Chapter 13 - Reborn. Angry. In her own bed.

Morning should arrive gently.

Soft light. Slow awareness. The quiet, reasonable unfolding of a day that has not yet decided to ruin you.

Maya wakes up like she’s been dropped back into her body mid-fall.

Her eyes open. Her breath caught halfway between in and out.

Body already braced catches halfway in. Her muscles are already braced for impact that never comes.

There is no alley. No wall at her back. No hands.

Just sheets. Cotton. Warm. Clean in a way that feels almost obscene.

She doesn’t move. The first thought arrives sharp and uninvited.

Emotional truth: something is wrong.

Deflection: excellent. Again. Love the consistency.

Sharper truth: she is alive.

Then she examines that. Truly. No, something isn’t wrong. Something is different. And yes. I am alive. Don’t tell me it was all just a fucking dream!?

She lies there. Still. Listening.

Not for footsteps. Not for the slow drag of something that used to be human. For breathing.

She turns her head. Dex is there.

On his side, facing away from her, mouth slightly open, breathing slow and even like the world has never once asked anything difficult of him. The same face. The same softness. The same man who—

She stops the thought before it completes. Not because she can’t finish it. Because she doesn’t need to.

She lies still for a long moment, listening to the sound of him breathing, and catalogues the fact that it no longer means what it used to.

Then she sits up. Too quickly.

The room tilts, just for a second, like her body hasn’t caught up to the idea of not being on the ground, not being pinned, not being—

She plants her hands on the mattress and waits it out.

Solid. Stable. Real.

Her hands are clean. No cuts. No shaking. Whole.

“Okay,” she says quietly, and the word lands with more weight than it should.

Her voice sounds… different. More controlled, in a way it wasn’t before.

She swings her legs over the side of the bed and stands. The floor is warm under her feet, familiar in a way that feels almost suspicious, like the world is trying to convince her this is normal again.

It isn’t.

She crosses to the mirror and stops just short of it.

There’s a flicker of hesitation. Not fear, exactly, but something adjacent to it. A recognition that whatever she sees will confirm something she cannot un-know.

If it’s me, she thinks, then everything is still coming. Because no dream could have been that vivid for that long. No way.

She looks.

It’s her. Not the thinner, worn down, hollowed out by hunger and bad decisions and better ones that came too late version of her.

Just… her. Before. And there’s highlights in her hair that wasn’t there when the world ended. Ones that was there more than one winter ago…

Maya exhales slowly, like she’s been holding that breath since the alley and only just realised it.

“Right,” she says, softer this time.

Information first.

Always.

She turns, already scanning the room with a different kind of attention. Not as a place she lives, but as a space that contains things. Objects. Resources. Potential.

Her gaze lands on the bedside table.

The clock reads 6:12 AM.

Tuesday.

The date—

She steps closer, leans in, reads it once. Then again, because repetition confirms reality, and reality is something she now treats with professional suspicion.

It doesn’t change. Of course it doesn’t.

She knows this date. Not because something happens today. Because nothing does.

Because this is before the news breaks wrong, before the first reports get dismissed as isolated incidents, before the anchor smiles like his face is being held together by contract rather than comprehension.

Eighteen months.

Eighteen months before the world ends. Bang on target with those highlights.