Chapter one

"You'd be dead in a day," Brett typed. "You wouldn't last one chapter."

"One chapter?" I typed back. "I'd be at the hardware store buying water while your heroine's in her closet."

I hit send and grinned. An hour earlier, I'd posted a one-star review of Dawn of Ruin, the biggest zombie romance on the planet, and four thousand strangers had come to burn me for it.

The review had taken me eleven minutes, which was ten more than the author seemed to have spent on Vera Lockhart's personality.

She stocks the pantry. She locks the doors. She writes the list. Then she dies in one paragraph. Cannon fodder with a clipboard. Would not mourn.

My name is Nell Hartley. I review books for a living, if forty dollars a review counts. Online I'm NellNoMercy, forty-one thousand followers, and my whole brand is saying what readers think at chapter thirty and are too polite to type. I read the last page of every book first. I hate surprises.

That morning, my editor had laid me off. Budget cuts. So tonight, I had nothing to lose.

The first comment had landed before the kettle boiled.

You clearly didn't understand the story, wrote a user called LilyForever.

I cracked my knuckles.

I understood it fine, I typed. Lily gets a magic storage space in chapter forty-one, the best survival tool in the world, and uses it to hide in a closet for fourteen chapters. She eats one granola bar. Twice. She forgives the woman who tried to poison her, then tells that same woman where the water is hidden. That isn't a heroine. That's a hostage who hasn't noticed.

She's PURE, LilyForever replied.

She's a security risk.

Damon is perfect!! wrote someone else.

Damon has more red flags than a military parade, I typed. He's arrogant, controlling, and cruel, and the book expects us to swoon every time he does the bare minimum. We're told he's a genius forty-one times. Then he loses his entire supply vault because he forgot to lock it.

The replies came fast. Then something odd happened. My answers were getting more likes than their attacks. Wait, he DID leave the vault unlocked, someone wrote. Oh my god, the closet, wrote another.

Vera was a side character, Brett wrote. Get over it.

That was the one that got me.

Vera Lockhart is Damon's wife, I wrote. In three days she stocks the pantry, locks every door, writes the list, and patches up the wounded. Nobody thanks her. On day three, in chapter seventeen, Damon pushes her out of an SUV so the heroine can escape, and the author gives it one paragraph. Vera was the only competent person in the cast. The book punished her for it.

And the apocalypse has more plot holes than survival supplies. Nobody buys water for six chapters. SIX. The author reuses the same six lottery numbers in five different scenes (seven, fourteen, twenty-two, thirty-one, thirty-eight, forty) and nobody ever claims the jackpot. It's either lazy writing or a very rude lottery.

lmao the lottery thing is real, someone wrote.

That's when Brett typed his reply. You've read it.

By the time I refilled my tea, he had deleted it. But a screenshot, with my answer under it, already had two thousand shares.

Then a verified account joined the thread. R.J. Pike. The author.

Cute, he wrote. Do you know how many copies I've sold?

Eleven million, I typed. And not one of them has a working water supply.

You're a failed writer.

I'm a successful reader. It's the only job where I've never been wrong about an ending.

He blocked me. It felt like winning.

It should have been enough. It wasn't. Something kept itching, so I opened chapter seventeen and read Vera's death again.

Vera held the garage door so the others could climb into the SUV. Damon shoved her back. The SUV pulled away. Lily cried for a full page.

That was it. Three days of feeding, guarding, and counting, and the book thanked her with a shove and a page of someone else's tears.

I was furious on behalf of a woman who didn't exist. I typed the last comment before I could stop myself.

If I were Vera, I'd have let every last one of those idiots starve.

I hit post and put the phone on the arm of the couch.

It buzzed. Theo. My brother is nineteen, three hours away, in his first year of engineering at a school we can't afford. He texts me one word after every review. Savage.

Tonight, there was another one. Call me tomorrow? Mom's birthday is Sunday. We need to pick a cake.

Will do, I typed. Go to sleep.

Mom cleans offices at night. She's done it for twenty years so Theo could be the first in our family to sit in a lecture hall. I'd just lost the only income I had. I had two hundred and twelve dollars and a tuition payment due in ten days.

Another notification slid in under Theo's. A gray circle, no name, no photo. A reply to my last comment.

Prove it.

I laughed. It came out like a cough. "Sure."

The screen went white.

Welcome to Dawn of Ruin, said a calm voice from nowhere. Current survival rate for your assigned role: 0.03 percent.

I opened my mouth to ask who the hell this was. Nothing came out.

The last thing I heard was my phone buzzing in my hand, with Theo's name on it.