Elliot glanced nervously in both directions, just to be sure there was no one watching. There were a handful of small cars on the road now, and there would be more with every minute. As Aurora woke, so too did its residents. Within the hour, there would be dozens of people moving in either direction, making anything even remotely like stealth completely impossible.

The best place to read would be home, obviously. But if he didn't know what was inside, he couldn't bring it back to Ruby's apartment! His girlfriend didn't deserve to be implicated in any of this.

He leaned over the bridge, holding the notebook cautiously with one hand. That way, he could keep it entirely out of view from the street. Only another pedestrian would be able to see what he was doing, which he should hear coming.

"Property of Dr. Randolph Zelenka. If found, please return to..."

Elliot skimmed past the contact info, though filed it away in the back of his mind for future use. Something told him that trying to call or contact the man who owned this would not be in his legal best interest at this moment.

He skimmed the next few pages, and instantly had a better idea of what he was looking at. This was a lab notebook, with detailed notes taken from observational experiments of some kind. Most of it went right over his head, but maybe his girlfriend would be able to make more sense of it. Ruby was in her senior year of premed biology, with a semester before her graduation. She must've had to fill out notebooks like this. Elliot had a few vague memories charting reactions in high school chemistry, none of them particularly pleasant.

They grabbed Dr. Zelenka for a reason. It has to be in here somewhere.

Granted, he didn't know whether the doctor had intended to leave this notebook behind when those MPs came for him, or whether the drop was happenstance. But his instincts told him the latter. He wanted Elliot to stay as far away from him as possible, to the tune of several hundred dollars in cash. If he wanted to keep the notebook safe, he could've asked for that instead.

The last few pages of the notebook were those that had last caught his attention, and that was where his eyes went now, under a heading of "Spontaneous Causality Violations Along Closed Timelike Curves".

That was what he thought it said, anyway. Despite not appearing to be a medical doctor, that trope apparently held true here.

The doctor had helpfully written a few lines in bold, circling and underlining them several times next to a few simple number tables.

"Subject Zeta" was the heading, with "mass" charged along with "time".

Elliot didn't need any kind of advanced degree to see the 'subject' had begun this trial at 101 kilograms, and ended it somewhere near fifteen. In a vacuum, that could mean almost anything—an evaporating liquid, the funds in Elliot's bank account as the month's bills all hit one after another, or maybe a chunk of limestone getting eaten by acid.

All those might be possible, except for the photograph stapled to the page, a vaguely equine shape with a bright yellow coat and positively enormous eyes. At that size, the photo allowed the animal's terror in vivid detail. It was sitting inside something metal, with air holes along the side and a ceiling low enough that it couldn't stand up all the way.

"Subject shows remarkable evidence of continuity with human identity. Recommend comprehensive personality screening before evaluation of intelligence. Objects of significance to subject's life could be used to gauge the degree of connection, preferably with many lookalike duplicates that might be easily confused. Details of the intelligence profile difficult to extract without autopsy, though subject size suggests normal IQ unlikely. Bony protrusion appears unlikely to be sufficient for any practical defensive purpose.

Propose increase in bioscience funding to grey board, 45B. Require specific talents in protein folding to identify reverse chirality in identified analogues."

It went on and on like that for the rest of the page, saying very smart-sounding things that would probably make sense to someone who wasn't a waiter at a diner. He prepared to shut the book and tuck it away, except for the bolded portion on the reverse side. That text was the last Dr. Zelenka had written before losing the notebook. Judging by the number of times he'd circled that little block of text, it must be important.

"Phosphorescence of subject correlates to cascading causality violations. Effects are undetectable, except as a curious numbing sensation detectable only to sapient subjects. Animal models appear unaffected."

Then below the block, in much messier yet somehow easier-to-read words: "IT'S ALREADY TOO LATE"

Elliot briefly considered tossing the whole notebook into the river a second time. Even if the exact meaning of all those science-sounding terms was lost on him, he felt their ominous implications on a level beyond literal meaning. It was already too late for what?

Elliot tucked the notebook away again, and resumed his ride. He had been working all night, right up to the most bizarre encounter of his entire employed life. By the time he woke up, Ruby should be back from her morning classes, and maybe she would have some time to make sense of what he'd found.

While he rode, Elliot expected to see the flashing blue and red of the police, or maybe worse. Those soldiers might roll up with their hazmat suits and drag him off to join the doctor in who knew what unknown fate. Yet there were no police, no soldiers, no sign that anything was different from an ordinary morning in Aurora.

He didn't ride all the way to the school, just the close blocks of apartments a mile or so away where many of its seniors or recent graduates lived. He headed up the steps, tapped his magnetic key, and the apartment clicked open.

