The Lost Journals: An Official Minecraft Novel

by Mur Lafferty

  He had gotten over his near-drowning incident, but Alison understandably still had her moments of sadness over the loss of her family. Max tried his best to distract her in those times, like breaking the fence so the sheep would get out and she could have a solvable problem instead of the unanswerable storm of grief.

  He’d never tell her the fence was his fault, of course. She might get mad.

  * * *

  —

  When Alison had moved in, Max’s mom, an architect, had welcomed her by building a tower connected to the back of their house for her to live in. It gave Alison a special place to retreat to when she needed alone time, and was cooler and more elaborate than a plain old bedroom. Max had tried to hide his jealousy at the time; his parents had never thought to put their amazing architectural skills behind making him a unique space that was all his own. Then he remembered what Alison had gone through and why she might need her own haven, and he got over his angst.

  Sort of.

  After the adventure with the escaped sheep, and after a dinner where Max and Alison assured his mom that they and the sheep were just fine, he made sure his mom was asleep, and then crept to Alison’s tower door. He knocked softly.

  Alison peeked out, coal smudged on her face. “What?”

  “What are you crafting?” he asked eagerly, immediately forgetting the reason he was visiting.

  “Shhh, come inside,” she said. He gave a quick look behind him and then followed her to the staircase. Instead of up the stairs, she went to a door she had placed in the wall under the stairs and opened it. It led straight into the hillside behind Max’s house; he and Alison had regularly been clearing out the area to make a secret crafting fort.

  The fort had a crafting table that he had made for her soon after she’d moved in. She’d been pretty listless and unhappy, and Max had finally told her to distract his mother for fifteen minutes. Alison asked something about the skill of building in midair, something his mom excelled at, and as she talked, Max had snuck out to the shed to use his mom’s crafting table. He’d presented the new crafting table and a few basic tools to Alison later that night, and she had smiled for the first time since moving in with them.

  From then on she had something to focus on, something to do rather than wander around, grieving. They had immediately started collecting wood and stone and seeing what they could do with it. In one day they’d built their own workshop in the hidden cave they’d dug beneath the tower.

  Since then, Alison had gotten quite good at crafting, repairing, and upgrading items. Tonight, Max saw that their workshop was cluttered with a number of new items. Alison had been busy since dinner! New shovels, axes, pickaxes, fishing poles, and buckets sat on the table. She picked up one shiny pickaxe and handed it to him proudly. “I found some iron,” she said. “Now go find some diamond so I can make you a diamond pickaxe.”

  “You went mining for iron without me?” he demanded. “Why would you do that?”

  His face lost its happiness and she glared at him. “To surprise you with a new pickaxe, you ungrateful dummy.” She turned her back to him and started to put the tools away in the chest by the crafting table.

  His outrage deflated. “Thanks,” he mumbled. Eager to change the topic, he went over to the chest where they typically stored their materials. “So, uh, what else did you find?”

  She didn’t answer right away, so he opened the chest and stared at the contents. She had managed to find iron, sand, and coal in her excursion, but hadn’t hit any of the choice blocks he’d only heard of veteran miners finding: gold, emerald, diamond, and lapis lazuli.

  “You should go replace your mom’s tools with the new stuff while she’s asleep,” Alison said, still not looking at him. They’d secretly been upgrading Max’s mom’s tools, and replacing the broken ones. It gave them a place to put all the extra stuff Alison was crafting just to get more experience.

  He’d clearly struck a nerve, but wasn’t sure what he had done. “Hey, Ali, I’m sorry. It’s just fun to go mining with you, that’s all. I don’t like missing out.”

  She rubbed a hand over her face the way she remembered her mother doing and turned to him again. “I know. But…” She swallowed, then continued, “My dad used to get mad and say that I wasn’t grateful for the things he did for me. I thought he was being mean. Now I know how he feels. Felt, I mean. And I can’t apologize to him.”

  Shame flooded Max, making his ears burn. He looked at his grief-stricken friend, stuttered out an apology, took the offered tools, and left her alone with her tears.

  Which only shamed him more. Why couldn’t he just be grateful for the gift she’d given him? He was good at distraction, like letting out the sheep and giving presents. But he knew sometimes Alison needed him to just listen when she was feeling raw and unhappy, and that was the hardest thing for him to do.

  WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LAVA, MAKE LAVA JUICE

  It was weird to see both sides of the argument, Alison mused that night. She remembered the sting when her father had snapped at her, but now she understood what it was to do something nice for someone and have them toss it aside like yesterday’s pork chops. She couldn’t sleep, so she got out of bed and watched a skeleton wander around the clearing down below her window.

  She went downstairs to the workroom and checked her supplies. She had just enough iron left to make a pickaxe for herself, so now she and Max could mine that much faster together. She pulled out a map she had been painstakingly drawing. She had placed the house and the tower against the hill, and estimated the hill’s total volume.

