Adrian Blackwood had seen warzones, overthrown cartels, and navigated the toxic maze of politics, but nothing could have prepared him for this.
He was in the middle of a sentence during a parliamentary briefing, folder of classified reports in hand, when the sky shattered. A meteor streaked across the stars, burning fire and ash and screams as it passed. The windows of the conference room caved inward with the force of an explosion. The alarms shrieked. The room collapsed into pandemonium.
That was the First Disaster—the meteor shower that burned cities to the ground, overthrew governments, and changed the rules of reality overnight.
Adrian didn't think. He acted. Instinct and training took over. He sprinted across the room and dragged a bleeding intern from underneath a burning support beam.A colleague, petrified with shock, was shoved behind the steel legs of a collapsed desk. Commands poured out of him with the iron will that had once captivated the nation and terrified his enemies.
By dusk, the capital was unrecognizable. Ruins and fires took the place of landmarks and institutions. The meteor strikes had decimated civilization. Communications were down. The chain of command? Decapitated. The president? Believed dead. Parliament? Vaporized or missing.
Adrian's world now fit into a single black SUV.
His team:
Greer—Head of Security. Tactical. Brutal. Not a sentimental bone in his body.
Ellis—Cyber operations wunderkind and Adrian's old sparring partner from overseas. Sly, brutal, and with a sharp tongue and an affinity for hacking near-dead systems.
Tom—Paramedic. A bit green behind the ears but otherwise competent and well-trained. Hands that have seen more than anyone should, but keeps his mouth shut.
Bryce—Chain-smoking driver. Loud, reckless, and impossible to ignore.
Mira Zhao—Former intelligence analyst
They weren't a team to start with. Just survivors. Strangers with overlapping orbits. But Adrian's trajectory pulled them into its wake. He didn't ask them to follow, they just did. Eight months passed. The world continued to unravel. One city after another fell under the crushing weight of the Second Disaster: a hellish heatwave.Forests burned to the ground. Lakes dried to cracked hollows. The sun was an executioner and the shade became more precious than gold.
They scavenged. Avoided gangs. Hunted water more than food. Hope became a thin, flickering thing.
Then there was the rumor.
An abandoned industrial complex north of Toronto—vacated storage tanks, operational generators, emergency food rations. It could be nothing. It could be a godsend.
Adrian decided to go investigate.
He didn't know he was walking directly into the event that haunted his dreams.
The ambush came fast: muzzle flashes, rooftop gunmen, shadowy flanking figures. Bryce took a bullet in the side and howled in pain. Tom went down next, hit in the leg just above the knee. Blood erupted in a fountain.
Greer returned fire with cold accuracy. Ellis attempted to jam their attackers' communications using a cracked tablet. Adrian himself took cover behind a fallen crate, emptying the last of his magazine and frantically calculating escape routes that no longer existed.
They were outnumbered. Boxed in. Losing.
Then A shot.
Clean. Unmistakable.
Followed by another.
And another.
And another.
One by one, their attackers fell. Screams gave way to panic. Shadows fled backward. Whoever was sniping had the eyes of a hawk and the skill of an assassin. Not a wasted bullet. No missed shots. Each kill efficient. Bloodless.
The attackers fell back, bloodied and limping, some crawling backward on elbows and hands.
Silence reigned.
Adrian raised his head and scanned the rooftops.
No movement. No smoke. No clues. Nothing.
Except the deep, inescapable feeling that something, someone had changed the course of their fate.
Phantom?
Savior?
Ghost from the future?
He didn't know it yet, but Julyah had just entered his timeline, changing the outcome of a tragedy she'd seen long before it ever happened.
And because of her…
no one died.