by Mur Lafferty
“When will we sleep?”
He shrugged. “I dunno, but you’re not sleeping now, are you?”
He had a point. She crafted some new tools, got some torches, and they went into the hill to get back to work.
* * *
—
The real tragedy of it all was that their next “incident” wasn’t nearly as bad as flooding the farm with lava and skeletons. It was a minor mistake, really.
They’d misread Alison’s map. When they found a cave, Max went in to check for mobs while Alison tried to update the map. The cave was massive, at least twenty blocks deep at its deepest level. They’d have to carve in some steps to get around, but it wouldn’t be a problem.
But Max always wanted to see what was on the other side, so he insisted on carving out an exit once they’d decided the cave was safe. Alison stared at the map, puzzled, then recognized their mistake too late: they were much closer to the surface than they had originally realized. They broke through and sunlight streamed in.
And after the sunlight, the sheep streamed in.
They had broken through the base of the hill straight into a ranch. Alison recognized it immediately; it belonged to Mr. Hatch, her family’s neighbor. She could see his sheep pens, and beyond that, her own sheep pen that he had so graciously offered to help watch for her. This is all she saw, however, before the frightened sheep did the thing that frightened sheep always did.
First, startled by the sudden appearance of two humans popping out of the hill, they ran in the opposite direction. Fuzzy black and white tails waved at Alison as they scrambled for safety. Then, of course, they hit their pen’s fence. Unsure of where to run, they ran along the fence looking for a way out. Which eventually brought them back toward Alison and Max, standing stupidly in the mouth of the exit they’d just created.
Alison stepped aside quickly as they neared, but Max stayed in front of the hole.
“Get out of the way!” she shouted.
“We can’t let them into the cave, they’ll fall and we’ll never find them!” Max said, spreading his arms.
“But they will run you over!” Alison said, grabbing his arm.
He shook her off. “Sheep like me.”
Alison faced the choice of whether to stand with her friend and take the fall like he would inevitably do, or jump aside and save herself.
When she remembered that if she didn’t save herself, no one would be around to find their sheep-trampled bodies, she jumped at the last minute. Max stood there, one arm outstretched to cover the hole, one arm extended, holding a piece of wheat.
The lead sheep, an old ewe named Belle (because she was the bellwether—Mr. Hatch was about as creative with naming as her father had been) grabbed the wheat from Max right before she pushed past him and they both tumbled into the darkness.
Alison was prepared; she’d already taken out her pickaxe. She rammed it into the granite beside her and held on with one hand, then reached out and grabbed Max’s arm with the other. She wasn’t strong enough to pull him up by herself, but she held on tight and used his falling momentum to swing him to where he could grab the ledge himself.
Max held on as more sheep tumbled in. Their bleating echoed throughout the cave. Alison anchored a torch to the wall and used both hands to help pull Max up.
“Sheep like you, huh?” Alison asked.
“Shut up,” Max said, and looked down. “They look okay…” he said doubtfully.
The sheep had only fallen about four blocks. Belle was limping but the others looked fine. Alison guessed they had all fallen on Belle and bounced off. The bigger problems were getting them out of the hole and keeping them from falling into a crevasse Alison had just noticed in the corner of the cave.
“Max, did you check out that hole over there?” she asked, pointing.
Max squinted. “No, I didn’t see it until now.”
“So, it could have skeletons, or zombies, or creepers.”
“It could also have more sheep,” Max said defensively.
“Sheep don’t come from caves!” Alison said. For someone who claimed to be good with sheep, he definitely didn’t know a lot about the silly creatures.
Belle had started bleating more forcefully, her panic rising. The other sheep milled around her, taking their cues from her and adding their own panic to the mix. The echoes in the cave only made it worse.
“We need to get them out of here before Mr. Hatch finds us,” Alison said. “Come on, let’s build some stairs for them.”
They didn’t have the time or the resources to make actual stairs, so they had to make do with staggered blocks they hoped the sheep would walk up. Their rudimentary “stairs” were two blocks wide, making a steep walkway. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as simple as just asking the sheep to hop up the stairs and back to their pen. The animals were already terrified, and ran from Max and Alison. When they tried to herd the sheep onto the steps, they clustered underneath instead.
“Do you have any more wheat?” Alison asked, exasperated.
“None,” Max said.
“All right. Keep them away from that hole; I’m going home to get some wheat. I’ll be right back.”
Alison reached the top of their stairs and jumped into the pen, where she ran straight into a sturdy body. She looked up, dreading the worst.
“Um. Hi, Mr. Hatch. We found your sheep.”
* * *
—
Max regretted messing with Alison’s map. She needed another win, another way to feel useful, and it shouldn’t involve really dangerous things. So he’d just “altered” the map to make them come out at Mr. Hatch’s ranch. She could be a hero saving the sheep, and get some confidence back.
