Lucas moved back to where he’d left his capsule, Apollo still cradled in both arms. He set the dog down gently, then moved around to the back of his armament and felt the smooth metal thud onto his back. The connection snapped into place, then the world tugged, and he lurched as his vision went dark—

  He gasped, sucking in air that his puppet body didn’t need. His actual body. He was back in it, slumped in the leather seat, eyes a little bleary. Lucas flexed his fingers as he settled into his flesh and bone, finding comfort in being back in his own skin.

  The difference was always stark, though thankfully not unsettling. He pushed himself up, muscles exploding with euphoria, which he paused briefly to experience, before climbing out of the capsule. “Dismiss,” he muttered, and the capsule shimmered, folding in on itself before vanishing entirely in a ripple of displaced air.

  Isabelle was already moving toward the main street, bow gone back into wherever it was that armaments went to when not in use, Apollo limping beside her. Lucas jogged to catch up and scooped the dog back into his arms, noting how his trainers felt oddly heavy after experiencing the agility of the puppet.

  As they walked, Lucas couldn’t help but notice the street, the blood trails, the abandoned bags and fruit that even now flies circled and maggots squirmed within. He spotted a few windows, their curtains drawn, people perhaps inside, hunkered down, hiding. But tomorrow would be the third day. Anyone still inside would no doubt be hungry, which would force them to come out in search of food. That would increase the casualties, and that meant the prowling wolves would find more targets to bring back to the supermarket. It would be a problem.

  Apollo’s fur bristled against Lucas’s chin as he walked, the dog’s weight shifting with each step. The sun was sinking toward the horizon now, bleeding orange and red across the sky. Shadows stretched long across the pavement, pooling in doorways and alleyways. The temperature was dropping—not much, but enough that Lucas felt it on his bare arms. Streetlights would normally be clicking on about now, but they stayed dark. Dead. The twilight turned everything softer, edges blurring, details fading. It would be full dark within the hour.

  Lucas turned to Isabelle, and that nagging feeling to discuss what was going on popped up again. While he had been content to just leave it, it wouldn’t do to let her continue to distrust people, especially not when he wanted to build something that could counter Vincent in the future. You couldn’t trust everyone, but you had to start somewhere.

  “I’m just going to come out and say it,” Lucas began, turning his head to her.

  Isabelle quirked an eyebrow. “Go on.”

  “Ever since those beams shot up into the sky on the first day, you’ve changed. You begged me to bring you to my house initially, to not leave you and your sister behind, but now you look at me with so much… distrust. Why?”

  Their footsteps scraped across the pavement as they continued to move down the street toward Lucas’s neighbourhood. An awkward silence settled in as Isabelle contemplated. Apollo let out a low whine, squirming within Lucas’s grasp, discomfited by the situation. Apollo whined again, pawing at Lucas’s chest as if trying to defuse the tension.

  “It’s not that I distrust you, Lucas. It’s more that I know I’m the only one who can protect my sister.” Isabelle lifted her hand and began twisting her fingers together. “This world has changed. Literally. Sthearts has somehow shifted and ended up inside a forest. And that’s only part of it; God knows where the rest of it is. We don’t even know how much has changed. We could be inside a different country, Lucas. These changes have brought not only the danger of these creatures, but the danger of people. Because at the end of the day, people are always going to be much worse.”

  Lucas nodded; she wasn’t wrong. While humans could do the most miraculous of things when they wanted to, they could also commit the greatest of crimes, especially in times like this when law and order had gone out the window, and everyone was desperate.

  “So yes, I look at you with distrust.” Isabelle’s eyes moved to the pavement as they continued to walk down the street. Her voice cracked a little. “It’s not that I want to. I just need Sasha to be safe. And I know I’m the only one who can truly look out for her, especially with my dad gone.”

  “You have my mum and me.”

  Isabelle shook her head. “Do I? How do I know that as soon as things get rough and you run out of supplies, you won’t throw us to the wolves? Literally, in this sense.” Isabelle wet her lips, her gaze drifting up as the setting sun caught in her eyes. “So in that moment when those beams went off, it all hit home for me. My dad is gone, the world’s changed, and people now have powers that make them more dangerous than they have ever been. And I’m the only one who can look after my sister.” Her voice trembled, a tear slipping from her eye before landing on her chest. She’d clearly done her best to hold back the emotions that were welling up within her, but failed to do so, at least a little.

  The two of them then let a quiet settle in, preferring to do the rest of the march home in silence, though their talk had made Lucas feel somewhat more understanding of where she was coming from. It wasn’t so much that she distrusted him; it was just that she didn’t know who she could fully trust, and it would take time to actually work up to that. The adrenaline and the craziness of the situation had probably been what spurred her actions during their first meeting, and he could not take that for granted.

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  They moved through the broken streets, glass crunching beneath their feet. A car sat abandoned halfway onto the pavement, the driver’s door hanging open. Further down, a bicycle lay twisted against a lamppost. They turned the corner onto Lucas’s street, and immediately the scene shifted.

