Chapter 6

Ivy's POV

It took a long time and more close calls than I could count to turn the quiet girl I'd been into one of the strongest ability users at the settlement, the kind of person who could make a hard call and act on it.

I started out pulling regular shifts on guard duty. I fought my way to squad leader and then to captain, and I shed blood for every promotion.

I defended the settlement and the people inside it with everything I had. As far as I was concerned, that place was home.

I used to be proud of what we were doing there. I thought we'd managed to hold on to some small part of what made us human.

When I think about it now, all I can see is how long I let them make a fool of me.

In the end, they set me up and had me shipped to the island to be used as a test subject.

My family were the only ones who knew how fast I healed.

They were also the only people I still trusted enough to take whatever they handed me without stopping to ask what was in it.

I owed them for taking me in. We shared blood. Family looked after family. How many times had I heard those lines?

Every word of it was bullshit.

I could kick myself now for how readily I used to believe them.

So when Robert brought up marrying Castillo's son this time around, I let him finish and gave him a chance to make a deal. I needed my father's pendant back.

Mr. Castillo's money was a bonus.

I watched the blood on the pendant for a long time. Nothing happened.

What if Amber was the only one who could use it?

I felt my face harden as soon as the thought occurred to me.

It had come down through my father's side of the family. If I couldn't use it, I'd sooner break it than let anybody else have it.

I'd barely thought the words when the pendant got so hot I could feel it burning against my palm.

Where the blood had landed, a thin layer flaked off, exposing glossy, translucent red jade.

When nothing else happened, I pricked my fingertip again and smeared blood across the rest of the pendant.

Grayish white flakes peeled away in chunks. Within seconds, the pendant looked like a different piece entirely.

The stone was red all the way through now, with the clarity of fine jade.

Amber had worn it day after day in my last life, with that dull outer layer still on it.

What was it about my blood that had brought out the red stone underneath?

Could it have something to do with which side of the family it had come from?

I looked down at the stone and tried asking it without speaking. Where's the space?

How was I supposed to find the place where Amber had stored everything?

I waited for some kind of sensation and felt nothing at all.

Then my vision cut out. When I opened my eyes, I was standing on bare black soil. There was nothing growing anywhere I could see.

I turned to see what was behind me.

Three little cabins stood inside a fenced yard.

Nobody had lived in them for a long time, judging by the state of the buildings. The fence leaned so far over it looked ready to give way.

I stepped into the yard. There was a dry well in the middle.

Where the hell had I landed?

Was I inside the pendant?

I'd expected somewhere to store supplies. Apparently I could go inside myself.

The pendant was gone. A bright red mole had appeared on the inside of my right wrist.

I'd never had a mole anywhere near that spot before.

The pendant had to be the mark on my wrist.

If it could disappear into my skin, why had Amber always kept it out where anyone could see it, hanging around her neck?

And if a living person could come in here, why had I never seen her store so much as a live insect?

Storing things was the only ability she'd claimed. She was too scared to make a supply run by herself, so I'd gone with her every time.

I'd seen her use the space often enough to be sure it hadn't held anything alive back then.

I tried giving it another instruction in my head. Out. Let me out.

A second later, I was standing in my bedroom again.

I stood there stunned. The pendant could do far more than I'd expected.

There was soil in there. I could grow food.

I went back inside to get a closer look at the cabins.

Each cabin held one room. There was a living room, a bedroom, and a kitchen at the far end.

Most of the furniture in the first two cabins fell to powder at a touch.

All that was left in the kitchen was a freestanding cast-iron stove and an old iron kettle. The kettle crumbled into rust flakes in my hand.

I tried the wooden cabinet. I'd barely moved the door when the whole thing collapsed with a crash, sending dust billowing up into my face.

I coughed twice before I could draw a decent breath.

I waved the dust away and took a few steps back.

I found a way down into a cellar behind the kitchen.

Beyond the first few steps it was too dark to see where the stairs went.

I switched on my flashlight and followed the stairs as they wound down.

One look around at the bottom told me I'd found something bigger than a cellar.

A huge warehouse lay underneath the cabins.

It was empty and seemed to stretch beneath the entire tract of land above.

Before I counted on any of it, I needed to make sure I could use the space to store things.

I kept putting things in and pulling them back out until I could do both whenever I wanted.

I put one serving of ice cream on the ground up top and another in the warehouse.

A few hours later, I went back. The ice cream up top was a puddle.

The serving downstairs looked exactly as it had when I put it there.

That was the first clue I had that time might run differently in the warehouse than it did up top.

Aboveground, time seemed to pass normally. In the warehouse, it had practically stood still.

What could I do with a room where time barely moved?

Just thinking about it made me breathe a little faster.

I could stock up on food and supplies without having to use them before they went bad.

I estimated a few hundred acres, with a clear barrier like glass all the way around.

It gave a little under my palm, like gelatin. No matter how hard I leaned on it, I couldn't get through.

About half an hour in, my head felt heavy and foggy. I had to get out.

I tried several more times. I never managed to stay long.

The fish tank I'd left inside was still there, and the little fish were alive and swimming.

Maybe the limit applied to humans because we could think and make choices. The fish seemed fine.

I'd need to test that when I had the chance.

I sighed. So much for stockpiling everything and spending the rest of my life in here.

I still had the space, though. And I knew what I needed to do with it first.

I took out a pocket notebook and started writing down every supply I could think of.

Then I pulled out my phone to look things up and kept adding to the list as I went.