MY EX HUSBAND ABANDONED ME BUT THE MUTANT KING CHOOSE ME

Aria had treated enough gunshot wounds to know when blood was winning, and the warm tide soaking through her gloves told her that Daniel had only minutes left unless she could slow it down.

"Keep your eyes open, Daniel, do you hear me? I need you awake just a little longer," Aria said, pressing the heel of her hand harder against his side while her other hand hunted through the medical bag.

"Medic, we have to go, now!" Holt shouted from behind the overturned jeep, swinging his rifle toward the smoke that was crawling down the road.

"Then come and help me lift him, instead of standing there telling me what I already know," Aria snapped, her voice cracking on the last word.

"Command's called the withdrawal, Foster, we're losing the position, we're..." Holt broke off when a burst of gunfire chewed the tarmac a few metres away, then ducked lower. "Aria, please!"

"One minute, Holt, just one, I'm not leaving him here while he's still breathing," she said, dragging the final packet of gauze out of the bag with her teeth clamped around the torn corner.

The explosion lifted her off her knees before she could tear it open.

She struck the wrecked vehicle shoulder first, then skull, and the world collapsed into a thin, high whine that drowned out everything else. Her supplies lay scattered across the road in front of her, and she dug her elbow into the ground and tried to push upright, but her arm folded under her like wet paper. She stretched for the strap of the bag, only a hand's length away, and her fingers refused to close around it.

"Aria!" Holt shouted, his voice stretched and slow, as if he were calling down a well.

Copper flooded her mouth, and she kept her eyes open for as long as she could.

She woke with a breath that tore all the way down her throat.

Her hands flew over her ribs and thighs, searching for the wound, but nothing was wet and nothing was torn. Her fingertips found a bandage wrapped around her head, and when she pressed it, a bright bolt of pain went straight through her skull.

"Ah, God," Aria hissed, dropping back against a pillow that was far too soft.

The ceiling above her was white plaster edged with a thin line of gold, and the air smelled of perfume and antiseptic. Silk slid cool against her bare legs when she shifted, and she lay still and counted her own pulse at the wrist, which came to ninety-eight and steady.

"Where the hell am I?" she whispered to the empty room.

When she raised her hand to rub her eyes, she froze, because the fingers in front of her face were long and pale, with neat pink nails and a thin gold band on the left hand. Aria's hands were square and scarred across the knuckles, with a thumbnail that was always ragged from the field.

"No," she said under her breath, turning the hand over, then back again. "No, that's not, that isn't mine."

The dressing table was within reach if she rolled, so she rolled, and her stomach lurched badly enough that she gripped the edge of the table until the room stopped swinging. A stranger stared out of the mirror, with dark hair matted at one temple, grey-green eyes and a mouth far too delicate to be hers.

"Who the hell are you?" Aria asked, lifting her chin and watching the woman in the glass do exactly the same.

She touched her cheekbones, then her jaw, then pulled at the skin beneath one eye as though it might peel away. "This can't be right," she murmured, pressing her fingers hard against her temple. "I was in the field. I remember the explosion, I remember Holt shouting, I..."

A silver frame sat at the corner of the table, and she lifted it with both hands because they would not stop trembling.

The woman from the mirror stood in a white dress and laughed at something beyond the camera, while a handsome man in a dark suit rested his hand at the small of her back. He smiled with his mouth and nothing else, and he was looking at the photographer rather than at her.

His name arrived before she asked for it, along with a flash that did not belong to her. A hand tightened around her upper arm in a crowded restaurant, and a low voice said, Don't make a scene, Izzy, while she set down a wine glass she had never been allowed to refill.

"Nicholas," Aria whispered, and the name sat sour on her tongue. "Isabella Hart. Your name is Isabella Hart."

Another flash hit her, sharper this time, with sirens and a staircase and a hot wrench in her side as her leg gave way. A pair of polished shoes stepped around her without slowing.

"So this is my husband," she said slowly, then let out a short, bitter laugh and corrected herself. "No. Not mine. Hers."

