"This even looks like one of the maps I played in the game." Cora took a slow look around as Syala, the last to touch down, dropped to her knees and pressed her palms against the ground.

"I don't want to ever do that again," she whispered.

Zilaka crouched beside her and gave her a hug.

"Could whoever's doing this to us access your memories of the game and use them to construct a battlezone?" Dylan rested his hand on Syala's shoulder and glanced over at Cora.

"We'd have to be plugged into a computer network for all of us to appear in the same battlezone, so I don't see why not." Cora grimaced. "If this is based on the game I'm thinking of, the 'gameplay' area will be restricted periodically. A wall of electricity will start at the edge of the map and close in on all the players, so we'll have to keep ahead of it or we'll be fried."

"That'll force everyone here to converge on one spot, then." Syala squeezed her eyes shut and contorted her face as she tried not to burst into tears. "We won't be able to hide somewhere and wait for everyone else to finish each other off."

"I hope our abductors didn't pick that particular detail from my memories, but if they did, we'll try our best to avoid everyone else as we approach the center. If we're lucky, there'll only be a few other people left by then."

"The downside of that," Grishnag grumbled, "is that the few still alive at the end will be better fighters than everyone else."

"Not necessarily," Nishara said. "I can see how blind luck might play a part in this."

"Then may fortune smile upon us." Syala stood, gave Zilaka and Dylan a kiss, and held their hands as everyone walked toward a small house with a rusted-out truck with missing wheels beside it.

"Approach the house carefully," Cora said, "in case someone else got to it first." She pointed at a cliff in the distance. "If we can find what we need here, we'll see if we can make our way up to the top of that cliff. We'll be able to see others approaching, and get out of their line of fire by just backing away from the edge."

"Sounds good." Grishnag crept past a clothesline with laundry swaying in the hot breeze.

Cora scanned the house and the one beside it for heat signatures and found none. But then, when they'd first arrived here, she hadn't detected the copper-armored goons in time to prevent everyone's first deaths. She turned her head back and forth, trying to keep her optics on both houses and the cliff in case someone else had already claimed the high ground.

Grishnag reached the front door, cocked her right fist back, and pushed it open. She darted out of the doorway, waited a moment, and then leaned through to give the front room a quick visual sweep. She turned back to the others and whispered, "Looks clear. Well, the living room does, at least."

A sharp pop came from the right, near the cliffs, and the left side of Grishnag's head burst and splattered the door. Everyone stared in shock as her body slumped against the door frame and toppled over, coming to rest on the porch. Cora recovered first, ran to Syala, Zilaka, and Dylan, and shoved them toward the door.

"Everyone inside! Now!"