The world spun as Valerie tried to stand up.

Groaning, she clutched her head. Ruben . . . Sophia . . . she’d been with them. Near them. Saving them from a fire. Where were they?

Smoke saturated the air. The house in front of her was on fire, and one corner of it was destroyed, the walls broken and the roof fallen in.

House? Where was she? This wasn’t the city.

No, Ruben and Sophia weren’t here. Valerie’s thoughts cleared as the dizziness and headache receded. That had been a daydream. A fantasy. She was on the west side of the city, looking at their old apartment. But this wasn’t the city.

Lining the street she was on were two-story wood buildings spaced a few feet apart, their fronts open and adorned in a way that said they were shops with a small flat above. A small town. Most of the buildings were on fire, some partially destroyed as if they’d been struck by wrecking balls. The burning buildings threw shifting shadows in the dim twilight. Was it dusk or dawn? A knight on horseback appeared briefly down the street as she galloped past. Wait, hadn’t it been midday? And — a knight? Was this some sort of medieval reenactment? A movie set?

No, she was in the city — but this wasn’t the city — she’d been looking at the apartment — but her apartment was nowhere in sight — it was the afternoon — but it was dark, the orange light provided by the flames. Why was everything burning? Nausea rose in her again.

Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out her phone. No service. Only 14% battery left, too. Shit. She should have charged it at the gy —

She was knocked to the ground from behind, the sudden impact strong enough to make her expel the nausea she’d barely been holding in. A man with strange, ripped clothing pushed past her without looking back or apologizing. After hastily wiping her mouth on her sleeve, Valerie scrabbled on the ground for her phone. It had to be intact. She couldn’t afford to get a new phone! Picking it up, she wiped it off and looked it over. It was scratched, but, to her relief, undamaged. She pushed it into her pocket as deep as it would go.

The silence was unnerving. Despite the horrendous events happening, it was completely silent, as if everything were an illusion. Or a delusion. An artsy Oscar-baiting silent movie? Valerie closed her eyes and remained on all fours, hoping that, if this were a hallucination, it would pass quickly.

Like the introduction to an immersive, virtual-reality horror movie, screams faded in against what she realized was the background whine of tinnitus, wrenching her from unnerved to terrified. Some of those screeches were coming from things that weren’t human. That fleeing man with the ripped clothing seemed to have had the right idea, and Valerie was considering following suit when a scream came from nearby. A child’s scream, from the second story of the burning building right in front of her.

Adrenaline surged in Valerie’s veins, a burning anticipation that overcame her fear. The smell of smoke, the burning building, the child’s scream. This was familiar.

With all else incomprehensible, impossible, Valerie latched onto that which she recognized. A child in a burning building. Be a hero, a good person. A mother her daughter could look up to.

Ignoring a small voice in her head that insisted that this was a terrible idea, perhaps dazed by the suspicion that this was an extension of her daydream, she ran toward the destroyed corner of the house, leaping over the rubble, arms stretched protectively in front of her.

Part of the exterior wall was on fire. A smashed table, chairs and other furniture overturned. On all surfaces, shoes of all shapes and sizes — pointed leather shoes, open-toed sandals, cloth slippers, boots.

What on Earth —

Thumps and screams from above snapped Valerie back into focus, and she bounded up the narrow stairs two at a time. A bedroom, its doorframe doorless, with two patches of splintered wood where the hinges had been ripped out. And inside the bedroom —

Huge, hairy haunches with sizable bald patches. She bit down the urge to yell. A giant bear, facing away from her, was tearing into a screaming person on the other side of the room. Two screaming people — kids, their forms obscured by the bear.

Suppressing any survival instinct she possessed, with a shout Valerie ran into the room and punched the bear’s rear. She had to get its attention. If she could distract it, provoke it into chasing her, maybe she could lose the bear outside.

But it was no use. The screaming kids were louder than her shouts, and she didn’t have the boxing ability to knock out a bear from behind.

There had to be a stick or a poker here. Anything. To her left, slumped against the wall, was the body of a man missing vital sections of his torso. The dead man’s right hand tightly grasped a sword. A sword? She didn’t have time to think about it. Trying to ignore the blood and gore that spilled from the corpse’s mauled midsection at every disturbance, she wrested the sword from the dead man’s hand. The stench of blood was so strong that it made her want to spit out pennies that weren’t in her mouth. The hilt, slick with blood, was barely large enough for both her hands. The weight of the sword felt ungainly.

How the fuck did people use these?

She rushed at the bear with a thrust to the center of a bald patch on its rump. The sword went in with a sensation akin to slicing chicken.

The bear growled and spun around, claws outstretched. Valerie jumped back, barely managing to pull the sword out as it turned, the claws missing her arms by inches.

Dear God. What was that?!

