"Run."
The word fell like a stone between us. For a half-breath I thought he was joking about some dramatic flourishing to scare me into staying. Then I saw the way his hands clenched, how his jaw worked, and the rational part of my body accepted what my throat already suspected: he meant it.
"Where?" I whispered.
"Now," he said. "Out the fire door. Don't look back."
I grabbed my phone, grabbed the Polaroid off the table, the paper warm from my palm, and shoved both into my coat. My legs had their own plan. I moved before my head caught up, feet slapping the hallway like someone who had rehearsed an exit and forgotten the lines. Rowan was ahead of me, moving quiet and fast, keys flashing in his hand.
At the stairwell the light flickered. The building smelled of old rain and bleach. Behind us the corridor was a slow, sleeping thing until it wasn't. A shadow moved at the far end, too deliberate to be coincidence.
"Someone's there," Rowan said, breath low.
I wanted to argue about Polaroids and wrong texts and how ridiculous it was to run because of a message. The want turned in my mouth like a coin. Instead, I said, "What if it's just a neighbor?"
He didn't slow. "Then the neighbor will have a better story. Move."
We pushed out the emergency door into the alley. Cold air hit my face as if someone had opened a window to the world. The city smelled sharp with rain and petrol. Down the alley a car idled with headlights off. Two people leaned against its hood, faces low. They weren't talking. They were watching.
Rowan moved like he knew them, controlled and efficient. He didn't speak to them; he walked as if the ground itself would swallow anyone who stopped to see. One of the figures lifted a hand, a signal, or a greeting. My skin went tight.
"Get in the car," Rowan hissed. "Now."
I obeyed because the rest of me had stopped trying to act brave. I didn't even notice I was shaking until his palm touched my back and guided me in. My knees bumped into the seat; the leather smelled of someone else's breath. The engine thrummed; we rolled away before I found words.
"Who were they?" I asked, voice small under the hum of tires.
"People who remember," he said. "And people who want answers."
"About Amelia?" The name sounded huge in the cramped backseat.
"About what she was to us," he corrected. "And what we did when we were foolish."
The car moved through streets I thought I knew, but tonight the city looked like a place of edges. Rowan's phone buzzed and he glanced at it, face folding with a tiredness that was more than sleep. He tapped a reply with fingers that were steady and quick.
"Where are we going?" I demanded. My voice carried the sharpness of someone trying to stitch a wound shut.
"To a safe place," he said. "For now."
"For how long?"
"For as long as it takes." He said it quietly, like a promise and a threat at once.
We drove to a house that looked older than the time around it, bricks softened by ivy and a small, stubborn light in the window. He took me in through the back, past a kitchen that smelled of rosemary and stale tea. A woman looked up from a chair; she didn't ask questions. She handed Rowan a damp towel and then disappeared into a hallway that hummed with quiet authority.
"You can stay here tonight," she said. Her voice was direct, not unkind. "We don't keep guests who bring trouble."
"We're not guests," Rowan began, and then stopped. The woman met his eyes and the whole room rearranged itself into the shape of obedience.
I sat at a table and watched him move like a man trying to be ordinary. He poured water for us both, leaving his chair facing the window as if he expected the room to need escape. I wanted to push everything into language, why me, why the voice, why the warnings but I couldn't find a beginning that didn't sound like accusation.
Instead I said, "Tell me what happened. From the start."
He gave me a look that wasn't pleading. He sat, exhaled, and began with small, precise fragments, like someone cleaning glass after a storm.
"There was a study," he said. "We were young. We thought we were helping people remember things that time had hidden. It wasn't therapy, exactly. It was research patterns, associations."
"You mean you were playing with memory." My voice had a bitterness I didn't like.
"Not playing. We were earnest and reckless. Amelia volunteered. She fell in love with the idea of being remembered, in a way that made her brave and, maybe, naive."
"What went wrong?"
"Complications. A cascade of small choices. Someone gave instructions that shouldn't have been given. Data got misread. Promises were broken. People were hurt. People wanted someone to hold them accountable. I thought I could keep the story clean. I was wrong."
He looked at me like a man who had been waiting to be punished and couldn't quite ask for it. "After she died, the file library closed. We sealed it. I left. The names were filed away. We told ourselves that would be the end."
"So someone dug it up."
"Someone always digs." He pressed his palms together. "And now you're tangled up in it because the data found you."
The window blinked with movement. I saw a silhouette pass the lamplight outside an intruder, or the imagination of someone already terrified. "Why me?" I asked. "Why would a lab file include my voice?"
Rowan searched for the answer like someone searching for a bandage. "Because the experiment sampled emotional signature heartbeats, breathing patterns, idiosyncrasies and sometimes patterns overlap. Or someone made them overlap. Or" He stopped.
"Do you think someone deliberately tuned it to me?" I finished for him.
He stared until the light in his eyes shifted into a cold, animal calculation. "I don't know who would be cruel enough. But there are people who have very long memories."
The house kept breathing around us the kettle in another room, the clink of a spoon. We both listened as if the sound had weight we could measure.
My phone vibrated. A message preview glowed on the dark screen: Unknown number 'We saw you.'
I didn't know whether I wanted to vomit or to laugh. It was a child's sentence, an announcer's cue, a threat.
"Who sent that?" I asked.
Rowan didn't look at the phone. He looked at me, and for the first time there was a softness that was not pity. "They know now."
"Know what?" My voice went thin.
"That you heard the voice. That you are connected." He reached across the table and took my hand like someone making sure a person was still there. "Which means they will come to check."
The kettle shrieked somewhere like a sudden animal. A step fell on the porch. Too measured to be a visitor.
Footsteps approached the back door. A key turned in the lock. Someone knocked, polite and firm not the rummage of a burglar but the precise knock of someone who wanted to be let in.
The respite broke.
The woman who'd welcomed us rose without hesitation. She moved to the door with the practiced calm of someone who had opened it before to people she didn't trust.
She opened the door a fraction and looked out. Her face lost color, and she turned back to us with that old, sharp steadiness.
"It's for you," she said, and her eyes were not on me. They were on Rowan.
He smoothed his shirt like a man trying to fold himself into no more than he was. He stood slowly, and the room tightened like a held breath.
"What do they want?" I asked, but I already knew the answer, and the knowledge tasted like iron.
The knock came again harder, insistent. The woman at the door called out, "Who are you?"
A voice replied, low and familiar in a way that made my skin prickle. "We're here to ask questions about the dead."
Rowan's jaw tightened. He didn't answer. He didn't move.
And the moment hit like a door closing in the dark someone said my name from outside the house.
Not a knock this time, but a voice intimate, knowing, impossibly close.
"Maya."