I clomp down the stairs to make sure that Ryder can hear me coming, but he doesn’t react. He lies across the middle of his bed horizontally, spread out like a star, motionless. I start with the same question. “Wanna talk about it?”

  But Ryder doesn’t answer like Nancy. He shakes his head, one-two-three back and forth, each movement making a swish across his bedspread. As girly as Nancy’s is, Ryder’s is boy-ish, a plaid made up of dark blues and greens. His furniture is all the sort of blocky stuff IKEA is known for.

  There’s a Playstation on the floor.

  I cross the room anyways and climb up on his bed. It’s smaller than Nancy’s, maybe a double. Still bigger than my old twin, I think with some frustration. I wonder if I can fit my parents’ king in my upstairs bedroom.

  Not the time, Jane. Focus.

  Ryder sits up as I make myself comfortable. And then we just stare at each other, in silence, for… I don’t know. I’m bad at telling time in these sorts of situations. It could have been one minute, it could have been five. But, finally, Ryder gives in. He slams his hands down on either side of him and shouts, “I hate this!”

  And there it is.

  “I miss my mom and dad. I miss my friends. I miss playing video games with my brother and I even miss my school! I know it’s only been a few days—that really, it’s just like a regular weekend—but my brain knows it’s not. We had to watch a girl die today!” He finally starts to tear up, but the stubborn set of his jaw keeps them from spilling. “And blood feels icky on my hands.” He turns away from me.

  I nod. I have nothing else to say, nothing to add that’ll make it better. He’s right. It’s been as many days as a long weekend would be, but it’s a totally different civilization out there. People are still hiding, the stores have been looted, and we drove by a few places where smoke still trailed in the sky—fires that started three days ago and weren’t able to be put out by emergency services. Nancy saw firsthand what happened in hospitals. We’ve been so distracted by playing the Game that it’s influenced just how much we’ve noticed.

  Or how much of it Ryder noticed, I suppose.

  “I could feel it,” he goes on, his voice quieter. I look up at him; he’s staring down at his hands, a single rolling tear having escaped his eye. “The magic. When the surge happened. I thought it would hurt, since you were screaming yesterday. But I could feel it. It didn’t feel happy, not really, but it didn’t hurt me. It felt… like it had to do it and that was that. Is there a word for that?” He looks up at me finally.

  “Resignation,” I offer.

  His nose scrunches up. “Isn’t that when grown-ups get fired from their jobs?”

  I can’t help it: I laugh. “No, it’s when they quit. But being resigned to something also means…” I have to think about it. I never learned how to describe things like this to kids. “You just kinda accept it, even when it sucks. Especially if it sucks.”

  With his nose still a little scrunched, he thinks about it. Then nods. “Yeah. The magic was re-signed.”

  I can hear the slight difference in his pronunciation, and I don’t bother trying to correct him. He’ll probably never end up back in school, so does it really matter?

  “But when the magic is that blah about all this, it kinda makes me blah, too. It made me realize just how much the world is different now, and how it’s not just going to go back to normal.” He pauses, then flings his head to me. “Right? It won’t go back to normal?”

  I can’t give him the false positive, even if I’d love to take away his pain. I shake my head. “Sorry, kid. Even if someone can get a government up and running again, or if they manage to stop people stealing stuff from grocery stores, it’ll always look a little different.”

  “And that’s not going to ever happen, because the magic is stopping the government and the grocery stores. Or else the mutant animals will.”

  “That’s about right, yeah.”

  Ryder’s quiet for another second. “I think I’m going to be a little sad about this for a really long time,” he whispers.

  The truth of it nearly breaks my heart. “Me too.”

  “Will you help me choose how to spend my Token?”

  “Of course.”

  So we do.

  ***

  After an evening of board games and hot chocolate—light and water-heating care of Ryder’s fire—we set out the next morning in better spirits. I’m getting a little worried about the gas in the Volvo. I’m sure that gas still exists in the stations, but without power the pumps wouldn’t work. We’d have to find where the gas reserves are and figure out a manual pump.

  Or else track down some gas canisters and start siphoning gas from the abandoned cars that still litter the streets.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  We loot a Home Depot, a Canadian Tire, and even a Goodlife Fitness. If there is a limit to our inventories, I haven’t found it yet.

  At one point we drive past a church. “Do you think this one’s got people in it, too?” Ryder asks.

  “Probably,” Nancy says.

  I’m already past it when I ask, a little added sarcasm, “Do you want to go back and check?”

  Ryder shakes his head violently. “No. Just curious.”

  The other thing that becomes prevalent is the amount of hand-drawn signs that have been taped to every traffic light, lamppost, and building wall. They say that a Town Hall meeting of the survivors is to take place on Monday—aka, two days from now and five days after the original Event.

  “Are we going to that?” Nancy asks, in the same non-believing tone that I used when I asked if we wanted to check the church.

  “I’d really prefer we didn’t,” I say.

  But the presence of the posters keep tugging at the back of my head. We’ve heard a few times about that census happening in Toronto—the Survivor Identification and Reunification Program, they're calling it. Just a big registry in my mind, and luckily Ryder hasn’t wanted to go. Guess getting your heart broken once was enough.

  Seems the town wanted to hold something of their own.

