I woke up to sunlight and the disorienting realization that I'd slept through the entire night without waking once.
No nightmares. No jolting awake at phantom sounds. No lying there in the dark calculating how many hours until dawn and whether it was worth trying to sleep again or if I should just get up and do something productive with the insomnia.
Just sleep.
Deep, uninterrupted, the kind my body had apparently forgotten how to do until it was given a bed that didn't have springs digging into my spine and a room that didn't smell like mold and desperation.
I sat up slowly, testing this body's limits again with the same clinical assessment I'd used yesterday. It would take some time to realize that this was my new reality... right now, I felt like I was in a suit or something...
Then again, I guess I was.
The weakness was still there—muscles that had never done real work, joints that had never been pushed past their comfortable limits—but at least I wasn't disoriented anymore.
I had two months. Two months to prepare for an apocalypse that would kill ninety percent of the population in the first week alone. Two months to figure out what resources this body had access to, what advantages came with waking up in a clean room with silk sheets and a wardrobe that probably cost more than I'd earned in my entire previous life.
Two months to not die like an idiot this time.
I stood and crossed to the wardrobe, my bare feet silent on the hardwood floor. The brass handles were cool under my palms as I pulled the doors open, and what greeted me was exactly the kind of excessive bullshit I'd expected from a room this pristine.
The first thing I noticed was the clothes.
Rows and rows of them, hanging neatly on wooden hangers that matched the wardrobe's finish, organized by color in a way that suggested either obsessive-compulsive tendencies or enough free time to care about aesthetics.
There were dresses in soft pastels and rich jewel tones, blouses with delicate embroidery, skirts that would tangle around my legs if I tried to run. Everything was expensive—I could tell that much from the fabric alone, silk and cashmere and materials I'd only seen in magazines before the world ended and magazines became kindling.
Completely impractical for survival. Beautiful, sure, if you cared about that sort of thing, but useless for anything that involved actual physical labor or the possibility of needing to move quickly.
I pushed the hanging clothes aside and checked the drawers built into the bottom of the wardrobe.
They held even more clothes—undergarments in matching sets that had probably never been worn for anything more strenuous than looking pretty, pajamas in silk and satin, stockings still in their packaging.
A jewelry box sat in one drawer, dark wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and I opened it with the same detached curiosity I'd used to search abandoned houses for supplies.
Necklaces. Bracelets. Earrings in gold and silver, some with gemstones that caught the morning light and threw it back in sharp glints.
There were even rings stacked in velvet-lined slots, each one more ornate than the last. Everything was expensive, everything was pristine, and none of it was useful for anything except looking wealthy.
I was about to close the box when something caught my eye—a hair stick pushed to the back of the top tray, partially hidden under a tangle of chains.
It was made out of a stunningly beautiful dark green jade, and polished to a shine, with intricate carvings along its length that formed patterns I didn't recognize.
The top was shaped like a lotus flower, each petal carved with enough detail that I could see the veins in the stone, and the pointed end looked sharp enough to do damage if I drove it into something soft.
I picked it up, turning it over in my hands and examining the craftsmanship with the same analytical eye I'd used to evaluate weapons in my previous life.
The jade was cool and smooth, heavier than I'd expected, and the carvings were deep enough that they caught on my fingertips as I ran them along the length. I also like how, unlike the rest of everything in this room, this was practical.
I could use this to pin up the ridiculous hair this body came with, keep it out of my face and away from anything that might grab it in a fight.
The sharp end caught the light as I turned it, and I tested the point with my thumb out of habit, the same way I'd tested every knife and makeshift weapon I'd ever picked up to see if it was worth keeping.
It was sharp. Sharper than I'd expected from something decorative.
The point bit into my thumb before I could pull back, a quick sting that made me hiss through my teeth more from annoyance than pain. Blood welled up immediately, a bright red bead that spread across my skin and dripped onto the jade before I could stop it.
