Apocalypse Countdown: No longer their stepping stone

Penny’s POV

I hurled my phone onto the mattress the second the final chapter of Apocalypse Rebirth loaded. Rage sat hot and heavy in my chest, the kind that made my hands shake.

I had started the novel out of boredom. I kept reading for the dumbest reason possible: the second female lead shared my name. Penelope Lang. Penny to anyone who mattered. It felt like a private joke from the universe, a tiny reason to care about a character who was clearly written to suffer.

Big mistake.

“Seriously?” I groaned at the ceiling. “She died like that?”

I grabbed the nearest pillow and flung it across the room. It hit the wall with a pathetic thud that only fueled my irritation.

Penny Lang had been pure cannon fodder. A loyal, trusting fool who possessed every advantage and still managed to throw them away for a one-sided friendship. The jade bangle alone should have been enough to guarantee her survival an interdimensional storage space the size of a warehouse, complete with a purifying spring. People in apocalypse novels would have killed for less. And she had handed it over to Ivy White, the sweet, fragile, reborn heroine, simply because Ivy asked with trembling lips and big wet eyes.

Ivy used the space to hoard supplies in the final days. Then, when the dead began to walk and the weather turned psychotic, she sent Penny into the red zones to scavenge while she sat safely behind barricades playing the delicate flower. Penny kept going back. Even after being used, discarded, and, she still called Ivy her best friend, like some tragic martyr in a bad stage play.

And the cherry on top? Lucas Zane.

The male lead. CEO, billionaire, one of the strongest survivors in the entire book, and so devoted to Penny it had actually hurt to read. She turned him down for years. Why? Because Ivy had a crush on him, and a “good friend” would never compete.

I scoffed into the empty room. “If I were her, I’d have told that fake white lotus to take a long walk off a short balcony.”

I crawled under the blanket still muttering. “If she’d just used her brain for five minutes…”

Sleep took me mid-complaint.

The first thing I noticed the next morning was the sheets.

They were too smooth. They slid against my skin like cool water, heavy, expensive, nothing like the scratchy clearance-bin cotton I had bought two years ago. My pulse jumped before my mind caught up.

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling was wrong. The light was wrong. The air itself felt faintly sweet with lavender and something richer underneath, like money had a scent. I sat up slowly. A plush white carpet stretched across the floor. An antique vanity gleamed in the corner. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed a skyline of glass and steel alive with morning traffic.

This was not my eight-hundred-and-sixty-square-foot apartment in a small Ohio city, complete with a leaky faucet and a neighbor who practiced drums at midnight.

“Where the hell am I?”

My voice came out wrong too softer, more melodic. I scrambled out of bed and stumbled toward the full-length mirror.

A stranger looked back at me.

She was young, with long, silky black hair and delicate features. Her skin was flawless, pale and luminous. Her almond-shaped eyes were gentle and bright. I knew that face. I had seen it described across hundreds of pages. I had imagined it so many times it had become familiar.

But it had never been mine.

I lifted my hands and stared. These were not my hands. Mine were rough from years of dishes and cheap detergent. These were tender and graceful, without a single callus.

Pain exploded behind my eyes.

It was so sharp I thought my skull would split. I crumpled against the vanity, clutching my head, wishing I could just smash it against the wall and be done. Then the memories came a flood of them, foreign and intimate at once. A childhood in a big house. Parents laughing at a dinner table. The sound of a phone call and a police officer’s careful voice. A black card handed over in a lawyer’s office. A best friend’s hand slipping into hers.

Ivy.

It took five full minutes for the pain to ebb, though it felt like an eternity. When it finally did, I knew exactly who I was.

I was Penny Lang, second female lead of Apocalypse Rebirth.

My knees gave out. I sat down hard on the edge of the bed.

No. No. This was a dream, a nightmare. Any second now I would wake up and laugh about it. I looked around again: the vanity, the enormous wardrobe stuffed with designer clothes, and on the bedside table, resting on a velvet cushion, the jade bangle.

Everything matched.

A chill crawled up my spine. I had transmigrated into the novel not as a nameless passerby or a background extra, but into the body of the girl I had spent last night insulting.

I waited. I counted to a hundred, then to three hundred. Nothing changed.

“Is this what I get,” I whispered, “for criticizing a fictional character?”

It was terrifying if I thought about it too long. So I decided not to. I forced myself to breathe deeply, hold it, let it out. At least I had not been dropped into some slum. This body came with a penthouse and a bottomless bank account.

But if I was truly inside the novel, that meant…

My eyes snapped to the bangle.

Today. Today was the day Ivy came to ask for it.

My fists clenched in the silk sheets. I was not going to be cannon fodder. I was not the same Penny Lang anymore.

The doorbell rang.

“Pen! Are you up?”

That voice. Sweet, gentle, and so innocent it practically dripped honey. Heat rushed into my face. My teeth were gritted before I realized it.

Ivy White. The reborn heroine.

In the novel she was a fragile beauty with a kind heart and a tragic past. In reality she had been reborn with full knowledge of the apocalypse and had chosen to tell no one. She had used that knowledge to save herself, and her first step was to manipulate the original Penny into surrendering the one treasure that could have saved them both.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to drag her out of her designer flats and throw her off the balcony. But I could not let her suspect anything was different. I had to be careful.

I grabbed the bangle, crossed the room, and pressed a panel on the wall beside the headboard. A hidden compartment slid open of course the original Penny had one. I tucked the bangle inside and sealed it.

“Coming!” I called, keeping my voice light.

I opened the door. Ivy stood in the hallway with her hands clasped and a bright smile on her pretty face. Her big, shining eyes were full of barely contained excitement.

If I had not known better, I might have thought it was because she was happy to see me.

No wonder the old Penny never stood a chance.