2026-10-21 01:56:00TRESTIN — DAY ONE (AGAIN)
---
I wake up warm.
That's the wrong thing. That's the first wrong thing, before I even open my eyes. The cold had agreed with my body. We had a deal. And now I'm warm, and there's a pillow under my head, and someone is running a tap somewhere down the hall.
I sit up so fast my skull cracks against something metal.
The maintenance back room. Facilities office. A narrow cot I've slept on a hundred times between night shifts. A gray blanket that smells like floor wax. The radiator ticking in the corner, doing its job.
My hands are fine. My face is fine. I touch my left cheek and feel the thin scar, and it's not frozen, and it's not stuck to anything.
I died in that parking lot. I know I did. I felt my body agree.
I grab my phone off the crate beside the cot.
Tuesday. November 4th.
I stare at it for a long time.
November 4th. The Dim doesn't arrive until the tenth. I had it written on a whiteboard in a life that hasn't happened yet, in a building that hasn't frozen, counting days down for nobody but myself.
Seven days.
---
I check my wrist. Bare.
Then I check it again, slower, turning my arm over under the desk lamp like a man looking for a scar that should be there.
Nothing. No band. No chip. Nothing.
Outside the office window, students are walking to class. A girl is laughing into her phone. A boy is carrying two coffees and trying not to spill them, and a bike bell rings somewhere, and the whole campus is going about its business on a Tuesday morning in a world that has seven days left.
I need proof. Real proof. Not a phone that could be wrong.
I get up and walk to the far wall, where the cabinets are, and I crouch down to the corner behind the mop sink.
There's a stain on the floor there. Shaped like a bird. I know because I've stared at it at 3 a.m. for two years, and once I named it. Pigeon.
It's there.
I stand up and go to the key cabinet. It's old green metal, and on the left side, low down, under the lock, somebody scratched a Z into the paint with a screwdriver before I ever worked here.
I run my thumb over it.
It's there. It was always there. It will be there in seven days, when the pipes burst and the paint peels off this cabinet in long gray curls.
"Okay," I say out loud, to nobody.
My voice sounds strange. Not scared. Something worse. Something with weight.
Okay.
---
Here's what nobody understands about being unranked.
The whole campus is a machine for counting people. In a week, the bands will count everyone where they sleep, how much heat they use, how many rations they pull. Gold, blue, gray every one of them a dot on a screen in the founders' wing, and every dot can be found, followed, watched.
I won't be a dot. I'll be a gap in the map.
No band means I don't trip the scanners. Keys mean doors open for me that don't open for anyone. A night shift means my being awake at three in the morning looks like a job instead of a plan.
The system made me invisible. The system is about to find out what invisible people can do.
---
I find a pen. On the back of a maintenance request form, in block capitals, I write three words.
FOOD.
FUEL.
HIDING PLACE.
Food I can get. Fuel I can get, if I'm patient and stupid-looking. The third one is the problem.
Heat is the whole war. When the grid dies, warm air becomes the only currency left on this campus, and the founders' wing already owns all of it. There's a bunker under that building. Everybody whispers about it. Nobody's ever seen it.
I don't have a bunker. I have a lanyard.
But I do have Rask.
Rask works graveyard with me. He's fifty-something, doesn't talk much, smells like tobacco and bleach, and he's been at this campus longer than the current chancellor. A few weeks back, we were hauling a broken chair up from the science block, and he stopped at a door I'd walked past a thousand times. A plain steel door, painted over so many times it looked like a wall.
"See that?" he said.
"Yeah."
"Sub-basement down there. Old plant, from before they built the new one." He tapped the door with one knuckle. "Boiler down there could heat a city block if you fed it. Corridor floods in the spring. Nobody goes down because nobody can get down." He looked at me sideways. "Unless they had a key."
I didn't ask him what he meant. I was tired, and it was three in the morning, and the world wasn't ending yet.
I'm going to ask him now.
---
Before I go, I stop at the window.
The east hostels are across the quad. Second floor, fourth window from the left. I know which one it is. I've known for two years, the way you know the shape of a word in another language without ever being able to say it.
Amelia Grace's window. Her curtains are open. I can see a lamp on, and a stack of books on the sill, and the top of a chair with a coat hung over the back.
Her coat. The one from the parking lot.
I put my hand flat on the cold glass.
Here's what I did the first time around, in the life that ended in that lot: I watched. That's all. I watched her cross the quad and I held doors she never noticed and I counted the days down by myself and I died ten feet away from her because I never once had the guts to say a single useful thing.
