Rebirth14 min read
I Came Back with a Jade Pendant and a Whole Plan
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I died in year five of the collapse. I thought it would be the end. Then I woke up three months before the storm began again.
"I opened my eyes and I was back," I said out loud in the empty kitchen. "This time, nothing gets to me by surprise."
My name is Fatima Leroy. The jade pendant at my throat had been my grandmother's. In my last life, a streak of my own blood revealed a space inside it—small at first, but safe. I remembered how it had saved me. I remembered the rules of that space, the experiments, the quiet nights of rationing.
"I remember," I whispered, fingers working at the pendant. "We have work to do."
I cut my fingertip with a sterilized blade and let a bead of blood fall onto the jade. The pendant drank it and then opened like a bright, small sun in my mind. A space unfolded—no, a whole patchwork of space, bigger than I'd ever dared to imagine.
"There is a field. There is water. There is room," I told myself, feeling both fear and a fierce lift in my chest. "I can fix this."
The first move was obvious. I had one expensive house worth of assets and a bank account that still held my grandmother's stock money. I sold the villa at Beryl Bay fast and cheap—quicker to liquidate than keep it—and I rented a safe nineteenth-floor apartment in Yifeng. Nineteen was high enough to avoid the first floods and low enough to be reachable when the city turned hostile.
I started buying. I will not lie: I bought like someone trying to outrun a train. Rice by the thousands of sacks. Oils, cans, beans, salt. I bought every brand of bottled water I could order. I bought blankets, warm coats for winter, light jackets for rain, shoes for every foot I imagined needing to run. I bought stoves, cookers, generators, and a dozen kinds of seeds.
"Are you sure about this much?" the wholesaler asked over the rush of forklifts and paper slips.
"I am sure," I said. "Send one truck now. I'll pay deposit."
"You're spending a fortune," he said.
"So I thought when I spent it too late last time," I said, and handed over the transfer code. "Not this time."
I lived at the warehouse for days, sleeping next to pallets of supplies and carrying boxes into the pendant space at night. By daylight I filled order forms, negotiated with suppliers, and planned routings. At night I walked through my new private field, testing soil and planting seeds like a woman loving her future.
"Fatima, congratulations," said the real estate agent when the villa sale cleared. "You moved fast."
"I had to," I told her. "A storm is coming. All of it."
One afternoon I went to a jewelry shop to look at jade. I wanted to upgrade the pendant's power if I could. The counter buzzed with air-conditioning and polite conversation. A clerk with a neat bun reached across the glass.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "That piece—green, with the fine vein—please."
"Catalina Vinogradov here will help you," she said, smiling. "Would you like to try this one on?"
I let the bracelet sit on my wrist. I felt that same small tug—a hunger in the space. This time I tested carefully. I let the pendant draw half the bracelet’s glow. The bracelet dimmed but did not die. The space in my head hummed and expanded.
"It worked," I breathed. "More than I dared hope."
Catalina waited politely while I signed for one bracelet and left with one more in my pocket—not to wear, but to feed the pendant slowly, little by little.
By the time the field grew to a thousand acres inside my space and a creek ran along the far edge, I had learned how to steal only what I needed from jewelry cases: a touch here, a trick there. "Buy one, leave one," I told myself, always paying for one piece and taking only a honed sip of energy from others. The space responded. It grew a spring. It let me put living things inside—the first rabbits, then goats, then two lambs that liked the green like lambs always do.
"Fatima, you look terrible," said the landlord's assistant over the phone when I moved into the Yifeng unit.
"I'm fine," I lied. "Just tired."
A week later the storm broke. Rain came like a sea with teeth. Streets flooded. I had one rent unit in a high building and a thousand acres in my head. People pushed and shouted in the market. I watched them buy half a month's food in an hour. I kept my head down and took only what I absolutely needed to keep my front cupboards looking modest.
