Minecraft: Mob Squad: Never Say Nether: An Official Minecraft Novel

I can’t believe that we finally found horses but now we have to travel underground instead. It’s a good idea, though—the tunnel in the fortress is a straight shot, and mine carts are fast. The first time I stood over this open hole in the ground, I was scared and excited. Maybe it’s because I’m descended from miners and was born underground, but I’ve always felt at home down there in the dark. Still, before our adventure, I’d never explored beneath the surface anywhere except my family’s mine, where I was surrounded by people I knew and places long proven to be safe. Well, relatively safe. A mine is still a mine, after all. And then Mal was digging out a shelter and randomly found this yawning chasm.

We’re lucky that Chug has a ladder in his pocket—he almost always has a ladder, now that he knows the pocket trick. He says it’s because Tok’s cats sometimes get caught in odd places, but if I had to guess, I would say it’s because we spent most of our childhood getting in trouble and running away from angry people, and that’s a whole lot easier if you can climb up a tree or a building to escape whoever’s chasing you. It’s not surprising that I have déjà vu as I climb down into the cavern, but I’m a lot more confident this time than I was back then. Whatever is down here, I’m ready for it.

Mal went first, because that’s how we usually do things. I’m so glad she’s back to normal, healthy and full of energy and always so certain about what to do. It was weird, when she was injured and mostly helpless. I’ve only seen her that way once before, and it was really scary. It just goes against the natural order of things, when someone you trust and look up to is suddenly fragile, like if salmon could fly or chickens could swim.

Which makes me wonder…if salmon could fly and chickens could swim, would they taste like each other or a mixture of both?

“Lenna?”

Chug calls up to me from the ledge down below, where he waits with Mal, both of them holding torches. It’s a long way down to the bottom of this cavern, so we agreed we’d all meet on the ledge before moving the ladder down to the ground for another climb. The horses and Poppy are waiting in a little paddock Mal dug for them. I don’t want to go anywhere without my wolf, but I also don’t know how to get her down a ladder. I gave her a bone and told her to sit, and she’s such a good girl that I’m sure she’ll still be sitting there when we get back.

I look to Poppy one last time before stepping onto the ladder. As I begin to climb down, I can’t help noticing Jarro, who’s staring at me with bald terror written all over his face. I stop.

“What’s wrong?”

He looks back at the horses. “Will they be okay?”

“They’re wild animals. They’re in a pit. Mobs don’t care about them. And Poppy is with them, too. They’ll be safer here than they would be underground. If we could get them underground. Which we can’t.”

He sighs, and his shoulders slump. “I guess I got kind of attached to Speckles. I hate leaving her behind.”

“We all hate it. Chug hated leaving Thingy, and I hate leaving Poppy. But we have to keep moving forward. Don’t worry—they’ll be here when we get back. And since you know there’s no way I’d leave Poppy behind, you know we won’t forget them.”

Jarro nods…maybe a little too much. He can’t stop nodding. He’s biting his lip and pacing and breathing too fast.

“Is something else bothering you, Jarro?”

He cranes his head to look down into the hole. “Is it safe?”

“As safe as a ladder into a hole underground can be.”

“But, I mean, you guys have been telling me that everything gets dangerous when it’s dark, and now we’re all going into a cave. So that’s got to be dangerous, right?”

I shrug. “We have weapons. We have torches. We’re at full health. You haven’t really seen us fight yet, but we’re good at it. We took down over a dozen illagers in a woodland mansion once and didn’t get hurt too badly.”

Jarro looks away nervously. “Okay, but…I don’t even know what illagers are. My mom sent me home when they attacked the town, remember? And I always thought I would be a good fighter, but it’s like…” He angrily kicks a stone. “I’m afraid that when the time comes, I’ll just freeze again, like I did with that creeper, and somebody will get hurt. Or I’ll fall off the ladder, or the ladder will break and drop me, or—”

“Stop.” I step off the ladder and hold my torch between us. “You’re telling yourself stories about things that haven’t happened. Why don’t you tell yourself a story with a happy ending?”

He looks at me like I just grew a second head. “Because I don’t see anything good coming from us going underground! We should just keep riding the horses and following the trail. We know what to expect up here. We know we’ll be okay.”

“You think you know that, but we’ve had bad things happen to us up here. We don’t even know if the bridge has been replaced.” I cock my head. “I think you’re just scared of the unknown. You’re scared of what you don’t know.”

“Obviously!” he splutters.

“Well, here’s what I know. If you go with us, we know what we’re doing and we have experience and weapons. If you stay up here alone, you’ve got nothing.”

“You wouldn’t leave me here,” he says, daring and smug.

I blink at him.

