“Well, I see you’ve found my hunting cabin.”

Green eyes. Skin lighter than mine.

“Well, not technically mine, in the sense that I didn’t build it myself. The thing just sort of popped into existence one day, like the rabbits and polar bears, and, well, I suppose, me, and you, if you’re anything like me.”

A high voice. Soft. And with an accent?

“Well, go on then, say something.” Clad from head to toe in leather, with a slowly lowering bow. “If not a ‘thank you,’ then at least a ‘hello’ would suffice.”

Real? I couldn’t believe it. I’d been burned so often, gotten my hopes up too many times. Illusion? Hallucination? Or, maybe like I’d believed that first day on the island, a dream?

“Well, maybe you can’t speak.”

I tried. I couldn’t. Dizzy, mind racing. Too much to process, to believe.

“Or maybe you don’t understand what I’m saying. Or maybe”—lowering the weapon fully—“you’re just too cold for words. Heaven knows I was when I woke up here.”

Packing the bow away, hands free to remove the hide helmet and chest plate.

“Here.”

Tossed at my feet, hovering above the snow. “It’s not exactly a winter coat, but rabbit hide does keep one warmer than diamond.” With the helmet and chest plate gone, I could see a head of sunset golden hair, painted on, just like mine, but continuing down to a ponytail on a green shirt.

“You don’t have to accept it, or if you’d prefer to change inside the igloo…”

Swift motions, away with the sword, shield, and diamond armor. The rabbit fur WAS warmer, not by much, but offering just enough flexibility to keep my body’s warmed air within. The feeling of it against my skin, the physical sensation of touch. That’s what I think finally broke me out of my stupor. One final sense to back up my eyes and ears.

This was real.

“Th…thank you.”

“So, you do talk?” The laugh, the first real music I’d heard in this world. “And you’re quite welcome.”

“Thank you,” I said again. “Thank you!” To my rescuer, to the sky, to luck! “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

I didn’t plan to run to her. And in my ecstatic stupor, I completely forgot that this world wouldn’t let you hug.

“Hang on there!” Retreating quickly, backing up with waving hands. “A little personal space if you don’t mind!”

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I just…I’ve been alone for so long…I haven’t had a friend to talk to since…”

“Hang on!” And, in a cooling tone, “We’re not friends. We’ve only just met.”

“Yeah, I know, but…” I spluttered, “I mean, c’mon, we’re both not from here. You just said so, right? We’re both strangers. Which makes us—”

“Strangers.” Another step back. “To each other, as well as to this world. In fact, I know this world a good deal better than I know you.”

“Oh, c’mon!” I pouted. “You know what I mean.”

“I do, and you’re wrong.”

You’re wrong. No one had ever said that to me before. At least no one I could remember. I’m sure that back in my world, our world, someone must have told me I was wrong at least once or twice. But since I’d woken up here, I’d had only my animal pals for conversation, and their “moos” and “bahs” had been but an outward expression of my inner monologues. Now here, for the first time, was a dialogue, a conversation with another thinking, talking person, who had just told me that what I believed was wrong.

“But,” I pressed, talking way before my brain had time to okay the words, “there’s, like, two of us now! And we’re the same, and…”

“You don’t know that.” A third step backward. “You don’t know that we come from the same world or even the same part of the same world. You don’t know anything about me other than I look similar to you, and just because you look similar to someone…”

“…doesn’t make them a friend,” I finished, quoting a rule I’d come up with after almost being poisoned by the witch. “Rule twenty-five.” I gave a resigned sigh.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing, sorry, I’ll tell you later…if”—and suddenly my stomach knotted—“there is a later? I mean, if you don’t want company or anything…”

“No, no, let’s not be dramatic.” A slight chuckle, and my insides began to relax. “I’m just saying you can’t be friends with someone you don’t know yet, and I don’t know anything about you.” A small, welcome step closer. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Oh, yeah.” My turn to chuckle. “Right. I’m…I…totally don’t know what my name is!”

