FWOOSH!

  The gas droplets on the front of the man catch immediately. Just as quickly, Nancy pulls the gas back into her inventory and I do the same with the pump and hose, and the three of us are booking it to the Volvo. I worry that it wasn’t enough gas, that the man will put it out and come after us, but some of his ratty fabrics caught and the fire seems to spread. As he’s busy yanking off the flannel and using it to whack out the small flames on his legs and stomach, shouting obscenities the whole time, the three of us get into the car.

  I’m pulling out of the gas station before Ryder even has his door closed.

  It takes about thirty seconds of my best Mario Kart skills dodging stalled cars on Yonge Street before we feel safe enough to react.

  “Holy shit!” Ryder squawks from the back seat.

  “Language!” I say.

  “No, Jane, I think that’s the perfect reaction,” Nancy says, letting out something that sounds like a laugh and a sob at the same time. “Holy shit indeed.”

  “You lit a guy on fire!”

  “I know! Well, technically you lit him on fire. I just tossed the accelerant.”

  “Oh my god, you’re right!” I hear Ryder slumping back in his seat. “I lit a guy on fire!”

  “That was so unbelievably bad ass, Jane,” Nancy says. The car starts beeping at us, and all three of us scramble to put on our seatbelts. “Do you think he was telling the truth? That whole human-lie-detector thing being his magic?”

  “Honestly? Yes. He didn’t believe that we had a big strong man with us when you said it, because it was a lie. When I said it, I was thinking of Ryder, so it was true.” My eyes pop over to the rearview, where Ryder’s grin is wild at being considered a ‘big strong man.’ I can’t help but grin back at him. “He seemed just uncertain enough that it could have been a genuine power.”

  “There must be so many different types of magical abilities,” Nancy says, slouching back in her seat. “I wonder what they all are.”

  “Me too,” I say. And then I tell them the other thing I had made up my mind about. “That’s why I’m going to go to that Town Hall.”

  “We are!?” Ryder asks from the back seat.

  “Absolutely not,” Nancy says at the same time beside me.

  “We are not,” I say to Ryder in the mirror. “I am.”

  “Jane, that’s absurd. You have no idea what it’ll be like.”

  “All the more reason for me to go alone.”

  “I can fight my way out, though!” Ryder says.

  “And that’s exactly why you’re not going.”

  They both keep talking over each other, Nancy about why it’s a bad idea for me to go, Ryder about why it would be a good idea for him to go. Finally I smack my steering wheel with both hands. “Enough!”

  That shuts them up.

  “Look, we’ve been lucky so far. So, so, unbelievably, inconceivably, lucky. We haven’t had guys like that—” I look up at Ryder in the mirror, “—guys like that first one at Wal-Mart, beating down our door. We haven’t had other people in the stores when we’ve been looting. Hell, Ryder was alone in the Wal-Mart when the Event first happened!”

  “No I wasn’t.”

  “We have to—wait, wait?”

  “Jane, half the population disappeared,” Ryder says, exasperation in his voice. “That means only half the people who were in the Wal-Mart disappeared.”

  I look over my shoulder, needing to see Ryder in the flesh. “Jane, the road,” Nancy scolds, but I’m already back, facing forward.

  “You never told me that.”

  “You never asked.”

  “Want to tell us about it, Ryder?” Nancy asks, doing what I had done but more—twisting around to face him. “What happened when the people all vanished?”

  He’s silent for a moment, still in a way he rarely is. I think about the last time he was that still—last night, right before he broke down. I wonder if I should be pulling over, doing this in a place where Nancy and I can be closer to him. “We can wait until—”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “No,” he interrupts me. “I can tell you. It just sort of… happened. It took a second for people to start reacting. Like it happened that quickly, that quietly. In the amount of time it took to take a step, and poof, the store was half empty. A lot of people started yelling out other people’s names. I did, too, yelling for my mom. Then someone started screaming and people started grabbing random things off the shelves, making a huge mess, crying and shouting and I saw this lady throw her phone into a wall when she realized it couldn’t make calls anymore. There were lots of crashes, when breakable things must have been pushed off shelves, but I don’t know. I kinda wandered, looking for my mom, and eventually everyone just… left. I always liked looking at the video games so that’s what I did, and then I knocked into the display and everything came tumbling down and then you were there.” He cocks his head to the side. “Why are you crying?”

  I pulled over, maybe a sentence into his story, because I wanted to be looking at him properly. By the time he’s done, I’m crying. “I don’t remember the store being that chaotic and messy,” I say with a sniffle.

  “And that’s why you’re crying?”

  “I’m crying because I’m proud of you, of how brave you are.”

  “I wasn’t brave. I wanted to hide in my video games, like I always do.” He looks down at his hands.