“Jarro, do you know that for years, I had a headache every morning because I knew you were going to bully me? But I had to go to school anyway. I tried all sorts of different timings, tried to walk by your house earlier or later or take a different route, and sometimes it worked, but most of the time it didn’t. But I still went to school, knowing you were going to make my day stink. So if I can do that, you can do this. You can climb down the ladder, because fear only stops you if you let it. You just have to feel the fear and do it anyway. I’d go underground a thousand times before I went back to first grade and had to walk by your house.”

With that, I swing around on the ladder and climb down. He can join us or he can stay behind, but I’m not going to sit around feeling sorry for him.

“What was that all about?” Chug asks.

“I told Jarro that if he didn’t climb down, we’d leave him behind.”

Chug’s eyes bug out. “Whoa. You’re hard-core.”

I stare up at the top of the ladder and speak loud enough for my voice to carry. “He’s never had real problems before. He can learn to face them, like we did, or he can hang out in that shelter and wait for us to find Tok. It’ll be boring but safe. We can’t waste any more time.”

Chug holds out his fist, and I bump it with my own. He knows I’m not really big on hugging.

“If Jarro’s not coming, can we move the ladder and head down?” Mal asks.

I steady the ladder with both my hands and wait. “Not yet.”

I’m just about to give up when I feel the ladder shift under Jarro’s weight. He climbs down slowly, trembling, clinging to the wood. I step back once he’s near the bottom rung, and he steps off onto the ledge.

“Don’t look down,” I tell him. “Sit, if you need to.”

He drops to his hands and knees, and Chug smirks but doesn’t say anything. I know he’d love to rib Jarro for his fear, but Chug seems to understand that you don’t pick fights while standing on stone ledges over a dark abyss. Chug is also not the sort of person to kick someone when they’re trying. As scared as I once was of Jarro, out here, he’s pretty pathetic.

Mal pulls down the ladder and lowers it until it touches the ground below. I hold the top rungs to steady it as she climbs down from the ledge with one hand, a torch in the other. Then Chug goes, leaving me with Jarro, who’s still clinging to the rock.

“Almost there,” I tell him. “If you did that, you can do this, too.”

He nods, and I hold the ladder for him, knowing Mal is holding the bottom of it. As Jarro passes by me, he whispers, “Thanks,” and I just nod. Once he’s safely down, I collect the torch hanging on the cavern wall and climb down myself.

The last time I was down here, there’d been a cave-in. But now, those boulders are gone, the area cleaned up to clearly reveal rails. This track connects Cornucopia to the woodland mansion. Even if our town Elders sealed up our end of the tunnel, they didn’t destroy the track this far in. If Chug really can make a mine cart, our journey will be so much faster. He puts his torch on the wall, and I walk seven blocks and attach mine. Mal keeps hers in hand.

“Okay, here we go,” Chug murmurs, pulling the wonky crafting table out of his pocket.

As he gets to work, I take out my bow and arrows, and Mal has her diamond pickaxe at the ready. The cavern is utterly silent, other than Chug’s crafting noises, and all of my senses are on high alert. I can smell water somewhere, and minerals, hear dripping far off and the squeak of a bat. It’s colder down here but not unpleasant.

“What do we do now?” Jarro asks nervously. In the quiet, his voice is startling, and it echoes off the walls.

“For one thing, be quiet,” Mal whispers. “We’re listening for mobs—for groans or clacking or twanging or squeaks. Get your axe out. Be ready. Chug’s our best fighter at hand-to-hand combat, and we have to defend him while he’s working.”

“You’re not the best?” Jarro asks her.

Mal shakes her head ruefully. “Nope. I mostly distract them so Chug can use his sword. If you see him swinging, get out of the way.”

“And if you see me nock an arrow, also get out of the way,” I add. “I can’t shoot stuff if you’re between us.”

Jarro nods and pulls out his axe. “So it sounds like my job is to be quiet and stay out of the way.”

“Anytime you want to jump into a fight, we can use you,” Mal assures him. “Even Tok can take up a weapon, if we’re in trouble.”

Jarro is about to say something snappy about that, but Chug stops hammering and glares at him, so he wisely reconsiders and instead asks, “Where’d you guys learn to fight?”

“Out here. We almost lost our first fight—with four zombies. I felt like I was just flailing, like I didn’t know how to swing my pickaxe or where to aim. I was sure we were going to lose,” Mal admits. I appreciate that she said “lose” instead of “die,” because that’s a much friendlier word.

“So you guys left town, found weapons, and just started fighting zombies?” Jarro asks.

Mal nods. “Yeah, except Nan gave us the weapons.”

He snorts. “My mom would never give me a weapon.” He sniffles and swipes at his nose with his fist. “I mean, she won’t even let me cut up my own steak.”

“Why not?” I ask, and Mal shoots me a look that suggests it’s not my business.

