“They’re coming.”

Cheri turned pale as Tyler panted the news, exhausted from the sprint to the clubhouse.

The easy confidence that Tyler had come to associate with Cheri vanished in an instant. Dire as the situation was, Tyler felt a pang of guilt as he roused the girl from her relaxation. He hated bringing distress to her, hated that she had looked so comfortable before he’d gotten there, hated that his arrival was what messed that up.

He wanted to bring her good things.

Cheri got up quickly, doing the half-standing, half-floating thing she did when she was in a hurry. Her violet eyes flashed blue as she glanced around the clubhouse in a panic, then changed to a bright green as she gestured towards Emily and Tyler’s room. A moment later, her scarf came flying down from the loft, snaking its way to her outstretched hand.

“Thanks for letting me stay here, Tyler,” Cheri said as she wrapped the scarf around her face. “Tell Emily-”

“Wait.”

Cheri paused mid-sentence, turning to look at where Tyler was shifting the couches and blankets on the north side of the cushion pit. There was a lot of stuff on top of the trapdoor, by design, but it was also intentionally some of the lightest things to move that were fastened to the top of the hidden room’s entrance. He grabbed hold of the heavy metal ring that was bracketed to the top of the thick slab of wood, and groaned as he heaved the trapdoor up along with all the cushions and blankets that hid its form from the outside.

“In here,” Tyler said, gesturing to the stairway into the darkness.

Cheri frowned. “I appreciate the thought, and I really do want to stay, but if they have a sensor capable of determining where I am...I’m not sure hiding beneath the floor will do any good.”

That was hard to argue with. Tyler stared down the staircase silently, mind racing. He couldn’t let her leave just yet. There was still so much to learn, so much to say.

“They’re not looking for you,” Tyler said eventually. “Em thinks that Julia told the wizard police something bogus, so they’re coming out here to look for contraband or something.”

“Still…” Cheri said, looking torn.

Without thinking, Tyler took both her hands in his. Her eyes widened at the sudden contact, and his own face reddened, but when she didn’t pull away or look disgusted, Tyler pressed on.

“Stay, Cheri,” Tyler said. “I’ll...We’ll keep you safe. You’re one of us.”

She smiled sadly, and despite himself Tyler felt his heartbeat quicken. Everything about her was so beautiful. Her hair, her spirit, her smile. Even her sadness was resplendent.

“It’s nice of you to say that,” Cheri said, “but-”

She cut off as voices reached them from outside; loud, hostile tones muffled by a single layer of stained wood. Cheri went still as a statue, and Tyler felt something powerful in the air.

He’d never felt anything like it. It was...momentous. It felt like he was standing on the edge of something vast, something deep and grand. He knew, and he couldn’t say how or why he knew, but he knew that if he didn’t act, Cheri would vanish and she wouldn’t ever come back. The air grew heavy, and Tyler knew without a doubt that what he was feeling was the weight of destiny.

“Come with me,” Tyler said. “I won’t let-”

He cut off as Cheri flinched, her hands drawing away from his for the first time. Though she didn’t pull out of his grasp, that momentary withdrawal made him reconsider his words. 

I won’t let you go? Tyler thought. No, those are the wrong words. That’s not really how I feel.

“I don’t want you to go,” he finished lamely. “I don’t want you to be back out there, all alone. But you have to hide, now.”

He squeezed her hands once, then released them. It was ultimately her choice. Still, he knew that if it had been Emily in his place, she’d have been able to convince her. She’d have known what words to say. He felt the shakiness at the back of his throat that told him the tears were coming. The helpless, bitter emotion that surged forward heedless of his instructions. He closed his eyes, if only to hold back the flow of weakness for a moment longer.

But it was warmth that he next felt on his face, not wetness. His eyes flew open, and Cheri had her hands cupped on his cheeks, and she was staring straight at him with glowing violet eyes. The heat that rose in his face burned away the tears that had threatened him only moments before, but whatever Cheri was looking for in his gaze, she found.

“Okay then,” she said, a small smile on her face. “But do me a favor?”

Tyler nodded numbly.

“Hide with me?”

Every single word that Tyler had ever learned fled his brain at that moment, and so he simply nodded. Nodding seemed like a safe bet. Cheri took the stairs first, and Tyler followed her down, one hand idly rubbing the warmth left by her hand.

Once they’d reached the bottom of the stairs, Cheri turned to look back up to the clubhouse proper, until his closing of the trapdoor cloaked her face in shadows.

