The steel door was freezing against Catrin’s back.
On the other side of the reinforced glass, Julian Vance stood perfectly still. His tailored apocalypse-survival suit was spotless. He held the master keycard in his gloved hand.
"Julian, open the door," Catrin pleaded, her voice cracking.
She tightened her grip on the small, shivering bundle in her arms. Nico was burning up. His four-year-old body felt like a furnace against her chest, his breathing a shallow, wet rattle.
Down the dark, concrete corridor behind them, the screeching started. The sickening sound of claws scraping against metal. The Spore Mutants had breached the outer perimeter.
"Julian!" Catrin slammed her bloody fist against the glass. "They’re coming! Open the vault!"
Julian looked at her, his expression a tight mask of regret. Not malice. Just cold, calculating regret.
"I can’t, Cat," he said, his voice carrying through the intercom. "The bio-scanners at the gate... Nico’s temperature is too high. His genetic markers are spiking. He’s infected."
"He’s just sick! It’s a fever!" she screamed, tears cutting through the grime on her face.
"It’s a risk assessment," Julian said softly. He adjusted his collar, a nervous habit from the boardroom, now playing out at the end of the world. "I have three hundred people in this shelter. Investors, engineers, essential personnel. If I open this door and the boy mutates... we lose everything we built. You understand business. You understand the math."
"He’s your son!"
"He’s a liability," Julian corrected, his voice dropping to a whisper. "And you wouldn’t leave him behind. So that makes you a liability, too. I’m sorry. Truly, I am. You were a good wife."
He stepped back. He swiped the keycard.
Click. The heavy locking mechanisms slammed shut, sealing the vault. Sealing Julian inside the utopia she had helped him fund. Sealing her and Nico in the slaughterhouse.
"Julian!"
Catrin dropped to her knees as the corridor lights flickered and died. A low, guttural chittering echoed from the shadows. Six red, glowing eyes peered out from the darkness.
Catrin curled her body completely over Nico, burying her face in his soft hair.
I’m sorry, she thought, shutting her eyes as the monster lunged. Mommy is so sorry.
Pain tore through her back, absolute and blinding—
Catrin gasped, her eyes snapping open.
She shot up, her hands wildly clutching at her chest. No blood. No tearing claws. Just the smooth, cool slip of silk sheets.
She was breathing so hard her ribs ached. She frantically looked around. Warm sunlight filtered through sheer curtains, illuminating the pristine, minimalist master bedroom of the Vance Estate.
What?
Catrin scrambled out of bed, her bare feet hitting the heated hardwood floor. She practically tackled her nightstand, grabbing her phone.
May 29th, 2026. Exactly one month before the meteorites fell. One month before the sky turned red and the terraforming spores turned the world into a living hell.
Her legs gave out. She collapsed against the edge of the bed, pressing her trembling hands over her mouth. She wasn’t dead. The freezing concrete, the betrayal, the teeth tearing into her, it was all gone.
Nico.
Catrin shoved herself off the floor and sprinted down the hall. She threw open the door to the nursery.
Nico was sprawled in the middle of his oversized bed, entirely tangled in a blanket, snoring softly with a stuffed bear shoved halfway under his cheek.
Catrin covered her mouth to stifle a sob. She slowly walked over, collapsing into the chair beside his bed. She reached out with a shaking hand, gently brushing the reddish-brown curls from his forehead. His skin was cool. Healthy.
He was alive.
She sat there for ten minutes, watching his chest rise and fall. Slowly, the trembling in her hands stopped. The tears dried up.
The suffocating panic of the apocalypse faded, replaced by something entirely different. A freezing, absolute rage.
You understand the math, Cat.
Julian’s final words echoed in her skull. The cold, corporate rationale he used to justify locking his wife and child in a hallway with monsters.
Catrin stood up. Her green eyes were dead, devoid of any of the warmth she usually carried.
"I understand the math perfectly, Julian," she whispered to the empty room. "Let’s do some accounting."
Forty minutes later, Catrin walked down the sweeping glass staircase of the estate. She was dressed in a sharp, forest-green blazer and tailored trousers. Her reddish-brown hair was blown out perfectly. She looked like a woman stepping into a boardroom to commit a murder.
Julian was sitting at the massive marble dining table, sipping espresso and scrolling through a tablet. He looked up, giving her that polished, practiced smile that had charmed half of Silicon Valley.
"Morning," he said, not really looking at her. "You’re dressed up early. Board meeting?"
Catrin walked to the opposite end of the table. She didn’t sit. She tossed a thick manila folder onto the marble. It slid across the smooth surface and hit his coffee cup with a dull thud.
