Death Recorded for Tomorrow - Her Details. Her Trusted Doctor's Signature. Date of Death: Tomorrow - Nathan Ashborn

INTRO - Death Recorded for Tomorrow - Her Details. Her Trusted Doctor's Signature. Date of Death: Tomorrow.INTROWhen Lena Wysocka saw her own name in the field marked "deceased person," for several seconds she was certain she was reading someone else's document. She wasn't frightened. Not yet. She was sitting at the kitchen table with one leg tucked beneath the chair, her laptop open between a half-finished cup of coffee and a box of allergy tablets. A fine October rain fell beyond the windows of her Warsaw apartment. The glass reflected the lamp above the counter and her own face, a little pale after twelve hours of work, but unmistakably alive. The email had arrived at 10:47 p.m. Sender: Central Medical Records Archive. Subject: Document Made Available to Patient. Lena had almost deleted it. For the past several months, she had been receiving similar automated notifications after every appointment, test, or prescription change. She clicked only because she had undergone a CT scan two weeks earlier and was still waiting for the report. The attachment was not a test result. It was a death certificate. She slid a finger across the trackpad and enlarged the document. Surname: Wysocka. Given names: Lena Maria. Her PESEL number matched digit for digit. So did her date of birth. The address was outdated - the apartment she had moved out of a year and a half earlier - but it had been hers. This was not a random coincidence involving someone with the same name. Her eyes moved lower. Date of death: October 4, 2026. She looked at the bottom-right corner of the screen. October 3. 10:51 p.m. She laughed. The sound seemed so alien in the empty kitchen that she stopped immediately. "Very funny." She said it aloud, as if someone might be sitting on the other side of the laptop, waiting for her reaction. Her first thought was ordinary enough: a system error. Her second: fraud. Only the third made her straighten in her chair. The certificate looked real. Not like something someone had put together in a word processor. It had an identification number, a facility code, system markers, fields Lena did not even understand. At the top was the logo of St. Michael's Hospital, where she had been treated for more than ten years. She scrolled down. The immediate cause of death had been entered as a medical abbreviation. SCA. Lena knew what it meant. Sudden cardiac arrest. Below that: cardiopulmonary failure. And lower still was the doctor's name. Tomasz Radecki. This time she did not laugh. She read it again. Tomasz Radecki, MD, PhD. Medical license number. Electronic verification. Signature. Lena pulled her hands away from the keyboard. Dr. Radecki had been treating her for nine years. He was the one who had identified the arrhythmia another doctor had dismissed as stress. He was the one who had personally called her after one of her tests instead of waiting for the scheduled appointment. He was the one who kept saying that patients deserved the truth, even when the truth was uncomfortable. He was one of the very few people she trusted without reservation. Her phone lay on the table. Lena picked it up and dialed his number. One ring. Two. Three. Voicemail. She hung up. She glanced at the time. It was late. Radecki had a wife, children, a normal life. He should not be answering calls from a patient at nearly eleven at night. Except someone had just used his name to sign a document declaring her dead. Tomorrow. Lena opened the message details again. The sender address looked legitimate. The link led to the same portal she had used before. She was logged in through her own profile. The document was visible in her medical history. This was not an attachment sent by some anonymous stranger. The death certificate was actually in her patient record. She stood up from the table. Suddenly she needed to move. She crossed the living room and checked the front door even though she remembered locking it. Top lock. Bottom lock. Chain. Everything secure. She went to the window. Six floors below, the street was nearly empty. Wet asphalt reflected the streetlights. A white delivery van was parked outside the shop. Someone ran along the pavement beneath an umbrella. Nothing unusual. She returned to the laptop. There was one more detail on the document she had not noticed before. Time of death. 07:40. Lena stared at the four digits. At that time tomorrow, she would normally have been in her car. But on Sunday she was supposed to be somewhere else. At eight in the morning, Dr. Radecki had asked her to come to the hospital. Not for an appointment. For an additional test. The phone vibrated in her hand. Lena jerked so violently she nearly dropped it. A message. From: Tomasz Radecki. She opened it at once. "I saw you called. Is everything all right?" For a moment, she simply stared at the screen. Then she began to type. "I received a strange document. A death certificate. Mine. It has your signature on it." She read the sentence twice and pressed send. Two check marks appeared. Read. Ten seconds passed. Twenty. A minute. Radecki was typing. Then the indicator disappeared. He was typing