Chapter 2: Reborn

I woke up screaming, my body shooting upright so violently that my head spun, and I wrapped both arms around myself and squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for teeth and claws to finish what they had started. I could still hear the screams, still feel the crushing weight of the zombies and the unbearable pain that had swallowed me before everything went black, but nothing came. I held my breath through one second, then another, and when nothing bit me or grabbed my ankle, I slowly opened my eyes.

There was no blood, no rotting corpses, no zombies. I looked down at myself and ran my hands over my arms, my stomach, my legs, my neck, as if I needed proof that I was still whole, and apart from a dull ache behind my eyes, I felt nothing but fine. Too fine.

The room around me felt strangely familiar. The bed beneath me was the one I used to sleep on, the curtains hung slightly crooked from the time I had tried to fix them and given up halfway, and when I caught the smell of stale coffee I turned toward the small table beside the bed and found a half-empty mug sitting exactly where I used to leave it. A car horn sounded outside, and somewhere through the thin wall a television played, ordinary sounds arriving one after another like pieces of a life I thought I had lost.

“Where am I?” I whispered, and I climbed out of bed on legs that shook so badly I had to grab the mattress for support. I knew this place. I knew the crack near the ceiling, the stain on the carpet, the drawer that never closed properly. This was my old apartment, the one I had lived in before the apocalypse and left behind five years ago.

My heart began pounding as I backed away. “No. This isn’t possible.” Maybe I was dead and this was some afterlife my mind had built from the last home where I ever felt safe. I walked to the mirror and froze the moment my reflection appeared, staring at a face that looked younger, skin smooth and healthy, eyes bright without the exhaustion carved beneath them. My fingers flew to my cheek and found nothing where a deep zombie scar should have been, and when I pulled my collar aside and lifted my shirt, there were no bite marks, no wounds, no scars anywhere on my body.

I looked like myself from before the world ended, and my knees nearly gave out. “I’m supposed to be dead,” I said aloud, my voice strange in the quiet room, and I pinched my arm hard enough to yelp, but I was still there, still alive.

Before I could make sense of any of it, a chime rang through the room. Ding! I spun around searching for the source, and a second, louder chime followed before a blue light appeared in front of me, a translucent screen floating with no wall or device behind it, thin streams of light moving across its surface like water trapped under glass.

“What the hell is this?” I whispered, and words began appearing across it one line at a time.

System binding in progress. Beep. Beep. Beep. Welcome, host. Congratulations. Mind Control System successfully activated.

“Mind Control System? Is this some kind of joke?” No answer came, so I rubbed my forehead and tried again. “But I’m dead.”

The screen flickered and a single word replaced my doubt. Incorrect. Then more lines filled the space: Host, Serelle Vale. Status, Alive. Age, twenty-three. Level one. Influence Points, zero. Experience, zero out of one hundred. Mind Push, level one, two daily uses. Resistance Penetration, five percent. Inventory, unbound. System Shop, locked. And at the bottom, a line that turned my blood cold: Current Timeline, three months before the apocalypse.

I read it three times before I stepped away, shaking my head. “No, no, no.” I had spent five years fighting to survive a collapse that this screen claimed had not yet happened, and I ran to the kitchen and tore the calendar off the wall beside the refrigerator with trembling hands. August. Not 2114. I dropped it and rushed back for my phone on the bedside table, and the date staring up at me confirmed it: August 18, 2109.

“I’m back,” I whispered, tears gathering as I stared at the screen until it blurred. There was no explanation, no memory of being rescued, nothing logical about waking up five years in the past with an unmarked body, but I could not deny the truth in front of me. I had died and somehow I had been given another beginning, and a broken laugh escaped me before I covered my face and let myself cry without worrying about noise for the first time in years. I did not have to hide, conserve water, or wonder what waited outside the door. I was alive, and I intended to make sure I never made the same mistakes again.

A mechanical voice suddenly spoke inside my head, host emotional stability restored, and I jumped so hard I nearly fell off the bed before realizing the sound had not come from the room at all.

“You can talk?” I asked.

Yes.

“So you’re really a system.”

Correct.

“Are you going to control me?”

No.

“Can you read my thoughts? Control other people’s minds?”

No, the screen answered both times, and I relaxed slightly before it changed again, offering a tutorial with two choices below the question. I hesitated only a moment before I reached out and pressed yes, my finger meeting something solid instead of passing through empty light.

Beginning first time tutorial. Mind Control System. Purpose: guide host to reshape fate and maximize survival before the world’s collapse.

Reshape fate. Those two words settled somewhere deep inside me, because for the first time I understood that everything I had suffered through in my old life could finally mean something. I read on. Primary Ability: Mind Push. Temporarily amplifies the host’s intent, allowing influence over a target’s decision for a brief moment. Permanent control is impossible.

“So I can control people?”

No. It cannot provide permanent control.

Still useful, I thought. Very useful, if it could tip a decision at exactly the right second. I asked whether I could hear thoughts and received another no, sighed, and kept reading until a new line appeared. Beginner Assistance Available. Potential Target Identification Remaining: two.

“What does that mean?” I asked, but before the system could answer, something slammed against my apartment door hard enough to make me jump.

“Serelle!” The voice on the other side was one I recognized instantly, and every muscle in my body tightened as memories of this exact day rushed back to me all at once. The screen vanished and the room went dark and quiet except for the woman outside pounding the door again.

“If you don’t pay my rent tonight, I’ll throw you and everything you own onto the street!”