MasukNobody slept.We stood on the porch in the dark, all of us, and listened to the siren go on and on. Marcus with his arms folded. Priya with her coat over her nightdress. Tessa with Theo asleep on her shoulder, his fist knotted in her collar. Cole at the rail with his face turned toward the lower city, where a red glow had begun to rise against the clouds. Nadia, bandaged and silent, in a borrowed blanket at the back.Gideon stood beside me.He had not let go of my hand. I did not ask him to.“How long?” said Marcus.“The dam holds a few days more, in the first timeline.” I kept my voice even. “This is early. But it’s the rain, not the dam. It’s coming from the north, and the ground’s already saturated.”He gave me a long look. Gideon had told him, I realized, in the kitchen, in four terse sentences. Marcus had said only, well, that explains the rifle, and gone back to cleaning it.“I’d like it noted,” Priya said tightly, “that I always knew you were hiding something.”“Noted.”“And th
I told him the truth.Not all of it at once, and not gracefully. I sat on the hearthstones with my knees pulled to my chest, and the fire popped, and the words came out the way a river comes out of a broken dam, slow and then too fast to stop.I told him about the truck.I told him about the snow and the boot print on my hand. I told him about a woman in the seat behind my husband, and a boy on her lap, and a man who had said there’s only room for one more in two different lives. I told him I had died. I told him I had woken ninety days before the dead began to rise. I told him about the white numbers and the little room in my chest, and that I had known every single hour of this ruin before it began.I did not look at him while I spoke. I looked at the fire.When I finished, the silence went on for a long time.“The dead,” he said at last.“Not yet. Not for months. First the flood. Then the freeze.” I rubbed my eyes. “Then something worse.”“And you’ve known since the first day.”“Ye
I don’t remember deciding.There was the rope, a long dead snake in my hands, and the water boiling brown below the cliff, and a purple coat bobbing, vanishing, bobbing. There was Cole beside me, shouting my name. And there was something very quiet in the middle of my chest, the voice that had been trying to tell me for ten weeks what I really was.Everything I own has a thread.The rope was mine. Every meter of it. I had pulled it from my own Storage, and the tether ran from the near end in my hands, across the white water, to the far end somewhere in the dark below, where it was still tied to a man’s harness.I wrapped the near end around my right wrist, three turns, and braced my boots against the rock.“Row, what are you—”“Hold my belt.”Cole grabbed me. I closed my eyes and pulled.Not with my arms. With the thing under my ribs, the thing that had learned to take a road and a diesel tank and twenty tennis balls. I didn’t take the rope into Storage, because I didn’t want the rope
“Here’s what we have,” Gideon said.He knelt on the rim with a stick and drew in the dust, fast and clean. His voice had changed. The quiet, stubborn man from the porch was gone, and in his place was something steady and cold and utterly focused, a man in his element.“Gravel bar, here. Forty meters off the north bank. Current’s too hard to swim. Their only way out is a line.” He glanced at me. “I need rope, forty-five meters minimum, rated for people. Harnesses. Flotation. Blankets, because half of them are hypothermic. I need it ten minutes ago, and the nearest cache is in town.”Cole made a soft sound. “Row,” he said, very low.I looked at the rim, at the empty road behind us. At the green and roaring dark. I could have stalled. I could have said let me think.I raised my hand.The ledger bloomed behind my eyes in ordered columns of light. ROPE, 200 meters, kernmantle, rated 2,000 kilos. HARNESS, 18 units. LIFE VESTS, 24. THERMAL BLANKETS, 40. Marcus had made me stock it in the fir
I didn’t scream. I want that noted, because I felt the scream sitting in my chest like a stone, huge and cold and perfectly still.I knelt on the riverbank in the green light and took Theo by both shoulders.“Tell me what you see.”“A number.” He pointed at the corner of his eye with a grubby finger. “It’s white. It’s been there since the day the lady in the stone talked to me. It said sixty-one, then forty, then ten. This morning it said seven and now it says three.” His lip trembled. “She told me not to tell. She said you had enough to carry.”“Baby…”“I didn’t want to make you sad.”Something in me broke quietly, the way ice breaks on a pond. I pulled him into my arms and held his small, solid, frightened body. Over his head I met Gideon’s eyes. He stood a few feet off with the binoculars hanging forgotten around his neck. He didn’t speak. He only looked, and in the green light his face was a man’s who had just watched a theory become a fact.“Later,” I said.“Later,” Gideon agreed
The sky turned green on the morning of Day Seven.I woke at dawn to a color that did not belong in the world. Not storm-green, not the sick yellow of a tornado, but a clean, bright, bottle green, like light through a wine glass. It filled the window and lay across the floor and turned Theo’s sleeping face the color of seawater.I went out to the porch in my bare feet.The whole valley glowed. The fields looked varnished. The barn roof had gone black, and the mountain behind it stood out hard and sharp against a sky with no clouds, no sun, only a flat green canopy running to the horizon.“Huh,” Marcus said behind me, very quietly. He held a coffee cup in a hand that wasn’t quite steady. “I’ve seen a hundred sunrises. That isn’t on