again. Then stopped again. Finally, a reply arrived. "Don't open anything else. Don't call the hospital." Lena felt the tension that until then had been trapped somewhere beneath her breastbone move higher. She typed: "Why?" This time the answer came immediately. "Are you alone?" She looked at the door. A minute earlier, the question would have seemed absurd. Now she stood and switched off the kitchen light. "Yes." He did not respond for a long time. Lena called. The call was rejected. She tried again. Rejected. A third time. Radecki's phone was now switched off. The death certificate remained open on the laptop screen. Only then did Lena notice the small icon at the bottom of the document. Modification history. She clicked it. First entry: document created at 21:16. Second: authorized at 21:22. Third: made available to patient at 22:47. There was a fourth entry. Scheduled closure of patient record. Execution date: October 4, 2026, 08:00. Lena read it several times, trying to decide whether it could be some standard system function. She did not know. What she did know was that at eight in the morning she was supposed to be at the hospital. Her phone vibrated again. Not a message. A call from a private number. She stared at the screen until the fourth ring, then answered. "Hello?" For a moment there was no reply. Only a faint hiss. "Hello?" She heard breathing. Then a man said: "Ms. Wysocka, please don't come to the hospital tomorrow." She froze. "Who is this?" A brief silence. "If Dr. Radecki calls, please don't tell him that you spoke to me." The call ended. Lena immediately dialed Radecki. His phone was still off. She walked to the balcony door and looked down. The white delivery van was still parked outside the shop. This time its headlights were on. A few seconds later, it pulled away. Not toward the intersection. It drove slowly beneath her building. Lena stepped back from the window. The laptop made a short sound. The document refreshed. The doctor's name still read Tomasz Radecki. The date of death was still tomorrow. Only one field had changed. Time of death. Instead of 07:40, it now read: 23:30. Lena looked at the clock. 23:12.

Chapter 1 - Eighteen Minutes - Death Recorded for Tomorrow - Her Details. Her Trusted Doctor's Signature. Date of Death: Tomorrow.Chapter 1 - Eighteen MinutesLena stood against the wall between the balcony and the bookcase, staring at the time displayed on the death certificate. 23:30. Her phone said 23:12. For several seconds, nothing happened in the apartment. The refrigerator hummed steadily, somewhere one floor above someone dragged a chair, and outside, tires hissed across wet asphalt as a car passed. Everything remained exactly as it had been twenty minutes earlier, before her own death had become an entry in a system. Lena took a photo of the laptop screen with her phone. Then she took a screenshot on the laptop itself. She opened the document history and captured that too. 23:13. What unsettled her most was not that someone had entered a time of death. What unsettled her most was that someone had changed it. The first version had said 07:40 the following morning. Now someone was predicting that she would die in seventeen minutes. Or wanted her to believe she would. Radecki's phone was still switched off. For a moment Lena considered calling the private number back before remembering that she couldn't. She opened her call history, tapped the details, and found exactly what she expected: private number, twenty-seven-second call. "Please don't come to the hospital tomorrow." It had not sounded like a joke. Nor had it sounded like a warning from someone who had accidentally discovered an error in her medical records. She looked at the front door. She should call the police. The thought was so obvious that for a moment she was surprised she had not already done it. But the rest of the imagined conversation immediately followed in her head. Hello, someone issued my death certificate. Has anyone threatened you? I don't know. Has anyone tried to enter your apartment? No. Have you seen anyone suspicious? A white van. What make? I don't know. License plate? I don't have it. She knew how it would sound. She also knew that if nothing happened at 23:30, every minute after that would push the whole thing out of the category of danger and into the category of mistake, prank, or paranoia. Still, she dialed 112. The emergency operator spoke calmly. She did not laugh at her. She asked precise questions, and Lena answered them while becoming increasingly irritated by the uncertainty in her own replies. She gave her address, the name of the hospital, the doctor's name, described the call from the unknown man and the van. "Is anyone trying to enter your apartment right now?" "No." "Have you received a direct threat against your life?" Lena looked at the document. "Someone entered my time of death as fifteen minutes from now." There was a short pause on the other end. "I understand. I'm asking whether you received a message or verbal threat directed at you personally." "No. Not directly." The operator told her not to go into the hallway, not to open the door to anyone she did not know, and to wait for the police patrol. Lena felt a sudden, irrational sense of relief. Not because the police were going to solve the problem. Simply because someone besides her now knew about the death certificate. That alone made it stop feeling like a private nightmare trapped between the laptop screen and her own imagination. 