Not too long after, we’re back at home sitting around the kitchen table. Nancy has her hands wrapped around a mug of hot chocolate as she stares off into middle space, getting to know the Game interface. She took the whole thing remarkably well, other than a little jump when it first took over her vision. And now we have three little white dots clustered together in the map.

  “It’s fascinating,” she says, not for the first time, and her gaze focuses on me and Ryder sitting with her. “And I feel so much better, without the constant magic running rampant in me.”

  “And we’ll have to go out and fight more monster, so we can continue to get new levels and ranks, and upgrade all our skills!” Ryder says, the kid practically quivering in excitement. “We should also probably figure out rooms, now that there’s three of us living here,” he adds, almost an afterthought.

  “Three of us?” I say

  “Living here?” Nancy squeaks at the same time.

  Ryder looks back and forth between the two of us. “Um, obviously. We have to all live together if we’re Party Members.” He looks squarely at me. “And I can’t be sleeping on the couch for the rest of my life.”

  Nancy and I exchange glances. Letting her into the Party was one thing, but the thought of just… opening my parents’ home to strangers?

  These aren’t strangers, I try to remind myself. These are my Party Members. These are the people I’m banking on keeping me alive for the rest of… forever.

  Panic grips me.

  For now, I amend.

  I look over Ryder’s head and into the rest of the room, the Tuscan-styled kitchen my mom so lovingly renovated half my life ago. On a built-in shelf above the stove sits a cookie jar in the dorky shape of a goose wearing reading glasses and cradling a book in its wings. A gift my dad and I got my mom when I was seven.

  My parents are gone. But I’m alone, not really, not with the Game in my head and these two people in front of me. In fact, if I don’t open the house to them, my mother’s soul will be regurgitated from the being who ate it to haunt me in my sleep.

  We fought about a lot of things, me and my mom. But being a good host wasn’t one of them. It was a skill that I maintained with finesse, though one that Alex didn’t seem to care about.

  Well, it’ll serve me well now.

  “No, I guess you’re right,” I finally say, turning my gaze back to Ryder. I try, but mostly fail, to smile. “There’s the extra bedroom upstairs or the basement,” I say to him. “Which would you want to be your room?”

  Ryder’s eyes go wide. “The basement!” He answers without hesitation. His smile is infectious.

  I glance over to Nancy. “Then we’ll share upstairs,” I say.

  She frowns, though, not nearly as excited as Ryder. “As grateful as I am, I don’t think it makes sense—”

  “Yeah,” Ryder interrupts. “Why should you two have to be crammed upstairs when there’s the big room down here?”

  He wants to give Nancy my parents’ bedroom. My throat tightens.

  Nancy seems just as put out. “No, I mean, living here—”

  But Ryder’s already pushed away from the table and hopped towards the door to the master suite. “We’ll have to figure out room for clothes—oh yeah, Jane, can we go get me some new clothes? I’m wearing the same underwear from yesterday!—but this big bed is…” His voice trails off as he gets farther into the room.

  Nancy and I just stare at each other. A moment of silence ticks by. Another.

  “It’s fine for you to come move in here. It makes sense,” I start. “But my parents’ room…”

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “I get it. It’s hard to accept that they’re just… gone.” She pauses, and then adds, “Do you think they’ll ever come back?” I get the feeling she’s been wondering this for a while.

  But it means she doesn’t know. About the souls being eaten. Tell her, I ask of the Game, not being able to do it myself. I look away, ashamed. The spokes along the back of the kitchen chair shove into my spine.

  And a moment later, she lets out a small, “Oh.” She sniffles. “I guess I knew, somewhere deep down…”

  Ryder flings himself back into the kitchen. “Why didn’t you follow me?”

  “We need to go back to my house,” Nancy says, and when I look at her, she’s perfectly composed. “I’d like to say an official goodbye. And pack a few things.”

  ***

  Just as quickly, we’re piled back into Dad’s Volvo. Nancy gives me a major intersection near her house and off we go.

  We drive most of the way in silence, just some brief comments about how we don’t see other people out there. But we don’t see any mutated monsters, either, which is nice. Until Ryder says, out of the blue, “I wish I could go back home.”