She left the bedroom with one hand trailing along the wall, and the living room looked as though someone had tipped it out and sifted through the pieces. A kitchen cupboard hung open with almost nothing left behind its door, and when she knelt to check the lower shelves she found two packets of crackers, one tin of peaches and a tray of bottled water with eleven bottles still beaded with damp.

"Not even a week, not for one person," Aria muttered, counting them a second time as if the number might change.

Beside the front door, a brown smear had dried against the white skirting board, its edges flaking, and she crouched over it with her jaw tight.

Please, Nick, I can't stand up, Isabella's memory said, and Nicholas answered without looking up from his phone, Don't be dramatic, I'll send someone.

The door had closed behind him, a soft and unhurried click.

Aria stood too quickly and had to catch the counter, her knuckles whitening against the marble while she waited for the dizziness to pass. "He took the food, he took the water, and he left her bleeding on the floor," she said quietly, and she stayed motionless for several seconds before she turned and walked back to the bedroom.

She looked at the photograph for a long moment, her thumb pressing so hard against the silver frame that the metal creaked. Then she set it down on the dressing table and squared it carefully against the edge.

"Wonderful," she said to the empty room. "I wake up in a stranger's body, and the first thing I learn is that her husband was completely useless."

A crash from outside drew her to the living room window, and what she saw there made her forget the headache for a moment.

Cars sat at wrong angles across the road, a van burned at the junction with slow, greasy smoke, and two people sprinted between the parked vehicles, one of them carrying a child on his hip. "Go left, there's a gap, go left," Aria urged under her breath, her forehead pressed against the cold glass.

A man lurched out from behind a bus, leaning too far forward with one arm swinging loose, and he hit the nearest runner at the waist. They went down together, and the scream that reached her through the window was short and wet.

Aria stepped back, then forced herself to look again, studying the streets, the rooftops and the alley beside the building as if she were reading a map. They bite, said a small, sick fragment of Isabella's memory. Everyone said stay inside.

She found the television remote on the sofa arm and thumbed it on, and a newsreader's tired voice crackled through the speakers. "Evacuation points at the stadium and the east terminal are now at capacity, and residents are advised not to approach any affected persons," the newsreader said, before the picture dissolved into static.

"Come on, give me something," Aria muttered, snatching the phone from the table and tapping the screen twice, then three times, while the call failed.

Down in the street, the thing that had attacked the runner raised its head, abandoned the body and began to wander toward a stalled taxi, where it stood swaying beside the open door.

"All right," Aria said, turning away from the window with her mouth set in a hard line. "No rescue, no reliable information, and no husband worth keeping, so I need a weapon, food and a way out."

She found a heavy brass lamp on the hall console and lifted it in both hands, and her arms began to shake almost immediately. She tried a step, then another, with her left leg dragging and the floor tilting beneath her.

"Brilliant," she whispered. "I can't even run."

Something scraped along the corridor outside, a soft shuffle followed by a knock against the wall, and Aria went rigid with her breath trapped in her chest. "It's downstairs," she breathed. "It was downstairs, it can't have..."

Metal scratched in the lock, and it was not the frantic fumbling of something mindless but the steady turn of a key.

She backed against the wall beside the door and set her feet the way Holt had once taught her, hips square and the lamp raised past her shoulder, while her pulse hammered inside the bandage over her ear.

"Isabella? Open the damn door," a man called from the corridor, his voice low and irritated.

Her fingers stilled on the brass, because the voice pulled a whole afternoon out of the fragments, a staircase and a pair of polished shoes stepping around her on the floor.

Nicholas.

The lock clicked, the handle dipped, and the door began to swing inward.

"Isabella, what the hell are you playing at?" Nicholas said as he pushed it wider. "I've been standing out here like an idiot."

Aria held the lamp high behind the edge of the wall and watched the gap widen, and she recognised his face from the photograph, though seeing it in the flesh made the memory of the staircase land far harder than it had any right to.

She said nothing, and her knuckles whitened around the brass.

Then Nicholas stepped inside.