A frontal view of the bear showed it to in fact be a massive wolf. It looked sick, though. The fur on its head had fallen out, its gums were visible, swollen, and drooping, and its eyes leaked yellow pus. Was it rabid? She’d never seen a rabid animal before.

On the other side of the giant wolf were a young woman, a boy, and a girl. All three were covered in blood.

With the attention of the wolf fully on her, Valerie executed her plan. Keeping the sword pointed with a shaking tip at the monstrous wolf, she backpedaled, barely evading the beast’s claws as it struggled to lunge through the doorway. Outside, she’d have to find some way to lose it. Maybe she’d find another building to dodge into.

The beast, through the doorway, lunged at her again, and she leaped backward, her stomach dropping as she remembered too late that there were stairs. Time seemed to slow for a moment, as her adrenaline reached all-time highs and her brain kicked into high gear processing thoughts at a speed that normally would seem impossible. One part of her wondered when she’d wake up. The other part of her, seeing the beast soaring through the air toward her, strained her arm muscles to point the sword toward the beast, while trying to control her legs, which instinctively kicked toward a floor that wasn’t there.

The beast slammed into her, and she yelled as pain erupted in her shoulder, and they tumbled down the stairs, a snarling mass of fur and flailing arms and legs that seemed to strike the corner of every stair on the way down. She shoved and scrabbled against the stairs and the beast, and when the world stopped dropping out from under her she stumbled to her feet and staggered across the room. Without the sword, she couldn’t do anything against that thing. The disemboweled corpse she’d stolen the sword from flashed through Valerie’s mind.

She had to make it out of this building. Preparing to attempt to dodge the next attack by leaping to the side, she looked back.

The beast was still at the bottom of the stairs. Several moments passed before Valerie realized that the beast wasn’t sizing her up but was completely, unnaturally still. As the seconds ticked by, and her senses began to normalize, a second bolt of pain in her left side made itself noticed.

What kind of shitty dream had this much pain?

Heroism was not worth this.

As she clutched her side, warm blood pooling on her hand, her own voice spoke unbidden in her mind.

Level up. Blessing granted: Fighter. Skill obtained: Power Strike. Error: User is disconnected. Connecting.

Valerie managed to think, What in damnation? before she was seized by a massive headache, drawing out a shout of frustration and bringing her to her knees.

* * *

After the headache subsided to a dull ache, Valerie backed up in a panic until she had the beast squarely in her view. It still hadn’t moved.

She groped around until she found a plank of smoldering wood, and then, holding it pointed burning end toward the wolf, she stood, wincing, gasping.

The wolf remained still.

How long had that head-splitting headache lasted? The kids had stopped screaming, but the burning house hadn’t fallen apart. Not that long, then. Somehow, she had managed to wound the wolf. Kill it? As they’d fallen down the stairs, it might’ve fallen on the sword. At least, she couldn’t see the sword anywhere, which meant it was probably under the wolf.

Or was wishful thinking clouding her judgment?

Maybe it was just playing dead. Were wolves smart enough to do that? Surely anything a possum could do, a wolf could do.

The holes in her torso required medical attention. There was no telling how far she’d have to walk to find it, if any existed … whereever she was. And the kids were silent. She’d come too late. But what would be the point of all this if she hadn’t saved them? She had to at least check.

But the wolf was between her and the stairs.

“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

It was dead. It had to be dead. If it wasn’t dead, she was dead anyway.

Certain that if she waited any longer, her courage would fail, she dropped the plank — fat lot it would do — and limped as fast as she could toward the wolf, hugging the wall as she went around it.

No snarl rose above the crackling flames, and no claws rent her.

Refusing to look back, she climbed the stairs, much slower than her first trip up them. Blood dripped out of her with every step.

In the bedroom, the man slumped against the wall — the father, whom she’d taken the sword from — was dead. The mother, lying crumpled in the middle of the room, was dead, too, her head pulverized, her body swatted aside, and her limbs lying at the wrong angles.

The boy lay on top of a girl in a tiny, bloody pile a few feet past the mother. They were the ones the beast had been biting when Valerie had entered.

The boy’s head turned.

He was alive!

Rushing forward, Valerie knelt down.

“Where are you hurt?”

As she reached toward the boy’s shirt, her heart dropped. The boy’s eyes pleaded, but from his throat only came gurgling sounds and blood gushing from long gashes that crossed his sternum. Underneath, the girl moved, trying to get out from underneath her brother.

Valerie shut her eyes for a moment. There was no way the boy would survive for much longer. Rationally, Valerie knew that it would be kinder to put the boy out of his misery. But she couldn’t.

If only she’d arrived earlier.

Clenching her teeth, Valerie pulled the boy up, aware of the amount of pain she was inflicting by moving the boy, praying that the girl underneath was all right. The little girl was covered in blood. Valerie grabbed the girl, who yelled and struck out wildly with small fists that Valerie easily fended off, and with gentle strokes she wiped the blood off the girl’s face.