There weren’t any lights wired into the modified crawl space. On the rare occasions where the Clubhouse had needed to come down here, they’d made use of the flashlights kept in a box near the stairs, but that wasn’t an option this time. There was just barely enough light to see by filtering through the floorboards above, but that went both ways. If he turned on a flashlight, they could look down and see the glow.

So darkness it was. Just him and Cheri, alone in the dark.

Together.

Breathing the same air.

Dear God, Tyler thought. What was I thinking?

He felt the heat back in his face, and he pretended to check inside the cupboards built into the wall to give the feeling what he hoped was enough time to dissipate.

He knew there wasn’t much to enjoy inside the food storage area. Emily and Jay had stocked the safe room with the types of supplies that were more for emergencies than parties. Rice and grains, dry pasta, dehydrated fruits and vegetables in vacuum-sealed bags, beans, and salt took up most of the space in the cupboard, with a few recent additions, like Marika’s stock of tea-bags and Roman’s freeze-dried coffee. The cupboards on Cheri’s side of the room were packed with water, in gallon jugs and bottles, as well as first aid supplies and some basic camping gear. There was a phone sitting on a small nightstand near the staircase, only to be used in emergencies.

Tyler, who had only recently grown to a height where he couldn’t stand straight up in the smaller-than-average room, sank to a crouching position rather than tweak his neck trying to stand upright. He felt more than heard Cheri coming to join him by the cupboard.

“Can they hear us up there?”

Tyler shook his head. “Not if we stay relatively quiet. My sister did her best to soundproof it, but it’s not perfect. They could hear us if we yelled, probably?”

Cheri reached into the cupboard and removed one of the small bags of pasta. She turned it over in her hand, looking at it without seeming to read the packaging at all. Tyler had a sudden urge to put his arm around the girl’s shoulders, though he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. She didn’t seem particularly sad, outwardly at least, but the impulse to encourage her, to let her know things would be okay was almost overpowering.

Tyler was reaching toward her when Cheri spoke.

“They did all this, didn’t they? Jay and Emily, that is. Built the clubhouse, found all of you, helped you get better. Right?”

Tyler smiled. This, at least, was a relatively safe topic. “Yeah, they did. Mari and I were at the fringes, when it all began, but Jay and Emily started it all. The Club is their dream, brought to life.”

“Why do they do it?”

Tyler opened his mouth to answer, but found the words he’d chosen choked to silence by powerful emotion. This wasn’t how he’d expected his weekend to start. A message from his sister that the Vengeants were headed for the Clubhouse. An opportunity to hide in a cramped, hidden space with a beautiful wizard. And now…

“They do it because they’re scared,” Tyler said quietly. “They’re scared of the bad things that have happened, and not being ready for if they happen...when they happen again.”

“You’re talking about what happened to your mother.”

Tyler stiffened.

“Who told you?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper. It wouldn’t have been Jay or Emily, and Marika...she knew better. She knew where the line was, and she didn’t step across them so blatantly. Toed them, sometimes, but she wouldn’t do anything like this. 

The violet in Cheri’s eyes flashed once, as if in response, but she was spared from having to answer as heavy footfalls sounded through the ceiling. Cheri dropped the bag of pasta, her eyes widening. Her head snapped back towards the ceiling, and she sank slowly to the floor where she crouched, still as a statue.

The tones of loud conversation filtered through the wood to them, the words indistinguishable, but the tone harsh and combative. Cheri’s eyes were as wide as they could go, the whites of them showing as they darted about the ceiling despite not having anything to look at. It wasn’t until their violet glow returned that Tyler realized that someone looking at a lucky angle might be able to see the magical light.

“You’re right,” Tyler said. Cheri’s eyes jumped back to him. “Most of it goes back to my mom, and what happened four years ago.”

If the people up there could see them, or if they could sense magic, the best thing he could do for Cheri was keep her distracted, keep her calm. Even if that meant…

“I can feel it, you know,” Cheri said sadly. “The pain you feel, the fear Jay hides. The guilt Emily carries.”

He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to that. Honestly, he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. She didn’t make it sound like she was doing it on purpose. It would have felt like a betrayal of trust, an invasion of privacy, if she’d done it on purpose. That didn’t make him any less comfortable. So much of what he hated about himself was locked away, hidden as best he could. If Cheri could see it-

“I think you’re pretty amazing.”

If there hadn’t been just the two of them in the room, Tyler wouldn’t have believed that the quiet words had come from Cheri.

“Wha-” Tyler started, but cut himself off as he noticed he was talking at a little bit louder than normal volume. Cheri tensed, and Tyler continued more quietly. “What are you talking about? Why?”

Cheri was silent for long enough that Tyler thought she wasn’t going to answer.