  I nearly crash the car when a surge notification headache rushes in. It disappears faster than the last one did—looks like the additional Token I put into the Compass Ability is making a difference—and we’re off, chasing it down. It’s slightly harder to follow the movement on traditional roads, as it heads over an area of trees and green space.

  But what the hell! The front of the Volvo is already beat up from the birds, and there are scratches along the sides from where I had to squeeze between abandoned vehicles. I drive over a curb and onto a walking trail and into the green space. We get whacked by a few tree branches and Nancy keeps squeaking her disapproval and Ryder keeps giggling and saying, “This is amazing.”

  And then we drive off another curb, cross the street, and end up in the parking lot of a Montessori school.

  “Looks like you’re going back to school,” I tell Ryder as I throw the car into park. Already I can see the red dots accumulating on the map, the slow crawl of the first few monsters.

  “Noooo,” Ryder moans, but he’s also laughing a little while unbuckling his seatbelt, getting ready to join the fray.

  It took four days, then, for us to make jokes while forging into battle. Good to know.

  We head into the school. Yellow tiles cover the floors and forest green free-standing lockers line the narrow hallways. Murals spread on the other wall, bright colours and cartoons bringing out a playful energy. As we follow the haze on my map, we pass thin tables pressed against walls and oversized benches in open nooks. The purple haze slows and then stops entirely in a space that covers a hallway and a classroom.

  “At least we only have to worry about half the monsters,” Nancy says, trying to find the positive.

  “Monsters can use doors, Nancy,” Ryder reminds her.

  “Speaking of monsters,” Nancy goes on to say, looking around. “Why aren’t they attacking us?”

  That gets everyone’s attention. I look around, both in real life and on my map, and offer a possible reason: “We’re not properly in the surge site yet. Maybe we’re not seen as an actual foe until we’re all competing for the same magic surge?”

  “But we’re walking right that way,” Nancy points out.

  “And that’s why we got the Game, and they are monsters,” Ryder says. He taps his temple. “We’re still superior.”

  “Okay, smarty-pants,” I say, hip-checking him as I head past him and closer to where the monsters are congregating, the sounds of their fight already echoing through the building. “Throw a fireball for me and we can talk about who’s superior.”

  “Hey,” Ryder whines, immediately moving to catch up to me. “You know I’m really sensitive about that!”

  “Be careful!” Nancy calls from behind us, staying a little further back to ensure she won’t be badly injured.

  As we head toward the classroom, we cross some invisible barrier. One second the monsters don’t even see us and a step later we’re ripe for the picking and they start lunging. Every day we learn something new!

  And then we’re swinging. The monsters seem to have evolved further overnight—up until now, they’ve basically been regular animals, except for some size variations and an obscene amount of increased aggression. We still haven’t seen a monster actually use magical abilities. But something has changed with this battle: I see a black squirrel with little horns, a rabbit whose teeth look like they’d fit better on a saber-toothed tiger, and a bird who slices open skin with razor-edged wings.

  For the first time, I feel a little scared. The truth of how much I—or Ryder, or Nancy—could be injured makes me more tentative in my swings, a little too light in my bashes.

  I kind of wish I had the man from the church’s gun.

  But it catches up to me. A chipmunk gets past my bat, scurries up my leg, and manages to sink its excessively large and thick teeth into the meaty part of my shoulder.

  I let out a screech and drop one of my bats, grabbing the thing with my bare hand and flinging it through the doorway into the classroom. Warmth immediately spreads down my shoulder, and I loose an extra second as I look over and get momentarily light-headed at the amount of blood staining my t-shirt.

  A loud bawk pulls me from the spell of the blood and I look down to see a… chicken!?

  Holy shit, yeah, it’s a chicken, pecking at my boot-clad feet. I barely feel it through the thick leather, pecking down the length of my foot. I wait, and sure enough… thunk! I grin and kick the stunned chicken. I dug my old steel-toe boots out of the back of my closet the other day and apparently, steel beats chicken beak.

  For now.

  But it’s enough to pull me from my reprieve and I head into the classroom, hearing Ryder’s yells inside. It’s definitely a younger grade’s classroom because the sideboards are covered in art projects, trays of extra school supplies, books, and learning tools that could be considered toys in other environments. The walls are lined with cork boards overflowing with notices and example worksheets and diagrams, and a chalkboard still has last week’s lesson written on it. Papers are already scattered all over the floor, covered in smears of red blood. A Mac computer screen teeters on the sideboard, finally falling on top of a squeaking red squirrel. I roll my shoulder, still aching, and ignore the fresh flow of blood. Instead, I rush back into the chaos and rhythm of the fight, swinging and striking and kicking and elbowing and whacking and chopping. I use the heavy desk and the plastic chairs when I need to. One of those horned squirrels ends up on the wrong side of my bat and goes out the window; that’s when I realize that the glass has been blown out. And just as the one monster goes out, two more fly in—and I duck when I recognize the curve of their beaks, the width of their wingspans. Maybe they’re common birds that have mutated, but I’m pretty sure these are hawks: birds that are already dangerous before a mutation.

  They let out a cry and more than one of the monsters in the room flinch at the sound.

  As I’m watching, the two hawks fly directly at each other. And as they come together, their beaks just touch.

  And from the point of contact, a bolt of lightning ricochets toward the ground.