Having finished eating, I teleported Soul Eater out of the remnants of the bird and shrunk it down a bit. From sword to dagger—where all that excess material went was anyone’s guess. There seemed to be no costs or repercussions for shaping the black metal as many times as I wanted, but perhaps I just hadn’t hit the limit yet. The description of the item talked about feeding the weapon, which implied some kind of energy conservation shenanigans going on. I put these thoughts aside for now; figuring out how to leverage Soul Eater as a free energy source could wait. I had been trudging through the forest all day, so now that my belly was full and a pleasantly warm fire warmed my feet, I just wanted to relax a bit.

I turned Soul Eater over in my hand and nudged it with my mind. Following my thoughts, the end of the blade split in two and the forked tips swelled to form miniature feet. I made the weapon’s handguard longer, then twisted them to create arms with tiny fists. The pommel grew larger too, and I did my best to add as many details to the head as I was able to. Indistinct face and a tad too long neck aside, gemstone-bellied Soul Eater looked surprisingly good for a stickman.

I admired my creation, willing it to move its arms and legs around. It made me shiver a little. The gemstone in the blade glowed like an eye in the dark, holding the colors of fresh honey and the rising sun. Warm hues that contrasted the obsidian blade beautifully. I ran my thumb over the gemstone’s surface, smooth and tough and cold like the rest of the weapon. Tiny veins spread out from it whenever I willed the black metal to change, the veins’ inner light pulsing softly as they pumped their orange blood. A bit creepy perhaps, but a wonder to behold.

“You’re being creepy,” Imaya told me.

“But a wonder to behold,” I said, spreading my arms wide. Imaya scooted a bit farther away from me.

“That’s, um, well, if you say so,” she mercilessly mumbled. “A-Anyway, why were you petting your dagger as if you’re up to something nefarious?”

“It’s just my nightly routine as a budding villain,” I replied. “I’m preparing for world domination.”

I set Soul Eater down on its legs and tried to make it stand on its own. The poor thing didn’t have any sense of balance, so I had to make its legs stubbier and form spikes on the bottom of its feet. Now it could stand alright, but its legs were stuck in the ground—not exactly ideal for walking. In the end I dismissed the spikes and elongated the limbs, having Soul Eater get down to all fours. The figurine looked less like a human and more like some sort of demon, especially when I twisted its neck so that the head looked forward. Narrowing my eyes in concentration, I made the skeletal turtle crawl toward Imaya. I wasn’t able to move more than one limb at a time, not if I wanted to maintain the illusion that my creation was actually using its legs to move.

“Ooh, that’s kinda cute,” Imaya said, poking my Eater of Souls as it struggled to reach her. She got too careless however, because I split the pommel wide like a maw and chomped down on her finger. Imaya let out a startled squeak and yanked her hand aside, flinging Soul Eater into the campfire.

“That’s quite enough, Randel,” Tamara said, shaking ashes and burning ember angrily off her boots. “Would it hurt you to take things seriously for once?”

I bit my tongue to stop myself from talking back. It would have been either a flippant or a dismissive reply, neither of which we needed right now.

“Sorry, it’s my fault too,” Imaya spoke quietly.

Nobody had anything to add after that, and so a sombre silence settled upon us. Tamara always did a good job at souring the mood—though if I was being honest, the mood hadn’t been so great to begin with. In some ways, nights like this were worse than the days full of walking; now that we could rest, we also had the time to think. The absurdity of our new reality weighted on us all the heavier.

To have something to distract myself with, I teleported Soul Eater back to my hand. It arrived with the stickman’s neck between my thumb and index finger. I had already experimented a bunch and found out that as long as one of my hands had any way to touch the handle, I was able to teleport the weapon to me. The reverse stood true as well; if something covered Soul Eater, I couldn’t shift myself to the weapon.