“I come from a place where everyone has power,” Cheri said eventually. “It’s given to us at birth. No one has to work for it. I mean, sure some people get powers that are counter-intuitive, or difficult to understand, but they still just get them.

“Living the way we did, the way I did, you sort of just develop this mindset, that the Mundanes in the world, born without magic, would therefore be powerless. Helpless, weak, wretched things.”

“Ouch,” Tyler murmured, though he flashed Cheri a teasing smile as the girl turned to apologize.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Cheri said, a small smile touching her own thoughtful expression as she turned back around. “The opposite, actually. People in Avalon, and I assume the other Rainbow Nations, though I’ve never been, are...bad. Not necessarily all of them, and not terrible, not evil. We’re just...bad people. We take what we want when we think we can get away with it, and when magic enters the equation, that window of opportunity can become enticingly large.

“But the Mundane people don’t have that window of opportunity. You have to work and scrape and struggle for every iota of power you get and…”

She paused like she was searching for the right words.

“It makes you better people. Stronger, kinder, gentler. It draws other people in, and encourages them to become better people too. It’s why everyone wants to follow people like Emily. People like my father.”

Tyler’s eyebrows shot up. He’d never heard Cheri mention her family before. Since she was a runaway, Tyler had always assumed that her family was a sore topic, and no one ever really brought it up.

“What does he do?” Tyler asked, when Cheri didn’t continue. “Your father.”

Cheri turned around again, and she had a cautious look on her face.

“Can you keep a secret?” Cheri asked, her stare regaining a measure of the intensity it had shown earlier.

Taken aback by the sudden gravity of the conversation, Tyler nodded dumbly.

“He’s-”

A crash from the floor above made them both jump. Tyler froze, looking up towards the ceiling while Cheri jumped to her feet. The violet light shone in Cheri’s eyes again, but rather than the hesitant glow that she’d shown earlier, this time it blazed, a nimbus that flickered and jumped like fire. She searched the ceiling like she was looking through a window, and her brow furrowed in confusion.

If there was a chance the light could be seen from below before, it was barely less than a certainty now.

“Cheri-” Tyler began, but she cut off as she saw the alarm on Cheri’s face.

“Didn’t you say there were going to be Rainbow Cabal wizards coming?”

“Emily said so, yes, but you really need-”

The girl wasn’t listening. The light in her eyes flashed red, and she leapt, slamming into the trapdoor with a resounding crash, tearing the latch from the wood and flinging the heavy wooden slab open with enough force that one of the hinges came loose. Cheri barely seemed to feel the impact, continuing upward and into the clubhouse.

Tyler’s mouth fell open, and he stared at the ruined trapdoor for a few seconds before remembering what was going on and scrambling up the stairs after Cheri.

“What…?” Cheri said, trailing off as her forehead wrinkled in confusion. “What is this?”

The ground floor of the Tryhard Clubhouse had undergone a transformation in the ten minutes or so that he and Cheri had been in the safe room. Tyler found it difficult to not gape. Streamers were pinned to nearly every free rafter, and what must have been nearly two hundred balloons had been blown up and set loose near the ceiling.

The space where the whiteboard and other practice equipment was normally stored, in the alcove beneath Emily and Tyler’s room, was dominated by a table laden with sweets and party snacks, far more than what existed in their typical storage. Overhead hung a massive banner, hastily constructed but still pretty impressive considering how much of a last ditch effort it was.

It read, “Welcome to the Tryhard Club!”, with periodic smaller scribbling along its length with messages like, “Cheri, you rock!” and “Tryhard Club’s first wizard!”

Emily, Marika, Jay, and Roman were arrayed in front of the banner, each wearing the silly red and black Tryhard Club t-shirts Roman had printed for everyone on the anniversary of his joining. They featured a thick, black “TC” on the front, with each member’s name printed on the back, across the shoulders.

Cheri wasn’t the only one who was confused. A turbulent mixture of emotions stirred inside Tyler. It had been a trick. To get Cheri out of the Clubhouse for long enough that they could set up the party. Emily had lied to him, to make it just a little more convincing.

Roman looked a little taken aback by Cheri’s dramatic exit from the safe room, but if the older members were surprised, they didn’t show it. Emily stood tall, her hands planted on her hips as she nodded once. At the signal, Jay and Marika produced two articles of clothing and approached Cheri, Marika with a mischievous grin and Jay with his gentler, encouraging smile.

“Why?” she asked, her voice uncharacteristically small.

Jay clapped Cheri on the shoulder. “Em told me she was getting the feeling that you didn’t really think you were one of us yet. We wanted to make it official.”

