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  Oz grabbed himself and pretended to crumple over, providing a reenactment of the final move. The Tank buster. Knee meets groin. Critical hit. Bryan propped himself up against the tree and rubbed his sore, raw knuckles and inspected the blood on his shirt. Some of it was his now. Some of it was Wattly’s. Some of it, still probably Oz’s. While Oz danced around, throwing imaginary punches, Bryan took stock of his injuries. From the outside it wasn’t that bad. A split lip. No doubt a few bruises. But he felt worse inside. His intestines felt like mashed potatoes.

  “I mean, right in the rocks. Direct hit.”

  “Yeah,” Bryan said. He felt under his ribs where Wattly had planted all his toes. It felt like something was already growing there. “How did they get a hold of you, anyway?”

  Oz looked down at his feet. “I was looking for you after school,” he said. “They figured you wouldn’t show, so they found me. Said I was the bait. Where were you? I texted you a hundred times!”

  Bryan thought about telling him. About Jess. About how they had dodged cars together. About the mustard and the valentine and his own big mouth and all the rest, but it was too hard to explain. His lower lip was swollen. His throat hurt. Besides, Oz was barely even listening. He was still pretend fighting, acting the whole thing out all over again. Bryan pressed gingerly along his forehead, where a lump was already forming.

  Suddenly Oz stopped dancing. He looked at Bryan, eyes wide. “Wait. Was that . . . was that it?”

  “It?” Bryan repeated, but he knew exactly what Oz meant. He pictured the words floating above Wattly’s folded body.

  +200 XP, the words had said. LEVEL UP. Nothing else. But Bryan had faced the Demon King. Vanquished him with a well-placed knee. It was over. Had to be. “Yeah,” Bryan said. “That was it.”

  Oz looked like he was going to pee his pants. He was actually vibrating. “I knew it. You totally creamed him. Game over, man. Game. Over.”

  “Game over,” Bryan repeated. He peeled himself off the tree. He felt like he could at least stand now. Maybe even walk, though the houses around him continued to spin. He turned and stumbled down the sidewalk.

  “Hey. Wait up. Where are you going?” Oz said, scrambling up next to him.

  “Home,” Bryan said. “I’m going home. Like you said, it’s over.”

  “Sure. All right. Hang on. I’ll just call my mom. Have her come and pick us up.”

  “No. That’s all right. I’m just going to walk, I think,” Bryan said, taking a few dizzy steps and then finding his balance.

  “But what about your bike?”

  “I’ll get it later,” Bryan mumbled.

  “Oh. Okay.” Oz stepped into line right behind him. Bryan stopped and turned. He stared at his best friend.

  “I’m going home, Oz. Just me. You can call your mom and have her come get you.”

  Oz frowned, eyes scrunched. It took a moment. Finally he nodded. “Oh. All right. Yeah.”

  “I’ll call you tonight,” Bryan promised.

  “Right. Okay. Whatever you say.”

  He looked hurt, but Bryan couldn’t explain. He just needed to be by himself. He waved good-bye and turned back toward home, just leaving Oz standing there on the sidewalk, sad and alone and confused. Bryan didn’t look back. The fight with Wattly had taken everything out of him and left him with . . . what exactly? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he suddenly felt empty inside. It wasn’t at all how he expected to feel. It was a victory, after all. He’d won.

  So then why did it feel like he was still missing something?

  5:32 p.m.

  Father Knows Best

  Game over. That’s what Oz had said. No more messages. No bullies to beat. No races to run. No puzzles to solve. No rats or zombies or witches. Bryan could almost hear the end-credits music playing in the background, but he knew he was just imagining it.

  As he walked, Bryan tried to recall everything that had happened, but some of the details were already blending together, parts of it so fantastic he was starting to wonder if he hadn’t just made them up. Had there really been Russians humming while he was solving those geometry problems in Tennenbaum’s class? Did Mrs. Reynolds really bite Ms. Wang just to get a Twinkie? Was there ever a dragon in Romeo and Juliet? Maybe Bryan had imagined some of it. Maybe Myra was right and he was a paranormal schizofrenetic with an overactive imagination. A twelve-year-old kid working on six straight nights of playing the same stupid video game, hopped up on too much sugar and not enough sleep. The whole day was already hazing over, becoming hard to sort through, even harder to believe.

