Apocalypse Inheritance: They Erased the Wrong Daughter

Chapter 1: Good Luck Out There The fist hit the back of my head and I dropped. My knees cracked against the wet tile of the shower block, and before I could put my hands down, someone grabbed my hair and pulled me sideways. I hit the floor with my shoulder and the pain shot through my neck like a hot wire. "You think you're better than us?" a voice said above me. I didn't answer. I had learned that lesson in my first month here. Answering made it worse, and silence made it end faster. A boot kicked my ribs. Then another one. I curled my body tight and covered my head with my arms, and I waited. "Hey," a second voice said. "Guard is coming." The hands let go of my hair. The boots stopped. I heard them walk away fast, their wet feet slapping the tile, and then the shower block was quiet except for the water still running behind me. I stayed on the floor for ten seconds. Then I pushed myself up slowly, one hand on the wall, and stood. My ribs were screaming but nothing felt broken. I had gotten good at knowing the difference between broken and bruised. Two years gives you that kind of knowledge whether you want it or not. The guard appeared at the door. Simon. Middle-aged, tired eyes, a clipboard in his hand. He looked at me standing there, wet and bleeding from a cut above my ear, and his face didn't change at all. "Valour," he said. That was the name on my file. The name the family gave me and then took back. "Processing wants you. You're out today." I blinked. "Today?" "Today." He looked at his clipboard. "Your release date moved up. Something about overcrowding adjustments, I don't know. Get dressed and come to the front desk." He left. Just like that. I stood in the shower block with water still running at my feet and blood dripping down the side of my face, and I tried to understand what he had just said. I had counted the days. My release was supposed to be three weeks from now. I had planned for three weeks from now. But today worked. Today worked fine. I turned off the water, dried myself with the rough towel they gave us, and got dressed in the same clothes I had worn for two years. Gray pants, gray shirt, flat shoes with no laces because laces were considered a risk. I walked to the front desk. Simon was there with another officer I didn't know. They had a plastic bag on the counter. Inside it: forty-three dollars in mixed bills, a transit pass, and a hair tie. Everything I had when I came in. "Sign here," Simon said, pushing a form toward me. I signed. He slid the plastic bag across the counter. "The transit system went down about four days ago. Payment network crashed. So that pass probably won't work." "What happened?" I asked. Simon shrugged. "Some kind of attack. Everything digital went down. Banks, phones, internet. It's been a mess out there." He said it the same way someone might say the cafeteria ran out of soup. Like it was a problem, but not his problem. I picked up the bag. Forty-three dollars. A dead transit pass. A hair tie. This was everything I owned in the world. "Good luck out there," Simon said without looking up. "Thank you," I said. I did not mean it. The front gate opened and I walked through it, and the air outside hit my face like something alive. It smelled different from the air inside. Cleaner but also stranger, like the world had changed its scent while I was locked away. The road in front of the facility was empty. No buses, no taxis, no cars moving at all. There were a few vehicles parked on the shoulder but they looked like they had been sitting there for days. One had its door hanging open. I looked left toward the city. Smoke was rising from somewhere near the center, a thin gray column that bent sideways in the wind. The power lines along the road were dark. No traffic lights were working at the intersection a hundred meters ahead. I looked right. Away from the city. Toward open highway and flat land and nothing that anyone in the financial world would ever care about. I turned right and started walking. I had a place to go. Not a home, not a safe house, not a friend's apartment. A building. A decommissioned data center sitting in a region that every financial analyst in the country had ignored because its equipment was twenty years out of date. I found it in the public records library during my second year inside, on a Tuesday afternoon when the library monitor wasn't paying attention. Nobody would look there. That was the whole point. I walked for hours. The highway was mostly empty, but every few miles I passed abandoned cars or groups of people sitting by the road with bags and coolers. Some of them looked at me. Most didn't. Everyone had their own problems now. A man sitting on the hood of a truck called out to me as I passed. "Where are you headed?" "East," I said. "Nothing east but dead towns and old buildings." "I know." He watched me keep walking and didn't say anything else. The sun moved across the sky and started going down, and I kept walking. My feet hurt. My ribs ached where the boots had landed that morning. The cut above my ear had stopped bleeding but it stung when the wind touched it. I didn't think about the pain. I thought about numbers. Twelve years of the Valour family's financial records lived inside my head. Every account number, every transfer, every shell company, every routing code, every buried transaction that Benjamin thought no one would ever find. I had spent two years in a cell memorizing all of it, turning every page I had ever touched into something permanent that no one could take from me and no cyberattack could erase. Christopher had sat across the table from Benjamin that night, with a document in front of him that had my name on it. He was my fiancé. I loved him. I trusted him with everything I had, and he used that trust to build a case against me so clean that even the judge didn't question it. He didn't look at me when I walked into the room. That was the part I remembered most. Not the document. Not Benjamin's calm face. Christopher's eyes, looking at the paper, looking at the table, looking at anything in the world except me. I stopped thinking about Christopher. He was a problem for later. Right now I needed to reach the data center before dark. The building appeared just as the last light was fading. A flat, gray structure behind a chain-link fence, surrounded by empty parking lots and dead grass. No signs, no lights, no movement. It looked like something the world had already forgotten. I climbed the fence. Dropped down on the other side. Walked to the main entrance. The door was a heavy metal thing with an electronic lock that should have been sealed shut. But it wasn't. The lock panel was dark, and when I pushed the handle, the door moved. Someone had been here before me, or the power failure had released the locks. I pulled the door open and stepped inside. The air was cold and dry and it smelled like dust and old wiring. The hallway stretched ahead of me into complete darkness. I reached into my plastic bag and pulled out the hair tie. Then I felt along the wall until I found what I was looking for: an emergency flashlight mounted in a wall bracket, the kind that charges from the building's power grid and holds enough juice to last a few hours after the power dies. I clicked it on. A thin beam of yellow light cut through the dark. And there, on the dusty floor of the hallway, I saw them. Boot prints. Fresh ones, pressed into the dust in a line that led straight toward the server room at the end of the corridor. Someone had already been here, and they hadn't been gone long.