Cold
Eggs

Dr. Raines gave her six days. He said it the way you said something when you already knew the answer but needed the other person to arrive at it themselves — gently, without pressure, with the specific patience of someone who had a recording of her voice saying yes and therefore already knew how this ended, but was decent enough not to mention that part again.

He gave her a number. A direct line, not the institute switchboard. He said she could call at any hour and he meant it. He said there were people who could answer questions she hadn't thought to ask yet, and that this was normal, and that most people's first twenty-four hours with this information felt like carrying something too large to put down and too heavy to keep holding.

He said: "I'm sorry this arrived on a Thursday morning."

She almost laughed at that. Almost.

She thanked him. She ended the call.

The kitchen was very quiet. The robot had retreated to its charging cabinet at some point during the call — she hadn't noticed when, only that it was gone now, the hallway door closed with its usual soft click, giving them the room, as it always gave her the room once it had learned she needed it.

The eggs on the counter had gone completely cold.

The coffee was still warm — the passive thermal surface holding it exactly where she'd left it — and Kira picked it up and held it in both hands because she needed something to do with her hands and this was the thing they knew how to do.

Sabrina sat across the table and looked at her.

Kira looked back.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

It was Sabrina who spoke first. Because it was always Sabrina who spoke first.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," Kira said.

Another silence.

"A seed," Sabrina said.

"A seed."

"Wrapped in fabric."

"Wrapped in fabric."

"From a hundred years in the future."

"From a hundred years in the future."

Sabrina picked up the cold eggs and ate a forkful without looking at them. "I just need to say it all out loud a few times before I can have thoughts about it."

"That's fair."

"Your voice. On a recording. Saying yes. Before you said it."

"Yes."

"And a man named Elliot Raines who sounds like he hasn't slept in eleven days—"

"He sounds like he hasn't slept since 2025."

"—who needs you specifically. First on a list. Six days from now." Sabrina set down the fork. She looked at Kira with the expression she had worn in the car, in the waiting room, on the bridge — the look that meant she was setting aside whatever she personally felt in order to be fully present for what Kira needed. "What are you thinking. Right now. Not what you should think. What you actually think."

Kira set down the coffee mug. She looked at the table — the grain of it, how it had been a desk this morning and was now something else, a place where the shape of the next six days had just been handed to her by a man in Seattle who already knew how she'd answer.

"I think," she said slowly, "that a hundred years from now, something that has been built is still alive. And I think that whatever that thing is, it needs to tell us something. And I think whoever sent that list knows that I — specifically, first, out of seventeen people — am the one who should hear it first."

"Why you?" Sabrina asked. Not challenging. Genuinely asking.

"I don't know. I've been writing about the future for six years. About what we're building, what we're losing, what we're becoming. Maybe that's why. Or maybe it's arbitrary and my name just happened to come first alphabetically on a list someone wrote by hand a hundred years from now, and there's no grand reason at all."

"Do you believe that?"

Kira was quiet for a moment. "No," she said. "I don't."

She thought about the city she'd walked through that morning. The clean air. The mountain. The world that had been persuaded, slowly and expensively, to take care of itself. She thought: whoever is still there, a hundred years from now, living in whatever came after all of this — they needed to reach back. They needed someone to come and see. And they needed that person to be someone who would understand what they were looking at.

Sabrina got up. She went to the counter, took both plates of cold eggs, set them in the robot's reclaim tray, and began making toast — finding the bread without being asked, as she found everything in Kira's apartment, the deep unthinking fluency of someone who had been letting themselves into this kitchen for three years.

Kira watched her do it.

"You're very calm," Kira said.

"I am absolutely not calm," Sabrina said pleasantly, dropping two slices into the toaster. "I am the least calm I have ever been in my life, including the night of the headaches, and the night of the bar, and both of those were significant. I am calm in the way — specifically in the way — that someone who once sat in a hospital waiting room for six hours is calm when the next large thing happens. You learn a kind of quiet. It's not peace. It's just the absence of screaming."

