“I have always been… different, in some way. An AI, a soldier, an outcast. If being with a human woman makes me different in a new way, what does it matter? I do not care. To be fair, I give many fucks about a host of things. Just not this one.” -Bubbles, Questionable Content-

  _____

  James sat upright on the edge of one of the basement’s hospital beds. He was technically in quarantine, but everyone in the Lair was in quarantine right now, and would be for several days. This, understandably, had made a lot of the long term residents that had obligations a little upset. But they didn’t really have a lot of great options, and so they were all going to have to do their part to make sure that at least here, in this city, there wasn’t a wizard plague.

  If they were careful, and smart, and cautious, they might even get through this without the infection spreading through the members of the Order that hadn’t deployed to Springfield.

  It did help that the more contagious Underburbs diseases burned themselves out extremely fast. James himself, after surviving his bleeding issue, and taking a small nap, had woken up to several concurrent drumming thoughts in his head.

  [Survivor - Low : +1 Skill Point]

  [Survivor - Low : +1 Skill Point]

  [Survivor - Tidal : +3 Skill Points]

  He still didn’t know what ‘tidal’ was for. Not that he knew what the other ones were for, anyway, aside from having bigger numbers. Maybe someone else had figured it out by now; there were plenty of people who had Underburbs experiences to compile into a full dungeon report now. Or the foundation of one anyway.

  Either way, he was allowed mostly free reign of the medical department. Not that he had much of a reason to leave his room. Anyone who had gotten through with no obvious infections had been checked and double checked, then allowed into the rest of the Lair. Well, allowed into their apartments. Everyone else could wander the Lair until they verified complete safety. And on the other side, some people who had active infections were in double-bonus quarantine, until immunity developed and the Underburbs magic was repelled. Deb wasn’t budging on that. They weren’t letting returning delve teams in, they weren’t letting Texture-Of-Barkdust go to sales meetings, they weren’t letting Pendragon get airborne, they weren’t doing anything that involved opening a single door out of the Lair until the air was clear. Even the elevator was almost completely sealed, just in case.

  And since he wasn’t the only one, James was spending his time here hanging out with the other people who were stuck for a while.

  Zhu was too. And it was his arm that was extended off from the side of James’ battered and bruised body. The borrowed tee shirt he had on not really hiding all the abrasions and contusions across his arms and neck. Zhu was in a little better shape; he’d survived whatever had put holes in him, and gotten his own next skill point, but he was still exhausted to the point that his manifestation’s feathers were thinning.

  But maybe not for long.

  ”Yeah, you’re definitely oil. Or oil enough.” Vex said as she held Zhu’s talons in her hands.

  ”Babe you can’t call people oily.” Her girlfriend sitting by the door and reading a thick book commented. Astra hadn’t talked much since getting here, and James got the impression she was dealing with some kind of chronic illness. The woman had rough brown skin, but there was something about her complexion that felt off; like she was dealing with endless anemia or something like it.

  But that didn’t stop her from having a sense of humor, and while she clearly had trouble focusing, she was a lot more delighted by the Order than either of her more suspicious partners. Which was why she was reading a copy of their operations manual.

  James chuckled before either of the others could say anything. “Don’t worry, Zhu knows.”

  ”Well I know now.” Zhu’s voice was like he was stifling a yawn, despite not having the organs for it. “So how oily am I?”

  ”Pretty oily.” Vex admitted. “Uh… y’all have any grass I can use? If you want me to try to fix him, I mean. Like I’ll try. I don’t know if it’ll work, but it feels wrong and it probably sucks to have it in you I guess.”

  James was nodding before he actually realized what he’d been asked. “Sorry, grass?” He asked. “Like weed, or sod, or a third form of grass I am not familiar with yet.” Vex started to answer while her girlfriend covered her laugh by raising the book she was reading upward, when James snapped the fingers of the hand Zhu wasn’t on and jumped back in. “Or like magic grass that comes from a dungeon? Because we definitely don’t… I mean we probably don’t… actually the odds we have that have gone up exponentially in the last week so maybe.”

  ”Lawn… grass?” Vex ventured like she wasn’t sure if James was going to keep talking.

  She’d come back with them, along with a lot of other survivors who needed help or medical attention, but it was obvious she was still on her guard. The Order had helped. That didn’t mean the Order was good.

  But also Astra was alive, and Mags was alive, and she was alive, so Vex owed him. And she’d figure out if they needed to be escaping after

  that.

  ”There’s a garden down here, and also Rufus’ thing. There’s gotta be some grass.” Zhu said thoughtfully.

