Ryder wasn’t totally wrong. We got three days of days off, bringing us to a full two weeks of life in the apocalypse. He started bouncing off the walls in the house by the end of the first day, so we started taking walks around the perimeter of the safe zone. We practiced our magic, him with his fireballs and me with my telekinesis, even managing to untie and retie his shoe laces together with nothing but my mind. He didn’t realize and tripped as he tried to take a step.

  My cache of Rank Tokens stayed at 20, no matter how many days I distributed my allotment of three. We headed outside the gate of the safe zone and instigated a couple fights just so Ryder could get a little sprinkle of magic from the ashing to gain a few more Tokens. I thought that, without the surges, the animals’ mutations would settle, but it’s the opposite. There were creatures that didn’t seem recognizable as the animals they were when this started. Bats the side of turkeys. Turkeys the size of cows.

  Though the Game still labelled our safe zone as “Party Leader Jane’s Safe Zone,” the residents started calling it Haven—a wildly uninventive name, in my opinion, but I did love that everyone felt safe. Sutherland didn’t send us out on more recruitment missions, but more people arrived all the same, word of our space starting to spread. Roy even came, crawling with his tail between his legs, along with a few others from the church. Not Ingrid, though. I wondered about the fallout, the argument that caused the church crew’s split. I didn’t care enough to ask Madison, Roy, or Sutherland. I enjoyed the not knowing. I relished in not being in charge of anyone or anything except Ryder.

  We didn’t see much of Nancy, since she was often busy getting called to help people. Often times it was simple as a paper cut, but Portia took a fall and broke a hip. Gigi was beside herself, but half an hour later it was as if it never happened. The wonders of magic.

  Ryder kept telling her she needed to create office hours for the smaller woes of the community, but so far she refused. So it was often just him and me.

  On Wednesday, we celebrate with the whole community, about eighty of us all together, with a huge block party right in the middle of the road. I’m perched at the end of the long row of tables—picnic tables, folding tables, wooden kitchen tables. Transporting them into the road was easy with supernatural strength and magical inventories. I’ve got Ryder on one side of me and Nancy on the other, and I stare down the length of the table, a sovereign overseeing her kingdom. It really does feel special, knowing that all this could only happen because of me. Maybe a little cocky, but I prefer special. I see Colton laugh at something Gigi says and wonder if it’s time to seek him out, since he’s made it clear he wants to spend more time with me. I guess I should be flattered. He finally learned what his magic is and the world no longer seems to tilt in his direction. It makes him feel a little more approachable.

  The sun is warm on my face, but there’s the slightest bite in the air: winter is on its way, and none of us have any idea what a magical winter might hold. We’re doing what we can to prepare, building more covered areas and even a greenhouse. Beaker’s been hard at work.

  Savannah pulls a cake out of her inventory decorated with the words Happy Two Week Anniversary, Apocalypse. I’m really impressed with how good she’s gotten with her abilities. Everyone, actually. A couple quiet days and everyone seems to have learned a thing or two about what they can do. Dustin can use Madison’s abilities and turn himself completely invisible now, a fact that he uses to prank as many people as he can. One of our recruits has been honing her ability to know when something needs to be cleaned, and with a few volunteer cleaners and Wing’s strength, the houses are all pristine.

  There’s a small tap on my leg. I look down and there’s Elsa, standing on her back paws to reach me. “Elsa,” I say, dropping my hand onto her head to give her a scratch behind her ears. “Did you come to steal a snack?”

  She arches into my pat. “Thank you, but no. Actually, I was wondering if you would come with me.” She turns to look over her shoulder at Ryder, who had heard her and is looking over at us. “You, too.”

  Ryder and I share a glance. I can see it in him immediately, this desire to go running headfirst into whatever Elsa has cooked up. Not that I would deny him—or Elsa. “Of course.”

  “Subtly,” Elsa commands.

  I nod, and tug on Nancy’s sleeve, and the three of us slip away from the table with no fanfare. We follow Elsa between two houses where she easily passes through a gap in the fence. “Elsa,” I tell her. “We can’t fit through there.”

  She looks startled, but then gestures with her paw. “Then go find another way through. I’ll wait.”

  With our instruction given, we head back to one of the main gates and take the long way around the exterior of the fence. “Remind me to ask Beaker to make a few extra gates,” I say to my friends as Elsa comes back into view, idly licking one of her paws.

  Nancy snorts.

  “Finally,” Elsa says, pulling into a long stretch before heading off at a trot. “Follow along.”

  We do, and enter a stretch of York Regional Forest. At some point, Mazy sidles up to us, her muzzle covered in blood. It doesn’t even make me flinch anymore—actually, she lets me give her a quick scratch on the top of her head.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Befriending a tiger was not even remotely on my apocalypse bingo card, but here we are.

  “Where are you taking us, Elsa?” Nancy asks after a solid forty minutes of walking.

  “And why couldn’t we have driven there?” Ryder mumbles, tripping over a large branch on the ground.

  “It’s just up ahead,” she says. “I figured a human should know.”

  “Know what?” Ryder asks.

  But Elsa doesn’t say anything else, not for another few minutes when she finally says, “Here we are.”

  We come to a halt in front of… an entrance to a cave. A large mound of boulders and sandstone standing idly in the middle of a small clearing, with a wide and gaping mouth leading down into the darkness.

  “A cave?” Nancy asks, incredulity in her tone that matches my thoughts exactly.

  “No,” Ryder says. His voice is awed, and his eyes are saucers. “It’s a dungeon.”