Tyler took his place with the rest of the Tryhard Club as Jay held out a shirt, this one printed with Cheri’s name. The wizard girl took it in both hands, letting it unfold so she could see the club’s initials, then crumpling it up and bringing it to her face. At first Tyler thought she was smelling it, until he saw the slight shake in Cheri’s shoulders, heard the muted sniffling through the cloth.

Marika stepped up, lightly tapping one fist on the top of Jay’s head. “You made her cry, brute.”

She held a wizard hat in her hands, the cliched fantasy variety that Tyler hadn’t ever seen an actual wizard wear. It had the same color scheme as the shirts, mostly red with black trim, and had a comically wide brim with a high, pointed tip. When Cheri didn’t react quickly enough, Marika reached up and put the hat on the girl’s head, pulling it down low enough that the brim covered her eyes.

Cheri made an odd choking sound, which Tyler only recognized as a giggle once the girl had fought the mirth up through her tears. With the shirt hanging over one arm, she gripped the edge of the hat, pulling it down lower so it covered most of her face.

“Thank you, guys,” she said, her voice somewhat muffled by the hat. “This means...more than you would believe.” She stopped and sniffed once, hard. “And I’m sorry about the trapdoor.”

Emily clicked her tongue. “It’s not your fault. I told Roman not to antagonize you, not when you thought wizards might be here searching for you. He didn’t listen, so he’ll be reattaching the trapdoor, by himself.”

Roman scowled, mumbling something under his breath. Tyler couldn’t quite make it out, but she was pretty sure it was something along the lines of, “It was still funny.”

Jay and Marika stepped off to either side as Emily walked forward to meet Cheri. It was strange, seeing the way the normally confident wizard girl always seemed to shrink when she directly faced Emily. Not that Tyler was any different, of course. There was an intensity to his sister, something that forced you to take her seriously, made you want to stand straighter, act better. He was just surprised that it affected someone as uniquely powerful as Cheri seemed to be.

“Here in the Tryhard Club,” Emily said, “it doesn’t matter where you began. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, or who you were before. As long as you’re willing to put in everything you have, every day, and do whatever you can to help others do the same...You’re a tryhard. You’re one of us. This place will be a haven to you for as long as you’ll do us the service of staying here. A home.”

She extended a hand.

Cheri hesitated for a moment, then reached out and clasped hands with Emily. Her free hand, the one holding the shirt, reached up and wiped her eyes quickly and when it returned to her side, there was no sign of the emotion she’d displayed earlier. Only that confidence, that fierce pride.

“I think I’ll stick around,” she said, the nonchalance in the words undermined by the glowing smile on her face. “You guys still have a lot to learn, after all.”

“Hear, hear,” Emily said, tapping on foot against the ground in time with the words, as was tradition. Tyler and the rest of the club echoed the words, stomping twice as they did. When Cheri still looked uncertain, Emily reached up and tapped one fist on the top of the girl’s head, like Mari had done to Jay earlier. A gentle reprimand.

“You do it now, too,” she said gently.

Cheri smiled even wider, the tears spilling out down her cheeks once again.

“Hear, hear,” she mumbled, tapping her foot uncertainly.

The girl jumped as the entire rest of the club burst into applause, Roman producing a remote and pointing it at the stereo system that was installed at the rear of the clubhouse.

“And now, we party!” he crowed as lively pop music began to play over the speakers.

After that, it was much like any other night at the Tryhard Club. The weekend loomed ahead, and everyone danced and sang and laughed, enjoying good food and better company. The highlight of the evening came when Roman, a little hyped up on all the sugar and relative lack of supervision, decided it was time to give Cheri what he called a “proper initiation.” The girl had been in the middle of a conversation with Emily about the various kinds of magic when Roman, half in cover behind one of the couches in the cushion pit, had hurled a pillow at her, scoring a clean hit to the side of her head.

What followed was one of the most brutal pillow-fight massacres that Tyler had ever witnessed. As Cheri rounded on him, Roman had brandished one of the heftier cushions, one that he frequently claimed was the mightiest pillow weapon in the clubhouse’s arsenal. His confidence had vanished quickly, though, as Cheri tore the pillow from his grip from nearly fifteen feet away and began pummeling him mercilessly, all without getting any closer. Every time Roman would get his balance together enough to crawl to another nearby pillow, Cheri would pick it up as well, adding it to the assault until she was simultaneously wielding eight pillows. After a few minutes of laughing at the spectacle, Marika and Tyler joined in, coming to Roman’s aid, and it devolved into nearly an hour of chaotic pillow combat.