  Even the fight with Wattly. It was real. Otherwise it wouldn’t hurt to take a breath—but maybe it was just that. A stupid school-yard brawl—not some epic battle between good and evil. He hadn’t slain some fiend from beyond the underworld. Wattly wasn’t the devil. He was just a kid with a thick skull and parents who probably didn’t hug him enough as a baby. Even the fight itself was a jumble in Bryan’s head. A confusion of fists and feet and limbs and bodies with only the final image clear—of Tank balled up on the ground with his hands tucked between his legs. The rest was fuzzy. Pixilated. Like when you zoom in too close on a picture and lose sight of what you were looking at. The whole day was like that.

  Except Jess. Her he could remember. The grass stains on her elbows. The frayed ends of her shoelaces. The way she seemed to lean slightly sideways as she walked next to him. That sudden look of disappointment in her eyes when he mentioned Landon Prince, as if he’d given away the ending of some movie she’d been waiting to see.

  Bryan stood at the end of his block. The white Civic was parked out front, which meant his dad had beaten him home. The very sight of his house with its overgrown hedges and cracked driveway—no coin slots—and the mat that said “Welcome” in twenty different languages, all too small to read, gave him some comfort. Tomorrow Bryan would wake up in this house, in the room looking out over the garage, and everything would be back to normal. His Boots of Average Walking Speed would just be tennis shoes. His alarm clock wouldn’t ask him for a quarter. He wouldn’t gain Fortitude when he ate his cereal and wouldn’t lose hit points when he stubbed his toe. He would be back to his same old self. He hoped.

  Bryan stood beside his father’s car and checked his reflection in the driver’s-side mirror, wiped off as much of the blood and dirt as he could manage, and adjusted his hair to hide the swelling on his forehead. He opened the front door slowly, hoping maybe to sneak by unnoticed. He got all the way to the landing before his father rounded the corner.

  “You’re home late.”

  Bryan stopped but didn’t turn around.

  “I was with Oz. Sorry. I should have called.”

  “Yeah, you should have,” his father said. “But it’s all right. Go wash up. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  Back in his room with the door shut, Bryan tried turning his computer back on, but the machine was still fried. Beating up Chris Wattly hadn’t brought it back to life. He took off his soiled shirt and changed into one featuring a band that was way too talented to be popular. He didn’t bother to look at himself in the mirror. He knew he was a mess.

  His father was already seated at the table when Bryan came down, the evening paper laid out beside his plate. Bryan sat and took a swallow of water, washing down the copper tang left from the blood on his lip, which stung against the cold glass. Suddenly, sitting there, he was overcome with exhaustion. And relief.

  “Game’s not over yet,” his father muttered.

  “What?” Bryan asked, sitting up, body suddenly stiff.

  “Hmm?” his dad said, then pointed to the paper. “Sorry. The series. Boston’s up three to one, but I think Saint Louis can still come back. They just need more help from the bullpen.” His father folded up the paper and pushed it aside, then looked across the table at Bryan, who tried to put his head down quickly, but not quickly enough. “What happened to your lip?” His father pointed his fork at Bryan’s face.

  “Dodgeball,”
Bryan said, picking the first thing that came to mind. Maybe not as good as Fell off my bike, but certainly better than Got in a fistfight with a Tank.

  “That’s one serious game of dodgeball,” his father said with a whistle.

  “Oh yeah,” Bryan said.

  “You know you are supposed to catch them with your hands, not with your mouth.”

  “I’ll remember that for next time,” Bryan said, though he hoped there wouldn’t be a next time. Not like this time, anyway.

  His father grunted, then took his fork and stabbed into his mashed potatoes with one hand. “So,” he continued, “how was the rest of your day—outside of the dodgeball you tried to eat?”

