As Beth counted down the days until the superpower auction, she examined every hint from The Book. It wasn’t technically her only chance. After the spring auction, there would be an autumn auction, and then a spring auction after that. But by the time the next auction rolled around, any skill that was even half-way useful would be priced out of her reach. This was her best opportunity.

  When it came to broad strokes, The Book was very helpful. The skills were divided into three groups which would come to be nicknamed Internal-external-eternal, although Beth preferred active-creative-passive. Group one skills had an effect while explicitly cast. Group two skills either had a permanent effect or generated a product. Group three were passive abilities that did not need to be activated. Beth immediately excluded anything from group two. She didn’t want to waste a slot on any effect she could just buy.

  When it came to specifics, The Book was less helpful. There was the general maddening lack of detail, but it also seemed that information about skills would never be well known. At least not in the year or so of future that The Book detailed. The best information she had was on the two defensive skills ‘she’ had taken in The Book, but Beth was still confused as to why she’d taken them in the first place.

  The ones she was drawn to – the clichéd ‘secretly’ overpowered skills – all started terribly. The dimensional space wouldn’t be accessible for months. The identify skill only revealed information that the user already knew. The tame animal skill didn’t improve on conventional techniques. They might get exceptional later, or they might just be a trap. There was no way of telling.

  A week before the auction, they were eating another meal of mashed potatoes and butter. Fortunately, Beth had started harvesting from her roof garden, so they could supplement with sharper tasting radishes and winter greens, as well as the foraged wild garlic and nettles. Eating each in rotation helped relieve the monotony and helped drown out the stodgy smell of the mash.

  Oakley and Calley started another fight. The folding card table they set up every meal wasn’t even really big enough for four, and the twins had to share a single edge. The first elbow was probably an accident. The second and third were not. Her father reached his breaking point and banished them to eat on the stairs outside.

  “Don’t you think that’s a bit of an overreaction?” asked Beth.

  “Nothing else seems to work,” her father said. “They just seem to be getting worse and worse. I won’t be having this. We really need to do something about their behaviour.”

  Beth said hesitantly, “One of the people I work with knows someone working as a teacher for all the stranded children. They’ve set everything up at Pines University. Perhaps it would be a good idea for Oakley and Calley to join as well? It would give them a bit of structure to their days. Give them a chance to make friends.”

  Beth had been reluctant to recommend it before, knowing how her father would feel about anything aimed at refugees. After all, it hadn’t been urgent. It wasn’t like Calley and Oakley would have to stay up with any sort of syllabus. But the twins couldn’t be left indefinitely on holiday, either. The only other real option was some sort of apprenticeship, but her father was even less likely to agree to that.

  “They have?” said Sophie. “They haven’t said a word to us.”

  “I think they put up notices at the shelters,” said Beth. “They probably assume all the residents already have some sort of arrangement for their kids schooling.”

  Sophie looked at Beth’s father and spoke just as cautiously as Beth had. “I think that might be a good idea.”

  “I’ll have a word with Peter about it,” he said. “But perhaps there’s something in it. Doesn’t do them any good to be stuck inside all day, making a mess. They clearly have some energy to work off. It’s perfect timing to get them out of the house, anyway.”

  “Perfect timing for what?” asked Beth.

  “I’ll be doing more work from home,” he said. “It will be good to have some actual peace and quiet. Heavens know I can’t get a moment of silence with them both in the house. When I was young, children were seen and not heard, I tell you. These days, children seem to think they’re the rulers of the household, I swear.”

  The internet definitely wasn’t in a state to let anyone work from home, and Beth suspected her father’s old work didn’t even exist anymore. “There’s work you can take home from the matching service?”

  “Oh, no,” said her father. “I quit that. It wasn’t really a proper job.”

  Beth had to breathe through her reaction. She couldn’t have just heard what she thought she heard.

  “Oh?” she said weakly.

  “Really, I can’t think what made you recommend it in the first place. Surely you should have realised that a job intended for someone like you wouldn’t be suitable for someone like me.”

  Please let that mean… “Did you pass the job on to Sophie?”

