Ten O’Clock

I woke up cold, and for a long moment I thought that was the miracle.

It was not the sting of glass or the scorch of stone. It was a soft, ordinary coolness, the hum of an air conditioner in the corner and a sheet that smelled of lavender washing powder. A bird was singing somewhere outside. I lay very still and listened to it as though it were the most extraordinary sound I had ever heard.

I was not on the steps. There was no sun, no heat, no blood on my wrist. I lifted my hands in front of my face and turned them over and over, looking for the cuts from the glass, and found nothing.

Then a heavy arm settled across my waist, and I stopped breathing.

Preston was asleep beside me, his face half in the pillow, his mouth slightly open. He looked exactly as he had every morning for three years. I understood, with a clarity that made my stomach turn, that I had never once seen what was underneath.

I slid out from under his arm so slowly that it took a full minute. In the bathroom I ran the tap and gripped the basin. The woman in the mirror was twenty-seven. Her lips were not split. I touched my face, and she touched hers. 'I'm dead,' I told her quietly. 'This is what it's like.'

But the water was cold on my wrists, and my heart was hammering, and dead people do not need to be sick into a sink. When I had finished, I woke my phone.

It was a Tuesday. The date meant nothing for a second, and then it meant everything. Below it sat a calendar reminder: 10.00 a.m. Sign Tower loan guarantee, second tranche. V.

I knew that morning. I had lived it. I had sat in a bank boardroom in my best blue suit and put my name to a document that gave Preston's tower another forty million pounds of my company's credit, and afterwards he had kissed my forehead and called me his partner. I remembered feeling like the luckiest woman in Halbrook.

I walked down the hall on legs that did not feel like mine. Teddy's door was ajar, and his room smelled of socks and half-eaten crisps. It was the best smell I had ever known. He was asleep with his headphones on and one foot hanging off the mattress, fourteen years old, with toothpaste dried at the corner of his mouth.

I sat on the edge of his bed. I had not heard from him in fifty-one days. I put my hand on his hair and cried without making a sound, the kind of crying that has nowhere left to go. After a while one of his eyes opened.

'Dess?' He pulled off a headphone. 'You're crying.'

'Bad dream.'

'You're shaking.'

'I know.' I kissed his forehead. He pulled a face and wiped it off with the back of his hand, and I laughed through the tears, because it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

My phone buzzed against my knee. Nia. Night shift done. Coffee Friday? I'm buying. She had added a little cup. I stared at it until the letters swam. Nia, who had died in the second week with a stethoscope round her neck, was complaining about her night shift. I typed Yes, then wrote I love you, looked at it, and deleted it, because it would have frightened her.

I told myself I would only go downstairs and make coffee, as though it were any morning. That was my mistake. Or perhaps my luck.

Dahlia was in my kitchen.

She stood at the counter in my white dressing gown, the one with the blue trim, stirring a mug of tea. Her hair was loose. Around her neck, half hidden beneath the collar, hung three strands of pearls.

Ruth's pearls. My grandmother had worn them at my parents' funeral, at my graduation, and at the opening of Lane Logistics, and when she died she had put them in my hands and said, 'Wear them when you have to be brave.' I had left them in a velvet box on my dresser. I had not given anyone permission to touch them.

'Morning, Dess!' Dahlia smiled the soft, apologetic smile of a houseguest. I had spent two months thinking of it as sweet. 'You're up early. Big day, isn't it?'

'Is it?' I said.

'Oh, come on.' She laughed and clinked her spoon against the mug. 'Forty million pounds, and your signature on the dotted line. Preston's so proud of you.'

My hand tightened on the door frame. Preston had introduced her two months ago as a distant cousin just returned from abroad, a woman who knew nothing about our lives and needed our spare room. I had never mentioned the guarantee to her. I had never said that figure aloud to anyone but him.

'He told you the amount,' I said.

For half a second her face did something I had never seen it do. Then the softness slid back over it like a lid. 'Oh, he talks in his sleep,' she said lightly. 'You know Pres.'

Pres. Nobody called him that except me, and I had stopped three years ago.

I smiled. I said I would just fetch my phone. I walked out of my own kitchen very slowly, shut myself in the downstairs cloakroom, and put both palms against the cold tiled wall.

That was when the air above the basin began to shimmer.

A thin blue line drew itself across the mirror, then another, until a glowing panel hung there, perfectly still, as though it had been waiting for me to look up. Letters formed on it one by one.

HOST REBORN. WELCOME TO THE LAST LIGHT SYSTEM.

Below them, in smaller numbers, a clock began to count.

TIME TO SIGNATURE: 02:38:51.