CHAPTER 3: SPACE

I had barely finished telling myself that death would have to run from me this time when I realized I had no idea what this strange space could actually do. If I had truly been given a second chance, I could not afford to waste it on guesswork. The apocalypse was coming, and every advantage I had could mean the difference between surviving and dying a second time.

I walked the edge of the courtyard, following the river toward the wall of white fog that swallowed the far end of the space. The grass was cool under my bare feet, and the air smelled clean in a way I had almost forgotten was possible. No matter how far I walked, the fog never seemed to get any closer. It stayed the same distance away no matter how long my legs ached, as if the space itself did not want me to reach it yet.

I stopped, frustrated, and closed my eyes instead, picturing myself standing right in front of it. The world blurred around me, and when I opened my eyes again, I was there, close enough to touch the mist.

Teleportation. Inside my own space, I could move anywhere just by thinking it.

I reached out to touch the fog and my fingers stopped against something solid. An invisible wall stood between me and whatever lay beyond it. I pressed harder, but it did not give even an inch. Through the mist I could just make out the river continuing into the distance, blurred and formless.

So the space had a border, and it was locked.

I turned over every possibility I could think of. Maybe it needed gold or jade to grow. Maybe it needed good deeds, the way old stories always claimed magic things did. Maybe it needed the Crystal Cores that would only appear after the apocalypse began. I had no way to test any of that yet, so I let it go and focused on what I could actually use right now.

Back on my sofa, I stared at the safe across the living room and thought about the gold and jadeite bracelets locked inside it. I concentrated on them, picturing them clearly in my mind, and a second later they were gone from the safe and sitting warm in my open palm.

I could pull things from anywhere in the house without ever touching them.

I tested it on everything within reach after that. Pillows, blankets, boxes, small things I had forgotten were even in the room, all of it vanished one by one into the space until my living room looked half emptied. Then, almost as an afterthought, I thought of Rex and Nido, and both of them appeared on the grass beside me, blinking in confusion at their new surroundings.

Rex jumped straight up, all four paws leaving the ground. Nido’s pupils went thin and sharp as he stared around him. Neither of them understood what had happened, and I laughed for the first time since waking up screaming, a real laugh instead of the broken sound I had made in the desert.

They found the spring before I did. Rex barked at the water as if it had personally offended him, and Nido paced along the edge, meowing until I filled a small basin and set it on the grass. They drank every drop of it, and I crouched beside them afterward, watching the way something in both of them seemed to settle.

I checked the bracelets again once they had finished drinking, curious whether the space had done anything to them, but they sat in my palm exactly as they had before. So much for that theory.

“Guess good deeds are next,” I muttered, half joking, scratching Nido under the chin. “From now on you can call me Quinn the Great Philanthropist. I’ll expand this place one good deed at a time if I have to.”

Nido blinked at me slowly, unimpressed, and flopped over onto his back instead. I laughed again and rubbed his belly, grateful for something as small and simple as a cat who did not care what I called myself.

My stomach growled loudly enough that both animals looked up. I left the space and went straight for the fridge, pulling out a container of durian, a can of beer, and last night’s leftover crawfish and chicken feet. I sat at the table and gripped my chopsticks so tightly my knuckles turned white, some old instinct from two years of never knowing where my next meal was coming from.

I cracked open the beer and drank half of it in one go before a thought stopped me. I pulled the rest of the food into the space along with the beer, curious about something. If the space kept a constant temperature of its own, would it warm the beer up or would the beer stay cold no matter what I put around it. I set a cup of hot water from the dispenser beside it as a second test and left both there while I finished eating in the kitchen.

By the time I checked again, the beer was still ice cold and the water had barely cooled at all. Whatever the space did, it did not force everything inside it to match its own temperature. Things kept whatever state they arrived in, at least for a while. I filed that away for later. It was not a discovery. It was not even useful yet. But every small thing I learned about this place felt like another brick in the wall I was building against everything I already knew was coming.

