For the second time that night, Jeremiah awoke screaming.

  His body surged upright, a violent jerk that sent waves of pain coursing through him. The metallic tang of blood flooded his senses as the raw, guttural sound escaped his burning throat. White-knuckled hands shook as they clutched at his sweat-soaked sheets.

  Wide eyes, still clouded with remnants of the dream, darted frantically through the suffocating darkness, searching for half-remembered horrors.

  Gasping for air, cold sweat cascading down his trembling form, Jeremiah felt his heartbeat thundered in his chest. For a moment, it was the only sound in his world.

  ThumpThumpThumpThump

  Slowly, agonizingly, the nightmare released its hold on Jeremiah’s fractured mind. Crity returned in pieces. Grasping, cwing hands became harmless shadows. The strangling tentacles of some watery beast were repced by his damp sheets. The endless roar of fierce beasts and uncountable footsteps transformed into his own heartbeat. As the adrenaline ebbed away, his body wilted, succumbing to the weight of his exhaustion.

  For what felt like an eternity, Jeremiah y sprawled in his bed, one arm shielding his eyes from the oppressive darkness. The frantic rhythm of his heart gradually slowed, and he took a deep breath. Slowly. Jeremiah pushed himself back into a sitting position and swung his legs over the side of his bed. He sat there for a moment longer, feeling the quiet AC blow a slight breeze over his drenched skin.

  He reached for his smartphone on the bedside table beside Billy’s bowl.

  3:00am.

  He still had a few hours before he had to get up.

  Jeremiah sighed and rubbed his temples. He had thought the nightmares were getting better — or at least they hadn’t been coming as frequently as before. With a groan, Jeremiah pushed himself off his bed and stood. Every part of him ached like he had just run a marathon. Even walking the few steps to the restroom took more effort than it should have. For a moment, he wondered if he was coming down with a cold. He really hoped not.

  The CSA work he’d been taking was barely enough to cover expenses. Even missing one day would be a major setback for him.

  Jeremiah yawned as he shuffled forward, absentmindedly swiping away the HUD windows cluttering his vision. The blue windows shrunk until they were small blinking dots in the corner of his vision. He rolled his shoulders and yawned again, wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand.

  Jeremiah made it three more steps before he froze. His eyes widened, and his heart rapidly pounded against his sore chest.

  He stared at the blinking dots in his vision, his brow furrowing and his mouth agape.

  His optical HUD was active… Why was his HUD active?!

  The Neuro-Optical Heads-Up Dispy was one of the most common pieces of super-tech in Nexus, with over 95% of the popution using one. The impnt itself could be installed beside the eye in only a few minutes with a non-invasive surgery. It would even grow with the user through a mix of nanotechnology and super-tech nonsense, meaning even those as young as five years old could access the technology.

  Entire companies specialized in creating their own chip sets with their own features and hardware, much like they had competed in AR lens prior and smartphones before that.

  Jeremiah, too, had an impnt. There was only one issue…

  I’ve not had a HUD chip in over a decade! Jeremiah thought to himself.

  He lifted his smartphone and stared at it. Why would he? The custom smartphone that Sarah had made him better in every way. Sure, it couldn’t project images directly into his brain, but the tech packed inside the tiny device was astounding. The bloody thing could even teleport back to him if he ever lost it. It was true super-tech.

  Jeremiah reached up with shaking hands and pressed a small, hidden button beside his eye. With a click, the chip slot for his HUD impnt ejected, and Jeremiah pulled it out, staring bnkly at it.

  Empty…

  It was empty. Jeremiah didn’t have a HUD installed. His eyes flicked back to the blue dots still fshing in the corner of his vision.

  What the hell…

  His breath came faster, and Jeremiah stumbled slightly, a sudden rush of dizziness washing over him. He steadied himself on the nearby wall, then reached up and grasped his beating chest with his free hand.

  Again, he froze as he felt the icy touch of metal.

  The memories flooded back in a wave. Memories of blood and pain. Memories of silver tentacles burrowing through his flesh. The agony and fear.

  For a moment, it overwhelmed him, and Jeremiah could do nothing but lean against the wall and dry heave. After several moments, Jeremiah pushed himself away with shaking arms and stumbled to the nearby mirror. There, he took in the horrible truth.

  His nightmare had been no such thing.

