Jax Cole died for two bags of rice and he remembered every second of it, the cold black mud under his knees, the thin wire cutting into his wrists until blood ran down his hands, and the way the black rain that smelled like rust kept falling on his head while his own family watched. In front of him Ravena Voss stood holding the rice like it was treasure, Kade Voss stood beside her with a cruel smile as he kicked dirt toward Jax's face, and Selene Voss, his wife of three years, stood a few steps behind them refusing to look at him even as he begged for her help. Commander Drax of the raiders looked down at Jax and said, "We don't need a worker, we need bait for the crawlers," and when Jax tried to say Selene's name, Selene finally looked at him with cold eyes and said, "You were always useless, Jax, at least now you can be useful once," and then the knife came down and everything went dark. The hate did not go dark, the hate stayed alive and burned so hot that when Jax opened his e

The city was still alive and loud and bright, and no one except Jax and Mira knew that it was already counting down to its last days, because the calendar on Jax's bunker wall said May 20, only twenty five days left before June 14, and every night Jax stared at that calendar with his jaw tight and his eyes burning with a fire that had not gone out since he died in the mud. Mira had now moved into the second room of the bunker, she brought only a small bag and a rifle she kept oiled and clean, and in the morning she woke up early and shouted at Jax, "Get up, reborn man, if you want to survive beasts you need to run faster than beasts," and Jax groaned and said, "I already died once, do I have to die again from running," but he still got up and ran around the hill with her while she timed him with an old stopwatch. After running, they sparred, Mira was fast and her punches were sharp, she hit Jax's shoulder and said, "Your spatial cut is strong but your body is weak, what if you ru

Three days after Jax walked out of the hospital and left the Voss family behind, the whole wholesale market in the city knew his name because no one had ever bought so much food at once, and Old Man Finn kept telling his workers that Jax had gone crazy but in a good way. Jax stood in Finn's warehouse surrounded by mountains of rice bags and water boxes and oil drums, and Finn wiped sweat from his forehead and said, "Jax my boy, are you sure you need another five tons, you already bought enough to feed a whole street for a year, where are you putting all this, do you have a secret store somewhere?" Jax smiled and put his hand on a tall stack of rice bags and said calmly, "Finn, I am building something far away, a place where food will be more valuable than gold, trust me, soon everyone will wish they bought as much as I did," and as soon as Finn turned to shout at his workers, Jax let his power flow and the entire stack of fifty bags vanished into his endless space without a sound.