I lie in bed the next morning, staring at my ceiling.

  Today marks one week since the Apocalypse Event. One week since half the population disappeared and the latent magic in the earth started surging. One week since I took responsibility for a child. My life has changed time and time again in this last week.

  And yet I’m still waking up in my childhood bed, in my childhood bedroom.

  I think back to the rest of the night. Gigi assured me that Colton wasn’t intentionally lying, that they hadn’t discovered any sort of magic abilities in him. I explained a little, that by the nature of his surviving the Apocalypse Event it means he has magic in him. We told her about the Game, explained what we knew.

  Gigi chose not to join the Party.

  It still frustrates me now. Why not? It could offer her help, stability, shortcuts. But she insisted. She spent the night in the extra room upstairs, just down the hall from where I am now. We pulled an extra bed from Nancy’s inventory that she had from her old house. Today, she wants to pick her own house on the street.

  There’s something about her decision that makes this feel official. Building a home. Starting this community. Using the houses on my street as a starting point.

  I ask the Game the question that I wasn’t brave enough to ask last night: How can I help protect someone who doesn’t join the Game?

  How can you be sure you can protect someone who does join the Game?

  I sigh. “Can you be less petulant child and more game system, please?”

  Being in the Game doesn’t mean you can protect them. It just means they have the tools to better protect themselves.

  “What about forming a Safehouse? If Gigi is living down the block, how can I protect her where she sleeps?”

  It takes the Game a moment to answer me. I wonder if it’s actually thinking, or if it’s changing its own rules in the background to give me an answer. A constantly evolving, self-aware AI could be pretty scary, if left unchecked.

  Without adding strength to your Party, I cannot extend the borders of the Safe Zone.

  Hmm, right. When we added Beaker and Savannah the other day, it could add one more house. Is there another way to add strength to it? I’ve got all these Rank Tokens. Can we create some sort of Safe Zone Ability?

  The Game doesn’t answer. After a few minutes of waiting, when it doesn’t speak up again, I let out a groan and get out of bed. I go through the motions of getting dressed for the day and mentally add one of my daily allotment of three Rank Tokens into my telekinesis. I’ll hang on to the other two, for now. I open my profile to check what level the Ability is at, and nearly lose my balance with one foot in my jeans.

  Because my unused Rank Tokens are still at 20.

  It doesn’t make sense. I used three yesterday—one into my strength, two into Telekinesis—and one just now. It should be down to 16. And I can see that what I spent them on took. My Physical stat is up to 8 now, and the telekinesis Ability is level 6.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  That 20 haunts me. But I push it out of my mind and see what this new level of magic can do. I have to open the drawer myself, but I lift a pair of socks out and through the air into my awaiting hands. Cool.

  When I try to grab a leather jacket from my closet, I can barely drag it across the floor. Interesting.

  I head downstairs. The rest of the house’s residents—and our next-door-neighbours—are already in the kitchen. “Good morning,” I say, kissing the top of Gigi’s head before heading over to the cupboards to grab a mug. A chorus of ‘good mornings’ echo around me. I take a seat at the table, fill my mug with water from my inventory pitcher, and use the new strength of my telekinesis to send the mug across the table to in front of Ryder.

  The small chatter around the table stops and everyone looks at me, eyes wide.

  “Jane!” Nancy breaks the silence.

  “That was awesome,” Ryder says, grinning as he warms up my water.

  We have a nice breakfast—Savannah pulls a steaming frying pan full of fluffy, cheesy scrambled eggs out of her specialty inventory—and I let the nice chaos of a full table of people speaking to each other roll over me. This is it. This is the point of all of it. The fighting, the uncertainty, the constantly being covered in blood. It makes it all worth it.

  By the time the meal ends, Gigi’s rubbing her hands together and ready to go house shopping. “You sure you don’t just want to be next door?” I ask. “Or across the street?”

  “Maybe that’s where I’ll end up,” Gigi says. “But I won’t know until I’ve seen them all.”

  I guess I can’t argue with that. And we all go out, as a group, into the neighbourhood.

  Gigi doesn’t like the house just next door, which still hasn’t been tidied up since the residents disappeared. We go two more, both turned down, before we come across something more interesting.

  Well, I don’t think interesting is the right word.

  The house is destroyed. It reminds me of going into Ryder’s house, of seeing the destruction that the raiders did. But this doesn’t feel like human raiders. There’s gouges on the wall that looks like claw marks. There’s tufts of fur. There’s a lot of dried, crusty blood.

  And there are bodies.

  Human bodies, of course. Any monster bodies would have long decomposed. We find one further back in the foyer and another two in the den. They’ve been mangled, gaping holes in their chests, scratches and bite marks over the rest of their bodies. The large window in the den is shattered, the shards scattered over the beige carpet and making the streaks of blood look like rubies in the reflections.

  The bottom half of a child’s body is caught on the jagged edges of the glass remaining in the window frame, one of its legs inside the house and one outside.

  Savannah vomits when she sees it. Gigi reaches out, grabbing onto the doorframe for support as she wavers.

  “I didn’t even consider,” Nancy whispers.

  I bring my voice down, too. “Consider what?”

  “That we had neighbours. Other people who survived the Apocalypse Event but who weren’t safe in their own homes from monster attacks.”

  “We’re lucky that we get the Safehouse,” Ryder says from my other side.

  I look over his head to my grandmother. This is why we need her close. This is why she needs to be in the Party. Her eyes are still taking in the scene in the den. She says nothing.

  “Come on,” I say, louder this time. “We should get out of here.”

  “Did the monsters take out their… hearts?” Savannah asks, her voice weak, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Why would they do that?”

  Beaker takes a few careful steps into the room and looks down on one of the bodies. “No, I think—I think the heart is still there.”

  “It took their core,” I say, the memory coming back to me.

  Standing outside a Tim Horton’s.

  A dead little girl.

  The message from the Game.

  “Core?” Gigi asks, speaking for the first time since we came into the house.

  I nod. “Everyone who survived the Apocalypse Event has a magical core in them. It’s why they weren’t taken. It’s why they’re able to gain powers.”

  “Wait, taken?” Savannah asks.

  I stare at her for a moment, trying to process. Do they… not know? Did they not ask? Did the Game not tell them?

  Nancy is the one to break the silence. “The Apocalypse Event. It was all orchestrated by some magical, god-like being from another world. It… it eats souls. Non-magical souls.”

  “Shit,” Beaker mutters.

  “And those of us left have magical cores,” I say, feeling like I’m repeating myself. “The monsters are attracted to them. I guess it gives them more magic, if they eat it.”

  “When the monsters decompose and release their magic… is that their core?” Nancy asks me. I can practically see the gears in her head turning.

  I shake my head. “Monsters don’t have cores. They just mutate instead.”

  “You never asked the Game?” Ryder asks Savannah and Beaker. “You never tried to find out what happened?”

  “Guess the magic needs to go somewhere, when they die.” Nancy thinks the thought through. But I’m already turned back to Savannah and Beaker, curious about their answer to Ryder’s question.

  They look at each other, that sort of silent conversation that two people can have. After a moment, Beaker nods, and he finally speaks. “We can’t talk to the Game.”

  Ryder, Nancy, and I all react at the same time. “What!?”

  “Not like you guys can,” Savannah adds. “We can access our profiles and we have our inventories and the map, and we get notifications. But we don’t… we can’t have a conversation with it.”