Over thirty people were still at the playground, far from home, and we had every reason to believe that the ground between us and safety was littered with undetectable ambush predators.

Keeping the kids close, I got the attention of Darryl and a woman who’d asked questions about the Tagon, but didn’t have kids with her.

“I have an ability choice available. I think I might be able to take something to help us find these badblankets, but I need a few minutes to look through my interface. Darryl, can I ask you and…” I trailed off, not remembering the woman’s name.

“Mindy,” she supplied.

I nodded, grateful. “Could I ask you and Mindy to watch my kids for a few minutes?”

Both agreed and I sat down against the climbing wall, closing my eyes against distractions.

Before I took my own ability, I wanted to know if communications abilities existed and check their descriptions. The walkie-talkies were only a stopgap measure and not a true solution, so if I met someone who might get a useful synergy bonus from taking a communication ability, I wanted to be able to recognize the opportunity and let them know. I skimmed through the results of my searches quickly, trying to commit what I saw to memory.

Then, I searched again for an ability I’d considered earlier, Sense Life. I hoped it would have some synergy with my existing abilities. It seemed, intuitively, like having an extra sense to pinpoint an enemy might make it easier to hit. And Draw Attention focused senses, right? They both used the word senses.

Okay, fine. It was a little bit of a crapshoot, but I was trying to make myself feel better because taking it seemed like the obvious move to get us all home safely. I wanted to be able to one-shot a dragon, but what I needed was to keep my family safe.

You have selected: Life Sense: sense friends and foes all around you. Ability type: passive. Confirm choice?

Confirm, I told the system mentally.

The shivery sensation started up, but after it danced through my body it settled in my head like the world’s worst brain freeze. I could feel my pulse throbbing and I started to feel nauseated.

Belatedly, I wondered if I’d been too flippant about this. I was adding another sense to my body. How much of my brain was devoted to processing eyesight? Would I grow a weird deformity, like an extra nose or antennae?

Eventually, the pain receded, but the nausea remained. I was getting new input, but I didn’t understand it. I was awash in an overwhelming sea of new sensation I couldn’t contextualize.

I opened my eyes. At some point during the “brain freeze” feeling, I must have fallen to the ground. Mulch was pressing into my cheek, and a sea of concerned faces hovered above me.

My sight was clear, but even though I could make out every detail I had trouble making sense of the faces I was seeing. I had to scan the crowd multiple times before I recognized my own damn children.

“Space,” I gasped. “Please, give me space. I think… I think I can feel you all. It’s too much.”

The crowd retreated and the nausea lessened. “Thank you,” I said. “Just… just a little further, please?”

Everyone must have moved out of my range, because suddenly the new sensations receded to next-to-nothing.

I pushed myself back up to sitting. I still felt disoriented, and it still was harder than it should have been to recognize my children. Before, I felt like I’d been seeing everyone in costume, with extra masks and hats and mustaches to disguise their features. Now, I felt the opposite, like I was looking at faces with only some of the features drawn in. Did they look worried? They probably would look worried, in a situation like this. I couldn’t tell, but I went with that assumption.

I pushed my face into a smile that I pointed in my kids’ direction. “I’m fine! Don’t worry! It’s just a little intense. I’m going to need some time to get used to this. Give me just a minute, and then I’d like just one person to come closer to me.”

My instructions were too complex for Cassie, who immediately rocketed into my range. Micah followed her and caught her by the arm. “Cassie, no!” he yelled. “You’ll hurt Mommy!”

Cassie started crying as he started to pull her backward.

“Wait!” I said. “Two… two of you is fine. Let’s play a game, okay?”

Micah frowned. “What kind of game?”

“I want to play!” shouted Gavin, indignant.

You don’t even know what the damn game is, kid!

“Gavin, you can be the judge. Micah, Cassie, I need you to stay really close together and I want you to move back and forth. I’m going to try to close my eyes and point to you. Try to be silly about starting and stopping and changing direction to make it hard for me. Gavin, you tell me good job or bad job after I point. Okay?”

We started “playing.” At first, I didn’t do well at all. My new sense was odd. I couldn’t really describe it in terms of vision or hearing or even touch. I was getting weird feedback from all of my senses, but I felt something completely new as well. The best way I could describe it was the feeling you got after doing a somersault underwater. Even if you had your eyes closed, there was a tug, a buoyancy, that helped you know which way was up. I couldn’t make out any details, and it was easy for me to get it wrong. But after a few minutes, I started getting positives from Gavin like “Almost!” and “Pretty much” and a few excited “Yep!”s that noticeably outnumbered my misfires.

I asked them to start moving closer and farther away from me, too, so I could practice gauging distance, but Mindy interrupted.