  There’s a pause as his word choice hands in the air.

  “What does that even mean?” Nancy asks, turning to him.

  “Like Legend of Zelda. Or Stardew Valley!”

  “That means nothing to me, Ryder,” Nancy says.

  But I think I’m starting to understand. He goes on to explain. “In games like that, you have to go diving into the dungeon and clearly the levels to fight stronger monsters for experience points and special equipment. This is the next step of our world changing and mutating.”

  “We have the Game, Ryder,” Nancy says. “The world isn’t a game.”

  “What else could it be?” I ask. “The monsters out here are placid and there’s no more surges. That doesn’t mean that the magic is just… done. It’s just in there, churning shit up there instead of our here.”

  Nancy lifts her hand to her mouth and gnaws on the cuff of her sweater.

  “Elsa, how long has this been here?” Ryder asks, never taking his eyes off the entrance to the cave/dungeon/whatever it is.

  “How should I know,” she says. “I’ve known about it since this morning. What else matters?”

  “So we can’t know if this was here from the beginning or only once the surges stopped,” I say, understanding Ryder’s question.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ryder says immediately. “We’re going in.” He takes a step forward.

  I seize forward and grab the back of his shirt. “Absolutely not.”

  He cranes his neck to look back at me. “But Jane—”

  “Not without equipment and supplies and extra muscle.”

  A grin spreads across Ryder’s face.

  “Are we sure that’s a good idea?” Nancy asks, teeth marks visible on her cuff. I’m surprised at how nervous this makes her, considering how much we’ve been through.

  “Why not?” Ryder asks, his excitement ramping up. “We can handle it, between my fire and Jane’s bats.” He mocks swinging a baseball bat. “It’ll be like old times!”

  I can’t help it—there’s something in me that’s getting excited, too. The idea of new monsters, magical equipment, and new adventures? Maybe three days of quiet were too many for me, too.

  “Someone’s coming,” Elsa says. She’s staring into the dark mouth of the dungeon, her ears erect and leaning forward, her eyes wide and pupils blown out. “We’re leaving.”

  I think she means all of us, but she scrambles back, leaps onto Mazy’s back, and the two felines are gone.

  “We’re never going to get home,” Nancy laments, watching where they disappeared between the trees, but both Ryder and I are facing the dungeon entrance. I can hear it now, the footsteps echoing off the stone inside.

  “Ryder,” I whisper, a warning.

  “Ready,” he replies, lifting one hand to light his fire. I’m ready to yank one of my bats out of my weapons cache.

  But I don’t. Because the last person I expected to see walks out the entrance of the dungeon.

  “It’s you!” I say. Nancy and Ryder both shoot looks at me. But they wouldn’t recognize him. They weren’t there that night, a light bobbing in the air, gentle singing beside the body of a raccoon, a man bopping me on the nose with a tire iron, the brush of magic across my fingers for the first time.

  “I’m sorry?” the man asks, his low voice feeling familiar. I had forgotten the slow, careful way he speaks—even just two words are enough to bring me back to that night.

  “The light guy. Who showed me the magic ashing?” I say to Nancy and Ryder, and then lamely lift my hand in his direction.

  “I showed you that?” he asks. I guess I shouldn’t feel hurt that he doesn’t remember me. It changed how I saw the monsters. It didn’t change him at all.

  “Well, yeah. And now I can do this.” Without even moving a hand, I pull the tire iron from his back pocket. I didn’t see it, but I can feel the weight of it though my telekinesis, and it slips out of his pocket and comes to float in front of his face.

  A grin spreads across his face. “The blade of grass,” he says. So maybe he does remember. “Nicely done.”

  “Thank you,” I say, oddly satisfied. “What was it like down there?” I ask, changing the subject, using his weapon to point into the dungeon.

  “Dark,” he says, his grin turning a little cheeky. “Good thing I know a guy with light magic.”

  It makes me grin, but a quick look at Ryder and Nancy show them looking unsure.

  “We didn’t go far,” he goes on to say. “And it was quiet for quite a while. Then we noticed a hoard of gigantic bats and opted to collect a few more weapons.”

  “We?” Nancy says, speaking in his presence for the first time. I had hardly noticed the plural, to be honest.

  The man dips his head. “Maybe you three can be our extra weapons.”

  I can feel Ryder tense up beside me, excited about the possibility of the dungeon and worried about the new people. I know him that well, by now. But I look over him and over to Nancy.

  “It would be nice to have extra hands,” she says. “And the light magic.”

  “Adventure awaits,” I say, my own smile beginning to grow.

  “So where’s your partner?” Nancy asks, looking over the man’s shoulder into the cave. “No offence, but I’m not going into a dark cave with a stranger who left his partner behind.”

  He lets out a small chuckle, the sound a low caress over my skin. Even Ryder shivers. “My partner—”

  “Is right here,” a new voice says.

  It’s my turn to tense up. I’m not so sure about going into the dungeon with these folks. Suddenly, I’m not really sure about anything anymore.

  Tall, thin, tanned, and somehow still wearing perfect red lipstick—a woman steps out of the shadows of dungeon entrance and comes to a stop beside her partner. “Well hello,” she says, leaning a crossbow against her shoulder, staring right at me.

  The weight of Nancy and Ryder’s gazes sit heavy on me, but the heat of her gaze is stronger. Powerful. Familiar. I dip my chin, a greeting and an acknowledgement.

  “Alex.”

  END OF VOLUME ONE