REBORN BEFORE ZERO: I already know how the world ends

WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS

You want to do what?"

The bank teller, a young man whose name tag read PERRY in large hopeful letters, was looking at Zayden the way people look at things they are not sure are real.

"Close both accounts," Zayden said. "Full balance withdrawal. Cash."

Perry blinked. "All of it."

"All of it."

"That's..." Perry looked at the screen and then looked back up. "Sir, that's over twenty-two thousand dollars."

Zayden had not known about the savings account interest. Good. Every dollar helped.

"I'm aware of the amount," he said. "I'd like it in hundreds and fifties, split roughly even."

Perry was already reaching for a supervisor. Zayden had expected this. He let it happen, kept his expression mild, his hands visible on the counter. He was wearing the same plain blue shirt he had worn to this branch a dozen times before. He had his ID. He had his account numbers written on a piece of paper because he understood instinctively that looking like a man with a plan was different from looking like a man with a problem, and the difference was in the small details.

The supervisor was a woman in her early fifties with reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. She came over with the careful pleasantness of someone who had dealt with difficult transactions before and preferred to do so without incident.

"Mr. Voss. I understand you're looking to make a large cash withdrawal today?"

"That's right."

"May I ask what the funds are for?"

"Property purchase. Private seller. They want cash."

It was a clean lie. Believable, common, and impossible to verify quickly. The supervisor nodded slowly. "We'll need to file a currency transaction report for amounts over ten thousand. Standard procedure."

"Of course."

"It may also take us a short while to gather this amount. Perhaps thirty minutes."

"I have the time."

He sat in one of the padded chairs along the wall and waited. A woman across from him was managing a stroller with one hand and filling out paperwork with the other, doing both badly and not particularly caring. An old man in a cardigan was talking to a different teller about something that required him to gesture with both hands. Regular Tuesday morning. Nothing on fire. Nothing broken. The world running its familiar routine without any idea what was coming down the track.

Zayden watched a news ticker on the small television mounted near the ceiling. Stock numbers. Weather. A human interest piece about a dog that had been reunited with its owner after eighteen months.

In his first life, this bank had been a shelter for eleven days during the early weeks of the outbreak. He had slept behind the teller counter, crammed in with four other people, eating granola bars they had found in the break room refrigerator. Perry, if he had survived, had not been among them.

He looked away from the television.

* * *

He split the cash into three portions before he left the parking lot.

One portion went into the money belt under his shirt. One portion went into the false bottom of the gym bag he had brought for exactly this purpose, under a layer of actual gym clothes he had put there to make the bag look used. The third and smallest portion went into his wallet, because a man who carries only a small amount of cash in his wallet looks like a man who does not have much money, and a man who does not look like he has much money is a man who does not become a target.

This was apocalypse thinking. He was doing it three months before the apocalypse. It felt both absurd and completely necessary and he had stopped trying to reconcile those two feelings around hour two of his first day back.

His next stop was a storage facility on the east side of the city.

He had chosen this location carefully, during his four-hour planning session. It had three things he needed: it was outside the primary collapse corridors he had memorized from his first life, meaning it would not be in the path of the heaviest population exodus after Day Zero. It had twenty-four-hour keypad access, meaning he would not be dependent on staff presence to get to his supplies. And it was owned by a company with no visible connection to any of the entities he had identified as being affiliated with The Architects, which was the name he had privately given to the group responsible for manufacturing the outbreak.

He rented two adjacent units. Paid cash for twelve months upfront, which raised an eyebrow from the facility manager, a heavyset man named by his shirt as GLEN, until Zayden explained that he had just gotten out of a very bad lease situation and would prefer to own his time outright for a while. Glen accepted this explanation in the spirit of a man who understood bad lease situations and wanted to finalize his paperwork before his lunch break.

Zayden walked the units twice. Measured them in paces. Stood in the center of the larger one and thought about what could go in here, what order it needed to come in, what temperature range these walls could hold in winter, whether the loading bay out front could accommodate the kind of vehicle he would eventually need.

He thought about Orin Hux, who was currently somewhere in this city carrying packages on a bicycle, unaware that his oldest friend had just decided to save his life.

He took out his phone and typed a message.

Hey. Are you still doing that thing on Thursday where we watch the game?

The response came three minutes later.

Depends. Are you still pretending to care about sports?

