I double-checked all my supplies to make sure we had what we needed for the Nether. I had plenty of snowballs collected. I repaired my diamond pickaxe, and grabbed a bow and arrows from A.J.’s arsenal. I loaded up on torches and buckets. I’d even enchanted my armor to add Fire Protection. My inventory was close to full by the time I finished.

Anton, Esme, and Lonnie sat waiting for me outside the orchard in the small panic room filled with chests. They were also armed to the teeth. Anton and Esme had even figured out a way to attach more arsenal to Lonnie, who now had his own armor. As I walked in, I caught the tail end of a conversation between Esme and Anton.

“What happens when you cross over to teenagerhood?” Esme asked Anton as they started enchanting their armor. “Why does everyone your age get all weird and angsty?”

“High school is like being in Jumanji,” Anton said. “You get tossed into the jungle and you have to figure it out on your own, and if you don’t, you’ll get trampled.”

“Lonnie didn’t seem to think much of high school either,” I said. “He said there were just different types of mobs and bosses.”

“He sounds like he knew what he was talking about,” Anton said, his tone softened with something that resembled sadness. For a moment, I wondered what it would be like if all four of us were just regular kids playing Minecraft. Perhaps we would all be friends.

“We need to keep playing our way out,” I said, getting back to the task at hand.

“Great,” Esme said. “Too bad A.J. never showed up. He would have been a good player to have on our side.”

“We’ll be fine just the four of us. We’ve been fighting off mobs like crazy ever since we got in here, we’re good. The Nether has nothing we haven’t seen already in the Overworld,” I said. I gestured at the stack of chests. “Now let’s open those babies up and see what’s inside.”

Anton shook his head. “No can do.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“These are empty, and that one is an ender chest.”

How didn’t I see that before? The chest was black with purple particles hovering all around it.

“I think we’ve done all we can here,” Esme said. “It’s time to go.”

She started for the hole in the floor to get out.

“Don’t forget, the only way for us to survive this is for us to stick together,” Anton said. “If I make a portal for us to leave, we all have to go through it this time.”

“Fine,” I agreed. Lonnie had made so many improvements since the last time Anton tried to get me to leave that I had to believe he would be fixed by then.

As Lonnie descended, he looked at me and then down into the hole like he was asking if I was going to follow. “I’m coming,” I said. He seemed satisfied enough to climb down.

We regrouped in the greenhouse. Esme located a couple of regular chests and raided the few supplies inside. A.J. was clever enough to have stored all the good stuff in the ender chest, it seemed.

“Last call to check your supplies,” I said. “Once I build the portal, I’m going through whether you’re ready or not.”

“Wow, you got bossy,” Anton commented.

“I prefer to think of it as leadership qualities, thank you very much,” I corrected.

I chuckled, and Lonnie turned to me with a smile. It was exactly the kind of thing we would have found funny, you know, out in real non-Minecraft life. I was reminded that Lonnie had also mentioned we would need a fishing rod in order to pull the blazes into melee range. I shook my head in amazement; Lonnie was somehow communicating with me through telepathy. I was sure of it. How else had he been able to plant all these memories to help guide me in our quest? Then I caught a scowling look from Esme, and I stopped.

Anton clapped his hands together and rubbed them like he was an old-school cartoon villain without the thin twirly mustache. “All right, let’s do this! Once we finish this trip to the Nether, it’s off to the End, and then we’re outta here!”

I was going to explain why we should maybe wait to leave and instead find a fishing rod, then stopped. There was a chill inside the room. I looked around, searching for the source of it. Outside the window, in the places not messed up by the blasts I had caused, the icy tundra stared back. Nothing appeared different, but it almost felt like someone had come into the house and left a door open. The chill came over me again.

Anton had already exited down the suction lift. Esme had moved on to another room, looking for more stuff to raid.

I walked carefully around the greenhouse, searching. A little way down the path was something shadowy standing between two apple trees. It turned.

An enderman.

With a white scar slashed across its face.

I heard my own breath sucking in, and then the sound of my own scream. I pushed Lonnie out of the way, knocking him into the carrot garden. A chicken flapped across my vision, blinding me for a couple of seconds. When it was gone again, the enderman was closer. I pulled up my inventory and took out the diamond sword.

