Rebirth13 min read
I Woke Up Twice and Found the World Was Eating Itself
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I woke up with my mouth full of dust and my head full of someone else’s memories. The first taste was of iron and rain from a dream where I had been more monster than girl. The second taste, when I finally opened my eyes for real, was instant regret and the cheap flavor of instant noodles.
"My name is Kennedi," I said to myself. "Kennedi Duncan. Not a monster, not yet."
"Kennedi!" someone hissed outside the door. "If you're still in there, hurry. We leave in five."
I pushed the door open and found Kirsten Brown squinting in the cheap afternoon light, carrying a cup of water like it was treasure. "Good," she said. "You're awake. Gunilla's been asking."
"Gunilla?" I asked, and my voice came out thin.
"Gunilla Faulkner. You lot call her 'Huan' sometimes," Kirsten said. "She got rough jobs. You were three days gone."
"I dreamed I was a zombie," I said, because the truth seemed too blunt. "I dreamed I wandered a mountain and I was happy to be fed by the forest."
Kirsten laughed softly. "Leave it. Dreams feed fear. Eat, Kennedi. You're needed."
I ate until my stomach hurt, because there are some things you can only measure with an empty bowl.
"How bad is the city?" I asked.
Kirsten's fingers tightened around the cup. "Worse, maybe. Some places have gone quiet. Others have made new rules. Cedar's people—" She spat the name like it was a stone. "—Cedar D'Angelo, he runs the nearest inner compound. He's not kind."
"Cedar D'Angelo," I repeated. The name clicked in my head with a sour, small taste of memory. I had seen him once before, in the dream that wasn't my dream, the one where the world burned in weird colors.
"He's the sort to turn a scared city into a market," Kirsten said. "We stay out of his way."
"But Gunilla goes to him?" I asked.
"She trades favors to keep us fed," Kirsten said. "She says it's the price of having a roof and water for Leon."
"Leon?" My throat closed. "Leon Huang?"
Kirsten's smile was like rough paper. "Yeah. He's all crooked dreams and open eyes. Gunilla calls him 'Small Boat'—the boy who won't wake. You helped him last time, remember? You were at his bedside like a lantern."
"I don't remember," I said, which was true and not true. The memory held a shape and not the name. Faces blurred into each other like wet ink. The most stubborn picture was a thin boy with dark lashes, sleeping in a bed that smelled faintly of ammonia and antiseptic.
"I remember you," Gunilla said when she came in, leaning on the doorframe like she owned the air. She had the slow, dangerous kindness of someone who had failed beautiful things before. "You saved us. Now you owe me decency. Eat."
"I owe you my life a dozen times," I said.
"Then stop whining and tell me where you keep that damned ring," she said with a grin that made my ribs warm.
I dug the little ring out from inside my shirt where I'd hidden it—something Gunilla had given me to hide—and the memory tugged sharp and quick: a man, a sigh, a jagged laugh in the dark. I had no idea why I had kept it, only that it felt like a promise I couldn't trade away.
"Pack," Gunilla said. "We're going west. There's a forest—maybe a secret. Maybe nothing. Either way, we move."
"Do you think that old dream has anything to do with it?" I asked as I stuffed the ring into my pocket.
Gunilla's face softened. "I don't buy ghost stories. But if your head remembers something, it might be worth following."
We left with a pack heavy and a heart light in places that didn't matter. The streets were a map of ragged survivors and dead engines. The changed people—what the town papers had called 'the afflicted'—staggered in a rhythm that did not belong to clock hands. Sometimes they looked at me and I felt a tug of memories that were not mine; I felt jaws that were not meant for me.
"We'll go to the market first," Gunilla said. "Then the base. Then the edge. Keep your eyes open."
At the market, a line of men anchored by fear and greed argued over canned meat so hard hands bled. I stayed close to Kirsten while she bartered, because barters can drown you if you open your mouth.
"What do you need, Kennedi?" Kirsten asked.
"Food and something for a fever," I said. "Leon—he keeps burning up."
Kirsten nodded. "Bring the boy to me. I'll bring what I can."
We took a back alley to the run-down clinic, and the man behind the counter—Brooks Barrett—almost sold himself for a vial. He kept one hand on the register like it might run away if he let go.
"How'd you wake up?" Brooks asked me when he recognized the ring at my throat.
"A fever and a promise," I said. "Something like that."
Brooks' eyes softened. "Then take this. Small things help."
He handed a tiny box of tablets like contraband. I slipped them into my pack and felt like we had stolen a day.
"Be careful of Cedar D'Angelo," Brooks said low. "He's trading more than food now. He trades people."