23:17. She went into the bedroom and pulled a small bag from the wardrobe. She threw in her wallet, charger, car keys, medication, toiletry bag, and a sweatshirt. Then she stopped. What exactly was she doing? Packing to flee her own apartment because an anonymous voice had told her not to go to the hospital and a medical system claimed she would be dead before midnight. She took the sweatshirt out. A second later, she put it back in. Her phone vibrated. Tomasz Radecki. Not a call. A message. "Don't go to the test tomorrow. I did not schedule it." Cold spread through Lena's fingers. She replied immediately. "But I got a message from you." The typing dots appeared almost at once. "From where?" "Patient portal. Your name. Room 214. 8:00." He did not answer for half a minute. Then: "Take a screenshot. Don't delete anything." "What is happening?" Read. No reply. Lena opened the message about the additional test. It had been sitting there for four days. She had not paid attention to the details before because it looked like dozens of other hospital notifications. "Supplementary consultation - cardiology. Patient: Lena Wysocka. Attending physician: Tomasz Radecki, MD, PhD. 04.10.2026, 08:00, Room 214." She took a screenshot. 23:20. Someone buzzed the intercom. Lena froze. One short buzz. Then another. She approached the panel by the door but did not press the button to let anyone in. "Who is it?" A man's voice answered through the speaker. "Emergency medical services. Ms. Wysocka?" Lena pulled her face away from the intercom. For a moment, she thought she had misheard her own surname. "Excuse me?" "Emergency medical team. We have a call for Lena Wysocka." Her heart struck harder. "Who called you?" "Please let us in." "Who called you?" A brief exchange of voices sounded on the other end, too quiet for her to make out the words. "We have a report of loss of consciousness. Please open the entrance." Lena looked at her hands. "I haven't lost consciousness." This time the silence lasted longer. "Am I speaking to Lena Wysocka?" "Yes." "Are you alone?" The same question Radecki had asked her earlier. Lena did not answer. "Please wait a moment," the paramedic said. The intercom went silent. 23:22. Lena called the emergency number again. She gave the reference number from her earlier report, which she had received by text. "There's an ambulance outside my building," she said. "They claim someone reported that I lost consciousness." The operator told her to remain inside. "Is the ambulance real?" "We're checking." "Who sent them?" "Please stay on the line." Lena went to the window without turning on the light. The ambulance stood partly hidden behind the trees, a little farther from the entrance. Its emergency lights were off. She could see two people in reflective clothing. The white delivery van was gone. A waiting call appeared on her phone screen. Radecki. "The doctor is calling," she told the operator. "Answer him. The patrol is on the way." Lena switched calls. "Tomasz?" At first she heard traffic. "Are you at home?" "A man just called and told me not to tell you I'd spoken to him." "What?" "Someone called from a private number. He told me not to go to the hospital and not to tell you about the call." Radecki swore under his breath. In nine years, she had never heard him swear. "Lena, listen to me carefully. Do not open the door." "There's an ambulance outside." Silence. "What did you say?" "Someone reported that I'm unconscious." "Don't open." "They're real paramedics." "That doesn't matter." "How can it not matter?" "Because someone sent them there." Radecki's voice sounded different from usual. Not like a doctor explaining a result to a patient. The calm professional patience Lena always associated with his office was gone. Now every sentence came too quickly, like a man trying to keep pace with a situation he had already seen once before. "Tomasz. Tell me what is going on." "Not over the phone." "I have a death certificate with your signature on it." "That is not my signature." "The electronic verification says otherwise." "I know." That one word silenced her more effectively than anything else could have. "How do you know?" Radecki did not answer immediately. "Because you're not the first." The call dropped. Lena stared at the screen. 