Chapter 1

Olivia's POV 

I opened my eyes with the day's plan still turning over in my head: go and count the half case of canned goods I had hauled back yesterday. That had been a leaky old building in Manhattan, where the ceiling dripped without pause whenever it rained. And yet what hung above me now was the delicate canopy of a four-poster bed.

I went still. I survived fight after fight, climbed over corpses to second-in-command of a survivor outpost, and took over the camp when the leader dropped dead — and before I could eat one victory dinner, I closed my eyes and slept. When I opened them again, I was back before the disaster.

Damn it. Why was I reborn?

July air off the East Coast seeped through the seam of the French windows, carrying the salt and brine that belongs to Long Island Sound alone. The antique lamp on the nightstand, the abstract painting I had chosen with my own hands, the shallow scratch in the floorboard — everything matched my memory, unchanged to the millimeter. I sat staring at that lamp for a long time, long enough for cold sweat to break out in my palms, before I braced one hand on the mattress and stood, thick black hair falling loose down my back.

A photograph stood on the nightstand: my parents and I on a yacht deck, smiling, back when everything was good and steady. My father's linen shirt had washed pale; the sea wind had knocked my mother's straw hat crooked. I had looked at that photograph more times than I could count among the ruins. They had vanished in the waters off Bermuda, no bodies, no remains.

I turned the frame over and set it face down on the cabinet. My throat was dry and tight, my heart slamming. The next second, the breakdown I had been holding down blew apart: "Why me, of all people? I barely made it through three years of hell — why make me live it again? God, is this your idea of a joke?"

The clock's red digits blinked 1:31 a.m., July 5, calm as a cold sneer. Two whole months remained before the blood-colored aurora came down and the end began.

The memories came up like a tide. That night the sky tore open along a red fissure, the light burning from the north all the way to the south; people called it an aurora, though it was far more terrible than any aurora has a right to be. Everyone poured into the streets to film it and post it, certain they were seeing the most beautiful thing of their lives. I stood on the balcony and watched it too. Then the extreme weather rolled over the land: by day the heat was savage enough that asphalt could hold a shoe sole fast, by night the cold split water pipes, and a gray rain of ash fell out of the sky that did nothing at all to your skin and killed you once it reached your lungs. In three weeks, modern civilization came apart completely.

I, Olivia Sterling, was the sole heir of the old-money Sterling family. After my parents went missing, the tens of billions in trust funds, the properties and jewelry scattered across the country were meant to be my backing. But when the disaster arrived, all that wealth became waste paper in an instant, and this grand Long Island estate turned into a pile of brick and timber worth nothing. I, who had once been an heiress, ended up unable to trade for a single piece of bread I could swallow.

Three years of hell. The people I trusted put a knife in my back, and in the end my own hand drew the blade and finished them; the ones who looked soft and pitiable turned around and sold me out. After that I stopped being any kind of saint. Over more than a thousand days and nights, the nights I slept safely could be counted on my fingers. The one partner in the world I would hand my back to, Rexie, is still locked up somewhere waiting for me to come and get her.

There was a phone under the pillow. I dug it out, opened the banking app, and my fingers shook so badly it took several tries to type the password correctly.

A long string of numbers came up: thirteen billion, four hundred forty-five million, plus some loose change.

I stared at it without breathing, laughed silently first, shoulders shaking and shaking, and then laughed out loud, the sound of it rolling around the room until an owl in the garden cried out in alarm and vanished into the dark.

Money — and right now it still had real purchasing power, not the toilet paper it would become in the last days, good only for wiping. The trust inheritance, the stocks and securities, the mansions I did not live in three times a year, the collections sitting under dust in the jewelry cabinets: every bit of it could be cashed out and turned into the supplies that keep a person alive. Barefoot on the floor, I turned a full circle in the dark and swore at the ceiling that starting today I would sell everything. The houses, the stocks, the private yacht, the jewelry, all of it into goods, hoarded down to my last penny. Even Jesus would not stop me. The suffering of my last life was still vivid in front of my eyes; in this one, I would not walk that road again.

I went down the stairs barefoot in one run and pulled open the double doors of the first-floor refrigerator, and cold light and cold air came pouring out over shelves packed full. I swallowed without meaning to.

I remembered being a socialite in the old life, an entire dinner carried by half an avocado, and looking back at it now, the whole idea struck me as ridiculous. On the top shelf sat a cake with a piece cut from its edge and a chocolate plaque bearing my name, and that was how I learned today was my birthday. In the last days, forget a whole cake — if I could taste the least hint of sweetness, I counted myself secretly lucky.

I sat cross-legged in front of the open refrigerator and put away birthday cake, prosciutto, cold cola, and cold roast ribs in succession, pushing the salad container off to the corner. Sugar and fat burst across my tongue and the taste of it nearly brought me to tears. Only when my stomach was swollen and my burps tasted of grease did I prop myself on the refrigerator door and climb to my feet.

By two in the morning every light in the study was on. I dug out paper and pen, and since it had been so long since I had sat at a keyboard without fear, writing by hand came more naturally. Down jackets, fleece, cashmere blankets: after the disaster, the day would bake everything and the night would split the pipes. Rice, flour, pasta, instant oats, plus potato flakes and pancake mix. Sanitary pads, toilet paper, toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap, rolls of heavy tape. Generators, solar panels, storage batteries, cases of propane, and a water unit that could condense drinking water straight out of the air; gasoline, diesel, kerosene, firewood; cold medicine, fever reducers, anti-inflammatories, medical alcohol, vitamin C. Pots and pans, salt and pepper. Halfway down the page I stopped, then went back and added a line: hot dogs, luncheon meat, macaroni and cheese, cup noodles, beef jerky, canned chili, and whole cases of ice cream.

With more than thirteen billion in principal on top of the proceeds from the real estate and the stocks, would it be enough? Staring at the list covered in my handwriting, a strange tremor passed through me without warning. A perception I knew surfaced in my mind out of nowhere, absolute space, and my body moved forward on instinct before I had decided anything.

I took the key and unlocked the hidden door behind the bookcase. The lights came up slowly and led down into the depths of the secret room. It gave me no exact shelf number, but it told me the direction clearly: on that row of low display stands on the inner side, lying quietly among a heap of antique ornaments. Right there.

My fingertips tingled faintly, and I could almost see it, a weak, self-contained pulse coming off the thing.

In my last life I had gone to my death without knowing this family secret existed, and I had never imagined that when I came back, the space itself would take the initiative and point me toward the location of its vessel.