Prologue
JENNA
Life had a weird way of teaching you lessons you desperately didn’t want to learn.
But how could you learn in a world like today?
People were homeless, women were being brutally assaulted without any justice, and children were starving.
It was a world that I thought I would never see.
In school, we were told the future would be great.
I watched slowly as our nation made way for a dictator.
People said oh he’s doing what needs to be done to save our country.
The number of times anger filled me, and I wanted to do something that would likely have me thrown in a cage somewhere, and I would be forgotten.
We could have had greatness once upon a time, but instead, we were handed war.
The rich got richer, and the poor…well, they started to just fade away.
Then, suddenly one day, there was a breakthrough in science. Yes, there’s a large fancy word for it, but hey, I’m no scientist, and that’ll take too much to explain.
Time travel.
Yeah, time travel becoming a thing was supposed to be helpful. But as a woman, and a disposable one at that, I was drafted to be one of the twenty women to be shoved through a machine that looked like it came straight out of Doc Brown’s laboratory.
Jenna Mason, twenty-five, five foot six, one hundred and twenty pounds…ish.
That was me. Back in 2026. The year I didn’t get a choice. Prison or future.
I’m innocent, if that even matters anymore. I just have that kind of face, I suppose.
Now, it was 2058. Thirty-two years into the future. I would be fifty-seven right now if I stayed in my own year. And I had no way of knowing if the other nineteen women even made it into the future or not. We didn’t land together.
But I could tell you one thing. Things didn’t get better with time. The world ended.
June 21st, 2026
That date would be forever seared into my memory. No matter where I was. It was catastrophic worldwide. Greed, power, war…. men. Destroying the planet and everything good on it.
But people didn’t end. They just regrouped and rose again. Was it any better? No. Because the people who rose were the wrong ones. Of course they were. Because the rich always had a plan for when they destroyed things. A backdoor to disappear through to avoid the fallout of their bad decisions.
Now, instead of Los Angeles, California, I was living it up in New Eden. The regime’s iron fist crushed every bit of dissent that had been bubbling. But we still had our rebellion. Despite my rocky start to this new world, I had been the rebel leader’s sharpest blade.
That was before I was captured.
Draven, my sworn enemy, had snatched me during the raid, dragging my body against his as explosions lit up the night.
I was forced into this concrete cell with no escape plan.
My wrists were bound above my head, and when he came in to check if I was still breathing, his massive frame blocked the only door out of here.
I was fucked. Rather than fight against it, I started to lean into it.
I was horny and bored. What else would I do before my ultimate death? Might as well enjoy the ride.