Dad woke us before the sun.
Just me and Junha — he left the others sleeping, a hand on each of our shoulders in the dark, the way he used to wake us for school a hundred years and one lifetime ago. We sat at the kitchen table while the new sun was still just a rumor on the horizon, and my father gave his two sons the talk.
It was good advice. I want to be clear about that. Everything he'd learned across thirty years of a life he'd never once explained to us — how to read a room before you step into it, how to tell a man who'll fight from a man who's bluffing, when to spend goodwill and when to bank it, how to never, ever let anyone see everything you've got. Street rules. Survival rules. He laid them out low and serious, like he was handing us something loaded.
And I sat there and took every word.
Because here's what he didn't know: I'd learned all of it already. The hard way. The thousand-year way, on a battlefield he couldn't begin to picture, against things that would've swallowed his whole world for a snack. There wasn't a single rule he gave me that I hadn't already paid for in blood.
But you don't tell a father that. You let him give you the talk. You let him believe he's the one keeping you alive — because once, in a world that doesn't exist anymore, I'd have given anything to sit at this table and hear his voice tell me one more careful thing.
"I've got it, Dad," I said when he finished. "I'll take care of them. All of them. There's nothing you need to worry about."
He searched my face a second. Whatever he found there, he didn't argue with it. He just squeezed my shoulder once, harder than usual, and let me go.
The others surfaced one by one, and Mom put out breakfast, and the day started the way the days started now — half ordinary, half impossible.
Seojin emptied his pockets onto the table: the take off the bandits we'd dropped the day before. They hadn't been carrying Earth money. They'd carried the board's money — Universal currency, the coin every world on the table actually answered to — and Seojin ran the whole pile through that Merchant gift of his, converting, sorting, until we had a clean stack of something that would buy us anything, anywhere.
"At this rate," he said, admiring his own work, "I'm going to be the single most useful man in the apocalypse, and I won't have thrown one punch."
"Don't get comfortable," Jiyeon said.
Because today, she was coming.
She'd cornered Dad about it at breakfast, and this time — maybe because of what we'd walked home able to do yesterday, maybe because he was learning he couldn't lock his whole family in a box — he'd said yes. So the four of us heading out for water wasn't me, Junha, Dad and Seojin. It was me, Junha, Seojin, and Jiyeon, who looked entirely too pleased with herself.
"Don't say a word," she told me, lacing her boots.
"Wasn't going to."
"You were thinking it."
I was. Mostly I was thinking she had no idea how useful she was about to be.
We needed water — a real source. The supplies wouldn't last forever, and the first rule of any world, old or new, is that you find the water before you need it. So we struck out through the empty streets, past the colony road, into ground none of us had walked.
We found him about an hour out.
At first I took it for a husk. A thing, not a person — curled at the foot of a broken wall, skin gone grey and cracked like dried riverbed, so withered I nearly walked us straight past it. Then it moved. Barely. A hand, opening and closing on nothing.
Not a husk. A man, or near enough — scaled, long-jawed, a tail curled against his side. A lizardman, the first of the board's people any of us had met up close, and he was maybe an hour from dead.
Jiyeon was already on her knees beside him.
"Move," she said — to me, to all of us — and laid her hands on the cracked grey skin. And then she glowed. Soft and green and warm, light spilling out of her palms and into him, and right in front of us the grey began to retreat, the cracks knitting shut, his breath coming back ragged and then steady.
Heal. That was hers. Of course it was — the coldest of us, the one who could freeze a room just by walking into it, and the system had looked at her and seen the part she keeps hidden.
She propped his head up and gave him water from our own stores, careful, a little at a time. She never asked whether it was wise. She never asked what he was. She just helped him, because he was dying and she could stop it.
I'd never been prouder of my sister in two lifetimes.
When he could speak, he wept — real tears, sliding down the scales — and pressed his forehead to the ground in front of the four of us. He didn't have many of our words, but he had enough. Saved. Grateful. Come.
He brought us to his clan.
It was tucked into a fold of the new land a few kilometers on — a whole people, a hundred strong, lizardfolk who'd woken on the second morning of the board to find their piece of some other world stitched onto ours. They'd lost their own, too. They were just as frightened as we were, just as lost. And when their healed brother told them what Jiyeon had done, the fear went out of the entire camp at once.
They took us in like family.
We talked — slow, half in their tongue and half in ours, with a lot of pointing and laughing at the gaps. We traded what we knew. And by the time the sun began to sink, we'd done a thing I never once managed in a thousand years of the first cycle.
We made an alliance. Real allies — people who'd stand at our side because my sister knelt in the dirt for a stranger.
The first time, I trusted no one. The first time, I met no one. The first time, I was alone from the very start, and I stayed that way until the very end.
This time it was day two, and already we weren't alone.
So we stayed for it — the celebration the clan threw as the new sun went gold and dropped. They had drums, of a sort. They had a thing that was almost dancing and a thing that was almost song, and Seojin flung himself into all of it with zero dignity and total commitment. Junha got hauled into some reptilian line dance, was terrible at it, and didn't care. Even Jiyeon — the honored guest, the healer — let herself smile.
And me, I stood at the edge of it a while, in the firelight, surrounded by allies and family and a brother who knew my whole impossible secret, and I let it land.
A thousand years alone. And here, two days in, was a party.
I'm not too proud to admit I had to look at the fire for a bit.
We left as the last of the light went. On the way to the edge of camp, an old lizardman — older than the rest, slow, milk in his eyes — caught my arm and pointed us the way to go for water. There was an oasis, he told me. Not far. He drew the route in the dirt with one clawed finger, careful, like it was a gift.
The water we'd gone looking for. Handed to us, in the end, by the people we'd stopped to save.
We got home in the dark, the four of us, tired and grinning, and told them everything — the lizardman, the clan, the alliance, the oasis waiting a half-day out.
Mom listened with a hand over her mouth. Dad listened with his arms crossed, nodding slow, and when I reached the part about Jiyeon — about what she'd done, kneeling in the dirt for a dying stranger — I watched him look at his daughter like he was seeing something new in her, too.
We had allies now. We had a way to water. We had a family that was still, somehow, whole.
The first time, none of this existed. The first time, there was only me.
I went up to bed that night thinking the same thing I'd thought at the dinner table — except it was starting to feel less like a hope and more like a promise.
This time is different.
— To be continued.