“You be careful out there,” Mom calls to us from the back porch.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her, “we won’t go far.”

  The second we cross from the tall grass into the woods, Tyler drops his ball and begins dribbling it around rocks and gnarled tree roots. The closer he gets to the Living Place, the faster he moves, and I have to jog to keep up with him. As I run, I can feel the pores on my face open as if I’m in a steam bath, and I know that being out here will even help my acne.

  Tyler stops as we near the clearing that hides the well. He won’t go into that clearing again. Neither will I. Instead we stay just outside of it, kicking the ball back and forth between the trees.

  “You be goalie,” insists Tyler, bouncing the ball from one knee to another, high-stepping like the leader of a parade, no sign of asthma or worry.

  “Okay,” I tell him, “but if you aim at my head, you’re dead meat!”

  “I won’t aim at your head,” he tells me, then takes a shot directly at my face.

  I throw up my hands a moment too late—the ball painfully ricochets off my ear, and between two trees.

  “Goal!” shouts Tyler, jumping up and down.

  “Why you little—”

  “Amber—the ball!”

  I turn to see the ball bouncing into the clearing, over the brightly colored wildflowers. I know exactly where it’s headed.

  “Stop it!” yells Tyler, as if I have arms that could stretch out that far and bring the ball back. I race out, but it is too far away, and I can only watch as the ball disappears into the well.

  “Oh, great!” says Tyler. “You owe me a new ball!”

  “You kicked it!”

  “It hit your head!”

  I step up to the well and look down, seeing nothing but darkness. Then I hear something: a distant sucking sound. Then silence. Until that moment I didn’t realize there was any noise in the air at all—I guess my ears just became accustomed to the faint rasp of wind across the well—but now that airy hiss is gone.

  Instantly things begin to change.

  At first, I think it’s just my imagination. “Tyler! Look at the grass and flowers. Do they look funny to you?”

  He looks around and shrugs. “No.”

  “See how they’re lying? They’re not as tall as they were before. It’s as if the whole field has flattened out a bit.”

  “That’s because we just ran across it,” he says.

  “But we didn’t walk everywhere,” I say pointing to the other side, where the flowers have definitely begun to wilt.

  He furrows his eyebrows, the way Dad does when something confuses him. “That’s weird.”

  Tyler looks into the hole again. Dark and silent. “What about my ball?”

  “We’ll get you a new one.”

  “You’re paying for it.”

  “Fine,” I say, just to get him moving. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  By the time we reach the circle of trees just beyond the clearing, I notice some leaves have begun to turn yellow.

  * * *

  A summer blight, the neighbors call it. A new breed of weevil, or something like that. Trees, grasses, and shrubs brown and yellow around us over the next three weeks. At first it’s just our property, but the blight spreads in twisting spokes like brown tentacles of death, following the banks of streams and the veins of canyons. Birds fall dead from their perches on trees. Worms crawl up through the earth only to bake and dry in the sun. From my window I can see the brown wasteland of our backyard. The dead grass blows away like chaff in the wind, leaving behind mud.

  The town begins a slow simmer, boiling toward panic as the arms of the blight stretch toward farmland.

  Tyler doesn’t play soccer anymore. He barely gets out of bed. At night his wheezing keeps me awake—not because it’s so loud, but because I’m terrified that it might suddenly stop.

  And then there’s my parents.

  One morning, after a breakfast as somber as a funeral, I dare to ask my father a question that I’ve been afraid to hear the answer to.

  “Dad,” I ask, “when did your hair start going gray?”

  He looks at me as if it’s a forbidden subject. It’s Mom who answers. “It’s just stress, dear,” she says. “That happens sometimes.”

  But it’s not just Dad’s hair and Tyler’s asthma—there are other things. Like the way the food I eat doesn’t seem to nourish me anymore. I’m losing weight. Now all I ever want to do is sleep.

  “What’s happening around here?” I ask them.

  They sense the urgency in my voice and look to each other as if communicating in some sort of parental telepathy.

  “Honey,” Dad says, “you don’t have to worry about Mom. It’s probably nothing; the doctor said so.”