There’s something about the darkness of the cave, how remote and alien and separate it feels from the world, something that makes it feel like it’s okay to say things you wouldn’t say in daylight. That has to be the reason that Jarro says what he does.

“Because after my dad died, I was all she had,” Jarro says softly. “She had me when she was older, and my grandparents are dead, and then my dad— Well, it was an accident. He was fixing the roof and—”

He takes a big, sucking breath, and I notice that Chug has stopped his hammering to listen.

“Anyway, she always tells me it’s just the two of us against the world, and it’s her job to keep me safe. So I can’t climb trees or leave the Hub or slice bread. So there. I’m sure you’ll have something clever to say about that.”

Mal and I both look to Chug, because it’s true: He’s never missed a chance to eviscerate Jarro with words. But Chug looks…sorry for Jarro.

“I didn’t know about your dad,” Chug says quietly.

“Yeah, well, it’s not exactly something I like to talk about.”

For a moment, they just stare at each other, but it feels like someone should say something, so I say, “Is that why you’re so mean all the time?”

“Um—I—what? Why would you—pssh. Whatever.” Jarro shakes his head. “You guys were just annoying. Are annoying. You always act like you own the town and you’re better than anybody else. Like the rules don’t apply to you.”

Mal holds up her pickaxe. “I mean, they kind of don’t. Chug, how’s that mine cart coming?”

Chug sighs and slams metal down on the crafting table. “I messed this one up. I need more iron. Could you do a little mining?”

Mal hands her torch to Jarro. He takes it and looks from me to her.

“Just go against your instincts and protect Chug at all costs,” she says with a smirk.

Mal runs a hand over the roughly hewn stone wall near one of our torches. That’s where I’d start, too—it looks about right for a vein. As her pickaxe strikes again and again, Chug hammers and grunts and tries to salvage what he can from what was well on the way to being a very bad mine cart. “This is harder than it looks,” he grumbles.

A lump of iron clumps onto the ground. “I think there are a few more—” Mal says. As she mines, she burrows deeper into the rock.

“So you can just…dig through rock?” Jarro asks, mesmerized.

“That’s what mining is—” I start, but then I hear it.

Rattle. Rattle.

“The rattling thing,” Jarro whispers, clutching his axe to his chest—luckily with the blade pointed away. “A—a skelbie!”

Chug is hammering, Mal is deep in the stone wall, and that leaves just me and Jarro.

“It’s a skeleton,” I tell him, nocking an arrow and listening for the next click of bone on stone. “It’ll shoot arrows. I’ll shoot back at it. If you can hit it from the side, it should go down without too much trouble.”

“But—”

“No buts. Just use your axe. And remember: We don’t have any potions. If you don’t help with the fight, we might be in trouble.”

Rattle.

I take aim and let loose an arrow, satisfied at the clatter of a solid hit. I get another arrow ready, but then a groan echoes around the chamber.

“Jarro, there’s a zombie!” I shout. “You’ve got to take it down!”

“I can’t!” he shouts back. “I’m not ready—”

“Tell that to the zombie.”

I focus everything I have on the skeleton. I can see it now, rushing toward me by the light of the torch, and I release arrow after arrow until it falls. I spin, looking for Jarro, but I don’t see him. The zombie’s groans are louder now, and when Jarro cries out, I know he’s taken a hit.

“Hit it, Jarro! Pretend it’s a log!”

“I can’t—”

“You can, you big idiot!” Chug bellows from his crafting table.

But he clearly can’t. The axe forgotten in his hand, Jarro turns his back on the zombie, as if not seeing it will mean it doesn’t exist.

“Jarro, you have to fight!” I shout. They’re in the shadows, so I can’t risk hitting Jarro with an arrow, but I grab the torch he dropped and run. The zombie is groaning and biting, and Jarro is holding it off with one arm—which has a nasty wound on it.

But he’s not going to use his axe. He can’t. He’s frozen.

I whip my pickaxe out of my pocket. It’s not much, but with the zombie focused on Jarro, I’m able to take it down without suffering any damage myself. It falls, leaving rotten flesh and, luckily, an iron ingot. Jarro frowns at the wound on his arm before scooping up the ingot and holding it out to Chug.

“I was looking for one of these,” Chug says, taking the ingot and putting it into service.

Mal pops out of her hole with three more chunks of iron. “How’s it going out here?”

“Jarro almost got killed by a zombie, and I took down a skeleton,” I tell her.

“I didn’t almost get killed,” he says. “It’s not that bad—”

“Speaking of not bad…”

We all turn to look at Chug, and he’s proudly holding a mine cart.

“Nice work,” I tell him.

We bump fists, and Chug puts the cart on the rails.

“Let’s go get my brother,” he says.

And that’s the exact moment Jarro chooses to faint.