“Really?” A loud laugh this time, warm and kind. “I was just winding you up! I don’t know my name either! Never needed to. No one to address me up till now.”

“Ha!” I guffawed back. “I know, right?! I guess we need names. I’ll be—”

“No, no, let me name you.” Leaning closer, again, examining me up and down. “So much more fun! Like that book about the lad who’s shipwrecked on the island and names a native after a day of the week…although it probably should have been the other way around, don’t you think? A bit twisted, him being the visitor and casting himself as lord?”

I just shrugged. I’d heard of the book, and, full disclosure, if I’d ever bothered to read it, it might have made my real-life island trial a heck of a lot easier.

One more thing I gotta do when I get home.

“So, let’s see what we can see…” Green eyes continued to look me over. “We’ll, you’re a guy…”

“I am?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “How do you know?”

“Well, you have a beard.”

“I do?!”

“Definitely. A little brown, goatee thingy round your mouth.”

“Really.” After all this time, all of my amazing accomplishments and discoveries, I still hadn’t figured out a way to see my own reflection. “I guess, if I really think about it, I have kinda always thought of myself as a guy.”

“ ‘Guy,’ ” she repeated. “About as proper as anything else.”

“And you,” I began.

“Well, I’m definitely a girl.”

“Really?” Okay, for the record, while I’ve been referring to her as a girl in these pages, and while I’d been thinking of her as a girl, I, until this moment, had no actual evidence to do that. I mean, dudes can have long hair, and a high voice doesn’t mean anything. In fact, I wasn’t even sure that she had a high voice, because of her accent, which seemed to lilt musically when she spoke.

“How do you know you’re a girl?” I asked.

“It’s how I feel and it’s the type of name I want.”

“Fair enough,” I answered. “Do you want me to call you Girl?”

“Oh good Lord, no!” she exclaimed. “Do you always name things so literally?” Before I could point out that she’d just named me “Guy,” she continued, “It’s got to be something thoughtful, something powerful and strong and beautiful that I don’t mind hearing at any random moment during the day.”

“Oh, is that all?” I asked sarcastically. “No pressure there.” And she laughed again, that wonderful laugh that warmed me like a summer breeze.

“Summer,” I said confidently. Then, “I mean, if that’s cool with you.”

She took a moment, mentally digesting it, then nodded. “Perfect.”

I think a lot of cultures on my world have a lot of different greetings. I think some shake hands, some bow, some put their hands over their hearts. That one’s my favorite, but, like almost all the other gestures, is impossible for my rigid, angular form to accomplish. What I could do, and did, was step within arm’s length and extend the soft flesh cube of my hand.

“Nice to meet you, Summer.”

She copied my motion exactly, bumping my fist with hers. “Nice to meet you, Guy.”

I’d like to say it was the touch of her fist, the solid, reassuring human contact that made me shiver. But, in all honesty, I was probably just cold.

“Ggghghgh.” I shivered, which produced a giggling response from Summer.

“Come on then,” she said, turning away. “Let’s get you home and properly warmed up.”

“Home?” I asked, noticing that she’d turned away from the igloo. “Isn’t this where you live?”

“Are you mad?” she asked as she walked away.

“Well,” I said, running to keep up, “didn’t you say it appeared when you did?”

“Oh, if only,” she answered, leading me back in the general direction of the coast. “This just recently came along, long after I really needed it. When I first got here…”

She began at her beginning, and wow did I try to listen to every word. But it was so hard with my mind racing through everything that was happening.

I wasn’t alone anymore! I’d found…well, not a friend—Summer seemed pretty clear about that. But why? Why the distance? Why wasn’t she just as happy to find me as I was to find her? I figured I’d ask her later, after I’d earned her friendship.