  I’m caught completely off guard. “What’s probably nothing?”

  They turn to each other again, realizing they’ve opened a can of worms. Now that I look at Mom, I can see the dark rings under her eyes and the failing expression on her face, like a hillside about to give way.

  “I just have to go back in for a few tests, that’s all.”

  “The doctor says it’s probably nothing,” repeats Dad.

  I bolt from the room, not ready to hear any more, not wanting to face the possibility that the cancer is back, growing through Mom’s body like the blight spreading through town.

  But it’s more than just a “blight.” I know that. I’ve known it from the beginning, but I haven’t dared to think what it’s really all about. Now I have no choice.

  As I burst out into the street, the despair is everywhere—I hear hacking coughs from windows down the road. I pass a bone-thin dog, its coat mange-torn and its eyes large and hopeless. The stench and sounds of slow death rise in the air around me—they fill the air within me. I can feel my own body winding down.

  I burst into Delilah’s unlocked door. She always keeps it unlocked. She says she trusts in the safety of the world. I wonder if she trusts in it now.

  I find her lying on her bed. At first, I think she’s asleep, but her head slowly turns to me. “Amber,” she says. “I suppose you’ve been wondering about me. I’ve been tired, is all.” She smiles and gazes at me through rheumy eyes.

  “I need to know something, Delilah.” I gently take her hand. “I need to understand. You know what’s happening around here, don’t you? Please, tell me.”

  She nods sadly, and takes a long moment before she answers.

  “It’s dying,” she says.

  “What’s dying?”

  “Everything. The birds, the trees, the land, and the sea. All dying. All dying.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Nothing to do,” she says weakly. “The Living Place is dead. No telling why.”

  “What is the Living Place?” I ask her, afraid to hear her answer, but more afraid not to.

  She sighs and shifts in her bed, not even trying to sit up. “Every living thing has a breath of life, child,” she tells me. “And everything that breathes needs a place to do it from.” I sit back in my chair, beginning to understand what she is telling me. “I knew it the moment I saw it. I’ve heard tell of such a place, but never dreamed it was real.”

  I just shake my head, not wanting to believe it.

  “I thought you understood….” Her voice gets weaker with every passing word. “The world… has stopped… breathing….”

  And in a moment, so does Delilah. She just closes her eyes, takes one deep breath, then a shallow one, then a shallower one still, and she is gone.

  I let go of her hand and it falls limply to the bed. I want to cry, but I know Delilah would not want me to cry. It’s part of the circle, she would say. Flesh to dirt, to daisies, to flesh once more. I realize now that the best thing I can do for Delilah is to make sure the cycle doesn’t end with her. That the renewal continues.

  I leave Delilah’s house, stepping into my own house just long enough to fish out my dad’s Swiss Army knife from a junk drawer. Then I head straight out into the backyard, tramping through the mud toward the barren trees beyond. The abundance of life Delilah was so fond of talking about is gone. All the moss is brown and the rich smell of peat has turned bitter. The bodies of rats and rabbits litter the ground as I get closer to the Living Place. They are uneaten, yet they are undecayed. Even the bacteria has died here, I think, and I wonder which is worse: the indignance of flesh breaking down into dust or the crime of it not being returned to the earth at all. I push forward past the wedge of stone pointing toward the center of life.

  The hole stands bare now; the grass and flowers have been blown away, like flesh torn from a skeleton, and the parched, hard earth is cracked and mottled in sickly shades of gray. I imagine the blight stretching out from this place; a slow shock wave of death enveloping the whole Earth, leaving it a voiceless, soulless rock drifting in silent space until time itself ceases.

  I stand at the lip of the hole. How long has it been since Tyler’s ball went down there? Four weeks? Five? “There’s nothing to be done,” Delilah had said—but she didn’t know the ailment. I do, and if there can be a cure, it’s up to me.

  This is for Delilah, I say to myself, and for my brother, and my mom and dad….

  And although I am terrified, I know that my fear means little, for if I succeed, even if I die, the life I save will be well worth my own. Before I can change my mind, I dive into the hole headfirst, with my eyes closed.