  James shook his head though. “No, no. We didn’t put grass in the garden ‘cause it’s a huge waste of water. And Rufus grows horrors beyond our comprehension, not grass.”

  ”Rufus grows tiny cacti!” Zhu defended the stapler. “And also… okay, I thought about the sentence I was about to say, I apologize.”

  ”Yeah that’s what I thought.” James sighed as he felt his arm getting stiff, Vex still continuing her examination. “We could probably just get someone to bring us some grass though. Why do you… need it? Like, do you mind if I ask? I really want to ask about your whole magic thing.”

  The only thing James wanted to do, for the rest of his life, was ask people about magic things. So when Vex’s mouth twitched with the ghost of a frown, and she said “No”, James was disappointed.

  Disappointed, but not really upset. After all, it wasn’t like she was telling him she could fix a problem but wouldn’t. Just that she didn’t want him to know details. And that was her choice, so he just sighed and nodded. “Alright. Well, I dunno when the line to get stuff delivered is going to clear up. Probably never, before Deb lets everyone out. But… if you’re okay sticking around…” He really tried to not sound too hopeful. It wouldn’t be fair to project the increasingly frantic way James was grasping for a cure for Zhu onto this random person he’d known for a day at most. A day where they’d both slept through half of it.

  For her part, Vex just gave James an expectant look. Like she was waiting for something else from him, and he’d just kind of left her dangling without a complete answer.

  He wasn’t really paying attention to her though. He was saying something quiet and reassuring to Zhu, and neither of them really seemed to notice when Vex let go of Zhu’s manifested arm and rolled the wheeled stool over to bump into the wall next to Astra.

  Her girlfriend didn’t look up from the operations manual. “I think he means it.” She ‘spoke’ without moving her lips inside Vex’s head. When her partner gave her an incredulous look that she didn’t need something as petty as magic to interpret, Astra smiled thinly. “He didn’t even notice your test. He doesn’t… care, babe. Or he cares a lot, but about other stuff.”

  ”Everyone cares about magic.” Vex muttered. “Of course he fucking cares. He’s doing this on purpose.”

  ”It’s true, I do. Am.” James said loudly enough that it made Astra jump in surprise. “Sorry, I feel like this came up already, but I have enhanced hearing. If you want to take the conversation to another room or…”

  ”Right, this.” Vex sighed and leaned forward, an elbow on her knee as she cocked her index finger James’ way. “How many dumb party tricks do you have?”

  James pursed his lips, laughing silently for a second before giving an honest answer with a shrug. “I have a spreadsheet if you want to see all of them, I guess?” He offered. “Because you’re right. I do care. Magic has made my life immeasurably better. And the more of it I find, the more I can use to inflict better lives on other people.” He rolled his shoulder, Zhu’s feathers fluttering in a false breeze as they both stretched and tried to get different forms of stiffness out. “Ask whatever probing questions you want. That’s fine. I don’t mind, okay? There’s only one way to earn the trust of someone who’s been fucked over, and that’s to actually do the thing you say you mean. We’re well acquainted with that around here.”

  ”Does this have to do with the snakes?” Astra asked out loud in her purposefully quiet voice, tipping the edge of the book down again as she wobbled in her seat, legs crossed under her.

  ”Surprisingly no!” Zhu said happily. “Camracondas are history to me, but I know they were all pretty eager when they arrived. No, it’s all the others that needed it. Except Ben.”

  ”Ben is a… mimic?” James held his hands out like he was trying to measure the word for accuracy. “He’s fine. Ben’s got trust issues too though, Zhu.”

  ”Oh right, he was here for like a month before he told anyone.”

  Vex raised her hand with the sharp motion of someone flagging down a half-asleep taxi driver. “Hi, yes, hello. Ben is a human name! Who is Ben! Did you just kidnap someone!”

  ”No? No, Ben’s not human, he just wandered in and decided to stay. Seriously, that’s all any of us know, including Ben.” James chuckled easily as he kicked his feet off the side of the hospital bed. He didn’t feel like getting up yet, but also didn’t want to lay down again, and there was a shortage of places to sit down here with a hundred people occupying medical while they quarantined. “Kinda getting off track. The point is, we’ve been through this kind of process before. You’re our guests. If you can help Zhu, then I’ll owe you forever, but you’re not a prisoner, you can leave whenever, and no one at the Order will ever demand you tell us about your magic.” James frowned and then conceded, “Unless it’s an immediate issue that’s threatening lives.”

  ”How often does that come up?” Vex kind of wanted to know if that was a common excuse they used.

