Tessa waited until the clinic closed before she asked Eli to come back.
Marisol had finished the last scheduled wound check, and Leah was upstairs helping Mrs. Ortega put away fabric. The storeroom smelled faintly of antiseptic and the bread someone had brought that morning. Tessa locked the supply cabinet, checked that no patient records remained on the table, and pointed Eli toward a chair.
He stayed standing. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”
She placed her notebook between them. On the open page she had written four lines. Eli recognized the first before she read it aloud.
“You knew a route into a gate the survey team had barely entered. You reacted to the photograph of my father’s arm before you explained what you were looking for. You told me not to join the expedition but couldn’t give me a reason beyond your fear. And you keep talking about guilds as if you’ve spent years dealing with them.”
“I have worked with guilds,” he said.
“For how long?”
The answer he could substantiate was not long enough to explain what he knew. He sat down.
Tessa remained standing on the other side of the table. “Has a guild threatened you?”
“Not in the way you’re asking.”
“Are my patients in danger because of something you’ve concealed?”
“I don’t know of a specific threat to them.”
“Pell has their clinic address. He knows you help here. If there’s a reason he would come after you, I need to know whether that could reach the people who come through this door.”
Eli looked at the inventory she had pinned to the wall. Someone had added two boxes of dressings that afternoon and crossed out a bottle of antiseptic. The list was precise because the clinic could not afford to mistake a hope for a supply. Tessa was asking him for the same distinction.
“There is a reason I distrust a guild,” he said. “It’s also the reason I knew the route. But I can’t prove most of what I’m about to tell you.”
“Start there.”
He had rehearsed this in fragments. Each time he tried to arrange the story, he reached the moment of his death before he found a way to explain the beginning. Now Tessa was waiting, and another carefully limited answer would leave her making decisions around a danger she could not evaluate.
“I remember living ten years after awakening day,” he said. “I remember dying at the end of them. Then I woke up on awakening day again.”
Tessa did not move. The account had entered the room between them, but she had no way yet to decide what it was. Upstairs, the sewing machine started and stopped. Someone dropped a spool; it rolled across the floor with a soft, uneven rattle.
“You mean a dream,” she said.
“No. I remember a life. I can’t prove it wasn’t something else, but I experienced it as real.”
“Ten years.”
“Yes.”
“And you woke up when?”
“The morning the gates first appeared.”
She pulled out the chair opposite him and sat. Her notebook remained open, but she did not yet write anything down. “Tell me what you remember. Don’t start with what you think it means.”
He took a breath. “My assessment was Gravekeeper. It was considered F-rank. I worked as a porter and recovery worker for several teams. Eventually I worked for Aegis.”
“A guild?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do there?”
“Carried supplies. Identified the dead. Retrieved equipment. I wasn’t important to the people running raids, but I was useful enough to bring along.”
The words flattened years of work into a few tasks. He remembered the weight of bags, the smell of blood beneath stone dust, and the way a leader could speak over a body as if the person had already become an accounting entry. He did not need to make Tessa carry all of it tonight.
“There was a raid,” he continued. “We found a room with bodies in it, and Rusk locked it after ordering us out. I found signs that the guild had concealed what happened there.”
“What evidence?”
“Bodies with restraints, a concealed chamber, and a manifest and notes I tried to get to someone outside the commander’s control. I believed he was hiding what happened. I did not see how the people in that room died.”
“Who was the commander?”
“Rusk,” Eli said. The name meant nothing to Tessa; he could see that before she shook her head.
“He’s alive now?”
“As far as I know. I haven’t verified where he is.”
“And then?”
“I was hurt during a struggle over the manifest. A collapse trapped me in a passage. I saw someone trying to reach me through the rocks.” He paused. “It was you.”
Tessa’s hand stopped on the notebook. “Me.”
“You were an Aegis medic. You and another porter, Neri, tried to move the rocks. You reached for me through a gap, and someone pulled you away when more stone fell.”
“What happened to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she get through?”
“Not before I died.”
He could still hear her voice through the fallen stone. He remembered the way he had tried to answer, the blood in his throat, and the terrible calculation that his strength was failing before anyone could clear the rocks. He had carried the memory into the new day with such force that seeing her at the building had felt like finding someone who had already been lost.
“I thought you might die trying to reach me,” he said. “I didn’t see it happen. I don’t know whether you lived or died after the passage collapsed.”
Tessa stared at him. “You said I was a medic. Did you know me?”
“We worked on some of the same raids. You treated people the guild would rather have left behind. I knew you as a colleague. Not as a member of your family.”
“Did I know your ability?”
“You knew about Gravekeeper. In that life it didn’t offer me Weak-Point Sight.”
“What did it do?”
“It showed names and causes of death. I used it to identify people when the records were incomplete.”
“And now it offers abilities from the dead.”
“After I fulfilled your father’s request, it offered one. I don’t know whether that will happen every time, or what makes it possible.”
Tessa looked at the list on her page. She put a small mark beside the line about the dungeon.
“The map?”