  “Of course not,” her father said, frowning. “Why would you even think that? Really, Beth, it’s quite concerning that you’re still showing this level of disrespect to Sophie. It really isn’t any of your business if Sophie choses to work within the home. We’re adults, and we make our own decisions about how we live.”

  “It isn’t that,” Beth tried to explain. “It’s just that the job itself is valuable. I paid quite a bit for it. Even if you didn’t—”

  “You paid for it?” interrupted her father. “You don’t have to pay for a job. They pay you. I’m afraid to tell you that you were scammed. It really was a good thing that I left, knowing that. Honestly, to think I was almost involved with something that was corrupt enough to sell jobs! This is why you should tell me these things, Beth. You’re young and don’t know any better, but you need to start learning. When I was your age, I didn’t have any choice but to shape up and get smart.”

  That might have been true before the infection, but hadn’t her father noticed the problem of unemployment? Had she accidentally provided an alternative too soon, so he never realised that getting any sort of job required personal connections? And not infrequently, a little bribery?

  Beth thought about contacting the competitor, to see if they could arrange some other form of compensation. But she dismissed the thought. Her father had quit the job of his own free will. Beth wouldn’t have been willing to offer anything more if the situations were reversed.

  “The job brought in food,” said Beth. “That’s very rare nowadays.”

  “It was an insult,” said her father. “Paying in food and goods, like I was some sort of beggar. Absolutely ridiculous that something like that was allowed to happen. Fortunately, I have found something much better.”

  “You have?” asked Beth.

  Maybe it was alright. Maybe her father’s exposure to other people because of the part-time job had changed things. Maybe he had found a proper, full-time job. It wouldn’t matter so much that they had lost the twelve hours a week if they had two full earners in the family.

  “Absolutely. I’ve been invited to join an amazing money-making opportunity.”

  Oh, no.

  “They have this really clever way to trade in cee-pees, as well,” he said. “I’ll be paid in those.”

  “Ceeps, Dad,” corrected Beth.

  Her father ignored her. “We have people who are willing to exchange cee-pees for ration cards, in exchange for certain services. Then we purchase flour and take it to the food exchange. That way we can credit the cee-pees back against whichever person we like.”

  Oh, no, no.

  The Book revealed that Pines would soon open an official bank allowing people to exchange seeps directly and officially. The unofficial trading would be shut down harshly.

  “Is that the opportunity?” she asked.

  “Not at all,” said her father with a hand-wave. “That’s just why they’ll be able to pay me in cee-pees, once things get off the ground. The real trick is that we will be selling people soap making kits. Our customers will produce the soap, and if it’s good enough quality, we buy it back from them.”

  “You provide… the base soap?” asked Beth, completely confused.

  “No, of course not. Where would we get base soap? You really should have more awareness of what’s available in the shops, what with all that’s going on. There isn’t anything left on the shelves at all. A complete disgrace, of course, but in this case, it’s created an opportunity for us. No, we provide the important ingredients, and the people we recruit supply the wood-ash and fat.”

  Wood-ash and fat were the only two necessary ingredients in potassium lye soap. Anything else just assisted with scent, texture or colouring. Unless they were going to provide the potato to float in the lye water to judge when it was concentrated enough. Beth had considered into trying to make some soap herself, but it hadn’t looked feasible. The family didn’t have a wood burning stove for the ashes, didn’t have oil or butter to sacrifice for the fat, couldn’t devote an entire burner for the hours and hours it would take to reduce the wood ash water to lye, and had no way to ventilate the subtly choking fumes while it was happening. None of those problems would be helped by any sort of kit.

  “In fact,” said her father, “that’s something you can help me with. You see, I need a little bit of starter capital.”

  Oh, no, no, no.

  “I am completely broke,” reminded Beth. “This month’s housing dues took absolutely every single point I’ve made.”

  Not even an apocalypse was enough to forgive taxes. The local council had swapped to expecting payment in alternatives – ceeps, food, or community service – and taken the chance to increase the amount. It now took headcount into consideration and paying for five was no small sum.

