chapter one

“Leave her. She’s slowing us down, Lucan.”

Sabine said it gently, the way she said everything she meant to hurt me with.

I lay on the pharmacy floor with a steel shelf crushing my leg. Outside the shutters, the dead were pounding. Two weeks had passed since the first bodies got up in Harrowgate, and I knew their sounds by heart: dragging feet, wet breathing, hands that never tired. One bite and the fever started. Within the hour, the person you loved stopped being a person.

I had watched the dead take my neighbors, my coworkers, a man I once shared an elevator with every morning. They didn’t scream or plead. They just kept coming, and the only things that ever stopped them were a destroyed brain or a long enough head start. I had been fast once. Then I started carrying other people’s bags.

“Lucan, please. I got insulin. I got antibiotics. Lift the shelf.”

My husband looked at the bag in my fist. Then he took it. Not my hand. The bag.

“Thanks, Ione.”

“Lucan!”

“There’s no time.” He slung the pack over his shoulder. Sabine’s fingers slid through his. My stepsister, who had cried at our wedding and called me the sister she’d always wanted. Her nails were painted. I had stolen that polish for her myself.

“You were never meant to make it this far,” Lucan said quietly. “I married you because you were useful. You cooked, you carried, you paid. You never asked for anything back.”

“Six years,” I whispered. “I loved you for six years.”

Sabine smiled, a real one for the first time. “That’s why it worked.”

They left through the back. A moment later, the shutters gave way.

I won’t describe what came through. I screamed his name until my voice broke, and the bite hurt less than they had. My last thought was a vow: if I ever got one more chance, I would never be useful to them again.

“Ione? Did you hear me? I need your answer before I leave.”

Sunlight. My bedroom. The ceiling fan turned slowly overhead.

I jerked upright, hands flying to my leg. Whole. Beside the bed, Lucan stood at the mirror knotting his tie, alive and humming. My phone lay on the nightstand. October 3.

My breath stopped. The dead rose on October 17. I had counted those days in every hiding place afterward, the way you count the days since a funeral. Fourteen days. Enough time to build something they could never take.

The first week, the city told itself it was the flu. The second week, the radio went to static. I remembered the exact color of the sky the morning the sirens began: a clean, hard blue, as if nothing could ever go wrong beneath it.

I knew things now that nobody else on earth knew. Which streets would choke with abandoned cars. Which hospitals would fall first. Which pharmacy would still have shelves, and which door would be the last one I ever walked through.

“Honey.” Lucan sat on the bed and took my hand, warm and well practiced. “Marcus at the firm runs a private fund.

Guaranteed return. It triples in three months, but the window closes at noon today. I need your savings. All of it.”

Two hundred and twelve thousand dollars. Six years of overtime and my grandmother’s gift. In my last life, I had wired it that same morning, kissed him goodbye, and never asked where it went.

“All of it?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t ask if I weren’t sure.” His thumb moved over my knuckles. “Trust me.”

I looked at his face and understood that it had never been love. It was a habit of taking, and I was the habit’s favorite source.

“Of course,” I said.

His shoulders dropped with relief. “That’s my girl.”

“Send me the account details. I’ll wire it right now while you watch.”

He hesitated half a second, then typed on his phone. Mine buzzed: Halloran Growth Partners, followed by an account number. I opened my banking app and entered it. The screen paused, then showed a line of small gray text.

“That’s strange,” I said. “The name check doesn’t match. It says the account holder is Sabine Whitcombe.”

Lucan went still.

“Is my stepsister the fund?”

“It’s a clearing account. She’s helping with the paperwork.”

“Sabine. Who can’t keep four hundred dollars in savings.”

“Ione—”

His phone lit up on the dresser. We both looked. A message from Sabine: Has the safety net sent it yet? Tell her to hurry, babe.

I read it aloud, slowly.

He lunged for the phone. I stepped back and held up mine.

“I could call Marcus,” I said. “On speaker. Ask for the fund’s registration number. Or I could call my stepfather and ask whether his daughter manages investments. Or we could call your mother. Which would you prefer?”

Lucan opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He had never once been caught without a story.

“It’s not what it looks like,” he said finally.

“It looks like my life savings in Sabine’s account by noon.”

“You don’t understand.” His voice cracked. “I owe people, Ione. Real people. I had a bad run, and they gave me until the end of the month.”

So that was where the money would have gone. Not to a fund. To a debt he had hidden for a year while I paid for the groceries.

A year of late nights, of client dinners and weekend conferences, and I had never once asked to see a receipt. I had called it trust. It had only ever been convenient for him.

“Then sell your watch,” I said.

His face emptied. “You’re ruining me.”

“No. I’m just not paying for you anymore. I want a divorce. Papers tonight. If you fight me, this screenshot goes to your firm’s compliance office with Sabine’s name on it. Go to work, Lucan. You’re late.”

He grabbed his jacket. At the door he turned and tried one more voice, the wounded one. I closed the bedroom door on it.

Then I sat on the bed and moved every dollar of my savings into a new account at a different bank, one with a passcode only I knew. My hands shook until the confirmation came.

The apartment was quiet after he left. The coffee he never finished sat cooling on the counter, next to the dish I would have washed without thinking. I looked at it for a long moment and left it where it was.

I took an envelope from the drawer and wrote on the back of it, in block letters: Money. Shelter. Food. Water. Medicine. Allies. Strength. Seven words. Fourteen days. For the first time in six years, I was the only person on my own list.

My phone buzzed. A voicemail from a number I didn’t know. I almost deleted it.

“Ms. Calloway, this is Alaric Finch of Finch & Holloway. This is our fourth attempt to reach you about your grandfather’s estate. It is urgent.”

Fourth attempt. In my last life, I never received a single call.

Someone had been deleting them. I had a very good guess who.