Chapter 8

Olivia's POV

I didn't know when I had fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes again, it was almost four o'clock, and the alarm hadn't gone off yet.

I lay still, staring at the ceiling. Not laziness — I simply knew what was coming.

In another hour, the eerie red aurora would seep in through the edges of the curtains. The sky would turn deep and rich, as if stained with blood.

In my previous life, I'd watched it from the roof of a half-collapsed building in Manhattan. I'd thought it was some rare atmospheric phenomenon. I'd even taken photos.

I got up and went to Rexie's bedroom, knocking on the door. "Time to get up."

A muffled grunt from inside. The sound of blankets shifting. Then silence.

I went back to the living room and pulled every curtain shut, checked the ventilation seals one by one, and ran a quiet inventory of the backup generator's fuel reserves. Two hundred gallons of diesel. Enough.

Rexie shuffled out in her slippers, hair a mess, a pillow tucked under her arm. She clocked the sealed curtains, walked to the nearest window, and lifted a corner.

She turned toward me, lips already parting — something eager in her expression, like she'd spotted something worth mentioning.

"Don't open the window, Rexie. The apocalypse is here." I cut her off.

She let go of the curtain and took a step back.

By nine in the morning, the outdoor thermometer had pushed past 130 degrees Fahrenheit and showed no intention of stopping. We switched on the backup cooling system — an industrial-grade unit I'd sourced from a commercial refrigeration supplier in Texas, originally designed for large-scale cold storage. Rexie had asked why I needed something with that kind of output. I'd told her for contingencies. She hadn't pushed it.

Now she stood directly in front of the vent, arms crossed over her chest, letting the cold air pass across her skin.

"This godforsaken weather," she said.

"I did a tour in Kuwait, a hundred and twenty degrees in the summer, and it never felt this bad."

"Kuwait is dry heat. This is different."

She cut me a sideways look.

"How do you know that?"

I didn't answer.

The TV was on with the volume low. The crawl at the bottom of the screen updated every few minutes with the national heatstroke death count. Someone had posted a video from Midtown — a stretch of asphalt visibly softening in real time, bubbling at the surface like something boiling from underneath.

Another clip showed the Central Park reservoir: a solid white layer of dead fish covering the water, so dense the surface beneath was invisible. When the camera zoomed in, the eyes had already turned white.

Rexie watched the lake footage, brow furrowed, saying nothing.

At two in the afternoon, the sky changed.

The scorching red light was swallowed whole by a bank of lead-grey clouds. The light dropped suddenly, and the air pressure sank with it. For a moment, there was a dull ache in the head.

White flakes began to drift down.

Rexie was off the couch before I could speak, already at the window. "Is that snow?"

I caught her arm. "Don't open the window."

"It's September —"

"I said don't."

She was pinned in place by my tone. Outside the window glass, the flakes drifted down slowly, impossibly light, like goose-down snow. Across the street, a few pedestrians had wandered out onto the road. One of them raised both hands, palms up, tilted their head back toward the sky, and smiled.

Then the smile disappeared, and she screamed at her own palms.

Rexie went very still. She kept watching the street, silent, and I noticed the fine hairs along her forearm had risen.

The flocculent material landed on the iron railing, and a wisp of white smoke rose instantly from the point of contact. It landed on the hood of a sedan parked by the roadside, and the paint began to bubble and peel within ten seconds, exposing the gray primer beneath.

In my past life, I witnessed a man rush out into the street, thinking the temperature had finally dropped. But in less than three seconds, his palms dissolved down to bare bone. I was no more than thirty feet away, and there was nothing I could do.

I stopped thinking about it.

"Seal every vent," I said, turning to Rexie. "And check the lids on the backup water tanks — make sure they're tight."

She did as I told her.

At 6:20 in the evening, the power went out.

Long Island's lines fell in sequence over the span of forty minutes, one substation triggering the next like dominoes. Across the water, Manhattan held — I could still make out the lit skyline from the far side of the bay, towers glowing as if nothing had happened at all.

Our backup generator kicked on three seconds after the main supply cut.

Rexie stood beside the generator and listened to it run. She looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite name, and said nothing.

I already knew what she was thinking. "The TV still works," I said.

The official statement aired at eight o'clock. The anchor's voice had been calibrated for calm — steady, measured, with a warmth that sounded deliberate. Yellowstone's supervolcano had experienced a minor eruption after a century of dormancy. The ash fall was volcanic in origin. Corrosive properties were within manageable parameters. FEMA was mobilizing resources. Shelter centers would open tomorrow. The public was asked to remain calm.

Rexie set her phone down and looked at me. "You believe that?"

I didn't change my expression.

"Do you?"

She said, "If the volcano really erupted, half the North American continent would be gone. We wouldn't be talking about a few casualties."

"Right."

She knew it too. She set down the remote and leaned back into the couch.

In my previous life, I had believed every word of that broadcast. I'd stayed indoors for a week, waiting for the shelter centers to open, waiting for the supply airdrops, waiting for a call that would tell me things were turning around. The call never came. The shelter center coordinates turned out to be a scorched field by the time I got there. The airdrops were shot out of the sky mid-descent by people with better guns than the ones waiting on the ground.

Late that night, the first rain came.

It hit the windows differently from normal rain — heavier, the sound off in a way I couldn't fully account for. I took a glass from the cabinet, gripped it with a pair of long tongs, and held it out through a narrow gap in the window frame.

When I brought it inside and held it up to the light, I found the water murky — not with sediment, but with floating black flecks, finer than the white flocculent material in the ash rain, almost like the residue of diluted ink.

I set the glass in the corner. I didn't pour it out.

In my previous life, the virus spread faster than anyone's worst projection. No one had anticipated the water cycle. That was the part that killed most people before anyone understood what was happening.

For the next three days, we didn't open a window. We didn't go outside. Long Island had lost power but still had cellular signal — the towers were running on independent battery backup. Manhattan and Queens hadn't lost electricity at all; people over there were still posting, still streaming, still forwarding, and the information poured through like a burst pipe.

The hospital footage started appearing in news broadcasts on the first day — corridors lined with bodies, not enough gurneys, people lying directly on the floor. The symptom reports on day one said fever and vomiting. By day three the language had shifted: hemoptysis, respiratory failure, and a phrase the anchor visibly hesitated over — internal tissue damage.

On the third afternoon, a livestream from a supermarket circulated across every platform before it could be taken down. The shelves weren't empty from buying — they were stripped from rushing. Someone filmed two men in a parking lot facing each other over the last case of bottled water, both holding knives. The video was deleted after nearly forty thousand shares.

Rexie watched the footage without speaking. She stood up, walked to the storage room, drew the greatsword from its scabbard, and began practicing her sword swings.

I didn't stop her.

.I picked up the tactical binoculars and stood on the balcony, surveying the area around the house.

I saw Diane Whitaker's place next door, a woman standing in the rain with her head tilted back — and then two people rushed out and dragged her inside.

I didn't know what that person was trying to do.

And I had no interest in minding other people's business. I turned off most of the lights and sat in the darkness, listening to the rush of air from Rexie's sword swings, and the soft, unceasing patter of rain outside the window — rain that showed no sign of stopping.