“Welcome to the game.” The robotic words are crisp and clear as a bell. But they don’t actually seem to come from anywhere.

  In fact, Jason is sure of it. It’s an easy conclusion to draw with just how alone he is in an empty white void.

  At the same time, his eyes are drawn to the 52 face-down playing cards spread evenly along the rim of the round mahogany table.

  In the veggie buffet, he can just make out the faintest impression of glowing numbers underneath. He can’t quite read them though.

  So he eats the meatballs in the way.

  Scattered haphazardly throughout the jello, each shining letter is laid out in a clear pattern to spell ‘Choose Your Class.’

  But just as he reads them, the steadily pulsing numbers flash with a blinding yellow light. Then they grow a brighter orange. And an even brighter purple before resolving to the brightest possible black.

  Despite his white-tinted sunglasses, Jameson has to shield his eyes from the glare, hoping against hope that he didn’t shoot too much jello.

  Only now the letters are back to how they were before. In fact, they never changed.

  Attention returning to cards, Jason looks them over for several months. Gradually, meticulously, he devotes week after week to thinking through the pros and cons of each choice in turn. As time inexorably turns hesitance to confidence, he finally lifts one of the 52 blue plastic cups along the rim of the tractor wheel.

  The Joker is underneath. Oh no. Deep in his bones, Jason knows that was the worst decision he could’ve made. He was so sure. So stupid. So obvious…

  Jason lowers his head to rest in his arms. He can practically taste the cheap plastic supporting his elbows.

  The more he reflects on his choice, the further filled he is with profound regret. How had he done this? He could’ve chosen the black lotus. So why didn’t he? Doesn’t he want to save her? He can’t stand it. The soul-crushing guilt…

  “James!”

  James wants to address the shrill, feminine voice yelling from up ahead. But he’s finally about to solve the Rubik’s cube. This is no time for distractions. He’ll see what’s the matter once the colors are separated. Just as God intended…

  “JAMES!!!” There it is again.

  Plastering on an expression that practically lists out all the better things he has to do with his time, James glances up.

  As expected, Stephanie is scowling at him from the front of the room.

  Apparently noticing his mood, she excretes an emotion he’s never smelled from her. “I just want to know what you thought you were doing.”

  Was that… An apology?

  Afterwards, she just stands in front of the chalkboard with an unmistakable posture of equal parts confused and supportive.

  Glancing a little further up, Jason’s ears widen as he finally notices the big blinking neon sign saying ‘Detention’.

  All hints of rebellion instantly dashed, he lowers the metal rope puzzle he was untying and resigns himself to explain each and every one of his myriad misdeeds.

  Time to come clean. “Uhgah-” He stops talking midway through his first non-word. Except that’s nothing like what he tried to say.

  With a start, he looks down at himself, only to find that he’s wearing some sort of ripped-up toga haphazardly patched together from itchy, reddish-orange canvas.

  “James dies. It’s that simple.”

  At the sudden proclamation, his gaze locks back onto his sister in alarm. “Ugh?” There it is again…

  He immediately tries to clarify. “Gluh?”

  Stephanie looks pissed. “NO.” She says it with a kind of unquestionable authority he never expected to hear from the diminutive, if standoffish girl.

  So much so that Jason couldn’t help but recoil. “Woah… Steph, what ar-”

  “STOP!!!”

  Jason has never seen her this angry. Not even close. Wait a minute, why’s she the one giving him detention?

  He starts to rise from his yoga mat, but doesn’t get very far before her follow-up makes him hesitate.

  “GET BACK!!!” His sister’s voice has never sounded like this either.

  Expression otherwise unchanged, Steph’s mouth slowly expands to a rictus before letting out a protracted shriek that only intensifies as her mouth widens. Soon, it eclipses the width of her face. And it only keeps growing from there. In both size and volume.

  Jason feels like his head is going to explode.

  Clearly having had enough of his insubordination, the girl reaches down and picks up the bucket of water at her feet.

  The concrete beneath her cracks as she vaults at James with a standing leap covering at least 20 horizontal yards.

  Midair, her limbs move in odd ways that he might normally associate with off-balance flailing. But the intensity in her eyes makes the intent and control unquestionable.

  At the ten-yard crest of her leap, the seemingly random movements turn unmistakably purposeful as her entire body arcs in a full counter-clockwise circle.

