When Alex and I were dating, we loved to go bowling. It was a silly pastime, but we had fun. And Alex was obnoxiously good at it. My favourite part was the little vent in the ball return that blew air. I’d stick my hand out over it, pretending like I was a good enough bowler to need to, I don’t know, dry the sweat off my palms. I had no idea what the little burst of air was actually for.

  It always made Alex laugh like a maniac.

  As I kneel here in front of a dead raccoon, a stranger at my side, I’m reminded of that little vent. There’s the lightest push of air against my fingers, leaving a coating of something gritty on the skin. But when I rub my palms together, there’s nothing there.

  Slowly, I start to see it. It reminds me of ash off a bonfire, already dark in colour, against the black of a midnight sky. You can kind of see an outline that moves through the air, but only because you see what you’re not seeing.

  The whole thing is, for lack of a better word, a mind-fuck.

  As the weird ash leaves a gritty coating on my hand, I look over at the man next to me.

  “Don’t stare,” he mumbles, his eyes never leaving the animal in front of us. It almost looks like we’re praying, the way we’re kneeling.

  I turn my head back to the raccoon. “How did you discover this?” I pull up my profile and stare at the little zero beside “Rank Tokens,” waiting to see if I get another one.

  “When I killed my first mutant, I cried,” the man admits. “I wanted to bury it. That felt like the right thing to do.” He shrugs, his shoulder brushing against mine. “It took me that long to dig the hole. You can see the magic release easier when it’s the middle of the day.”

  “And you knew what it was?”

  “Of course not. But I was curious, and I got close, and the next thing I knew…” He lifts a hand, twirling it over his head toward the mini sun above us. “It was brighter that night. I made an assumption, and so I started experimenting.”

  “And now you can control the spread and intensity of your light.”

  “Right-o.”

  The ash slows, and finally stops, and the raccoon corpse in front of me disintegrates into the ground. I fall backwards on my ass trying to get away from it, letting out a strangled yell.

  The man laughs. “Oh yeah. I should’ve warned you. Once the magic is gone, the animals kinda… deflate.”

  “No shit,” I spit out. The available Rank Tokens in my profile is still at a zero. “I don’t think this worked,” I say, climbing up to my feet and wiping my palms on my thighs.

  The guy looks up at me, cocking his head. “You haven’t even tried your little levitation trick again, so how can you know?”

  Right. “I, uh, don’t feel any different.”

  He nods, understanding. “And you won’t, really. But different you are.” I suppose that’s a point of which I am well aware. I remember the first time I read that I’d evolved. I grabbed my face, scared that it changed me on the outside.

  Other than my pants being a litter loose in the waistbands, I’m still unchanged.

  Is it possible that this magical ash levelled up my Abilities without a Rank Token? How would I know which Ability it ranked up? I reach down, grab a new blade of grass, and try to levitate it.

  It goes exactly as far as it always does, about two inches off my hand. Even if I focus, it doesn’t go any higher than that.

  “Or maybe you’re not,” he says, and shrugs, snatching up his iron and getting back to this feet. He towers over me, now that we’re both standing side-by-side. “Or maybe you’re different in another way.” He uses his tire iron to bonk me on the nose. A light little tap. It doesn’t even hurt, but I’m so surprised by the action that I don’t respond right away.

  When I do clue back in, he’s already on the road and wandering away, his light following along behind him. “So long, fellow human,” he calls out, and then he starts whistling, a jaunty tune, and I watch him—well, his light—until he rounds a corner and is gone.

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  “That was weird,” I say, though there’s no one around to hear me. And with a sigh, I head back home.

  And though I watch my profile as I get inside and upstairs—no Nancy to be seen—and as I brush my teeth and change into my pyjamas, the Rank Token count stays firmly at 0.

  ***

  When I wake up the next morning, it’s at 1.

  I leap out of my bed with excitement. This is huge. This changes everything. This means our last week of grinding in monster battles had so much waste. But in theory, it means that the payout from each monster we kill going forward will be bigger, since each monster has more magic. There just has to be some better way to absorb the magical ash than standing over it with our hands out.

  “Any ideas, Game? An Ability?” It would suck to have to spend a Token on an ability, but if that’ll help expedite the process, it’ll be worth it.

  Ideas or an Ability for what?

  That was… odd. Usually the Game knows exactly what I’m thinking about at any given point in time. Is it possible that the two new Party Members mean that its consciousness is spread thin? I thought it said that the more people, the stronger it can be? “To absorb the magical essence that is released from dead monsters.”

