Chapter 2: Not For Anyone

I woke up and the first thing I could think of was...why I wasn’t in more pain.

My eyes stayed closed as my consciousness dragged itself up through layers of nothing, and the first thought I had was that I should hurt worse. After all, I knew my bones had been broken, that my skin had been split open, that my blood pooled in places blood shouldn’t pool.

But there was nothing.

No sharp stabs in my ribs where stones had cracked them, no throbbing in my skull where the last one had caved it in, just this strange absence of agony that felt wrong in a way I couldn’t articulate.

Could I have actually survived? Was that even possible?

The thought was so monumentally stupid I almost laughed. I would have, too, except laughing would require effort and I wasn’t ready to commit to that yet.

Only the good die young, and I must have hit a bus full of nuns in a previous life to get the kind of shitty luck I had now—if karma was real, I’d be immortal out of spite alone.

My hands moved without me telling them to, reaching out to brace against whatever surface I was lying on.

Instead of concrete or dirt or the splintered wood of whatever shelter I’d been squatting in, my fingers sank into something cool and impossibly soft.

Fabric.

Actual smooth, silky fabric that slid under my palms like water. It was the kind of texture I hadn’t ever felt. Not before the apocalypse with my shitty life in the slums or in ten years after the apocalypse because nobody wasted resources on luxury when they could be using those resources to not starve.

I inhaled through my nose on instinct—checking for threats, for smoke, for the rot-sweet smell of zombies that clung to everything in Xiongbu—and got lavender and vanilla instead. Clean smells. Expensive smells. The kind of thing rich people used to waste money on before the world ended and everyone realized that smelling nice didn’t keep you alive.

Bracing myself, I opened one eye.

A white silk canopy stretched above me, catching sunlight and scattering it in soft patterns across fabric so pristine it looked like no one had ever touched it... like it existed in some alternate reality where dirt and blood and survival didn’t leave their marks on everything.

I blinked, pretty sure that I was either dead or going crazy, but the canopy didn’t disappear. Neither did the light, warm and golden and coming from somewhere to my left in a way that suggested actual windows with actual glass that wasn’t cracked or boarded up.

I opened the other eye and sat up.

The room that came into focus around me was obscene in its cleanliness—not just clean, but pristine in a way that felt like a personal insult to every hard surface I’d slept on for the past decade.

The walls were purple, the color of those useless flowers that used to grow in gardens before they realized flowers didn’t fill stomachs or stop zombies. Looking up, I couldn’t miss the white crown molding that wasn’t chipped or cracked or held together with duct tape and prayer. Paintings in actual frames—watercolors of more flowers, delicate and pointless and completely intact.

The floor was hardwood, polished to a shine that reflected the sunlight streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows covered by sheer white curtains that moved slightly in the breeze from an air conditioning vent.

Air conditioning.

I hadn’t felt air conditioning in ten years, hadn’t even thought about it because thinking about things you couldn’t have was a waste of mental energy better spent on not dying.

A plush cream-colored rug covered part of the floor, thick enough that my feet would sink into it if I stood up. A vanity sat against one wall, its surface covered in bottles and jars I didn’t recognize—perfumes, maybe, or lotions, the kind of frivolous shit I’d never had money for even before the world ended.

A wardrobe stood in the corner, dark wood with brass handles that looked freshly polished, and I had the absurd thought that someone had actually spent time polishing brass handles while the world was ending.

Everything was intact. Nothing was broken. Nothing was held together with wire or hope or the desperate ingenuity of someone who couldn’t afford to let anything go to waste.

This had to be a new level of hell that I had never experienced before. There was really no other explanation.

I looked down at my hands, still clutching the duvet I’d apparently been sleeping under, and felt something cold settle in my chest.

These weren’t my hands.

My hands had calluses—thick ones on my palms from climbing fences and gripping whatever I could use as a weapon. There were rough patches on my fingers from work that never stopped.

I had scars across my knuckles from fights I’d won and a few I’d barely survived.

Instead, these hands were pale—almost as white as the sheets I was clutching—with smooth skin that had never seen a hard day’s work. The nails were perfect, rounded and painted a soft pink like someone had actually sat down and done them properly, like that was a reasonable use of time and resources.

There was no dirt, no scars, no calluses. Just soft, useless hands that would blister and bleed the first time they tried to do anything practical.

A strand of hair fell across my face as I stared down at them, black and silky and entirely too long, and I reached up to catch it between my fingers with a growing sense of wrongness that was rapidly crystallizing into something closer to dread.

My hair was short, a pixie cut so short so that there was nothing for anyone to grab in a fight, nothing I had to waste time or water maintaining.

I’d kept it that way since I was fourteen and figured out that long hair was a liability I couldn’t afford, a weakness that could get me killed if someone got their hands on it.

But this hair fell past my shoulders, down to the small of my back, soft waves that came from conditioner and care and all the things I’d stopped having access to a decade ago.

This hair would get me killed in a fight. Too long. Too easy to grab. Completely impractical.

I looked up and found a full-length mirror directly across from the bed, framed in silver that caught the sunlight and threw it back in sharp glints, and the woman staring back at me wasn’t me.