The city went dark on the second night. "Power cut at 3 p.m. to avoid electrical fires," the notice said. I had filled baths and buckets and labeled everything for the space. The building filled with nervous tenants. Someone knocked at my door and begged to sleep in my room.
"No," I said. "Go and find a group that can protect you. I can't risk strangers."
"Please, our whole floor is flooded," the voice begged.
"I can't," I said.
I had learned a long time ago that compassion, when the world fell apart, could pull people into ruin. My history had proof: earlier help had been repaid with blood. That was the lesson that had kept me alive, and that lesson made me cold when someone knocked.
On the sixth day the floor above me fell into mania. Men in groups started kicking doors and stealing food from people who'd been displaced into the stairwells. I could hear the pounding in the corridor. One by one they came to my door, heavy and mean, and demanded food.
"This is ridiculous," the leader, tall and red-faced, said when I opened enough.
"I said no," I said.
"Open or we'll take," he barked. "Women alone? Might as well have fun."
"Do you want to try that?" I asked softly, taking my hands behind my back.
He laughed and stepped forward. Two of his friends crossed into my room like wolves.
"I'll show you," he snarled.
He got very close, and he reached toward me. I moved like I had moved for five hard years. I didn't scream. I didn't bargain. I didn't plead.
"Felix Espinoza," the leader said when he stumbled.
"Fatima," I said. "You were warned."
Three men fell before the corridor smelled of iron. The world went very quiet. I dragged the sleeping wrecks out to the balcony, sealed them into garbage bags, and dropped them to the water below. I left the door open. The corridor swallowed them.
"I killed men before," I said later, while I disassembled what remained of a stolen hammer and sharpened a knife for the field. "We are not a charity. We survive."
I moved to the base when it opened. The second base was a compound of old brick houses and dirt courtyards set apart because it used to be a village. They accepted supplies for points. "Bring thirty jin of rice to enter," a guard told me.
"I gave fifty," I said.
"You will be registered," he said, taking my sack.
I paid and signed and received a thin card with a number on it: 1092. The registration woman smiled and told me the rules of water and power. "One point per hundred liters. One point per kilowatt." We negotiated, traded, and I kept my secret. I let the base think I was small and careful.
Two nights later a young man—thin and hungry—ran to the gate like a child on the wind. He called me "sister" and then, in the middle of a sentence, "mom."
"Who are you?" I asked, very clearly, because the name was wrong for my age.
"My name is Flynn Courtney," he said, with a small mouth and big eyes. "You are—my mother."
I laughed then—out loud and raw. "You're eleven," I said, sizing him. "Who are you to call me anything?"
Flynn tilted his chin. "No, I'm your son from the future. I came back for you."
"You are impossible," I said. "Either you're a liar, or you're a very noisy liar."
But he told the details—details only I had known. He told me he had been born in the wasteland, made by my own hands—my egg, a sperm from a bank, stitched into life because the world had been empty and lonely. He told me he had learned to build things, to tap networks, to hack. He said he had built a broken time device and rode it backward until the machine dissipated and left him here.
"Why here?" I asked him.
"Because you are here," he said, as though this were the simplest thing. "Because you planted the space. Because I wanted you to have someone and because I wanted to try to help."
He was braided with honesty. He was also eleven and insufferably confident. I let him eat. I let him sleep on the couch. I let the world change.
"Fatima," said Giovanni Hunter one night when he came to our gate, "I heard about the boy. He told me things about thermal cloth."
"Who are you?" I asked, because the face was lined and steady. "Do you work for the base?"
"I'm with the science team," he said. "We have units of thermal suits, but one material eludes us. Your son says he can help. Can he?"
Flynn stood up and met Giovanni's eyes like a small soldier. "Yes."
We made a bargain. Flynn would help the base adapt the thermal suits, and I would let them have a small tranche. In return, the base would help us with a workshop and some safe tools. It was a fragile bargain, but in the end the base needed solutions.
"I will give you a thousand credits," Giovanni said briskly. "You take what you need."