  It feels like something a parent would have said while scolding a boy. And the way Ryder said feels like an echo of someone else. I’m glad that his parents are gone, so I can’t yell at them for ever saying that to him. “You were brave because you didn’t scream and make a mess and throw a phone at a wall. Sometimes being brave means not doing something. Sometimes that’s enough.”

  I see Nancy nod out of the corner of my eye. I look over and she’s crying, too.

  In our defence, it’s been a very stressful day so far. Of course we’re going to be a little hyper-emotional.

  Ryder seems to notice it, too. “Girls are weird,” he says, his brow furrowed as he looks between us. His gaze settles on me. His frown relaxes. “But thank you. And I know I’ve said it before, but I’m going to say it again: thank you for taking such good care of me.” He looks at Nancy. “Both of you.”

  “Hey, we’re family now, right?” I say, reaching a hand into the back.

  Ryder rolls his eyes, but he takes my outstretched hand. “Right,” he says.

  Nancy laughs and reaches out too, adding hers on top of the pile. “Right.”

  “And sometimes, family has to light weird men on fire for each other,” Ryder says with a finite nod.

  That seems as good a time as ever to start driving again, laughter echoing around the car.

  “Oh yeah,” Ryder says, surprise in his voice. I glance in the rearview to see him bend over. He sits back up with a bag of chips in his hand. “I grabbed this.”

  I start laughing all over again.

  ***

  That evening, back at the Safehouse, there’s a knock on my bedroom door. “Come in,” I say, sprawled on my bed. I’m rereading one of my favourite novels from when I was younger by the light of a couple candles.

  Nancy lets herself in, smiling a little as she takes in the room. “I haven’t been in here yet,” she says. “I feel like I’m getting an insight into the real you.”

  “The teenaged me,” I correct. “I moved out of this room when I started university and only moved back a few months ago.”

  “Why’d you move back?” she asks, perching herself on the edge of my bed.

  “My engagement ended,” I answer, honest and blunt. And though I can see the start of a question in her eyes, I sit up and put the book down. “What do you want, Nancy?” I ask, not mean or rude, just a very clear indicator that we’re not talking about my engagement. Or Alex.

  Nancy nods, understanding. “This Town Hall. Why are you really going?”

  I exhale hard through my nose. “It’s not this huge deal,” I say. “And I’m not trying to keep a secret from Ryder. There’s no ‘real’ reason.”

  Nancy just tilts her head, waiting, her long hair swinging out with the movement.

  “I meant what I said today. We’ve been lucky, we’ve been safe. This house is safe from monsters, but I doubt the Safehouse aspect would keep out other humans. We need to know what’s happening out there. And who’s out there. And yes, I’d like to know what other types of magic the surges are giving. We can only make it so long on our own.”

  “You want to expand the Party?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “No. But we might have to. Or at least join up with a larger group.”

  “The church!?”

  I shake my head. “No, I’m not in the market for religious zealots. We know this wasn’t a rapture and I don’t want to be the one to tell them that their god is actually some monster entity from another world who has the capacity to steal souls from earth for a quick lunch.”

  Nancy chuckles, a low and throaty sound.

  “No, I mean start our own thing. Bring in people that we know we can trust. Pick and choose based on them, their magic, whatever.”

  “And where exactly are we hosting this… magical commune?”

  “I don’t know, Nancy, I’m making this all up as I go.”

  Nancy snorts.

  I cross my legs. “All I know is, is that I want to protect you guys. That I want to level us all up so we can stay alive. You told me a truth from your past last night, so here’s one from mine: I never really wanted to live.” I spread my hands in front of me, an offering and a truth. “As a teen, I didn’t think I’d make it to twenty. For a lot of my twenties, I wasn’t sure I’d see thirty. And now that not seeing thirty is a genuine concern?” I toss my hands up and let them drop back into my lap. “I find that I want it, more than I think I’ve wanted anything else in my life. I don’t want us to just survive. I want to find a place for us to truly live.”

  Part of me wants to scoop it all up, take it all back, shut myself down and shut Nancy out. Sharing parts of me like this isn’t in my skillset, and it sure isn’t one of my Abilities. But if I’m going to do the things I just vowed to do, part of that means trusting my Party. It means giving them every part of me, as messy and broken as I sometimes think myself to be.

  “Thank you,” Nancy whispers, too overwhelmed to speak louder than that. “For sharing. And for wanting those things for us. I want that, too.” She smiles. When she speaks again, it’s closer to a normal volume. “Not that you need it, but you have my blessing to go to that Town Hall. As long as you’re safe, and as long as you come home to us, and maybe if you can find other good party members—that’s not a terrible thing.”

  I grin. “I promise.”