This is how popular HIVE was: A plurality of the world had been trapped in it for nearly twenty-four hours. It had caused a crisis of global proportions. It had attempted to swallow humanity into itself forever.

And it was still all anyone wanted to talk about at the Bullworth High cafeteria lunch table the following Monday.

“I just still can’t believe Eric Alanick was evil,” Gus said. “Like totally, crazy-pants evil.”

“I can,” Aaron said, through a mouthful of stuffed-crust pizza. “Guy was a vampire. Come on.”

“Okay, whatever,” Gus said. “I’m just glad they caught him before he made it to his private jet. Apparently the guy was so buzzed from all that time in HIVE, they found him crawling across the tarmac.”

“We were all buzzed, Gus,” said Sammi, moving in to steal a pepper slice. “I seem to remember you face-planting the moment our pod doors opened, screaming about wasps.”

“Yeah, but. Come on.” Gus shifted in his seat defensively. “It’s a funnier image when it’s corporate bigwig Eric Alanick.”

“Fair.” Sammi crunched into the contraband pepper, and then got an idea. “Hey—talk about a final boss, am I right?”

“Sammi.”

“Sorry.”

“I thought it was funny, Sammi,” said Jason.

“Thank you, Jason.” Sammi beamed. “You know, I don’t know if I’ve said this enough, but I’m really so glad you joined us for lunch today.”

As a sign of inclusiveness and respect, she stole a pepper slice from his tray as well. And if he wasn’t too pale for color to ever pass his cheeks, it might almost have looked like Jason had maybe, possibly, blushed.

“Thanks,” he said. “I mean it—thank you, guys. I don’t want to be rude, but I’m sort of new to having friends—and I know you guys are sort of old to it—I mean, you’re all each other’s friends—I mean, I just hope it’s not too weird that I—”

This was my cue to put a bookmark in my book, close it, and put it down on the table.

All eyes turned to me.

“Jason,” I said. “Everything about this is weird. Two days ago, you didn’t know we existed. Literally. Then we all went through an insane ordeal together, most of us died, and then we came back, and we are all just trying to act like that is normal.”

The table was deathly silent.

“But you can’t be new to having friends,” I said, rolling my eyes, “because we’ve been friends since we were six. And the only way you can be rude is by forgetting that. Okay?”

Jason smiled, and I saw the same thing I’d seen when I’d fallen gasping out of a pod chamber not thirty hours ago, prompting him to come running toward me with concern on his face.

I saw someone who really and truly cared about other people.

“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Well, Kara,” said Sammi. “While we aren’t pretending everything is normal—how are things with your mom?”

“Hey!” Aaron whined. “That’s the kind of thing that I normally ask, and then someone kicks me for being rude!”

“It’s a post-Update world, my friend.” Sammi shrugged.

“It’s good,” I said. “Things with my mom are good.”

And I smiled.

Because they really were. No—they were great.

Those first few moments back in the Apiary had been overwhelming, to say the least. It turned out that HIVE returning to its last save point meant returning everyone to how they’d been before Phase One of the Update had begun that morning. People who’d become Drones were restored to their full selves; my friends were pulled back from whatever digital abyss they’d been consigned to; and most pressingly, everyone who had been trapped was once again free to remove themselves from HIVE.

Which they did. En masse.

I was the first one in our Apiary to exit, and Jason had rushed to my side, propped my back up against the side of the chamber, and wet my dry, gasping lips with a bottle of water—oh, no, that was energy drink. Okay, he was trying to revive me with neon-green energy drink. Cool. Still, I’d been grateful, spluttering it down like an astronaut who’d just crawled out of their reentry craft.

Then, down the row from us, another pod door had popped open.

Then another, and another, and another.

Soon the entire Apiary was filled with people hugging one another, helping one another off the ground like a mutual support society of baby deer, and disbelievingly swapping notes on the insanity they had all just survived.

Jason and I just looked at each other and laughed like crazy people. We’d done it. We’d really done it. I couldn’t wait to tell—

“Kara!”

“Kyle!” I yelled. “Kyle, I’m over here!”

As the only non-buzzed person in the room, Jason had gotten up and run to find my brother, throwing his arm over his shoulders and carrying him to me, which was especially touching considering Jason weighed about ninety pounds less than my brother. Or than anyone, really.

“Wait, Kara!” That was the unmistakable sound of Sammi’s listen-to-me yell. “We’re over here! We’re here, too!”

“I can only carry one of you at a time!” Jason wheezed, but he dropped Kyle at my side and went off to find her.

While Jason rounded us up, I grabbed Kyle’s hand. “Are you okay? Is Dad—”

“Yeah, yeah, he should be at home—oh, hold on, I think he’s calling me,” Kyle said, reaching into his pocket with a still-shaking hand and holding his phone up to his ear with considerable effort.

“Hello? Dad? Yes, no, we’re fine—no, don’t drive to come get us! Stay at home until you can stand, obviously. Kara, tell him he can’t drive.”

I would very much have liked to do that, but at that moment, my own phone started buzzing.