"One thousand credits won't keep them fed," I said. "But I'll help. We will help each other."
Flynn hacked the base with a child's nerve and a genius's patience. He slipped codes and changed flags and wrote lines of script as if he had been born inside a server. When the engineers at the base brought the problem sample, Flynn smiled like he owned the place.
"Give me the fabric samples," he said.
"Do you know what you're doing?" asked Giovanni.
Flynn shrugged. "Yes. Have you seen sunlight in the right way? Do you know how to trap its heat and release it when you want to be warm, but shield you when it's hot?"
"We can only make six hundred suits this week," said a thin man from the lab. "We need more—"
"Bring them all," Flynn said. "Let me look."
The next morning many of the suits were remade. The fabric swapped in and the seams sealed. Flynn had written a small algorithm for the material to weave micro-channels that held the temperature and released it in time. It was simple only after someone like Flynn explained it.
"How did you learn this?" Giovanni asked him quietly in my kitchen.
"A friend taught me," Flynn said. "I traded food for lessons."
"Who was your friend?"
"A hacker," Flynn said, and looked at me. "You'd have liked him."
We reclaimed two hundred suits and placed them into storage. Giovanni left grateful and slightly wary, because he had seen how quickly Flynn could rearrange things.
"Flynn, you have to be careful," I said that night.
"Yes, mom," he said, and I nearly laughed at how natural it felt to hear myself called that.
We needed people if we ever wanted to build a better shelter for more than our small clan. We needed a flying machine, materials, minds. We needed hands.
"Ace Santos is a flyer," Flynn told me one evening. "He'd build a flight rig. At Goldbay University—"
"How do you know that name?" I asked.
"Because I learned how to look," he said.
So we invited Ace Santos. He ate and he agreed, fueled by both hunger and the scent of real food. He had been a graduate student once, now he was a worker at the base. He believed the chance to finish a flying machine might mean the difference between a life of bread and an impossible dream.
"It is always about food," Ace said, laughing with his mouth full. "Feed me, and I build."
We set him to work. We set Flynn to collect parts. We set Giovanni to secure permissions. I set the perimeter and bought fuel.
The night before we planned to take a caravan to the university for half-made prototypes, someone betrayed the base.
"Edgar Contreras," whispered a guard the next morning. "He said he could broker exports for the suits."
"Edgar who?" I asked.
"Edgar Contreras," the guard said. "He runs a cartel that pretends to be a logistics group. He has been appointing supply quotas and keeping supplies from the poor."
My teeth tightened. "Is he a leader?" I asked.
"A petty boss," the guard said. "But he has men and a ledger."
We watched. I watched him smile in the hall and sign coordinates for deliveries while small faces behind his back waited for water. My chest felt ice-cold and furious. I had no patience for men who profited off the despair.
Flynn found proof. He always found proof. He had been learning to slip into files and copy the logs. He came to the hall the night the food was delivered by the base trucks and said quietly, "I have everything."
"Show me," I said.
We took the files into the office where the whole base came to get water in the afternoon. It was a busy hour. People queued, with children and crutches and hands wrinkled from the heat. I pulled up the projection board—an old screen that rarely worked—and I started the file. Flynn's fingers were quick and sure. Giovanni watched, jaw clenched.
The message began with small things: invoices stamped for three times the price, trucks routed to Edgar's warehouses, a list of supply "diverted" to private accounts. The camera cut to call logs with Edgar's signature: "confirm reroute," "delay entry," "hold quota until paid."
"It can't be true," Edgar said, stepping forward. "Those are falsified. Who put those on the board?"
"Who else would report things?" the man behind him snorted. People turned in their queue and watched.
"Turn off that screen!" Edgar barked, stepping toward the panel. "You can't do this here."
"Watch us," I said, and I pushed the remote with a movement Flynn had taught me.
