Nadia's POV
I almost do not go to the hospital.
I wait in the hallway outside my apartment door four minutes after Marcus's voice fades on that phone call. I can feel the seconds. I press my back to the wall and breathe through my nose like I teach panicking patients to breathe and I force myself to think and not feel because feeling right now will get me killed
Marcus told someone where we were meeting.
A meeting Kieran had envisioned in his own mind. Told nobody. Nowhere wrote:
Which means one of two things: Someone in Kieran's orbit is feeding intelligence upstairs. Or someone has something we haven't found yet, something closer, something already inside the walls we thought we were building.
I go to the hospital.
Not because I am not afraid. Because scared is not a reason to stop. "Scared is just information. It tells you that the stakes are real." I know the stakes are already real. I died once to learn them.
The next morning at seven Felix finds me in the supply room.
He closed the door behind him. The first thing I notice is that. Felix Okafor doesn't close doors for small talk. When he has decided something he closes doors and does not want witnesses to the deciding.
I put down the inventory clipboard. I wait.
He begins, "I've been thinking about what you said. Concerning the gaps. "This is what this hospital looks like when something real happens." He folds his arms. I worked the figures out myself after you went yesterday." Every gap you've pointed out is there. The blood products. Generator fuel reserve. "The surgical supply chain. He hesitates. "You were right. About everything." "I know," I say.
He stares at me for a moment. Felix has eyes that miss nothing And that made him the best doctor in this building in my last life and makes him dangerous in this one – he looks at you and sees the version of you that exists beneath the version you are showing him. "I'll help you," he says. "But I want you to tell me what you really know about. Not what you might think it would be. Not supply chain forecasting." He steps a little closer. What do you know Nadia.
It's not a question.
I watch him for a long time.
This is the moment I've been waiting for since I walked into his office three days ago. How much to give him. How much is enough to make him useful but not dangerous. Felix is the logical before he is the loyal. The right sort of man in a crisis, the wrong sort of man to trust halfway. Half-trust in a rational man is only a delayed betrayal. Eventually he will fill in the gaps himself and what he fills them with could be worse than the truth.
So I told him.
Not all of them. Not Kieran though. Not the government program, not the folder with my name in red letters. But the gist of it is, I have reason to believe a large outbreak is imminent. That it shall be within this city in three months. That the current resources of the hospital will be depleted within seventy-two hours of the first wave. I have been quietly preparing that and I need someone inside the hospital's infrastructure that can help me move supplies without drawing the administrator's attention.
I speak for six minutes.
When I'm done, Felix sits on the edge of the supply shelf.
He puts his hands together. He looks down at the floor.
He does not speak for thirty seconds.
He says, "Tell me what you want from me." I count them all.
And I breathe, for the first time since waking up in these clean sheets, with a dead woman's memories and a living woman's second chance.
We chat for 20 minutes. Once he commits, Felix is precise and fast. He asks the right questions in the right order, and takes mental notes the way surgeons take mental notes, cataloguing everything without writing any of it down. When we're done he has three things on a list he can action this week without raising flags. He will take care of the blood product order. He will silently re-evaluate the generator fuel. He'll kick off cross-training two nurses he already trusts in trauma triage protocols he'll bill as professional development.
He stands up. "Nadia," he says, hand on the door. He turned around. "How long have you known about this?
I look into his eyes. "Long enough" I say.
He nods, slowly. Like that answer matters to him more than a certain date would. Like he's putting something into the neat, logical filing cabinet of his brain.
He goes away.
I let myself feel the relief for ten seconds, standing alone in the supply room. Felix is in. That's what matters. What matters is that Felix survives this time. I saw him die in my last life, in the fourth month, trying to save patients at a hospital that was already out of everything. He deserved better than that." He'd better be on the right side of the wall when this city falls apart.
I take my clipboard.
My other phonebuzzes in my coat pocket.
Kieran. I open it, expecting some sort of reply to my message about Marcus and the phone call. It's a different thing. 3 lines. And the third one stops my heart all together.
Don't tell Felix anything more. I do. "Take back all you gave him.
I look at the screen.
Then the second message comes in before I can even process the first.
Just sent you a picture. Open it up. See the second face. Felix isn't who you think he is. He's not the man you think he is. Nadia. He was like this before either of us came back.
My hands, my steady, reliable, no-longer-honest hands, start to shake.
I study the picture.
I see the second face.
And the supply room lurches sideways because I know it right away, know it right away, know it with the bone-deep certainty of a woman who has spent the last week memorizing every face that counts -
Felix Okafor is already on his way back through that hospital to the administrator's office.
He had his phone pressed to his ear.