The apartment was always a relief from the heat and stress of the world outside—Ruby made sure of that. His girlfriend wasn't just brilliant, she was also a natural with every green thing she touched, filling the space with flowers and herbs. The little outdoor balcony was almost entirely overrun with them, aside for the narrow gap just wide enough for his bike.

"Morning, Elliot," said a young woman, passing him as he shut the glass door to the balcony. "How's the traffic?

That was Samantha, Ruby's roommate from before the two had moved in together. Sam was everything Ruby wasn't—short and solid, with more muscle on those arms than most young women her age. Her grease-stained overalls got a little less blue with every passing day.

"Slow," he said. "Ruby already gone?"

"Yep." She spun slowly around, holding out her arm until it pointed back into the kitchen. "Left breakfast for you in the kitchen. I stole some of the bacon, sorry not sorry." Samantha grinned up at him, entirely unabashed by the admission.

Elliot settled into a kitchen chair, shrugged out of his jacket, and removed the plate covering the food his girlfriend had made for him. She'd already put just the right amount of butter and syrup on the pancakes for him. He took one bite, then grinned. Much better than anything they served at work.

"I get enough bacon on the job anyway!" he called back into the living room, gently nudging the few remaining slices away with his fork. "I can't even smell it anymore without thinking of work."

"In that case..." she hurried back over, snatched a fork off the cupboard, and stabbed all three slices right off his plate. She took all three into her fingers, then tossed the fork back into the sink. "If she asks, I'll tell her you told me it was okay."

He shrugged, and went back to eating. Elliot ate some of the eggs and one of the pancakes—not so much because he was hungry, but because Ruby had put in the work to make extra.

Sam shut the door a few minutes later, thumping down the steps to the ground floor. A few seconds later, he heard her swearing from the parking lot, along with a groan of metal as her old pickup finally banged to life.

Now the sun was properly up, filling the windows with blinding orange light. With it came the true weight of Elliot's exhaustion. He hadn't just been working all night, but he'd also seen something incredible, and maybe dangerous.

Would the military look him up, and search his property just to be sure? It wouldn't be hard to get any of his contact information they wanted—he even got mail at that apartment.

Maybe there was a smart-person way to scan the notebook, then destroy the original, storing away the text in some form that wouldn't be easy to extract. But if Elliot knew how to do things like that, he would probably be earning a living wage by now.

It's probably fine. If it was that serious, they wouldn't have just let us go.

Even so, Elliot spent almost an hour in the shower after that, scrubbing every inch of himself, until the soap made his skin itch and the water had long since run cold. By the time he was finished, he barely had the energy left to pull on a pair of boxers before crashing face-first into the bed he shared with Ruby. He was unconscious in seconds.

Elliot had always been a light sleeper, light enough that even minor changes in his bedrooms could jostle him back to reality. His mind still felt groggy, as though his resting time had been far less than it ought to be.

But maybe he was wrong—that sure looked like the high sun of afternoon peering through the blinds.

Ruby shuffled through the doorway, weighed down by a backpack much heavier than she should have to lift. She was trying to move quietly, though of course it wouldn't make a difference. By the time she reached her desk, he was already sitting up, watching her from across the room. "How goes midterm prep?"

Ruby turned to look back at him. She was everything that Samantha wasn't—tall, athletic, with bright red orange hair and a splattering of freckles. Most days she wore contacts, though evidently she hadn't found the time to put them in that morning, because she had the glasses instead.

That was fine by Elliot—she looked even smarter that way.

"Not great. Campus got locked down right after lunch. Not... exactly sure why. But now the study group is going to meet over zoom, and you just know how shit that's gonna be. This is not the day for a drill."

He rolled out of bed, making his slow way over to join her. But from the slouch in her shoulders and the sharpness in those eyes. Affection wasn't what Ruby wanted right now. "Guess you want your room back?"

"Nah, I can zoom from the living room. Sam's out until six, and I know you need to keep sleeping. Just got to get my laptop in this mess..."

She stopped, holding up the paper notebook from on top of it. "This yours?"

Elliot had to decide...

1. Ruby's studying can wait, this is more important. Tell her everything and ask her to look over the notebook.
2. If she doesn't pass her exams, Ruby will be stuck here another semester. You can talk about it over the weekend.
3. Knowing any of this might make her liable—snatch the notebook quickly, and pretend it's nothing. It's probably time to get it out of the apartment.

Author's Note

Trying a different site as recommended by equestrian.sen in the comments. This is probably plenty powerful for what we're doing here. But we'll see how it holds up in the coming days, and maybe switch as required.

My goal would be to do about one of these chapters per week, depending on length. Though at the beginning some of the poll options may not be as life or death as what's coming when the events on the cover are fully set in motion.

Vote in this week's poll:
https://poll.horse/NC9B9YXe