  She’d found veins of coal and iron, and marked where she had discovered each. She thought that if they went west, under Max’s mom’s pumpkin farm, they might find some better blocks. She hadn’t shown the map to Max yet, but might tomorrow. If they made up, that is.

  The pickaxe lay on the workbench, strong and well made. Alison stroked it for a moment, proud of her craftsmanship. She had never really felt that being a sheep rancher or tailor was her calling, as much as she loved the fuzzy nuisances, but this—crafting these tools—felt right.

  Max’s mom hadn’t noticed yet that they had been secretly replacing her worn tools with Alison’s upgrades. Or she hadn’t said anything, anyway. And Max’s mom wasn’t someone who held anything back. Alison admired that, even when most of what Max’s mom said had to do with overprotecting Max. There were far too many times Alison didn’t say what she thought. And even months after the accident, you’d think I wouldn’t care what I said to people.

  What was she afraid of? She’d already lost nearly everything. But the answer was obvious: all she had left was Max’s friendship and his family’s hospitality. And she couldn’t bear losing that.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Max’s mom said their favorite words. “I’m going into the village to see your dad today. Don’t leave the house.”

  Max’s family had an odd setup, with his mom in the house working on her architectural designs, and his dad staying in town for the last few months to manage a huge building project there. When Alison had asked about it, Max’s mom had gotten taut around the eyes and said he had to take on extra work, then changed the subject. It felt like she was hiding something from Alison.

  Max didn’t like to talk about why his parents were working and living apart either, dodging the subject when Alison had asked about it, and she wondered why they’d all become so tight-lipped and somber. Max’s family used to be a large, happy, boisterous group, often coming over to Alison’s house for large dinners. They would sometimes bring Max’s aunts and uncles, as his uncles Nicholas and Maximilian and Aunt Horty also lived in the area. The times Uncle Nicholas came over, Grandma Dia would complain and fight with him, and they’d contradict each other, but her mother always said the families were very close—not in spite of the older generation’s bickering, but becaus
e of it. Alison didn’t understand that at all, but she missed those times.

  She obviously didn’t know all the details of Max’s current home life, but she wasn’t going to push Max if he didn’t want to talk about it. Alison knew expressing his feelings wasn’t Max’s strong suit, so she would wait until he was ready. Until then, they had adventures to go on.

  “Are you going to be okay going by yourself?” Alison asked Max’s mom.

  Max’s mom smiled, puzzled. “Of course. I go alone every trip when Max is in school.”

  Alison dropped her eyes. “I know. It’s just…there are dangerous mobs out there.”

  “Ah,” Max’s mom said. “I see. Well, you don’t need to worry about me, dear. I can handle myself just fine out there. And besides, I’ll be back before nightfall.” She gave Alison’s arm a pat, and then went back to preparing for her trip. Alison pushed down the fear that was roiling in her stomach over the thought of Max’s mom being on the road alone.

  She’ll be back before nightfall, Alison repeated to herself. Everything will be fine.

  As Max’s mom bustled around the kitchen collecting supplies for her half-day journey to the village, Alison’s and Max’s eyes met across the table, instantly forgiving each other and making their usual plans without speaking. A few weeks back, they’d already decided that if they mined the hillside behind the house, that wasn’t technically leaving the house. They were just excavating an area that they could turn into more rooms for Alison’s tower, right?

  “She will totally buy it,” Max had said confidently, but Alison wasn’t so sure. Still, the call of more crafting supplies was too strong to ignore.

  They helped his mom pack up their donkey, Francine, with several tubes of blueprints and some food for the road, then waved her off with a promise to stay “inside.” His mom stopped briefly to check the growth of her pumpkins.

  Max’s mom often spoke of how well her garden had grown this year, but she was disappointed that the gourds weren’t quite ready to sell at the market yet. She bent down and patted one fondly, assuring it that she’d take it to town next time.

  Max rolled his eyes at this. Alison knew he hated pumpkins and all dishes that had them as an ingredient, but it wasn’t a vegetable Alison had eaten much of, so she still enjoyed the family’s pumpkin dishes.

  Max’s mom straightened and frowned at the dense copse of trees that had grown between the garden and the hill behind the house. “We need to trim these back when I get home,” she said. “But wait for me, don’t do it yourself.” And then she was off.

  “Be careful!” Alison called after her.

  “Finally!” Max said as his mom headed off down the path, leading Francine. “She’s gone.” He raced down the hall to his room and returned with a couple of torches and his new pickaxe.

  “I’ve been working on a map,” Alison said, and pulled it out of her pocket. “Here’s where we’ve dug out so far, and I’m thinking this might be a good place to go.” She moved her hand to the spot below the pumpkin patch. “I think if we go a few blocks deeper than we’ve already been searching, we might find better stuff.”

  “Let’s go!” he said, heading for the door.

  “Hang on—what if we find something nasty down there?” Alison asked. She always asked this, because she knew that finding a cave full of zombies and skeletons was more likely than finding a vein of gold this close to the surface.

