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“I know,” Stella said, and licked her top lip the way we always do when we’re stressed. “I think we’ll have to run away with him.”

  So we took out the three-seater bicycle Dad had built for us himself for our ninth birthday, put Dad in the basket he’d attached on the handlebars for our schoolbags, and started pedaling toward the fields. It was a hot day and we forgot to take water with us, but Stella said that we absolutely could not go home. Of the four of us, Dad looked the thirstiest, but also the happiest. He was always the one who most liked going on outings, and Ella begged us to go back and get him some water, but Stella and I insisted that we had to keep going.

  Ella was insulted and said that if we didn’t turn around she wouldn’t help us pedal, and that almost turned into a fight. But all of a sudden, in the middle of a cornfield, Stella saw a faucet and I managed to turn it on, even though it was rusty, and Dad stood on his hind legs and drank tons of water. He got all wet but looked like he didn’t care at all. Then Stella gave him an ear of corn, which is Dad’s favorite food, and he gobbled it down in an instant. That, of all times, was when Ella started to cry, saying that maybe Mom was right and that rabbit had come into our house for no reason and wasn’t our father at all. When Ella said that, Dad stopped eating the corn and went over to her. She was sitting in the mud, crying, and Dad put both his soft paws on her and licked her. At first Ella was a little scared, but then she started to laugh because his tongue tickled, and when she laughed, we laughed along with her. “Dad is the only one who knows how to make us laugh this way,” Stella said, and even though Ella didn’t say anything and her face was still wet with tears, I could see from the way she stroked Dad’s fur that she knew Stella was right.

  At that moment, behind Ella’s back, right next to the path, I saw the corn leaves move. At first, I thought it was the wind, but there was no wind that day. It was someone coming toward us who was moving the leaves. I couldn’t see his face, but from the movement, I guessed he was much taller than us, as tall as Mom, maybe even as tall as the man from the pet store, whom I hadn’t liked from the first time Mom took us to his shop. The cages there always looked dirty, and except for a glowing purple fish, I never saw a happy-looking animal in his shop. I wanted to tell Stella and Ella that someone was coming, but fear paralyzed me. I knew that if they looked at me, they would realize right away that we were in danger, but they were too busy petting Dad.

  When the mysterious walker appeared from among the corn stalks, Stella pressed Dad to her chest and Ella and I stood in front of her. Dad’s nose quivered and his eyes blinked nervously, and it was clear that he was afraid, too. The walker was a tall, skinny boy with huge teeth and pimples on his face, and he was holding a rabbit, too, but his rabbit was plump and had white spots all over its brown body. The boy with the huge teeth stood there and looked at us without saying a word. Dad squirmed in Stella’s arms, as if he knew the plump rabbit from somewhere and wanted to talk to him, or at least sniff him, but Stella held Dad tight so he couldn’t jump down. “What do you think you’re looking at?” she asked the boy, in her scariest voice.

  “I don’t know,” the boy said, “I just . . . never saw three girls who looked exactly alike.”

  “And what are you even doing here?” I asked, but in a voice a lot quieter and nicer than Stella’s.

  “Nothing,” the boy with huge teeth said, shrugging. “We were on the way back to my grandma’s house when it started to get hot and we remembered that there was a water faucet here.”

  “We remembered?” Ella asked.

  “Yes,” the boy with the huge teeth smiled and pointed to the head of the plump rabbit he was holding in his arms, “my Dad’s a rabbit, too.”

  ROBBIE

  On the morning of his birthday, Robbie got out of bed and discovered, in the living room next to the colorfully wrapped presents, that his dad had turned into a rabbit. He recognized his dad right away from the limp, but Robbie’s mom, just like ours, didn’t believe him.

  Robbie’s father was an officer in the army. His job was to defuse bombs. Robbie always thought that it was the most annoying and thankless job, because if you do it right, nothing happens, and if you do it wrong, not only do people say you did a lousy job but you get blown to bits. But Robbie’s dad loved his job. A few years ago, he couldn’t defuse a mortar shell some kid found in a strawberry field, and when it exploded, Robbie’s dad caught a piece of shrapnel in his leg and has been limping ever since. When he got out of the hospital, his commanders wanted to transfer him to another job, but he insisted on staying. “It’s not like I have to run after the bombs,” he explained to Robbie and his mom, who also wanted him to take a different job. When Robbie’s mom tried to convince his dad, saying that the new job would be just as interesting, Robbie’s dad smiled and said, “Defusing a bomb is like solving a riddle, and you know there’s nothing in the world I love more than solving riddles.”