This was a new type of lesson, a friendship-lesson, or what I’d like to call a “fresson.” I know, I know—me, always having to figure out the rules. But it’d been the key to my survival all this time. Crafting, mining, monsters: Everything has rules, and as my own lesson number seven states, “Figuring out the rules turns them from enemies into friends.”

It made sense that it couldn’t be any different with friendship. There had to be boundaries, rights and wrongs. Especially when dealing with another human being. This would be way more complicated, and potentially more hazardous, than dealing with my simple animal pals. Just thinking about all the ways to mess up made me shiver more than the cold did. I couldn’t afford to alienate her or drive her away and ruin my one chance to not be alone again.

I realized I’d have to learn a whole long list of fressons, with the second one right on the heels of the first.

Friends listen.

So I did, fighting through all the inner thoughts you’ve just read to try to pay attention to what she was talking about. I know I missed more than a few details (and fortunately she didn’t quiz me later), but I got the basic gist of her origin.

Like me, Summer’d woken up underwater, shot for the surface, found herself alone, and swum until she’d sighted land.

Unlike me, however, she wasn’t lucky enough to find a lush green island. She’d come ashore on the ice-crusted beach. No apple trees, no animal companions. She’d begun starving on day one, and had that been me, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have lived past day two.

She’d taken out a lone spruce tree within minutes of walking ashore and discovered how to make a crafting table immediately, and from there how to make tools and weapons. If you read my first book, you know how long that took me, and how long it also took me to get up the courage to fight my first monster. Summer didn’t have that luxury.

That first night on the ice, as the sun set and the mobs rose, she’d had to fight for her life with a wooden axe and sword until she’d killed enough zombies (or “zeds” as she called them) to live on their flesh for days. Because that’s what she did, and without any cow milk to chase away the hyper-hunger.

Those first few days were brutal: freezing, exploring, constantly sick and hungry from barely enough toxic ghoul meat to survive. She couldn’t fish, because she didn’t know about spider silk yet. And she couldn’t hunt rabbits because, back then, there hadn’t been any. Apparently, this “taiga” (her word) had originally been emptier than when I’d arrived.

I honestly don’t think I would have made it, especially given how long it took me to start figuring things out. I probably would have just wasted away in some hand-dug hole. It’d almost happened my first night on the island, burying myself alive as a zombie lurked outside. Had that happened here, and if I’d been as hungry, cold, and injured as Summer, I might have just given up.

She never did. She always fought back. And those early wins, both on the battlefield and on the crafting table, had given her the confidence to keep moving. Down the coast and then inland, looking for, well, something better, including a chance for rescue. That’d sure been my goal, when I’d first reached the island. But because it was an island, I’d been forced to stay in one place and make do with what I had. With her, there had always been the hope of something beyond the next ridge.

I think the term is “nomadic,” although she described it as being a “hunter-gatherer.” She’d gathered crafting wood from trees by day and hunted zombies for their flesh by night. She hadn’t thought of mining yet, or agriculture. Those had had to come with staying put.

Which came with the discovery of the cave.

It was on the morning of the tenth day (can you believe it—ten whole days?!) that she’d climbed up the bank of a frozen river and saw what looked like a dark hole at the base of a lonely mountain. She hadn’t thought of investigating, but when a zombie shambled out and promptly burned into that morning’s breakfast, her hunter’s instincts thought there might be more inside. While there weren’t, she did discover something just as valuable as food: shelter.

After so much fruitless wandering, Summer had realized it might be a good time to stop and figure out a new strategy. And this cave seemed like a safe enough place to do it. Especially after exploring the shallow interior and finding the same blessed game changer that had chased my nightmares away: coal! With torches fixed to the wall, and a door she’d previously—and accidentally—crafted against the entrance, she finally had a safe space to think, experiment, and grow.

Agriculture, iron—you get it. One advance after another, including advances into the cave itself, which, apparently, I’d walked right over and past without ever realizing it. Because just as Summer finished telling me what I’ve just told you, she stopped at the base of—get this!—the volcano!