At some point while we were inside the Wal-Mart, the overcast day became sunny. It’s turned into a beautiful, warm fall day.

  And apparently I’ve turned into a fighter.

  The plastic baseball bat is still in my hands. I want to drop it, but something in me won’t let me ditch it, and when I stare at it for the extra second, a label shows up for it:

  Melee Weapon

  I try to put it in my inventory and it disappears from my hands, though some instinct in me knows that it didn’t go into my inventory. It went into a weapons storage, which is in a different place. I don’t have the time to think too hard about it.

  Ryder and I head toward my car. I realize, as I’m reaching for the handle, that something is wrong.

  “The tires,” I hear Ryder say.

  Sure enough, someone’s slashed my tires.

  I let out a groan. “That asshole,” I say. “Well. Guess we start walking.”

  So we do. It’s about ten kilometres between the Wal-Mart and my parents’ house, and I figure that’ll take us a good chunk of time. I check my phone. There’s still no cell signal. I tuck it back into my pocket. It might be no use for me now as a phone, but there’s still a comfort to the feel of it. And I have one of those wallet add-on things so all my cards are with me. My credit card might be as useless as my phone now, but if that guy had managed to get his hands on my licence this would be a very different scenario.

  We’ve gone just a few minutes in silence before Ryder speaks up. “Hey, Jane?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I just want to say thank you. For, you know, coming back for me. And letting me come with you now.”

  “We’re Party Members,” I say, though his thanks do mean a lot. “Besides,” I add, not wanting to let the situation be too serious, “you didn’t really give me a choice about coming along.”

  Ryder grins at me. “No, I didn’t. But I promise I’m going to work real hard. The Game told me that you chose a Fighter class—that’s a good choice!”

  “I didn’t choose it. The Game chose it for me when I used that bat to hit the guy. Now it’s a Melee Weapon.”

  “Oh. Would you have wanted to choose a Fighter class?”

  “No, probably not.”

  “Oh.” Ryder falls silent. “Then I’m sorry.”

  I want to wave him off, tell him there’s nothing to apologize for. But I suppose, like with how he thanked me, sometimes you just need to say the thing out loud. “Thanks, I guess.”

  We walk for a few more minutes, and I wonder if Ryder is interacting with the Game. I probably should, find out everything I can, but I take the time to enjoy my surroundings instead. I’m usually driving too fast to appreciate the view.

  The Toronto suburbs are beautiful in the fall, all the colours of the trees and the crispness of the air. My mom always said that I was a walking portrait of autumn—eyes the colour of the grass, hair the colour of the leaves. It always seemed a forced way of describing my muddy green eyes and coppery hair, but thinking about it now makes me smile.

  Mom would never believe that I looted a Wal-Mart and knocked a man unconscious.

  I think of a question, a little embarrassed that it took me this long to ask it: “Oh, Ryder. What class do you want to choose?” We’d have to figure out what he could do to activate it in the Game.

  “I’ve already chosen,” he says. “The Game showed me my choices. I chose Mage!”

  Lucky duck. “If I suddenly found out magic existed, I’d have chosen to be a magic-wielder, too,” I say, finding myself laughing.

  “You can still use magic,” Ryder says, the tone in his voice sounding like Duh.

  “I can?”

  He nods. “There’s subclasses. Or spells! Or magical artifacts! I’m sure you can find something.”

  That actually doesn’t sound like too bad a plan. “You’re pretty good with this whole video game thing, aren’t you?”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  He gives that non-committal shrug that I’m sure terrifies a parent about their kid becoming a teenager. “My brother and I used to play a lot together.”

  “You have a brother?”

  “Well, had. Probably.”

  That sours the mood a little bit. The poor kid. “Tell me about him,” I say. And so we pass the bulk of our walk in companionable chat about the people in our lives.

  Ryder talks a lot more than I do.

  We fall back into silence as we enter the subdivision my parents live in. It’s already a pretty secluded area, but turning off the main road feels like walking through a portal into another universe. A few cars had passed us on the road, but the whole walk was a little eery. And now, with dusk starting to fall, it was getting dark.

  Only a few of the streetlights turned on.

  All the houses are dark.

  “It’s really freaky,” Ryder says.

  I can only nod.

  “And have you noticed that we haven’t seen any animals?”

  That one takes me by surprise. I think back—I’m sure I’d heard some scurrying, some bird song, but now that I think about it, I realize he’s right. “They were probably hit by the magic surges, too. They might be… changed.”

  “Like squirrels with antlers? Or a bird as big as a dinosaur!?”

  “Let’s hope not like that.” My poor, plastic baseball bat would be a bad weapon against a hundred-foot-tall crow.

