Chapter 5

# Chapter 5: The Warehouse

"Ma'am, you've ordered three hundred tons of rice, forty generators, and a lot of salt. Are you opening a restaurant?"

"No," I said. "A funeral."

Hank Dolan, the broker, laughed like I had made a joke. Then he looked at my face and stopped.

It was Saturday morning, three days before the sky broke. We stood in the yard of an old cold-storage facility on the east edge of the city, a gray concrete block with no windows and a loading dock big enough for six trucks. It had been empty for two years. The owner wanted it gone. I had bought it the day before for cash, under Harrow Holdings, and Julian would never find it.

"Where do you want the generators?" Hank asked.

"Inside, along the north wall. Fuel goes in the sub-basement. Water filters next to them, and I want the steel plates welded over every window and the back door by tomorrow night."

"Tomorrow night? Ma'am, that's forty men working overtime."

"Then pay them double. Triple, if they stay quiet."

He scratched his neck. "Mind if I ask what you're so afraid of?"

I looked at the sky, which was a clean, perfect blue.

"Everything," I said. "Start moving."

By noon the yard was full of trucks. Rice, beans, canned meat, flour, sugar, salt, in pallets so tall they blocked the sun. I checked every manifest myself. The second wave of trucks brought antibiotics, bandages, sutures, painkillers, and boxes of insulin that had cost me a favor from a pharmacist I had never met. The third brought gasoline in steel drums, and the fourth brought rolls of barbed wire.

In my first life, I had spent forty days learning what mattered. Water first, then medicine, then fuel, then food. Guns were useless against what was coming, but walls were not. Light was not. Noise was the enemy. I wrote the list from memory and checked every line.

Around two o'clock, Dale Mercer called.

"Your ex-husband has been calling every bank in the city," he said. "He knows the trust is frozen. His mother is telling anyone who will listen that you've had a breakdown. And Camille Voss left the apartment on Alder Street an hour ago with two suitcases."

"Where did she go?"

"Julian's mother's house."

"Good. Let them sit in one place." I leaned against a stack of crates. "Keep watching, Dale. And if you have family, get them out of the city by Monday night."

A long pause. "That's an odd thing to say."

"It's a good thing to do."

I hung up before he could ask.

By six the sun was dropping and the workers had gone to eat. I was alone in the main hall with a clipboard, counting the last crates by flashlight. The warehouse hummed with the low sound of cooling machinery. It smelled like cold concrete and cardboard.

I had reached the forty-first pallet when the dread hit me.

It started at the back of my neck. A prickle, then a weight, as if someone had set an ice cube against my spine. I stopped counting. The skin on my arms rose and my heart began to thud, slow and hard.

I knew this feeling.

It was the feeling I'd had in the swimming pool, forty days into the end of the world, a minute before the Skitters crawled over the cover. I had never understood it then. I had only learned to trust it.

"No," I whispered. "It's three days away. It can't be now."

The glass of water in my left hand cracked.

I looked down. A thin white line ran from the rim to the base. Then another. The water inside began to shiver, tiny rings spreading outward though nothing touched it.

The glass shattered in my grip.

I didn't feel the cut. I felt my palm burn instead, a sudden, pure heat that traveled up my wrist like a lit fuse. I dropped the clipboard and held my hand up to the flashlight beam.

A mark was glowing in my skin.

It was thin and red, a curved line like the edge of a crescent, with a second line crossing it. It pulsed once, bright as a coal. My blood from the broken glass ran toward it and vanished, as if the mark were drinking it.

"What the hell," I breathed.

I tried to rub it away. It didn't smear. I pressed my thumb against it and felt a low vibration, like a heartbeat that wasn't mine. Then the glow faded and the skin went smooth and pale, and the cut was gone too, as if I had imagined the whole thing.

I stood frozen in the cold hall, my pulse roaring in my ears.

*Whatever that was, it wasn't in my first life.*

The flashlight went out.

So did the emergency lamps. So did the strip lights along the ceiling, and the red exit sign above the loading dock, and the little green LED on the generator panel. The dark came down so completely that I could not see my own hand.

"Hello?" I said. My voice sounded very small. "Hank? Is anyone there?"

Nothing. Not a footstep. Not even the hum of the machines, which had stopped.

I took a step back and bumped into a crate. The mark on my palm began to burn again, slowly this time, and the cold at my neck turned into breath.

Warm breath. Right beside my ear.

"Finally," something whispered, in a voice like paper being torn. "You're awake, Maiden."