too unpredictable - when the organization decides the risk is too high - they remove the anomaly. Quietly. Quickly. In ways that look like accidents."
Nadia stops walking.
Not because she's scared. Because she needs to think and she thinks better when she's still.
"You're telling me Roman was sent to get close to me so someone else can decide whether to kill me."
"I'm telling you it's possible. I'm telling you that you are currently on a list inside that organization. And I'm telling you that Roman Vael has been inside that building, in those meetings, for three years." The voice drops slightly. "Ask yourself why a man like that is suddenly showing up at your clinic with a fake insurance card and a fake address bringing you warnings about your husband. Ask yourself who benefits from you trusting him."
Nadia stares at the wall in front of her. Blank white. Easy to think against.
She runs the logic. Fast and clean, the way she does when a patient is crashing and she has thirty seconds to make the right call.
Roman has foreknowledge. Roman has resources. Roman knows about the infection timeline, about her, about things he should have no way of knowing. He left the USB drive in her coat pocket. He warned her about the breakfast. He has been, by every observable measure, keeping her alive.
But.
He also has a fake address. Fake insurance. A medical record from four years ago that shows eleven minutes without a pulse. A mark on his arm that her dead mother wrote about in a journal Nadia was never supposed to read.
She knows better than anyone that being useful and being dangerous are not opposite things.
"Why are you telling me this?" she asks.
"Because the faction inside the Watchers that wants you removed is gaining ground. And some of us believe that what you are - what you're becoming - is too important to lose." A breath. "We need you alive, Dr. Voss. But we need you making choices with full information. Roman is giving you pieces. We're offering you the whole picture."
"In exchange for what?"
Silence.
Then: "When the time comes - and it will come - we'll ask you for one thing. You'll know it when we ask."
Nadia almost laughs. She doesn't. "That's not a deal. That's a trap with nicer packaging."
"You're a smart woman."
"I'm a suspicious one. There's a difference." She straightens. Starts walking again. "Don't call this number again."
She hangs up.
She stands in the hallway and counts to ten.
One. Two. Three.
She thinks about Roman's grey eyes and the way they went completely still when she touched his wrist. She thinks about the mark on his arm. She thinks about the word her mother used. Watchers.
Six. Seven. Eight.
She thinks about the list.
Nine. Ten.
She pulls up her lawyer's number. Different phone - the second one she bought three days ago with cash, the one Daniel doesn't know about. It rings twice.
"It's Nadia Voss," she says. "I need the papers served tonight. Not in four days. Tonight."
A pause. "That's very fast. We'd need to -"
"I know what you need. I'll make it work. I need it done before midnight."
Another pause. Shorter. Her lawyer is good at reading tone. "I'll make some calls."
"Thank you."
She hangs up and keeps walking and does not let herself feel any of it - not the fear, not the fury, not the complicated thing her chest does every time Roman Vael's face appears in her head - because feeling it costs time and time is the one thing she does not have enough of.
She has eighty-nine days until the world ends.
She has seventy-two hours before Daniel and Cora make their move.
She has an organization full of people who might want her dead and a stranger who might be protecting her or setting her up and no way yet to tell the difference.
And she has tonight.
She pushes through the stairwell door and takes the stairs down instead of the elevator because the elevator has a camera and the stairwell doesn't and she needs thirty seconds of being completely unseen.
She gets to the bottom. She pushes the door open.
Roman Vael is standing on the other side of it.
He is not surprised to see her. He looks like a man who has been waiting - but not the way someone waits when they planned to be there. The way someone waits when they got there just in time.
His face is tight. That careful blankness is gone.
"We have a problem," he says.
And then his phone buzzes. He looks down at it. And for the first time since she has known him - all five days of it - the color drains from his face completely.
He turns the screen toward her.
It is a photo.
Of her secondary location. The warehouse. The supplies. The lists.
Taken from inside.
Someone had already been there.