A little after midnight, things began to wind down. Marika bid everyone farewell and exited to her room to get some sleep, and Roman had passed out unceremoniously in the cushion pit, snoring loudly. Jay was making the rounds, doing little bits of spot cleaning to make sure nothing would be irreparably stained before the more serious cleaning effort began in the morning. Cheri was helping gather used plates and scattered pillows, though she wasn’t using her magic to do it.

Tyler thought things had gone well. All the same he was somewhat miffed at his unwitting role. He spotted his sister climbing the ladder to their room, and followed her up, pausing only to slide their door closed behind him.

She turned to face him, a bottle of spray cleaner in one hand and a package of paper towels in the other. If she was surprised to see him, she didn’t let it show on her face.

Nothing ever seemed to make its way to her face without her wanting it there.

On the other hand, whatever was on his own face must have been as obvious to Emily’s eyes as her own expression was inscrutable to Tyler’s.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but you know it had to be that way.”

“Really? It had to?”

Emily laughed, the sound painfully hollow to Tyler’s ears. It sounded natural to some, to those who hadn’t known her before what happened, but he still remembered the way she used to laugh. The difference was plain to his ear.

“You’re a terrible liar, Ty.”

“I am not!” Tyler said hotly.

“Okay,” Emily said. “Tell me you don’t like her.”

His jaw dropped, half a dozen sentences starting to his lips and then ending at their first syllable. A knowing smile appeared on Emily’s lips as he stuttered.

“I meant it, when I said I was sorry,” Emily said once he’d given up. “It’s just sort of hard to get one up on her, y’know? And I felt like we needed to ambush her with this, or she wouldn’t accept it.”

Tyler knew she was right. God, but wasn’t she always right? The bitterness in the thought took him by surprise, but rather than retreating from it, he sank into it.

“Just because you’re right,” Tyler said, speaking slowly to keep his voice even, “doesn’t mean you have the right. You assume you know better, and that gives you the right to manipulate me?”

A flicker of something real passed over Emily’s face, but it was there and gone too fast for Tyler to recognize it. She crossed the room, hauling the door open with the hand that held the spray cleaner, and then paused on the threshold.

“I don’t know any better, Ty,” she said, her back still turned. “Every day since...since that day, I’ve felt like I’m drowning. Barely too tired to tread water, barely too buoyant to sink. No land in sight. I don’t…”

Emily trailed off, and Tyler could almost believe he heard a tremble to her voice.

She turned back to him, and for the first time in four years, the emotion on her face was laid bare. Pain, like the pain he’d felt in the days following Mom’s death, like the pain Dad had shared with him as they’d grieved together. Only Emily hadn’t grieved with them.

“Em,” Tyler began, “you don’t-”

“Emily!”

Both of them jumped as Jay’s shout reached them. It bore an edge of gravity, the type of tone that had no place at the end of a night of partying and joy. The look on Emily’s face, that rare, fleeting vulnerability, vanished in an instant, as if all it took was that one reminder of the world below to banish the emotion.

She rushed back to the ladder without another word, and Tyler felt the weight of another powerful moment, only this one he’d missed.

He took his time following his sister down the ladder and towards the barn’s exterior door. After all, what could be happening that could require Emily’s attention, but also somehow benefit from his own immediate attention?

His thoughts were a bittersweet mess, a conflicted mixture of the time spent alone with Cheri, the party afterward, and the painful interaction after that. He was so consumed in that roiling storm that he almost knocked Cheri from her feet as they attempted to pass through the barn’s door at the same time.

“God, I’m so sorry!” Tyler cried, reaching out to steady the wizard girl. There was more to his apology, but those words fled him when he got a better look at her.

There were tears in her eyes.

Before he could ask what had happened, before he could ask what was wrong, her eyes flashed green and she took to the air, flying straight up into his and Emily’s room and disappearing within it. The door rolled closed behind her, lock clicking. 

Fear burning in his gut, Tyler sprinted through the door, all thoughts as to his own inadequacy vanishing along with the sight of Cheri’s tear-stained face. He heard Emily and Jay’s voices around the edge of the barn, and he ran around the corner towards them with his heart pounding.

And stumbled to a stop.

Marika stood a short distance away, eyes trained on the shadowed treeline. Jay and Emily stood next to the exterior wall of the barn, the former turning to regard him with a reproachful look and the latter staring at the wall, eyes unfocused like she wasn’t truly seeing.

Beyond them, just between the two, someone had written on the wood of the barn. Each letter was one foot high, written in an unmistakable red liquid so fresh that thin, crimson rivers ran down from each. Two lines, two thoughts, separated by where a bloody handprint and a gleaming machete were embedded into the wood.

NO HOME. NO HAVEN.

I FOUND YOU.