The image that appeared in the mirror looked nothing like the way I remembered looking before.
It had pale skin, smooth and unmarked by the sun damage and stress that had carved lines into my face by the time I was twenty-five.
There was no wrinkles around my eyes from squinting against glare, no rough patches on my elbows or knees from sleeping on concrete and climbing over broken pavement. My original skin had been tanned dark from a lifetime of working outside because I didn't have a choice. It was lined with the kind of damage that came from dehydration and exposure and never having access to things like moisturizer or sunscreen.
This skin looked like it had never seen a hard day in its life, like it belonged to someone who stayed inside and had people to do the hard work for them.
Dark brown eyes stared back at me...at least those were the same...but everything else was different in ways that felt deliberately designed to piss me off.
Long black hair that would be a death sentence in any real fight.
Freckles scattered across my nose and cheeks, light and delicate like someone had painted them there for aesthetic purposes. I never had freckles before...my face had been too dark, too damaged, too marked by the reality of survival to show something as frivolous as freckles.
And instead of wearing sweatpants and a hoodie that had more holes in it than anything else, I was wearing a nightgown.
It was a soft pink dress made up of silk fabric with lace at the edges. It was the kind of thing I'd seen in magazines before the apocalypse and never thought about again because who the hell wore silk to sleep in? Then after the zombie cam, no one would actually get changed at night when you needed to be able to run at a moment's notice, when you needed to sleep in your clothes because taking them off meant wasting precious seconds if something went wrong in the night?
I reached up slowly and touched my face, watching the reflection copy the movement with a precision that confirmed what I already knew. My fingers—these pale, soft, useless fingers—pressed against my cheek, and I felt it. The pressure. The warmth.
This was real.
This was me.
I died.
The thought settled in my chest like a stone and somehow less surprising than it should have been.
Meilin's face swam up in my memory, twisted with satisfaction as she raised her hand for the last time, and I remembered the crack of impact, the darkness, the certainty that this was it—this was how it ended.
Not with zombies or starvation or any of the thousand other ways the apocalypse could kill you, but with a jealous bitch and a crowd of cowards who were too stupid to see they were being manipulated.
I died, and now I was here, wherever here was. In a body that wasn't mine, in a room that was too clean, wearing silk pajamas like some kind of joke.
I pinched my arm, hard enough that my nails—these perfect, manicured nails—dug into the soft skin.
Pain flared up, warning me that this was not a dream... this was real.
I was alive. Just not in my old body.
My heart picked up, hammering against my ribs in a rhythm that felt too fast, too panicked, and I forced myself to take a breath and shove it back down where it belonged.
Panicking was pointless—all it did was waste time and resources I might not have, cloud my judgment when I needed it clear. I learned early on in life that wasting either time or resources on useless emotional reactions would get you killed fast.
Whatever this was—reincarnation, transmigration, some kind of cosmic joke designed specifically to fuck with me—I'd figure it out.
I would survive this.
I always did.
I was better than a cockroach like that.
I swung my legs out of bed and stood, testing this body's limits with the same cold assessment I'd used to evaluate every shelter and weapon and potential threat for the past decade.
The floor was cool under my bare feet, the hardwood smooth and polished, but my legs felt wrong—too light, too weak, like they'd snap if I pushed them too hard—but they held my weight without collapsing, which was more than I'd expected from a body this soft.
I crossed to the window, each step careful and measured, and pushed the sheer curtains aside.
The world beyond the glass looked like the one I'd left behind—same sky, same sun, buildings in the distance that were intact and clean instead of crumbling and overrun.
I could see roads that weren't cracked and overgrown with weeds. I could see people moving on the streets below, going about their lives like the apocalypse had never happened, like they had no idea what was coming.
Because it hadn't happened yet. Not here.
I let the curtains fall and turned away from the window, my mind already working through the implications with the same ruthless efficiency I'd applied to every problem for the past ten years.
A desk sat against the far wall, dark wood polished to a shine, and on top of it was a phone—sleek, modern, the kind I hadn't seen in a decade because they'd all been scavenged for parts or broken beyond repair in the chaos of the first few months.
I picked it up. The screen lit up at my touch, face ID unlocking it without hesitation because apparently this was my face now, this body's face, and the technology still worked because the world hadn't ended yet.
The date stared back at me in bold white numbers: March 6th, 2130.
I stared at it for a long moment, my brain doing the math automatically.
If this world followed the same timeline as mine—and the fact that it was 2130 suggested it did, suggested this wasn't some completely alternate reality but the same world at a different point in time—then the apocalypse would hit in exactly two months.
May 6th, 2130. The day the first zombies appeared and the world went to hell and everyone who wasn't prepared died screaming.
I'd died on May 8th, 2140, ten years almost to the day after it started.
I had ten years of fighting and scavenging and doing whatever it took to survive, and I'd had no warning. There was no time to prepare, no chance to stockpile supplies or find a defensible position or do any of the thousand things that might have made the difference between surviving and thriving.
Instead, I was plunged into a world of chaos and death and the desperate scramble to stay alive one more day.
Well, that was until Meilin decided I was too much of a threat and got me killed for it.
Two months was a lifetime compared to that.
Two months was enough time to prepare, to plan, to figure out what the hell I was going to do with this soft, useless body and this clean, pristine room and the fact that I was apparently alive again in a world that hadn't ended yet.
I put the phone back down on the desk and walked back to the bed, my mind already spinning through possibilities and discarding most of them as impractical or too much work.
The silk sheets were still warm from where I'd been lying, the pillows soft and perfectly arranged like someone had actually taken the time to make the bed properly instead of just collapsing onto it and hoping for a few hours of unconsciousness.
I climbed back under the covers and pulled the duvet up to my chin, sinking into the mattress like it was trying to swallow me whole, and felt something in my chest unclench slightly at the sheer comfort of it.
Two months. I had two months before the world ended, and for the first time in my life—lives—I had warning. I could prepare. I could plan. I could figure out what the hell I was going to do with this second chance that I definitely didn't deserve but apparently had anyway.
But not right now.
Right now, I was going to sleep.
You know, real sleep. The kind where I didn't wake up every hour checking for threats, the kind where I didn't keep one hand on a weapon, the kind where I didn't have to worry about someone breaking in or zombies getting through the walls or any of the thousand other things that had kept me on edge for a decade.
I wanted the kind of sleep I hadn't had since I was three and the world was still pretending to be normal.
I closed my eyes and let the darkness pull me under, soft and warm and completely free of the nightmares that usually came with it.
Two months was plenty of time to figure out my next step.
For now, silk sheets and actual pillows and doing absolutely nothing sounded better than any plan I could come up with.