Chapter 3The Only Girl Not Reborn

I clicked on a link from one of the screenshots.

It took me to an official, government-backed portal. It was real. The site was clunky, clearly rushed into existence overnight, but it had a public ledger. You could type in a donor's name and see exactly what they had surrendered.

I typed in my father's name.

They had done it. They had actually surrendered their life savings and the deed to the house.

It wasn't a scheme to play the stock market.

They weren't lying.

A shard of ice slid down my spine.

At that exact moment, I saw my parents rushing out of my apartment building.

"Are you really from the future?!" I yelled, running toward them.

But the moment they saw me, it was like they were looking at a ghost. They violently flinched, veering away to avoid coming anywhere near me.

They scrambled into their car. I threw myself in front of the hood, desperate for an answer.

My father didn't even hesitate. He slammed his foot on the gas.

I barely threw myself out of the way in time, scraping my knees on the asphalt.

They hadn't even tapped the brakes. They didn't care if they killed me.

I sat on the pavement, the world spinning out of focus.

Why? Why had the people who loved me most—my parents, the man I was going to marry—suddenly severed all ties with me?

Just because they were "Returners" and I wasn't?

Brrrring—

My phone rang, pulling me out of my shock.

It was my boss, Wallace.

His voice was frantic, breathless. "Where the hell are you? Have you looked at the time?"

"Get to the office right now. We need you to finalize the upload of all our proprietary algorithms to the Global Crisis Database..."

White noise roared in my ears.

Wallace worshipped money. Making him lose a dollar was like drawing blood. Our new algorithm was projected to double our quarterly revenue, and he was just giving it away to an open-source global database?

There was only one logical conclusion left.

The world really was ending.

Half an hour later, scrolling through the news on my commute, I confirmed it. The entire globe was mobilizing to face a crisis three years away.

I scoured comment sections, forums, and subreddits. Not a single person was questioning the concept of waking up with future memories.

That meant it was everyone. Every single human being on Earth was a Returner.

Except me.

Because I wasn't a Returner, my boyfriend and my parents were terrified of me. They cut me off to survive.

But the logic didn't track. Even if I didn't have memories of the apocalypse, I was just one woman. How could one ordinary person possibly threaten the survival of the world?

There had to be another reason they were so afraid of me.

When I got to the office, I played it safe. I didn't breathe a word about my memory gap. I pretended to be one of them. I sat down with the engineering team and seamlessly helped them upload our life's work to the public domain.

At lunch, everyone gathered in the breakroom. The air was thick with a strange, manic energy.

A few people were talking about blowing their savings to live out their wildest fantasies, trying to make up for regrets they carried from their "previous" deaths.

But the vast majority had already enlisted in the colossal, global engineering projects being drafted to prepare for the end.

When there was a lull in the conversation, I took a calculated risk.

I mimicked the exact look of visceral terror I had seen on my mother's face that morning.

"Did you guys hear?" I whispered, keeping my voice shaky. "I... I ran into someone today. A guy. He didn't remember. He wasn't a Returner."

The words hung in the air.

Instantly, the entire breakroom went dead silent. The blood drained from my coworkers' faces.

The atmosphere became so heavy and suffocating it was hard to breathe.