The back staircase ends in a little mudroom with multiple doors, one that leads to a backyard and one that leads to a garage. There’s a hook with two sets of keys dangling. I peek into the garage and, sure enough, two cars are parked inside.

  It confirms my suspicion that everyone in this house was raptured.

  I grab the keys and check out the cars, thinking that it’s not a bad idea to have multiple vehicles that we can be taking out, assuming we can manually get the garage open. Both cars have mostly full gas tanks and built-in navigation systems, which is amazing. I’ve felt a little lost without Google Maps, and neither of my parents’ cars have a nav system in the car itself. The garage is also extra deep, leaving a good amount of storage in the back. I see a couple bins labelled holiday decorations, some gardening tools, and sports equipment. All things that can be useful.

  But I have to face the rest of my team eventually, and when I head back into the house I find everyone in the kitchen.

  “Everything’s packed up and ready for them to move in, Jane!” Ryder tells me, sitting at the kitchen table and scuffing his feet along the floor. He’s too tall already to let them dangle.

  “Awesome! I guess let’s hit the road.”

  Savannah leans over and bumps her shoulder in to Nancy’s, as they stand beside each other against the counter. “Nancy offered to drive us.”

  I plaster a smile on my face. “Oh, great!” I say. But it’s not great. It feels like I’m being replaced. A few days ago, I might have longed for someone else to replace me. But now… it feels like someone’s reached a hand into my chest and squeezed.

  “You’ve been a little go-go-go-ing all day,” Nancy says. “You’ve earned a break.”

  “Beaker and Savannah were at the Town Hall, too,” I point out.

  Beaker shrugs from where he’s sitting at the head of the table. “Yeah, but we didn’t really do any fighting or anything. We just kinda sat there.”

  Savannah steps toward me and touches my arm. It’s a gentle touch, and her thumb sweeps across my skin. “From what I’ve been told, you’ve been going nonstop for much longer than just today, keeping these two alive and protected.” I look away from Savannah, but it means I look at Nancy instead. She smiles at me and nods. Even Ryder nods, I see out of my periphery. Savannah’s hand runs down my arm and scoops up my hand, pressing it between hers with enough force that I give her my full attention. “Take a load off. Relax. Turn that brain off for a little bit.”

  “We all have inventories,” Nancy says. “The only reason I’m going is because these two don’t have cars.”

  “All right, then,” I say. “Drive safe and we’ll see you when you get back.”

  After a round of good-byes, Nancy, Beaker, and Savannah head out the front door and disappear into the night. I turn to Ryder. “Guess it’s just us, like old times,” I say, giving him a little nudge. Though ‘old times’ seems silly, when it was literally just one night between meeting Ryder and meeting Nancy. “What do you wanna do?”

  Ryder looks up at me with a grin. “I wanna go hunt down a surge.”

  I sigh, stepping away from him and plopping into the chair that Beaker vacated. “Ryder, it’s pitch black out there. And we have no idea if one’ll pop up that quickly.”

  His grin drops. “But we didn’t get any new Rank Tokens today! We just sat around waiting for you to get home!”

  “I didn’t get any today, either, even with the surges at the Town Hall,” I tell him. “Even if we walked around the block or took a drive, there’s no way of knowing if we’d find one.” He nods, dejected, but I can tell there’s still something bothering him. I reach over and pull his chair closer to mine. “Hey, what’s wrong? This feels like more than just some cabin fever.”

  He lets out a sigh. “Just feeling the big sad feelings again,” he admits. My heart breaks. “I think I like Savannah and Beaker, but meeting other new people just reminds me about all the old people in my life that I’ll never see again.”

  “Definitely a good reason to have the big sads,” I say. I think about the way I used to handle my big sad feelings. Locking Alex out of our bedroom, shoving headphones into my ears and turning the volume up all the way, burying myself under the covers until the feelings went away. It was not a healthy coping mechanism. “How can I help? No, wait. How do you want me to help? Do you want me to talk you through it? To distract you? Do you want to yell and scream and cry about it and I can just support you?” Whatever I’d need in this situation isn’t necessarily the same as what he’d need, and I want to make sure I understand how best to help.

  He gets out of his chair and wraps his skinny arms around my neck. He’s quiet for the moment, and it nearly makes me cry. “Knowing you’re here is enough,” he says softly into my hair as I rub his back, and he pulls away before the moment is fully ended. “But maybe a distraction isn’t a bad idea.”

  “Of the board game kind?” I offer.

  He shakes his head, a mischievous smile growing on his face. “The hunting down surges kind.”

  I sigh, but it turns into a chuckle. “Okay, point made. Let’s take a stroll around the block and see what we can find.”

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  Ryder lets out a whoop and off we go.

  ***

  We did not come across a surge, but we did have a nice walk. For the most part, we were left alone by any monsters, though my flashlight did end up revealing a cow, grazing on one of the front lawns. It bleated at us, loud and low, and we quickly sped past it.

  “I really don’t want to fight that guy,” Ryder stage-whispers once we’re past. I vehemently agree.

  He’s in a better mood once we’re home and he takes himself downstairs after a quick good night. I finally get around to unpacking my backpack, which I had ditched at the foot of the stairs after coming home with the two newbies.

  It’s as I unpack it that I come across the letter from Sutherland Beverly again. He knew that I’d have someone to help me with food and better weapons. He knew exactly what my thought would be the first time I read his note. There could be coincidences, but after everything I saw today, I’m fairly certain about what his magic is.

