Before the Catastrophe, I Strike First

Reality-warping anomalies descend on the world, and with them comes a lethal labyrinth of survival rules that no one fully understands. Mia Townsend, a former homicide detective, now reborn into the body of a seventeen-year-old school girl, is selected as a national representative and sent into the trials.Where everyone else fixates on simply not dying, Mia refuses to think that small. She brings a detective's precision to each forbidden prohibition, treating every rule not as a wall but as a riddle with a seam running through it. Layer by layer she peels back the lies, finds the life hidden inside each trap, and moves forward while the world around her stands frozen in fear. She isn't surviving the anomalies. She's outplaying them.