NADIA'S POV
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The face on that screen belongs to a dead man.
Nadia knows this because she watched him die. Marcus Teel. Forty-one years old. Former paramedic. One of the first people she recruited for the shelter's medical team in her previous life. She watched the infected reach him in the east corridor of the shelter during week six of the outbreak. She heard him scream. She kept moving because stopping meant dying and she was not ready to die yet - that came later, at the gates, with Daniel's voice reading false charges in the cold air.
Marcus Teel was dead. She was certain.
And yet there he is on security footage, walking through Mercy General at eleven PM, calm and unbothered, wearing a jacket she doesn't recognize and a face that has not aged a single day.
She hands Roman his phone back.
"I need to show you something," she says. "Come with me."
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She drives. Roman sits in the passenger seat and does not ask where they are going. She appreciates that more than she expects to. Daniel always asked where they were going. Daniel always needed to know, needed to be positioned, needed the information before she was ready to give it. Roman simply watches the road and waits and lets her move at her own pace.
It is a small thing. It matters anyway.
She pulls up to the warehouse and gets out. She unlocks the side door - three separate locks, her system, her keys - and steps inside. She watches Roman follow her in and then she watches him do something that makes the tight thing in her chest loosen exactly one degree.
He doesn't look at her.
He looks at the space.
Carefully. Completely. The way she looked at it the first time she chose it - assessing sight lines, entry points, structural integrity, ventilation. He turns in a slow circle and his pale grey eyes move across every corner with the focused attention of someone who is not performing competence but simply has it.
She thinks - okay. He's real. The competence is real.
"Three entry points," he says. "You've secured two. The roof access on the north side needs a lock."
"It's on my list."
"Move it to the top."
She moves it to the top without arguing because he is correct.
She spreads her supply lists across the central table. Three pages. Organized by category, priority level, and acquisition timeline. She spent four days building these lists from memory - every shortage she watched kill people in her previous life, every gap that turned a manageable crisis into an unsurvivable one. She knows these lists are good. She also knows they were built by one person working alone at two in the morning and one person working alone at two in the morning misses things.
Roman reads them without speaking. She watches him read - the way his eyes track across the page, the small pauses where he's calculating something, the slight tension that appears between his brows on page two and stays there.
Three minutes. He reads all three pages in three minutes and then he looks up.
"Here," he says. He points to four separate items across the three pages. "Dialysis supplies. You have none listed. When municipal water quality drops in month two, kidney patients will crash faster than anything else you're treating. You'll lose people you could have kept." He moves his finger. "Pediatric intubation kits - your sizes only go down to age five. Below that you have nothing." He moves again. "Long-term insulin storage. You have refrigeration on your list but not backup cooling for when the power cycles become unpredictable." He points to the last gap. "Burn treatment. You have basic wound care but nothing for serious burns. When the infected start spreading to structures and people start using fire as a barrier - and they will - you will have nothing for the people who get caught in it."
Nadia looks at the four gaps.
She adds them. No argument. No defensiveness. They are correct and being correct is the only qualification she requires from anyone standing at this table.
He watches her write.
Something in the air between them changes. She can feel it happen - the specific shift of two people who have been circling each other carefully suddenly finding themselves standing on the same side of a problem. Not allies yet. She is not ready to call it that. But something. People working on the same thing in the same room without fighting about it.
It is the most functional she has felt since she woke up.
She is adding notes to the burn treatment entry when the side door opens.
Both of them move at the same time - Roman a half step in front of her before he catches himself and stops, which she also notices and also does not address right now - and then Jess walks in carrying a box and wearing the expression of someone who was not expecting company.
Jess stops.
She looks at Roman. Then at Nadia. Then at the supply lists spread across the table. Then back at Roman, taking in the careful way he is standing and the fact that he positioned himself without thinking between Nadia and the door.
She sets the box down slowly.
"Are we collecting strays now?" she says.
Nadia almost smiles. Almost.
"Jess, this is Roman. Roman, this is Jess. She's our head of medical operations."
Jess raises one eyebrow. "I am?"
"You are."
Jess looks at Roman again. He looks back at her with those grey eyes and says nothing, which is apparently the correct response because Jess gives a short nod and opens the box she brought.
"I pulled these from the hospital's secondary storage," she says. "Things that weren't logged in the main system. Nobody's going to miss them for at least six weeks." She starts laying items on the table. "Also I ran the name on that insurance card you asked me to check."
Nadia goes still. She did ask Jess to check it. Three days ago, before Roman told her the truth about the Watchers. She forgot she had asked.
"It doesn't exist," Jess says. "But here's the interesting part." She pulls out her phone. "The provider name is fake but the policy number format is real. I have a cousin who works in insurance fraud investigation. She says that number format belongs to one specific private network." She turns the phone toward Nadia. "A network that was shut down eight years ago after a federal investigation." She pauses. "Into an organization that was quietly monitoring people who had - and I am reading this directly - experienced clinical death events."
The warehouse goes very quiet.
Nadia looks at the phone. Then at Roman.
Roman's face is perfectly still.
But his jaw is tight in a way that tells her everything.
Because the organization Jess just described was not the Watchers.
It was something that came before them.
Something Roman has not mentioned even once.