It takes about three seconds for Savannah to react. She slams her palms into my chest and shoves me backwards.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you!?” she bellows.

  I wipe the back of my hand over my mouth, the gore that was on her lips now on mine. Though I’m sure there was even more gore already on my hands, so who knows what sort of war zone my face looks like. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I saw it on a TV show once. Getting someone out of a panic attack by—”

  “I don’t care,” she spits out, running her hands down her body, though whether she’s checking to see if a monster defiled her or I did, I don’t know. “But I guess, ugh, thank you.”

  She did not sound very thankful. “Welcome back,” I say anyways, almost laughing. I climb to my feet and hold a hand out to her. “We gotta move.”

  She looks at my hand and smacks it away, and gets up to her feet herself. If she won’t take my help, then I won’t offer it. At least she seems mostly back to herself, and I trust her to follow. Especially after I yell, “Come on!” and head back toward the centre of the surge site.

  The other three are already mostly there, but not quite centred enough. With a quick check of the map, and check of the scene around us, I call out again. “To me!” I shout, and I see Ryder’s head whip in my direction. Without missing a beat, he takes off—and the other two follow him closely.

  I get into my position. A second later, I’m smashed into by two smaller bodies, and I let my arms wrap around Ryder and Nancy. I can sense Beaker and Savannah just beyond.

  How much trouble am I going to get in? How mad is Beaker going to be? And just when we were starting to make progress!

  “How much longer?” Ryder asks, letting go of me to lob a fireball at something that came too close.

  “Soon,” I say. “There’ll be a little earthquake,” I say, glancing over my shoulder to try to tell this to Beaker and Savannah. “And the monsters will go into a sort of trance. Once you notice that, get down and get your hands into the dirt.”

  Beaker meets my eyes and nods, but Savannah doesn’t. Honestly, it makes me laugh, more than anything.

  And then it happens, just as it’s always happened, just as I explained. There’s a rumble along the ground, just a tremor, and the monsters all stop attacking each other. I hear the light meow of a cat. “Now!” I cry, and all five of us drop down to the ground.

  I shove my fingers into the dirt, feeling one of my nails break.

  The surge hits. The world goes white.

  ***

  For a moment, I’m weightless in a vast space of blinding light. I can’t feel or see my body around me. All the pain, the stress, the frustration—from the battle, from life over the last week, from life over the last few years—is like a distant worry. I’m comfortable in a hot bubble bath, lounging in the warmth of a hot sun. I know, really, I’m doing neither of those things, since I don’t seem to have a body. But all the worries and hurts of life can’t touch me here.

  I want to stay forever.

  Of course, as soon as I have that thought, the light fades away, leaving me standing in the middle of the field where our current battle was taking place. But the monsters, and my team, are gone. I just see my own body down on one knee, my fingers knuckle-deep in the dirt, my face contorted in a scream.

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  Motes of light race along the ground, reminding me of the old videos where it showed information moving along wires. There are hundreds of these little lights, maybe even thousands, and as I watch, individual lights exit through the ground and into the open air above it, where they wink out. A few of these motes of light exit the ground through the fingers of my body, where I watch from a distance, and enter my body and dissipate into me.

  It’s the magic, I realize. I’m watching the movement of the magic, the way it surges, the way it comes into our bodies and eventually turns into a Rank Token. Each of those little lights are entering one of the monsters or humans in the area.

  Just as I have that thought, the vision around me shifts. And when it comes back into focus, I’m one again on the ground with my fingers dug into the dirt. This time, it’s the conservation area where Ryder and I went for our first battle. Where we met Nancy. Once again, as I watch, the motes of light course over the ground, entering my body through my fingers. One mote zings through my body and out my foot, and I can almost see the fox go flying.

  But I realize that the motes here are different. Where in the vision of today’s battle, the motes are a steady blanket on the area, here there’s only a few lines of the lights. They’re concentrated streams, like a bunch of different rivulets of water running down a window. Like when it’s just sort of drizzling outside and the raindrops create their own tracks down a windshield, versus when you drive into a car wash and the water that sprays covers the whole thing all at once.

  The vision changes again, my body staying in place while the world around it moves backwards. It moves so quickly that I cannot make out the details, but my subconscious sees Elsa the cat, sees Ryder amongst the video game boxes, sees my mom sitting in the front seat of the car. And when the world around me stands still again, the motes of light in the ground barely move through the earth at all. They get pulled up into each space where a human would be. In the analogy of water on a car windshield, this is like the lightest snow, where each snowflake touches the car and disappears, melted by the heat coming off the vehicle.

  Though I can’t explain how, information and understanding comes to me, connected by the two moments where I had direct contact with the magic in the earth. The surges have been happening, and evolving, since the very beginning. I just haven’t noticed.

  Before I can properly parse this new knowledge, prod at it with my consciousness, the world flares into white again, and my consciousness slips away entirely.

  ***

  I wake with a faceful of dirt. That whole vision feels a little fuzzy, like a dream when you wake up. I can’t remember exactly what I saw, but my understanding of how the magic exists seems to be in tact.

  Wait, the magic.

  I pull up my profile as I push my body up and drop onto my butt. There’s a strange symbol next to my Rank Token count. Definitely not a number, at least not one from this planet. I wonder what it means.

  A few groans sound around me, and I dismiss my profile to take stock of my Party Members. “Everyone okay?” I ask, and my voice is a raspy croak. Ryder is sprawled out on his back, but his eyes are open and he’s holding his head. Nancy is kneeling, her hands on her thighs as she breathes. Savannah and Beaker are sitting, Beaker with his knees bent in front of him and Savannah leaning against them, her own legs splayed out in front of her.

  Beaker nods, reaching over and placing a hand on Savannah’s shoulder. Nancy rubs her hands down her legs, and then looks up at me. She doesn’t nod, but I take the eye contact as proof that she’s fine.

  Ryder lifts a hand above his head and puts his thumb up. And then flips his hand over, his thumb pointing down. “Technically yes,” he says, “but it feels like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

  “Is that from the magic or the fight?” Beaker asks.

  “Yes,” I manage to say. He meets my gaze with some confusion, but then his lips twitch in a hint of a smile.

  Slowly, not wanting to overwhelm my body too much, I get to my feet and take stock of the battlefield around me. I don’t know how long we were out for, but it doesn’t appear to be very long at all, since I can still see the surviving animals stagger away in their drunk states. They leave behind a large smattering of dead monsters, covering a wide spread of the field. The next step in the day’s activities is collecting all those corpses and getting them into one pile, so that when the magic expels from their bodies, we can be there to catch it.

  My body aches in a way that makes me not look forward to the extra labour.

  I look down, surveying the ground from above, and I get a flicker of memory of the vision. The magic, running in waves along the dirt. I wonder if it’s still there, now, invisible to the naked eye. Could I only see it because I was actively tapped into the surge? Was it some extra gift from the magic itself?

  Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever really know.

  I start to turn my attention back to my team. We have more important things to do right now. “We need to keep—”

  I get interrupted by Beaker, suddenly directly in front of me, who punches me in the face.