Ryco
The last thing Nessa Calder remembers is her husband's hand closing the rescue-boat gate. There was room for his mistress. There was room for the supplies Nessa had carried through a drowning city. There was no room for her.
Then she wakes sixty days before the first storm.
This time, the thirty-two-year-old cold-chain engineer refuses to sign away her mother's depot, leaves her marriage, and spends her inheritance on the things the coming apocalypse will make priceless: clean water, heat, medicine, and doors that hold. A strange storage space gives her a small advantage. It cannot make food, shelter a person, or tell her which memory will fail next.
Her preparations attract Gideon Shaw, a former maritime rescue commander with his own boat, equipment, and reasons to distrust people who promise safety. Their first agreement concerns a damaged loading berth. The next could decide who survives the flood.
As power fails and the streets disappear, Nessa's husband returns to demand a place inside her gates. So do neighbors, desperate strangers, and an old friend whose loyalty has a price Nessa does not yet understand. Protecting her supplies is becoming easier than deciding whom to protect with them.
Then the temperature drops weeks before it should, and an enemy reaches a supply route she told only her closest companions.
Nessa has survived this world's ending once. Who has already made her preparations part of theirs?
2.4K