23:24. She tried calling back. Radecki's phone was unavailable again. The intercom buzzed for a third time. She ignored it. Someone knocked on the apartment door. Three hard blows. Lena backed into the living room. "Ms. Wysocka? Emergency medical services." They were already on her floor. She did not open the door. "Ms. Wysocka, can you hear us?" "Yes." "Are you all right?" "Yes." "We received a call regarding sudden cardiac arrest at this address." Not loss of consciousness. Sudden cardiac arrest. Exactly the same diagnosis abbreviated on the death certificate. SCA. Lena realized she had stopped breathing and forced herself to inhale slowly. "Who called?" "We don't have information about the caller. Please open the door. We'll check your vital signs and close the intervention." "The police are coming." Someone sighed on the other side. "Even better." The voice did not sound threatening. If anything, the paramedic sounded irritated rather than dangerous. "Just tell me one thing," Lena said. "What time did the call come in?" She heard rustling. "Twenty-three sixteen." Four minutes after her time of death had been changed to 23:30. "And what exactly was reported?" "Woman, thirty-eight years old, cardiac history, sudden loss of consciousness, suspected cardiac arrest." Lena was thirty-eight. Her medical record still contained her old home address. The hospital knew the current one because she had updated her information during her last appointment, but the death certificate showed the old address. Someone was using more than one source. Or a system that stored both. More footsteps sounded in the stairwell. "Police," a male voice said. Lena opened the door only after she saw the uniform through the peephole. Two paramedics and two police officers stood in the corridor. The paramedic, a man around forty, looked at her with a mixture of relief and annoyance. "Apparently conscious after all." "For now." The female officer frowned. "Ms. Lena Wysocka?" Lena nodded and let the officers in. The paramedics remained at the threshold. One of them asked permission to perform a basic examination. Lena considered refusing for a second, then realized how absurd that would be. If someone really was planning to exploit her cardiac history, the last thing she needed was to genuinely faint from stress. Her blood pressure was elevated. So was her pulse. Otherwise, nothing suggested an immediate medical emergency. "Did the caller know about your medical conditions?" the officer asked. "Anyone with access to my records would." Lena showed her the death certificate. The officer studied the screen for a long time. "Can you send this to me?" "Yes." "And the messages from your doctor." Lena hesitated. Radecki had explicitly told her not to call the hospital. He had not told her to hide his messages from the police. She sent the screenshots. 23:29. The paramedics were just leaving when Lena remembered the time. She turned the laptop toward the officers. 23:30 appeared in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Nothing happened. No sound. No knock at the door. No sudden shortness of breath. Lena almost felt relieved. Then the patient portal refreshed by itself. The death certificate disappeared. In its place appeared a message: "Document unavailable." She clicked the history. No document. She opened notifications. The email still existed, but the link led to a blank page. "It was here a second ago," she said. The officer leaned over the screen. "You have the photos." "That's not the point." Lena opened her medical record. Tests, appointments, prescriptions. She scrolled quickly. The CT scan from two weeks ago. A checkup from three months earlier. Holter monitoring. Echocardiogram. Lab tests. The appointment scheduled for eight the following morning had vanished along with the death certificate. As if it had never existed. Lena's phone vibrated. A message from Radecki. One sentence. "If the document disappeared exactly at 23:30, you're no longer a target for today." Lena read it twice. The police officer standing beside her noticed the change in her expression. "What happened?" She handed him the phone. He read the message. "What does that mean?" "I don't know." But Lena knew one thing now. Tomasz Radecki knew far more than he had told her. And the man she had trusted with her heart for nine years had just treated the fact that she had not died before midnight as good news.

Chapter 2 - The Patient Who Wasn't There - Death Recorded for Tomorrow - Her Details. Her Trusted Doctor's Signature. Date of Death: Tomorrow.Chapter 2 - The Patient Who Wasn't ThereThe police stayed until one in the morning. They took down her details, photographed the screen, wrote down Radecki's name and the phone number that could no longer be reached. Lena told the same story twice. The second time, her own words sounded like someone else's account: death certificate, changed time, anonymous call, ambulance dispatch, messages from her doctor. None of those things, taken separately, had to mean danger. Together, they formed something no one in the room seemed able to name. The policewoman, Sergeant Marta Kwiecień, did not try to reassure her. Lena appreciated that most of all. "If I were you, I wouldn't go to the hospital in the morning," Kwiecień said at the door. "At least not alone." "The doctor said the same thing." "The doctor is also the man whose credentials appear on that document." "Do you think he could be involved?" "I think we don't know anything yet." Kwiecień handed her a slip of paper with the case number. "If anyone shows up, calls you, or anything happens that concerns you, please don't try to investigate it yourself." Lena almost smiled. "So I shouldn't do exactly what I'm planning to do." The officer looked at her more carefully. "That wasn't a joke." "Neither was mine." The door closed behind them at 1:07. Lena did not sleep. She tried, but every