But everything had gone wrong, and Alison became a real hero when she’d saved him from falling backward into a cave and being buried under sheep.
Max’s mom was taking no prisoners now. This situation wasn’t nearly as bad as dumping lava and skeletons into the garden, but apparently any mistake you make after lava and skeletons is a very bad mistake, Max thought bitterly.
Luckily, after their last adventure, he had thought to remove his secret from the hiding place in the workshop. Since he was in charge of repairing the garden, he had buried it underneath some pumpkins he’d planted.
That turned out to be a brilliant idea, since this time Max’s mom found the workshop. She took their tools, their workbench, their furnace, and began methodically tearing down Alison’s tower, block by block.
Alison had asked tearfully if she was being kicked out, and Max’s mom stopped raging and said calmly, “Of course not, dear. Very little could make me that angry. You will sleep in Max’s room for now.”
She went back to work tearing down the tower.
“My room is pretty small, Mom,” Max ventured. “Why don’t we both move into the tower?”
His mom fixed him with such a glare that he stopped talking.
True to her word, she put a bed in Max’s bedroom opposite his own, and then began building a wall down the center of the room. She put a door in her own bedroom wall so Alison could get in and out—and so Alison couldn’t sneak around at night without going past her.
“Be good for a week,” she said through the open door as Max sat on his bed, “and I’ll give you two a window to talk through. Be good for a month and you get a door. Show me you’re trustworthy for a year and the wall will go away. Two years and I might rebuild the tower.”
A year. Two years. So much could happen in that time. He might die of boredom. But as he flopped back onto his bed, he thought that he’d learned his lesson: Mom was not on board with mining behind the house.
He caught Alison at the breakfast table the next morning tapping her fingers, and he realized she was counting blocks in her head. His mom was at the furnace, cooking breakfast, her back to them.
“What are you planning on doing? You’re not going in there again, are you?” he whispered.
“I have to,” she said.
“You’ll get us thrown into a cage! Just wait a while to let her cool down. What’s so important that you’re getting right back down to making her mad?”
Alison’s face flushed. “I’m making armor. I want to make a set of really, really good armor.”
“What?” Max thought the goal was a cool one, but not enough to endanger them and risk his mother’s wrath. “Why do you have to do that? Why is it so important? Is it for you?”
She shook her head, and he was shocked to see her eyes fill with tears. He gave a panicked look at his mom’s back, and then leaned closer. “What did I say? What’s wrong?”
“It’s for her.”
“For who?” Max asked, frowning.
Alison glanced at his mom. “Her.” A tear dripped down her face. “I can’t lose another parent, Max. I owe her everything. I want her to be safe when she’s traveling around all alone. If I get better at crafting I can give her a set of armor to wear when she goes into town, and that can thank her for taking care of me.”
Max wanted to take her hand and comfort her. He wanted to shout at her that he was fairly certain his mom would rather Alison just be a regular safe kid and not endanger her life to protect his mom from an imagined threat. He wanted to sit back and just be confused that this, this weird thing, was driving his rules-abiding friend into a life of disobedience. And he realized that they had more in common than he’d thought.
What he did do was pass her his napkin so she could wipe her tears. His mom turned around and brought a plate of eggs to the table.
“Alison, what’s wrong?” she asked, spying Alison wiping her eyes.
“The thing that’s usually wrong,” she said, smiling slightly. “Sometimes it just hits me.”
Max’s mom leaned over and hugged her, which only made her cry harder.
* * *
—
Alison was strangely quiet for the next few weeks of their punishment, nearly back to how she was when she first moved in, grief-stricken and alone. Max wished he could talk to her privately, but his mom kept one of them with her at all times. She took Alison with her to help retrieve Mr. Hatch’s sheep and to fix the holes in his farm.
She took Max with her to the village, leaving Alison and Francine at home and making him carry her pack (meaning he couldn’t carry his own). He got to see his dad and the building project he was working on, but this time around he found that visiting with Dad wasn’t a treat, since he was even angrier than Mom had been.
He asked Alison if she had been mining during these times alone, but she shook her head.
Their punishment included Alison helping Max’s mom plan the details of her upcoming projects, while Max grudgingly helped his mom with her designs.
They were busy, that was for sure, but they were also miserable.
After one week, true to her word, Max’s mom came in with a pickaxe—one of Alison’s fine iron ones, Max noticed—and knocked a hole in the wall between them. She left the mess for them to clean up, but they finally were allowed to talk in private.
“I’ve got an idea,” Max said, standing by the window and looking through to Alison lying with her back to him on the bed.
“What is it?” she said flatly, rolling over and staring at the ceiling. “I need to get back to making things. I just…need to.”
“I think she’ll be okay, Ali. You remember how she took care of that skeleton?”
“What’s your idea?” she asked, ignoring him. “Does it include waiting till she stops being mad?”
