NADIA'S POV
-
He walks out without waiting for her answer.
Nadia stands in the empty exam room holding his discharge paperwork and listens to his footsteps move down the hallway and disappear, and she does not move for thirty full seconds. She counts them. One habit she picked up from dying is that she counts things now. Seconds. Steps. Exits. The number of people between her and a door. Counting keeps her head clear when everything else is trying to make noise.
Thirty seconds.
Then she moves.
She goes straight to her office, closes the door, sits down, and pulls up Roman Vael's chart on her computer. She reads every word. Twice. Hairline fracture of the third metacarpal, left hand, sustained approximately eight weeks ago. Initial visit unremarkable. Patient cooperative, no complications, standard discharge instructions. The attending who saw him the first time noted he answered all questions but volunteered nothing. No emergency contact listed. Insurance through a private provider she doesn't recognize. Address listed as a street she knows is in the east district - the same district where the first infection cluster is going to appear in eighty-nine days.
She reads that line three times.
Then she picks up her pen and writes on the notepad beside her keyboard. Not on the computer. Paper only, for things she doesn't want existing in any system she doesn't fully control.
Find out who he is before he finds out who I am.
She stares at what she wrote. The dark thing in her chest pulses steadily, the way it has been doing since his wrist was under her fingers. She does not like that. She does not like that her own body has opinions about Roman Vael that her brain has not approved. She presses one hand flat against her sternum and thinks, firmly, that whatever this is, it does not get a vote. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
She has a plan. The plan does not include a grey-eyed stranger with a marked forearm and impossible knowledge and the specific stillness of someone who has been in dangerous situations so often that danger no longer registers as anything except information.
She tears the notepad page off, folds it, and puts it in her pocket.
Then she gets back to work because she has eighty-nine days and feelings are not on the schedule.
-
She finds out three things about Roman Vael by the end of her shift.
The first thing is that the insurance provider listed on his chart does not exist. She spends twenty minutes on her lunch break searching for it through four different databases and finds nothing. Not a dissolved company, not a rebranded one. Nothing. The name was placed on the chart to pass a casual look and would not survive any serious investigation. She is doing a serious investigation.
The second thing is that the address he listed is real, but the unit number does not exist in that building. She knows this because she treated a patient from that building six months ago and remembers the layout clearly - it is a four story walk-up with eight units and the number Roman listed would put him on a nonexistent fifth floor.
The third thing she finds stops her completely.
She searches his name in the hospital's broader patient database, looking for any other visits across the system. There are none in the last year. But the search returns one result from four years ago - a different hospital, a different city, a patient named Roman Vael admitted for injuries consistent with a serious assault. The notes are sparse, the kind of sparse that means someone edited them after the fact. But the admitting physician had written one line that survived whatever cleanup happened afterward.
Patient unresponsive on arrival. No pulse. Resuscitated after eleven minutes. Patient awake and oriented within the hour. No neurological deficits. Cause of clinical death undetermined.
Nadia reads it once. Reads it again. Sits back in her chair.
Eleven minutes without a pulse. Nobody wakes up from that oriented and intact. Nobody. She has lost patients after four minutes. The brain begins dying at six. Eleven minutes is not survivable, not with full cognitive function restored within the hour, not without damage so severe the person would spend months in rehabilitation.
Unless something brought him back.
Something like what brought her back.
She closes the database. She sits very still. The thing in her chest is not pulsing now. It is doing something worse. It is humming. Low and steady and directed, the way a compass hums when it locks onto true north, and the direction it is pointing is toward the hospital exit and the parking lot and whatever street Roman Vael is on right now.
She ignores it. She stands. She has one more hour of her shift and she is going to work it.
-
She is charting her last patient when Jess appears in the doorway again.
"Someone left this at the front desk for you," Jess says. She is holding a small white envelope with Nadia's name on the front. Just her first name. Handwritten. "Didn't see who dropped it. Front desk said a man, but they didn't get a description."
Nadia takes it. Waits until Jess leaves. Opens it.
Inside is a single card. On it, in the same neat handwriting as the note on the USB drive, are two lines.
Your husband had dinner with Cora Walsh tonight. The restaurant three blocks from your apartment. He told her the papers haven't been served yet. She said good. They have a plan for when they are.
Nadia turns the card over. On the back is one more line.
You have seventy-two hours before they move first. Meet me tomorrow. Mercy General coffee cart, seven AM. Come alone. I'll explain everything I can.
She stands in the hallway holding the card. Daniel and Cora. Of course. She knew they were already moving - she watched them do it in the first timeline - but she had calculated she had more time. The divorce papers being served in four days was supposed to be her first strike. If they already know the papers are coming and they are making plans, her timeline just collapsed.
She needs to move tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight.
She pulls out her phone to call the lawyer.
It rings once. Twice.
Then someone picks up, and it is not the lawyer.
It is a voice she has never heard before. Low. Careful. And absolutely certain of itself.
"Dr. Voss," the voice says. "Don't hang up. I'm not calling about your divorce. I'm calling because Roman Vael is not who you think he is - and I need you to know the truth before you meet him tomorrow. What I'm about to tell you cannot be unsaid. Are you ready?"
Nadia's hand tightens on the phone.
The dark thing in her chest goes completely, utterly silent.
For the first time since she woke up, she does not know what to do next.
"Who is this?" she says.
The voice says one word.
"Opposition."