The ice wouldn’t come anymore.
Neve Sinclair thrust her palm forward and felt only a thin, brittle chill crawl across her skin before it died.
Her power was spent.
Beside her, Silas and Declan were breathing hard, shoulders pressed to hers, their weapons slick and dark.
And the zombies kept coming.
They poured out of the alleys and across the cracked asphalt in a tide of gray skin and snapping teeth.
The stench of rot was so thick it coated the back of her throat.
Neve had lost count of how many she’d frozen since dawn.
It didn’t matter.
For every one that fell, three more stumbled into its place.
Then she heard engines.
A convoy of trucks roared around the corner, and ability users spilled out of the beds, dozens of them.
Wind ripped through the street and flung the nearest zombies aside like paper dolls.
At the front of the group, hair streaming, stood a figure Neve would have recognized anywhere.
“Sylvie!” Relief hit her so hard her knees nearly buckled.
“She came for us.”
Declan didn’t answer.
His jaw was tight.
For one moment, it looked like rescue.
Then the wind turned.
A blade of compressed air sliced through the guard standing to Neve’s left, a quiet man who had watched over her since the first week of the outbreak.
He dropped without a sound.
Another guard fell.
Then another.
Sylvie’s people weren’t fighting the zombies.
They were fighting them.
“Move!” Silas grabbed Neve’s arm, and Declan took the other.
Together they hauled her toward the only building still standing on the block, a gutted office tower with shattered windows and a stairwell that stank of smoke.
There was nowhere else to go.
The open street was a wall of the dead, and behind it waited Sylvie’s people, cutting down anyone who tried to run.
They climbed nine flights.
Neve’s legs burned and her lungs felt full of glass, but Silas and Declan never let go of her.
They burst onto the roof.
There was no door to barricade and no neighboring building close enough to jump to.
This was the end of the road.
Silas turned to face the stairwell, and Declan stood beside him.
Neither said a word.
They didn’t have to.
The fight didn’t last long.
When it was over, Silas lay facedown near the ledge, one hand stretched toward Neve as if he’d been reaching for her.
Declan was on his back a few feet away, eyes open to the gray sky.
Neither of them moved.
Neve’s mind went white and silent.
She stared at the woman crossing the roof toward her.
She knew that face and that smile.
This was the girl she had shared birthday cakes and secrets with since they were six years old.
“Why?” she whispered.
Sylvie Ashford tilted her head, almost fondly.
“Why?” She laughed.
“Because ever since we were kids, you’ve been the precious little princess.
Anything you wanted, your grandmother handed you without blinking.”
She began to circle, slow and unhurried.
“My family was richer than yours.
Everyone knew it.
But whenever I wanted something, I had to beg my father for it.
Smile for him.
Perform for him.
Half the time, even that wasn’t enough.” Her smile thinned.
“I used to hate people like you.
Born lucky.
Never having to try.”
She stopped in front of Neve.
“But I don’t hate you anymore.
What’s the point of hating someone this stupid?”
Neve flinched as if she’d been struck.
“Your grandmother left you so many people to protect you,” Sylvie went on.
“And look at them.
The world ended, and those idiots still chose to die for you instead of saving themselves.”
She nudged Declan’s body with the toe of her boot.
Neve made a small, broken sound.
“She really did love you.
But she never could have imagined this, could she?” Sylvie spread her arms.
“Everyone she left you built the road I’m walking on.
Every supply run you led, every ability user you brought in, who do you think benefited?
The Ashfords didn’t grow this strong, this fast, by luck.”
She laughed again, bright and delighted, and the sound carried across the empty sky.
Standing among the bodies of the only people who had never lied to her, Neve finally understood.
Sylvie was right.
When the outbreak began, Nana had been one of the first to turn.
Neve remembered the sound of her grandmother’s bedroom door splintering and the gray film over those warm brown eyes.
After that, she remembered very little except fear.
She had clung to Sylvie the way a drowning girl clings to driftwood.
Sylvie told her where to go, and she went.
Sylvie told her who to trust, and she trusted.
Sylvie told her to share, and she gave away everything.
The habit had formed so slowly she’d never noticed it.
Declan had warned her.
So had Silas, in his quieter way.
The Ashfords are using you.
Cut ties.
She had been furious with them for saying it.
Sylvie would never hurt her.
They’d grown up together.
They were practically sisters.
Practically.
“Give me the jade pendant,” Sylvie said, and the laughter was gone from her voice.
It was an order.
“And the space inside it.
After that, you go your way and I’ll go mine.”
Neve’s fingers drifted to the pendant at her throat.
The green stone was cool against her skin, the last gift Nana had ever given her.
Inside it was a pocket of space the size of a warehouse, holding food, water, medicine, and weapons.
It was enough to keep a small army alive for a year.
That was what all of this had been for.
She looked over the edge of the roof.
Nine stories below, the street writhed with the dead, a sea of upturned faces and grasping hands, drawn by the noise and the smell of blood.
She looked back at Sylvie.
“Come and take it,” she said quietly.
“I can’t lift my arms anymore.”
Sylvie hesitated, measuring her.
Neve was a Level 5 ice user, but she’d been fighting since sunrise, and anyone could see she was running on nothing.
Sylvie was Level 5 too, a wind user.
And she trusted no one else to touch that pendant.
She stepped closer, weight balanced, eyes fixed on Neve’s hands.
She was watching for the flicker of frost that would mean an ice blade aimed at her heart or skull.
It never came.
Sylvie reached up with both hands to unfasten the clasp at the back of Neve’s neck.
Neve wrapped her arms around her.
She poured every last scrap of her strength into that embrace.
Sylvie’s eyes flew wide, and she opened her mouth to scream.
Neve threw them both off the roof.
Wind tore at them.
Sylvie thrashed and clawed, summoning gusts that only spun them faster, her panic feeding the fall instead of stopping it.
Neve didn’t let go.
She held on the way she once had in the dark, only this time she knew exactly who she was holding.
The ground rushed up.
The dead reached for them with open mouths.
Neve closed her eyes.
I’m sorry, Nana.
I’m sorry, Silas.
Declan.
I’m so sorry.
A phone was ringing.
Neve’s eyes snapped open.
She wasn’t falling.
She was lying on a mattress, wide and deep, under sheets that smelled faintly of lavender.
Sunlight spilled across her face.
The phone kept ringing on the nightstand.
She couldn’t move.
Her heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
She had jumped.
She had felt the wind and heard Sylvie scream.
She should be dead.
Slowly, she sat up.
The room was familiar in a way that made her chest ache.
It had high ceilings and pale cream walls.
The floor-to-ceiling window overlooked a garden, and the morning light came through it unbroken by boards or barbed wire.
In the corner, a white wicker egg chair hung from its chain, a knitted throw draped over the edge.
She used to curl up in that chair for hours, rocking gently while she pretended to study.
This was her house near campus, the one Nana had bought her freshman year.
And this was her bedroom from before.
Beside her lay an enormous teddy bear with a faded blue ribbon around its neck.
She had slept with her arms around it every night until the world ended, then lost it in the first week of the outbreak.
It was here, whole and clean.
With shaking fingers, Neve pinched her cheek as hard as she could.
It hurt.
She stared at the sunlight, at the untouched window, at the phone still buzzing on the nightstand, and one impossible thought rose in her mind.
Was I…
reborn?
She had read stories like this, the addictive web novels she used to devour late at night, where a heroine was betrayed, died, and got a second chance.
She had never once imagined it could happen to her.