2

That's the last thing I remember clearly, stone and timber pressing down from every direction at once, dust filling my throat where air should have been, my own scream cut short into something wet and small. 

Then there was nothing. No darkness, no light, no sense of up or down, just the absence of anything at all, like the whole world had switched itself off around me.

I don't know how long that lasted.

Then something pulled at me, hard, the way a hand yanks you back from the edge of sleep, and I gasped so violently I nearly threw myself off the bed.

My own bed.

I lay there for a second, chest heaving, sweat soaking through the back of my shirt, staring up at a ceiling I recognized down to the water stain in the corner my father had promised for two years to fix and never did. 

Soft morning light came through the curtains.

 Somewhere outside, a bird was making an obnoxious amount of noise for no reason.

My ribs.

I remembered the beam coming down, remembered bracing for a pain so total I wouldn't even have time to register it before it ended me. 

I pressed both hands flat against my ribs now, hard, waiting for the ache, the bruising, anything.

Nothing. 

No pain at all. My skin was just skin, unmarked, ordinary, exactly the way it had always been.

I sat up so fast my head spun.

"What the fuck,?" I said out loud, to nobody, my voice cracking on the second word. "What the actual fuck."

My hands were shaking. I turned them over, checked my palms, my arms, running my fingers over skin that should have been burned, crushed, gone, and finding nothing there but the unremarkable skin I'd had my whole life.

I was breathing. My heart was pounding hard enough that I could feel it in my throat. I was alive, sitting in my own childhood bedroom in my parents' house, wearing an old college t-shirt instead of a wedding dress, and none of it made any sense at all.

"It was a dream," I said, out loud, like saying it would make it true. "It was just a dream, Delphine, get it together."

My phone was sitting on the nightstand exactly where I always left it. 

I grabbed it so fast I nearly dropped it, and the screen lit up under my shaking thumb.

The date sat there at the top, plain and simple and completely wrong.

Ten days before the wedding.

I stared at it for a long time. Long enough that the screen dimmed and I had to tap it awake again just to make sure I hadn't misread it the first time.

"No," I said. "No, no, that's not, that's not possible..."

SURVIVAL PROTOCOL ACTIVE.

The words weren't spoken. They simply existed inside my head, cold and flat, with no mouth behind them and no warmth in them at all.

I dropped the phone.

"What the hell was that," I whispered, scrambling backward until my spine hit the headboard, heart slamming so hard now it actually hurt. "Who's there? Who said that?"

TIME UNTIL EVENT: 10 DAYS.

STATUS: UNPREPARED.

I sat there, frozen, staring at the empty air in front of me, at nothing, even though some rational part of my brain, screaming to be heard over the panic, knew the words weren't coming from anywhere in the room at all. 

They were coming from inside me.

"This isn't real," I said. "I hit my head, I'm still under the fucking church, this is some kind of dying brain thing..."

CONFIRMATION AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.

"I don't want confirmation, I want you to get the hell out of my head..."

CONFIRMATION AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.

I pressed both hands against my eyes and breathed in through my nose then out through my mouth, the way some therapist had taught me years ago for a panic attack that had nothing on whatever the hell this was.

"Fine," I said finally, barely above a whisper. "Confirm it, show me."

The words came fast then, cold and clean, like a list read off a screen only I could see.

DAY 4 FROM NOW: SEISMIC EVENT DETECTED, COASTAL REGION.

DAY 2 FROM NOW: EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM ACTIVATION, UNSCHEDULED.

DAY 0: EVENT.

"That's it? That's all you're giving me?"

ADDITIONAL DATA UNAVAILABLE.

"What does that even mean, an earthquake, where, how bad..."

ADDITIONAL DATA UNAVAILABLE.

I let out a breath that was half a laugh and half something closer to a sob.

"You're telling me the sky is going to turn red again," I said slowly. "In ten days. On my wedding day. And you can't tell me anything else."

CORRECT.

"And Emeric is going to..." My voice broke completely, and I hated myself for it, hated that even now some stupid, wounded part of me still couldn't say the words without falling apart. "He's going to lock that door behind him again. He already showed me exactly who he is."

The System didn't answer that.

I don't know what I expected. Some acknowledgment, maybe, that what I'd just described was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

Instead:

STATUS: UNPREPARED.

OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE.

I laughed, and it came out ugly and cracked and not at all like a real laugh.

"That's it? That's the whole plan? Survive?"

YOU HAVE TEN DAYS.

I sat there on my own bed, in my own room, with ten days standing between me and the exact same fire, the exact same hands shoving me toward a door I was never meant to walk back through.

Ten days.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand, and my fingers came away wet, and underneath the grief for a version of myself who'd died not understanding any of it, something else was starting to burn.

"Okay," I said, out loud, to the empty room, to the voice that wasn't a voice, to whatever the hell this actually was. "Okay. Ten days."

I grabbed a notepad off my desk, the one I used to make packing lists for trips that never mattered as much as this one was about to, and started writing.

Water, food, medicals, Fuel, cash, not traceable.

I stared at the list for a second, then underlined the last line twice, because if Emeric had spent two years hiding an entire second family from me, I had no idea yet who else might be watching how I spent my money.

Then I wrote one more line, underneath everything else, a name I hadn't thought about once in my entire first life, a man half the city used to laugh about behind his back for the things he'd been saying for years before anyone believed him.

Cassian Drell.

I don't know why he was the first person who came to mind. Maybe because in my old life I'd overheard my father call him a paranoid lunatic at a dinner party once, and laughed along with everyone else at the table.

Nobody was laughing now.

I picked up my phone and started searching for an address.