  I had forgotten that at the bottom of the note, he left me an address. It’s a street name I’m unfamiliar with, and I frown down at it. And then I remember the cars in the neighbour’s garage with a built-in nav system. I drop everything else, shove my feet into my shoes, slip out of the house, and jog over to the neighbours. Nancy, Beaker, and Savannah aren’t back yet. I head from the front door to the garage door, grab one of the keys on my way, and turn on the Hyundai that’s parked in there. I open the navigation system and type in the address.

  The neighbourhood is familiar. I guess I know where we’re starting our surge search tomorrow. I turn the car off and head back into the house to get to an exterior door.

  There are voices coming from inside the house.

  I recognize the voices as Nancy, Savannah, and Beaker, but sneaking around in what’s technically their house without their knowledge feels suspicious. I consider heading straight out the back door, but I don’t know exactly where that door exits to and sneaking around the outside of the house might be even more awkward.

  So I pause, frozen, indecisive, in a position where I can hear every word that they say:

  “And you trust her?” Beaker. I have to assume they’re talking about me.

  “With my life,” Nancy replies. “And rightfully so, as she’s already saved my life more times than I can count.”

  “From dangerous situations that she put you in,” Beaker says.

  “Well… that’s true.” Nancy pauses. “But it’s coming from a place of wanting me to get stronger.”

  “For her own sake,” Savannah adds.

  “I guess that’s partially true, too. Though also for Ryder’s.”

  “Yeah, and let’s talk about that,” Beaker says, getting a little more animated. “She regularly throws a literal child into the face of danger.”

  Nancy scoffs. “She doesn’t really throw him. He runs into it.”

  “She can stop him if she wanted to,” Savannah says. “She doesn’t want to.”

  “He doesn’t want her to,” Nancy corrects. “She’s not forcing a child to follow her blindly into battle. She’s the one following him, and only because she has to.”

  “Sounds mighty convenient,” Beaker says.

  “You didn’t have to agree to join up with us,” Nancy says. The way she’s protecting me, protecting us, warms my heart.

  It’s Savannah’s turn to scoff lightly. “We’d be idiots not to. This inventory system is going to make all our lives so much easier. Plus, it sounds like we can control how our powers get stronger, using the Rank Tokens. I don’t know how else we’d have done that before.”

  “So you’re using her. Using us.”

  Savannah struggles to find her words, making a few false starts before, “That makes it sound so… preconceived.”

  “We’re just going along with a situation that makes sense,” Beaker says. I have to clap a hand over my face to stop a snort.

  “And you’ll what, bail as soon as it becomes inconvenient?”

  “We’ll do what we need to do, for us,” Savannah says, ferocity in her voice.

  I need to leave. I need to not hear any of this. I need to protect myself.

  “You’re cowards,” Nancy says, a matching ferocity in hers. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her so strict, so intense, so mean. “You’re going to make her—make us—need you, lean on you. You’re going to be a role model for Ryder. And then what, you’re just going to run away when things stop being easy?” She laughs, a derisive thing. “Well, let me tell you a hard truth that you might not have realized: nothing is easy anymore. You thought a shitty salary or a skeevy landlord was hard to deal with? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And you’ll be so thankful, at the end, that Jane’s here busting her butt, putting herself directly in harm’s way, doing something that she has zero desire to do, just to make sure it can be a little bit safer for you.”

  I’m biting down on my lip, rooted to the spot, too scared to move.

  “So yeah, I trust her. And yeah, I’ll keep throwing myself into dangerous situations with her. To protect her, and to give her a chance to level up, so she can in turn protect me. That’s how families work.”

  “You were all strangers three days ago,” Savannah scoffs. “You’re hardly family.”

  “You two were strangers to each other three days ago. And now you’re in love,” Nancy says, the mocking tone of those last two words echoing through the house. “And if you haven’t noticed, our families are gone. So I’ve found myself a new one. And I’ll give them every piece of me, if they need it.” A chair skids against the floor, and I tuck further into the shadows of the hallway. “You have the Game now, so if you guys want to fuck off and do your own thing, be gone by morning. But if you want to stay here, then that means you’re joining our little family. And that means one hundred percent commitment.” Footsteps sound, then pause again. “I do hope I see you in the morning. But if not… good luck. Don’t die.”

  Footsteps sound again, and Nancy storms through the hallway, opens the front door, and slams it shut behind her.

  There’s a few moments of silence before Savannah’s voice comes out of the kitchen. “The Game won’t let me exit Jane’s Party.”

  Shit. They want to leave. Nancy’s impassioned speech is going to convince them to leave.

  “It’s because it knows you don’t want to,” Beaker says, the fight gone from his voice.

  “I want—”

  “Do you even know what you want? You wanted to go to that Town Hall today specifically to find someone else to tie ourselves to. And we did.” There’s a shuffle of movement, and Beaker goes on. “And from the sounds of it, we got really lucky with who that someone else is.”

  “She’s reckless—”

  “Ryder is reckless. She just tries to keep him safe.”

  “She’s rude and… and hostile!”

  “In her defence, look at how you’re acting.”

  There’s a pause. And then a sound of a kiss, and suddenly my desire to get out of here is for a whole other reason.

  “We’re staying,” Beaker says. “We’ll commit. But we’ll always have each other’s backs first.”

  Savannah lets out a resigned sigh. “I do like your backside,” she says, and there’s a smack of a hand on fabric. I’m assuming a backside.

  Beaker laughs, and the next thing he says is too low and throaty for me to catch.

  And they start kissing again, the sounds filling the house, and Savannah lets out a small gasp which melts into a groan, and I no longer care where the door will drop me.

  I use their moment of distraction in each other’s bodies to open the side door and slip into the backyard.