This time I don't just watch.
I take my hand off the glass. I fold the list into my pocket. I put on my jacket, and I take the master keys off the hook, and I walk out into a Tuesday morning that has no idea what's coming.
---
Rask takes his break at the north stairwell behind the science block, because it's the only place on campus where the cameras don't reach and a man can smoke in peace.
I go through the service door, down one flight, and stop.
The stairwell is dark. It's always dark down here. But there's a light on one bare bulb, low down, at the landing, throwing a yellow circle on the concrete.
And the steel door at the bottom of the stairs is open.
Not unlocked. Open. Standing a few inches off its frame, with a chain hanging from the handle, and a padlock on the end of the chain that is not locked at all. It's swinging, loose, oiled, catching the light.
Somebody's been down here.
Somebody's still down here, maybe, because there's no dust on the top step, and there's a smell coming up out of that gap in the door.
Diesel. And something else.
Something burning.
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Medication
AMARA — DAY SIX---The fever doesn't break.I've been counting hours the way other people count money. Sunday morning makes it four days. Sunday night will make it five. I don't know what happens after five and I'm scared to look it up, because the last thing I looked up was how long a person can go without water and I still see the number when I close my eyes.His name is Joss. He's sixteen.He's on the bottom bunk with the blanket up to his chin and his hair stuck flat to his forehead. His eyes are closed. His breathing is too fast, too shallow, and there's a heat coming off him I can feel from the chair I've pulled up beside the bed."Amara.""I'm here.""Amara, is it Sunday?""It's Sunday.""Oh." He swallows. His throat must feel like sandpaper. "Okay."He says okay like it's a thing he's giving me. Like he's the one looking after me.The white pills from the clinic are gone. I used all of them. They helped for one day and then the fever climbed back up and there was nothing left
Twelve in the Dark
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The Coat
AMELIA — DAY FOUR INTO DAY FIVE---Gray.The band is thin plastic and it's cold when they snap it on, and it stays cold for a long time before it warms to my skin. There's a chip inside it. They said it holds my name, my tier, my room number.I look at it on my wrist all afternoon and it looks like a hospital bracelet.Ashley got gold. He didn't brag about it that's not his way but he came to find me in the quad afterwards with his sleeve pulled down over his wrist like a man hiding a watch. "It's ridiculous," he said. "It's a piece of plastic.""It's not ridiculous," I said. "You'll be warm."He looked at me for a long moment and then said, "So will you," and I didn't know what that meant and I didn't ask.Vanessa got blue. She showed me at dinner, holding up her wrist under the light, and she said, "I'd give it to you if I could," and she meant it, and that's the thing about Vanessa. She always means it in the moment.Blue gets a warm room. Gray gets the cold one.I don't cry about
The Man Who Remembers
ASHLEY — DAY FOUR---On the first morning, before the coffee, before the phone, before I even sat up, I reached for my laptop and checked the family allocation.It's the sort of thing a person does without thinking. Like checking your balance. Like checking the weather. My father put the number in my head when I was eleven: Hayes, four seats, founders' wing, sub-level two. He said it the way other fathers say we're going to the lake in August.Four seats. Sub-level two.I typed it in and it was there. It was already there. The bunkers had been built years ago, quietly, and the seats were already assigned, and I was going to be warm while other people were not.I closed the laptop and went back to sleep. I remember that clearly. I went back to sleep, and I was not surprised.That's the thing about being someone like me. You don't get surprised. You get confirmed.---Here is what the bunker was actually like, since nobody else seems to know.It was warm for the first month. Genuinely
Gold, Blue, Gray
TRESTIN — DAY FOUR---By nine in the morning the quad is full.I've never seen it like this. Not for a protest, not for a concert. Students are packed shoulder to shoulder from the library steps to the fountain, and the fountain is off, and nobody's laughing. There's a stage at the north end that wasn't there yesterday. A table. Six guards in dark jackets standing along the edge with their hands clasped in front of them.And scanners. Three of them, tall gray frames like airport security, set up in a row at the south end, humming.The dean comes out at nine-fifteen with a folder and a face like a man reading a verdict."Following the emergency order," he says, "the university will be issuing Continuity Bands to every registered student. These will help us allocate resources fairly." He clears his throat. "Every student will be assigned a tier. You will wear your band at all times. Report to the scanners in an orderly line."Somebody near me laughs. Nobody else does.---It doesn't ta
Second Place
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