Kira looked at her. "I sat in the waiting room. Not you."

"Yes, and I was in the room with the diagnosis." Sabrina turned, leaned against the counter. "We were both in the thing. We just had different seats." A beat. "The toast is going to be two more minutes."

"Okay."

"And then after the toast," Sabrina said, "I am going to tell you about last night."

Kira blinked. She had genuinely, entirely, completely forgotten about last night. "The bar."

"The bar," Sabrina confirmed. "Because I have been sitting on the worst story of my life for two hours while time travel happened at your kitchen table, and I need to tell someone before it turns into something I can't laugh at anymore."

The toast came up. Sabrina buttered both pieces with the focused, methodical energy of someone putting something manageable between herself and something unmanageable. She handed one to Kira. She sat back down. She took a breath.

She told it the way Sabrina told everything — from the beginning, with full context, with characters properly introduced, with the specific digressions that turned out later to have been entirely necessary. She told Kira about Callum. About the jawline. About the fungal lattices and how he had said gardening back to her like it was something she had said cleverly. About the Zero-G pale ale and the BAC threshold she had carefully set and the terms and conditions she had not read.

She told her about paragraph four.

She told her about the pressure.

She told her about the override and the reroute and the three seconds of silence between songs.

She told her all of it — the smell, the mood lighting shifting to sympathetic lavender, Callum's expression that had not changed by even one single muscle, her own walk to the bathroom, the gait of someone trying to reclassify thirty seconds as belonging to someone else.

By the time she got to "even the bathroom knew, even the bathroom felt terrible for me" — Kira was laughing.

Not the polite kind. Not the kind you performed to be supportive. The real kind — the involuntary kind, the kind that came from somewhere deep and genuine and surprised her even though nothing about Sabrina had ever failed to eventually be funny.

She laughed until her eyes watered.

Sabrina watched her laugh with the expression of someone who had arrived at the exact destination they had been aiming for the entire journey.

Kira laughed again — the real kind, the helpless kind. And underneath it, holding it the way a river held its banks, was something that wasn't quite sadness and wasn't quite fear but was the specific feeling of a person who understood, with sudden and complete clarity, exactly what they had and exactly what it would cost to risk losing it.

Sabrina. Here. At this table. Telling this story. Alive.

Six days.

The laughter faded the way laughter faded — gradually, and then all at once, leaving a different quality of quiet behind it. The kind that had weight. The kind that knew what it was sitting next to.

Sabrina reached over and took the last piece of toast from Kira's plate. She ate it without ceremony. She looked at the wall display, which had gone back to its default — warm wood grain, the time in the corner, the temperature outside — as if the notification had been a dream and the morning had simply continued.

It had not been a dream.

"Can I ask you something?" Sabrina said.

"Yes."

"If the recording didn't exist. If you hadn't heard your own voice saying yes. If it was just — a physicist, a watch, a list, a seed, and six days to decide." She looked at Kira steadily. "What would you do?"

Kira thought about it. Actually thought about it — not the answer she should give, not the answer that sounded right, but the real one, the one that was forming somewhere underneath the fear and the wonder and the cold toast and the laughter.

She thought about the mountain above the rooftops. About the city that had learned to take care of itself. About the six-year-old question she had been writing around and toward for her entire career: what do we become, if we keep going? What does all of this turn into?

She thought about a seed, wrapped in fabric, carried a hundred years to say: something is still alive here.

She looked at Sabrina.

"I'd go," she said quietly. "I think I'd go."

Sabrina nodded once. The specific nod of someone who had already known the answer and had needed to hear it said out loud.

"Okay," she said. "Then we have six days. And the first thing we're going to do is make more eggs, because I need actual breakfast before I can help you figure out how to travel a hundred years into the future and come back."

She got up and went to the counter, and Kira sat at the table in the shifting morning light and listened to Sabrina open the refrigerator and say, with perfect ordinary confidence: "Do you want chives or just herbs?"