Zayden's throat tightened. He pressed his back against the storage unit wall and stayed there for a moment, eyes closed. Three years. He had not heard that voice in three years. He had sat with the memory of it in a dark basement while the blood went out of him and thought about all the things he should have said.

Thursday is good, he typed. I need to talk to you about something anyway. Come over.

Four dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.

That sounds ominous. You're not dying are you?

Zayden looked at the empty storage unit around him. At the bare concrete walls that would soon hold enough supplies to keep a dozen people alive through the worst of what was coming. At his own hands, clean and unhurt, on the phone screen.

Not if I can help it, he typed back. Just come.

* * *

He spent the afternoon moving.

Not large things. Not yet. The large purchases would take planning and they would take a cover story, because a single twenty-nine-year-old logistics coordinator buying industrial quantities of food and water filtration equipment would attract the kind of attention he could not afford. He had a cover story in progress, which would require two phone calls and a visit to a specific city licensing office, and he would get to it within the week.

Today was small things. The kinds of purchases that register as nothing when taken individually: camping supply stores, the sporting goods section of a large chain retail outlet, a hardware store, a pharmacy. He paid cash for everything and spread his purchases across six different locations, because six transactions involving camping gear and water purification tablets and medical supplies read as six unrelated shopping trips, while the same purchases made in one location read as a pattern.

He was thinking about Thessaly Morne while he did this.

In this version of the world, Thessaly was his boss. Had been for the last fourteen months. He had taken the job because she had made it sound like an extraordinary opportunity, which it was, just not in the way she had made it sound. She had recruited him specifically, he now understood, because his skills were useful to her purposes: he knew how supply chains worked at a granular level, he knew where things were stored and how they moved and who controlled access to them, and she had needed that knowledge to help plan the distribution strategy for what came after Day Zero.

He had essentially helped them map the collapse without knowing that was what he was doing.

The thought made his jaw clench so hard he felt it in his temples.

He was going to walk into Thessaly Morne's office tomorrow morning and sit across from her desk and listen to her talk about Q4 projections with a smile on his face that he would have to build from scratch, because the smile he felt like wearing was not one that belonged in a professional setting.

He was going to be very, very good at this.

He loaded the last of his afternoon purchases into the back of his car and sat in the parking lot for a minute, organizing his thoughts the way he organized supply loads: heaviest things at the bottom, most frequently accessed things nearest to hand, nothing fragile next to anything that could shift.

One hundred and three days left.

He started the engine and pulled into traffic.

* * *

He drove past the fire station on Mercer and 8th without stopping.

He had told himself he was just going to drive past. He had told himself this twice before he got there. He drove past slowly, watching the bay doors from the corner of his eye, and then pulled over half a block down and sat there with the engine idling.

He was not sure what he had expected to see.

A paramedic rig was parked in the second bay, rear doors open, someone doing a restock inside. The figure was a woman, dark hair pulled back, moving with the quick efficiency of someone who had done this task enough times that it no longer required conscious attention. She was talking to someone out of his sightline, and he could hear the shape of her voice through the car window even though he could not make out the words. A tone that was dry and direct and unbothered by the fact that she was doing two things at once.

Seraphine Kael.

He had not planned to stop here. He had told himself that approaching her today was not part of the plan, that it was too early, that coming at someone out of nowhere required a reason and he did not have a natural one yet.

He watched her for about forty-five seconds, which was approximately forty seconds longer than a man sitting in a parked car should watch a stranger without becoming something other than a stranger.

Then he pulled back into traffic and drove away.

He would find a reason. He had time.

He just needed to remember that he had time. Three months felt like nothing compared to what he knew was coming, but it was also more time than he had ever had for anything that mattered. In his first life he had reacted to everything. He had never once had the luxury of planning ahead because there had never been anything reliable enough ahead to plan for.

He had that now. He had the future in his head like a map, and maps were only useful if you were willing to follow them even when the road looked fine and the signs had not caught up with the reality yet.

He drove home. He made a meal that was actually nutritious rather than just convenient, because he had spent three years eating badly and his body still remembered the difference. He sat at the kitchen table and went over the list again, crossing off what he had done today and adding three items he had thought of during the hardware store visit.

Tomorrow: Thessaly Morne's office. Normal face. Empty eyes.

Thursday: Orin Hux. Truth, or as much of it as Orin could absorb without deciding Zayden needed medical help.

He thought about the right way to have that conversation for a long time before he went to sleep.

He had not come up with it by the time his eyes closed.