The next clip played: Edgar's own voice on a recorded call, offering a warehouse "cut" in exchange for "exclusive priority." The voice slid out like oil. The queue around us made a strange sound—like hungry people inhaling.
"No!" Edgar shouted. "This is illegal—"
"It is stolen," Flynn said. He sounded small but was very loud in the crowded air. "You took it."
Edgar turned red. "You have no evidence. This is tampering. Arrest them!"
The guards looked at each other. Food had to be kept and the rulebook read. Then Giovanni stepped forward.
"Everyone," he said, raising his hand, "do not move. We will hear this out."
"Listen to the voice!" a woman cried.
"I want to state on record that these logs match the bank trail," Flynn said. "Edgar ordered and redirected. The GPS signs are there."
"Stop the show!" Edgar bellowed. He lunged toward Flynn. He would have struck Flynn had not a dozen hands stopped him. The crowd hissed with the idea that their water and suit supplies might be funneled away. Someone in the queue grabbed a baby. Another man, a farmer who had lost everything, pushed forward, eyes wide with a heavy brightness.
"Traitor!" he screamed.
Edgar's men drew knives. Two flickered like beetles. The air warped with the smell of metal and fear. I stepped forward.
"Do you want the ledger?" I said.
"That ledger is private," Edgar snapped. "You can't—"
"Public goods?" I said. "You pocket them?"
"Silence!" Edgar said, and he turned on me, chest puffed, like a man who had never been called by a name other than Sir.
"Here," Flynn said quietly. He pressed a file to the hands by the screen. "Everything."
The projection showed the ledger. It showed the truck routes. It showed signatures. Edgar went pale. He had no answer that made sense to the faces around him. He had been playing a game with people who could not afford to lose.
"Edgar," I said, stepping closer. My voice was very soft. "You stole from them. You sold water. You sold heat. They are dying because you took what saved them."
"You have no right—" he stammered.
"Do you want to tell the crowd why you delayed the trucks?" I asked.
He opened his mouth. "They're lies. The numbers were misread."
"Read them out," I said.
He could not. He looked at the faces of those he had starved by tricking their supply chain. They looked at him and waited because I made them wait.
"Because of Edgar Contreras," I said, my voice now louder, "we are standing in a line for water while his storerooms are full. Because of him, an old woman down there didn't get her suit and burned in the heat. Because of him, a child went to bed with nothing. Tell them Edgar, why."
The crowd was loud now. Fingers pointed. Phones and old cameras began to light up like tiny suns. Phones rose to record. "Say it," someone called out. "Tell us!"
Edgar's face jittered. For a moment he tried to command a room he'd bought with hush payments. That room was gone. He looked at me, at Flynn, at Giovanni who stood the way a man stands when he knows law but is tired. He blinked.
"No!" he cried. "This is slander!"
"Then tell us when you diverted the truck," I said.
He shouted denials, but then someone in the crowd who worked at the docks recognized a signature and shouted a time. Edgar had left orders weeks ago. The crowd's noise pressed like a storm.
He went through stages. First, he was defiant. "I did nothing!" he screamed. Then frightened. "You're lying! The logs are fake!" He grabbed his throat in a sudden mimicry of choking. Then denial: "These are lies. I am a man of business." Then, small cracks. His voice quavered. He could not meet the eyes of those who had been cheated.
"I didn't know," he whispered at last. "I didn't know who would die."
"How little you must have seen if you still used money," someone in the crowd spat.
He rocked. "It's not true. I was told to hold. I never meant the pain."
Around him the crowd shifted. People whispered and then began to sing low, angry chants. Some took pictures. Some recorded video. Giovanni moved through the crowd with the ledger like a priest with an altar of truth. A woman with a broken wrist in the queue—she had been waiting all morning for water—lifted a hand and slapped Edgar across the face. The sound rang like a bell.
"Stop!" Edgar bawled. "Please!"
"Please what?" asked a voice. "Return the goods?"
