“I came the long way.” He kept the flashlight low, pointed at the floor between them. “They’re watching the main entrance. Two of them, I think. Maybe three.”
“Who are they?”
He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t quite read. Not evasive, exactly. More like someone choosing their words with surgical care.
“That depends,” he said, “on what you’ve started to remember.”
—
The dread that had been slow and ambient all evening suddenly sharpened into something with edges.
“What does that mean?”
Spyros set the flashlight on a shelf, angling it toward the ceiling so the room filled with diffuse, ghostly light. He sat down on a crate. He looked tired in a way that went deeper than one night.
“The messages,” he said. “The ones that arrive before they’re sent. I told you I found eleven cases.” He paused. “I lied. There are fourteen. I didn’t include the three where the sender had no memory of writing the message at all.”
Kaja felt the archive get smaller.
“Why not?”
“Because those three people all described the same thing afterward. A smell. Sweet. Almost floral. Like something between jasmine and something else they couldn’t name.” His eyes moved to her face. “You smelled it when you came in tonight.”
It was not a question.
She had not told him that.
The thought arrived quietly, without drama: she had not told him that.
“Spyros.” Her voice was steady. She was proud of that. “How did you know about the smell?”
“Because,” he said, “one of the three people who didn’t remember sending the message — the first one I found, four years ago — was me.”
—
Upstairs, something moved. A door. Footsteps on the stairs, unhurried, as though whoever was coming had all the time in the world.
Spyros was already on his feet. He gestured toward the far end of the archive — a secondary exit she had scouted when she arrived, an old loading bay door that opened onto the alley behind the building.
They moved.
Kaja kept close to the shelving. The sweet smell was stronger now, and she realized with cold clarity that it had been growing steadily since Spyros arrived — not following her, not emanating from the stairwell. It was coming from somewhere inside her own perception, as though it were a quality of her attention rather than the air.
That thought was too large to hold right now.
She filed it away. She had always been good at that.
—
The loading bay door was stiff but not locked. Spyros pushed it open and cold Oslo air rushed in, carrying the smell of the river and distant traffic.
They came out into the alley. Moved quickly. Said nothing until they were two blocks away, standing in the orange wash of a streetlamp near a canal footbridge.
Spyros spoke first.
“The message you received. The one from your own number.” He looked at her directly. “You haven’t asked how I know about it.”
She hadn’t. She’d noticed that omission and smoothed over it without examining it, the way she smoothed over other things.
“How do you know about it?”
“Because the same thing happened to me. Four years ago. And I have spent four years trying to understand what it means.” He turned up his collar against the cold. “What I believe — and I want you to understand I arrive at this reluctantly, as someone who spent his career in data analysis — is that for certain people, under certain conditions, there is something that reaches back.”
“Reaches back,” she repeated.
“Through them. Using the infrastructure they already have — their phones, their habits, their own language — to send information from a point forward in time to a point earlier.” He paused. “Not a technology. Not a system someone built. Something that exists alongside us. Something that has always been there.”
Kaja was quiet for a long moment.
The canal reflected the streetlamp in a long, trembling stripe of orange.
“You said it uses people,” she said finally. “What does it use them for?”
“To navigate,” he said. “I think. I’m not certain. But the people who receive messages from themselves — they all have something in common beyond the messages.”
She waited.
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