What separates humans, as a species, from every other species of animal? Is it our ability to use tools? Our building of community? Our capacity to self-reflect? No. Beyond and behind all these differences lies the true source of our significance above all other life forms: our Numbers.

What then does this mean in regards to the quantity of our Numbers? While the presence of Numbers unquestionably proves value, does the amount of Numbers a person has further prove value above those with less?

- Excerpt from “Meaning and Significance”

Walking into the combined living room and kitchen of the cabin, I’m once again struck by the dichotomy of the surrounding wilderness to the comfort of modern convenience.

“Want some pizza? We’re just about to have lunch.”

A sudden grin splits my face as I recognize the smell permeating the air. “How do you have pizza? And of course!” As much as the canned food I found in the shed probably saved my life, after four days I’m starting to get a bit sick of it.

Melete walks back into the room with a wet washcloth held in her hand, and tosses it in my direction. “You should probably clean yourself up a bit first...you look gross.”

As much as I want to get insulted by that statement, I turn my head, give a small sniff, and begrudgingly nod as I hold in a gag.

Styx answers my question, “The pantry in this place is pretty well stocked, as well as the freezer -- the power is out now, but it looks like it only went out a few days ago, so the freezer is still plenty cold. We don’t have anything that expires, but any food that’s canned, frozen, or with a long expiration date we’ve got a solid supply of to be comfortable until someone comes for us. You can take a warm shower too, if you’re willing to put the same dirty clothes back on afterward. The plumbing and water heater are both still running. ”

Being clean again sounds extremely appealing to me right now. But before I can, I have a few burning questions I need to get answered. “I’d love a shower, but...what happened? Have you heard anything? With the cabin...and the numbers?” I hesitate when asking this last question, my fear of being alone again in my loss of my life’s work.

“Wait, you weren’t with the rest of us when we left on the bus? Have you been alone this whole time? How have you survived the creatures?” Styx asks in amazement.

“Please,” I beg, tired of having to wait for any answers, “just start from the beginning...what happened to everyone?” I look to Styx, having decided that she’s the most equipped for giving answers, Pallas not having spoken since muttering his name and Melete having some...strange tendencies.

“Fine,” Styx sighs, “as long as you tell us what happened to you afterward.”

“Everything started to go wrong about an hour into the free time. I felt a migraine come on almost instantly, followed by a huge sudden weakness that never let up, even after the migraine went away a few seconds later. From talking to everyone else in our class, it seemed like everyone had the exact same thing happen to them.”

“After the migraine went away, we were all very confused, but Mr. James…” after a sharp look from Melete, Styx corrects herself, “...I mean our teacher managed to keep us all calm. But then…” she pauses, and seems to struggle with what to say for a second before continuing, “one of the students realized the thing with the Numbers on our arms. Everyone’s Numbers, no matter how high or low they were before, were set to zero. And everyone had a new one hundred marker on their palm.”

At this revelation, I let out a huge sigh of relief. Even after everything else I've seen, even after seeing the bodies and arms of the students on the bus, getting direct confirmation that I am not alone in my low Numbers feels like a weight has finally been lifted from my shoulders.

Styx pauses as she sees the relief clear on my face. I struggle to school my features back into a normal expression of concern, and she continues after a second, “Once everyone realized their Numbers were gone, chaos was everywhere. Our teacher tried to keep us all together, but we could barely even hear him over everyone’s crying.”

At saying this, Styx rolls her eyes, and I remember that she is one of the ‘Number-Free Advocates’, a small-ish political and social group which advocates for the removal, or at least ignoring, of Numbers in our society. It can be easy to identify one of the Advocates members based on how they almost always cover their Numbers with artificial tattoos or armbands. I remember it always struck me as weird for an Advocate to be attending our very pro-Numbers driven school, but who am I to judge?

“Some of our classmates were demanding we go home immediately, a few wandered off to try to get cell service to call home, and a few were just crying or yelling in corners. Our teacher was telling everyone to pack up their supplies, and that we would be leaving for home in an hour when we heard screaming outside, a different type of screaming from what was in the cabin.”

