By all rights, I shouldn’t remember anything after that because that’s where my story ended. Curtain down, save file, that’s a wrap. Once the bullet hits the spinal cord, you’re out, you’re done, you don’t have to worry about this shit anymore. You definitely shouldn’t find yourself waking up in a room that looks suspiciously like a CDC holding facility, with no one to talk to but some unidentified voice on the other side of a one-way mirror. So what the hell did I do to get so lucky?

The room was practically barren, containing nothing but a bed with white blankets and a rounded white bedside table—bolted to the floor, of course. Wouldn’t do to have the mysteriously resurrected dead journalist throwing things at the mirror that took up most of one wall. The only wall with a door, naturally. It was locked. I’d tried the knob, and then I’d searched the walls around it for a blood test unit, in the vain hope that checking out clean would make the locks let go and release me. There weren’t any. That was chilling all by itself. I grew up in a post-Rising world, one where blood tests and the threat of infection are a part of daily life. I’m sure I’d been in sealed rooms without testing units before. I had to have been. I just couldn’t remember any.

There was something else the room was lacking: clocks, or windows, or anything else that might let me know how much time had passed since I woke up, much less how much time had passed before I woke up. There was a voice from the speaker above the mirror when I first woke up, an unfamiliar voice that asked my name and what the last thing I remembered was. I’d answered him—“My name is Georgia Mason. What the fuck is going on here?”—and then he went away, cutting off communication without answering my question. That might have been ten minutes ago. It might have been ten hours ago. The lights overhead glared steady and white, not so much as flickering as the seconds went slipping past.

That was another thing. The light was hard and white, the sort of industrial fluorescent lighting that’s been popular in medical facilities since long before the Rising. It should have been burning my eyes like acid by now. I was diagnosed with retinal Kellis-Amberlee when I was a kid, meaning that the same disease that causes the dead to rise had taken up permanent residence in my eyeballs. It gave me excellent low-light vision, and a tendency to get migraines if I so much as tried to watch normal television without my sunglasses on.