The world lurched.
Not sideways, not down—just lurched, like reality had hiccupped and forgotten how physics worked for half a second. My stomach dropped, my vision blurred at the edges, and then everything snapped back into focus and I was somewhere else.
Darkness.
Complete, absolute darkness that pressed in from all sides like a physical weight.
There wasn't even a hint of light and the only sound I could hear was my own breathing, harsh and too loud in the silence. There were no walls that I could see, no floor beneath my feet that I could feel, just this vast emptiness that stretched out in every direction and gave me nothing to orient myself with.
I should have panicked. Normal people would have panicked...waking up in a void with no warning, no explanation, no way to tell up from down or if there even was an up or down.
But panic was a waste of energy I couldn't afford, a luxury for people who had the time and resources to indulge in useless emotional reactions, and I'd survived ten years of hell by not wasting either.
I took a breath. Let it out slowly. Forced my heart rate back down to something manageable and my mind into the cold, analytical state that had kept me alive when everyone around me was dying.
This was new. This was unexpected. But unexpected didn't mean dangerous—not yet, anyway—and I'd dealt with worse than darkness and silence.
I held up my hand, the one I'd cut on the hair stick, and watched blood drip from my thumb into the void. The drops disappeared into the darkness without sound, without impact, like they were falling into nothing...just empty space that went on forever in every direction I looked.
It was a spatial dimension. It had to be.
I'd heard rumors about them in my previous life—whispers from people who claimed to have found artifacts that opened pocket spaces, storage that existed outside normal reality and could hold more than should be physically possible.
Most of those people had been full of shit, desperate survivors clinging to hope that there was some kind of magic solution to the apocalypse, some cheat code that would make survival easier.
But this was real. This was happening. And if it was real, then it was useful.
I turned slowly, trying to gauge the size of the space, but the darkness gave me nothing to work with.
But that was fine. I'd test it.
I'd fill this space methodically, item by item, until it couldn't hold anything more.
That was how you figured out dimensions when you had no other way to measure—you filled the container until it was full, and then you knew exactly how much it could hold. Basic problem-solving. The kind of practical thinking that had kept me alive when people smarter than me were dying because they wasted time on philosophy instead of action.
Two months to prepare for the apocalypse. Two months to stockpile supplies, weapons, food, water, everything I'd wish I'd had the first time around when I was scrambling to survive with nothing but what I could scavenge from abandoned buildings and corpses.
And now I had a spatial dimension. A black box that could hold god knows how much, hidden away where no one could steal it, accessible with a drop of blood on a piece of jade jewelry that looked like nothing more than a pretty accessory.
I almost laughed. Would have, if laughing didn't feel like a waste of breath in a space this empty.
The universe had a sick sense of humor—killing me with stones and then dropping me back in time with a cheat code that would have saved my life a hundred times over if I'd had it the first time around.
But I wasn't going to waste time being bitter about cosmic injustice or wondering why I deserved a second chance when better people had died screaming.
I had two months. I had warning. And now I had storage space that could hold everything I needed to survive.
That was more than enough.
The world lurched again, that same stomach-dropping sensation of reality forgetting how to work properly, and then I was back in the bedroom with sunlight streaming through the windows and the hair stick still clutched in my bleeding hand.
I looked down at my thumb. The cut was small, barely deep enough to qualify as an injury, already clotting at the edges. The jade was clean—no blood on its surface, like it had absorbed what I'd spilled or sent it somewhere else entirely.
I wrapped my long hair around the hair stick and pinned it to my head. I pressed my thumb against the edge of my nightgown to stop the bleeding, my mind already working through the implications with the ruthless efficiency I'd applied to every problem for the past ten years.
A spatial dimension. Accessible with blood.
The size unknown, but that didn't matter—I'd figure it out by filling it, the same way I'd figured out everything else that mattered.
And with two months to prepare, I was actually looking forward to seeing just how much stuff I could fit in it.