Adrian Blackwood had faced warzones, toppled cartels, and navigated the poisonous labyrinth of politics, but nothing had prepared him for the end of the world.
He was mid-sentence in a parliamentary briefing, fingers clenched around a folder of classified reports, when the sky cracked open like a shattered mirror. A meteor blazed across the heavens, trailing fire, ash, and sheer panic. Windows blew inward with a deafening roar. Sirens wailed. The conference room disintegrated into chaos.
That was the First Disaster—the meteor shower that scorched cities, toppled governments, and rewrote the rules of existence overnight.
Adrian didn't think. He moved. Instinct and training took the wheel. He dove across the room, dragging a bleeding aide out from under a burning beam. Another colleague, frozen in shock, was shoved beneath the steel legs of a collapsing desk. Orders spilled from his mouth with the iron confidence that had once charmed voters and terrified enemies.
By nightfall, the capital was unrecognizable.
Rubble and fire replaced landmarks and order. The meteor strikes had gutted civilization. Communications were severed.
The chain of command? Shattered. The president? Presumed dead. Parliament? Vaporized or vanished.
What remained of Adrian's world now fit into a single black SUV.
His team:
Greer, his stoic head of security—tactical, brutal, and devoid of sentiment.
Ellis, once a rival in cyber-ops, now a sharp-tongued ally with a knack for hacking nearly-dead systems.
Tom, a green but level-headed paramedic whose steady hands masked deep trauma.
Bryce, his chain-smoking driver—loud, reckless, but impossible to shake.
Mira Zhao —Former intelligence analyst
They weren't a team at first. Just survivors. Strangers with overlapping paths. But Adrian's presence drew them into orbit. He didn't ask them to follow, they just did.
Eight months passed. The world kept unraveling. One city after another crumbled beneath the oppressive weight of the Second Disaster: an unrelenting, hellish heatwave. Forests turned to ash. Lakes became bone-dry hollows. The sun became an executioner, and shade more valuable than gold.
They scavenged. Evaded gangs. Hunted for water more than food. Hope became a fragile, flickering thing.
Then came the rumor.
An abandoned industrial zone north of Toronto—sealed storage tanks, working generators, emergency rations. It could be nothing. It could be salvation.
Adrian decided to check it out.
He didn't know he was walking straight into the memory that haunted his dreams.
The ambush came swiftly, muzzle flashes, rooftop gunmen, flanking shadows. Bryce took a bullet to the side, howling in agony.
Tom went down next, hit in the leg, just above the knee. Blood spurted like a geyser.
Greer returned fire with precision. Ellis tried to jam their attackers' signals using a cracked tablet. Adrian himself crouched behind a toppled crate, squeezing the trigger on his last magazine while calculating escape routes that no longer existed.
They were outnumbered. Surrounded. Losing.
Then— A shot. Crisp. Unmistakable.
Followed by another. And another. And another.
One by one, their enemies fell. Screams turned to panic. Shadows scrambled backward. Whoever was sniping had an eagle's vision and an assassin's aim. Not a wasted bullet. No missed shots. Each kill clean. Clinical.
The attackers retreated, bloodied and limping, some crawling away on elbows.
Silence fell.
Adrian lifted his head, scanning the rooftops.
No silhouette. No smoke. No clue.
Just a presence, intangible, but deeply felt. Something had changed the course of their fate.
A phantom?
A savior?
A ghost from the future?
He didn't know it yet, but Julyah had just stepped into his timeline, rewriting the outcome of a tragedy she'd seen long before it ever happened.
And because of her… no one died.