  Beth did have a little hidden away, but she couldn’t explain the source. The weeks before the food substitute became available would be the worst when it came to hunger, so she had traded away the flower bulbs and other unusual foods to the various refugee families she had stayed in touch with. Her father would not approve of how often the trade was simply for a future favour, so it was easier not to mention at all. Still, that little amount would hardly be enough for whatever her father had in mind.

  “I know that,” said her father. “But we can take out a temporary loan. I wanted to get one myself, but it turns out they don’t recognise my assets! How absurdly ridiculous. They claim they want us to become entrepreneurs, but then promptly punish us when we do. Typical, isn’t it? Just the way you can expect them to act. But never mind that now. You just need to sign a bit of paperwork.”

  “You… want me to take out a personal loan against income we desperately need just to get by?” asked Beth.

  “It won’t be long,” said her father. “I’ll be making more than that back in no time at all.”

  “This does not strike me as a wise idea,” said Beth.

  “If you’re really going to be all fussy about it, I suppose I can make other arrangements. One of the people I’m working with mentioned a service that will hold our ration cards in exchange for the money.”

  “They get all our rations?” asked Sophie, sounding a little faint.

  “No, no,” said her father, patting Sophie’s hand reassuringly. “They’ll pass most of it on. It’s just security.”

  Most? They were already eating everything they could get their hands on. And if her father didn’t repay the money, would they eventually claim it all?

  “But honestly, Beth, it’s not a big deal,” said her father. “You won’t even notice it. Once this is done, I’ll be all set up and can handle everything else myself. It’s just a silly paperwork formality.”

  Beth cursed the circumstances, her father, and most of all, herself.

  She had sworn to herself that she would stand firm. That it was ridiculous that she would allow herself to be drawn into a debt cycle. But now that it was in front of her, she couldn’t see an alternative. She knew from experience that she was not going to get him to change his mind. Her father had never been prepared to listen anything Beth had to say before, not even when she came equipped with overwhelming evidence. Her father was going to borrow money, one way or the other. She couldn’t let him borrow from what was almost certainly some sort of organised crime. If it had been her father impacted alone, she might have been able to stand firm. She might have even decided that Sophie was an adult and had her own responsibility. But Calley and Oakley were innocent in everything, and they would be the ones who would suffer the most.

  And maybe she was wrong this time. Decent soap was genuinely in short supply. Maybe it really would make money. Maybe her father would return to supporting them all without Beth having to worry about anything further. Maybe it really would only be for a short time and never happen again.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  Beth caved.

  When she came home from arranging the loan, she opened The Book with dread.

  Version 1.2.2.

  Beth wanted to pretend it was possible that it was a good update, but her hesitance gave away her true feelings even to herself. The Book failed to mention any good fortune. Instead, it showed Beth being asked to take on further loans. After all her work to push the indentured servitude date out to three years, the timeline had shrunk again. Now it was even less than the first edition. All her work had provided exactly the wrong type of motivation for her father.

  Beth went to the bathroom and poured out a little water to scrub her face. For once, she appreciated the shock as the chill hit her skin. She stared at herself in the mirror, too upset to even cry. For a moment, she thought about giving up and just letting it all happen. At least at the wheat farm, she wouldn’t have to worry about anything. All the decisions would be made for her.

  No, she instructed herself firmly. She had ways to fight. The food substitute would be available soon. And by the time the government emergency supplies ran out, she’d have her allotment. Maybe that would that be enough to feed the family by itself.

  Her downloaded research told her that potatoes were the most efficient use of land. Potatoes, butter and milk could keep a human going for a very long time, as tedious as it made the meals. If they did have the best-case scenario of allowing plots the traditional full ten square rods, that was 250 square meters. That was… call it 1000 kgs of potato, or 200kg each. Call that… 500 Calories per person a day. Ath the absolute maximum. Hells. She supposed she should have guessed an allotment wouldn’t be enough. There had to be a reason why there were still wheat farms for Beth to be sold into.

  Okay, so the allotment would help. She still had her job. She could choose skills that could bring in even more money. Maybe some of those group two options after all? Or turn more of the points into food substitute and continue to use her salary purely for taxes. The only way to get more points was converting tokens, but—

  The tokens!