“I saw a report after another team recovered the crystal. I helped carry the find afterward. I remembered the route and the buyer. I assumed the gate might still hold the same crystal, but it opened earlier here and the route had changed.”
“You knew all that when I asked you in the clinic.”
“Yes.”
“And you chose not to tell me.”
“Yes.”
She did not soften at his admission. “Why?”
“Because I thought you wouldn’t believe me. Because I was afraid anyone who knew might be questioned about it. And because if I told you I’d seen you in another life, I thought you might decide to keep away from me.”
“You thought I might make a decision you didn’t like.”
“Yes.”
“That’s different from protecting me.”
He had no defense that would make it less true. “It is.”
Tessa closed the notebook, then opened it again. “When you told me not to join the expedition, were you seeing me or the person you remember?”
“I was seeing you. I was also remembering her.”
“She was me, according to you.”
“Yes. But she had lived through years you haven’t. I don’t know what choices led her to Aegis, or what you’ll choose now.”
“You spoke as if you did.”
“I was afraid the same thing would happen.”
“And you thought keeping me out of a gate would stop it?”
“I thought it would keep you away from one danger.”
She leaned back. “My father died in a building, not a gate. I can stay here and people can still be hurt.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because you kept trying to move me away from the work instead of telling me what you feared.”
Eli looked at the table. The wood had a shallow circular stain where a cup had stood too long. He traced its edge with his eyes, resisting the desire to explain himself until she stopped being angry.
“In the passage where I died,” he said, “I heard you trying to get to me. I couldn’t make you hear me telling you to leave. When I saw you at the building, I thought if I could keep you far enough from danger, you wouldn’t have to make that choice again.”
Tessa’s voice was quiet. “I haven’t made that choice.”
“No.”
“And you don’t know why the other person did.”
“No.”
“Then don’t make her decision mine.”
He nodded. He could feel the memory of her voice as clearly as he had felt the weight of the rescue sheet. The fact that it was real to him did not mean it belonged to the woman across the table. She had her own memories, including the one of him calling her by a name she had not given him permission to use.
“Did my father die in that life?” she asked.
Eli hesitated. “I never met him there. You told me your father died in the first outbreaks, and I later recognized his name on a casualty list. I didn’t know the details of his death.”
“Did I tell you the details?”
“No.”
“Did I have the clinic?”
“Yes. You spoke about your clinic and the volunteers there. I didn’t know where it was or when you had started it.”
She looked around the storeroom, at the shelves, the folding screen, and the handwritten sign near the door. “Then I still have choices about what happens to it.”
“The outbreak happened earlier too. The gate route was different.”
“Your memory of the future isn’t a schedule.”
“I thought it could be, before those things changed.”
“Did you tell anyone else?”
“No.”
“Not even the registry?”
“No.”
Tessa rested her hands on the closed notebook. “I don’t know what to do with this.”
“You don’t have to decide tonight.”
“I know. That’s my decision as well.”
He almost smiled at the correction. She did not.
Tessa went to the cabinet and checked that its lock had caught. The motion gave her a reason to stand with her back to him for a moment. When she returned, she carried the appointment book and opened it to the next day.
“Marisol needs to know if she should find someone else to carry supplies,” she said. “I can tell her you’re unavailable without telling her why. But if you know of a danger on that route, tell me now.”
“I don’t remember one on the route she’s taking. I haven’t checked today’s notices.”
“Then I’ll check them before she leaves. That is something we can do even if I never understand the rest of this.”
She wrote a reminder beside Marisol’s name and set the book aside. Eli noticed she had not crossed him off the schedule, but she had not promised him a place on it either.
“What can you prove?” she asked.
“The contract shows I asked about the gate route, but it doesn’t prove why. People heard me warn them about the wall. The ability is real, though I can’t prove where it came from without letting someone study it. I can tell you things I remember before they happen, if any of them still happen.”
“Would that put anyone at risk?”
“It shouldn’t have to. I remember small things as well as disasters.”
“Then we can discuss a test later.” She tapped the notebook. “I’m not agreeing that your story is true because parts of it fit. I’m also not calling you a liar because I can’t explain it.”
“That seems fair.”
“I don’t care whether it seems fair to you.” She took a breath. “I need time to think about what you told me and what it means for the clinic. Until then, if you learn anything specific about Pell or another threat, you tell me.”
“I will.”
“Not after you’ve decided what I should do.”
“Before.”
She wrote the word down. Then she drew a line beneath the list and closed the notebook for good.
Eli stood. His legs felt steadier than they had after the expedition, but his chest was tight. He had imagined confession as a door opening: one moment he carried the secret, the next it was shared. Instead the room held more questions than before, and Tessa had every reason to take them away from him.
At the door he said, “In the life I remember, you tried to help me. I don’t know what happened afterward. I won’t claim more than that.”
Tessa looked up. “And in this one, I asked you to let me decide whether to help.”
“Yes.”
“Remember that one too.”
He left the clinic and walked toward the main road. He did not see the man across the street lower his umbrella and follow after a pause. Behind Eli, Tessa remained at the table, looking at the four lines she had written before he arrived. She added a fifth: What can be checked without putting anyone in danger?