Ozair and Mayo came down the stairs into the living room, and the others looked up.
"Good morning," Mayo said.
"Morning," they all replied, in varying states of alertness.
Mina from the armchair, Elina from the couch, Aryan standing near the window with his arms folded, Toviro by the door already looking like someone who had been ready for an hour.
They sat. The room held the particular quiet of people who have slept briefly and woken into something important.
Then Toviro said, "It's time. Are you ready?"
All of them answered at once, without hesitation.
"We're ready."
They started to rise. Then Toviro said, "There's a problem."
Everyone stopped.
Aryan looked at him. "What is it?"
Toviro looked around the room slowly, taking each of them in one by one. Then he said, simply, "Does anyone here know how to drive?"
Silence.
Complete, thorough, slightly embarrassing silence.
Toviro turned to Ozair first.
Ozair exhaled. "Honestly? No. I can't drive."
Toviro turned to Mayo.
"I can't," Mayo said immediately.
Toviro looked at Aryan. He didn't even ask. He just looked at him. Aryan held his gaze for a moment, then said nothing, which was its own answer.
Toviro turned to Elina, and she pressed her lips together and gave a small helpless shrug.
They all looked at the floor.
"So," Ozair said, "what do we do now?"
Nobody answered.
The silence that settled over the room was the silence of a plan suddenly missing something obvious.
Then Mina stepped forward.
She was smiling.
Everyone looked at her, and one by one the same thing moved across their faces, the slow, dawning realization followed immediately by relief.
"Did you all forget about me?" she said.
Mayo laughed, short and disbelieving. "I completely forgot that mom could drive."
Ozair turned to look at him. "You couldn't have mentioned that before?"
Mayo tilted his head with a small smile and said nothing, which was also its own answer.
Toviro stepped toward Mina, and his voice was careful when he spoke. "Mom. Are you sure? It's a long way. We don't know the roads."
"Don't worry about that," she said, without a moment's pause. The certainty in her voice closed the subject entirely.
Toviro nodded. Then he moved to the living room doorway, turned back to face them, and said, "You all stay here. Mom and I will go and bring the car. Be ready when we get back."
They nodded.
Toviro and Mina stepped out, and the front door closed behind them.
Then the living room held just the four of them and the low morning dark outside the windows.
Ozair sat back down on the couch, dropped his head into his hands, and said, "I can't believe we are actually doing this."
"We are," Mayo said.
"Stepping into a completely new world. With new rules. New land. Things we've never seen," Elina mentioned.
"And monsters," Mayo added helpfully.
Ozair pointed at him. "And monsters. Right."
Mayo and Ozair grinned at each other, only they knew what that meant.
Aryan was leaning against the wall, arms still crossed.
"We don't know what's ahead. That's exactly why we can't be reckless. Whatever's out there, we have to be sharp."
"We will be," Elina said. She was sitting forward, her elbows on her knees, looking at the floor with the focused expression of someone running through things in their head.
"I just wonder what it actually looks like. The new lands." She paused. "The world got bigger and none of us have seen any of it yet."
They were quiet for a moment, each of them somewhere slightly different in their own thoughts.
Then Mayo said, "Do you think the Dark Lords are actually as powerful as Toviro described?"
Ozair made a sound that was half laugh, half certainty. "Doesn't matter how powerful they are. Eventually we're going to find every single one of them and kick their butts."
"Very strategic," Aryan said.
"I'm serious."
"I know. That's what concerns me."
"We beat that thing in the market," Ozair said, sitting forward. "The monster that came through the ceiling. We handled it."
"You handled it," Mayo said. "I was largely behind you."
"You were morally present. That counts."
"Does it?"
"I'm choosing to say yes."
Elina was smiling now. Aryan had uncrossed his arms.
The room had shifted in that small way rooms do when the people in them stop thinking about what's coming and just exist for a moment in the company of each other.
Then from outside came the low sound of an engine.
Then a horn.
Two short beeps, unhurried and clear.
They were all on their feet before the second one finished.
Through the window the headlights were visible at the end of the path, sweeping across the overgrown fence as the car turned.
They moved as one toward the front door, pulling it open, stepping out into the cool dark morning.
And there it was.
Ozair stopped walking. His mouth opened slightly.
"That car," he said.
"That's a Chevrolet Suburban," Aryan said, and his voice had something in it that wasn't quite his usual composure. "That's a very expensive one."
It was enormous and dark, sitting on the road with the quiet confidence of something built to go anywhere.
The kind of vehicle that appeared in advertisements on motorway billboards and looked like it belonged in a different life entirely.
Mayo was just staring. "It looks like a luxury hotel on wheels."