  Beth had a bag full. She laughed out loud in relief, then bit on her thumb to stifle the noise. She had been panicking herself for no reason whatsoever. She didn’t have a clear idea of just how much tokens worth, but The Book suggested it would be a lot. She was going to be very rich, very soon.

  The Book hadn’t presented them as a solution, which is why she’d forgotten. It didn’t mention them at all, now that she thought about it. Like she’d never taken them in the first place. Perhaps it just couldn’t come up with any explanation, so it left it out? She had multiple examples now of how it glitched when it came to the impact of itself on the future, but was one that changed everything. The only difficulty would be explaining how she got the tokens.

  After some further consideration, Beth realised that was, in fact, a considerable difficulty. She couldn’t tell anything like the truth. If she admitted they came from the crematorium, no matter what her excuse was, they’d just be confiscated. No matter what approach Beth could think of to pretend she’d found a ‘new’ token, all of them came down to exposing herself to infected. To taking combat skills and joining the scavenging teams on the mainland.

  Beth didn’t want to. She didn’t want to kill infected. She didn’t want to get infected.

  After waiting for the announcement for months, the decision was now rushing at her. On the Seventeenth of March, exactly 72 hours before noon of the equinox, three bongs sounded. They reverberated deep in the base of her spine, but Beth imagined she could still have ignored them as something else. An expanded emergency broadcast system. A kids game. A reversing electric car. They repeated more loudly, with more force, and her whole body echoed with them. Then the undeniable – her vision was obscured by writing that could not be dismissed as anything natural.

  Beth read back and forth through the package to confirm her previous understanding. The aliens provided an ‘introductory gift’ of 720 points. Any amount they didn’t spend on purchasing skills could then go to purchasing the food substitute, at a rate of one point for five thousand calories. Beth also had an additional notice. One not entirely unique to her, she suspected, but one that wouldn’t be common.

  Blink, blink, blink. Pause.

  She could not keep the tokens. If she decided to join the scavenging, then she needed the best skills she could get. If she didn’t, then her only option was to sell food substitute. Keeping them just risked getting caught, now that other people knew what they were.

  With that handled, it was time to check with the rest of the family. One by one, they accumulated in the living room and stared at each other in silence. In contrast, the street outside was filled with raised voices and hysterical crying.

  Oakley was finally the person to take the plunge.

  “Aliens?” he asked rhetorically. “This whole zombie infection thing was an alien invasion all along?”

  There was a shared exhale of relief. If they were going crazy, it was collectively.

  “Does it still count as an alien invasion if they haven’t actually invaded?” Beth asked. “They’re not presently here. It’s technically just an attack at this point.”

  “Two different sets of aliens, even,” said Calley.

  “Only one set is attacking us, though.”

  “That’s what they claim,” she said.

  Beth agreed with Calley. Perhaps if she hadn’t read The Book first, and had her attention drawn so strongly to the use of tokens, she would have been more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it was just so obviously set up to force humanity to fight.

  “But why tell us about all this cool stuff when we can’t get any of it?” complained Oakley.

  That was when the family discovered that the twins had different information to the rest of them. Their only option was to purchase the food substitute. Their introductory gift was a measly ten points, with a notice that they would accumulate half a point a day. Beth didn’t think it was a co-incidence that was about what they’d need to cover their food. The twins could view the auction details, but none of the actions were active for them. Beth had vaguely wondered why The Book had never mentioned which skills they had purchased, but she hadn’t realised the relevance. After all, the Book hadn’t gone into detail about anyone else’s choices either.

  “I guess it’s good that they aren’t giving superpowers to children,” said Beth.

  “It can’t be real superpowers,” said Sophie. “I mean, aliens are one thing. We all knew that they were a possibility. But magic isn’t real.”

  “I think we’re well into Clarke’s third law here,” said Beth

  “…. What?” asked Sophie.

  “’Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’,” quoted Beth. “Perhaps in future we can deduce the scientific principles behind it and develop our own skills, but we don’t have enough knowledge yet.”

  “It doesn’t matter how it works. It only matters whether it does work,” said Calley.

  “We’ll find out after the auction,” said Beth. “We can’t risk being the only ones without anything to show for it.”