  “We run,” he suggested with a grin, like he always did.

  * * *

  —

  Alison mined like an ant. Max mined like a grasshopper. She did it methodically and carefully, and Max dug wherever he felt like.

  Alison always worked in a grid pattern, moving forward for sixteen blocks, over for two, and then back for sixteen. Whenever she decided to go deeper, she did so carefully, creating a sloping passage and never digging straight down.

  Every time she traversed these paths, she thought about making some stairs, and then at night when her legs weren’t aching with the effort of jumping up on blocks, she figured it would be a waste of time and resources.

  Max just dug.

  When they had first started excavating, Alison immediately had to stop him from digging straight down, pointing out that he didn’t know what kind of cavern he might fall into, and reminding him that if he fell, getting back up would be tough. Max then had to show off that he had perfected the art of jumping up and placing a block underneath himself to slowly build a pillar and rise within the hole he’d dug. Alison’s older sister, Dextra, had used that procedure once, and then had promptly fallen off and needed medical attention. Seeing the technique again was so upsetting that she had spent the rest of the day not talking to Max.

  Or so she had planned—and then she saw the sculpture of a sheep he’d made out of blocks of red wool outside her window. The statue had a silly face that surprisingly looked very much like her sheep Apple.

  And now, Max didn’t dig straight down anymore.

  Inside the hill, Alison checked her map by the light of the torch ensconced in the wall. “We need to dig in that direction to get under the farm,” she said, and Max started picking away at every block ahead of him, tunneling a large hole in the hill. She sighed and stepped a few blocks down, and then began digging her next grid.

  Max snaked his tunnel in and out, messing up her grid and calling out joyfully whenever he found something that wasn’t stone or dirt. Alison worked carefully, gritting her teeth and continuing her regimented excavation, marking her map. At the end of this, she would have to go through Max’s haphazard mess and try to include that on her map.

  She was still digging and thinking about her map when three things happened at once:

  1: Max shouted that he’d gone too far and opened up a spot in the hill high above the pumpkin patch. Alison was vaguely aware of the daylight coming in, and turned around to see what he was doing.

  2: Her iron pickaxe efficiently laid waste to the sandstone in front of her, and she mined without thinking while looking over her shoulder. She opened her mouth to yell at him to plug that hole so his mom wouldn’t see they’d been digging, but was overcome by heat and red light in front of her. She shielded her eyes and stumbled back, her eyes stinging from the pain.

  3: An arrow twanged into the wall on her right. The cave that she’d opened was apparently full of lava and at least one skeleton armed with a bow. Two more arrows followed the first one. Okay, definitely more than one skeleton, she amended.

  She scrambled backward, even as Max was calling her name again.

  “Ali, did you hear me? I found the pumpkin patch! We’re just above it!”

  Lava began to leak from the cave while more arrows bounced off the wall behind her. Skeletons began walking toward her, avoiding the lava but clearly intent on punishing Alison for breaking into their home uninvited.

  Alison got to her feet. She spared one final glance at the advancing mob of skeletons, then turned and barreled toward Max. He didn’t have a chance to ask any questions before she grabbed him by the arm and fled through the hole he’d created.

  * * *

  —

  “Maybe she won’t notice,” Max said, looking below them.

  From their safe perch atop a tree in the stand of oaks Max’s mom wanted to cut down, they looked across the pumpkin patch.

  Skeletons, at least twenty, patrolled the farm in the safety of the shaded area. They avoided the center of the patch, which now was nothing but a smoking pool of lava that smelled vaguely of burnt pumpkin pie. They wandered directly under Max and Alison, the only good news being that they couldn’t see the kids through the branches.

  “The only way for her to not notice is if you almost drown again,” Alison suggested, sitting with her knees up to her chin. “Think we can make that happen?”

  Max glared at her. “I’m not the o
ne who opened up the room to the lava and skeletons and fire and pain! And why didn’t you just plug the hole? You’re carrying enough blocks, aren’t you?”

  “See how fast you think when you’re dodging arrows and streaming lava!” she countered. “I was just trying to get away!”

  “Face it, Ali, you opened the way to that cavern and now Mom’s pumpkin patch is destroyed,” Max said.

  “You opened the hole in the hill,” she countered, but there wasn’t a lot of strength in her words. She was torn between rage at Max and fear that he was right. What would happen when his mom got home? Would she ground Max and kick Alison out? How could she ruin her host’s trust in her so much?

  “We could get rid of the skeletons before she gets home,” Max said thoughtfully. “Then we would only have the lava to deal with.”

  “Fight skeletons. In lava. You can’t even fight a sheep!” Alison said.

  Max went red. Ali didn’t often bring up the time when Okay the sheep had butted him in the back and tossed him into the water trough, but when she did, it got to him. He prided himself on being really good with the sheep, but that one just didn’t like him, and she made it known when she could.

  “Only ’cause I didn’t want you to have to explain to your dad why you’d brought home a bunch of wool and mutton that night,” he mumbled.