Sarah Jenkins
In my first life, I was Preston’s combat quartermaster. I kept his team fed, fortified their perimeter, and crushed my knee hauling rations—only for him to strip my winter coat, seize my sidearm, and drop the iron bolt on the airlock hatch.
“In the field, we don’t bleed rations on dead weight.”
Those were his last words before the freezing sleet and starving scavengers finished me off.
Now I’ve woken up seven days before Zero Hour.
A solar superflare is about to burn out the power grid and freeze the city solid. But this time, my grandmother’s pendant has opened a hidden void in my mind—a dark space where time stands still, boiling soup stays scalding forever, and nothing ever rots.
While Preston pressures me to sign over my late mother’s townhouse to cover his gambling debts, and my parasite sister—who wrapped herself in my blanket while I froze—screams about rent money, I get to work.
Fifteen thousand pounds of grain and clean water. Eight hundred piping-hot meals. Heaters, fuel, trauma kits—and a three-hundred-pound steel door bolted eight inches into the cinderblock.
Then I hand Preston to the loan sharks hunting him.
When the sky turns violet and the transformers explode, he comes sprinting to my door, begging me to open it.
Goodnight, Preston.
This time, I’m the one who locks the door.
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