Chapter 4

Olivia's POV

After a long, roundabout journey, I put up at a motel in Amarillo, Texas. On the nightstand sat two experimental subjects: a tub of convenience-store ice cream and a live chicken.

I put the ice cream into the space and took it back out four hours later. Not the slightest change — it would never melt, never spoil. Good.

The chicken was the real test. I gripped its wings and felt the heart beating against my palm. In, then out. The heartbeat had stopped, but the body was still warm. I drew the blade across its throat and the blood came as it should. It was dead, beyond argument, yet the space had locked the freshest instant of it the way it would lock anything I meant to eat.

I took the lifeline first. Food.

Through the line Wayne Holt had opened for me, I rented a car in Amarillo and drove south, reaching Buck McRae's ranch at noon.

August in Texas is brutal, and the cattle were dropping in whole rows. He had a hundred and twenty thousand head, and the slaughterhouses had crushed the price down to the floor, so all he could do was stand there and watch his stock die.

I quoted him market price and paid in full the same day, and once the contract was signed and the count verified, I drove back. On the way I passed a smokehouse whose chimney was laying a column of smoke across half the county road. I pulled over to try their brisket. One bite and I couldn't help myself; I asked the owner how many he could make in a day.

"On a good day, three hundred," he said, wiping his hands.

"Starting tomorrow, a thousand a day, for twenty days straight. I'll pay up front."

He stared at me and asked whether I was opening a restaurant.

"No," I said. "I just want to share it with friends."

Twenty days later, he and his two sons were still turning meat in their sleep, their hands working the tongs again and again against the dark.

Seafood came next. I flew to Maine and the Northwest coast and placed orders for lobster, salmon, and king crab all the way down the line; then doubled back to Iowa in the middle of the country and pulled twenty thousand turkeys off a farm. Then I called in a round of factories and bought salt, cotton, seed, and farm tools by the pallet.

Then medicine. The most precious thing in the end times was never gold. Antibiotics, iodine, and suture thread were what I piled up the deepest, charged in separate transactions through a handful of medical-supply wholesalers, and every bit of it went into the space.

Then energy. Once the economy collapses, the plants go dark — generators, solar panels, storage batteries, all three, or none of it matters.

And one more thing. I made a detour to a gun shop in San Antonio and ordered designated-marksman rifles, a grenade launcher, and whole pallets of ammunition. Guns never suited me the way blades did, but they would do the job; I also picked out several heavy two-handed swords, meant for Rexie.

And for any of it to be worth a thing, I stopped into a bookstore in Boston and swept the agriculture, surgery, and mechanics shelves clean. If you don't know how to run the equipment, no amount of supplies is anything but garbage.

Everywhere I went I ordered takeout from the local restaurants, never fewer than three hundred portions at a time, and the excuse was always the same: a company event, or a charity giveaway. I remember in Chicago I ordered three hundred deep-dish pizzas on one call, and the clerk phoned back to confirm. I told him, deadpan, that yes, we had a large outdoor event that evening. That store set a single-day sales record it hadn't touched in twenty years.

A little over a month into the buying, the call from the lawyer came. The Long Island estate had closed that day — trust restructured, equity transferred, thirty-eight billion dollars. That money, together with the manor, the trust, and the real estate I'd already sold, came to nearly four billion, all of it spent clean in under two months, the bulk riding on food and medicine, with energy and weapons behind it.

I went back to the motel to rest up for a couple of days, and in that time I called Wayne Holt and had him put together another order of the same list as last time. The line went quiet for a long while.

"Ms. Sterling. Still those tens of tons of cargo. You're sure?"

"I'm sure. The funds land today."

He had no reason to refuse. Take the money, do the job — that is how the trade has always worked.

I also flew to Hawaii for dive gear and waterproof lamps. In my last life I'd been trapped by floodwater for three days straight, and I was not letting that happen again.

The money shrank before my eyes.

One morning, with the buying finally wound down, the balance on my phone was down to under eighty thousand dollars. The manor was sold, but I had never intended to be homeless. On the plane I booked a three-bed, two-bath house on the North Shore of Long Island, less than three kilometers from my old place.

I landed that night, walked straight in, dropped my suitcase in the entryway, and lay down on the sofa in bare feet. If my father knew I'd burned through nearly four billion dollars in under two months and sold off the manor, the trust, and the real estate to boot, he would probably claw his way up out of the grave just to pin on me the medal for the greatest squanderer in Sterling family history. Thinking that, I turned over and slept.

I was so tired I didn't wake until three the next afternoon. The low sun came through the window and I stayed in bed. Through a month of preparation I had crammed every thought into the purchasing lists, and not once had I stopped to really think about Rexie.Not that I'd forgotten her — the guilt was simply too heavy, so I'd shoved it to the bottom, and I'd been too busy to look at it.

Only now, sitting up, did I finally admit it: it was time to go get her. She had been locked in the psychiatric detention center for almost two months.I pulled on my shoes in a rush, grabbed my keys, and headed out the door.

Rikers Island sits across the East River; you take a ferry. I parked at the Queens pier, and while I waited for the boat I could see, far off on the high wall of the facility across the water, a row of white things flapping in the sea wind. Up close they resolved into bedsheets stretched over branches, like a line of flags.

Security logged my visitor details and let me through.

Down the corridor was the outdoor yard. On the lawn, a dozen people sat in a ring around a big landscaping boulder, and on the boulder stood a short-haired, powerfully built woman holding a mop, telling her story with tremendous feeling.

I listened for a moment and recognized it — her rewrite of the Odyssey, the lead swapped out for Queen Rexie, leading a fleet to war against the Cyclops.

I called her name. Her eyes lit up at once; she jumped down off the rock, waved to the crowd, announced that the queen's envoy had come, and told her subjects to wait for her triumphant return. Then she tossed the mop to the nearest person and came over with long strides and gave me a bear hug.

"You finally came," she said. "I've been suffocating in here."

I looked at her and smiled. "You seem to be doing fine. You've made yourself queen."

She let go, grinning with every white tooth showing. "Of course I have. I built order in here."

"Come on. Let's get the paperwork done."

We had just reached the ground-floor lobby when a middle-aged doctor with a bald patch came trotting up, a stack of charts hugged to his chest and two nurses behind him, an expression in his eyes I knew well — the excitement and gratitude of a man who has just watched his savior walk through the door.

"You're here to collect her?" he asked, urgent.

I said I was. He breathed deep, clutched the charts tighter, and said it was wonderful, "We can expedite the discharge paperwork."

Rexie, all innocence, asked him, "Doctor, I behaved well in here, didn't I?"

The doctor was silent for two seconds, then answered in a rush: "Ms. Rexie Carter, your energy is truly remarkable."