  The monsters have no magical essence. They do not have a soul that can house a magic core.

  Huh. A loophole. Or an oversight. Some backdoor manner of collecting magic that isn’t connected to the Game. And yet, the Game still recognized that I collected it.

  Standing over the dead animal and basking in its magical ash will have to be the way we go, I guess. For now. I don’t believe that there aren’t other ways, but I’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there.

  I hop down the stairs with renewed vigour. I have a plan, and it feels wonderful. We have to find another surge, or maybe two, and get what we can get from the surge itself—and then get what we can get from the monsters we’ve killed. And we have to go to the address that Sutherland gave me. I wonder if he’ll even be there today, but then I remember that he can see the future, at least a little bit, in some way. If we get to the address today, he’ll be there.

  Not that I know why we’re going to that address. What, or who, might be there. But when someone psychic tells you to go to an address, you go to that address.

  The others are in the kitchen. Nancy smiles at me like she didn’t defend me to the teeth the night before. Ryder is eating a bowl of cereal, the milk left on the table. Eventually we’ll run out of milk—we don’t have a lot—but I can’t stop myself from letting the kid have his breakfast. “Hope you guys enjoyed your day off yesterday,” I say in lieu of a greeting. “Today we’re hunting surges.”

  Ryder lets out a whoop and dribbles some milk out of the corner of his mouth.

  I had real, actual conversations with real, actual adults yesterday. And yet watching Ryder drool milk makes me feel more alive than all that.

  “Really?” Nancy asks, her hands wrapped around a steaming mug of tea. “I’d have thought you’d be all in on our little community-building project.”

  “Oh, I am,” I say, grabbing a mug and teabag for myself. I miss coffee, but having some tea every day is working just fine. “But we need to make up for the lost day, and pad up Beaker’s rank too.” I pull a jug of water from my inventory, fill my mug, and pop the jug away again. As I head back to the table, and push my cup in front of Ryder, I make my big reveal: “I think I found another way to add to our Rank Tokens, without necessarily using a magic surge.”

  Ryder, already holding a fireball over the mug to warm the water, jolts his head up and nearly knocks the whole thing over. “Really?”

  “I mean, we’ll still use the surges, but it comes from the animals themselves.”

  “And how, exactly, did you find this method?” Nancy asks, just as suspicious as she ought to be.

  I grin at her. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.”

  “Aww, you think I’m pretty?”

  “Ravishing. Thanks, Ryder.” I claim my mug from him and pop my teabag in.

  We’re just finishing cleaning up when Beaker and Savannah come in. I can’t remember if I locked the door behind me when I came in last night, or if Nancy opened it this morning. I decide not to worry about it. “Morning,” I call out, a little more tersely than what’s polite, but still a whole hell of a lot more polite than they deserve.

  Nancy’s gaze whips to me, but she says nothing about it.

  “Good morning!” Savannah says, entering the kitchen and seeing us wash the last of the breakfast dishes. She deflates. “Oh, you guys have eaten.”

  Were we supposed to wait for her? She still hasn’t tried using her inventory to cook. I guess doing that this morning would have been a smart thing to try.

  Oops.

  I pull an apple out of my inventory and toss it to her as I step past her into the hall. “Time’s a-ticking,” I say. We got monsters to kill!”

  Beaker, behind her, makes a face, though I don’t think he realizes that I see it.

  I’m shoving my feet into shoes when Nancy comes up beside me. “Are you being rude on purpose?” she asks me quietly.

  “I’m not being rude,” I answer. An outright lie. “We got things to do, that’s all.”

  “Jane,” Nancy starts.

  I hold up a hand, cutting her off. “We lost a whole day of collecting Rank Tokens. I just want to get going.” About five different emotions wash over Nancy’s face before she bites down on her bottom lip.

  “Everything’s fine,” I go on to say. I give her a smile.

  She seems unconvinced, but she moves away from me. As she does, I catch a glance at Savannah and Beaker, speaking quietly to each other in the doorway to the kitchen. She’s right, though. I am being rude on purpose. I think about what the guy last night said: Wariness and rudeness are two different things. I didn’t even get his name. Would that be considered rude?

  Maybe I can try to be a little less hostile. I suppose that’s all I can really offer. “Let’s go, people!” I call out, to the group at large. “We’re losing daylight here!”

  Maybe I’ll start my not-rude plan later.