Chapter 4: Ninety Days

I woke up screaming, hands flying to my throat like I was still choking on the last second of a life that had already ended — before I realized I wasn’t dying. I was remembering.

The warehouse. The gunshots. Ethan’s face as he turned away. Mia’s tears that never once turned into action. And then the phone on my nightstand, its screen glowing with a date that stopped every muscle in my body.

Ninety days.

Ninety days before the outbreak. Before the riots, the blackout, before people started turning on each other to survive. Before Ethan let me die on a rooftop with the last bitter thought that I should have known better.

I was alive. I was in my old bedroom. And I remembered everything.

The girl who used to believe people were naturally good had died on that rooftop. Whoever woke up in her place understood something the rest of the world hadn’t learned yet: I had ninety days, a full memory of how the world ended, and I was not going to spend them saving people who’d let me die.

I was going to save myself.

My phone buzzed. Good morning, baby. Did you sleep well? Ethan. I remembered exactly what those words had meant the last time — the same warmth right before he took my supplies and left me behind. I typed one word back — Yes — no hearts, no softness, and set the phone down before I could feel anything about it.

Then I opened a notebook and wrote three words at the top of the page: NINETY DAYS. Beneath it, a list: food, water, medicine, fuel, weapons, a vehicle, a location no one else knew about. And beneath that, the one thing that mattered more than any of it — I remembered which stocks would spike before the collapse, which currency would explode in value right before the financial system failed. I didn’t have the money to act on it yet. That was the first problem to solve.

By noon I’d moved what savings I had into three positions I remembered climbing hard in the coming weeks, and opened a document titled PROJECT SURVIVAL. I was reaching for my coffee when the memory hit — a flash of white light, glass walls, a symbol, a name.

EVA-9.

I’d heard scientists say it during the early days of the outbreak, back when everyone still called it a vaccine, before anyone understood it had never only been that. And somewhere in that memory was a name: Damian Cross. One of the most powerful men left standing in the apocalypse — cold, untouchable, dangerous, and the same man who’d once tried to help me, for reasons I never understood before I died.

I searched his name. Businessman. Investor. Billionaire. CEO of Cross International. Then a headline stopped me cold: CROSS INTERNATIONAL ANNOUNCES NEW PARTNERSHIP WITH VALLIS BIOTECH — the company behind EVA-9. The partnership had been signed two months ago. He was already involved, right now, ninety days before anyone would need him to be.

I wrote his name under INVESTIGATE and closed the laptop just as my phone rang. Mia.

I had the strangest dream. It felt so real.

My blood went cold. If she remembered too, everything I thought I knew about this second chance was wrong. I told myself it was nothing and set the phone down, the feeling refusing to fade.

That’s when I saw the car.

Black, parked directly across the street, windows tinted too dark to see through. It hadn’t been there ten minutes ago. I watched it for a long moment before the passenger door opened and a man stepped out — tall, broad-shouldered, dark hair, a black suit that looked expensive in a way that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with control.

He looked up. Directly at my window. Directly at me.

And I stopped breathing, because I knew that face from the headline I’d just read — Damian Cross — but that wasn’t what made my chest go tight. It was his eyes. Cold. Controlled. The same eyes that had looked at me over a rifle in a burning university hallway and told me the apocalypse had already started.

Adrian.

It couldn’t be. Adrian had no last name, no company, no photograph on a business page. Adrian was a soldier who’d bled for me in a stairwell that hadn’t happened yet, wouldn’t happen for ninety more days — and yet I knew those eyes the way you know your own reflection, and my body had recognized him half a second before my mind caught up and told me it was impossible.

He lifted his phone.

Mine buzzed a second later. An unknown number.

If you’re planning to survive what’s coming, stop trusting the people closest to you.

I looked up again. The man and the car were already gone, the street empty like neither had ever been there. I stared at the message, then at the date still glowing on my screen, and understood with quiet, irreversible certainty that I wasn’t the only one who knew what was coming.

And whoever Damian Cross really was, he’d known my face before I’d ever seen his.