Free The Only Ones by Aaron Starmer

a level seventy-one druid.”
    Martin had no idea how to do anything on a level seventy-one druid, but he soon understood that this was how things were accomplished in Xibalba. Give and you shall receive.
    What Martin wanted more than anything was their stories. So he would make up excuses to have them join him on their roofs or at their fuse boxes. He’d say he needed their help, and when they would begrudgingly join him, he’d press them for the details of their lives.
    They recited their Arrival Stories, the tales of how they’d come to Xibalba. They told of months-long journeys along highways or up the coast, of hiding in flooded and fire-eaten cities, in spookily deserted villages. Some had traveled by bike. Others by boat. None could really explain why they ended up where they did. They were looking for someone, trying to make it somewhere, or just keeping on the move. Xibalba got in the way.
    The common strain in all the stories was that none of the kids ever actually saw anyone disappear. They had all been hiding away somewhere, too consumed in their own private lives to notice what was happening … until it had already happened.
    One of the more fascinating tales came from Sigrid Hansen. Sigrid was Xibalba’s resident messenger, a one-girl postal system who ferried messages throughout town in addition to maintaining a rigorous jogging regimen. A world-class junior-division runner, she had been born and raised in Norway but had been invited to an international cross-country meet in the United States. Because of her fear offlying, Sigrid traveled with her parents on a transatlantic cruise that would take them from Oslo to Scotland to New York and on to Florida, where the race was to be held. They arrived in New York on the Day.
    Rather than go sightseeing, like everyone else from the ship, Sigrid stayed aboard, put on a pair of headphones, and dedicated two hours to the treadmill. When she finally left the ship’s gym, she noticed that everyone was gone. And when they didn’t come back, she walked down the gangplank and into an empty Manhattan.
    “It should have been my day off, you know? I did not need to train that day,” Sigrid told Martin, throwing her hands in the air. “New York City was out there. My first time to visit it. And I choose to be in a room without a porthole. It is a cruel trick, yeah? Like an … irony, I think. I am staying in place for once, and it is everyone else who is now running away.”
    “Do you really think they were running away?” Martin asked.
    She shrugged and choked back some tears. “There is a hospital in this town. On rainy days, that was where I used to train. Kelvin never liked me going there, but who cares, yeah? It has long hallways, good for a stride. I kept the doors closed, because I didn’t like to see empty beds. The sheets still messy, you know? Made me sad. Still makes me sad, thinking about it. An empty hospital should be a good thing, yeah? I don’t go there anymore, of course. You don’t have to see ghosts, you know, to believe in them. You only have to feel them.”
    Martin thought it might be appropriate to hug her, but he didn’t. He was beginning to wonder if when people reachedout to him, it was only an act. It was because he, quite literally, held the power. Sigrid had asked him to provide electricity to, of all things, a treadmill.
    At night, Martin would go to Felix’s house and log on to the Internet. The house was still without electricity, but Felix was up at all hours, working alone in his kitchen, wiring together circuit boards and getting his mainframe prepared for its launch. He did it all by the dim illumination from a series of tiny lightbulbs tucked into his headband. The bulbs weren’t attached to batteries of any sort, and Martin couldn’t figure out how they worked.
    Felix proudly revealed his secret. “Fireflies,” he said. “Extract their luminescent chemicals and use them to fill Christmas lights. Voila.”
    The