  Rocks scrape me, tearing my shirt and jeans as I fall, until I am tightly wedged in the hole. With my hands before me, I must wriggle deeper and deeper, slithering in the darkness, feeling the blood rush to my head, pounding in my ears, and finally, when I can fall no deeper, my hands come across something cold and round, blocking the tight hole ahead.

  The ball is wedged in the hole too tightly to pull out, so I don’t even try. Instead I find the knife in my pocket. I pull out a stubby little blade and stab at the ball with all my strength. At first the knife just bounces off the hard leather surface, but I try again and again until the blade sinks deep, and I hear the telltale hiss of air escaping from the popped soccer ball.

  I grab the flattened ball, pulling it free from the hole, and as I do, I can hear the sucking of wind growing stronger and stronger. I push out my elbows and knees to keep from being sucked any deeper, and just when I feel that I can’t hold on anymore, the air being drawn into the earth stops… and then it begins to reverse with such force that the ground around me shakes.

  I feel myself moving up and up, with a blast of moist air! Suddenly I’m being coughed up out of the bowels of the earth at an impossible speed. The darkness gives way to light, I see sky, and earth, and trees. I am airborne, but only for an instant before I fall in a heap on the hard gray ground. A flash of light—I seem to see stars, like they do in cartoons—and then darkness, as I lose consciousness.

  * * *

  I wake to the sound of birds. Just one or two. It takes a moment for me to orient myself, remembering where I am and what I have done. I sit up, my head still spinning from what must be a concussion. Around me is the clearing, still gray and bare… but something is different. I hear the faint rasp of air slipping into the hole at the center, and the smell of the air is fresh again. A few feet away is the flattened soccer ball. It’s covered in dark, dark mud. In fact, so am I—it covers every inch of me, as thick as tar… yet I don’t feel dirty, for I know that this dirt is clean. I sit there for a few minutes more, then take the airless soccer ball and head out of the woods.

  * * *

  We spread Delilah’s ashes out over the Living Place. I know it’s what she would have wanted. And now in the clearing the wildflowers grow taller and brighter for it. In turn, they attract more bees, who take the nectar and turn it into honey for someone else to use in their tea.

  The blight ended as quickly as it came, and now the Living Place is back to its full green glory. I go back to the clearing every once in a while, to lie out there in the flowers. I never bring a soccer ball, and always keep a respectful distance from the “well.” Usually I just go there to think and to breathe in the sweet air, looking up at the fingerprint swirls of clouds above.

  I took Mom here once. Of course, I didn’t tell her anything about the place, but she was impressed by the flowers nonetheless. A few days later, her doctors informed her that her treatment was successful, and that she was back in remission again, just as quickly as Tyler’s asthma had subsided.

  Diseases, and blights and trauma—they come and go, I guess. Sometimes they take the best of us, sometimes they take all of us. But other times they visit just long enough to remind us we’re alive.

  ANGELS, DEMONS, MONSTERS, AND A TREE

  He knew it was virtual. He knew it couldn’t be happening, but it didn’t stop him from reacting as if it was real. And he wanted more.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” she whispered in his ear, and he could feel her breath as she did. “Your mind wants to tell you that this is pretend… but you don’t have to listen. And when you stop listening… that’s when it really gets fun.”

  —from “Non-Player Character”

  Non-Player Character By Neal and Brendan Shusterman

  It was not an alarm, but the incessant beeping of a microwave that woke Darion up. He could sleep through the sounds of battle and the wails of the dying—but a relentless microwave was hard to ignore. It was still dark outside, and the faint smell of burned food filled the entire apartment. He looked around. His mattress, which sat like a beached whale in the center of the kitchen, had a green energy drink spill near his feet that looked like toxic sludge, and beside it the refrigerator door was ajar. From the other room came the sound of swarming zombies, and the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire.

  “GET THE KIDS! SOMEBODY SAVE THE KIDS!” shouted a voice he didn’t recognize.

