Chapter three

My hand and a stranger's closed on the last box of tourniquets at the same moment, and neither of us let go.

"Let go. I need those."

"So do I."

"Someone threatened to kill me yesterday," I said. That finally pulled his eyes off the box and onto my face.Tall, broad through the shoulders, dark hair cut short, a gray T-shirt worn thin at the collar.

"I win,” I announced with a smug grin.

 "Strong argument," he said. "But I've been watching you throw this store into a cart for twenty minutes. I was going to wait politely.”"That's the least polite thing anyone's said to me today."

"It's only noon."

His mouth didn't smile. His eyes did, briefly. I let go of the box.

"Take it," I said. "I'll find another."

"There is no other. You've bought everything in a three-store radius." He glanced into my cart, then into his own, parked against the wall, and I realized with a strange jolt that he held almost exactly the same things. Water drums. Rope. Suture kits. A hand-crank radio.

We both stared.

"Hiking," I said.

"Sure."

"Camping. Long camping."

"Nobody camps with sixty tourniquets." He finally looked at me properly, a flat, assessing look that did not drift to my body even once. It stayed in my eyes. "Either you're the most prepared hiker in history, or you know something I don't."

"Or you do."

A pause. The cashier hummed behind us.

"I haven't slept properly in three weeks," he said, low. "Same dream every night. An empty road. Something coming down it that used to be people. I told my old unit. They laughed. So I started buying things." His jaw worked. "I'm Emrys. I used to teach hand-to-hand to men who thought they were hard."

"Tamsin." My heartbeat was trying to climb out of my throat. "I used to be a bookkeeper."

"Used to?"

"I got divorced yesterday."

His eyebrows rose a millimeter. "Congratulations or condolences?"

"Both."

That got an actual breath of laughter out of him, short and surprised. I felt it in my chest like a coin dropping into a well.

I bent to lift a water drum onto my cart, forty liters, and my arms shook immediately. The drum tilted. My knees folded. A hand caught the barrel from underneath and set it down as though it weighed nothing.

"Your stance is wrong," Emrys said. "You're pulling with your back."

"I'm fine."

"You're not. And whatever you're getting ready for, you're going to be carrying things like this. For a long time. For a lot of miles." He stepped back, arms folded. "You need training."

"I can't afford a trainer."

"You're buying a quarter of the store."

I didn't answer. I thought of a plane lifting off into smoke. Of a boot on my ribs. Of a black sedan outside a courthouse, and one finger drawn across a throat.

"Someone wants me dead," I said quietly. I don't know why I said that. Maybe because he was the first person in two lives who hadn't flinched. "My ex-husband's family. They took out a policy on me."

Emrys didn't laugh. He didn't ask if I was sure. He just nodded once, slowly, like a man adding a number to a list.

"Then you need more than a trainer," he said. "Be at the gym at five tomorrow. Dunmore Ground, on Fell Street. Wear shoes you don't mind ruining."

"Why are you helping me?"

"Because I've been waiting three weeks for someone else to lose their mind the same way I am." He picked up the tourniquets and set half the box in my cart. "Don't be late."

I was not late.

For the next ten days, he broke me down and rebuilt me. Footwork. How to fall. How to throw an elbow. How to hit a bag until my knuckles split and keep hitting it. How to carry weight on my hips instead of my spine. He never said a word about my size. He talked about leverage, breath, and the strange fact that my low center of gravity made me almost impossible to knock over.

"Your body isn't the problem," he said, on the fourth morning, when I was crying angry tears into a heavy bag. "You've just been using it to apologize. Stop apologizing. Start using it."

I hit the bag again, and again, and again.

It stopped feeling like punishment around the sixth day. It started feeling like ownership.

Outside the gym, I kept buying. Food that would last years. Water filtration. A generator. Solar panels. Armor plates. A plain stone farmhouse on the edge of the hills, a little over a million, which I snapped up from an anxious seller within an hour. A reinforced gate and fence. Two sturdy trucks. 

Lawyers and fees. My grandmother's twenty million went further than I had feared, and still not far enough.

On the eleventh night, sitting on the floor of the farmhouse with a spreadsheet glowing on my laptop, I saw the number at the bottom.

It was not enough.

Not for the compound I had seen in my last life, the one with the steel walls and the underground wells and the walled fields, the one that had held out for months while we starved outside it. That place cost a hundred and fifty million. I had been dreaming of it every night.

Emrys, sprawled against the opposite wall with a bandaged hand, watched me stare at the screen. "How short?"

"Hopelessly."

"There's always another way."

On the television in the corner, a bright banner scrolled across a news broadcast. TONIGHT: RECORD LOTTERY JACKPOT, ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLION.

I went very, very still.

Because I had seen that jackpot before. On a billboard, in the last life, with the winner's smiling face beside it and six numbers printed underneath. I had stared at that billboard every morning on my way to Caspian's office. I could have recited those numbers in my sleep.

Seven. Fourteen. Twenty-two. Thirty-one. Thirty-eight. Forty-five.

I stood up slowly.

"Emrys," I said. "Do you have any cash?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Why?"

"Because I'm about to do something very, very stupid."

I bought a ticket at a corner shop with hands that shook so badly the clerk asked if I was okay. When the draw ran that night, I sat in the dark and watched six balls tumble down the glass tube.

Seven.

Fourteen.

Twenty-two.

Thirty-one.

Thirty-eight.

Forty-five.

A chime rang in my skull, thin and cold, and a line of pale text slid across my vision.

[Condition met: Host died with a wish. Unique Talent unlocking: Slave Evolution.]