"We know," Gunilla said. There was a hardness there that matched the steel in her jaw. "Keep clean. Keep quiet."
We walked to the edge of their compound because Gunilla wanted to trade for a list of people with immunity or strange skills. She never asked for a lot. She asked for enough.
"Why are you going into his den?" I asked later, as we sat under a hollowed tree and Leon slept, sweating, between us like a small hot planet.
"Because some of us keep promises," Gunilla said. "Because I owe him a favor and I need you to owe me a different one. You're the one who woke up twice, right? That gives you luck."
"Luck?" I laughed bitterly. "Is waking up twice supposed to be good?"
"It's supposed to be useful," she said. "You looked at a thing and didn't run."
I didn't know if I was brave or stupid. Either way, I could not watch Leon sleep and not try.
"Tomorrow," Gunilla said. "We go to the forest."
"Tomorrow," I repeated. Then I slept in fits and starts, the way the whole world was stitched together.
The next day the convoy left the safe rings and ran into the first of Cedar's patrols. They wore cheap uniforms and expensive contempt. The man in charge had a face like it had been smoothed out of marble and then left in the rain—Cedar D'Angelo himself. He stepped off his armored truck and looked at us like a man who decided whether we were subjects or furniture.
"Who are you?" Cedar asked. His voice was broad and bored.
"Gunilla Faulkner and two others," she said, steady. "We trade. We need a passage west."
Cedar smiled like a shark. "And what have you to trade?"
"Information and labor," Gunilla said. Her hands moved like she might split the world in two if Cedar asked.
He laughed and for a moment I saw the other side—the man who had power because people believed in his command. "Come into the exchange tent. We will see what you'll give."
Inside, the air was hot and heavy as a confession. They brought out ledger books, a cracked radio, and a place to weigh goods. The crowd pressed in until our shoulders touched strangers.
"Your kind—" a voice called from the corner. "You trade flesh as well as food!"
"Shut up!" Cedar snapped, and the man fell silent like someone hit a dog.
Gunilla negotiated like a woman who had nothing left to bargain. She moved around the ledger and wrote names, names that could buy us a sliver of safety. I kept my hands folded because hands that move can give away secrets.
After a while, Cedar leaned forward. "I will give you three days of security for Leon," he said softly. "Bring problems, and you will find them solved with force. Bring a cure, and you will find a favor returned."
"Why help us?" I asked before I should have, because I had some kind of itch to see the truth in a man's eyes.
Cedar looked at me like a man tasting something surprising. "Because I like to collect things that matter," he said. "Because the world will become mine if I gather enough."
He waved his hand, and a guard brought in a thin man bound and tired. The crowd cheered because they loved simple theatre. "This one's been stealing," Cedar said. "Justice will be slow and pretty."
Gunilla's face tightened. I could feel the heat rising in her like a thing with claws. "That man is one of ours," she hissed. "Release him."
Cedar's smile widened like a crack. "We trade. I will trade you three days of shelter—trade your little boy—and the man walks free."
He named a price like he named a sin; it hung between us like a noose.
I stood up so quickly that my chair scraped. "You—" I started.
"Kennedi," Gunilla said, "sit down."
"No," I said. "You can't." I heard my voice shrill in the tent. "You can't take him."
Cedar's laugh rolled like a barrel. "You can fight me. Or you can trade. Choose."
I felt the room tilt. I remember learning long ago that when someone asks for your hand, they already have your arm. Gunilla folded into herself like a blade sheathed. The ledger sat open like a dead face. I thought then that Cedar D'Angelo might have been carved from promises.
We left without Leon and with three days to live. The world had a way of making bargains that tasted like old metal.
*
A month later, voices changed. Words that once passed between teeth came out like knives. News travels slow when roads are empty, but some stories find ways to swim.
They said Cedar had been compromised. They said someone had recorded his deals and made a show of it. "Who would dare?" I wanted to ask. People shrugged like ruined trees.
"We will go to the square," Gunilla said one night, fingers stained with iodine. "If they will make a public judge of him, they will be broken."
We walked to the central square, which had been a fountain once and was now a crater for rumors. People gathered like moths around old light. The air smelled of petrol and prayer.
"Bring the proof," Gunilla said to me. "If you have what you think you have, then speak."
I had a scrap of memory like paper—snatches of dialogue, a girl's whispered number. I had nothing but my ring and the way Leon looked when he slept. But there were others—Brooks, who had truth for sale in a broken box; Foster Chung, who saw patterns in the way people moved; Buck Schmid, who could sneak a camera into anything. They came with me.
We climbed an old vendor stand and set a battered screen up like a theater. The people leaned forward because they liked the spectacle of truth more than the quiet grief of fact.
