Chapter 1 Return to the Time Before the Apocalypse

Evelyn’s POV

My name was Evelyn Kane.

I knew what the end of the world smelled like. Rust, mold, and blood frozen hard as asphalt.

It was three in the morning at the Puget Sound docks. Water lapped at the pilings and metal shrank in the cold, and the rest was a heavy stillness, as though all the life in that place had already left it. I leaned against a pile of bodies with my right hand pressed to my left side, my fingers sticky with blood that had begun to slow, and I knew I had about twenty minutes left. I had calculated that before. I had never been wrong.

I didn’t fight back. My gun had run dry two fights earlier. My knife was stuck in a Lumberer’s eye socket back in the dark, and my Gale Veil faded after midnight. I’d shoved the only other survivor into a crawlspace and told her to keep running, no matter what. It wasn’t bravery. I was just too worn out to run, and someone had to hold them off.

My final thoughts were not grand. They were tiny and ordinary: Tyler sending me a random meme at two in the morning, Hannah's strawberry milk marked with masking tape on the shared fridge shelf, Aunt Marianne grumbling about the rain.

When I was seventeen, I had told myself to live longer and live better. I meant it. Then I survived ten years of this and became the person I was now.

I closed my eyes. The cold worked up through the dock planks. Somewhere in the dark at the far end of the building, something moved, leather on wet wood, patient, taking its time.

Then the cold took the last of it, and there was nothing at all.

A heating pipe hummed inside the wall. Slow footsteps echoed down the linoleum hallway. Wind came through the screen and carried the smell of coffee, fresh grass, and living plants.

I kept my eyes shut, cataloging every small sound and feel. It was a spring mattress beneath me, not packed earth. The sheets carried that stiff, scratchy feel of institutional laundry. Somewhere above the ceiling tiles, a sparrow flitted around — it must have slipped in through an unsealed crack.

I opened my eyes to a white ceiling and a curtain printed with cartoon cats in pink and lavender.

My hand shot to my waist before I had taken in the room. There was no holster and no knife, only the hem of a cotton shirt. Panic surged through me, and I climbed down from the top bunk meaning to clear the space, but my body failed me.

My ankle seized and my knee buckled. I grabbed the bed frame and landed hard enough to shake the whole bunk.

A dull pain throbbed in my foot. It wasn’t a monster bite or tourniquet ache, just the dull soreness of sleeping wrong and jumping up too fast. I gripped the bed frame on the cold linoleum, slowly realizing this young body hadn’t been worn ragged by the apocalypse.

There was no gunfire and there were no Fiends, only the sparrow above the tiles, the pipe inside the wall, and Hannah's slow breathing from the lower bunk.

"Evelyn?"

The curtain on the lower bunk pulled back. Her voice, thick with sleep, grew annoyed as it went. "You okay? Did you fall?" She paused. "If you're going to make a fuss, wait until I've had six hours."

The curtain opened a little wider. Hannah Reed peered out with her bangs messy from sleep and old eyeliner smudged at her temple, her RA keyring hanging from two fingers the way it always did. She had been holding it the last time I saw her, two years before she died, and I did not want to think about that now.

She was alive. I compressed everything that meant into a space behind my sternum and held it there.

"I'm fine," I said. The words came out level. "Legs fell asleep."

She held the look for a count of two, the same flat assessment she gave anyone who knocked on her door after midnight claiming they only wanted to talk, and then let the curtain fall. "Okay. Keep it down. Zoe was up until two."

I waited until Hannah's breathing steadied, then crossed to the window and pulled the curtain back a little.

The cherry trees along the east path were starting to bloom pale pink. Clouds drifted slowly across the sky, with no sign of danger in them. Below the window a cyclist cut across the quad and a boy on the library steps mouthed vocabulary words into the cold, and none of it knew what was coming.

Zoe's laptop sat open on the desk, its screen saver cycling through trail photos from some outdoor brand's partnership account. The clock in the corner read 7:14 AM, Monday, March 17, 2025.

I looked at it for five full seconds. Then I closed my eyes and pressed the numbers in like a combination lock. March 22. Saturday. Twelve noon.

I pulled the phone out from under my pillow, fully charged, signal full, no messages I did not expect, and opened a new note. The title took two words: Day 1. Then I started typing, my thumb moving without hesitation, because there was no version of this in which hesitation cost less than it bought.

Brokerage account, short positions, open today. Energy, logistics, commercial real estate. Close by Thursday.

Property, call the mortgage broker. Equity line. Cash out everything available.

Tyler, call before noon. Don't explain. Just get him moving.

Procurement, confirm delivery windows. Storage units, I-5 corridor, minimum two locations.

Supply list, cross-reference against the Anacortes site. No redundancy. No waste.

I added one more line at the bottom, separated from the rest by a blank space. It said that we would be out of the dorms before the twenty-second, and that there were no exceptions.

I dimmed the screen and tucked the phone into my waistband. Zoe slept on with one arm dangling over the edge of the bed, her REI card and a half-used stick of climbing chalk on the nightstand. Hannah had gone quiet again.

Morning light filtered through the blinds and fell across the floor, over Zoe's shoes and a textbook that had dropped off the desk overnight.

Then I found yesterday's jeans on the desk chair and went through what I knew.

The brokerage account held eleven thousand, most of it an old inheritance that had been doing nothing. If I placed the short trades before the market opened and closed them by Thursday, the money would grow fast enough to matter. The home equity loan would be harder, but I had planned it many times in another life and knew the shape of that conversation. Forty thousand, maybe more depending on the appraisal. Together with the profits from the shorts, that covered the supplies without touching the funds already sitting in Tyler's account.

I checked the time, 7:17, and found his contact. He would be in the truck by then, which was where he talked without editing himself. I let it ring, and he picked up on the third with road noise behind him and the radio going, some country station he had been pretending was ironic since college.

"Evelyn." His voice carried the particular roughness of a man on his first coffee and already driving. "You're up early."

“Listen before you reply,” I said, heading for the quiet hallway. “A client near Anacortes wants major structural and security work. They asked for you specifically, and supplies need to arrive by week’s end.”

There was a pause. The radio volume dropped.

"How much material," he said.

"Enough to do the job right. I'll send you the list. Don't read it while you're driving."

Another pause, longer than the first.

"Evelyn." The flatness had shifted into something more careful. "Last time you called me with a client situation, I spent three weekends installing a gate that definitely wasn't up to code."

"This one is up to code," I said. "Tyler. I need you on-site before Saturday. You and Dad, and Mom too if she's willing to stay and keep an eye on things while the work is going on. The client is fine with it."

He fell silent, and I knew that silence. He was weighing the risk against his trust in me, the way he always had. In the old timeline he chose wrong and I was not there to stop him.

"Okay," he said finally. "Send me the list. But you're explaining this to Mom yourself, because I'm not doing it."

The breath I let out was quieter than I meant it to be.

"Deal," I said. "Keep your phone on."

I ended the call and stood at the top of the stairwell a moment, looking down the empty corridor, past the fluorescent light and the closed doors and the bulletin board with a pizza coupon pinned to it that someone had put up before Thanksgiving and nobody had ever taken down. The heating system kicked on and the board fluttered, lifting the corner of the coupon and letting it fall.

It was 7:19 in the morning, and I had five days.

I pushed off the wall and went downstairs to find coffee, because everything that came next was going to require my hands to be completely steady, and I had not had a full night's sleep in ten years.