Pallas is looking at his feet, and Styx has tears in her eyes as she continues. “When we all went outside, Samantha...shut up Melete, she’s dead, I can say her name” Melete has the decency to look ashamed for the outburst that is preemptively cut off, “...Samantha was getting torn apart by these strange, rabid...monsters. I have no idea what they were, but I have never seen or heard of them before, or seen anything else like them. She had walked outside to try to get cell service, but by the time we all were outside and found her, she was already…”

Styx’s voice chokes off, and Pallas mumbles “...dead.”

I stare at them wide-eyed, remembering the remains of the body I had found behind the shed. That had been Samantha.

Choosing to ignore the wave of depression which is threatening to sweep over me, I ask softly, “What happened next?”

Styx manages to pull herself together to continue the story. ”After that, some of the guys and our teacher ran at the monsters to try and scare them off. They looked no bigger than dogs, and I’d have thought that they’d turn and run away if a big mob of us ran at them, but instead they turned and started to attack us as well. We didn’t know what to do -- we were all so weak, and Samantha was clearly already dead, so after one of the guys had his hand almost completely ripped off, Mr. James finally yelled for us all to run to the bus. I was in the back, and after it looked like everyone was on board, we took off, some of us trying to help staunch the bleeding of the guy who lost his hand.”

She looks around sheepishly for a second, and then finally makes eye-contact with me, “...I’m sorry. In all of the confusion, we never had the chance to do a head count, and no one realized you weren’t with us.”

This hurts a surprising amount. I understand that me being left behind was my own fault for sneaking off on my own, but I would have thought that someone would have at least noticed I wasn’t around. It isn’t as if our class is huge. I know I’m a loner and don’t really have any friends among my classmates, but to hear everyone else acknowledge it through their actions still pains me, more than I thought it would.

“...it’s fine,” I mutter. “And then?”

Styx looks relieved to hear my acceptance, clearly feeling guilty about the fact she hadn’t noticed I had been missing until a few minutes ago. “Mr. James was driving down the road FAST. A lot faster than was safe, but I think he was panicking a bit, plus the guy who lost his hand needed to get to a hospital as soon as possible.”

“I wasn’t able to see the tree in the middle of the road which caused us to crash, but all I know is that suddenly we were all tossed around as the bus veered to the side of the road into the trees. Honestly, I think we’re lucky the bus didn’t roll completely or anything. The first few seconds after the crash were all a daze to me. The next thing I know, the bus was suddenly under attack by... a tree.”

Here, she pauses for a second, as if waiting for me to laugh at her claim, but I just stare at her seriously. Even if I hadn’t seen the tree monster with my own eyes and felt it with my own hands, I’m not sure there’s any claim that I would find unbelievable after what I’ve been through.

“The thing was kind of short compared to some of the normal trees around us, and had been sitting in the middle of the road and was what had caused us to crash. It was able to flail all of the tree branches around to break through the windows around us, but if we all squeezed to one side, it was only able to scratch us with the skinny longest branches, instead of doing anything worse. After a while though, it never seemed to give up, and finally we just had to run when the front part of the bus was on fire. When it was trying to get in at the front side of the bus, we opened the escape hatch in the back and all made a run for it.”

She looks sadly down at the ground, “I’m not sure where everyone ended up, but the three of us, along with four others all ran the same direction into the woods. When we finally calmed down enough to walk back to the road, we couldn’t find anyone else, so we just followed the road this way. We wanted to wait around near the bus to see if we could find anyone else, but we were worried we’d find the tree thing again...so we left.”

“That first night was miserable. We had to sleep on the ground. Some of us tried to start a fire like they do in all the survivor shows, but it doesn’t seem to be as easy as they make it look on TV. And then the next morning we obviously didn’t have any food, aside from a few chips Pallas had in his backpack which he shared with the rest of us.”

“By this point, we had also figured out how to add back to our Numbers from the Number on our palm, “ Styx has a look on her face as if doing this was distasteful, “so we were at least feeling less weak than we had the day before.”

“But it still was a terrible night. By the time the sun finally rose, I don’t think I slept more than just a few hours that night. We were just walking along the road, hoping to eventually find some people. For a few hours, everything was calm until we heard some strange wailing coming from the forest, and suddenly there were a big clump of floating, glowing wisp things which were coming towards us.”

I lean forward, more interested now. This is the first part of their story I couldn't have deduced.

“We all ran along the road for a few more minutes, but the wisp things were fast enough that would couldn’t escape, weak as we were.”