  There, staring back from the mirror, was a far thinner Jeremiah than had gone to bed that night. He almost looked… emaciated. Like he’d just spent a few weeks in the hospital. And there, fused into his sternum — like his flesh and bone had melted around it — was the silver pendant Sarah had gifted him so many months ago.

  Much to his relief, however, Jeremiah didn’t look as bad as he remembered from the first time he’d awakened.

  His limbs were a little fuller, and his ribs weren’t as prominent as before. He wanted to dismiss it as a trick of his mind. Tell himself that the panic and pain of the previous night had made things seem.

  But then, if he could somehow become a walking skeleton overnight, was it such a hard thing to believe he could have recovered some of that mass in a simir time frame? Jeremiah honestly didn’t know what to think anymore.

  But he had a reasonable idea where he could find answers…

  Jeremiah slowly shuffled back toward his bed and sat down. He took a few deep breaths and turned his attention to the blinking dots in the corner of his vision. He hesitated momentarily before steeling his nerves and focusing on the blinking dot.

  Instantly, Jeremiah’s vision was overrun with dozens of blue screens. Most were messages filled with Tech-type jargon detailing the status of such-and-such sub-system or some type of error message that Jeremiah had no context for or chance of understanding.

  A disconcerting number of error messages…

  Jeremiah swiped these into a folder using standard HUD finger commands and then archived them. He even found the logs from st night.

  Administrator? Jeremiah thought to himself. At first, he thought the logs were talking about Sarah, and he felt a slight pang in his heart. No, that couldn’t have been the case. How could she give permission for… whatever the hell had happened? That begged the question then, who was this Administrator? And why did they have such permissions with Sarah’s tech?

  He swiped the logs into their own folder and continued sorting all the messages. Nearly an hour ter, when the st blinking dot vanished, Jeremiah frowned, left with more questions than answers.

  Should I call Ryan…? Jeremiah thought to himself, but quickly dismissed the possibility. If this really was a leftover piece of Sarah’s tech…

  He trusted Ryan… or had, at one point. But the man’s duty to Prima City had superseded everything else. Even his friendship with Sarah. If he really did contact Ryan, the man was just as likely to arrest Jeremiah as he was to help him.

  Could he call Sam? She’s a Tech-type as well. Maybe she can make some sense of these logs… Jeremiah considered. Again, he shook his head. As one of Sarah’s apprentices, the woman was already under scrutiny. If he pulled her into this and they got caught…

  No… he couldn’t risk it. Not yet. Not until he knew what exactly he was dealing with.

  As soon as Jeremiah closed the folder, his new HUD flickered into existence in his vision. The app tray to the top left of his vision was empty except for a single icon: a rge dragon paw made of stone.

  Nothing else existed in his view, not even a menu option, so Jeremiah did the only thing left he could do.

  With a mental command, he clicked the icon.

  Instantly, a new screen popped into his field of view.

  It was a matted grey, like it was carved from granite. A fearsome stone dragon grasped the edge of the screen in its massive hands and stared down at Jeremiah from behind it. Though it appeared to be a statue, the detail carved onto its surface would have made a master sculptor blush in shame. Jeremiah could almost feel it… watching him, as ridiculous as that seemed.

  On the screen itself, in scrawling aqua letters, a welcome message was visible. Below that was a stone button.

  ———?———

  Welcome to the Mystical Menagerie!

  [Begin Tutorial]

  ———?———

  The entire experience gave Jeremiah the feeling of one of those old-school VR Fantasy games that became popur with the rise of the HUD.

  Jeremiah could feel himself grinding his teeth and smmed a fist into his mattress.

  “What the hell, Sarah!” he said, hissing through clenched teeth. “All of this for what? Some bloody game?!”

  After a moment, Jeremiah’s blood cooled, and he stared at the screen with a frown, his eyes narrowing.

  No… no, it couldn’t just be some game. Could it? Sarah wasn’t the kind of person to put him through… that, for mere entertainment. That would have been something a psychopath would do. That would be the work of the Sarah Bridge the media was portraying.

  Jeremiah refused to believe that person was real.

  No. There was something more here. He knew it.

  He stared at the screen for a moment longer, then reached out and poked the prompt.

