Steve's apartment smelled like garlic bread. Jack stood in the doorway with a bag over one shoulder and a face he'd been practicing for three blocks, and Steve pulled the door wide and said, "You look like shit."

  "Thanks."

  "Seriously, you sleep at all? Your eyes are doing that thing." Steve stepped back to let him in, already turning toward the kitchen. "I ordered Thai. You're eating whether you want to or not."

  The apartment was exactly what Jack remembered. Clean but not sterile. Organized bookshelf, dishes done, a system for everything that Steve would deny having if you called it that. The couch was the same brown leather that would be buried under six feet of rubble on Day 4. The TV was on, game playing, volume low. Steve's laptop sat open on the kitchen counter with a spreadsheet visible. Always a spreadsheet. The man ran his personal life like a small corporation and somehow made it look casual.

  Jack set his bag by the door. Kept it close without being obvious about keeping it close.

  "Beer's in the fridge. Grab me one too." Steve was plating food from takeout containers, dividing portions with the unconscious precision of someone who'd never had to think about fairness because it came naturally. Two plates, equal shares, chopsticks for Jack because he knew Jack preferred chopsticks. Small things. The kind of care that Steve embedded in everything without being asked.

  In ten years that care would scale into something unrecognizable. The plates would be ration allocations. The equal shares would become resource quotas assigned by need, then by loyalty, then by utility to Steve's vision. The chopsticks would be knowing exactly what every person under his authority preferred and needed and feared. Jack didn't know when the shift happened. Couldn't point to a year, a month, a single decision where the care turned. Maybe it never did. Maybe it stayed care the whole time and that was the worst part. Intimacy weaponized into intelligence. Friendship hardened into infrastructure.

  But that was later, and later was a country Jack had visited and Steve had not. Right now it was just Thai food and a Tuesday.

  Jack pulled two beers from the fridge, twisted the caps off both, and handed one to Steve. They settled onto the couch. The leather was softer than anything Jack had sat on in a decade. His body sank into it and for a disorienting second he had no idea what to do with his hands.

  On the TV, someone scored. Steve swore and gestured with his beer. "Been like this the whole game. Defense is sleepwalking out there. Three turnovers in the second quarter alone."

  Jack had no idea what sport this was. He'd stopped tracking anything that didn't involve kill counts or ration schedules around year four. A grunt passed for agreement. He drank his beer and let the sound fill the room.

  Outside, a car alarm went off. Three short blasts, a pause, then the long wail. Steve glanced toward the window and didn't get up. Jack's hand had already moved to his hip where a weapon should have been before he caught himself. He turned the motion into a stretch, casual, reaching for nothing. Steve was looking at him when he turned back.

  Steve talked. He was good at it, always had been, the kind of person who could fill silence without making it feel filled. Work was frustrating. His boss was an idiot who couldn't read a Gantt chart. There was a new project he was excited about, logistics optimization for a regional shipping company. He described it with the enthusiasm other people reserved for vacations or first dates. Complex problem, and he'd cracked it. Mapped the whole thing out on a whiteboard and his team couldn't keep up with where he was going.

  Jack ate and listened and felt the tight wire in his chest go slack in a way he could not have named at gunpoint. Not grief exactly. Not rage. Something older than both, duller, like a bruise pressed against from the inside. The feeling of sitting across from someone who doesn't know they're going to die, and you can't tell them, and the pad thai is actually pretty decent.

  "Okay." Steve muted the TV. Turned on the couch to face Jack fully. "What's wrong."

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Not a question. Steve had spent twenty minutes giving Jack room and decided the room wasn't working.

  "Nothing's wrong."

  "Jack."

  "I'm fine. Long day."

  "You're not tired. Tired looks different on you. This is something else." Steve leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the posture he used when he was going to wait you out. Patient. Focused. Impossible to outlast. The same posture that would one day face down warlords and faction leaders without flinching. "You keep looking at things like you're memorizing them."

  Jack had been memorizing them. Exits first, load-bearing walls second, then the way light came through the west-facing windows at this hour. Which direction the building would fall and which corners might survive it.

