Saint Mary's University, City H, Province N, Country N — November 1st, 5:47 a.m.
The world hadn't ended.
The fluorescent ceiling light hummed softly overhead, and a breeze drifted in through the cracked dorm window, carrying the scent of wet asphalt and someone else's microwaved leftovers. The radiator beneath her bed clanked quietly, kicking in with a puff of heat that made the room just slightly too warm. Across from her, her roommate was sprawled out on her own bed, one leg hanging off the side, tangled in the covers.
Everything was painfully normal, just like it had been before the fall of civilization and the apocalypse that took over the world.
But no matter how hard she tried, Seraphina couldn't draw a full breath of air into her lungs.
She lay frozen in her single bed, arms clenched to her sides, every muscle locked so tightly it felt like her bones might snap. Her throat burned like she'd swallowed glass. Her chest ached with pressure that had no source. Even blinking felt wrong—like her eyes weren't hers anymore. Her body vibrated with a tension that wouldn't release, as if she'd been mid-scream when she woke, and the echo of it still rattled inside her lungs.
She stared up at the ceiling, heart pounding hard enough that she could hear it in her ears.
She wasn't supposed to be here.
Not in this bed. Not in this body. Not in this time.
And yet, she was.
A single buzz echoed from her phone on the bedside table. Then another. It buzzed again and again, rattling softly against the wood like an alarm she hadn't earned. Her head turned stiffly, eyes narrowing as she reached out—slow, robotic—and grabbed it just before the next ring. The screen flashed a number she didn't recognize. She silenced it without answering.
The second her thumb tapped the red button, the light shifted. Morning sunlight pushed through the curtains at the wrong angle, hitting her skin just enough to turn it a violet hue.
No. Not violet.
Lavender.
Her breath caught.
She sat up slowly, dragging her arm into full view. Pale. But not pale in the way a tired college student looked. There was a purplish tint beneath the surface, a subtle, unnatural undertone that made her stomach twist.
What the hell?
"Turn off your fucking phone," her roommate groaned from the other bed, voice muffled by a pillow.
Seraphina didn't respond. She ducked back beneath the blanket and opened her phone camera. Her hand trembled slightly as the screen loaded.
The face that stared back at her was hers. Technically. Same cheekbones. Same jaw. The same uneven lashes she never remembered to curl. But the hair—what used to be black—was now a mess of gray and silver, the strands lighter at the ends, the roots clinging to something darker, like a dye job gone wrong. Her lips were paler than usual, her skin still carrying that faint violet cast.
And her eyes…
Black.
Not dark brown. Not shadowed from sleep. Solid black from lid to lid like two polished stones had sunk into her face where her eyes used to be.
She looked like herself, and nothing like herself.
She'd begged Hattie to kill her. Pleaded to die before the thing Adam had built inside her woke up fully. But instead of killing her, she's been reborn. A year before the apocalypse was to happen, a year before everything went to hell in her last life. She thought maybe the nightmare would end with a second chance—that she'd return to her old body. The human one. The one before the cages and the scalpels and the injections. But this wasn't that body.
Whatever Adam had done to her, it had followed her into this life, too.
Her heart thundered beneath her ribs, but something beneath it shifted—slow, thick, oily. A pulse of motion moved through her chest like a tide rolling beneath frozen water. She didn't need to look to know what it was. It had lived there long enough.
The thing inside her wasn't sleeping.
It was waiting.
It curled through her ribs like ink through water, and her skin prickled in response. It wasn't hostile. Not yet. But it was always hungry. Always watching.
She shoved the blanket off and stood, her legs unsteady beneath her. The room around her remained maddeningly normal—same twin beds, same built-in closet, same over-bed cupboards packed with shampoo and notebooks and whatever impulse buys her roommate collected.
Her fingers trembled as she opened the narrow desk drawer and dug through it. Nothing. She'd never been one to wear makeup. She didn't even own concealer. Nothing to help her hide this.
She needed a plan.
By the time she finished dressing, the dorm had started to wake. The hallway echoed with the sound of slamming doors and running water as girls began their morning routines, shuffling to the shared bathroom in slippers and oversized hoodies. Seraphina kept her head down, slipping out with a scarf wrapped tight around her neck and a baseball cap pulled low over her face.
The walk to the drugstore was short, but she could feel every eye in the city on her.
She picked up black hair dye first. Then foundation. Then concealer. Then another shade of foundation. She spent fifteen minutes at the cosmetics aisle, grabbing anything that might hide the lavender glow to her skin. Her basket was full before she made it to the contact lens section.
Of course, it was just her luck; she couldn't buy them over the counter without a prescription. But instead, the helpful woman gave her a website that could deliver exactly what she wanted. It didn't even bother her to pay extra for overnight delivery.
For now, she'd just wear sunglasses.
The cashier gave her a look as she rang up the total.
"Costume party?" she asked, half-joking.
Seraphina didn't even blink. "Someone thought it'd be funny to pour purple dye in my shampoo and face wash. Full Smurf transformation."
The girl behind the counter laughed, clearly amused. "Seriously?"
"Yeah," Sera lied. "Totally hilarious."
She left the store without looking back.
Back in the dorm, she shut herself in one of the shower stalls and got to work. She dyed her hair twice, rinsing it until the water ran cold. The result wasn't black. Not even close. It came out a silvery gray with black roots—unintentional, unnatural. It looked deliberate, like something a girl would pay to have done.
Fine. She could work with that.
She started layering on the foundation. She wasn't good at it. Her hands shook. But by the time she stepped back and looked in the mirror, the girl staring back at her didn't look like a monster.
She just looked tired.
The eyes were still wrong. But the sunglasses would hide those, for now.
She had work in an hour.
The world hadn't ended.
Not yet.
But the hunger still burned, unrelenting in its demands.