Cora locked the bathroom door behind her.
She leaned over the marble sink, gripping the edges so hard her knuckles turned white. She turned the faucet on full blast.
The freezing water rushed over her hands. She stared into the mirror, but all she saw were the flashes of the refugee camp. The smell of rotting flesh. The sight of people dying in agony because there wasn't a single dose of antibiotics left in the city.
She looked down at her hands. They were smooth. The massive, jagged scar that had torn through her left palm in her past life was gone.
She closed her eyes and focused.
In her past life, she had awakened a hydrokinesis ability. The military had classified it as a low-level support skill. It was weak, but it was something.
She pushed her focus to the tips of her fingers.
The water running from the faucet stuttered. It was a microscopic pause, but it happened.
Cora's eyes snapped open. She curled her index finger upward.
A single drop of water, the size of a marble, broke away from the stream. It defied gravity, floating silently an inch above her palm.
Her breath hitched in her throat.
The ability had come back with her.
It was tiny, but it meant she wasn't completely defenseless. She flicked her wrist. The water droplet shot forward, hitting the mirror with a soft, wet tap, harmlessly splattering tiny droplets across the smooth glass.
A wave of dizziness hit her. Using the ability this early drained her physical energy fast.
She grabbed a towel, dried her hands roughly, and walked back into the dorm room.
She pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk, bypassing the textbooks, and pulled out a black notebook with a combination lock.
She spun the dials, flipped past the old class notes to a blank page, and grabbed a thick black marker.
She wrote the first word in all caps: FOOD & WATER.
She drew a massive star next to it. She remembered the taste of moldy dog food. She knew exactly what hunger did to the human brain. It turned people into animals.
She wrote the second line: MEDICAL SUPPLIES.
Antibiotics. By the second month of the apocalypse, a single pill was worth more than a gold bar.
She wrote the third line: WEAPONS & DEFENSE.
She needed distance. She couldn't fight infected hand-to-hand, not with her current physical strength.
Cora stared at the list. The ink bled through the paper. She had the knowledge, but she hit a massive, physical wall.
Money.
She opened her laptop and logged into her Bank of America account.
Balance: $3,050.00.
She let out a harsh, mocking laugh.
She had one other card—a black Visa tied to a small emergency account her parents had established before the crash. Harlon didn't know it existed. But when she checked that balance, the number staring back at her was barely four thousand dollars. Combined with her main account, it wouldn't even cover a single pallet of MREs, let alone the arsenal she needed. The trust fund was still the only real answer.
Her eyes drifted to the framed photo on her desk. It was a picture of her parents. Standing behind them was a man in a tailored suit with a fake, tight smile. Her uncle, Harlon.
When her parents died in a car crash, they left behind a ten-million-dollar trust fund. Harlon controlled every single penny of it.
In her past life, she never saw that money. When the world ended, those millions just became useless code on dead servers.
Her brain worked in overdrive, calculating how to pry a massive chunk of cash from a greedy Wall Street shark legally.
Her phone buzzed on the desk.
An iMessage from Hailee lit up the screen: Do you want me to grab you an organic salad from Whole Foods? Love you!
Cora's jaw clenched. She typed back: No thanks. I'm good.
She tossed the phone onto her bed. It bounced on the mattress and slid toward the edge of the pillow, teetering on the edge.
Cora lunged forward to catch it before it hit the floor.
The second her fingertips brushed the cold metal casing of the phone, the air around her hand warped.
It didn't make a sound. There was no flash of light. The phone just ceased to exist in the physical space.
Cora froze. She stayed bent over the bed, her hand still hovering in the empty air. Her heart stopped beating for a full second.
She dropped to her knees. She ripped the blankets off the bed. She crawled under the frame, sweeping her hands over the dusty floorboards.
Nothing.
She sat back on her heels, forcing her breathing to slow down. She closed her eyes and reached inward, trying to find that weird mental pull she had felt the moment the phone vanished.
Deep inside her consciousness, a space opened up.
It was massive, roughly the size of a basketball court. The air inside was gray and completely still.
And right in the center of that void, her iPhone was floating, perfectly suspended in nothingness.