“Listen, I’m sorry to say this… but it’s getting too hot out here. No one should be outside so long this time of day. We’ve already been out for a while, and we’re all wearing too much clothing. I’m a nurse over at the hospital, and we always get heatstroke victims during the summer. Even if you figure out how to sense these things, we’ll all be heatsick by the time we get home. There’s an empty house over there.” She pointed to a two-story across the street with a smashed front window. “Why don’t we relocate and raid their cupboards for lunch? We can take off our gear and rest in the shade until the evening, when it starts cooling off.”

“The house isn’t that close,” said Darryl. “If these new things are like the leafenrats, there’s gonna be at least three or four of them on the way. Minimum.”

The nurse gave him a thin smile. “Well, we’ll put the kids and those of us with healing skills in the back. Put some big, strong adults in the front to find our new friends. Everyone will be ready to jump in. It won’t be fun, but we’ll get there alive.”

There was a moment of silence after her proposal. She wasn’t wrong but…

“Wow,” said Carlos. “You’re ruthless. Hardcore.”

Mindy seemed irritated by that. She opened her mouth to argue, but Carlos hurried to cut her off.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong. Ruthless was a compliment!”

Mindy rolled her eyes, but let it drop.

The problem the heat presented was undeniable, so people began checking their gear and getting ready. To my shame, it was agreed that I should be well in the middle of the pack, as out of it as I was. I’d tried to take Life Sense to help! I hoped it still would… but for now, I was a liability.

Micah piped up as I was settling our extra gear on top of the Tagon. “Mom! Don’t forget to add your ability to the leaderboard!”

“It’s not a leaderboard,” I said tiredly, but marked down the changes.

Meghan Moretti - 105 Lavender Lane

Draw Attention - 140% 200%

Assisted Strike - 140% 170%

Life Sense - 190%

Could be worse, I thought. I asked Darryl to let me test Draw Attention on him, curious what I’d gained when I reached 200%, and found I now had an intuitive sense of exactly how long I would keep my target’s focus. Useful.

Then it was time to go. Darryl, Carlos, and three others had volunteered to be our frontline. Almost everyone not in the vanguard was holding a dog on a tight leash, and Cassie had bravely agreed to walk so the three smallest could ride in the wagon, after we explained that the doggies were too silly to know how to stay safe. I really hoped the dogs could handle the strange circumstances and excitement without losing control of their bladders.

I tried to focus on my Life Sense, I really did. But it was like trying to make out the audience in a theater: impossible with the stage lights in my eyes so bright and blinding. I couldn’t tell what lay beyond the people who encircled me, and the harder I tried, the more nauseated I felt.

When a woman in our frontline stepped on another badblanket, I was just as surprised as everyone else. She’d been walking with a knife out, and the point pierced through the creature as it tried to envelop her. We heard that hideous screech again as it released her torso briefly, adjusting its grip to leave a gap around her hand.

I didn’t dare try to help, disoriented as I was, but it didn’t matter. Everyone had been waiting for this, poised to strike, and the badblanket began evaporating almost before I could feel guilty about not helping.

The woman stumbled as her attacker disappeared, gulping deep breaths of air. She looked back at the rest of us. “I’m okay. I’m okay.” Her nose was bleeding too, just like the first girl’s, but otherwise she seemed largely uninjured.

Cassie’s view had largely been blocked by the people in front of us, so while her grip on my hand grew tighter, she was brave enough to keep moving.

Two leafenrats emerged from the bushes as we reached the house, but they died even quicker than the badblanket.

We only encountered that single badblanket on our way over, and I wasn’t sure if that was because they were less common than the leafenrats or if we’d just missed noticing them. We’d tried to keep a narrow column as we moved, with the five in front walking nearly shoulder-to-shoulder. Both badblankets we’d seen had waited until a human was literally standing on top them before striking. If that was how they always worked, we could have walked within inches of others and not known.

Carlos climbed through the broken window and, after a short delay, unlocked the door for the rest of us.

“Sorry about the wait. Took down a leafenrat that had gotten inside. Might be more, so be careful.”

I stood by the door, guarding my kids, as most of our group spread out to search. People didn’t mess around, kicking over laundry baskets and opening closets and pantries to check every corner.

Darryl and Carlos carried over a bookcase to block the broken window. A bookcase still full of books. I frowned, flexing my own hand. Two young guys carrying a bookcase? Sure, no problem. But a full one? I knew how heavy books were. Maybe if they’d both been weightlifters or something. Maybe.

But I remembered the shivery feeling I felt each time I confirmed an ability, the sensation that spread through every part of my body. How George Turner had been surprised that I hadn’t found this longsword too heavy. How many times I’d fought on the way to and from the Turners’ without feeling utterly exhausted. Swinging a sword or a big spear wasn’t nothing! I remembered, vaguely, from that one naginata seminar I’d attended in college, how tiring it could be.

Even without the hazy sensations I was getting from my new ability, I was sure I was different now.

Stronger.

These aliens were changing us.