“Eh, she’s already over it,” he said, waving off the concern. He was too excited to worry about anything right now. “I have something I want to show you.”
Alison tucked her knees to her chin, rolling herself into a tiny ball. “No, Max. She is definitely not over it. She won’t forget what we did to her garden, and the next time we mess up, she will remember the sheep and the garden. We have to be more careful.”
“You’re right, there. But I’m not talking about mining, or even crafting,” he said. He hesitated a moment, then slid a book into the window, resting it in the cavity of the missing block. “I’m talking about so much more.”
That, at least, got her attention.
* * *
—
Max passed his precious find through the window reverently, as if it were breakable. The journal was bound in cracked brown leather. A rough circle with two dots in the center was burned into the cover, and the whole thing looked handmade. Alison grabbed it and opened it to a random page: it was filled with scribbles having to do with potion recipes the author had experimented with.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, running her finger down the page and squinting at some crossed-out parts.
“I found it in a cabin,” he said. “Remember when you asked where I got the obsidian to fix your sheep pen?” She nodded, still studying the messy writing. “The obsidian wasn’t the only thing I found.”
She flipped another page carefully. “There’s a lot crossed out here. Or just missing.”
“I figure it’s a book of experiments—some of them didn’t work.”
Alison flipped back to the recipe for the potion of water breathing. “See, this one says it’s for water breathing, but the recipe listed here isn’t one I’ve ever seen before. I don’t know all the uses for fermented spider eyes, but I do know they aren’t used for a lot of beneficial spells or potions.”
Max leaned as far as he could through the hole in the wall, frowning. “I didn’t know that.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Max, that was in our basic potions class. How can you be interested in enchanting and brewing and not know that?”
“That was a long time ago, and it was really boring,” he said defensively. “And besides, the book still has a lot of cool stuff in it regardless. Keep reading.”
“Okay, so there are some potions in here that look like they work. And some detailed enchanting information. Oh, this is good.” Max made himself be quiet while she read, only bouncing slightly as he waited. He was hoping she would find the best part before he had to point it out, but she stayed on an enchanting page, which talked about weapons and armor. “Max, do you realize that with this book, I could make armor and you could enchant it? We could enchant weapons!” Her voice was starting to get that curious excitement that he knew always came before she agreed to one of his schemes.
“I know!” he said. “But keep looking. It gets better.”
“What is better than an enchanted sword?” she asked, but kept turning the pages. “An enchanted helmet,” she muttered to herself as she read.
Max waited for her to get closer to the back of the book to find the sketch. The earlier pages had been sloppy and haphazard, but this page looked like an entirely different person had written it. The script was small, precise, with clear measurements and a detailed sketch of a large rectangle surrounded by cubes of obsidian. In the center of the rectangle was a flaming bowl. The rectangle had been filled in with swirls; you couldn’t see beyond the structure, even though it didn’t look like it contained any blocks.
Below the sketch were three words.
She looked up at Max. “Is this for real?”
“There is only one way to find out!” he said, grinning widely.
Alison looked back down at the book and ran her finger over the words.
PORTAL TO NETHER
A STICK, A PICKAXE, AND ADVENTURE
What Max and Alison knew about the Nether:
According to school, it was a forbidden, mysterious place, and the kids weren’t really sure why it was so secret since no one would tell them how to get there in the first place.
According to Max’s
parents, it was a myth that deranged adventurers told as they wandered through town.
According to Alison’s Grandma Dia, it was a word you didn’t say unless you wanted a very long lecture about spreading falsehoods, and about the price of not being prepared, and she would talk so long that Alison would wonder only much later why you needed to be prepared to visit a place that wasn’t real.
And according to every reference book they could find, it was a chapter that was often torn out, but sometimes not removed from the table of contents.
And, on the topic of everyday word usage, Alison had once wondered: If they lived in the Overworld, what exactly was it over, anyway?
So, what they figured out was: It was definitely a place. It was definitely dangerous. And it was hard to get to—or at least hard to figure out how to get to.
Thus Max, of course, thought that they definitely had to go.
* * *
—
Alison insisted on waiting another week—until Max’s mom had officially allowed them to go out of the house together—before they snuck out again. She wouldn’t bend on this, and Max couldn’t go without her; he had little skill with crafting and he’d need her help with some repairs to things in the cabin. The fact that she wouldn’t just break the rules right away annoyed him to a level he hadn’t known she could achieve.
He dealt with his feelings by avoiding her for the last few days of their punishment. This wasn’t hard because his mom still kept them busy and apart.
Alison politely waited for him to cool off. She knew he’d come back around; he just wanted the adventure right now. Secretly, Alison couldn’t blame him, but she just couldn’t afford to push Max’s mom any further. The chore of coaxing (and in some cases lifting and carrying) Mr. Hatch’s sheep from the cave had been enough of a pain to cause her to tread lightly in their next excursion.