Jumping through space to Soul Eater was a wild experience. It didn’t actually involve any extraordinary sensations such as feeling my soul getting tugged across space-time continuum, but the phenomenon had taken me some time to get used to. Teleportation happened from one moment to the next, disorientating me if I wasn’t careful. Not only did everything around me change as abruptly as a cut in a movie, but I also tended to arrive in a different body posture than I originally started at. I had eventually figured out that I could determine which pose I wanted to land in; I just had to picture it in my head.

But even if being able to teleport made me the coolest kid in the neighborhood, a couple of things about it kept bugging me. Not sciencey things, unfortunately, though I supposed someone smarter than me would have found problems about moving all my atoms instantaneously through space as well. For me however, the biggest conundrum was that my clothes always came along with me. This made little sense, since Soul Eater got rid of the filth and dirt whenever I shifted it into my hand—so where was my free shower and instantaneous disinfection? I had been led to believe that the bond between me and Soul Eater was symmetrical, whereas it clearly wasn’t. At first I had thought that perhaps clothes were a special case for teleportation, but dressing Soul Eater up in strips of my shirt’s sleeve didn’t work either.

Other experiments along this vein had proven to be failures too. Clothes and small objects tagged along with me upon teleportation, but larger stuff like a screaming Imaya or an entire tree resisted my Ability no matter how close I hugged them. Disappointing, really. As if this wasn’t enough, the others then vetoed all of my attempts at figuring out the range of my teleportation. According to them, staying behind to have a nap while they trudged on with my dagger was not an acceptable method. Too risky, they said. It might not work, they added. But no matter how long they listed their logical reasons, I could not be tricked; I knew that deep within their hearts, they were just envious and mean. They couldn’t have free nap times, so they made sure that I wouldn’t get any either.

I spun Soul Eater around my fingers, manipulating the metal’s shape in an almost subconscious manner. It amazed me how surreal everything was. Just what had I been thinking about? Testing how teleportation worked? Bending metal with my mind? Taking magic for granted? It felt so … unbelievable. Fantastical. Everything had escalated so quickly. One day I was stressing about meeting my project’s deadline, the next day I was stressing about ending up dead. Well, alright, stressing might have been a slightly strong word. I wasn’t a fan of constant fear and paranoia, so I tried not to worry about impeding monster attacks and such. I was quite good at it, actually; not thinking about stuff was one of my many talents.

I looked at the six faces around the campfire, people with all kinds of skin, eye, and hair color. Such a ragtag sorry bunch we were, huddling close to each other in our increasingly dirty, uniform clothes. Still, if I considered all that we had been through … I honestly believed that we were holding on remarkably well. Not just physically, but mentally too. Everyone had their own way of coping with this sudden change of lifestyle, or at the very least, everyone had the will to push forward.

The two Sylven were difficult to judge, but they definitely didn’t seem to be on the verge of breaking down. Devi’lynn was constantly curious about our surroundings and my language, while Teva’ryn tended to be stoic and silent. Imaya buried herself in the game-like aspect of our adventure, while Simon took up the mantle of leadership and micromanaged everything. It was Tamara and Pell who took things the hardest, in my opinion. Tamara regularly lashed out on us for every small reason, the business end of her sharp sentences finding me quite often. As for Pell, he just appeared to be restless all the time. Whenever we were up and walking, he kept pushing ahead as if a safe haven was lying just around the corner.

I wondered if the stress would get worse as the days went on, or if the everyday challenges would eventually toughen us up … with the exception of Teva’ryn, of course, because he already looked tough enough to wrestle a bear and bathe in the blood of our enemies.

“Oh man,” Pell whispered, sighing dejectedly. “This sucks so, so much.”

“Hmm?” Simon grunted, gazing into the fire. Pell was doing the same actually; tired eyes watching the flames as if they held all the answers for our troubles. It had taken him a while to speak again.

“I wish I could have said goodbye,” Pell said. “My parents are going to think that I finally had enough and left them.”

“You weren’t in good terms with them?” Simon asked.

