The First Rule Of Survival

The call came while Victoria was still buried in warehouse ledgers, with the number “ninety” flashing behind her eyes like.

"Mrs. Blackwood, this is Reeves at the north facility." The man's voice was tight, clipped with the strain of someone delivering bad news to someone he’s scared of. "Routine inspection flagged a problem with the backup generator… It's been dropping out intermittently. If the main line goes unstable before we fix it, the cold storage would be at risk.”

"What's in cold storage?"

"Insulin. Antibiotics. The entire vaccine reserve you had shipped in last month." He paused. "If the temperature climbs past the safe range for more than six hours, we’d lose all of it. And there’s no way to reverse that."

Victoria's hand closed hard around the phone.

Six hours. She thought of the frozen bodies stacked outside a hospital that had run out of everything in her first life — insulin included, antibiotics, every single thing people had once taken for granted.

 "How long can the backup hold if the main supply fails right now?"

"I can't give you a confident number, ma'am. It's not reliable enough to promise anything."

That was worse than giving a wrong number. 

“Get the full inspection report, ready when I arrive," she said. "I'm coming now."

The warehouse was on the industrial edge of the city, gray and unremarkable from the outside. Victoria expected to find one faulty generator and sign off on a repair order.

What she found was worse, a system quietly rotting from the inside.

Reeves met her at the loading bay, bracing for what’s coming. Vivian’s yelling. Three maintenance staff stood a few steps behind him, avoiding her eyes.

"When did the warning signs start?" she asked, not slowing her pace toward the cold storage bay.

"Three days ago." One of the technicians answered before Reeves could stop him. "It started with warning lights, then intermittent voltage dropped."

"Three days." Victoria stopped walking. "Why am I only hearing about this now?"

Silence stretched a beat too long.

“Can someone answer me?” Victoria asked, staring at Reeves.

"Mrs. Blackwood." Reeves cleared his throat. "In the past, bringing you a problem without already having the solution tended to go badly for whoever brought it. We… we learned to wait until there was no other option."

Victoria absorbed that without flinching. The old Vivian made everyone fear her. So no need wasting time to defend or attack the last.

“I want to see the maintenance log, last inventory verification, and a clear answer on what would happen to the medical supplies if the backup fails for more than a few hours.”

They brought the papers. Unfortunately the delivery records did not fully match the inventory. One recent shipment was short by several crates with no clear explanation. 

Her pulse ticked up, but her voice stayed controlled. "Move the vulnerable crates into the secondary cooled unit now. Don't wait for the generator to be fixed."

The maintenance supervisor delegated the job to his juniors then gave Victoria some invoices to sign.

 She was halfway through signing the authorization when a voice cut across the loading floor.

"Someone should please explain the six-figure emergency authorization that just landed on my desk."

Adrian stood near the entrance, coat buttoned, eyes already moving across the warehouse floor like he was there for inspection.

He didn’t come because of the expense report he received, Victoria could see that in the way he was watching the staff react to her. He'd come to see for himself what she was doing.

He'd expected another mess. Hoping to find her shouting at someone, or worse, hiding from the problem entirely.

Instead he found records spread across a steel table, staff answering her questions, and his wife standing in the middle of it without a trace of panic.

Victoria didn't offer an apology. She handed him the maintenance report instead.

She handed him the maintenance report. “My backup generator is unreliable. The temperature-controlled storage that holds medical supplies could spoil a lot of things if a solution isn’t provided.”

Adrian read the pages in silence. Then he closed the folder. "A sound decision doesn't explain why you've suddenly developed an interest in emergency medical infrastructure, Vivian."

"You can interrogate my motives later." Victoria held his gaze, steady. "Right now I have six hours before that reserve would be worthless, and I'd rather spend them working than arguing with you."

Something flickered behind his eyes, the unease of a man recalculating an assumption.

He didn't leave. He stayed through the walkthrough, watching.

That was when Reeves caught the junior technician who'd stayed silent about the first warning light three days earlier. The young man went rigid, clearly bracing for a public dressing-down.

Victoria looked at him instead of raising her voice. "Why didn't you report it?"

"I thought I'd get blamed for it, ma'am." His voice was barely steady. "I didn’t want to be the one…"

"From now on," Victoria said, "every fault must be reported the second it's found. Honest reporting won’t cost anyone their position here. Hiding a problem until it becomes a crisis would."

She watched something shift at the warehouse afterwards, not relief exactly, but the staff's answers no longer filtered through fear of her reaction.

Adrian said nothing through any of it. But when Reeves glanced his way, silently asking whether Victoria's authority stands, Adrian answered without hesitation.

"You heard her."

He didn't praise her. He only stopped undercutting her in front of the people who worked for them both.

Before they left, she returned to the inventory sheet one last time, scanning for anything else Reeves' team had missed.

One line stopped her cold.

A shipment of water-testing equipment was marked delivered. Yet the warehouse had no corresponding receiving record.

Her chest tightened. That equipment wasn't a convenience. In her first life, contaminated water killed almost as many people as starvation, and she had no way to tell clean water from poisoned water except with that equipment.

"Verify the delivery date," she told Reeves. "The receiving log and the signature on it."

Reeves returned minutes later. "Signature belongs to a rep from…" he read the company name off the slip.

Victoria went still. She'd seen that name before, in Vivian's private files. A company tied to Project EVE.

"Preserve every record," she said quietly. "Find out where that shipment actually went."

Adrian was watching her face now. "You recognize the company?”

She chose her words with care. "I've seen the name before."

His eyes narrowed. He understood she was withholding information, and he did not push further.

Victoria checked the order date one final time, certain she'd misread it the first time.

The equipment had been purchased months before she  woke up in this body. Ordered under Vivian's name, authorized through a company bearing Project EVE's fingerprints.

Someone, Vivian, or someone working through her.,. had already been preparing for exactly this.

"What did you find?" Adrian's voice cut through the silence.

Victoria didn't answer right away.

She turned the record toward him instead, and watched his expression change as he read the date for himself.