I sat under the withered tree by the courtyard for a long time after that, doing the math over and over in my head, because the biggest discovery of the day was still ahead of me. I had measured the space with a thermometer and a timer out of pure habit, the way I measured everything now, and what I found made me sit up straight. The temperature held steady at twenty five degrees. The humidity sat at sixty percent. And time itself moved differently in here. Five hours inside passed as only one hour outside.

Five to one.

Three months until the cataclysm meant I effectively had far more time than that to prepare, to train, to gather everything I would need before the sky changed color and the world stopped making sense. It was not unlimited, and I still had to live my ordinary life outside these walls, but it was more than I had dared to hope for when I opened my eyes that morning.

I left the space and looked around my empty living room with new eyes. My house had two floors and six rooms, a small studio downstairs, and a terrace where Rex liked to run in circles until he collapsed. Until an hour ago I had thought of it as nothing more than a comfortable place to live and film my videos. Now I understood exactly what it was worth.

I had built a following over the years without ever meaning to. What started as short videos in college had slowly turned into sponsorships and weekly livestreams and more than two million followers who thought they were watching a lifestyle channel about a girl and her pets. None of that would matter once the world ended, but right now, today, it was still money, and money could still be turned into things that would keep me breathing.

The decision was simple once I let myself see it clearly. Sell the house. Turn everything into supplies before anyone else even suspected the world was ending.

I moved through the rooms with a clear head, pulling anything useful into my space one item at a time. Furniture, clothes, kitchen supplies, electronics, food, bedding, cleaning products, until entire shelves and closets stood bare. In my last life I had kept sponsored snacks and pet food stocked in the spare room, thinking I was being smart. It had only made me careless. Because I had food waiting at home, I delayed searching for Crystal Cores during the first critical days after the collapse, and that single mistake had cost me more than I liked to remember.

“Not again,” I said to the empty room, and my voice did not shake.

When the house was nearly stripped down to bare walls, I sat inside my space with my laptop balanced on my knees and opened an encrypted folder. I started a list. Food, water, medicine, seeds, fuel, clothing, tools, generators, batteries, hygiene products, pet supplies, weapons. I spent hours breaking it down into exact quantities, and by the time I finally stopped my eyes were dry and my shoulders ached from sitting still for so long.

I checked my banking app out of habit. Several hundred thousand sat in the account, an amount that would have impressed me before the world ended. Now I almost laughed out loud at the number.

“This isn’t nearly enough,” I murmured. Money only worked while the world still agreed it meant something. Once everything collapsed, a single bag of rice would be worth more than any bank account full of zeros.

I closed the app and looked out at my belongings scattered across the grass, at the neat rows already forming without me even trying, and for the first time since I had woken up screaming in the dark, I felt something close to safe.

Then my phone read 6:30 in the morning, and my chest tightened around a completely different thought.

Mom.

In my last life I had spent two years searching for her and for Kairo, never once knowing if either of them was alive or buried somewhere under the rubble of a city that no longer existed. I was not going to let two more years pass not knowing. I picked up the phone before I could talk myself out of it and pressed call before my nerve gave out.

It rang twice before she answered.

“Nerida? What’s wrong? Why are you up so early?”

Hearing her voice broke something open in my chest that I had been holding shut ever since I woke up. I had imagined this exact voice for two years, hiding in ruined buildings, sitting alone in the dark, wondering if I would ever hear it again.

“Mom.” My throat closed around the word before I could say anything else. “I…”

“Nerida? Why are you crying?”

I could not answer her right away. Two years of grief came rushing up all at once, every empty street I had searched, every building I had gone through and left with nothing. She misread my silence as heartbreak over some cruel comment online, and she talked me through it gently, the same way she always had when I was small, until I could finally breathe again.

“Come home, Nerida,” she said softly. “I will make all your favorite food. You can rest for a few days. What do you say?”

“Okay.” My voice came out small and steady at the same time. “I’m coming home. I should be there by noon. You and Kairo wait for me.”

“Of course we will. Drive safe, sweetheart.”