  Jeremiah jerked back, nearly leaping from his skin at the feeling of cold, rough stone under his fingertip. He stared, wide-eyed, gncing between his finger and the button. Well, that was new…

  The AR functions of HUDs had never quite mastered the sensation of touch. A pod was required for a fully immersive experience, even for more advanced VR games.

  “What the hell did you create, Sarah…?” Jeremiah asked himself, muttering slightly.

  The next instant, the screen in front of him shook, sending illusionary dust into the air. Even the stone dragon creaked as it raised its massive head higher until it loomed over Jeremiah. The text on the screen swirled and changed.

  ———?———

  Tutorial Initiated!

  Summoning Guide!

  ———?———

  The stone dragon then flexed, and the screen exploded in a fsh of light so bright Jeremiah had to turn away.

  When the light faded, and Jeremiah could see again, the screen and dragon had been repced with a swirling vortex of multicolored light. At its very center sat a pulsing light.

  Jeremiah stared in wonder at the sight. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was almost like someone had taken all the beauty of an aurora and condensed it into a window-sized package. As he watched, the center ball of light bulged outward, like something was pushing from the inside before settling back down. A moment ter, the thing inside pushed again. This time, the ball of light twisted and flexed, distorting in ways Jeremiah figured it wasn’t meant to.

  Almost on instinct, Jeremiah hurriedly turned away just as a crack formed on the twisted ball of light, and it exploded. Something shot out of the center of the vortex in a streak of light, cutting through the space Jeremiah had just occupied, and smmed into his wall with an audible thunk.

  Jeremiah stared wide-eyed at the melon-sized hole in his wall as bits of pster and dust scattered over his bed. Cold sweat formed on his brow, and Jeremiah slowly approached the fresh addition to his wall.

  “No way… It’s just AR… right Sarah? Why the hell are you programming something like this? Is this level of detail really necessary?!” Jeremiah said, whispering as if trying to convince himself of that. Then, with shaking hands, he reached his hand out… and stuck it in the hole.

  “Eh?” Jeremiah’s brain froze.

  “Eh?!” He franticly waved it inside the hole and grasped at the edge, breaking off a few more pieces of pster.

  “This isn’t real, right? I’m still dreaming… that’s it.” Jeremiah ughed to himself, “That’s right. Sarah wouldn’t have just made a game…”

  Before he could pull his hand away, though, a tiny hand shot out of the darkness of the hole and tched onto his finger. Jeremiah screamed and tried to pull back… only to find he couldn’t. Instead, he found himself stuck, as if his finger had been locked in an iron vice he couldn’t free himself from, no matter how much he struggled. Even pulling with his entire body weight didn’t cause the tiny hand gripping his finger to so much as wiggle.

  As Jeremiah panicked, a figure pulled themselves over the hole’s edge, nding on Jeremiah’s bed with a dull thud.

  It coughed, wiping off the pster dust, coating a pin white tee shirt and loose-fitting jeans.

  “Yo, thanks for the hand, kid,” the figure said. Its voice was deep and gruff, sounding like the speaking both needed a gss of water and a breath of fresh air. It somewhat reminded him of many of the detectives from Sarah’s old bck-and-white Noir films.

  Jeremiah could only stare, his jaw wide open and his eyes locked on the tiny, twelve-inch man.

  The tiny, twelve-inch man with a pot-belly and balding head.

  The tiny, twelve-inch man with a pot-belly and balding head and two sets of transparent insect wings, simir to a dragonfly’s.

  “It woulda took me a hot minute to get outta there on my own,” the figure continued. “Seriously, what the hell are those fools doin’ down at the rail station? I been tellin’ ‘em they gotta make sure the ring system’s properly fertilized, else they gonna mess up the calibration! But does anyone listen to old Mero? Hell naw!” the figure said as he ignored Jeremiah’s unblinking gaze. The tiny man rolled his shoulders and began to do aerobic stretches as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  Eventually, he seemed to notice Jeremiah’s stare, and he returned it with one of his own, accompanied by a deep frown. “What’s the matter with you? You never see one of the Faefolk before? I doubt that” he gnced around the small room. “Wait… this is Nexus, right? Don’t tell me those fools sent me to the wrong world!… Again!” the tiny man said, practically growing as he bared his oddly sharp teeth.

  Finally, he sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, scratched his pot belly, and gnced between Jeremiah and the hole in the wall. “Oh! And just so you know, kid… I ain’t payin’ for that.”