“We needed to turn and fight, and if we had all stuck together with that strategy, we would have been fine...but two of the other guys with us ran away. They seemed to think the wisps wouldn’t be able to catch all of us, and must have assumed they were fast enough to not be the ones who would be caught.”

“Cowards.” Pallas interjects.

Styx seems to agree, but doesn’t say anything out loud. Melete is nodding her head as Styx continues. “The wisp things didn’t try to run at all. It was strange, they felt almost like glass, and shattered about as easily as glass. They were basically floating glass balls, except each of them had a mouth with jagged teeth that they used to attack us.”

“They were slow-moving enough that I think we would have been fine, even with just the five of us there to destroy them all. After hitting them to the ground they would crack and stop moving almost immediately. Except they kept up the screaming, wailing noise the entire time. At first, it was easy to ignore the noise, but as time went on we all started to get headaches, which got worse and worse as the wailing kept on going. By the time we destroyed the majority of them and the headache started to lessen, it hurt almost too much to even move.”

She sniffs again, “Eventually, we managed to destroy all of them, but Corbin and Alyssa, the two other people who were fighting with us...they didn’t make it.”

“We pulled them off to the side of the road and tried to cover them with rocks, but we weren’t able to do much more.”

“After that, we walked for the rest of the day until we found this cabin, and we’ve been here ever since.”

I stare at her for a second at the abrupt end to the story.

Pallas finally contributes, “You forgot about what happened after we killed the wisps.”

“I don’t care!” Styx screams, suddenly angry, “It doesn’t matter!” Styx storms out of the room, through a door into what looks like a bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

The three of us sit quietly for a minute, Pallas looking guilty, before Melete whispers, “She was really close with Alyssa. It’s not your fault Pallas.” She sighs, and continues, “There’s really only one thing she left out -- after we killed the wisps, our Numbers changed. The Number on our palm would increase for each wisp we killed, which we can add back into any Number we want. We got a lot of Numbers that night, to the point that I’m already almost a third of the way to what my Numbers used to be before this all started.”

She bends down and lowers her voice even further, “But that isn’t even the weirdest thing. After the the fight was over and all of the wisps were dead, I got another tattoo on my right arm.” Pulling up her sleeve, she shows me a similar red, loopy pattern to what is currently on my right arm.

“When this appeared, all of a sudden I have a...skill -- I'm not sure what else to call it, but it's different from any normal skill. I've played piano and sung all my life and I was never bad at it, but now I can hurt people just by humming.” She instantly starts to demonstrate by humming a single note, not even a tune.

At first I don’t notice anything, but after a few seconds the extended note begins to grate on my nerves, and a few seconds after that I can feel the early stages of a headache before she stops.

“More magic,” I mutter, and Pallas looks at me strangely while Melete nods excitedly.

“Somehow, this tattoo is letting me do what those monsters were doing, just not to the same level -- at least not yet. I think if I practice I’ll be able to get better at it. The tattoo says “Sound -- Attack”, but not in any language I know. For some reason I just know what it says, and how to make the sound I make hurt people. It’s amazing!”

Melete happily starts humming to herself again, before Pallas jumps back into the conversation, “...what happened to you?”

I look to the door Styx disappeared through, and reply, “I’ll tell you later, when Styx is back. For now, can you point me to the bathroom?”

“...so that’s when I saw the fork in the road and walked up here to the cabin. And here we are.” An hour has passed since I first arrived, and we are all now sitting around the small table as I tell them everything I’ve been through since it all went wrong. With a few things left out.

For some reason, I’ve decided not to tell them yet about the magic I can do. I haven’t pulled up my sleeves yet, so there’s no way for them to know, although I’m pretty sure Pallas suspects there is more to the story than I’m telling. He hasn’t called me out, though, which I’m appreciative of. For now, I plan to keep it secret.

I really don't know my reasons for my secret. In my head, I justify the choice by saying it's really not important for them to know and that I'll tell them when it comes up later. I know this is just an excuse, but I still can't help but cling to the secret knowledge, refusing to share even part of what now makes me so special.

Besides, I can continue to practice my skill making adjustments underneath my clothes. And when I do decide to tell them, it will be a nice surprise.

Everyone likes surprises. Right?

S: 84

D: 31

W: 39

I: 29

C: 46 (+1)

47

Skills: Adjust:Self