“It’s complicated,” Pell said with a pained smile. “My father is disabled, my mother has drinking problems. Unemployed, both of them. I love them, but … yeah, looking after them isn’t easy. We argue a lot.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Simon said. “Believe it or not, I’m in a similar situation with my brother. I’m not sure if I feel guilty or relieved for leaving him behind.”

Pell didn’t have anything to add to that.

“Family is a messy thing, isn’t it?” Imaya asked, looking at her feet. “I argue a lot with my dad too. I wonder if he misses me, now that I’m gone.”

“Interesting,” Tamara murmured. When Imaya looked at her sharply, she corrected herself quickly. “I mean, it’s interesting that all of us have problems in our private lives.”

“Really?” Imaya asked. “Even you, Tamara?”

“I’m going through a divorce from my husband.”

“Oh,” Imaya said, eyes widening. “I didn’t think—I mean, you look so young … um, sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Tamara said. “The important thing is that I’m not all that averse to getting away from my old life. Just like you guys, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Huh, you might be right,” Imaya said. “That’s an interesting coincidence.”

A moment of pause passed, then four pairs of expectant eyes turned my way. I sighed.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I live alone, and I’m perfectly fine in my cozy little apartment.”

“No arguments either?” Tamara prompted.

“Well … my neighbor got really mad at me once because my cat snuck into her bathroom.”

“Right,” Tamara said, shooting me a flat look. “Forget I asked anything.”

“I know it sounds bad, but it really wasn’t my fault,” I said. “Nosy is just curious by nature.”

Tamara decided to ignore me, turning to Pell to inquire about his life instead. Mission accomplished! Seeing that the conversation shifted toward Pell’s and Simon’s families, I stayed only a few more minutes before excusing myself to turn in for the night—though I knew that sleep wouldn’t come so easily. I lay down on a pile of leaves anyway, arms tucked beneath my head, looking at the moonlit canopy above me. Perhaps it was just in my head, but the moon’s usual green light seemed to be tinged with yellow tonight.

I desperately wanted to believe that this strange connection between me and the others was nothing more than a coincidence. Family issues were quite common, after all. So what if none of us had been fully content with the life we led on Earth? It was our human nature never to be satisfied with only what we had. It was a reasonable happenstance that we all had something common … except, no matter how much I wanted to, I wasn’t able to fully convince myself. Doubt crept in through the cracks, and it dragged along some burning questions.

The first question was why. Why did those three-eyed aliens pick their test subjects according to this vague criteria? What purpose did it serve that we had troublesome families on Earth? I had thought that the Inspector wanted only to test the collars and the prototype weapon, but now it seemed like the experiments had a social aspect too.

The second question concerned me even more than the first. How? How did those three-eyed aliens choose the five of us out of every human on Earth? Were they spying on thousands from afar, grouping those together who met their criteria? Perhaps they were indeed able to peer into our lives from outer space, using their alien technology. If I wanted to be pessimistic about it, however? I would have said that they didn’t need to bother observing us from afar.

All we knew was that the aliens had abducted at least five of us from Earth. If they were able to get five of us, why couldn’t they get fifty? Five hundred? Five thousand? These aliens had mind-reading collars available. It made me wonder which was the more likely; spying on humans from afar until they found five eligible specimen, or collaring a few thousand of them and scanning their brains for quick results. The latter would have implied that the scale of these experiments was greater than we had thought.

This revelation led me to the final and most terrifying question of who else? Who else was taken along with the five of us? What if Pell didn’t actually leave his family behind? What if Simon’s brother was still sleeping in a facility nearby? What if—

“What if I’ve watched too many sci-fi movies,” I mumbled, turning to my side. I shifted Soul Eater to my hand, gripping it tight to stop my fingers from trembling. I took a deep breath, then reminded myself that my deductions could be on a completely wrong track. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. Even so, my heart clenched in despair as my traitorous mind continued to imagine Sarah strapped to an operating table, masked figures with malevolent trios of eyes bustling around her.

Sleep wouldn’t come easy indeed.