"Play it," someone whispered.
The video started with Cedar's tie, then his hands counting notes. His voice came in warm and clean. "You will deliver bodies," he said on the footage. "You will bring me labor, I'll bring you security. I am not cruel," he said, and then the camera tracked to show ledger pages with names crossed out.
The crowd murmured like a storm. Cedar laughed from the screen and then in flesh at the edge of the square, and for a moment I saw confidence swell in him.
"How dare you!" he shouted. He walked forward like a man walking toward a feast. "These are lies—fabrications!"
"Stop the feed!" Cedar screamed, and someone went for the power. But Foster had cut his wires ahead of time. Buck had a spare battery. The images kept playing.
Then we played something else. A message thread, cruel and bright as a blade: "Keep her quiet," one message read. "We don't need the burden," read another. The camera showed faces—people Cedar had called friends—watching without blinking.
"Shut it!" Cedar's voice cracked for the first time that I ever heard. He leaned toward the stage as if proximity could change pixels into pardon.
"No," Gunilla said quietly. "No more."
The crowd's mood shifted from curiosity into a clarity that tasted like snow. Someone in the back started to chant, "Justice! Justice!" and then others joined. Phones came up like flowers: "Record this," people hissed. "Let the world see."
Cedar's face moved through the stages I had been told a hundred times to expect: the early arrogant smirk, the small frown of surprise as the screen showed him counting hands, denial ("That's doctored!"), then the scramble—his voice rising as security closed around him, and finally a collapse into pleading.
"Stop! Please! You can't—" Cedar's voice dropped so low I had to lean to hear the end of it. For a man who sold safety to the terrified, his whimper was a child's.
He fell to his knees in the center of the square as the crowd closed in. People took his phone and thumbed through messages, and each message came alive like a snake. Someone began to read aloud the ledger: names and prices, children and water, food and hours. The public readout was a tally of human trade.
"How could you?" someone cried. "You counted people like bags of grain!"
Cedar's guards looked at him with an animal hunger I had not expected. "We followed orders," one of them said, but their eyes rolled with a betrayal that was new for them.
Then Gunilla stepped forward. She didn't look like a judge or a priest. She looked like a woman who had been fed poison and wanted to spit it out. "Cedar D'Angelo," she said, and her voice rang out like metal. "You used fear and hunger to make your empire. You made a ledger of suffering. You made children into currency."
Cedar on his knees was not the same man who had leaned over the ledger and named our purchase. He had gone from composed to cracking, from cracked to panicked. "You don't understand! You don't—"
"I understand," said Buck Schmid, his face pale as a ledger. "I understand exactly how you counted us. I understand that you thought you'd never be seen. You were wrong."
A woman in the crowd—a teacher who I would later hear was called Annabelle Simpson—threw a small handful of sand at Cedar's head. "For the children you sold," she said.
People began to shout names. They named the abused and the traded. They called out places where Cedar had sent bodies in exchange for blankets and bullets. Phones flashed and videos spun into the empty night. Some people who had been silent found their voice: "You took my sister!" one woman cried. "You took my son!" another sobbed.
Cedar's face turned from pale to chalk-white, then red, then wet with what looked like sweat and a fall of tears. "I can make it right," he begged. "I have food. I can—"
"Save it," Gunilla said. "What will you give us? Your ledger? The names of your buyers?" She stepped close. The crowd tightened like a net.
I remember the way he shifted then—how the arrogance drained out of him like water from a broken cup. He began the old moves: denial and blame, then a thin insistence on innocence. "They lied. They manipulated—"
"Your signature is on these pages," Buck said, and he climbed up on the stand and held Cedar's ledger for all to see. We played his voice again. He flinched when he heard himself.
Cedar's face went from confidence to confusion in a heartbeat. He looked around, realizing the ledger would not be buried, the videos would not be suppressed. He was a mountain with one small earthquake.
"That's not me!" he said. He started to cry then, but the crying had no architecture—no reason, only the fear of falling and the streaked mud of a man who had sold what he could not buy back.
"Beg!" someone shouted. "Beg and maybe they'll let you live."
Cedar crawled forward on his knees, hands outstretched. "Please," he said. "Please, I'll hand over everything. I can make it right. I can make it right. You've got to—please."
No one moved to help. The crowd watched, some with their phones up, recording him. Others leaned in, faces hard as stone.
A kid—no more than sixteen—stepped forward and spat on Cedar's boots. People applauded softly, an odd, cruel rhythm. Phones clicked and flashed. A woman took a picture. A man laughed.
