Chapter 7

By the time she reached the safety deposit box, Joanna was giddy with excitement. Her lawyer stood beside her, flashing a professional smile as he organized the final liquidation documents.

In her dream, things had gone entirely differently. Fearful of fracturing the family peace, she had blindly signed her shares over to Alice. She had naively believed that sacrificing her inheritance would finally make Gwen proud of her and satisfy Alice’s endless greed. Instead, even after the apocalypse struck and the dollar collapsed, her family had managed to exploit those funds to secure massive stockpiles of rice and survival staples. 

They used that leverage to keep Joanna trapped in the family mansion, enslaving her as their personal servant. Gwen would force her to clean all three stories of the estate just to earn a single, meager meal, while Alice constantly reminded her how lucky she was to be fed at all.

The only reason they had thrived in the early days was because of the shares liquidated from this very box. By January of the first year, those massive supplies had completely vanished due to Gwen and Alice's catastrophic mismanagement.

Not this time, Joanna thought, a cold smirk touching her lips. Let's see how well those vipers survive without her money or her protection.

The teller unlocked the vault chamber, and Joanna pulled the heavy metal box from its shelf. This repository held the last remaining artifacts from her grandfather and father. Her father had passed away when she was very young, and Gwen had deliberately hidden the existence of her trust fund. It wasn't until Joanna turned eighteen a few years ago that she discovered she had millions of dollars in accumulated dividends—wealth that finally allowed her to escape to college.

Opening the lid, her eyes instantly locked onto her great-grandmother’s emerald bracelet. Beside it lay a handful of family photographs and historical government bonds that could easily be cashed out for extra liquidity. She angled her body to block the security cameras, swiftly sweeping the items into her bag. You could never be too careful.

Meeting her lawyer in the lobby, she handed over the signed authorization forms. He shook her hand, promising to wire the initial liquidated balance by the end of the week.

Once he departed, Joanna began walking toward her hotel. Passing an electronics storefront, a wicked idea struck her. She detoured inside and purchased four high-end micro-wireless cameras. Might as well get some insurance, she mused. After ensuring the clerk activated the remote cloud-link software, she slipped them into her pocket and headed to her room.

Safely inside her luxury suite, she locked the deadbolt and emptied her bags onto the bed. Her hands trembled slightly as she snapped the emerald bracelet onto her wrist. Biting the tip of her index finger, she pressed a few drops of dark blood directly onto the central gemstone.

The metal instantly superheated against her skin, shimmering with a blinding green luminescence before dissolving entirely into her forearm. A violent wave of spatial energy pulsed outward from her chest, making her head spin. A mechanical ding could be heard in her mind. [ Space activated and bound.] The voice sounded unemotional but to Joanna it was the sweetest sound to her ears.

Closing her eyes, she focused her mind and plunged her consciousness inward.

It worked.

Joanna looked around her pocket dimension with breathless joy. In her dream, the level-one space had been nothing more than a bleak, 35 square-foot patch of barren dirt surrounded by an impenetrable wall of dense grey fog. No matter how many cheap gems she had fed it in her dream life, she had never been able to thin that mist other than 100 square feet. She could fit a small amount of gear and supplies for the team in there. Sometimes on supply runs, Drew would have to organize the things she could hide. He always put her down wishing her space was bigger. She frowned a bit at the memory. 

Testing the mechanics, she focused on a light jacket she had left on the bed. Instantly, it vanished from the physical world and appeared neatly folded on the dirt patch inside her mind. With another thought, she held out her physical hand, and the jacket materialized back into her grasp.

A triumphant laugh escaped her. She flopped backward onto the hotel bed and buried her face in a pillow, letting out a muffled scream of pure ecstasy. She finally had her weapon. She was going to rewrite her dream now.

Scrambling back up, she grabbed the heavy velvet bags of flea-market jewelry she had purchased the day before. It was heavy but she knew this was only the beginning. She waved her hand in front of it all and she transferred the emerald rings and necklaces into the space.

Another violent tremor rocked her soul. It was a massive, unprecedented influx of spatial energy. When the dust settled and she looked back into her mind, she gasped.

She had never achieved this level in her dream, let alone discovered that the space could manifest structures. Her space was five times larger now than it was in her dream!

Stepping into the shack mentally, she found a clean, single-room living area equipped with a modern kitchen counter. She instinctively turned the handle of the sink. Nothing came out.

No water yet, she noted, analyzing the limitation. Does this mean the space can eventually host running utilities?

Pure water was the ultimate currency after the collapse. Normal bathing had been reduced to rubbing down with damp, gray towels, and clean water at Nightshade Base had to be rationed through merit points. While biological water-fliers could generate liquids, their yield was notoriously brackish and often tasted faintly of sweat. If she could eventually hook a high-capacity water tower into this dimension, her quality of life would be unmatched. Maybe she could bring out showers during the apocalypse.