  James rolled forward and hopped to his feet, one ankle protesting slightly but then stabilizing as his Endurance purged the pain and ignored the damage now that he was moving. “Never, yet. I just feel like I shouldn’t say unqualified ‘nevers’ you know?”

  ”You’re bizarre.” Vex said plainly. “Also I can’t leave whenever, because-“

  ”Right, shit, quarantine.” James snapped his fingers with a swishing of his arm. “See this is why I need to not make unqualified statements.”

  Astra grinned with crooked teeth behind her book. “I like him.” She sent into Vex’s head. Mags’ too, since their partner was in range of her domain. “Mags hates him, doesn’t she?” Vex nodded slowly when James had his eyes closed in an overhead stretch. “Figures. She probably thinks he’s nice.” Vex snorted in reply and tried not to let the smile show. When her girlfriend started talking, she tended to keep talking if unopposed. Not that Vex minded, but it was hard when there was a voice in her head and someone else having a real conversation.

  Vex folded her arms and looked out into the hall where a pair of nurses were walking past. There were a few ‘knights’ just lurking a couple rooms down, but she didn’t think they were actually there to guard her or anything. Legitimately these rooms were just kinda awkward to spend a whole day in, so people who weren’t stuck in bed but still couldn’t leave the medical wing were hanging out. It felt lively, mostly.

  She considered just telling James that she needed some grass cause whatever American lawns were made out of had a minute amount of a natural oil in it, and she could use it as a sort of ‘needle’ with her domain. Considered saying that if she could actually do anything for Zhu, it would be using that known substance as a medium for excising his infected oil, a kind of workaround for only being able to split her domain two ways when she really probably needed three. Considered just flat out saying where she’d gotten the domain, how to expand it, and what it meant.

  “I just need some grass.” Vex told James. “And maybe for you to sit still for a few hours.”

  ”I can do-“

  ”He can’t do that.” Zhu cut in.

  James glared at the navigator on his shoulder. “I’ll read a spellbook.”

  Considering it for a second, Zhu gave a fluff of his feathers. “He can do that.”

  ”You have to sit still too.” Vex pointed out, a little annoyed they were turning her serious attempt to pay them back into a joke.

  ”Oh we’re screwed then.” Zhu said, before seeing the look on her face and slitting his eyes slightly. “Sorry. Yeah, I can do that. I’m just… it’s been a long time.” He said

  Trying to explain it, James’ voice came across as quietly respectful in a way that didn’t match what Vex knew about the guy. ”Zhu’s species is, in part, templated on the mind of whoever they grow up in. Zhu’s part me. And I’m… not good at making large personal changes, even when I need to. So both of us get used to being in pain, and then kind of live with it, and when something comes along to fix it…”

  ”We have to bully each other into being good to ourselves.” Zhu explained more directly.

  Astra flipped a page in her book. “You two are a good couple.” She said approvingly.

  Vex started to grin, cause she’d thought that too, and James laughed as some of his good mood came back. “Nah, we’re not dating. I dunno where the hell any of my partners are right now, except for ‘down here somewhere and not dead’. Since we’re here for a few days, you’re welcome to meet them if you want. I mean, I assume you’ll meet a lot of people. Don’t hang out with me the whole time, I’ll run out of interesting stuff to say fast.”

  ”Partners?” Vex asked a little surprised. “What, do you have a harem?”

  ”Babe you can’t ask people if they have a harem.”

  Giving the question way more thought than was probably normal, James eventually shrugged. “I might be part of someone’s harem?”

  ”How many of your ‘partners’ are camracondas.” Vex asked flatly, suddenly wondering if the guy she was talking to recruited nonhuman species just to sleep with them.

  ”Shockingly, none, though that’s kinda just because I haven’t had time to go on any romantic dates with TQ, even though he made it clear he wanted to.” James sighed. “I’ve been busy and it sucks.” He stepped over to the windowed wall of the hospital room, leaning a hand on the metal support bar as he looked out into the spacious and well lit hallway.

  ”You’re a weird-ass guy.” Vex stated, starting to feel like she’d be saying that a lot during her stay here. Her girlfriend elbowed her with a bony limb, and Vex just crossed her arms again. “What? He is. I mean, come on. He’s got a brain parasite he’s best friends with, his own fucked up polycule, and he’s a wizard, and doesn’t seem to care that I’m making this list! He’s laughing right now!” She pointed at James accusingly, though he was actually too busy laughing to be upset by the jabbing gesture. “I still don’t know anything about you guys or this place! What’s next?! I know you’ve got a fucking dragon! Do you have ghosts? Mermaids? Vampires? Can you cure cancer?! Grant wishes?! Pay my rent? Pay my student loans?!”

