Not a week later, I was awoken by knocking on the front door. I blinked to get the tears out of my eyes and threw on some clothes. I yawned as I opened the door. On the other side was a cop with a flashlight.

  “Hey kid,” he said. “Your parents home?”

  “Yeah,” I yawned. “What’s going on? They in trouble or something?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nothing like that. Can you get one of them, please?”

  I shrugged, then trudged to the bedroom to rouse Dad.

  “Dad, police at the door,” I told him when he was lucid enough to understand me.

  “Shit,” he spat.

  He got dressed, and we walked back to the door.

  “Mr. Teller?” the policeman asked.

  “Yeah?” Dad said.

  “You own farmland on the other side of town, right?”

  “Mhm.”

  “There’s been a fire in the barn over there. Firefighters put it out already.”

  “Any idea how it started?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” he said.

  “We’ve got cameras,” Dad pointed out. “If they survived the flames, the recordings could shed some light on what happened.”

  He yawned loudly.

  “Mind giving us a ride over? I don’t think I’m fit to drive right now.”

  “Sure,” the policeman said with a nod.

  Dad and I climbed into the back of the patrol car. I enjoyed the ride. There weren’t any seatbelts that fit me, so I was sliding around every corner. The only negative were the bars that filled the windows. They prevented me from sticking my arm out to fly a hand-airplane in the wind.

  When we arrived, there was a firetruck and two police cars in addition to the one we came in. As soon as I got out of the police car, I could smell the acrid smoke of burned oil and rubber. The spotlights from the police cars illuminated a grim picture. The front of the equipment shed was rather toasty. I hoped the back had survived better.

  “These the owners?” the person leading the firemen asked.

  “Yep,” the policeman said. “Here are Mr. Teller, the older, and Mr. Teller, the younger. They indicated there might be a recording of what happened for your investigation.”

  “Great!”

  He turned to Dad and me and extended a hand.

  “I’m Mike, the fire chief.”

  Dad shook his hand.

  “Follow me,” he told us. “And be careful. There might be broken and sharp bits of metal you wouldn’t want to step on.”

  I went to follow him and Dad, but he held an arm out.

  “Not you, kid. It’s dangerous.”

  “Let him come,” Dad said. “He’s the one who knows how to work the cameras and recordings.”

  Mike looked at me with suspicion, but relented.

  “Alright. Follow close by and be careful, please.”

  I nodded and walked behind the two men.

  The inside of the equipment shed was as wrecked as the outside had been. The tractors and other equipment that Uncle Ben and I had worked on were destroyed. Well, most of it was. There were some things that looked to be ok from where I was walking. The back area was mostly spared the flames’ destruction.

  “So, where are the cameras and recordings?” Mike asked.

  I pointed to a door in the back that was partially blackened by the flames. We walked to it and tried to open it. It was locked. Dad produced the key from his pocked. The lock clicked and Mike pulled it open. The room inside looked like it had been spared. There was the ever-present smell of smoke, but otherwise everything looked alright—if unpowered.

  “Any way to move the recordings?” Mike asked. “There’s no way to check here without electricity.”

  “Give me a minute to pull the drives,” I said.

  I walked over to the console and kneeled down. Under it were several portable flash drives in two rows that held the last 30 days of recordings—up until the power went down. I removed all the ones on one side of the console. The ones on the other side were duplicates that served a backup function.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “These drives have the recordings on them,” I said, handing them to Mike.

  “Thanks,” he replied. “We’ll look these over and have a report in a couple of days. Let’s get out of here.”

  “One second,” I said.

  I kneeled down and grabbed the backup drives. Even if they were doing their investigation, I wanted to see for myself. My laptop could handle pulling the footage from the drives, and I was—by this time—wide awake. Might as well use the early morning hours to get to the bottom of what happened—if I could.

  “Backups,” I explained. “I’m sure Dad will want to see for himself.”

  Mike nodded.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  Dad looked at me and I nodded.

  “Let’s go.”

  The trip back out was a sad one for me. While I’d had a goal going in, there was nothing stopping me from mourning the loss of everything I’d worked for in the last year. The building and most of the equipment would need to be replaced. That would take time and delay my planting—again. I needed experience, and this was a setback I couldn’t afford!

  Fire rose in me. I hoped that this hadn’t been an accident. If it was done by someone, I was going to find them and put an end to whatever bullshit they were doing. I thought back to the time when the field was torn up by a truck and wondered if the two incidents were connected.

