Chapter 3

I did the only thing I could think of. I said, "Wait."

The panel hovered in front of me, patient, the little icon beating in time with my heart. Or maybe my heart was pounding in time with it. I could no longer tell.

The text rearranged itself.

[Host stability: low.]

[Activation postponed. Standby window: 11 hours, 52 minutes.]

[Take your time, Abbie Lockwood. You have already died once.]

Then the panel folded into a thin bright line and vanished.

I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the empty air for a long, long time.

Then I did what any sane person does when the impossible happens. I tried to prove it wasn't. I pinched the inside of my arm until a bruise bloomed. I bit my tongue and tasted copper. I pressed my palm flat to the wall and felt the building hum with the ordinary life of other people's televisions and refrigerators.

Real. All of it. Painfully, stupidly real.

So I did the next thing. I got out my laptop.

It sat on the desk under a drift of unpaid bills, its lid furred with dust. The browser blinked awake on the last thing I had been doing in this life: a half-read article about the best way to bake banana bread. I almost laughed. Then I opened a new tab, and with fingers that would not stay steady, I typed: Arctic temperature record.

The first result loaded.

Siberian Town Records −38°C in August. Meteorologists Call It a "Statistical Outlier."

My mouth went dry.

I knew this headline. I had scrolled past it, in this very chair, at this very desk, on this very afternoon, on my way to a recipe. I had thought it was Weird, and moved on.

I clicked the next result. Polar vortex behaving unusually; experts say no cause for concern. Then the next. Cargo ships rerouted around early ice in northern shipping lanes, a tiny piece buried on page four of a business site. Grain exporters warn of "unprecedented" crop frost. Seventeen comments, mostly jokes.

Every one of them was a warning. Every one was an alarm bell ringing in an empty room, and the whole world had talked right over it, because the sun was shining and the pizza was hot and the rent was due.

I had been one of those people. I had spent last August buying Dana a spa gift card and a new coat for myself, on sale, proud of my bargain. I had been so busy being kind that I had never once looked up.

I closed the laptop gently, as if it might bite. The pen from the nightstand lay where it had rolled, and I picked it up and flipped over an electric bill. Then I wrote OCT 7 at the top and underlined it twice.

The first cold front. I remembered the day itself with horrible clarity: the sky turning the color of dishwater at noon, the temperature dropping fifteen degrees in an hour, and everyone laughing about it on the sidewalk, tugging their jackets tighter, calling it a freak storm.

By Day 3: Supermarkets stripped. I could still see the empty shelves, the woman sobbing over the last bag of flour, the manager standing helplessly at the front with a clipboard no one cared about.

Day 12: The First blackouts.

Day 20: The grid fails for good.

Day 30: Pipes burst across the city. People begin dying of cold inside their own homes.

My pen stopped over the next line.

Day 40: The first dead ones walk.

The room was very quiet. Outside, someone laughed on the sidewalk, a light, carefree sound, and I thought, with a strange tenderness that surprised me: You don't know yet. None of you know yet.

Forty-nine days. Seven weeks. By the time that first front rolled in, I needed to be somewhere warm, stocked, and locked in, with no one at my door who could take it all away.

I looked at what I actually had.

A bank balance of $4,318.62. A job as a dispatcher at a regional freight company, which at least meant I knew which warehouses held what, and which truckers owed me favors. A small, worn apartment I did not own. A body twenty-six years old, healthy, and, crucially, not yet broken.

It was not much. It was more than I had lying in the snow.

I started a second list beneath the first. Where do you survive a winter that kills cities? How much food does one person eat in a year? What breaks first: pipes, power, or people? And the last one, which I underlined so hard the pen tore the paper:

Who can I never, ever let near my door?

My phone buzzed against the desk, and I jumped like I'd been shot.

A text. A heart emoji, and a grinning face.

Garrett: Hey beautiful!! Thai tonight? 7 at Sunny's? Dana's coming too, she says she has NEWS 🎉

I read it once. Then again, because my eyes kept sliding off the words.

Beautiful. He used to text me that, and I used to melt.

I knew what Dana's news was. In my first life, it was that her lease was ending and she had nowhere to go. I had said yes before she finished the sentence. I had cleared half my closet that same night, and she had hugged me and called me an angel.

And then, slowly, the math arrived, and it landed like a fist.

Eight months. That was what Dana had said, in the lamplight, with my mother's quilt around her shoulders. Eight months of her tucking me in. I had found them in early December. Eight months before that was April.

I looked at the date on my phone. August.

They were already together. Right now.

While I sat here with a bruise on my arm and a list of the end of the world, my boyfriend and my best friend were lovers, and they were texting me hearts.

My thumb hovered over the screen. The old Abbie would have typed Yay!! with three exclamation points.

The new Abbie stared at that little heart for a long, cold moment and understood that the first test of this second life had just been delivered, gift-wrapped, with a smile.

I typed: Sure. See you at 7.

I deleted the exclamation mark I had added out of pure habit. Then I set the phone face down and looked at my hands.