  “Can’t we?” asked her father. “We’re humanity. We’re fine as we are. We don’t need any sort of handout. I don’t like the idea of acting like we’re some kind of victims and taking these alien scraps.”

  “Dad!” protested Oakley. “You wouldn’t give up on superpowers?”

  “Humanity is fine, of course,” said Beth. “But we could always be even better. Has anyone had a chance to look at what they’re offering?”

  “There’s a lot of options,” said Calley.

  There were. One hundred forty skills, in the three groups of forty-eight each.

  “And what do they even do?” said Sophie. “The names are so abstract. Morning dew, the grief of Heaven, cherished in your palm.”

  “They sound like someone ran it through google translate multiple times in a row,” said Oakley. “Hey, do you think that’s what they did? They have this amazing alien technology and superpowers and shit, but their AI translations are just as bad as ours?”

  “You watch your language when you’re around your mother,” said her father.

  “The description of that ability is at least straightforward enough,” Beth said. “Level 1: 0.7 ml per second. I think it’s safe to assume it’s the ability to condense water out of the atmosphere.”

  “We won’t know for sure until we buy them,” said Sophie. “And then it will be too late. The points will be gone. Perhaps we should save them all for the food-substitute.”

  “What if it’s all a scam?” asked Oakley, with an inappropriate amount of glee. “Get your hopes up by pretending to hand out miracles, only to yoink. Like those videos of people opening boxes from fancy brands, only to have it be something cheap.”

  “What have you been watching?” asked Sophie. “You know you’re not supposed to be on the internet if one of us isn’t supervising.”

  A job that had, more often than not, fallen to Beth. That was one aspect of the blackout she was glad of.

  “Come on, Mum,” he whined. “What am I supposed to do when a friend shows me something at school? You don’t want me to be rude, do you?”

  “Why don’t we have a good look at the options now?” suggested Beth. “We don’t to make any decisions yet, but at least we can get an idea of what’s available.”

  Not giving anyone time to protest, Beth passed out some of her dwindling supply of notepaper and pencils. Even the twins, although that hurt. Beth had a bizarre nostalgia for junk mail. Scrap paper just being given away for free, right through the door. Beth sat against the wall to write on the floor, navigating around the cracks in the floorboards.

  Sophie had not been exaggerating. They were very obscure. Beth could just about link the ones mentioned in The Book, but even that was a little uncertain. Option after option that could be useful. Ones explicitly about the infected – charging a structure to repel them, warning of the direction and distance of the closest, intentionally attracting them. Ones about everyday life – lights, water, food. And ones about the skills themselves – storing, documenting, displaying.

  She kept notes of anything that looked like it would make money. The water creation one Sophie had mentioned. The production of stones that generated heat. A way to process fabric. Beth felt uneasy about her strategy, though. Anything obviously and immediately valuable would probably be well-exploited by other people as well. Things that wouldn’t be useful for years wouldn’t help her either.

  One skill suddenly jumped out at Beth. Very overpowered. Not mentioned by The Book at all. Skill acceleration: reducing the time it took to level up. Beth stared at it for a long moment. If it was an obvious cheat to Beth, then it would be an obvious cheat to everyone else, too. That meant it was going to be expensive. Very expensive. Perhaps too expensive for anyone in The Book to acquire. But, perhaps, not too expensive for her.

  As she thought about it, the noise level of family shuffling grew markedly louder.

  “Done?” asked Sophie.

  Surely not.

  “Yes,” answered Oakley, clearly glad to be finished with the activity. “This is so stupid. Why is every skill another stupid riddle?”

  “How many can you even bid on?” asked Calley. “How are we supposed to guess how much anything is worth? They haven’t given us any numbers for how many are available.”

  “Yeah,” said Oakley. “What if there’s only, like, one of each, and if you don’t bid the full seven hundred and twenty points, you don’t get anything?”

  “Or they end up being supercheap, so anyone who doesn’t bid on a bunch just ends up on losing out?”

  “And what if it costs more points to level it up? You’d be pretty sad if you spent all the points and then couldn’t do anything with the skills.”

  Upgrading didn’t cost more points. Beth still wasn’t clear on how or when skills levelled up, but The Book was pretty clear about point usage, and there wasn’t any output like that.