  The policeman—Marc, I later learned—drove us home. The mood in the patrol car was not good. Dad and I said nothing, even when Marc tried to lighten the mood with gallows humor. I had a new goal, and that was to find out what—or who—was responsible. I hoped that the recordings would have a definite answer.

  When we got home, I rushed inside to plug the drives into the laptop. Each drive contained about a week’s worth of footage. I didn’t need all the drives, only the one that had the most recent recordings. Finding it meant looking through all the drives to see which one had what I needed. It ended up being the last one I looked at—because searching any more would have been a waste of time.

  The motion lights on the outside of the equipment shed came in clutch. After searching through the recording of the last day, I saw them come on just after midnight. Right in the middle of the frame was a man in a blue jacket holding a jerry can. He smashed a window in the left front door and dumped what I guessed was gasoline inside. He threw the mostly empty container through the window, then tossed a lit rag into the window and ran. The fire started quickly.

  While it sucked to see the arson happen and not be able to do anything to stop it, I was glad that I had the guy’s face in enough detail to identify the guy if I ever saw him. I hoped the police or firefighters would know who the arsonist was. Just in case the police didn’t have the footage, I emailed them the important section of the recording. I also emailed Gloria about the issue and what I’d need—the building rebuilt and new equipment as soon as she could. Planting season was on the horizon.

  It took a week to hear back from the police and fire department. Which really meant I had to bug them several times to get any response at all. The result was less than I had hoped for. Sure, there was a narrative based on the footage, but there was no identification of who the guy was.

  I felt the fury return. Who was this asshole to get in my way? I was trying to save the world! Didn’t he understand the delays would cost him his life? I took a deep breath. Since this was probably the same person who had ripped up my fields last year, I was going to have to educate him. The police weren’t likely to do anything without a good lead, and I didn’t have time to sit around, hoping no more sabotage would take place.

  What I needed was a plan. My mind immediately turned to the system and what skills I could unlock. Depending on what method of education I went with—reprisal or something more permanent—I would need a way of remaining undetected. Stealth had been a good option and one I hoped would improve when I leveled it up a bit. Tracking was another candidate. I needed to find the person who did it. Finally, I would need a skill to do the deed. Magic would be much harder to trace.

  When I considered whether to stick with hurting the guy or his stuff or outright killing him, I started with the lesser option first. To that end, I Searched through the available skills before selecting something that looked good. That it fit the crime I needed to avenge was even better.

  I put 51,100 experience into Tracking and Stealth to bring both up to level 9. I wanted to test the skills when they were in the second tier to see if that made a big difference. For a point of comparison, I improved Identify to level 9 as well.

  In a flash of inspiration, I attempted to Identify the man in the video recording. Sadly, all it did was give me a breakdown of the materials in the laptop instead. That, of course, would be a boon if I ever went treasure hunting. It was much less useful now, though.

  The next thing I tried was Stealth. It would be important for me to not show up on video just in case. I activated it and walked around in front of my house, where I knew there were cameras. I returned to the house after almost running out of chi to power the skill.

  Pulling up the camera footage on the laptop, I scrolled through the past hour of footage. I watched myself exit the house before walking to the side and out of view of the road. I carefully looked for any sign of my return to the front. There was a little shimmer in the air—like a smudge—that moved back and forth. While not ideal, it should be good enough for use at night.

  For Tracking, I needed to go to the scene of the crime. Thankfully, the construction crew wasn’t set to begin work for a few days, so the site was mostly undisturbed. I activated the skill and looked around. There were so many tracks showing that I was overwhelmed! I recognized some of them—like the route Dad, the firefighter, and I took into the equipment shed.

  There were many I couldn’t place. I traced each back to its source as best I could. Some were policemen. Some were tracks from the firefighters. Then there were the cars and trucks that ran up and down the gravel driveway. Eventually, I found what I was looking for—an unexplained set of footprints that lined up with what I remembered the man had done.

  I walked the footprints back to a set of tire tracks. Those tire tracks ran all the way to the road before turning left. Barely fifty feet down the road, the tracks were lost amongst the others. The road wasn’t overly busy, but it was busy enough and it had been long enough that the tracks were effectively erased by newer traffic.

  I cursed inwardly. Why hadn’t I thought to check myself on that night? With the system and skills, I might have been able to nab the guy then and there! Then I remembered it wasn’t Dad who drove me, but the police. How could I explain magic to the police and not have them either laugh at me or report it to someone who would put me in a tiny room? I was angry and had nothing to direct it towards. I stomped back towards Dad to get a ride home.