Chapter 2

I woke up screaming.

Not a scream of fear, exactly. It was the raw, animalistic sound that left my body convinced it was still dying. I clawed at my face, at my chest, searching for the frost, for the rotten breath, for the cold.

But There was no cold, only warmth. like a warm hand pressed against my skin. There was a blanket twisted around my legs, and a pillow soaked with sweat, and a ceiling above me painted a pale, cheap shade of yellow.

I knew that ceiling.

I lay there gasping for air, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth. My left leg moved when I told it to. No pain. No numbness. I bent my knee, then straightened it, and it obeyed me like it had never been broken at all.

"This isn't real," I whispered. My voice came out hoarse. "This is what happens right before. Your brain makes it up."

But the ceiling stayed where it was. A crack ran from the light fixture to the corner, shaped like a river. I had stared at that crack for three years in my first apartment, before the landlord finally patched it.

I sat up so fast the room swayed.

My bedroom. My old bedroom, the one in the building on Hartley Street. The secondhand dresser with the sticky bottom drawer. The window with the broken blind. The poster of a Japanese mountain I had bought on a whim and never taken down. Afternoon light fell through the glass in a long gold stripe, and outside a car horn honked, annoyed, ordinary.

A car horn. On a street that, the last time I saw it, had been buried to the second floor.

I stumbled to the window and ripped the blind aside.

Green. That was the first thing that hit me. The trees along Hartley Street were green, heavy with late-summer leaves. A woman walked a small brown dog on the sidewalk, wearing shorts. Shorts. Across the road, a delivery driver was arguing with someone on his phone. A kid on a scooter rattled past. Bus number twelve groaned to the stop at the corner, exactly on time.

No snow. No bodies. No silence.

I pressed my palm flat against the glass. It was warm from the sun.

Something broke open inside me then. I slid down the wall to the floor and pressed my knuckles into my mouth to keep myself from sobbing out loud. My shoulders shook. I cried until my breathing came back in ragged pieces, and then I cried some more, because I had not known until that moment how badly I had wanted to see a green tree again.

When the worst of it passed, I wiped my face and did what I should have done first.

I looked for my phone.

It was on the nightstand, plugged in, the screen dark. My hands shook as I picked it up. The cracked corner was exactly where I remembered. I swiped it awake, and the lock screen glowed at me, brightly.

Tuesday, August 19. 3:42 PM.

I read it three times. Then I checked the year, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

It was the year before the end. Seven weeks before the first storm.

I knew the date. The first cold front had arrived on October 7. By the middle of November, the power grid was gone. By December, there was no more outside, only survival and the things that hunted survivors.

Seven weeks.

I opened my banking app, because it was the one thing I could think of that couldn't lie. My checking account loaded slowly, and there it was: $4,318.62. Pathetic. My Rent would be due in two weeks. I remembered how that number had felt back then, like a wall I was always pressed against.

I remembered, too, how I had spent it. Dinners for Garrett when he was between jobs. A gift for Dana's birthday. Gas money I never asked back.

My thumb hovered over my contacts. Garrett's name sat at the very top of my favorites, above a photo of the two of us at the lake. Dana's was right below it, my best friend since we were twelve.

I did not call. I did not text. I stared at their names while something cold and very steady settled into my chest, where the grief had been.

They were alive. Right now, today, they were living their ordinary lives, eating lunch, complaining about work. They had not yet taken a single thing from me. Maybe the affair had already begun. Maybe not. Either way, nobody had pushed me to the floor yet.

I could walk into the kitchen of Dana's apartment right now and smile at her, and she would smile back, and she would never know that in another life she had tucked my hair behind my ear while I lay broken on my own floor, then walked out with my food.

I breathed in slowly. Out. The anger I had been too frozen to feel earlier finally arrived, a low, bright flame, and I did not let it consume me. I held it. I turned it over. I put it where I could use it later.

Then I walked to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

The woman staring back was twenty-four. Her cheeks were fuller than I remembered, her skin unscarred, her hair a messy dark tangle. There was no frostbite on her ears. No dark bags under her eyes. She looked like someone who had never gone hungry.

She also looked like someone who had never been betrayed.

"Okay," I told her quietly. My voice did not shake. "Okay."

I turned on the tap and splashed cold water on my face. rnning freely, filling the sink. In seven weeks, every pipe in this building would burst, and people would melt snow in pots just to drink. I stood there watching the water spiral down the drain, and I understood, with sudden terrible clarity, how much of the world I had taken for granted.

I had seven weeks, $4,318, and the only knowledge in existence that could keep me alive.

I went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. I needed paper. A list. Something solid, something I could hold. I yanked open the nightstand drawer and rummaged for a notepad.

My fingers closed on a pen. And as I pulled it out, the air in front of my face rippled.

I froze.

It was subtle at first, a shimmer, like heat rising off summer asphalt. Then thin lines of pale blue light drew themselves across the empty space, forming a rectangle that hung in the middle of my bedroom.

The pen slipped from my fingers and rolled across the floor.

Text crawled across the glowing panel, one clean line at a time.

[Host identified: Abbie Lockwood.]

[Time of death: Frozen Year, Day 61.]

[Rebirth complete. Survival window: 49 days, 3 hours, 18 minutes.]

My mouth had gone dry. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered that thing I had heard, falling into the darkness.

The panel flickered. A final line appeared, and beneath it, a small pulsing icon, like a heartbeat.

[Would you like to begin?]