  On the morning of Robbie’s last birthday, there was no cake and no party; nothing but a fat rabbit with a limp in their backyard. That whole day, Robbie’s mom sat next to the phone, talked to people and cried, and that same evening, the police declared Robbie’s dad a missing person. Robbie asked his mom to tell them that his dad had actually turned into a rabbit, but she slapped him, then said she was sorry and hugged him. After the slap, Robbie promised not to say the rabbit was his dad anymore, and in return, she let him raise it in the living room.

  “Our mom would never agree to that,” Stella said, “she’s very stubborn.” We were in Robbie’s kitchen now. His mom was still at work and his dad was playing with our dad on the small rug near the heater. They sniffed and circled each other happily, and Stella said that, from the way they were playing, you could see that they’d known each other for many years. It was starting to get dark outside, and Ella said that if we wanted to go home, we should leave now while there was still some light, because the lamp on our three-seater bike was broken.

  “We can’t go home,” I explained to Ella. “When Mom sees Dad with us, she’ll hand him right over to the man from the pet store, and Dad will have to live in a small cage and then with a family he might not like and . . .”

  “Yes,” Stella said, “you know that there are people who buy rabbits in pet stores and then eat them with mashed potatoes?”

  “Don’t believe her,” I told Ella, who immediately began to cry. “She’s just making it up.”

  “I am not,” Stella insisted, “it really happens.”

  “I don’t want anyone to eat Dad with mashed potatoes,” Ella said, still crying.

  “You can leave him here and come to visit him whenever you want,” Robbie said. “We have a big house, and he and my dad get along great.”

  MOM

  On the way home, Ella cried again and barely pedaled. “I want Dad to live with us at home and not in some other boy’s house.”

  “It’s not just any house,” I said, trying to console her, “it’s a house where he has a rabbit friend to play with.”

  “Yes,” Ella said, still crying, “he’ll be happy, but what about us?”

  “We’ll go visit him every day and bring him lettuce and parsley,” Stella said, “and he’ll run around us in circles and lick our feet the way you like.”

  “But for all that to happen, we have to be smart and stop telling Mom that he’s Dad. Promise?”

  Mom was waiting at home, worried. I was sure she’d yell at us, but she just cried a little and said she was glad we were back and we were okay, and then she hugged all three of us so hard that it hurt. In the living room, sitting in Dad’s chair, was the strange man from the pet shop. Mom said that when she came home and didn’t see us, she was very upset, and Alex was really nice. He calmed her down and helped her, and he even made her an egg in the basket. The three of us said we were sorry, and Stella lied and said she met a boy in summer camp who really wanted a pet and we all went to bring him the rabbit. “
Ella was supposed to write you a note,” Stella said, and Ella nodded and said, “I forgot.” We all knew that blaming Ella was the best thing to do because Mom always forgave her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mom said, “the important thing is that you came back. For a minute, I thought you’d left me too, and I was all alone in the world.” Even though I really wanted to tell her to stop saying that, because Dad never left us, I didn’t say anything. Ella went over to Mom, hugged her, and said, “We’ll never leave you, Mom.” When Mom hugged her back, she added, “And if it’s okay with you, we can all go back to the boy’s house tomorrow to play with the rabbit.”

  ARCTIC LIZARD

  I changed my will today. That’s something I never thought I’d do. I joined Unit 14+ a day after President Trump’s famous “Twenty-first Century Alamo” speech, but with all due respect to my flag and country, I did it for Summer. She was always there for me: friend, big sister, bodyguard, mother. And it was clear to both of us that if something bad happened to me on the front, everything I’d managed to get hold of and save up during my service would be hers. But this morning, on my way back to base from the hospital, I changed my will.