creak in the plumbing sounded like footsteps. Twice she checked the lock. Once she looked through the window. At 2:15, a white delivery van was once again parked across the street, but when she took a photo and zoomed in, she saw a bakery logo on the door. It drove away at 3:40. Under normal circumstances, she would have taken that as proof that fear had begun interpreting the world for her. The problem was that a few hours earlier she had thought the same thing about the death certificate. At 5:18, she finally fell asleep on the sofa. The phone woke her at 6:42. Radecki's number. She answered before her eyes were fully open. "Where are you?" No greeting. "At home." "Were the police there?" "How do you know?" "You texted me." Lena sat up. She did not remember doing that. She checked the conversation. At 00:11 she had indeed sent him a message: "The police are here. The certificate disappeared." Exhaustion. "They wanted to contact you." "I know." "Did you speak to them?" "Not yet." "Why?" "Because I need to talk to you first." Lena put both feet on the floor. "I'm not going to the hospital." "Good." "And I'm not meeting you somewhere you choose without an explanation." She heard a heavy breath on the other end. "There's a café near Krasiński Garden. It opens at seven." "A public place?" "Yes." "I'm bringing someone." "No." "That wasn't a request." "Lena, the fewer people..." "Don't finish that sentence." Radecki went quiet. "All right," he said at last. "Bring whoever you want. Just not anyone from the hospital." "Could someone at the hospital be involved?" Silence again. "Seven fifteen." He hung up. Lena dialed her sister. Then deleted the number before the call connected. Aneta lived about forty kilometers outside Warsaw, had two children, and had inherited their mother's gift for panic much more strongly than Lena had. Dragging her into something Lena herself did not understand made no sense. The second name that came to mind was Paweł. She hesitated longer. Paweł Zawadzki was her ex-partner, and for the past year the word ex had remained the only uncomplicated thing about their relationship. They had separated without betrayal, without screaming, without one single event they could point to as the reason. Over the years, they had simply become very good at postponing every important conversation until one day they discovered there was nothing left between them except logistics. And yet, three months earlier, when Lena's car broke down outside Radom, he had been the one she called. And he had come. She dialed. "Lena?" His voice was thick with sleep. "I need you to come with me to a meeting." "What time is it?" "In half an hour." "That wasn't an answer." "In half an hour, Paweł." Silence. "Did something happen?" "Yes." His tone changed immediately. "Where are you?" Twenty-five minutes later she was sitting beside him in his car. She did not tell him everything. She showed him the screenshot of the death certificate, Radecki's messages, and the photo of the blank portal page. Paweł drove without comment until they stopped at a red light. "Tell me this is some kind of security test at your company." "No." "Or an anti-phishing campaign." "No." "And the doctor says he didn't issue the document." "Yes." "But he knew it would disappear." "Apparently." Paweł looked at her. "Why did the police let you stay alone?" "Because they didn't establish that anyone had actually tried to kill me." "What about the ambulance?" "It was real." "Someone sent a real ambulance to a living woman whose death certificate had been issued minutes earlier." Lena looked through the windshield. "I know how it sounds." "No, Lena. I think you're only just starting to understand how it sounds." Radecki was already sitting in the café. He did not look like a man who had spent a peaceful night. He wore a dark sweater beneath his jacket, his hair was carelessly arranged, and there was two days' worth of stubble on his face, something Lena had never seen on him before. An untouched coffee stood on the table. When he saw Paweł, his mouth tightened, but he said nothing. "Paweł Zawadzki," Paweł introduced himself. "Tomasz Radecki." They did not shake hands. Lena sat opposite the doctor. "You have five minutes before I call the policewoman handling the case and tell her where you are." Radecki looked at his watch. "Then you've already wasted ten seconds." "Tomasz." "All right." He slid his phone into the middle of the table. On the screen was a photograph of a document similar to the one Lena had seen the previous evening. A different name. Jerzy Orłowski. Sixty-two years old. Date of death: August 14, 2026. Certifying physician: Tomasz Radecki. "Who is he?" "He was my patient." "Was?" Radecki swiped. The second image showed an obituary notice. Jerzy Orłowski had died on August fifteenth. One day later than the certificate said. Lena looked at the doctor. "What exactly is this supposed to prove?" "That your certificate isn't the first." "You told me that yesterday." "I didn't tell you everything." "Then start." Radecki looked at Paweł. "Does he need to hear this?" "Yes." The doctor did not argue. "Orłowski came to me in May. Arrhythmia, moderate heart failure, nothing that at the time would have justified