  “I always wished that animals could talk. Do you think we could get a pet dog who can talk?”

  I had gotten used to the few rumbles the earth made when there was a magic surge. It happened fairly regularly, just a small tremor like how it feels to be a little too close to a car when it drives past. What sort of magic is it bringing? How will the world change next? Will animals suddenly start talking!?

  One of the magic rumbles hit now, and I ignore it. “I doubt that animals will start talking,” I say, though to be honest I’m not totally sure I’m right.

  Ryder looks down at the ground, frowning. He pauses. “This one feels different,” he says.

  I’m a few steps ahead and I turn back around. It takes me a second to realize he’s talking about the rumble, and sure enough, I get what he means. “It’s bigger.”

  Ryder nods. “Maybe we’ll get another gift!” he exclaims, his voice rising in hope and excitement. He drops onto his knees and reaches over to the grassy area beside the sidewalk, pressing his hands into the grass. “Come on, magical powers,” he says. “Come on, come on…”

  I’m getting a strange feeling too, now, like we’re being watched. It’s different from the feeling I was getting from the magic surges. I think about the mania in the man’s eyes in the Wal-Mart. I think about how we’re half in the dark here. “We really shouldn’t stay out here like this, Ryder,” I warn, but he’s not listening to me. I pull my plastic baseball bat out of my weapons storage.

  The magic surge hits. It’s the same as the first time—there’s a rumble in the ground and a shockwave climbs through the bottom of my shoes and up into my body. The world doesn’t go black, but I do lose my balance and end up on the ground beside Ryder. I look over at him and he’s… glowing?

  The world calms down. Ryder returns to normal human colouring. “How do you feel?” I ask him. I haven’t noticed a difference in myself, but I wasn’t the one glowing.

  He lifts his hands from the grass, staring at them. And then he turns to me, his eyes a little distant. I assume he’s interacting with the Game, and a moment later he looks straight at me. A big grin takes over his face. “I have fire magic!” he croons.

  I was kind of expecting earth magic, given the way his hands were in the grass, but fire’s pretty cool too. Would have been useful against the asshole in Wal-Mart. I smile back at him. “We’ll have to practice pretty hard. I don’t want you to accidentally light anything in my house on fire. Or burn the whole house to the ground.”

  Some part of Ryder must have still thought that I wasn’t going to keep him around, because he lunges himself at me and wraps his arms tight around my neck.

  I haven’t had a proper hug in weeks. It feels nice. He’s skinny as a bean, all gangly knees and elbows, but it’s been a hell of a day and I find that my instinct is to keep this kid safe. The Game didn’t tell me that the man in Wal-Mart was dangerous, but I trust it enough that it wouldn’t have locked me in a party with someone with nefarious intentions.

  Also, he’s nine. How nefarious could any intentions he have really be?

  Congrats! Your Party strength has risen to 2!

  I huff a laugh at the Game’s notification and brush it away. I trust the Game. I trust Ryder. That’s what matters now. I pick up my plastic baseball bat.

  “Come on, let’s get home. It’s just around the corner.”

  We stand and start walking again, and I find that the weird feeling of being watched had gotten stronger. I glance around me as we walk, but I see nothing out of the ordinary—other than how quiet and empty the neighbourhood is, of course.

  “Let’s see that fire magic,” I say to Ryder, nudging him a little while we walk. “What can you do?” If someone is following us, maybe seeing a child produce a flame would be enough to send them on their way.

  If no one is following us, seeing magic like that would just be cool.

  “I think…” he starts to say, but then he trails off, lifting his hand with his palm up and sticking his tongue between clenched teeth.

  And sure enough, with a little pop like a match being struck, a small pinprick of fire appears in Ryder’s hand. A bead of sweat runs down his temple. “I did it,” he whispers to himself.

  I do another sweep of the street. And this time, I do see a movement. I stop walking.

  Ryder looks up at my stopping, and the fire pops out of existence. “What is it?” he asks, following my gaze to where I saw the shadow moving.

  “I thought I saw—”

  Ryder gasps. “A kitty!”

  Sure enough, a thin white cat comes out from between two bushes. I recognize her as Elsa, who lives across the street from my parents. They have a long porch across the front of their house, and Elsa would sit atop the post that connected the porch’s rail to the staircase’s rail.

  I smile. It’s reassuring, in some way, to know that some things haven’t changed.

  Ryder crouches down, sticking his hand out—no fire on it, this time—and makes the standard pstpstpst sound for calling a cat to you.

  Elsa takes a few steps toward us.

  Then she opens her mouth to reveal fangs that are about three times too big for her feline face, lets out something that almost sounds like a roar, and launches herself at us.