  At its conclusion, she slams the bucket over his head.

  A sound like shattering glass shakes the world with its impact.

  Hold on, did that noise come before the bucket landed? James’ upper back is totally soaked now. Why only there?

  Suddenly, Steph yells even louder than before. “FUCKING!!!”

  What in the-

  “FUCKING!!!”

  Why?

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “FUCKING!!!”

  Jason squints in what he remembers of her general direction from under the bucket.

  So she wants a contest, does she?

  Well, he can play too. “Fucking…”

  She outdoes him. “FUCKING!!!”

  He matches her. “FUCKING!!!”

  She crafts a subtle retort. “FUCKING!!!”

  As does he. “FUCKING!!!”

  And back. “FUCKING!!!”

  And forth. “FUCKING!!!”

  And Back. “FUCKING!!!”

  And forth. “FMMM!!!” Wait, what?

  His chest feels heavy now. And there’s something covering his mouth. The bucket? How could he forget?

  Head pounding worse than from any hangover, he groggily tries to lift it.

  But it doesn’t budge. How heavy is this thing?

  I tried harder.

  After a struggle, my desperate grasping for momentum finally bore fruit as I managed to roll over and blink myself awake. Still so tired… Had to get back to… What the hell had that dream been about?

  Stretching my stiff arms and legs, I let out a long, protracted yawn.

  The bucket had fallen off my back as I sat up and the world resolved into focus. It’d been oddly soft. And smelly. And warm. And dry. And probably not an actual bucket, huh?

  As though waiting for me to realize my mistake, the body finally finished unceremoniously flopping face-down onto the cabin floor.

  Half awake as I was, I still did my best to connect the dots. The smell… The tattered green winter coat… Stained an uneven brown in several spots… A homeless man?

  Putting that together, I realized how little the details truly mattered as I fully jumped out of the cot. “What?” This didn’t make sense.

  I had to be missing something? I showed Steph the thing… And then I went to sleep… And then…

  I just stared at the body for another moment. “WHAT???”

  From the stillest silence I’d ever felt, a loud metal clattering shattered my racing thoughts, scaring me into jumping and banging my head on the cabin roof. “Ow…”

  Thanks to the fresh corpse on my boat, I hadn’t noticed Steph standing there until she nearly dropped a pistol on its head. Was she here the whole time?

  Wait, better question… “Steph, what the hell is this?” My voice shook as it came out.

  In answer, Steph only stared glassy-eyed and open-mouthed at the body.

  “STEPH!!!” Unsure of whether she realized the issue, I attempted to simultaneously point in about a dozen different directions at once. The result was probably about as spastic as I felt just now.

  But I reckoned I got the point across well enough. “STEPH, WHAT THE HELL IS THIS???”

  Steph belted out her answer almost too fast and high-pitched to hear. “IDON’TFUCKINGKNOW!!!”

  She similarly waved her arms around as though to proclaim shenanigans on the world as a whole. We were both panicking, weren’t we?

  Realizing that, my mind raced for a way to ask for, and receive, a single sensible answer. Okay, Jameson… One thing at a time. “I don’t even-”

  Jump-starting my stalled-out brain, I mentally connected a few more dots. “Steph, where are we?”

  But she was too far-gone, face completely drained of blood and talking in a constant stream with no room for punctuation. “JustCameInHere-andThen-andThen-andThen-I-triedTo-toCalm-I-I-didn’tWant-wasn’tGoingTo-to-and-and-andThen-andShe-”

  I slapped her. I tried to make it light, but firm. Really less of a slap, and more a sudden, insistent pushing of her head to the left. Only with an added crack of impact that sounded worse than it was. I hoped.

  Hand on her temple, I gently but firmly turned Steph’s head towards mine until she couldn’t help but look into my eyes.

  I stared right back into hers. “Stephanie Williams. Where. Are. We?”

  The question seemed to snap her back to reality. “Richmond.”

  “What?” But I was so clear. She was supposed to wake me before we docked. Did I just get betrayed?

  My eyes hardened for a moment before softening again. No… No, I just hadn’t emphasized the importance of her waking me up. Which led her to ‘surprise’ me with already having taken care of everything by the time I did. That was actually sweet of her. It really was. She was just trying to help.

  But this was also bad… Very bad. Worst-case scenario bad.

