Chapter five

On the sixteenth day, the room grew.

I was standing in my storage unit at eleven at night, sliding the last of the frozen chicken into the space, when the bangle went hot against my wrist. I nearly dropped a crate. The green light flared, brighter than it ever had, and then I felt something inside my mind give, like a door swinging open to a bigger room.

I closed my eyes and looked.

The white walls had moved back. The low ceiling had lifted. The little closet had become something like a small warehouse, three or four times its old size, with deep shelves along one wall and a cold, clean smell.

"Oh," I breathed.

A soft light glowed in the corner, and words formed there, in a script I had never seen but somehow understood. Storage reached. Space expanded. Then, underneath, smaller: More is waiting.

I stood in the cold storage unit with my hand pressed over my mouth, and I did what I had not let myself do in weeks. I grinned.

It was the space's own rule, I understood. The more I filled it, the more it grew. And it liked being full.

That was the night I stopped buying carefully and began buying boldly. Cases of soap. Cases of shampoo. Bandages, thread, needles, disinfectant. Two hundred pairs of thick work gloves. A hundred and twenty blankets. Twenty axes and a dozen crowbars. Thirty large water barrels.

On the eighteenth day, I bought meat.

Not a little. A great deal. Frozen beef, frozen pork, frozen fish, packed in coolers and loaded into the space by the hundreds of pounds. Whatever I put inside stayed frozen for as long as it stayed there, and the room simply grew around it. By the end of the week, the space held enough noodles, rice, and meat to feed a hundred people for two months.

On the twentieth day, I bought livestock.

I found a small farm two hours north whose owner was retiring and wanted to sell everything at once. Sixty dairy goats, two hundred hens, and a handful of ducks. The farmer stared at me as if I were a mirage.

"I didn't think anyone was actually going to buy all of it," he said. "What'll you do with them?"

"I'll keep them safe," I said.

I could not carry live animals into the space. That was another rule I had learned the hard way. But there was a plan for that, too, and its name was Thaddeus Brandt.

He was a huge, silver-bearded contractor who had built two private bunkers for billionaires and never once asked why. I found him in a dusty trailer, drinking coffee from a chipped mug.

He squinted at my blueprint for a very long time. Three levels. A steel vault door. A greenhouse. A well drilled through solid granite. Animal pens.

"Chicken coops," he read aloud. "A goat barn. A wheat field. Lady, are you building a bunker or a farm?"

"Both," I said. "Only one of them is for show."

"How deep?" he asked, after I laid out the rest.

"Forty feet."

"How fast?"

"I need it in twelve days."

He laughed out loud. "Lady, that's impossible."

"How much would make it possible?"

He named a number. I looked at the receipt from the lottery, and at the carefully balanced sheet of my funds, and I said, "Let me show you what I can pay in cash."

By the end of the day, Thaddeus had two hundred workers on site and a very confused expression. By the end of the week, the hillside north of town was floodlit and loud with machinery, and the whole city had a new nickname for me. The Noodle Woman. The Doomsday Divorcée.

Someone made a video of the site. It went viral. I watched the comments scroll past on my phone, three thousand of them, five thousand, all laughing.

She's lost it.

Poor girl. Money and grief are a terrible mix.

This is what happens when your husband leaves you.

I put my phone face down on the table. It did not hurt as much as it should have. I had heard worse from the woman I loved most.

My aunt Ilsabet came to see me on the twenty-first day.

She arrived at the hotel with a pot of soup and red-rimmed eyes, and she set the pot down on the table and took both of my hands.

"Odie," she said. "Sweetheart. Please. Please, come home."

"I'm fine, Auntie."

"You are buying axes."

"Yes."

"You have two hundred men digging a hole in a hill."

"Yes."

Her eyes filled. "Whatever it is, whatever he did to you, you don't have to punish yourself. You don't have to do this. You can come and stay with me and we'll have soup and watch television and—"

"Auntie." I squeezed her hands. "Do you trust me?"

She hesitated. It was only half a second. But I saw it.

"Of course," she said.

"Then I need you to do something. In eight days, I need you to pack one bag, and keep it by your door. Food, water, warm clothes, your medicine. When I call you, you're going to leave at once. You won't ask why. You'll just come."

"Odie—"

"Please. Just this once."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she pulled me into her arms, and held me the way she had when I was six years old and my parents had died, and she whispered, "All right, my darling. All right."

I closed my eyes against her shoulder. I'm going to save you, I thought. I don't care if you never believe me. I'm going to save you anyway.

That night, I sat alone in the hotel with the window open. The city glittered below me, warm and unaware. Somewhere out there, Lorcan was sleeping on someone's couch. Pia was refreshing job boards. Marguerite was writing furious letters. Cordelia was posting about noodles.

None of them knew what I knew.

I flipped open the news on my phone, out of habit. Weather. Sports. A celebrity divorce. Then, at the bottom, a small article I would have scrolled past a week ago.

HOSPITALS IN THREE COUNTRIES REPORT UNUSUAL FEVER CLUSTER. Health officials: "No cause for alarm."

I read it once. Then I read it again.

My heart was beating very hard and very steadily, as if it had been waiting for this. I checked the date at the top of the screen.

March twenty-fifth.

Nine days left, if I had counted correctly.

Nine days. Or fewer.

I looked down at the bangle on my wrist. It was glowing faintly, patiently, as if it too had been counting.

"All right," I said to the empty room. "Let's see how much more we can fit in."