Someone grabbed Cedar's tie and stripped it off like signaling a surrender. His mouth went open like a cliff. "No," he whispered. "No, you can't do this."
"You took lakes and gave us deserts," Gunilla said. "You made people into numbers."
"Please," Cedar begged. "I'll give—I'll give my lands, my food, my power—just spare me."
He searched eyes as if they held receipts he could fold his way into. The only exchange he found was contempt and a bitter, careful kind of hunger.
Cedar rolled over onto his back and panted. His hands were trembling so hard the ledger shook. "Please," he said again, and now his voice was small, the voice of a man stripped of the armor he'd built. "Please don't…"
They stripped him of his insignia and his belt. The guards, the men who had followed his orders, backed away. The ledger was taken up and the names read aloud again. People started to walk out, some shouting curses, some filming, some sobbing.
That night the footage went everywhere. The man who had kept a ledger of human trade was left to stare at his own reflection in the broken fountain; no one could look away. He had gone from a smooth, arrogant leader to a man begging on his knees, with every transaction he had made played back in public. The only verdict that had weight was the crowd's.
Cedar D'Angelo's downfall was not a neat ending. He did not stand and speak. He did not jail us all. He wept and he begged, and the people decided their own justice. Some wanted to take the ledger and burn it. Others wanted to keep it so that the world would never forget what had been done in plain daylight.
In the end, the men who had followed Cedar's orders—low-level dealers who had acted like obedient cashiers of human life—were dragged out and humiliated. In a wide, ugly circle, the crowd forced them to sit and watch as the ledger's pages were turned and the names were called. One by one, the men went through the stages I had been taught to expect: a brief grin of participation; a slow dawning of fear when they heard a child's name read aloud; then denial—"It wasn't me! I only followed orders"; then argument—"You don't understand"; then the collapse into pleading—"Please, I have a family"—and finally, a soft, shameful fall apart. People took pictures. Someone filmed. Someone took their boots. Someone spat.
The three who had once tried to break into our home—men who had come to take from us what they thought was unguarded—were the first. They were bound, and the square turned into a verdict. Gunilla stood on the steps while the crowd opened a line of voices. They told the men how small they had been, and the men answered with weak apologies and explanations that tried to paper over what they'd done. Each explanation was a confession in disguise.
"Remember how you laughed when you took people?" a voice called. "Remember how you called them 'nothing'?" The men looked at the ground. "This is your day of remembering."
They went through every stage the night called for: bragging, denial, pleading, collapse. Cameras recorded each syllable. Someone shouted for them to be expelled from the compound. Someone else wanted them paraded. Most wanted them never to sell another soul.
It wasn't pretty. It was public. It was long. It was the sort of punishment that doesn't fix deep things but leaves a mark on those who watched. For the first time since the world had changed, those men were forced to see themselves as others saw them—and the mirror broke their faces.
I stood close to Leon that night, his fever cooled, his hands smaller than my own. Gunilla held him like a promise she had to keep. We watched the crowd pick itself clean like a wound. The images spread beyond the square: phones, whispers, then radio, then a faint conviction that the ledger—our ledger—would not disappear.
"Justice was ugly," Buck said later, when we sat and tried to count what we had left. "But it was right. He couldn't keep buying people."
"Did it fix anything?" I asked.
"Not everything," Gunilla admitted. "But now more people know. We can stand a little straighter."
Later, when things cooled and the nights got quieter, I walked back to the fountain alone. The ledger had been torn in half, but people had copied pages and kept them like talismans. I ran my fingers along the stone that had once been a mouth for water, and I thought of the boy who slept and the ring in my pocket. I thought of the way Cedar had begged and how he had finally crumpled. I thought about the men whose faces had changed into small, broken things.
We had made a punishment that evening and called it justice. It was public. It lasted hours. The men who had hurt us had been exposed and forced into collapse—a slow humiliation recorded on a thousand phones. They begged. They denied. They fell apart. The crowd recorded, shouted, applauded, and then walked away with a new weight in their pockets: memory.
"Will we ever stop fighting?" Leon asked me, weeks later, when his voice was softer and the fever gone.
"No," I said honestly. "But we can choose what to keep. We can choose how to remember."
He grinned with the small teeth of a boy who had been given a second chance at morning. "I like that," he said.
I did, too.
The forests still held secrets and the city still held monsters who pretended to be men. We would go look for both. We would wake and sleep and wake again. But after that night, after the ledger burned and the names were read, the world felt less certain about its appetite for us.
And so I kept walking, with Leon at my side, Gunilla and Kirsten behind us, and a ring in my pocket that was, for the first time, not just a promise but a proof that I had chosen to fight.
The End
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