And Valerie’s heart plummeted.

That wasn’t Sophia.

It was an inane thought. The girl couldn’t be Sophia. This wasn’t their old apartment, this was … wherever this was. But upon seeing the girl’s brown braids, the thin nose, the thin cheeks that have lost their baby fat, the timidity, the blue eyes, that the girl was five or six years old — Sophia was seven, but Valerie remembered her as three — it finally struck Valerie that this girl had no relation to her. The realization felt like a gust of wind, blowing away the daze in which she’d conflated her daydream with her current circumstances. The wounds in her right shoulder and left side evoked more pain than she’d thought possible. Outside were who knew how many of those wolves, howling now and then as if to remind her they were there. If they found her, they would kill her. Savage her. Tear her limb from bloody limb.

The girl hadn’t run or helped while Valerie had distracted the wolf. The girl was stupid, useless. It was for this little girl’s sake that she was now leaking her insides onto the floor; the least the girl could do was put in a little effort to save herself! Valerie had already been severely injured saving her; if Valerie continued trying to help the girl, that feebleness would get them both killed. Valerie nearly screamed: Why didn’t you run? Why didn’t you fight back? Are you planning to sit there and die?

Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. A good person would save this little girl or die trying. Valerie took another deep, jagged, painful breath. She wanted to be a good person. Besides, carrying this girl wouldn’t change her chances of running into the wolves by much. With luck, the girl might even help find other people or navigate the town.

Damn it. Why was she thinking about how to use her?

“Are you okay?” she asked in the friendliest voice she could manage and then berated herself mentally. What kind of idiot was she? The girl had just seen her entire family mauled to death.

Brown braids swung as the girl shrank back.

Valerie tried again. “Can you speak? Are you injured?”

The girl continued staring. Her left arm and stomach were covered in the most blood. Valerie reached down and felt them, and then she exhaled, relieved, a tiny bit of tension evaporating: the girl didn’t seem to be injured. The blood must be her brother’s.

They could try to hide. Maybe there was a cellar? But the burning building would come down on top of them. And Valerie was bleeding out. Even if there were more beasts outside, there was also that knight, who had to be their best chance at surviving.

A knight? Where the hell were they? Where were the police?

“Do you know where we are?”

A silent, scared, teary, bloody face. Valerie sighed. It was probably too much to ask the kid geographical questions right now.

“What’s your name?”

Gritting her teeth and holding her side, hoping it would slow the blood loss, she thought she could measure the precious moments passing by the blood leaking between her fingers.

“A-Amelia.”

Finally, a response. “Hi Amelia. I’m Valerie. We can’t stay here, okay? We have to get somewhere safe.”

“But Mama and Stephen are hurt! And Papa … ”

Amelia’s voice trailed off and she began sobbing again.

What was Valerie supposed to do? What a mother she was, unable to comfort a child. Once they got out of this mess — if they survived the night — did this place have orphanages? Social services? Or she could stay —

Valerie shuddered. Dangerous. Explosive. Unstable. No, she wouldn’t take Amelia in. Amelia wasn’t Sophia. Valerie couldn’t be trusted to be around kids. There were boundaries she wouldn’t cross until she was confident, certain that she’d fixed herself, that she could trust herself. She’d had a chance as a mother before and she’d failed. No matter what she promised now, she couldn’t guarantee that Amelia wouldn’t find herself cowering in a corner, cringing and terrified of a looming Valerie roaring and reveling in self-righteous anger.

“It’s okay,” Valerie said, embracing Amelia and picking her up. “We’ll be okay.” She glanced at the boy — Stephen — and immediately regretted it.

Lightheaded, she carried the girl out of the burning house, limping in the direction the knight had gone. She hoped it was the direction the knight had gone. As they passed buildings, the few that weren’t engulfed in flames and were relatively intact she called out to, pleading for help. The buildings were empty, or if people remained, they were ignoring her.

Five blocks from Amelia’s house, Valerie heard snarling behind her and then wood crashing and splintering against stone.

She picked up Amelia and sprinted, her gait lopsided from her injuries; each step drew a pained gasp. If she’d kept the sword, would it have made a difference? Around a corner, into a house, she had to lose the wolf. Please, dear God, she —

Her back erupted in pain as claws raked it. Amelia fell from her arms and tumbled on the ground.

“Pillar of Light!” a voice shouted. “Paladin’s Oath! You there, this way!”

Losing consciousness, Valerie wasn’t able to judge how far away the shouts were, or even whether they were real or the delusions of a dying woman. In her mind roiled by pain, one thought — one prayer — struggled to the surface: that the girl sprawled in front of her better not freeze up again and prove her foolish for being a good Samaritan.