The Parrot King left his house before sunrise, and Orion followed, flitting from shadow to shadow like a sparrow. He waited while the Parrot King disappeared into the house that Keely shared with her parents. A moment later, they both emerged wearing backpacks.

Orion could see it all quite clearly with Night Vision – a Level Four mind magic spell that he’d unlocked weeks ago. It worked by scanning the environment and showing you what you would have seen if everything was glowing – every leaf and apple of the orchard, every facade of every house, and the bright pink scarf of the Parrot King’s prisoner.

“Prisoner? That’s a little much,” said fake-Cassandra.

Orion knew better than to reply aloud. He knew what was fake and what was real – and right now, the reality was that two citizens of Johnson City were running away. Obviously, it had been the Parrot King’s idea. Just yesterday, after all, Keely had asked Orion if he could help her charge her phone, which he had graciously done – Universal Charger being another Level Four spell.

“Maybe she wanted to charge her phone because she was heading into the wilderness,” said fake-Cassandra.

The pink scarf bounced and swung its way through the orchard to the edge of Johnson City. It was easy to tell where the city ended and the so-called “American wilderness” was beginning to encroach. It was a phrase often heard on the military news network – the MNN – along with aerial footage and animated maps of the vegetation’s growth patterns. The prevailing theory was that the bees had been busy seeding the growth while everyone was worried about the sky demons.

Around here, the invasive flora had arrived in a matter of weeks, just after Christmas – moving south from Canada and north from the heartland like a green tide. Vines, flowers, and bioluminescent fungus swept over the roads and ruined houses. By New Years, it was growing thick at the edge of Johnson City. But there it stopped, as if by an invisible wall.

The pink scarf disappeared into it, vines moving aside to let her and the Parrot King pass. Then, it closed in behind her.

Orion counted to ten, then followed them into the thicket. The frozen moss beneath his feet gave a light crunch with each footfall, but it was quiet compared to the Parrot King’s raspy whispers and the rustle of his jacket layers. From the sound of things, he was trying to assure Keely that things would be fine once they got to Billings.

“Billings!” said fake-Cassandra. “That’s on the other side of the state.”

Orion felt his stomach twist. If they managed to get on a truck to Billings, they could easily disappear. American urban areas were frequently portrayed on the MNN as sprawling self-sufficient utopias where “a new technology known as pebbles” were being used to produce food to feed everyone – and where no one needed to worry about anything because the military both kept the peace and patrolled the perimeter. It was hard to tell what was real and what was propaganda, but Orion had seen clips of coffee shops packed with people, streets filled with music and dancing, and marketplaces where the masses bartered for everything from iPhones to fresh-cooked meats.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It made him sick to his stomach – the idea of Keely disappearing into the throngs of people, enveloped like a piece of bread among ants, her pink scarf being hawked alongside an iPhone in a marketplace far far away. If anything, this confirmed what he had long suspected: the Parrot King was a bad influence.

“If you’re going to make a move,” said fake-Cassandra, “might as well do it now.”

He considered this, running through the growing list of available spells in his mind. There were the obvious solutions: Wild Growth’ing the Parrot King into an old man, or Fireballing him into cooked meat. Or he could try something more subtle – like putting him to sleep.

“The Knockout spell?” said fake-Cassandra. “If you were going to do that, why’d you wait so long? We’re halfway to the refugee camp by now.”

That was an exaggeration, but she was right. Orion had come to realize that when he didn’t do something and didn’t know why, sometimes there turned out to be a deeper reason – something that Mom would have said came “from his subconscious.”

As he followed, he tried to figure out what it was. Several minutes later, he decided it was that the optimal outcome was this: something large and vicious jumps out of the wilderness, Keely stands petrified in fear as the Parrot King runs away, and he, Orion, casts a well-timed Fireball. Keely would open her eyes to the smell of roasted monster and see him, her savior, standing over its smoking carcass.

“And then she falls in love?” said fake-Cassandra.

“Shut up,” he hissed, accidentally out loud.

Up ahead, the two runaways froze. Keely’s pink scarf rippled in the wind. The vines around them swayed, sometimes moving with the wind and sometimes improvising.

“We should go back,” said Keely. “I heard Noel say she saw–”

“Noel is six years old,” scoffed the Parrot King. “You’re sixteen.”

They continued their discussion for several minutes, and it was all Orion could do to keep himself from resolving the matter with magic. He’d heard his parents argue a million times, but this was different. Mom and Dad spoke different languages; that was their problem. The Parrot King just spoke. Incessantly. As if he was the world’s leading expert on everything, including the American Wilderness. Whenever Keely tried to say something, he talked over her until the argument morphed into a monologue about the MNN’s recent documentary called “Into the American Wilderness” – in which an elite team of badass Marines had gone in with flamethrowers, machetes, machine guns, and cameras.

The way it was filmed and edited, you kept expecting monsters to jump out. But it never happened – which was the point the Parrot King kept making. Over and over again. As if he were talking to a six year old.

When the two of them began to move again, Orion followed – hanging farther back this time. Keely’s scarf was a mere pink smudge in the distance. But Orion never took his eyes off of it, pretending at times that he was a giant mutated wolf hunting marines with flamethrowers, and at times that he was Keely’s spirit animal, sent by her subconscious to protect her.

At some point, fake-Cassandra said, “We’re almost to the refugee camp” and Orion realized it had been several hours. It was probably about noon, though it was hard to tell with the sun being choked twice – once by the clouds and once again by the canopy of alien vines.

He smelled smoke. About a mile later, the vines began to thin, and the ground was black. Here he stopped, seeing the pink scarf heading into a village of military tents and temporary structures. There was a helicopter on a pad in the middle. Two soldiers in guard towers called out, and Orion saw the Parrot King raise his hands. Keely did the same.

“You’re gonna lose her,” said fake-Cassandra.