expecting sudden death. On the morning of August fourteenth, I saw that his record had been closed in the system." "What does that mean?" "Status: deceased. Date of death entered as that same day." "And he was dead?" "He was alive. I spoke to him by phone around eleven." Paweł leaned forward. "Did you report it?" "To IT. Administration. Medical management. The status was reversed after several minutes. I was told a record had been pulled incorrectly from an external system." "And the death certificate?" "I saw it later. It carried my electronic signature." "Which you didn't provide," Paweł said. "No." Lena looked again at the obituary. "How did he die?" Radecki tightened his fingers around his cup. "The next day he was found unconscious at home. The emergency team attempted resuscitation. It failed." "Cause?" "Sudden cardiac arrest." The hiss of the coffee machine and the conversations at neighboring tables disappeared from Lena's awareness. "Same as mine." "Yes." "And what did you do then?" "I started asking questions." "The police?" "I had no evidence of a crime. I had a system error and the death of a man with heart disease." "You had a document issued before his death." "One that disappeared." Irritation rose in Lena. "I have photos." "So did I." "Then what?" Radecki unlocked his phone again. "A photo doesn't tell you who created the document. The system log I received from IT said the authorization came from my account and from the device in my office." "Were you in your office?" "I was on vacation in Croatia." Paweł leaned back. "That can be verified." "I know." "And was it?" "Administration concluded that my account might have remained active on the terminal. They changed the password. They closed the matter as a procedural violation." Lena stared at him. "But you didn't." "No." Radecki moved to another image. Katarzyna Mielnik. Forty-seven years old. Another certificate. Date of death: September 2. Doctor: Tomasz Radecki. "Did she die too?" "No." Lena looked up. "She's alive?" "I don't know." "How can you not know?" "Because on September second she came in for a test." "To see you?" "She was supposed to come to me. At least that's what the notification in her portal said." A knot tightened in Lena's stomach. "You didn't schedule it." "No." "What time?" "Seven thirty." "And?" "She never reached my office. I tried to contact her for several days. Her phone stopped answering. Her correspondence address turned out to be outdated." "Did you report her missing?" "I'm not family. I passed the matter to administration and the police when I believed there was reason for concern." "What did the police say?" "That there was no missing-person report from any relative." "And the death certificate?" "It disappeared the same day." Lena put both hands on the table. "So we have a man who died one day after his death certificate was created, a woman who disappeared after a fake appointment, and me." "Yes." "All your patients." Radecki did not answer. That was enough. Paweł was the first to say aloud what had already formed in Lena's mind. "Either someone is using your account, or you're the common denominator." "I know." Radecki said it without indignation. "That's why I didn't want Lena going to the hospital today." "Why didn't you go to the police immediately after Orłowski?" Paweł asked. "I went after Mielnik." Lena frowned. "Yesterday you said that was when you started asking questions." "Because it was." "And?" Radecki looked around the room. "Someone knew about my report before I had even left the station." "How do you know?" "I received a message that evening." He pulled a second phone from his pocket. An old model, scratched, no case. He showed them a photo of the screen. "That was a mistake. Don't turn it into a problem." No number. Another message: "You have a family. Start behaving like someone who remembers that." Lena looked at him. "Why didn't you show that to the police?" "I did." "And?" "They checked what they could. The number was inactive. They found no direct connection to the hospital." Paweł crossed his arms. "So for a month you've known someone may be manipulating patient records, and you've still been going to work as normal?" "What exactly was I supposed to do? Resign and leave everything there to the people I suspect?" "Do you suspect anyone specifically?" Radecki looked at Lena, not Paweł. "I still don't know who I'm supposed to suspect." "Yesterday you knew the document would disappear at 23:30." "I guessed." "You wrote that I wasn't a target 'for today' anymore." "Because the same thing happened with Orłowski." A chill ran down Lena's back. "What happened?" "The first version of his document that I saw had a time of death." "What time?" "18:10." "Did he die then?" "No. About an hour before six, someone called an ambulance to his home reporting chest pain. He was home, felt fine, and refused transport. The certificate disappeared a few minutes after the time written on it." Lena stared at him. "And the next day he actually died." "Yes." "So the first attempt didn't work." Radecki said nothing. For the first time since the conversation began, he looked as if he genuinely wanted to be anywhere else. "Is that how you think of them?" Lena