The crowd went quiet and then loud again. The base had rules—justice sometimes moved slow here. But this was a raw moment. Edgar's men tried to pull him away. The mother of the dead woman stepped forward.
"My daughter died because she had no cooling suit," she said, and the whole near-silence leaned in like a blade. "You took what we needed. You lied to hide your greed."
Edgar crumpled then, not like a man collapsing under punishment but like a puppet cut loose. He fell to his knees right there in the hall. The guards held back. The cameras kept rolling. His first plea was a whisper beneath his breath, "Please."
"Beg," someone hissed.
So he begged. He begged to the crowd who had been cheated. He begged to the family who lost a daughter. He begged to me and to Giovanni. Gray flecks of snot and sullen tears ran down his face. He crawled toward the ledger and kissed the corner of it. The crowd hummed like bees.
"Get him on his knees," the farmer said. "Let him say it properly. Say it loud. Tell us who helped you. Tell us the names."
They wanted names. They wanted the ledger to be opened and the list of partners to be read aloud. Edgar squealed and named names he thought would ruin others. Some were true; some were thugs. Phones flew as everyone recorded his confession.
It wasn't just his kneeling and begging that mattered. It was that the public held him. People took his picture. People pushed their phones and the videos out like flares. They photographed his shoes. They laughed at his fancy cufflinks that had once meant he mattered. Someone took off his ring and tossed it toward the water line.
"Shame!" people shouted. The crowd clapped. Some cheered. Others wept. Some recorded the moment to send back to other bases. His fall was a spectacle carved into a hard day. He went from man with ledger to a man on the ground.
He went through the stages they needed to see: pride, shock, denial, collapse, pleading. The guards made him stand on a table and recite everything he had done in full voice. He read numbers and memos. He named names until his tongue was raw. The whole base listened. Each time Edgar named someone else the base made a note. Phones were raised. People filmed his trembling lips.
"Why did you do it?" I asked finally.
"For the chances—" he croaked.
"For what? A house? A ring?" the farmer said. "While kids burned."
He sobbed and said, "I am sorry."
"I do not accept your apology," the widow said. "We want justice and the supplies returned."
We did not execute him. We did not kill the petty tyrant. The base law moved slowly. But the public punishment—his being forced to confess, to kneel, to name names, to be filmed and to be recorded across every device—mattered. It stripped him of his power. That was punishment enough for most, and the rest would be left to the archive and the wheels of the base.
A crowd shoved a bucket of water at his face and the laughter that followed turned sour. He begged for mercy while the base decided to make an example. His warehouses were opened and his accounts frozen; his men were watched. The video of him pleading circulated to the other bases. Within a day, his name had hammered into every transcript.
"Good," Flynn said softly. "Now we can move."
We did. Ace Santos, Flynn, Giovanni and I took a night caravan to the university ruins. We scavenged metal skeletons of failed frames and rewired them with flywheels and converted engines to take Ace's new energy packs. We hammered and rewired and tested until a quiet dawn when the broken city looked like a place where anything could still be built.
"Ready?" Ace asked, tightening a bolt.
"I was born ready," I said. "I've seen worse."
Flynn smiled like a leader and strapped himself into a seat like a pilot. "Then let's go," he said.
We lifted off at dawn in a patched craft—the first in months to climb above the scorched skyline. I felt the pendant vibrate against my heart, like the whole field saying, "Now."
We were not saviors. We were three people with tools and stubbornness. We had a son from the future, an engineer who loved food, and a professor who knew how to treat wounds. We had a field inside a pendant and a spring that never ran dry. We had a plan: to gather talent, to make better suits, to open more air routes, and to share.
"This time," I told Flynn as the city shrank beneath us, "we will not wait for the world to die."
"Mom," he said, grinning like an eleven-year-old who had stolen a sun, "we are already starting."
We flew toward the ruin of the university where half-made ideas and half-eaten blueprints waited. We took off like thieves at dawn—thieves who had no time for excuses, only a hunger to do what had to be done.
The End
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