Nadia's POV
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I died on a Thursday.
I remember the exact second it happened. The way the first set of teeth found my throat. The sound - wet and final and nothing like the movies. The cold that came after, spreading from my neck down to my fingers like someone was slowly turning off the lights inside my body, switch by switch by switch.
I remember Jessa's face in the crowd.
She didn't look away. That was the worst part. She stood there with her arms crossed and watched with the same calm expression she used to wear when we'd sit on her porch drinking lemonade, like what was happening to me was simply the weather. Like I was simply the weather. Something to wait out.
I remember trying to say her name.
I remember the second set of teeth.
I remember nothing after that.
So when my eyes snap open at 6:03 AM and the ceiling above me is white and clean and familiar, my first reaction isn't relief.
It's terror.
I sit up so fast the room tilts. My hands fly to my throat - pressing, searching, feeling for torn skin and dry blood and the proof of what happened to me. There's nothing. Smooth skin. Steady pulse. I look at my palms. No wounds. No blood. No evidence that three days ago - or what felt like three days ago - I was thrown outside the shelter gates by the people I had spent eighteen months keeping alive.
My hands are shaking so badly I have to grip the sheets to make them stop.
The alarm clock reads 6:03 AM. The city outside the window is loud and alive and aggressively, offensively normal. Car horns. A dog barking two floors below. The smell of exhaust and someone's bakery starting their morning and ordinary human life moving forward without any idea that it has approximately ninety-one days before it all comes apart at the seams.
And from the kitchen - humming.
Marcus. My husband. Humming a song I used to love while he makes eggs on a Tuesday morning, completely unaware that the woman in his bedroom died, clawed her way back from somewhere she doesn't have a name for yet, and is now sitting in clean sheets cataloguing every mistake she made in a life she apparently gets to live again.
I press the back of my hand to my mouth. The tears come fast and I let exactly four of them fall - one for every person I trusted completely and shouldn't have - and then I stop. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth the way I used to tell panicking patients to breathe in the ER, back when I still believed calm was something you talked people into rather than something you built with your bare hands.
Then I feel it.
Something at the base of my spine. Dark and electric and alive, coiling there like it has always been there and was simply waiting for me to notice. It pulses once - slow, deliberate, warm in a way that doesn't feel like mine. Like a second heartbeat introducing itself.
Hello, it seems to say.
I go completely still.
In my old life - in the life I just died in - I didn't have this. I was a doctor. I set bones and sutured wounds and talked people back from the edge of panic and I was good at it and it was enough and I had nothing like this thing currently purring at the bottom of my nervous system like a cat that has decided it lives here now.
The zombies bit me. And then I came back.
And I came back with something.
I don't know what it does yet. I don't know what it wants. But it is real and it is mine and the second I acknowledge it, it pulses again - stronger this time, like it's happy I finally said hello back.
I get up.
In the bathroom I splash cold water on my face and look at myself in the mirror for a long time. Same face. Dark circles. Violet eyes that Marcus always called unusual and Jessa always called pretty and I now understand were something else entirely - a sign of something neither of them would have let me keep if they'd known what it meant.
I look at myself and I make a decision.
No one gets my kindness for free this time. Not one single person.
I go to the kitchen. Marcus turns from the stove with his easy smile and says "Morning, you're up early" and hands me coffee like it's any regular day, like I didn't die, like I am the same woman who went to sleep next to him last night. I take the mug and smile back and say "Couldn't sleep" which is the truest thing I have said in two lifetimes.
I sit at the table and while he talks about his day I open the notes app on my phone and I start typing. Every supply route that held. Every one that collapsed. Every face that was kind in the shelter and every face that watched me bleed. The names of the four people I need to reach in the next two weeks before they make choices they can't take back. The name of the lawyer I will call this afternoon whose office is on the other side of the city where Marcus has no reason to ever go.
I type Jessa's name last. I stare at it for a moment.
Then I save the file under the name GROCERY LIST and put my phone face down on the table.
Marcus kisses the top of my head before he leaves. "Have a good shift," he says.
"I will," I say.
The door closes. I sit in the quiet kitchen with my coffee and my list and the strange new thing coiling warmly in my chest, and I let myself feel, for exactly sixty seconds, everything I am not going to let myself feel again after this. The grief. The rage. The memory of Jessa's face.
Sixty seconds. Then I stand up.
My phone buzzes on the table. A text from an unknown number - no name, no photo, no area code I recognize. I pick it up.
Five words.
Don't go to work today.
I read it three times. My ability slams awake so violently I grab the edge of the counter to stay standing - not with hunger, not with fear, but with the blazing desperate urgency of a fire alarm, screaming at me in a language I don't yet speak.
My coffee mug slips from my fingers and shatters on the floor.
And from somewhere outside my window, very close, a car alarm starts screaming - and then every car alarm on the street starts screaming - and then they all go silent at exactly the same moment.
Complete silence.
Like something just held its breath.