pressed. "As attempts?" "I don't know what they are." "But you think someone tried to kill Orłowski." "I think there is a possibility I can no longer ignore." "And Mielnik?" "I don't know." "And me?" "That's why we're sitting here." Lena picked up her phone. "I'm calling Kwiecień." Radecki caught her wrist. Paweł shot to his feet. "Let her go." Radecki released her immediately. "I'm sorry." "Touch me again without permission and I walk out," Lena said. "I understand." "No, you don't. Yesterday my own doctor told me I wasn't the first person to receive a death certificate before dying. Today I find out one of those people really is dead, another disappeared, and you've been conducting your own investigation for weeks." "Not an investigation." "What do you call it?" Radecki looked out the window. "An attempt to understand why those particular patients were selected." Lena stopped dialing. "What did you find?" Radecki hesitated. Too long. "Tomasz." "Orłowski, Mielnik, and you don't have the same disease." "I already know that." "You weren't treated on the same ward. You don't have the same insurer. You don't live in the same district. You don't use the same pharmacy. No common employer or family doctor." "Except you." "Except me." "So nothing." "There is one thing." Radecki unlocked his phone and opened a table. Three names. Jerzy Orłowski. Katarzyna Mielnik. Lena Wysocka. A date appeared beside each. Lena recognized hers. September 17. "What is this?" "The date someone opened your complete medical records from the same administrative account." "Who?" "The account has no person's name attached." "How is that possible?" "It's a technical account used during migration between systems." Paweł leaned closer to the screen. "Who has access to it?" "According to the official documentation, no one on a day-to-day basis." "That's not a very convincing answer." "Because it isn't." Lena pointed at the date beside her own name. "September seventeenth. Why then?" "I don't know." "When did I receive the referral for the CT scan?" Radecki looked up. "The eighteenth." Lena's stomach tightened harder. "From you." "Yes." "Did you issue the referral?" Radecki was silent. "Tomasz." "No." For a moment, none of them spoke. Lena remembered the notification on her phone, the referral she had assumed was routine. The CT scan performed two weeks ago. The technicians. The contrast. Waiting for the report. Her assumption that Radecki simply wanted a closer look at the result of an earlier examination. "That referral wasn't from you either?" "No." "What about the scan?" "The scan was apparently performed." "The result?" "I never saw it." "What do you mean you never saw it? I've been waiting for it for two weeks." Radecki turned the screen toward her. "There is no CT scan in your medical record from the last six months." Lena stood. The chair scraped loudly across the floor. "I had one." Several people at neighboring tables turned their heads. "I know you're saying you did." "I'm not saying it. I was there. I lay inside the scanner. They gave me contrast. I signed a consent form." "Where?" "At St. Michael's." "In the main diagnostic department?" Lena opened her mouth. And then realized the answer was no. The scan had been performed in a building on the other side of the hospital complex, one she had never entered before. The notification had directed her to "Diagnostic Unit 4B." There had been no normal queue at reception. A woman checked her ID, put a wristband on her, and led her straight through. At the time, Lena had assumed it was a new part of the hospital. "Building B," she said. "Entrance from the technical parking lot." Radecki went pale. "St. Michael's does not have a CT unit there." Paweł looked first at the doctor, then at Lena. "What is in that building?" Radecki answered very quietly. "Archives. Administration for external studies. Several rooms leased to private entities." "So who performed her CT scan?" "I don't know." Lena reached for her jacket. "We're going there." "No." "I'm not asking." Radecki stood as well. "It's Sunday. The building will be closed." "Yesterday I was supposed to die at 23:30. Today I was supposed to be at eight for a test you didn't order. I'm not waiting until Monday." "Lena..." "You can stay." Paweł picked up his keys. "I'm going with her." Radecki closed his eyes for a second. "If we go, nobody goes inside alone." "'If'?" "I'm coming with you." They left the café at 7:51. At 7:58, Paweł's car turned onto the street leading toward the hospital complex. Lena glanced automatically at the clock on the dashboard. Two minutes until the fake appointment. A woman in a navy uniform stood outside the entrance to Building B. Not security. Not a nurse. She held a tablet. As the car slowed, she raised her head. She looked through the windshield directly at Lena. Then tapped something on the screen. Lena's phone vibrated. A new notification from the hospital portal. "Patient Lena Wysocka failed to attend scheduled examination." Below it was the time. 08:00. And one more line: "Procedure completed - patient absent." Radecki read the message over her shoulder. "Don't get out," he said. Lena looked back toward the entrance. The woman with the tablet was already gone.