Toviro climbed out of the passenger side. Mina stepped out from the driver's seat, calm as anything, like she hadn't just pulled up in something that cost more than most people's houses.
Toviro came around to them. "I chose it because we all fit. Luggage included."
"The ads for this used to come up on my phone constantly," Elina said, looking at it like she was seeing a rumor made real. "It was so expensive."
Toviro smiled. "Who pays for anything now? There are hundreds of cars out there. Ones more expensive than this."
Elina blinked. "I keep forgetting that."
Toviro moved to the back and opened the boot. It was cavernous inside, and they all crowded around the opening to look.
"That's the size of a room," Mayo said.
"I never thought I'd see the inside of one of these," Aryan said quietly.
"Same," Ozair said.
Toviro looked at them. "Are you going to appreciate it all morning or are we going to load it?"
"Loading," Ozair said, already turning toward the house.
"Loading," Aryan confirmed.
They moved fast after that. In and out, carrying the bags and packed bundles they had prepared the day before, handing things down the chain.
Toviro arranging everything inside the boot with careful precision while Ozair and Aryan brought the heavier things and Mayo and Elina handled the rest.
Mina stood to the side watching them work, directing occasionally, her eyes soft with something that wasn't quite pride and wasn't quite worry but lived somewhere between the two.
Then Mina turned and looked at the house.
She stood there for a moment, not moving, just looking at the front of it.
The door, the windows, the light above the entrance that she had left on.
The garden that had already begun to disappear under the creeping green of the recast world, the fence her husband had fixed twice and never properly finished.
Then she walked inside.
The others were occupied. Nobody noticed her go.
She moved through the hallway, past the kitchen, past the living room still warm from the night, and to the back of the house where her bedroom door stood half-open.
She pushed it and stepped in.
The room was how it always was. The bed they hadn't replaced in eleven years. The wardrobe with the door that didn't close fully.
The curtains she had chosen and Haruto had hung crooked and never straightened because she had stopped asking.
In the corner, angled against the wall, was a mirror. Floor-length, wooden-framed, ordinary to look at.
She crossed the room and stood before it.
Her reflection looked back.
Mina held its gaze for a moment, the way people do when they are about to do something they've been putting off for a long time.
Then she reached forward and took the mirror's frame and pulled it gently sideways.
It swung on a hinge, smooth and practiced. Behind it, set into the wall in the shallow gap, was a box.
She took the box and sat down on the floor beside it. Set it in her lap.
Then she reached forward and peeled back the small carpet in the corner of the room, and underneath, where the concrete ended and soft soil began, she dug with her bare hands. Not deep. She knew exactly how far.
Her fingers found the smaller box.
She pulled it up and opened it.
Inside was a key.
She fitted the key into the larger box, turned it and opened the lid.
Inside was a book. Brown cover, worn at the corners, the kind that had been handled many times over many years. And resting on top of it, face-up, was a photograph.
A man in a suit, standing straight, looking at the camera with the quiet confidence of someone who knew exactly where he stood in the world.
Just then footsteps came through the doorway.
Mina moved instinctively, pressing the photograph to her chest, turning.
Mayo stood in the doorway, and he hadn't seen the box or the key or any of it. Just the photograph, briefly, before she covered it.
He smiled. "Mom, who's that?"
She turned fully to face him, keeping everything behind her, the box closed. "Nothing," she said quickly.
Mayo looked at her. Something shifted in his expression, a small surprise at the sharpness of her answer. "We're done loading," he said, gentler now. "I came to get you."
"I'll be there," she said. "One second."
"Okay, Mom." He turned to go, and at the last moment, from that angle, his eyes dropped to the corner of the room—the peeled-back carpet, the small hole, the tiny box sitting beside it.
He saw it.
He didn't say anything. He just looked for half a second, and then he left.
The hallway went quiet again.
Then Mina turned back.
She opened the box and took out both the photograph and the book.
She looked at the photo for a long moment. The man in the suit. Standing straight. Looking back at her from somewhere that no longer existed.
A single tear ran down her face. She didn't wipe it away.
Then she opened the book and placed the photograph between its pages and closed it.
She stood, tucked the book beneath the spare clothes in her bag, folded a jacket over it so it wouldn't be visible, and closed the bag.
She took one breath.
Then walked out of the room, through the hallway, through the front door, and out into the cool morning air where they were all waiting.
They were standing in a line before the car, all five of them, facing her as she came down the path. The engine was running. The boot was closed.
The street behind them was still and dark and wild with the green that had grown over everything.
They were all smiling at her.
Mina stopped walking for a moment and looked at them, this group of young people who were somehow, in every way that mattered, hers.
Then she smiled back.
"Alright," she said. "Let's go."