  He crawled up on his spindly legs, raising himself to his feet. There was no kitchen table, or at least, not anymore; what was left of it sat in a broken heap of tangled wood in a corner, a bedsheet draped over it as if it were a corpse. He carefully stepped across the floor, avoiding bugs of various species traveling from one Doritos bag shelter to the next. He kicked aside a half-eaten bowl of mac and cheese that had more larvae than mac or cheese, and made his way to the beeping microwave, which was smoking. Inside Darion found an inedible mélange of blackened foodstuff. The kind that comes frozen—the kind any idiot can cook. His mother or his father must have set it for fifty minutes instead of five, and had promptly forgotten about it. Eating, after all, was only secondary to them now. He pulled the remains of the TV dinner from the microwave and threw it into the overflowing trash. What time was it? It was dark, and the clock on the microwave was no help; it blinked a perpetual midnight. In this house it was always the witching hour.

  From the other room came more gunfire.

  “OH GOD! SOMEONE HELP! THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!”

  “TAKE COVER!”

  He found his parents in their usual spots in the living room. The springs in the sofa had long since given up their battle against gravity, and the two of them sank into the cushions as if rooted there. His father held a weapon that wasn’t there. His mother moved her arms as if directing airplanes on a runway. Both wore immersive headsets that put them into the world of the game, but it also played on a huge TV screen above the web-filled fireplace, and on smaller screens in every other room, so they wouldn’t miss a thing, even when they took bathroom breaks.

  Ever since Mantra of Madness was launched six months ago, it had consumed his parents like a stomach slowly digesting a heavy meal. The game’s previous expansion packs had cost them their jobs, their friends, their bank accounts. This one had consumed what was left of their lives. The apartment had been different before Mantra. Things were functional. Darion had a bedroom. But that bedroom had quickly become a storage space for all the stuff his parents didn’t need anymore—which was everything. His parents had talked to him before. But now, snarls and gunfire had replaced their conversations. Anything that didn’t involve blowing away satanic alien zombies wasn’t worthy of their attention. They treated Darion like an NPC in the real world. A non-player character. Computer-generated and soulless.

  “Mom? Dad?” The first intrusion. He knew they wouldn’t respond until the third or fourth.

  “Mom? Dad? Can you hear me?” They shifted their shoulders uncomfortably, aware they were being summoned from somewhere outside of their current reality—but it probably only registered subconsciously.

  “You burned your food, and you have to eat!”

  “Did you wake him up?” his father said to his mother.

  “No, another NPC must have woken the sleeper,” his mother said. “Damn computer.”

  “That’s why I hate this level. Too many civilians to protect,” said his father.

  Darion tried again. “Did you hear me? Your food is burned.”

  “There’ll be rations at the next checkpoint,” his father said.

  And so Darion gave up. Only once their mission was complete, and they realized that virtual food could only satisfy virtual hunger, would they leave the game long enough to gorge themselves. Right now, they would only eat if he cooked it and put it in front of them. And as much as he hated doing that, he knew he would, because the only thing worse than watching them play was watching them starve.

  He wanted to scream, he wanted to cry, he wished he could just bawl his eyes out at what his life had become, but the tears just wouldn’t come. How had their lives come to this? The change had been gradual and insidious, like the weeds that had strangled their yard. Suddenly this was the new normal, and there was never a moment to cry. He figured someday he would, and it would feel good. It would make him feel better. He would cry himself to sleep and have dreams without the sounds of an apocalyptic war.

  Darion shuffled back into the kitchen. He looked at the wall clock, which had fallen from the wall and was now a baseboard clock. Its plastic face was cracked, and the hour hand was stuck at five o’clock, although the minute hand still ticked around the dial, as if in denial that anything was wrong. It wasn’t only the digital clocks in his home that had lost their sanity. He considered putting the broken clock back up on the wall, but then considered the rest of the mess, and realized that any cleaning he could do would just be large quantities of zero. Best not to demoralize himself by trying. So, ignoring the squalor, he found a pan that was only slightly crusty, scraped it off, and cooked some larvae-free mac and cheese for his parents.