Chapter 1

My husband, Mark, told me he was a reborn individual.

He said it with a straight face, his eyes shining with a strange light I' d never seen before. We were in our fortified penthouse, looking out over the ruins of what used to be San Francisco.

"I have a system, Ava," he said, his voice low and confident. "It helped me in my past life, and it' s helping me now. It's why we have all this. The food, the security, the power."

He promised me a life of luxury and success, a safe harbor in this broken world. He said his system would guide him, help them navigate the dangers of the new world, and build an empire from the ashes. I, a scientist who dealt in facts and evidence, found it hard to believe. But I loved him. I trusted his ambition, his charisma, his unwavering belief in himself. So I chose to believe in his strange story, too.

That trust was my first mistake.

It all fell apart a week later. An alarm blared through our settlement, a piercing sound that meant a breach. The mutated creatures from the Wastes had broken through the outer perimeter. Panic erupted. People screamed and ran for the central keep. I was in my lab on the lower levels, working on a new batch of the cure, when the lights went out.

The emergency lights flickered on, casting long, terrifying shadows. I heard scratching at the door, then a heavy thud. The reinforced steel buckled inward. I grabbed the heavy wrench from my workbench, my heart pounding against my ribs. The door burst open.

It wasn't just one. It was a pack of them. Gaunt, twisted things that used to be human, their eyes glowing with a feral hunger. They lunged. The first one knocked the wrench from my hand. Its claws tore through the fabric of my lab coat and into the skin of my arm.

Pain, sharp and blinding, shot up to my shoulder. I screamed. They swarmed me, their weight crushing me against the cold concrete floor. Teeth sank into my leg. I felt a sickening tear as muscle and flesh gave way. I fought, I kicked, I punched, but it was useless. There were too many. My vision started to blur, the red of my own blood mixing with the dim emergency light.

This was it. I was going to die here, torn apart on the floor of my own lab.

In that moment of absolute despair, I remembered something Mark had told me. A strange phrase he said was a backdoor, a way to link directly to his "system" in a true emergency. He'd made me memorize it, calling it a "key of absolute trust."

"Celeste's Melody," I choked out, the words tasting like blood and dust.

My world went silent. The snarling of the creatures, my own ragged breaths, everything faded. A soft, electronic chime echoed in my head, and then I heard a voice. It was not Mark's. It was calm, synthetic, and female.

"Host, what did Luna ever do to you? How could you trade her to those sharks?"

The system's voice was laced with something that sounded like confusion, maybe even disapproval. I didn't understand. It called me Luna. Why?

Then I heard Mark's voice, as clear as if he were standing next to me. But the warmth was gone. It was cold, flat, and impatient.

"No choice. Celeste is fragile and can't handle the pressure, and Luna is my co-founder, I can't do anything about it."

A pause. The world outside my head started to creep back in. I felt a sharp, new pain in my side. I think a rib broke.

Then Mark spoke again, and his next words shattered my entire world. They plunged me into a despair so deep it felt like drowning in ice.

"Celeste has suffered enough, what's wrong with protecting her a little? After this, my stock options will be enough, and I'll find a way to compensate Luna."

My downfall. The breach. The creatures. It was him. He did this. He had orchestrated it all. The security breach wasn't an accident. He had let them in. He had sacrificed me, his wife, the woman who had built the very cure that kept this settlement alive. He had traded me to a pack of monsters to protect Celeste, his manipulative, power-hungry protégé. And for what? "Stock options"? Is that what he called his influence and resources in this new world?

The creatures were pulling at me again, tearing me apart piece by piece. The corporate lawyers he mentioned must have been the enforcers of his twisted deals. I was just a liability to be liquidated. The last of my strength left my body. The fight was gone. I stopped resisting. I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me. My last thought was of his cold, calculating voice, and the devastating, simple truth: he never loved me. It was all a lie.