  Nancy and I look at each other, sitting in the front seats. I peek up at Ryder in the rearview mirror. “I don’t suppose you remembered your address?”

  He gives a small shake of his head, his whole demeanour deflated, staring out the window.

  “You don’t remember your address,” Nancy says—not a question, just her figuring out the situation—“So you can’t go home. Could you walk home, from memory? If you got close enough?”

  Ryder’s frown changes, not so forlorn anymore as he thinks. “Yeah, probably. There’s the stores on the corner or—oh! School!” He turns back toward us, his face flushed in excitement. “I know how to walk home from school!”

  Nancy’s smile is genuine as she twists in the passenger seat to better look at both of us. “That’s awesome! Do you know where you go to school?”

  I wait for Ryder’s face to drop again, but it doesn’t. He nods, his whole body moving with it. “Stonehaven! I go to Stonehaven!”

  I don’t know the school, but Nancy’s smile never wavers. “I don’t know the school, but I know a street called Stonehaven. Maybe we can find your home.”

  Ryder settles back into his seat, his joy a more private thing now. “I’d really like that,” he says, his voice quieter, looking back out the window.

  We get to Nancy’s house. It’s a modest little townhouse, in various shades of grey with strong, modern, block-like features their only adornment. A dozen matching ones sit butted up against each other on a narrow stretch of road. It’s a newer development, and there’s a big blank space of dirt and grass beyond it, before a patch of trees shoot up. “I’ll be just a minute,” Nancy says delicately, and she gets out of the car.

  Ryder looks like he wants to follow. “Let her say her goodbyes,” I tell him, and he nods.

  It’s awkwardly silent in the car, with nothing but a light breeze coming through the open windows. I’ve been plugging my phone in while we drive to charge it up and play some music, since my dad was a talk-radio kind of guy. And I can only listen to the sports newscaster-turned-regular newscaster for so long before I get depressed. But I also turned the car off when we parked. Conserve gas.

  Nancy takes more than a minute. After all, I had suggested she also take whatever she can from her kitchen and stick it in her inventory. Not to mention the packing of clothes, toiletries, personal items, and whatever final moments she needs. After a few have passed in silence, Ryder clears his throat.

  “Hmm?” I ask, peeking up in the rearview mirror.

  Ryder is staring out the half-opened window beside him, out toward the empty space. “Should we, uh…” His eyes flicker to the mirror, seeing me see him, and he points out the window.

  “Oh, shit.”

  A small pack of raccoons are stalking across the dirt, five or six of them. Based on the variations among themselves and the way they’re moving with purpose, they’ve clearly evolved quite a bit more than Elsa or our assailants from the conservation area this morning.

  “What should we do?” Ryder asks, his voice a whisper.

  If we turn on the car to close the windows, the sound would attract them. And I want to keep them as far away from the car as possible. Maybe they don’t know we’re here at all, and they’ll pass right by.

  Though the one in the front, still a normal-sized racoon, raises itself on its back paws and sniffs the air. It lets out a chittering command, and points—a literal, actual point of its little front claw—in our direction.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I go on, turning the car back on and pulling up the windows.

  “Jaaaanneeeeeee, they’re coming!” Ryder warns.

  “We have to go fight them,” I say, yanking off my seatbelt. “We can’t let them get to the car. We need the car.”

  “Those ones in the back are so big, though!”

  “I know. Game!? A little advice?”

  Your evolutions happen in three manners: mental, physical, and magical. Monsters’ evolutions work in a similar way.

  “How is that helpful?” Ryder cries.

  Your concern of the ones in the back being big means they evolved to be big. Not magic, not smart. The little one in the front, however… that one might cause some problems.

  I don’t like that the Game has concerns, but I do like the information it gives. The clump of red dots keep heading toward us on the map. Two big ones that are big but dumb. One normal-sized one that clearly is smarter. And a few that have magic—maybe.

  “We can do this, Ryder,” I say, reaching behind the passenger seat to grab my baseball bat.

  Ryder scoffs. “It’s a good thing we have a Healer right here with us.” He opens his door but doesn’t leave. Just meets my eyes in the rearview. “Oh wait,” he says, his tone dripping in sarcasm. And then he lights his fireball in his hand and exits the car.