The Part of Me Ahead

“They are all, in some way, already partly somewhere else. The gaps you have. The sense of lag. The feeling that your actions precede your decisions.” He looked at her carefully. “You’ve had that for months. Haven’t you.”
Again, not a question.
—
This was the moment. She could feel it — the particular weight of a threshold being crossed.
She had spent four months explaining the gaps away. Fatigue. Stress. The particular cognitive blur of spending too many hours staring at archival data. She had been so fluent in those explanations that she had almost believed them herself.
Almost.
There had been a morning in February when she had found herself standing in her kitchen holding a cup of coffee that had already been drunk, the rim faintly lipsticked, and she had no memory of making it, no memory of drinking it, no memory of the hour between waking and that moment. She had washed the cup. She had gone to work. She had not told anyone.
There had been a night in March when she had started typing a report and found, when she finished, that she had written something she had not consciously composed — accurate, organized, in her own voice, about a topic she had not yet consciously decided to investigate.
She had saved the file. She had not reread it.
She understood now, standing by the canal in the cold, why she had not reread it.
Because some part of her had always known that reading it would close a door she was not ready to close.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve had it for months.”
Spyros nodded slowly. No triumph in it. More like relief, or grief, or both at once.
“The message you sent yourself,” he said. “It got you here safely. It told you not to use the main door.”
“Yes.”
“You trusted it.”
She had. Without hesitation. Even before she had understood that she was the one who had sent it, she had trusted it completely — had felt, reading it, a strange sense of recognition, as though she were receiving instructions from someone who knew her perfectly.
Which was, of course, exactly what had happened.
“Spyros.” She heard something new in her own voice. A quietness that was not fear. “The messages. The people who don’t remember sending them. Are they — are we — in danger?”
He considered this with the seriousness it deserved.
“I don’t think the danger is from what’s using us,” he said at last. “I think the danger is from the people who have noticed what’s using us. And want to understand it. Control it.” He tilted his head back toward the records building, now a dark shape against the darker sky. “That’s who was in there.”
Kaja looked at the building. Then back at the canal.
She thought about the gaps. About the report she had written without writing it. About the cup of coffee she had drunk without drinking it. About the months she had spent narrating a story of ordinary stress and ordinary fatigue, because the alternative — the true shape of what was happening to her — required a kind of courage she hadn’t been sure she had.
She was sure now.
Not because she was no longer afraid. She was afraid. The fear was real and it had weight and it was not going anywhere.
But underneath the fear, running deeper and quieter, was something else: a recognition that the part of her which had been sending those messages, navigating the gaps, moving slightly ahead of her conscious self — that part had never once made the wrong call.
Every gap. Every missing hour. Every action that had preceded her awareness of it.
All of it had kept her safe.
She had been her own guardian without knowing it.
And now she knew.
The canal moved below them, black and slow and indifferent. Somewhere across the city, a church bell struck the hour.
Kaja Halvorsen put her phone in her pocket and did not check it.
For the first time in months, she did not need to.

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About the Author

Adrian Chervinsky — studied Criminal Psychology not to catch them but loose the cops tail … Dark narrow streets you prefer to avoid? He calls them home.

— Adrian Chervinsky

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August 26, 2026

10min-stories