SERA IS sucked right back into her memory of the Cataclysm.

She sees herself in the small motorized emergency raft again, speeding through intersection after intersection. And she’s screaming, begging for all of it to stop. The fires. The flooding. The acid rain pouring down from above. The earth’s violent shaking.

Sera zips past several miles of absolute destruction until she’s out of the city and turns onto her childhood street. She lets off the gas as she nears her house, then dives overboard and swim-walks her way up the flooded driveway. When she reaches a trembling hand out for the doorknob, she half expects to black out or be whisked away — like every other time she’s tried to access her memory of the Cataclysm.

But this time she remains present.

She watches herself slowly turn the knob, push open the door, creep inside the only home she’s ever known. “Uncle Diego!” she calls out.

No answer.

Sera moves through the living room, leaving the front door wide open behind her. The wood floors are covered in two feet of grayish water. Many of her uncle’s possessions are submerged or floating randomly: books, documents, framed photos, candles, old newspapers and magazines, vases. Most of the furniture is overturned. A leg is missing from the dining room table. The TV is knocked over and punctured. The mirror below the clock is shattered and hanging askew. It looks like someone has ransacked the place, looking for something, but what?

The kitchen is even worse. The fridge is wide open and mostly cleaned out, its door ripped from the hinges. The cupboards are full of broken plates and glasses. Sera stops cold when she sees the empty wooden knife block. The utensil drawer is still full of forks and spoons. But the knives are gone. Where are the knives?

“Uncle Diego!” she calls out again.

Nothing.

Sera sloshes out of the kitchen, but when she rounds the corner she lets out a short scream. There, frozen on the stairs, is a rail-thin man wearing her uncle’s raincoat. Long, unkempt hair and shaggy beard. Bugged eyes. The man looks half-dead already.

Sera’s heart is beating inside her throat as she says, “Who are you?”

Instead of answering, the man leaps down the rest of the stairs and splashes his way across the living room.

“Stop!” Sera shouts, but he’s already out the door.

She bounds up the waterlogged stairs, her whole body now wired with fear. What if something happened to her uncle? She pushes open her own bedroom door first. A few items are scattered around the floor. But otherwise it’s the way she left it. She continues to her uncle’s bedroom door and reaches for the doorknob, preparing herself for what she might find.

She slowly pushes open the door and looks around.

There’s an unfamiliar sleeping bag in the middle of the room. Trash piled in the far corner. But nothing else out of the ordinary. The man she’d just seen had most likely been living there. But for how long? And where was her uncle?

That’s when it hits Sera.

She has to go and see about the barn.

The rushing water is up to Sera’s waist as she steps up to the front door of the barn. She has to keep a wide stance and lean against the current to keep from getting swept away. Before she pulls open the heavy door she flashes back to all the Remnants she’s had over the years, many of which have involved this very barn. She’s always known it’s important. But she’s afraid to find out why.

Sera forces herself to pull open the door, and as soon as it’s halfway open she peeks her head inside and sees a body floating faceup in the water.

She immediately falls to her knees, sobbing.

Her uncle Diego.

The only family she’s ever known.

His face strangely contorted, eyes wide open.

She covers her own face, and then slaps down at the water and stands back up. Behind her uncle she spots four more bodies. All floating facedown.

She moves toward them, hiccupping and gasping for breath, tears streaming down her face. Her right hand shakes as she reaches out for the dead man’s cold arm, turns over his body. It’s a face she’s never seen before. But at the same time, it’s oddly familiar. She turns over a dead woman next to him, which evokes the same strange feeling. She can’t pinpoint the familiarity. But it’s incredibly powerful.

The third and fourth bodies make her fall to her knees again, slapping at the water and shouting, “No! Please!”

Dak’s parents.

She buries her face in her hands and cries so hard that strange animal sounds are escaping from her throat and she can hardly breathe.

And then a horrific thought occurs to her and she looks up at the first two bodies again. She stares at their faces. Then she looks at Dak’s parents again and back at her uncle. The two unknown faces are oddly familiar. Oddly like her own face.

“No,” she whispers, moving back toward the first man again, studying his eyes and mouth. “No.”

She reaches into his back pocket for his wallet, then pulls out his ID and reads the name:

Daniel Froste.

Her father.

She stares down at the man without crying or breathing, and then she looks at the woman. Her mother. Then she angles her own face up at the ceiling and screams so piercingly loud her ears continue ringing long after she closes her mouth.

The parents she’s never known have come back for her.

And now they’re dead.

Sera rips at her own hair and forces her head underwater, right cheek pressed up against the muddy ground. She stays like this until her lungs burn and her thoughts grow thin and disappear, and she can no longer stand the pain in her chest.

Still she refuses to let herself up, and then the memory slips away and she is lost.