The next morning, Aarika stood in the empty lobby of Cobalt Dynamics, the company that had once cost her everything. It hadn't happened yet in this life, but she knew the blueprint of betrayal far too well.
She had called in an old favor—someone who owed her anonymity for a rescue only she remembered. That favor bought her five minutes alone with the backup servers.
She slid her old employee card through the reader. To her shock, the scanner beeped green. Security had changed the outer tech, but not the inner access levels. Sloppy.
She moved fast, accessing the archived systems from five years ago. Most of the files had been wiped, but one folder sat untouched, buried under layers of renamed indexes. It was labeled "Financial Backups – R.Report."
Her heart pounded.
Inside were transaction logs—Zayden's shell accounts, moving small sums over months from Cobalt into offshore holdings. The theft had started earlier than she'd thought. This wasn't panic money. This was premeditation.
She copied everything to a flash drive.
But just as she turned to leave, her phone buzzed.
A private message. No name, no number.
"You're five moves ahead of this life. But I'm not far behind."
Her blood ran cold. She traced the message. The origin IP was masked but familiar—too familiar. She ran it through a filter and the truth appeared.
It came from a server inside Rachel Blake's personal network.
Rachel. Her ex-best friend. The woman who had smiled at her wedding and stabbed her during labor.
But Rachel was still oblivious in this life. Or was she?
Could others remember like her?
Twist: The IP logs show two distinct fingerprints: one matching Rachel... and one unknown, identical to Aarika's own digital signature from her "past" life.