"Sign it," she said. Her voice was flat.
Julian frowned, setting his tablet down. He opened the folder, scanning the first page. His polished smile froze, then slowly twisted into a look of sheer disbelief.
"A divorce decree?" He let out a short, incredulous laugh. "Catrin, what is this? Did we have a fight I forgot about?"
"Read the demands, Julian."
He flipped the page. His eyes widened, darting back and forth across the text. The color drained from his face.
"You want... eighty percent of the liquid assets? The offshore accounts? You want my controlling shares in Vance Tech and full custody of Nico?" Julian looked up, his jaw tight. "Are you out of your mind? This is a joke."
"Do I look like I’m joking?"
"Catrin, be rational," he snapped, slipping instantly into his patronizing CEO voice. He stood up, buttoning his suit jacket. "I don’t know what kind of mid-life crisis this is, but you don’t have the leverage to make these kinds of demands. You signed an iron-clad prenup. If you walk out that door, you get a polite stipend and the summer house. That’s it. You need me."
Catrin didn’t blink. She just pulled a sleek black USB drive from her pocket and dropped it on the table.
"That drive contains the unredacted financial ledgers for Project Eden," Catrin said smoothly. "The ones showing you illegally embezzled three hundred million from your investors to cover up your failed tech launches."
Julian froze. Absolute silence fell over the dining room.
"I was your shadow CEO for four years, Julian," she continued, her voice like ice. "I balanced your books. I fixed your PR nightmares. I made you look like a genius. I know exactly where every single dime of your dirty money is buried."
Julian swallowed hard, staring at the flash drive like it was a live grenade. "You... you wouldn’t. It would ruin you, too."
"Try me." Catrin leaned forward, planting her hands on the table. "If you don’t sign that paper right now, I am sending those files to the SEC, the board of directors, and the Wall Street Journal. You won’t just lose the company. You’ll spend the next twenty years in a federal penitentiary."
Julian stared at her, genuinely terrified. He was looking at her like he didn’t even recognize the woman standing across from him.
Because he didn’t. The woman who loved him died in a concrete hallway.
"You’re a monster," he hissed.
"No," Catrin said softly. "I’m just doing a risk assessment."
Julian’s hands shook as he picked up his gold fountain pen. He didn’t say another word. He violently scribbled his signature on the bottom of all three pages.
He threw the pen across the table. "Take it. Take the money. But you’ll crawl back, Catrin. You have no idea how to survive in the real world without my name protecting you."
Catrin picked up the folder, checking the signatures. Flawless.
"Have a nice life, Julian."
She turned her back on him and walked out the front doors, the morning sun hitting her face.
The moment the heavy mahogany doors clicked shut behind her, she pulled out her phone. She opened her private banking app.
Incoming Transfer: Vance Holdings.
Amount: $4,200,000,000.00.
Status: Cleared.
Catrin exhaled a shaky breath. It was done. She had the war chest.
She didn’t waste a single second. She dialed a highly encrypted number she had memorized in her past life. It rang twice before a gruff voice answered.
"Speak."
"This is Catrin Briar," she said, using her maiden name for the first time in years. "I know about the military liquidation at Sector 4. I want the Project Ark prototype. The fully automated mecha-fortress."
The man on the other line laughed, a harsh, grating sound. "Lady, that prototype isn’t for sale to civilians. Even if it was, the starting bid is two billion dollars."
"I’ll give you three billion," Catrin said instantly. "Wired directly to your untraceable accounts within sixty seconds. But I want it delivered to my private mountain estate by midnight tonight."
The line went dead silent.
"Do we have a deal?" Catrin asked.
"...Send the wire," the man breathed.
Catrin hung up. She looked up at the perfectly blue sky. In thirty days, it would be burning.
Suddenly, the heavy front doors of the estate creaked open behind her.
"Mommy?"
Catrin turned. Nico was standing on the porch in his dinosaur pajamas, rubbing his sleepy green eyes. His reddish-brown hair was a messy nest of curls.
Catrin smiled. A real, genuine smile that reached her eyes. She walked up the steps and scooped his warm, chubby body into her arms, burying her face in his neck.
"Good morning, baby," she whispered, holding him impossibly tight.
"Where’re we going?" Nico mumbled, resting his head on her shoulder.
Catrin looked back out over the sprawling, manicured lawns of her soon-to-be-bankrupt ex-husband’s estate. She felt a strange, humming warmth vibrate in her chest, the invisible, infinite spatial dimension binding to her soul once again.
"We’re going shopping, sweetie," Catrin said, her eyes flashing with a dangerous, brilliant light. "Mommy needs to buy a grocery store."