Back to the Bunk Bed

The first thing I noticed was the smell of cheap detergent and stale coffee — not the antiseptic sting of the hospital, not the copper tang of blood in my throat.

I sat up fast, heart hammering, and cracked my skull on the underside of a bunk bed.

"Scheiße," I hissed, and the word came out young. My voice. My *voice*. Not the ruined rasp of a man who'd spent his last months coughing into a tissue in a private clinic while his sister signed away his shares.

Grey light through a window with a broken blind. A desk buried under textbooks. A poster of a band I hadn't thought about in a decade, curling at the corners. I knew this room. I'd lived in it for three years, and I'd hated every square metre.

My hands. I held them up. No tremor. No yellowed nails. The scar on my left palm — from the workshop, from the summer I'd spent rebuilding an engine while Matthias Reinhardt hummed along to the radio — was fresh and pink, not the faded white line I remembered tracing in my final weeks.

I scrambled off the mattress and pawed through the mess on the desk until I found a newspaper, folded and coffee-ringed. I smoothed it flat.

*Süddeutsche Zeitung.* Friday, 12 September 2008.

I read it again. Then a third time. The ink didn't change.

Ten years. I had died on the fourteenth of March, 2018, alone in a room that smelled of bleach, and now I was standing in a student dormitory in Munich with a body that hadn't yet learned to flinch.

I laughed. It came out wrong — too loud, too broken — and I clamped a hand over my mouth, because the boy in the next room was asleep and in my first life I had never once spoken to him.

*Think.* That was the thing my father had beaten into me, and the thing that had kept me alive longest. *Think before you feel.*

But I felt everything. A decade of it. The boardroom where they'd voted me out. Elara's smile, frost-white, as she said, *You were never really one of us, were you, little brother?* The funeral where nobody cried. The hospital bed. The silence after.

I could find her right now. She'd be twenty-three, still an analyst at the family firm, still pretending to be harmless. I knew the exact café where she took her morning coffee. I knew she kept a spare key to the archive room taped under her desk drawer. I could walk in and end it before it began.

My hands had curled into fists. I made myself uncurl them, one finger at a time, the way Matthias had taught me when I was fourteen and furious at the world.

*Patience*, he'd said. *Anger's a tool, boy. You don't swing a hammer at everything that looks like a nail.*

Matthias. Who was alive. Who in my first life had died of a heart attack in the spring of 2011 — three weeks after Elara had him blacklisted from every workshop in Bavaria, three weeks after he'd told me he was tired and I'd been too busy climbing to listen.

I pulled on jeans and a jumper that smelled of dormitory mildew, grabbed my keys, and went out into the grey Munich morning.

---

The campus was the same. That was the obscenity of it. The same chestnut trees shedding early leaves, the same bicycles chained to the same railings, the same students hurrying with their trays in the Mensa queue. I walked past the lecture hall where I'd first met Sophie Lindqvist — she'd been arguing with a professor about a footnote, ink on her fingers, curls escaping a hairband — and stopped dead in the middle of the path.

The library. She'd be in the library. She always was on Friday mornings, in the third carrel on the left, with a stack of newspapers and a pen between her teeth.

I found her exactly there.

She looked up when my shadow fell across her table, and her eyebrows drew together. "Can I help you?"

Sophie. Twenty-four years old. Freckles. A dress the colour of weak tea, boots scuffed at the toes. In my first life I'd met her four years from now, at a press conference, and she'd asked me a question that had changed the shape of my career. In my first life I'd let her down.

"You're writing about the Berghof development," I said. "The one on the old railway land. The council vote's on Sunday."

Her pen stilled. "How did you know that?"

"The developer's bribing two councillors. Kessler and Brandt. There's a paper trail in the planning office — invoices to a consultancy that doesn't exist. You'll find it if you ask for the 2007 procurement files." I paused. "And in 2016 you'll win the Wächterpreis for a piece on the Voss family's labour practices in Bangladesh. You'll deserve it."

She stared at me. Then she laughed, uncertain. "That's — that's a very specific threat."

"It's not a threat. It's a gift." I leaned on the table, lowering my voice. "I know how that sounds. I don't care. Ask me something else. Anything. Something nobody could guess."

She bit her pen. Considered me. "What's my middle name?"

"Elisabeth. After your grandmother. You never use it because you hate how it sounds in a byline."

The colour drained from her face. "Who *are* you?"

"Someone who's been given a second chance and doesn't intend to waste it." I straightened. "Check the procurement files, Sophie. You'll find the invoices. And when you do — remember I came to you first."

I left her sitting there, pen forgotten, and walked out into the sunlight with my heart going like a drum.

I had no money. No name worth using. The Voss conglomerate would swallow me whole if I approached it now, and Elara would smell me coming from a hundred kilometres away.

But I had one call to make. One man who had believed in me when nobody else did, and who in my first life had died believing I'd forgotten him.

I found a payphone by the tram stop, fed it coins with shaking fingers, and dialled the number I still knew by heart.

It rang four times.

"Reinhardt," said a voice like gravel and coffee, and I had to press my forehead against the cold metal of the booth because my eyes had gone hot and stupid.

"Matthias," I said. "It's Kieran. I need your help."

A pause. "Kieran Voss?"

"The same." I swallowed. "I know it's been a while. I know I've got no right to ask. But I'm going to build something, and I want you to build it with me. Not for the Voss name. Against it."

The silence stretched so long I thought he'd hung up.

Then, low and wary and — underneath it, God help me — *hopeful*: "Where are you?"

I told him. I hung up. And standing there in the September light, with the whole ruined future still folded inside my skull and ten years of mistakes I hadn't made yet, I felt the first true thing I'd felt in a decade.

Not revenge. Not yet.

Hope. Fierce, defiant, and entirely my own.