  To make matters worse, Steph’s hose of a mouth was stuck on full blast after giving that single coherent, albeit unwelcome, answer. “I-wantedToSurpriseYouAndThereWasThisLightLike-a-a-nukeWentOffAnd-I-I-calledUn-uh-MikeyToAskAndHe-HeSaidHeWasParkedAndToComeMeetHimButThenSomeGirl-”

  From rock-bottom, my heart dropped lower than I thought it could go and the color drained from my face as it stared into hers. “Mikey’s here?”

  The palpable sense of command I forgot to filter out of my voice seemed to snap Steph out of it as she finally managed a single, meek, trepidatious nod.

  I started moving the instant I registered her confirmation. “We gotta go, Steph. Right now.”

  Every second was vital.

  But instead of moving her ass like I told her to, Steph just stood there. “Jason, what’s happening? Who… Who’s the girl?”

  My eyes darted around to every nook and cranny I could remember the boat having while I shoved all my stuff haphazardly into the same bag as the matter replicator.

  Mikey wasn’t supposed to be here. But he was here. Which meant he was making a move. And Mikey’s moves didn’t tend to bode well for anyone uninvolved in the planning.

  Had I dropped the ball somehow? No. At least I didn’t think so. Well, maybe… Not that it mattered just now. “Steph, we gotta go.”

  But she still hadn’t moved from where she’d dropped the gun.

  “STEPH!!!” I stamped my foot harder than I’d ever allowed on my boat’s deck.

  She flinched away from the noise.

  “Steph, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…” I shook my head. No time. “We gotta go now.”

  Hurrying along, I rolled and then lifted the heavy handcart over my boat’s lowest edge and onto the dock.

  Hearing some crunching from its underside, I watched in horror as one of the handcart’s two tires went flat. “Oh. Oh shit. Uh… No time. Hurry up, Steph. I’ll start moving with the BS. You get the guns and anything else you wanna keep.”

  But Steph just stood there, staring at the body.

  “NOW!!!”

  Half a minute later, we were already several minutes late in feigning a nonchalant gate towards the relative safety of the crowded pier. Not an easy task while balancing an unstable, unreasonably heavy metal cart over what might as well be a balance beam. A single misstep on this dock could ruin everything.

  Unfortunately, there was half a towel hanging out of the waterproof bag, snagged by its zipper in my hurry to leave. This presented a few problems.

  First, the imbalance did anything but help me navigate the cart’s half-flattened, rattling wheels down this series of lopsided, sporadically dented, faux-wooden planks.

  Second, a particular design flaw of the bag was that it stopped being waterproof while the zipper was open.

  That left us both, but especially me, one false step away from losing everything I’d just thrown my life away for. If only I’d figured out a way to save that hover dolly…

  But as bad as it was for me, Steph was having an even harder time. Sure, she didn’t have an uncooperative hand-cart to contend with. But that was more than made up for by having to hobble along on an ankle that was badly bruised at best, and fractured at worst. Let alone while supporting a big, lumpy reddish-orange canvas bag with the rest of our equipment. Huh…

  Deja vu aside, I wanted to help her. But I was barely getting by as it was. At least it could’ve been worse.

  By some miracle, the dock was uncrowded. Not only that, but what few people there were, all happened to be well out of the way on our straight shot to the pier.

  Piling miracle atop miracle, the other dock-goers seemed universally distracted by something happening off to the right, blocked from view by the line of boats.

  Gradually growing somewhat accustomed to the awkward trek, I was finally able to spare a tiny bit of brainpower for anything else. Namely, why I felt so uneasy.

  And then I found it. So all these people just happened not to notice an obviously distressed young couple, barely maintaining balance while panic-running down a recreational boating area? This was strange. No two ways about it and none to get around it.

  What we were doing was, in fact, attention-grabbing. Alarming, even. No matter how much I might’ve wished we were unassuming, this was far too easy. Or was it a coincidence..?

  Oh what, was I going senile? This was Mikey we were talking about.

  With subtlety belying all the self-control it took not to panic in truth, I jerked my head to the left. “Plan D.” I said it just loud enough to be sure Steph could hear me above the cart’s clattering. Nothing else for it then.

  Pivoting sharply to the left, I made a beeline in entirely the wrong direction to reach the pier.

  My relief was palpable when I heard Steph’s two worryingly asynchronous footsteps follow right behind mine.

  Thus, we veered from our escape to perform a quick home invasion.