  Bryan moved the green beans around on his plate. “Oh. You know. The usual. Quiz in math. Learned about mice in science. I got to be Romeo in English.”

  Bryan’s dad smiled, put down his fork, and put up a hand in a dramatic pose. “ ‘O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?’ That’s pretty much the only part I remember,” he admitted. Apparently, he’d never gotten to the part about the zombies. “It’s a love story, you know,” his father continued.

  “Yeah, Dad. I think everybody pretty much knows that.”

  “But they’re all love stories,” his father mused. “All the good ones, anyway. Trouble is half of ’em are tragedies, too, so the guy never gets the girl. That’s why the comedies are better. What’s the point if you don’t get the girl, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, what’s the point?” Bryan echoed.

  He stabbed a bean and held it above the plate, just staring at it. What’s the point? Oz had asked him sort of the same question when he said he wanted to unlock the secret level, back before this whole day even started. And Bryan had had to explain that it wasn’t the end. Even after you beat the Demon King, there was still something more. There had to be.

  Bryan looked across the table at his father. A professor of history at the local liberal arts college. He knew a whole lot of unimportant stuff—an encyclopedia of names and dates and other useless trivia. Most of the time, when Bryan wanted answers, he went to his mother—down-to-earth and logical. But this didn’t strike Bryan as the kind of thing that logic had an answer for.

  “Dad—did you ever have one of those days where you wake up and everything is just . . . different? Like you see the world differently? And everything you do is, like, I don’t know . . . epic somehow . . . like it matters in a way that it doesn’t normally?” Bryan paused. He wasn’t sure he was explaining it well. Maybe there was no way to explain it, not without going into the details and sounding insane. But his father nodded anyway.

  “Sure. I guess. I mean, most days are just days,” he said. “Just like all the days before. But every now and then you come across a moment. That rare opportunity to do something that matters. Save the world or slay the giant or find the treasure, or, if you’re really lucky, rescue the princess and ride off into the sunset,” he said with a wink. “History is made of those days. They’re the only ones worth remembering.”

  “Wait, what was that last part again?” Bryan asked.

  “What part? About history?”

  But Bryan wasn’t listening. He was looking out the window, at the dusky sky already marking the end of the day. He stood up and set his napkin next to his plate, all his food still untouched.

  “Where are you going? You can’t possibly be done.”

  “Exactly. I thought I was, but I was wrong. So wrong. I’ve got to go.”

  “What? You haven’t even eaten anything!”

  Bryan turned and grinned at his father. “There’s no time. I know what I still have to do. Thanks, Dad. You’re a genius.”

  He could hear his father still protesting, but he was already halfway to the stairs. There was no way he could explain, and even if he wanted to, there really wasn’t time. The party started at seven, and it was already after six. As he took the stairs by twos, he heard his father calling out to him, “Do you want me to save it for later?”

  “There are no saves,” Bryan called back, then ducked into his room and pulled out his phone. He closed his door and sat in front of his dead computer, hands shaking. Oz picked up on the seventh ring.

  “You still mad at me for getting kidnapped?”

  “I was mad at you for getting me in trouble in the first place,” Bryan said. “But not anymore. You still free tonight?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Um. Let me check my schedule. Let’s see . . . my dinner with the queen of England was canceled, so I guess, yeah, I’m not too busy.”

  “How soon can you get here?” Bryan asked, letting the sarcasm slide.

  “Mom’s asleep on the couch, and Dad’s working late, so my sister would probably have to bring me. She’s getting ready to go out with her girlfriends. She’s still in the hair and makeup stage, so I’m thinking at least a half an hour.”

  “Do you think she would drop us off somewhere?”

  “What do you mean, ‘drop us off somewhere’? It’s Friday night, man. Game night.”

  Bryan looked in the mirror this time, at the skinny kid with the flame-orange hair and the swollen lip. GARB OF MINOR COOLNESS, the label beside his clean shirt read.

  “Exactly,” Bryan said.

  7:33 p.m.

