“What do we do?” Lilli asked, eyes wide.
“We could try to fight them,” Starr suggested.
“I don’t know. We barely took out five last time. And that was from a single ship. There’s probably at least fifteen now,” I reasoned.
“So what, then? Should we hide?”
“Maybe…” I scanned the area, searching for hiding spots. There were plenty of nooks and crannies to slip behind, but I wasn’t confident any of them would offer much protection against giant robot spiders.
A shadow crossed the sky as the ships grew closer. I watched as their hatches began to creak open. One by one, the spiders parachuted down from the sky, floating to the mountaintop. I had guessed there would be fifteen, but now it looked to be at least twenty. Maybe more.
“Spiders,” Lilli moaned. “Why does it have to be spiders?”
One by one the spiders landed, shedding their parachutes and beginning to slowly crawl across the mountain. Their laser eyes scanned the territory, leaving no stone unturned as they began their hunt.
And we were sitting ducks.
“Come on!” Starr urged. “Let’s get out of here.”
We started running in the opposite direction. I wondered for a moment if we should try to climb down the mountain and retreat to live another day. But it looked too steep to descend, and every time I got near an edge, a piece of trash would break off from the pile, tumbling down to the earth. There was no way we’d avoid the same fate if we tried it ourselves.
But what else could we do? The spiders were closing in. We didn’t have a dragon to fly us to safety. We were running out of mountain. Once we reached the far side, we’d be completely trapped.
“You should go,” I urged Starr. “You have wings. You can fly away.”
“And leave you two here?” She shook her head. “I joined your team, remember? Teammates don’t bail on one another.”
“Can we all fly?” Lilli asked. “Or maybe you could take one of us down at a time?”
“Maybe…” Starr motioned for me to come closer. She grabbed me in a hug, squashing me against her. “Let me try.” She flapped her wings.
For a moment I thought it would work. We floated a good two feet off the ground. But before I could celebrate, we crashed back down, tumbling into a pile of trash.
“Sorry,” Starr groaned. “The wings aren’t strong enough to support two of us.”
I nodded grimly, staring down, my vision swaying and blurring at the sheer height of the drop. On this side of the mountain, I couldn’t even see the ground below. It was just a vast expanse of nothingness. As if we were standing on the edge of the world…
My eyes widened. “This is it!”
“What?” Lilli grabbed me, pulling me to my feet. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you see?” I waved a hand over the abyss. “This is the end of the world. This level, anyway. If there’s a hole, it has to be here.”
I looked down into the nothingness, my stomach churning. I knew I had to be right. But at the same time, I kind of wished I wasn’t. My fear of heights was worse than Lilli’s fear of spiders.
Starr joined me on the edge of the cliff. “You could be right,” she said. “But there’s no way to know for sure. Also, it’s kind of a risk, jumping into oblivion. It’s not like a regular hole. You don’t know if there’s anything underneath.”
“What do you mean?” Lilli asked, looking worried.
“Have you ever jumped off the edge of the world in a regular video game? Sometimes you just fall. You fall and fall and fall, and there’s nothing down there to catch you. You don’t crash-land. You don’t die. You don’t end up anywhere else. You just fall. Forever.” She shuddered. “Well, I mean at least until you reset the game. But here…”
“What if we killed each other in the air?” I asked. “That might reset us.”
“Not if there’s no graveyard down below,” Lilli pointed out.
I frowned, my stomach churning as another worrisome thought came to me. If we glitched out and got locked in a free fall, would we even be able to access our menu screen to exit the game? Get back to real life? It wasn’t like a regular game where you could simply push a physical button to reset the computer if the game glitched out and you couldn’t log out the regular way. In this case, we’d need someone to help us unplug on the other side—in the real world. Someone to pull the helmet from our heads, eject us from the game.
Would Mom or Dad come to check on us? But then Dad was out working on the zip line. And Mom was working in her office. And while it felt like we’d been here for hours, it might be only minutes with the time compression thing. Who knew how long it would be before they came in to yell at us about too much screen time? Would we be stuck in free fall for days? My stomach twisted at the idea.
“Maybe we should find another way,” I declared, backing away from the edge. “There’s got to be—”
GRUNT. CLICK.
I whirled around, heart in my throat. The spiders had found us. At least ten of them surrounded us, eighty metal legs clicking and clattering on the ground as their laser eyes locked on us, ready to strike.
They started forward. “Jump!” Starr cried. “Now!”
She dropped into the abyss, her body soon disappearing into the mist. At first I could hear her screaming, but then her screams faded away, as if they were too far down to hear. I glanced at my sister, horrified.
“I can’t…” I tried.
“You have to!” she scolded. “They’ll kill you if you don’t!”
The spiders kept coming. I stared down into the nothingness. “What if there’s no bottom like Starr said? What if we fall forever?” I knew I sounded like
