Aaron stood in the middle of the Waldberg royal chamber, staring at the well-dressed madman with a princess over his shoulder, the heavily-armored Human, and the Were-Fox girl dressed like a pirate—especially her—as the trio jumped down through the hole in the floor. He then watched in stunned silence as two others ran forward and jumped after them. He heard a sharp cry and then a series of loud, sickening crunches a second later, and some strange curiosity urged him to walk forward and spy on what exactly had happened, yet he stood rooted, unable to move. He heard and saw all these things, yet his mind couldn’t process them. He glanced over at his friends, Lars and Prax, and he found the same vacant, searching expression written on their faces that must have been on his too.

“That Were-Fox was . . . That was Bella, wasn’t it?” Lars asked quietly, looking over at Aaron.

“Definitely was,” Prax agreed without hesitation.

Aaron nodded. “It was either Bella or someone who had her exact same look. She coulda been a carbon copy.”

“But . . .” Lars’s eyebrows scrunched together as he tried to process what he had just seen. “She doesn’t play this . . . game . . . I thought.”

“No, she doesn’t,” Aaron answered. He remembered all too well exactly how strict her parents had always been. Aaron had known Bella since they were young children, and practically every moment of her daily life was regimented down to the exact amount of time she was allowed for “personal uses.”

There was no way any single moment in her daily schedule would have been allotted for “play time,” much less the amount that would have been needed to take part in a game as expansive as this one. Indeed, one of the main reasons that he and his group of friends hadn’t started sooner was that simply suggesting that they all waste time on a videogame would have been viewed as blasphemy of the highest order, high treason fit for execution. So, instead of virtual worlds filled with perfect recreations of all the things Bella’s parents hated, his small group had grown up doing other things instead so that they could include Bella, which usually meant studying as a group or the occasional trip to a museum or concert under strict supervision. Moreover, even though she was now an adult, Bella had been rigorously pressed into an elite master’s program so as to “broaden herself” and expand her views on the world.