  “Like Mum said, they could just be playing a cruel game on people.”

  That, Beth was willing to believe was true, independent of whether the skills were useful.

  “Wait, it’s an auction, right?” asked Oakley. “If even one person bids the full seven-twenty, is everyone who bids less screwed?”

  “Maybe it just takes the full amount from the idiot,” said Calley, “but everyone else pays whatever they bid.”

  “Neither,” reassured Beth. “It’s a uniform price auction. Everyone pays the bid amount of the lowest successful bidder. Not the highest or what they themselves bid.”

  “What a weird system,” said her father. “Such an absurd way of doing things. I suppose we can’t really expect much out of aliens.”

  “It’s how the electricity market used to work,” said Beth, but quietly.

  Sophie clapped her hands like a primary school teacher. “Why don’t we all share what we found?”

  Calley started by recommending Wandering fragments, the crumbs of creation’s banquet, gathered into your embrace. It was the group three skill Beth had tentatively identified as the dimensional space option.

  “That’s stupid,” said Oakley, and ignored Sophie’s faint protest at his rudeness. “What was the level description? Level 1: extradimensional space visible, 2.78cm on each side.”

  Oakley measured that space out with his fingers. “You could store a few peanuts!”

  “That is only level 1,” said Calley.

  “Why would anyone pick that?” asked her father, with an equal lack of tact. “It would be absolutely a waste of points even if it did scale up. Just get a backpack.”

  Beth had to admit that she was disappointed herself. She been excited when The Book mentioned the existence of dimensional space, and dismissive of the time it claimed it would take to become useful. But the initial presentation was worse than she had expected.

  “I think you should all get the fire-starting one,” said Oakley. “Nothing beats being able to throw a fireball.”

  “I suspect that skill is a little more domestic than that,” said Sophie. “As in, it will start a fire at very close range if you first prepare some kindling.”

  “It’s a magic lighter?” asked Oakley sounding betrayed.

  “The domestic skills are valuable as well,” said Sophie, comfortingly. “I think I like that first one I mentioned – about generating water. If I have that, then I don’t have to worry about when they have outages. Or perhaps one of the healing skills. There are quite a few different ones in group one and three.”

  “None of them will heal infection,” grumbled Beth’s father. “None of the skills do. I checked. You’d think if this ‘Alien Relief Group’ was competent, then that would be the first thing they’d sort out.”

  “Infection isn’t the only thing to worry about,” said Sophie. “We probably don’t have to worry about it all, here on Pines. But people die of other things all the time. And even short of death, there’s a lot of things that could make us very miserable. I wish I had a better idea of the difference between them.”

  Beth thought it was safe to share a least a little information. “From the descriptions, group one works on other people, and group three works on yourself.”

  Her father snorted. “If some work on other people, then it doesn’t have to be us who takes it. We should leave them to the people who are already health-care professionals. It will do them more good than it would us. That’s what they have a job for.”

  A glance at Sophie’s expression showed that she did not agree. Beth suspected this might be one of the rare times Sophie did not blindly go along with her father.

  “What do you think is the best option, Dad?” asked Beth, diverting him.

  “If I participate in any of this nonsense, which I’m not at all sure is a good idea, then I’m inclined to Faithful Speech.”

  Like all the other skills, it was hard to tell from descriptions, but it sounded a lot like mental manipulation. There were a few like that, and they all struck Beth as slimy.

  “Don’t you think it would be safer to get a protective skill?” asked Beth carefully.

  “Faithful Speech is a protective skill. As Sophie just said, infection isn’t the only thing we have to worry about. Remember that unpleasantness we got caught up in trying to buy groceries? All of that could have been prevented if people had just listened to me. Humans are the real danger.”

  Oakley was inspired to re-tell the plotlines of various zombie movies. Calley and Sophie pushed back on the fundamental decency of humanity, while Beth stayed silent.

  In the end, Beth never gave her recommendations. Which was fortunate, because she still had no idea what she was going to do. It would only be a short reprieve. She had three days to decide what skills she wanted, and as a result, just what kind of life she was going to lead.