CHAPTER 2: Five Years Too Early

Kara’s pov

Morning light crept across the floorboards in thin golden strips. I hadn’t slept.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my knees pulled up, my arms wrapped around them, staring at the same pale blue wall I had painted myself two years ago—or five years from now, in my previous life.

The crack near the light fixture still looked like a question mark. Everything was exactly as I remembered it from before the world ended, and that fact alone kept my pulse uneven.

My body felt wrong in the best way. No constant aches in my joints. No half-healed knife scars pulling at my skin whenever I breathed.

The old fracture in my left wrist was gone. I kept flexing my fingers, watching the smooth skin stretch and fold as though it belonged to someone who had never been forced to dig graves in frozen ground.

I stood and walked to the small mirror above the dresser.

The face that looked back was mine at twenty-six. Clear eyes. No hollows under the cheekbones. Hair longer than I had kept it in the later years, dark and a little messy from a night of not sleeping. I touched the glass. It was cool. Real.

“Okay,” I whispered. My voice sounded younger too. Soft around the edges. “You’re here.”

I needed proof that wasn’t just memory and a calendar.

My phone sat on the nightstand, the same cheap model I had before everything collapsed. I picked it up. The lock screen showed the date in clean white numbers. I unlocked it with the old pattern, still the same after all those years of different codes and dead batteries and opened the calendar app.

March 12.

I scrolled forward, then backward, checking holidays, appointments, even the weather widgets. Everything lined up with the timeline I carried in my head. The first red moon, the event the news would eventually call the “Celestial Anomaly,” was still five years and three months away. Public signs wouldn’t start until then. The real fractures in the world would begin even later for most people.

I set the phone down carefully, like it might shatter if I squeezed too hard.

Full memory. Intact. Every starvation winter, every locked door, every name on the list I had died with. No one else would remember any of it. Marcus was probably still working construction across the city, still charming, still collecting people who trusted too easily. Sarah still had her bookstore job and her soft smile. Lin was somewhere finishing her nursing degree, years away from the shelter door she would one day slam in my face.

None of them knew.

The thought settled in my chest like a cold stone. Relief and fury twisted together until I couldn’t tell them apart.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathed until the shaking stopped. Shock was a luxury. I had used up my share of it in the previous life. What I needed now was focus.

I opened the closet.

Clothes hung in neat rows, blouses for the office job I still had in this timeline, jeans, a couple of winter coats I had later burned for heat.

I pulled on a soft gray sweater and the first pair of jeans my hands found. Everything fits. Of course it did. This body hadn’t been through five years of rationing and running.

While I dressed, something strange brushed the edge of my thoughts.

A cold sensation, small and precise, like a single drop of ice water landing at the back of my mind. I froze with one arm in the sweater sleeve.

It wasn’t painful. It wasn’t a voice. It was just… space. Empty. Square. About the size of a large suitcase if I had to guess. I could feel the boundaries the way you feel the inside of your mouth without looking. Nothing inside it. No air, no temperature, just a clean, cold absence.

I concentrated on it, half-afraid it would vanish.

The sensation stayed. Steady. Waiting.

A spatial storage.

I had heard rumors of things like this after the mutations started in the old timeline, rare abilities that appeared in people who survived the early waves. I had never gotten one. Most people who did didn’t live long enough to explain how it worked. Yet here it was, quiet and empty inside my head on the morning of my rebirth.

I reached for a discarded sock on the floor and focused on the cold space.

The sock disappeared from my hand.

No flash. No sound. Just gone.

I felt it inside the space, light and soft against the mental walls. When I thought of retrieving it, the sock reappeared between my fingers exactly as it had been.

My heart kicked hard once.

Useful. Extremely useful. And small. I would need to test the limits later, weight, living things, liquids but not yet. Not until I understood more.

I put the sock back in the drawer and forced myself to keep moving.

Kitchen next.

The fridge held the same half-empty carton of oat milk, a container of leftover takeout from three days ago, and a sad bunch of cilantro I had bought on impulse. I opened the freezer. A bag of frozen berries and two ice packs. Ordinary. Temporary.

I made coffee out of habit more than I needed to. The smell filled the small apartment and grounded me in a way the mirror hadn’t. While the machine dripped, I checked my bank app.

The numbers were exactly what I remembered from this point in the old timeline. Enough to cover rent for two more months and buy groceries if I was careful. Not enough to stockpile anything serious. Not yet.

I needed money. Information. Time.

Most of all, I needed to decide how much of the future I was willing to risk changing.

The coffee tasted better than anything I had swallowed in the last two years of my previous life.

I drank it standing at the counter, staring at the ordinary street outside the kitchen window. People walked to work. A delivery truck idled at the corner. A woman in a yellow coat laughed into her phone.

None of them knew the sky would turn red in five years and three months.

None of them knew how fast ordinary headlines would become meaningless.

I picked up my phone again and opened a news app out of a sudden, sharp need to see the world as it still was.

Top stories loaded in clean columns.

A celebrity couple had announced their divorce. Stock markets were up. A minor earthquake had rattled a coastal city two states away, no injuries. Local weather promised clear skies through the weekend. A politician I vaguely remembered had been caught in a small scandal that would be forgotten by next month.

I scrolled slowly.

Every headline was soft. Temporary. The kind of news people argued about over coffee and then never thought of again.

In five years and three months, these same apps would be full of emergency alerts, casualty counts, and videos of things that should not exist. The celebrity divorce would not matter. The stock numbers would not matter. The clear weekend forecast would not matter.

I locked the phone and set it face-down on the counter.

The cold space in my mind sat quiet and empty, waiting.

I had five years and three months.

And no one else in the world remembered what was coming.