Mara's POV
The dead don't wake up.
Everyone knows that.
So when Mara Chen opened her eyes, gasping like she'd just been pulled from underwater, the first thing she did was check if she was still dead.
She wasn't.
Her heart was slamming against her ribs. Her lungs were burning. Her fingers clutched the bedsheet so hard her knuckles went white. She was staring at a ceiling she recognized — the small water stain in the corner that looked like a rabbit, the one she kept meaning to fix.
Her ceiling. Her bedroom.
She was home.
No.
The word hit her brain like a slap. This wasn't right. The last thing she remembered was the gate. The heavy iron gate of Refuge Sigma swinging open in the dying evening light. The sound of it — that low, grinding metal groan — was something she would hear in her sleep for the rest of her life. Except she wasn't supposed to have a rest of her life.
She remembered hands. Not zombie hands — human hands. Pushing her forward. Through the gate. Into the street.
She remembered turning around and seeing faces she knew. People she had stitched up, fed, kept alive. And beside them, her husband Daniel, watching her with an expression so calm it looked rehearsed. And Sasha — her best friend Sasha — who couldn't even meet her eyes.
She remembered the dead closing in around her.
She remembered the dark.
And now she was here. In her bed. Staring at the rabbit-shaped water stain.
A heavy arm shifted across her waist.
Mara went completely still.
She knew that arm. She had slept beside it for four years. She knew the weight of it, the warmth of it. She used to find it comforting. Right now, it felt like a trap.
Very slowly, she turned her head.
Daniel was asleep beside her. His dark hair was messy. His face was relaxed, peaceful, almost sweet-looking in the early morning light. He looked like the man she married. He looked like someone who had never done anything wrong in his life.
She knew better now.
She knew what lived underneath that peaceful face. She had seen it in the way he planted fake evidence against her. She had heard it in the way he spoke at her trial — calm, sorrowful, convincing — while sentencing her to death by exile. She had felt it in the way he did not move an inch when the gate closed behind her.
Her hands were shaking.
She pressed them flat against the mattress and breathed. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way she used to tell her patients to breathe when the pain was very bad and they needed to stay conscious.
Stay conscious, Mara.
She reached for her phone on the nightstand, moving slowly so she wouldn't wake him. The screen lit up in her face.
She saw the date.
Her stomach dropped straight through the floor.
It was three months ago. Three months before the outbreak. Three months before everything collapsed, before Refuge Sigma, before the trial, before the gate.
Before she died.
She was back.
She didn't understand how. She didn't understand why. Every scientific part of her brain was screaming that this was impossible, that people didn't come back, that time didn't rewind like a broken video. But her hands were healed — the bites she'd gotten in her last hours were completely gone, not even a scar. And something else was different too. Something she couldn't explain. A low, quiet hum sitting deep in her chest. Like a sound she could feel but not hear. Steady. Waiting.
She had no name for it yet.
She put the phone down and stared at the ceiling.
Daniel snored softly.
She could feel every second passing like a countdown tick. She knew what was coming — the exact day the outbreak would start, the supply routes that would stay clear, the people who would rise up and the people who would break down. She carried all of it in her head like a map drawn in blood.
This time would be different.
She would not be the woman who trusted everyone and ended up with nothing. She would not pour herself into other people's survival only to be handed to the dead as a thank-you gift. She would not stand in front of another council of small, frightened people and let them vote on whether she deserved to live.
She got up. She moved quietly around the bed, grabbed her phone, and walked to the kitchen.
She made coffee.
Her hands steadied the moment she had something to do. They always did — these hands had stayed steady through twelve-hour emergency shifts and mass casualty events and things she would never talk about at dinner parties. They would stay steady now.
She sat at the kitchen table with a notepad. She started writing.
Names. Dates. Locations. Supplies.
The pen moved fast and sure. She wrote down the hospital complex on the eastern edge of the city — big enough, structurally solid, easy to defend. She wrote down Priya Okafor — the virologist who got abandoned by Refuge Sigma in her first life and could have saved hundreds if anyone had listened to her. She wrote down supply warehouses and water access points and which roads would still be clear in the first two weeks.
She wrote down Tommy Shen, though she hadn't met him yet.
She wrote down Zane Holloway — and then stopped writing.
Stared at that name.
Zane wasn't supposed to be in Creston City. He'd been in another city entirely when the outbreak started. She'd met him later, inside Refuge Sigma, when he arrived half-dead and she was the only person who treated him like a human being instead of a liability. He never forgot that. He became one of the most important people in the shelter.
He was also one of the few people who said her name out loud when they voted to exile her.
He voted no.
She closed her eyes. Pushed the memory away. She had work to do.
She flipped to a new page and wrote one more thing at the top in capital letters: DIVORCE. TODAY.
She heard Daniel's alarm go off in the bedroom. She heard him groan and hit snooze. She heard his familiar morning sounds — the shuffle of feet, the bathroom door, the running water.
He came out looking sleepy and smiled when he saw her.
"You're up early," he said.
"Couldn't sleep," she said.
He moved toward the coffee pot. Completely normal. Completely unaware. He had no idea she remembered. No idea she had already started planning. No idea that the woman he thought he married — soft, trusting, so grateful to be loved — was already gone.
She watched him pour his coffee.
And then her phone buzzed.
She looked down.
An unknown number. A text message with no greeting and no name. Just seven words that turned her blood to ice:
I know what happened to you. Run.