“This isn’t going to work,” I called at the enderman. “You don’t scare me.”

But something about the enderman’s scar chilled me to the bone.

It came, as fast as ever, straight toward me as I thrust upward with the sword. I caught the enderman’s arm. It staggered back a step, but then reached around with its other arm to strike me. I ducked. My health points were still low. I had to be careful. The enderman took a side step and came at me again. I moved as it moved, and slashed with the sword again. This time I struck its torso. The enderman’s arm flashed out, lightning quick, thwacking my face. The blow burned like fire. I pulled back, then ran in, with the blade of the sword held parallel to the floor. Another stab. Another swipe from the enderman. Another smack that made my arm feel like it was aflame.

I crashed to the ground, and felt the hard floor against my knee. The enderman raised its arms again and I caught sight of the white scar. That was when I realized that I had seen the scar before. In the accident. The person in the other car, he’d had a slash across his face the same way this enderman did. Only it wasn’t white. It was red. I shook my head to get the image of the gash on the other driver’s face out of my mind, but I couldn’t.

I was out of energy. The room felt like it was spinning around me. Then I realized I was being turned and dragged away. It was Lonnie, pulling me away from the enderman. But who was going to stop the enderman from attacking him? I lifted my head just enough to see Esme aiming with her bow and arrow. By the time Lonnie had gotten me to the lift, Esme had delivered a final shot and the enderman broke apart.

Lonnie and I stepped into the lift. It whisked us down to the first floor. Anton was there, and he looked horrified.

“What’s going on?” we both asked each other. We both answered at the same time too, which meant neither of us heard what the other one had said.

Anton held his hands up. “It’s night again,” he said. “So you know what that means.”

I looked behind him, at the rows of endermen outside the house.

“There was one inside,” I said.

Esme burst through the false wall in front of the lift and looked at the three of us. “Why are you standing here?” she asked. “We have to run.”

“There’s nowhere to run,” Anton said.

I pushed Lonnie in his direction. “We’ll buy you enough time to craft the nether portal. Go!”

Anton hesitated, but grabbed Lonnie after a moment, and went back into the lift. I moved with Esme toward the front door. The line of endermen faced us. Two, no three, rows deep. It was going to be a massacre, and we knew it.

“What now?” Esme asked.

“Keep firing and hope for morning,” I said as I loaded my first arrow.

“What about that guy back there?” she asked.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t remind me about him,” I said.

We both aimed at the crowd and began to fire.

The arrows weren’t helpful. There were too many of them coming. What we needed was—

“Look what I found!” Anton was behind us again. He and Lonnie had TNT. He lobbed the bombs over our heads as we kept firing. Most of the endermen were starting to slow down. But some kept coming through the remnants of the blasts, and as the smoke cleared they were still advancing.

We had used up all of our arrows. Esme started to break apart anything made out of wood, to craft sticks. Anton caught on and got as many feathers out of our supplies as he could, then went back upstairs to raid the chickens.

“There isn’t enough flint,” Esme announced.

In the middle of the line of endermen, still heading toward us, was one with a white diagonal scar on his face.

“No,” I said.

Esme looked up. “No way.”

We pulled back. Esme fired arrows behind us as we moved as far back into the room as possible. We had one last TNT bomb.

“Take cover,” I said.

We moved behind the broken bookcase and I tossed the bomb at the wall. The blast threw us back a little farther, and buried us under rubble, but we were mostly unharmed. There was some kind of cave behind the wall we had blasted open. As we scrambled for it, Esme accidentally dropped a small object. It went skidding on the ground away from us and came to a stop just at the lip of one of the blast holes. A shulker box. Esme groaned when she realized what she’d done, then moved carefully toward it as it teetered on the edge of the hole, grabbing it as soon as she was close enough. I breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Good save!” She smiled and we kept moving.

Inside the cave, we followed a narrow path at Esme’s feet that led deeper down into the earth. At one point the path narrowed to a thin strip, and to our left were the gaping holes in the ground that I’d created with my blasts. I was still trying to puzzle out what had happened with the scarred enderman. How had it reappeared? And why did it have that scar? Esme stopped suddenly and I bumped into her. There was a lake of lava beneath us, and I could feel the heat of it searing my skin.

“What if we get stuck?” she asked.