  And now if I hit an IED in a Kiev alley tomorrow, or find myself in the crosshairs of a sniper on the outskirts of Minsk, it’ll all go to Sergeant Baker instead. Summer won’t understand, I know that. After all, I enlisted for her, for us. And that Baker, he’s a real schmuck. The guy did things to me in basic training that should get him beaten up. Maybe even thrown in prison. But after that night on the raft in the Baltic Sea, I can’t just go on like nothing happened. The new will is the only way I could come up with to let that bastard know how much I appreciate what he did for me. I can picture him sitting in his motorized wheelchair at his parents’ house in Cleveland, watching internet porn, when he gets the e-mail:

  “Sergeant Baker, we have good news and we have bad news. To tell you the truth, the bad news isn’t so bad—just that another lance corporal schmo who served under you (remember those days? When you could still use your feet to kick the ass of anyone who got on your nerves?) turned his gear in at the Great Quartermaster in the sky to . . . But the good news—brace yourself, my friend, because it really is good—is that you were named in his will and are now the proud owner of 29 rare master characters and 48 lucky eggs. Twenty-nine masters! Including an Armored Arctic Lizard from a limited edition Marines series. Only someone who was in Bangkok on the day of the Silent Revolution could capture that one. There are six of them in the whole fucking universe. And now one of those six belongs to you!”

  I can see him moonwalking his wheelchair in reverse, yelling like a madman. I know soldiers who gave ten years in the most dangerous assholes of the world who would happily trade their phenomenal collections for that goddamn lizard. I’ve used it in 142 head-to-head battles since I earned it, and I won every single one of them. If Baker knew I’d changed my will, he’d crawl over to my sleeping bag tonight and slit my throat, I swear he would. I can practically hear that shit’s roars of joy. But he deserves it. The guy shattered his spine for me. He could have hesitated, like any other soldier would have, just pussyfooted for one second and then he’d have been around to fire the salute at my funeral. But he didn’t.

  A few minutes after I send the new will in to HQ, my phone lights up with a message from Summer. My first response is panic: she must have found out. Someone from JAG informed her. I mean, her details are on the will, too. All the money and the benefits are still going to her. Maybe when a soldier changes his will, the beneficiaries are automatically notified? I stare at the screen, petrified. I’ve been through some scary shit this past year: when our jeep lit up like a shooting star in Lima, or on the snipers’ beach in Phuket when Timmy Tight-Ass spurted his brains all over my flak jacket, and in that village near Ankara when the rebels booby-trapped the candy and Jemma and Damian blew up like a bonfire. But all that is nothing compared with how scared I am to open Summer’s e-mail. Because if she’s found out about the will, then I have no reason to go back to San Diego. I have nowhere in the world to go home to. It was a mistake to send that new will in. I could have changed it by hand, given it to a guy in the unit and asked him to deliver it to HQ only if something happened to me, instead of uploading it to their server and risking it being sent all over the world.

  I open the e-mail the way you turn over the body of a terrorist who might be strapped with explosives: slowly and carefully. My hands are so sweaty that the touch screen doesn’t respond, but after I wipe them off on my pants, I finally manage to open the message. Summer says she hasn’t heard from me in a few days and she’s worried. So I start writing back about the injury, about how my sergeant saved my life, how I feel I owe him, I have to pay him back. And about how even though he’s old, almost twenty, he’s probably more obsessed with Destromon Go than we are. But in the middle of writing I stop, delete everything, and send a different message instead, a shorter one: “Everything’s fine. I was a little busy.” I sign off with three emojis of beating red hearts and one with a finger held up to a pair of lips, like it’s a big secret. Then I add, “I’ll tell you when I get back.” But she’ll never understand. She wasn’t there.

