Apocalypse Protocol: The Ghost Hounds

Arya's POV

I came off the couch with my hand already moving, palm flat, fingers spread, hunting the grip of a blade that wasn't there.

What I found was the hem of a shirt I didn't own and a waistband with nothing on it — no holster, no pistol under my arm, no charges taped flat against my ribs where three of them should have ridden. The room was carpeted and cold, the light through the window was neon and moving, and eleven floors down a city ran at full volume like nothing in it had ever gone wrong. Which was true at the time. Everyone's last good night looks exactly like this.

I took inventory the way I was taught, because the body lies and gear doesn't. The hands in my lap were clean, nails whole, no ridge of scar tissue across the knuckles, no burns on the pads from a magazine that ran too hot. I turned them over twice before I believed it, crossed a room bigger than my last three safehouses, and put my face to the mirror.

The face was mine and not mine — ten years softer, no pale line through the left eyebrow, no notch in the jaw where a fragment went in and never came out, eyes without the flatness that comes from knowing how most people end. Everything else was renovation. The eyes were a refund.

Then the memory arrived: the Colorado Plateau at dusk, a clearance run that was never going to end well, the air bending around something that should not have had a shape, seconds running long and short in the wrong places, my fingertips closing on a core the color of a bruise.

I gripped the sink and heaved until my ribs ached and nothing came up. Not fear. Fear I knew. This was just a stomach with opinions about time travel.

I rinsed my mouth and let the rest of it play.

I had twelve once, and nothing broke us — not the winter, not the swarm, not the jobs nobody else would take. Then the world finished what it had been practicing on everyone else, and it took them in the order it wanted. Iron Falcon on an overpass, a bridge coming down, a fuel line nobody trusted, a hill that had to be held, six years of sepsis we could never get ahead of, a doorway I got through because somebody stayed in it.

By the time the memory let go, I was on the couch again. My nails had gone into the leather and pulled up. Blood in the cuticles, in a hotel that charged by the night and would have billed me for the cushion. I breathed until the noise in my chest settled, wiped the blood on the upholstery out of spite, and stood.

Recite it. That was what I did when the map was bigger than the terrain. Ninety days out from some night in the middle of the desert, a purple aurora came up everywhere at once and did not move like weather. The burst killed ninety percent of the electronics on the continent inside an hour. Then the radiation went through everything that breathed and rewrote sixty percent of the human race into things that kill. Whoever was left slept a day or two and woke with a resonance in their blood — a talent, a category, a way of hurting the world back. The sales pitch for the apocalypse was never the problem. It was the delivery.

Cores were what the aberrants grew in their skulls, tiered one through nine and colored by category, and they were the only real currency we ever had. Past the fourth tier you needed your own color and your own tier, or your genes burned you from the inside out. No exceptions, no workarounds, no customer service.

That was the ladder, and I had to climb it a second time. Deep Rock put the rest out on shortwave from under a mountain in Colorado: seven alpha-class cores, and there was a serum. Year three the aberrants stopped running alone. Year four they came at the walls in formation. Before any of that, a winter that dropped to sixty below and a heat wave that turned half the species rabid in two weeks. Ninety days to get ahead of all of it, and I would be doing it with a checkbook and a phone.

That was the whole map, and I held it the way I used to hold a building I was going to enter from the roof down. A map is only as good as the assumption that the building hasn't been renovated. I died in year ten. The clock in my chest did not say what the old one said, and mine had never been generous.

Reaching for a pen was what tipped me off. My hand went to my right thigh where a pouch should have been — logbook, grease pencil, two spare mags — and there was nothing but denim, and the absence made me notice the other absence. I could feel the fold. Not reach for it. Feel it the way you feel a coat pocket with something heavy in it.

I closed my eyes and found its edge behind my sternum, and it wasn't the size that was wrong, it was the not-size. In the old life it started as a closet and grew into something you could park two dozen trucks in, and it always had walls I could count. This one kept going in the direction I looked and then kept going past that. In the middle of it there was a house.

The thought was barely formed before the floor dropped and I was standing on planks in one room with a bed, kitchen through the doorway, sink and toilet past that, everything plain like a cabin somebody had left ready.

I pushed out the back door onto dirt — black, loose, damp enough to hold a print, warm under the surface like a body — and it ran further than I could see before it stopped being anything. I crouched, took up a handful, and it smelled like ground after rain, which was a smell I had not had in ten years without blood in it.

At the edge of it there was water, a spring about the width of a bathtub, bright and giving off its own light, and I did the thing I shouldn't and put two fingers in. The burn scar on the inside of my right wrist closed and flattened and then wasn't there. Two years of pale, gone in about four seconds. Free medical care. That was new.

I looked at my hand a while. That core. Whatever I had my fingers on when the world ended the second time went in and changed the fold instead of just killing me, which was the only reading that fit.

It opened the one question I couldn't answer from a hotel bathroom — why the trip back came with the ability attached — and I shelved it, because there was no version of these next ninety days where I spent a week on that while the clock ran.

The first thing I did was try to put the squad back on the line, and the first name that came up was Dexter — Big Guy — every time.

He picked up on the fourth ring and I heard the room before I heard him — a Texas barbecue place at dinnertime, silverware, somebody laughing two tables over. Two hundred and twenty pounds of dead man said my callsign into my ear, and nothing in my life had ever cost what those two syllables cost me just then.

"Where are you?" I asked, and it came out flat, which was the only way it was coming out.

"Galveston. Little place off the seawall." He was chewing. "They got a brisket here that'll make you cry. Want me to bring you some?"

"Las Vegas. Tomorrow. Take the first flight you can get." Three seconds of nothing on the line, which was him thinking. "Call me when you land."

He didn't ask why. That was the thing about him, and it was why he was the first call and not the fifth.

"Yeah, okay. I'll find you ribs when I land. You sound like you need feeding.""

I hung up before he finished, because I was four words from coming apart on a hotel phone, and I put both palms flat on the glass and stood there breathing until it passed.

Below me the Strip ran its loop of pink and gold, four hundred thousand people spending in a city with ninety days left, and I counted the supply nodes I could see and the ones I knew were under it. The note app was already open. I typed the first line.

Aurora pulse: 90 days. Item one — money. Enough of it to buy the rest of the list.

Out past the last of the light, over the desert where the city stopped, the sky flickered, and for half a second it was the wrong color.