“An entire mob of endermen are behind us,” I said. “Do you really want to go back that way?”

“Good point,” she said.

We stepped forward and were rocked by a blast that came from somewhere over our heads. “What was that?” Esme asked.

I suddenly remembered A.J.’s warning about the chickens and Anton going to get feathers. “Chicken bombs?” I suggested.

“We better keep moving,” Esme said.

We went deeper, and with each step, I dug down, ruining the path.

“You know they can teleport, right?” she asked.

Yeah, but I’ll take every precaution I can.

We stepped around a corner, and entered a glittering cavern.

“Diamonds,” Esme said.

Without a word, we both jumped off the path and began mining. There were more than we could carry in the shulker box, so we maxed out what we could, and continued on. In another cavern, a mob of zombies moved toward us. I had an idea, and hacked away at the low ceiling. My intuition paid off, and a load of gravel came tumbling down, between us and them. No fighting necessary.

“Nice! How did you know that would work?” Esme asked.

“I just…had the idea. I thought I’d try this and see if it would work, and it did. Anyway, I’m tired of hand-to-hand combat, aren’t you?” I asked.

She shrugged.

After a few more steps, she said, “We need to get out of here.”

“How?” I asked.

She pointed up toward the top of the cavern. I nodded. We slowly started picking our way up the dark rocks, planting torches as we went to light the way that we hoped was out. It grew cold again, and we hacked up and out of the last bits of rock, to blinding white on the other side. We’d reached the surface of the tundra. I looked back toward A.J.’s house and found it far in the distance, gray and beige against the white snow. The cliff and forest were behind us. Somewhere between the house and the forest were Lonnie and Anton.

Esme and I started for the forest. Neither of us wanted to go back to the house, though we never said that. We just started hiking away from it. Esme pointed to a narrow ridge, like an undulating shelf above our heads, and we climbed up to it. It made for a good vantage point. A.J.’s house was to the right of us, and straight ahead was the spot from where we’d seen the house in the first place. It was like going backward. I was annoyed that we had been separated. We’d had a good thing going in A.J.’s base with all the food and supplies.

We got to the place where I had started cutting down into the rock to make a path for us to the house. But the boys weren’t there. We went back up into the trees and climbed them to be able to look around, but there was nothing. Finally, I put my hands to my mouth and called out, “Lonnie!” but Esme shot me a hot look that got me to stop before I even got to the “ee” at the end of his name. She jumped down from her tree and moved away from me, clearly annoyed. I jumped down after her and followed.

“Just when I think you’re finally getting better at thinking things through first…”

“We couldn’t find them. What was I supposed to do?” I asked.

“Not draw the mobs’ attention to us! Could you do that?”

I didn’t say anything. I was tired. And irritated. Plus, maybe she was right.

There was movement ahead, and I pointed, nearly saying something, but remembering not to at the last moment. Esme held her hand out as if she wanted me to stop moving, so I did, and she went on ahead. Then there was a garbled shout, and she came back running my way. Behind her was the scarred enderman, and behind it, Anton and Lonnie.

Esme took out a sword and got ready to face off. She walked around it, and it turned, following her, putting its back to me. I understood what Esme was doing. I took out my own sword and approached the enderman from behind. Now at the enderman’s left side, Anton pulled out his own diamond sword and got ready. The enderman swiveled to look at each of us, and then it chose the most vulnerable to attack—the person I was most hoping it would ignore—Lonnie.

We broke formation, piling on the enderman, striking it with as many blows as we could manage before it turned back on us, and now that we were closer, it got several good punches in. I felt weak. From the sluggish movements of Anton and Esme, I knew they felt the same. Lonnie was lying on his side, not moving. I started slashing again, screaming at the top of my lungs. The three of us got into a bit of a rhythm, each of us swinging in succession until the enderman had enough of us, and the purple particles around it started to go inside. It was going to teleport, but I wasn’t going to let it get away so easily.

I got in close, preparing to chop the fleeing mob with all of my might. I was so angry that it had somehow reappeared, that its scar reminded me of the accident, that it had chosen to attack my best friend. Before my sword could land, it disappeared in a swirl of purple pixels, and I screamed in fury.

Teleport, my frenzied mind shouted. Suddenly, trees disappeared, pixel by pixel. Ground cover. Dirt. Rocks.

Everything.