  People—only a few, but more than he would have liked to have seen, Vincent gather—dispersed, moving away from the centre of the road where folding tables still stood. The barbecue. Vincent’s barbecue. It was ending. It had to be, given how few people remained. Lucas’s jaw tightened. The man was definitely dangerous. Anyone who could organise something like this, who could gather people and get them to cooperate this quickly, that was someone with influence. And as far as Lucas was aware, the system didn’t have a Word that could do that. At least he hoped it didn’t.

  From the smattering of people with weak smiles moving back to their houses, he couldn’t judge how successful it all had been—if only they’d arrived back sooner—but the fact that it had happened at all concerned him. He leaned in toward Isabelle, keeping his voice low. “I don’t think they’ve made any big decisions, but I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

  She nodded, understanding without him needing to expand further.

  As he took a breath of the cool evening air to quieten his nerves, his stomach rumbled. He couldn’t help it. The smell still lingered in the air—charred beef, sausages, the fatty richness of cooked meat. His mouth watered despite himself. How long since he’d eaten properly? The beans and bread were already getting boring. The scent of the barbecue clung to everything, teasing, making his hunger sharp and immediate.

  Isabelle was scanning the dispersing crowd, her expression tight. No doubt looking for Ian. Worried that he was watching them even now, or planning something. Lucas searched too, but neither of them spotted the man among the remaining stragglers.

  What they did spot was Lucas’s mother. She stood by the low wall of their front garden, talking to someone. Lucas squinted, trying to make out who, when recognition clicked into place. Debbie. His mum’s colleague from the hospital, and occasional carpool partner.

  Confusion blossomed within him. He’d forgotten about her entirely. When had she gotten here? And why was she smiling so casually, talking to his mum like the world hadn’t ended a day ago?

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  The water bottle crinkled as Debbie brought it to her mouth and took a gulp, with dribbles of liquid slipping past her lips. Lucas watched the woman, still not sure how someone who was normally so reserved and so quiet—doing whatever his mum asked of her—had somehow made it all the way here through the gauntlet the rest of town had become. As she finished taking another gulp and placed the bottle on the table, Lucas’s mother stepped over and rested her hand on the woman’s shoulder.

  “Are you sure you’re okay, Debbie?” his mother asked, showing a surprising amount of concern. Any time his mum talked about this woman, she referred to her as a nuisance, getting in the way at the hospital and chatting up a storm when not seriously occupied or being watched by one of the matrons. Yet now, his mother was putting on the perfect display of a caring friend.

  Debbie turned to her and nodded. “I’m all right, Melina. Just a little exhausted, that's all. I haven’t slept in, well, a day, really.”

  Lucas’s mum nodded at that, patting the woman’s shoulder. And as she did, she turned to Lucas. “You’ve met my son already?”

  “I have,” Debbie replied. “Saw the boy a few times when I was waiting outside in the car.”

  “You went to Dixmont High, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” Lucas answered.

  The entire atmosphere was a little awkward. This wasn’t just a casual visit—no, they were in a full-blown apocalypse, and this woman had just arrived shortly after the surviving members of his neighbourhood had held a barbecue. Lucas still hadn’t gotten around to talking to his mother about how that little event went.

  “And this is the friend he recently made, Isabelle.” His mother then gestured to the girl, and Isabelle sat up a little straighter, her eyes running over Debbie. She was probably trying to work out how much she should trust this woman. Another person added to her growing list of people she didn’t trust and would consider a threat—a list that Lucas was hoping he’d be getting off of sometime soon. But that was not a problem right now.

  “How did you get here?” Lucas asked.

  Debbie shifted at the question and drummed her fingers on the kitchen table, the soft rhythm filling the room. A silence followed. Lucas even picked up the sound of howling in the distance, though the immediate sound of the floorboards creaking above signalled that Ronald and Sasha were no doubt on the stairs, trying to listen to what they could. If it hadn’t been for his slightly enhanced perception, he might not even have noticed.

  “If you mean, how did I get here without being ripped apart by those flameback wolves?” she said, eyeing each of them, trying to gauge their reaction.

  This was not the woman that his mother had described. She was sweet, if a little annoying and kind of lazy. But now she seemed traumatised, hardened into someone unrecognisable, so far from the woman his mum complained about. And as she stood at Debbie’s shoulder, Lucas met his mother’s eyes, and it was clear she was getting the same feeling.

  “They chased me into a building at first—a restaurant, I think. Me and a few others blocked the door, but eventually one of those boars got in, rammed the barricade down. It was a bloody mess. It trampled a poor bloke’s leg, crushing the bone before its tusks skewered his head. The damn beast then began feasting on him, right there, not even waiting. Not that I had much time to watch as more wolves barreled in shortly after, tearing into us. It was a massacre.”

  Debbie’s hands stilled on the table.

  “Luckily, I got my hands on a microwave and crushed one of their heads. I don’t know what overcame me.” She paused, her eyes lingering on a specific point on the kitchen table. “I don’t know how. By the time I realised what I was doing, the wolf was dead, and the system message was in front of me asking me to pick a class.”

  “You went through a similar thing, I take it.” She looked up at Lucas. “Your mum shared that you’ve been talking about the system and its abilities.”