  They set up the 14+ exactly one year after Trump was elected to his third term. America was still licking its wounds from the war in Mexico. Honestly? No one thought it would be that rough. Our drones pummeled them from the air on the front lines, but there was much less we could do about the terrorist attacks in the malls. The whole country was turned into a battlefield. The jihadis and those stinking Russians hooked up against us and started channeling weapons to the Mexicans like there was no tomorrow. The federal government declared martial law. At first there was a draft, and then, when things got really hairy, they announced a new unit and named it 14+. In theory you had to have parental permission to volunteer for it, but after the big Christmas attack on San Diego, Summer and I were left on our own. I mean, we had a state-appointed guardian and all, but the decision was totally up to us. Summer wouldn’t hear of it, but there were online ads running constantly. Unit 14+ soldiers were paid real salaries, five times what Summer made at McDonald’s, but that’s not what tipped the scales. No, what drove me to the induction center was the special collectors’ series they showed in the ads. Limited-edition Destromon Gos, master characters with mega CPs that appeared only in war zones. The US military put them up for forty-eight hours, and the only way to get one was to be someone out in the field, which meant either a marine or a Russian commando or whoever the fuck else was fighting us over there. I told Summer: I’ll sign up for one year, I’ll send money home every month, and when I get back we’ll have the best collection in town, maybe even in the whole fucking state. And I was right—I was so right. Six rare masters from three continents. Six! Before I enlisted, the only place I saw mega-CP masters was on YouTube. And now, if I can get through another ten weeks alive, I’ll take them back to Summer and I’m king. But if I die, it’s all Baker’s. Son of a bitch deserves it, though.

  Back on base, the guys in the unit seem happy to see me. Marine Cub hugs me and sobs. His ID says Robby Ramirez, but everyone calls him Marine Cub. His ID also says he’s fourteen and a half, but I’ll be damned if he isn’t twelve and a bit. That little squirt barely reaches my chest, and when we shower you can tell he doesn’t have a hair on his body, not even on his armpits or balls. Smooth as a baby’s butt. The Cub was there the night Baker jumped between me and the Chechens, and he helped me carry what was left of the Sarge back to the ship afterward. The doctors evacuated me, too, but in the field hospital they realized it wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked. Just some shrapnel in my gut. “Happy to see you on your feet, dawg!” the Cub says, trying to hide his tears.

  After dinner he and I have a little Destromon Go battle, and that’s victory number 143 for my Arctic Lizard. “Have you heard anything from the Sarge?” he asks later, while we freeze our brains up with red slushies from the c
ommissary. “HQ updated us about your condition, but we haven’t heard a word about Baker.” I tell him everything that happened in the hospital. About how the doctors almost couldn’t save him, how he’ll never be able to walk again. This is all too much for Cub, and he pulls out his cell and starts showing me his collection. “See that one?” he points to a Destromon Go character that looks like a giant mallet: “I found it on the raft the night you and Baker got hit. It may not be a master but it has a special whack-attack mode. Next time we fight, I’m sending him in and he’ll pound your fucking lizard into a chicken-fried steak.” An announcement over the loudspeakers orders us to gear up and report for roll call with our weapons. On the way I try to find out from the new platoon sergeant where they’re taking us this time, but he’s as mute as a corpse. We have so many enemies in this fucking world that it could be anywhere.

  Fourteen hours later we’re flattening an al-Qaeda base in Sinai. We wipe out Jamil “Nine Lives” al-Mabhouh, al-Qaeda’s legendary second-in-command, and his elimination is chalked up to me. At debriefing afterward, the company commander falls all over me like some girl, telling everyone how I came back from an injury straight into the inferno, and how when I found myself inches away from Nine Lives with a weapon jam, I didn’t lose my cool and smashed his skull in with my rifle butt. He salutes me in front of the whole platoon and says he’ll make sure I get a Congressional Medal. They all stand tensely at attention, the commander tells everyone to cheer for me, and they scream like a gang of lunatics.

  But the minute he leaves, everyone rushes at Snotty Sammy. Of all the fighters in the unit, he was the one who found a Fire Camel in Sinai yesterday. Which is an epic character—maybe the strongest in the history of the game. With its famous inferno attack and hump defense, Sammy’s Camel could fry my Arctic Lizard in two seconds. We pour buckets of ice water and sand on Sammy like we always do in the 14+ when a guy racks up a rare character, and Sammy, covered with mud, starts blubbering and thanking us. Six months ago he was writing book reports on Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in some crappy high school in Tuscaloosa. If someone had told him back then that he’d ever have a Fire Camel in his collection, he’d have cracked up laughing.