“You definitely lost them,” I answer, my finger hovering over the trigger key.

“How do you know?”

I shoot the idiot who runs in blind through the doorway of my building, and then I toss a grenade outside and race up the broken stairs as gunfire begins splintering the rotted wood exterior. “Because their whole team is outside my building. I’m surrounded.”

“Where are you?” Mike asks, and after I describe my location, he asks Luke, “Should we try to save her?”

“What do you think?” my brother replies, his tone grave.

“I don’t know, man,” Mike says. “She makes fun of me a lot.”

I chuckle as I crouch down and shoulder my grenade launcher. It’s my last grenade, but the enemy team doesn’t need to know that.

“Yeah,” Luke agrees. “And she told me she was going to give me a noogie next time she sees me.”

“I’m your sister!” I argue as I continue watching the bottom of the stairs. “What about all those weekends I took you to the movies?”

“You made me watch a musical,” Luke complains, and I launch my grenade when the enemy team sends one of their men on a suicide mission up the stairs.

“That was one time!” I argue over the sound of the explosion blasting in my headphones. “And it was an accident! How was I supposed to know that Crocosaur vs. Sharkopus was a musical?”

“Uh, a little something called the Internet?”

“Dude,” Mike interrupts. “Crocosaur vs. Sharkopus was awesome.”

“See!” I bark as I sneak down the dark hallway stretching away from the top of the stairwell. My fatigues-wearing player holds my final big-bang shotgun at the ready.

“What about that scene where the crocosaur launches off the cliff and the sharkopus impales it on a tentacle?” Mike challenges. “That scene was the sickest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“It was pretty cool . . .” Luke reluctantly admits as an enemy player bends down to pick up the rare knife I intentionally discarded. I shoot him in the head, race over to collect his weapons and my knife, and slip back into my stakeout position—a hole in the rotted wall.

“I wish I had a sister cool enough to take me to movies like that,” Mike says, and I smile at my computer screen.

“Okay,” Luke finally agrees. “I guess we’ll save her.”

“Hailey,” Mike says, the smooth tone of his voice doing weird things to my stomach. “Remember when I said I’d protect you?”

“Yeah?”

“You might want to back away from the windows.”

I have a second and a half to race from my hiding spot, into an open room on the opposite side of the hallway, when the entire front face of the building explodes. “Holy shit!” I gasp, realizing that Mike and Luke must have been converging on my location the whole time they were pretending to weigh their options.

The players from the opposite team—the ones who weren’t taken out by Mike and Luke’s twin rocket launchers—race up my stairwell in a panic, and I fire my M16 like Tony freaking Montana, mowing them all down. Their player counter goes from six to three to one to zero, and then a medal stamps onto my screen, boosting my player to a new level of game play.

“That was AWESOME!” Luke squeals, and I lean back in my desk chair with a triumphant grin on my face.

“Dude, look at Hailey’s stats,” Mike praises when the scoreboard appears, and I grin even wider.

“Hailey’s a badass,” I agree, and Mike’s answering laugh turns my cheeks a very not-badass shade of pink.

“I’d save your badass any day.”

“Do you guys want to play again?” Luke asks, and I hate to burst his bubble, but—

“It’s a school night.”

“Aw, Hailey, come on. Just one more?”

“You said that last night, and we ended up staying up past midnight—”

“But it’s not even eleven yet.”

“Bedtime,” I order, and Luke groans.

“Play again tomorrow?” Mike asks, and my brother finally relents.

“Okay. Thanks for playing with us again, Mike.”

“Are you kidding? You’re a rock star, kid. That rocket launcher move was sick.”

“Thanks,” Luke says, and I can hear the smile in his voice even from halfway across the country. When he tells me goodnight, I tell him I love him, and he bashfully says it back before saying goodnight to Mike too. Then, Mike signs off without another word, and three seconds later, my phone rings.

“What was that you were saying about me being a bad shot?”

I pull my feet up into my chair with me, a big smile consuming my face. Tonight is the third night in a row that Mike has played Deadzone Five with me and my brother, since he finally talked me into beta testing it, and it’s also the third night in a row that the clock has passed eleven with me listening to the sound of his voice.

“Kind of hard to miss when you have a rocket launcher,” I tease, and Mike laughs.

“You’re just jealous you didn’t get to blow up the entire side of a building.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Honestly, I bet that looked cool as hell from the outside. “You don’t need to rub it in.”

Mike laughs again, and I rest my cheek against my knees, content to listen to the sound of it. Eventually, I say, “I’m glad it was you and Luke though. He really looks up to you.”