  "I saw something today that rattled me. I'll get over it."

  "Saw what?"

  "A thing I don't want to talk about." Jack held Steve's eyes and didn't let his face do anything extra. "Can we just watch the game?"

  Steve held the look for three seconds. Jack counted them. In the first timeline, Steve's silences had gotten longer and heavier as the years piled up, until by the end his pauses could clear a room. This one was still short. Still the silence of a friend deciding to respect a boundary rather than a leader calculating how hard to push.

  "Fine," Steve said. "But you're staying through the fourth quarter. You're not doing that thing where you vanish at halftime without telling anyone."

  "That was one time."

  "Four times. And one of them was a funeral."

  Jack laughed. It came out wrong, too loud and half a beat late, a sound that belonged to the person who used to live inside this friendship. But Steve grinned at it anyway, satisfied, and unmuted the TV, and for ten minutes or so they just sat there.

  Two guys on a couch. Beer getting warm. Somebody on television running or throwing or whatever the sport required. Steve made a comment about the referees and Jack responded without thinking, and the rhythm of it was so familiar, so completely untouched by anything Jack carried in his head, that his throat tightened around his next breath. He covered it with a long pull of beer.

  This was the part he hadn't been ready for. He'd braced for the body, the clock, the preparations. Not for this. Sitting next to someone you loved who was going to become something you had to stop, while he complained about the refs and stole your egg roll when he thought you weren't looking.

  Steve stole his egg roll.

  Jack let him.

  ? ? ?

  He left at quarter to eleven. Steve walked him to the door and leaned against the frame the way he always did, like doorframes were built specifically for him to lean against.

  "Get some sleep. You look haunted."

  The word landed harder than Steve knew. Jack kept his expression easy. "I will."

  "Same time Thursday?"

  There wouldn't be a Thursday. Not the kind Steve meant.

  "Yeah. Thursday."

  Three blocks from Steve's building, his hands started shaking. He made it into a narrow gap between a dry cleaner and a shoe repair place, pressed his back against brick still warm from the afternoon, and went down. Knees on concrete, the cold coming through his jeans faster than it should. Breathing ragged. The alley smelled like solvent and cold stone. Not a panic attack. Deeper than that. The grief of a man who just had dinner with a ghost and had to pretend the food tasted fine.

  He gave himself sixty seconds. Counted them off the way he'd counted seconds between mortar impacts during the Siege of Atlanta, back when counting was the only thing between you and the screaming.

  At sixty he wiped his face with the back of his wrist and stood. The man who came up off that concrete was not the man who'd been laughing on Steve's couch twenty minutes ago. The civilian was packed away. What was left moved through dark streets with a purpose that didn't look civilian.

  The park first. He checked the cache he'd set up that afternoon, tested sightlines under streetlight, counted paces from the east entrance to his chosen ground. Everything held. Then back across town to verify the second position, a parking garage on Elm where the upper levels would give clear views of the eastern approach routes. The concrete there was solid. Three stairwells. He walked all three, memorizing the landings.

  At two in the morning he stood on the roof of his own building and looked out at a city that had maybe thirty hours left to be what it was. The skyline was lit windows and brake lights and the dull orange of sodium lamps. Ordinary. Every night looked like this one. Nobody down there could tell the difference.

  Jack could. Something was building at the edges of his awareness, faint as a pressure change before a storm. Not his lost Edge Sense. Something cruder, more physical, the way animals felt earthquakes before the ground moved. The mana was already seeping in through whatever fracture the system had opened, and his body, stripped of every tool the apocalypse had given him, could still register its approach.

  To the east, Steve's neighborhood was dark and quiet. Everyone in it was sleeping through the last normal night of their lives. Somewhere in that grid of streets and lit windows, a man was asleep in a clean apartment with a spreadsheet still glowing on his laptop, dreaming about logistics, who had no idea that the biggest logistics problem in history was about to land on his doorstep and reshape him into something his best friend would cross time to undo.

  Jack stayed on the roof until the horizon started to pale. Then he went inside, sat at his kitchen table, and sharpened the knife.