  The Wizard Appears

  It took the better part of an hour for Oz’s sister to put on her makeup. Bryan waited for them on the porch swing and texted Oz, informing him of what he was thinking and where they were headed. Oz texted back that he had already guessed where they were headed, he just wasn’t sure why.

  To rescue the princess, Bryan texted him.

  He didn’t get a response.

  The cherry-red Guzman-family Grand Caravan pulled up into their drive fifteen minutes later. Oz’s eighteen-year-old sister yelled through the passenger’s-side window.

  “I don’t have any extra booster seats, so you’ll have to grab one from your car.”

  She was funny that way. From inside the van he heard Oz tell her to shut up, starting a volley of “you shut ups” between them. Bryan zipped up his black hoodie and opened the passenger door. “Thanks, Carla,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

  Oz’s sister scowled at him and jerked her thumb backward.

  “No one sits in front. I can’t risk being seen with you guys.” Bryan crawled into the back next to Oz. “Also no farting, fake farting, vomiting, fake vomiting, burping, or telling stupid jokes. I choose the radio station. And no comments about my singing. And use whispers when you talk so that your inane conversation doesn’t drive me to cross over the median and kill us all. You buckled?”

  Bryan nodded. Oz leaned close and whispered. “So it’s not over?”

  “It’s not over.”

  Oz nodded thoughtfully, then reached into his pocket for his phone. “Oh, I almost forgot. I got this about fifteen minutes ago. It’s a response to my message. The one I sent to the developers of Sovereign of Darkness? I’m afraid it’s not much help.”

  Oz handed his phone to Bryan. The e-mail was short and polite, thanking them for being fans of the game and assuring them that they took all customer inquiries seriously.

  It then went on to explain that there was absolutely no hidden level in Sovereign of Darkness, suggesting that maybe they had gotten their hands on a pirated copy or that someone had hacked into Bryan’s computer and messed with the software somehow. It stated that any additional content they perceived as coming from the game was not licensed by the designers or the manufacturer and that GameThrottle Inc. could not be held liable for any consequences resulting from the play thereof.

  It added that studies had shown that excessive video game playing had been known to cause or inadvertently contribute to a variety of physical symptoms, including eyestrain, carpal tunnel syndrome, muscle fatigue, stiffness, soreness, blurred vision, and, in very rare cases, seizures and heart attacks, and recommended that Bryan and Oz take frequent breaks in betwe
en gaming periods and to cease gaming altogether when such symptoms started to manifest themselves.

  It concluded by thanking them again for their feedback and wishing them a happy resolution to their quest.

  “So what does it mean?” Oz asked, taking his phone back.

  Bryan shrugged. “It’s basically telling us to get a life.”

  “Oh,” Oz said, clearly daunted by the idea. “So what are you going to do if we get there and she’s with Landon?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Bryan said.

  “What if Missy doesn’t let us in?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What if Tank and his buddies are there?”

  Bryan hadn’t thought about that. “I don’t know, Oz. We’ll figure it out.”

  Oz patted the pockets of his jacket and grinned. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got you covered this time.”

  When they turned onto Missy’s street, they could already hear shouting coming from her house. There were only four residences on the block, each with its own long, winding private driveway, each surrounded by a wrought-iron fence or high stone wall and an electronically sealed gate. Bryan was suddenly aware of how poorly dressed he was. His Breeches of Enduring Stiffness still had giant grass stains on them. His Boots of Average Walking Speed were caked in mud. He had, at least, thought to brush his hair.

  “Jeez, what do you think one of these houses costs?” Oz said. “At least a million bucks?”

  Carla stopped at the end of the street. She didn’t even bother turning off the engine. “Call Mom when you are ready to be picked up. I’m not coming to get you. If you get in trouble, find a bus or have your new friend’s chauffeur drive you home. I’m sure she has one, judging by the looks of this place.”

  Bryan thanked her again. She smiled at him, then rolled her eyes at Oz. “Now get out of my van.”

  “I hate sisters,” he whispered as the van pulled away.