“What—is he calling my phone, too?” I asked. “Hold on a second, let me just—”

I stopped, staring at the words on my phone: UNKNOWN NUMBER.

And then I answered the call.

“Mom?” I asked, hoping against hope. “Are you okay?!”

“Well, it’s definitely a storage unit,” Mom said, her voice unspeakably bemused. “And I am definitely the most buzzed anyone has ever been. But from my very comfortable spot here on the floor, I was able to open the circuit board of this pod and turn it into a GPS-slash-cell-phone, so. See you soon?”

I babbled promises to find her, and Kyle shouted one or two things over my ear as well in a very sweet but unhelpful way, and then Jason dropped Sammi next to me and ran back to get Aaron and Gus, and Sammi demanded to know what she’d missed since the labyrinth, and the conversation really took off from there.

On the whole, there were much worse places to be after Update Day, as it came to be called, than safe with your friends and loved ones in an Apiary. We were spared the worst of the chaos in those first few hours after the world was freed. (After you freed the world, a tiny voice in my head tended to whisper. How cool is that? We probably shouldn’t dwell on it or anything, seems like it might go to our head, but, like, come on.) In those urgent initial moments of recovery, emergency services received more incoming calls than they’d ever gotten before during peacetime while half their staff were heavily buzzed themselves. And as the late hours of Saturday night turned into Sunday morning, the news just kept pouring in: Eric Alanick had been arrested. He’d been arrested by someone high up in international affairs, who’d been there in Terms and Conditions that day and decided to spill the beans in case it helped him to avoid getting arrested himself. He got arrested himself, and then everyone else he mentioned was collared as well—including, you know, the president of the United States. The vice president was claiming they knew nothing about it, but every news organization was having an absolute field day.

But none of that mattered because the Tilden-Swifts were having a home day.

All four of them.

Well, four and a guest.

As Gus, Aaron, and Sammi called their families to let them know they were okay, Kyle and I made plans to find Mom as soon as we were good to drive again. Then Jason had said, “You know I’m good to drive right now, right?”

And so Jason, Kyle, and I were off in Jason’s car, following Mom’s signal to where Eric Alanick had left her all those years ago, which was, indeed, in a rented storage unit only a few hours south of the city. She was, as she’d mentioned, heavily whammied after several uninterrupted years in HIVE, and I found myself glad we had taken Jason’s burrow of a car, since it meant we were able to wrap Mom up in some of Jason’s blankets and give her a comfy spot in the back seat to recover.

“Jason, dear,” Mom said, craning her neck around slowly as we drove north again. “Do you live in your car?”

“No,” Jason said quickly.

“Oh, good.”

“I live in the Apiary.”

“Oh—no, Jason, that is not allowed. You’re coming home with us.”

And he did, the sun just beginning to rise again as we pulled into the driveway, where Dad had been waiting up for us, having never technically left the house that weekend.

And then everyone was finally home.

Gus had called a lot of times that day. So had Sammi, and I’d even gotten one or two texts from Aaron, which oddly had been the closest I’d come to returning someone’s communication:

Just practiced pitching with my little sister. Not as good as with the apple, Aaron had sent. But better than I was before. And if I’d stayed stuck in HIVE, I could’ve been the world’s best pitcher, and I still couldn’t have hugged my sister after. So. Not sorry.

But I didn’t respond to him, or to anyone.

It was a day for family.

And then somehow, against all odds, in the face of unprecedented historical and political scandal, Monday was a day for school. Mom had asked Jason if he would be needing a ride to school, and when Jason had said that, honestly, he tended to spend the first few periods of the day at the Apiary, Mom had asked again if Jason. Would be needing. A ride. To school. He’d gotten the hint, and all day he’d been glued to my side, like he was my foreign exchange student and I was the host introducing him to our culture. In a way, I kind of was—I was introducing him to the culture of real life. It was actually sort of fun. My friend of ten years wasn’t so bad, once I got to know him.

And so here we all sat at the lunch table, technically having our first group meeting since the Apiary. No one had known what to say when we’d all sat down—but then Markus Fawkes had walked by, seen us, and run out of the cafeteria so fast that a hall monitor had chased after him, and we’d all burst out laughing. It appeared that being briefly and functionally nonexistent had finally drilled some humility into him, which was going to make the rest of the school year a lot easier.

Speaking of.

Gus and I still hadn’t really talked about what had happened between us in the labyrinth; to be honest, I didn’t know when we would, or what we might say. We’d all learned a lot about ourselves in a very short amount of time, and we could pretend it was normal for this lunch period, but sooner or later we’d have to face what we’d said and done.

But now as I sat here, watching Aaron ask Jason to tell him all about the craziest things he’d found at the top of the Honeycomb, and watching Sammi continue to steal food from both of them, and feeling Gus lean over and give my hand one quick, silent squeeze, I knew that nothing was going to break this group up. We’d be helping and teasing and irritating and delighting one another for a long time to come. Maybe we would even play more HIVE together—I’d heard that the first few people daring enough to go back into the Honeycomb in the last couple of days had found an entirely different world, one in which games seeped into other games and all the old ways of winning and losing had been rewritten entirely.

That sounded like a world I would love to explore.