LOGINThe market scare came on day nine, one day ahead of Ivy's estimate, which she took as confirmation rather than surprise. A logistics company in the Midwest collapsed overnight after a warehouse fire nobody could fully explain, dragging two of its biggest suppliers down with it. By the time markets opened the next morning, the sell-off had already started.Kingsley's board called an emergency session at seven a.m. Ivy waited in the car outside Damen Tower, watching the building's windows light up floor by floor, and didn't need to be in the room to know how the meeting would end.He called her forty minutes later."They approved everything," he said. "The full stockpile budget. The compound expansion. Even the early relocation plan for staff families." A pause. "Ivy, they didn't just approve it. They apologized for not listening eight months ago.""How does that feel?""Less satisfying than I expected," he admitted. "I'd rather have been wrong."Not everyone in the city was preparing.
The first sinkhole made the local news on a Tuesday. By Thursday, three more had opened across the state, and by the following week it was national ,a strange, spreading phenomenon nobody could explain, swallowing empty lots and a stretch of highway outside the city with no warning and no survivors to interview.Ivy watched the coverage from Kingsley's office, feet tucked under her on his couch like she'd been coming here for years instead of five weeks."Five weeks left," she said quietly. "This is when it starts being impossible to ignore. Give it two more weeks and people will start calling it a pattern instead of a coincidence."Kingsley didn't look away from the screen. "My board finally believes me. Wish it hadn't taken actual holes opening in the ground to do it.""They'll believe you completely in about ten days," Ivy said. "Right before the stock market has its first real scare."He glanced at her, the same look he always gave her when she said something with that particular,
Ivy didn't ease into it. She'd learned, in the last two months, that the people who survived what was coming were the ones who didn't waste time being careful with the truth."I died," she said. "Three months from now, in the life I remember. I was in a car accident the same night the sky turned wrong for the first time. I woke up back here, three months in the past, with a system only I can see. It lets me store things ,food, tools, anything ,in a space that doesn't exist anywhere except in my head. That's how I know what's coming. That's how I know things I have no business knowing."Kingsley didn't laugh. He didn't call her crazy. He just studied her the way he had in the grocery store aisle, like he was reassembling a puzzle he'd already half-solved."Show me," he said.Ivy reached for the coffee cup on the table between them, thought *Space*, and watched it vanish from her hand into nothing.[SURVIVAL SPACE — ITEM STORED]She thought *return*, and the cup reappeared, still warm,
Selina showed up at Ivy's apartment three days after the dinner, no makeup, mascara already smudged like she'd been crying in the car the whole way over."You did this," Selina said, before Ivy had even opened the door all the way. "The lease. The Cayman account. You've been planning this for months.""I don't know what you're talking about," Ivy said, and stepped back to let her in anyway, because some petty, satisfied part of her wanted to watch this up close.Selina's boutique had lost two more investors since the dinner. Julian's mother, humiliated in front of her own guest list, had stopped taking Selina's calls entirely, no interest in welcoming a pregnant mistress into the family once the whole story had curdled into public embarrassment instead of a quiet, respectable scandal."He's not even helping me anymore," Selina said, sinking onto Ivy's couch uninvited. "His lawyer says the Cayman account might get him charged with something. His mother won't return my calls. I gave up
The invitation to the anniversary dinner arrived exactly when Ivy knew it would, in the same cream envelope, with the same false warmth in Julian's mother's handwriting. *Five wonderful years. Family dinner, Saturday, 7pm.*Last time, Ivy had walked into that dining room with no idea what was coming. This time, she knew every word of it before she crossed the threshold , the folder Julian would set down next to the cake, the flat announcement, the way he wouldn't even lower his voice.She wore the same red dress from the gala. She'd learned, this time around, that it looked like armor.Thirty guests. The same thirty. Selina by the window in a new dress, hand resting on a stomach that was, this time, barely showing. Julian's mother at the head of the table, already looking at Ivy like she was something that needed to be tolerated for one more evening.Julian stood when dessert came out, folder in hand, exactly on schedule."I want a divorce, Ivy," he said, setting the folder by the cak
The eviction notice went out to Selina's boutique on a Tuesday, and by Thursday, the whole story had already twisted itself into something Ivy hadn't planned but wasn't going to correct."Some mystery landlord just pulled the lease out from under her," Julian's cousin Brianne said at brunch, loud enough for half the café to hear. "Selina's convinced it's Julian's ex-wife's family, if you can believe it. Apparently they still own half of downtown."Ivy's family didn't own anything downtown. Ivy did, now, through the shell company, but nobody at that table would ever trace a struggling housewife to a real estate holding with a name like Ashgrove Commercial Partners. She sipped her coffee and let Brianne keep talking."She's devastated," Brianne added, with the particular relish of someone who wasn't. "Julian had to cosign a new lease just to keep her from losing the whole collection.""Good", Ivy thought. "Let him pay for it twice".She didn't feel guilty. In her first life, Selina had







