Jane's bedroom door slams. She leans against it, out of breath, red package clutched to her chest, hair destroyed by smoke and urgency. The room is exactly as she left it. The cakes are exactly where they were. The Minecraft movie poster gleams on the wall, freshly nailed, proud of itself.
She holds the package out in front of her like an offering.
No one responds. She is alone. This was not the triumphant moment she'd planned, and it is exactly the triumphant moment she needed.
She tears the packaging open and looks at the game. The case is physical — an actual disc case, which already makes it a relic in 2025. The title is printed across the top in block letters that someone clearly put a lot of effort into:
A beat. She stares at it a little longer. Tilts it slightly, like she can read something between the badly drawn pixels.
Every device in the room responds simultaneously. Her phone, her computer, an old tablet on the dresser she hasn't used since 2022 — all of them light up at once with the energy of people who have been waiting for this exact moment and will not tolerate further delays.
They all open it at the same time.
Jane in her bedroom, surrounded by cakes. Keith in his room, wherever that is. Claire by her window with the power out and rain on the glass. Colby at his desk, affecting indifference so precisely it's almost an art form.
Four packages. Four simultaneous tears of packaging. Four discs inserted into four separate machines in four separate rooms that are suddenly, impossibly, connected by something the packaging definitely did not warn about.
The light starts from the cases. Faint at first — the kind of glow you'd explain away as screen reflection. But it doesn't stop. It grows, steady and white and total, until the walls of Jane's room are gone and the cakes are gone and the Minecraft poster is gone and there is nothing left but the light, and the feeling of the floor disappearing.
Jane falls.
Not like tripping — like falling through a floor that was never really there. And it's all four of them, she somehow knows this, all four of them falling through the same black void, through something that sounds like a note too low to be a sound and too long to be silence, through the absence of everything that was familiar, toward whatever's next.
[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
The light returns slowly. Gold, this time. Warm the way October is never actually warm.
Jane is lying face-down in a field. She can feel the ground before she can see it — solid, real, smelling like soil and something sweet she doesn't have a word for. When she opens her eyes there are flowers everywhere. Sunflowers, all of them, in every direction, reaching higher than they should, their heads turned toward a sky that is blue in a way that no sky she's ever looked at has quite managed.
She sits up. Rubs her head. Looks at her hands. Still her hands.
She looks around. The field goes on and on, and beyond it — at the horizon — something else. Buildings, maybe. Or structures. Something that is definitively not New Jersey, where she was thirty seconds ago.
The sky here is the wrong color for October. The sunflowers are the wrong height for anything. The world has the feeling of a dream that hasn't decided yet whether it wants to be a good one.
The sunflowers sway in a wind that comes from no direction in particular. The sky says nothing. The horizon continues being the horizon.
Jane Miller — amateur exorcist, bad movie enthusiast, proud hammer owner, nineteen years old as of today — stands up slowly in a field that should not exist and looks at a world she has never seen.
She gets the feeling this is going to take a while.
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