  James held up a hand, wheezing with laughter that had been escalating as Vex’s bottled up anxieties and stress poured out in an ironic outburst that he found very, very funny. “I… I…” he gasped for air, finding his breath refilling with a smooth ease thanks to a bunch of levels in the action. “…we can cure cancer, ghosts and vampires aren’t real as far as I know, mermaids are but the only one we knew about got murdered by a fascist secret police force, obviously we pay people’s rent we have a whole magical apartment complex and kinda own a city, and… uh… what was the other thing?”

  ”Wishes!” Astra cheerfully prompted.

  “Right.” James breathed again, steadying himself as an electric joy coursed through him. For the first time in a while, he felt like not only had he survived being heroic, but he’d actually succeed in the heroism. And now he was alive, energized, and he had a very real burning hope that Zhu would be getting healed too. So the words came out in an easy flood, a stream of consciousness answer that he found he firmly believed even though he was only hearing it for the first time himself. “Technically, dungeons might have literal wish granting powers. If they do, I assume they’re more Roadside Picnic and less Aladdin, but whatever. The point is that they’re not really needed, because dungeons have a lot of other stuff too, and the vast majority of ‘wishes’ can be fulfilled within roughly a month of delving, usually when the potential wisher gets magic that eliminates poverty in their life, fills a niche with their specific kinks, or both. Most people just aren’t that complicated, and that’s not a bad thing. We want to be safe, we want to be loved, and we want to be able to be ravished by a tentacle beast for three hours every lunar cycle. We don’t need to break cosmology to get our wishes granted, just get the right half dozen orbs and one good spellbook.” He met Vex’s eyes and shrugged. “So maybe?”

  Zhu tapped him on the back of his hand. “Hey, you’re talking too much.” He said.

  ”Sorry, I-“

  ”No, I mean, you’re talking too much.”

  Astra pulled her book closer to her face as Vex looked down at her girlfriend sharply before looking back to James and shifting to stand between the two of them defensively. “Hey, don’t-“

  ”Oh.” James frowned slightly, but only in contemplation, not anger. “That’s kind of a cool trick. I’m guessing your domain is words, or maybe language? So they can be abstract things, which is neat, unless I’m totally wrong. If you can make someone talk like that, it would probably be very helpful for our Research division, and by ‘helpful for Research’, what I actually mean is I want you to make them write cleaner reports.”

  ”Are you faking not being mad?” Vex asked sharply.

  ”That sounds like a lot of work.” James replied with a shrug. “Anyway, I’m gonna go see if I can get… lunch? I don’t know what time it is, Deb took away my braid I guess. If you want to talk later just let me know, I’ll be trapped here as long as you will.” He grinned as he left the hospital room they were borrowing. It wasn’t actually assigned to anyone, they’d just commandeered it to give Vex a spot to examine Zhu.

  “No one is that terminally chill.” Vex stated. “Mags is right. They’re a cult.”

  Astra closed the operations manual, keeping her finger marking the section she was reading about how the Order of Endless Rooms didn’t consider anyone expendable. ”You know, if he has special ears, then anyone loitering there probably does too.” She sent into her girlfriend’s head.

  Vex lightly hammered her head into the doorframe. “I hate this place.”

  ”I love this place!” Astra’s mental laugh was a joyful chime. “They have furries! How can you hate this place?” She held up a different section of the book with a diagram of a ratroach for emphasis.

  ”I’m not gonna survive three days here.” Vex sighed as she gave one last headbutt to the building.

  _____

  The aftermath of the fight left some people in better shape than others.

  Dancing-Gleam-of-a-Thousand-Knives, or Dance because no one was patient enough to use her full name, including herself, was not in good shape.

  Partly it was because someone had apparently hit her hard enough to rupture one of her internal organs. Partly it was because she’d gotten a glimpse into the deeper part of the Stratified Underburbs when the anchors had been turned on, and that included a watcher-class problem that had melted the plastic around her head. And partly, it was because despite surviving all that, and being fine, really, she was now being watched like a hawk by Charlie.

  And soon Alice too, as the human woman stirred from her own sleep in her nearby bed. The noise she made upon waking up was pained, and sounded so very small and tired, that Dance wondered if her mom would ever be okay again.

  ”Ah.” Alice gasped as her eyes flicked open, twisting to grab for something nearby and finding herself held back by the IV and monitoring cords attached to her body. “Ow.” She added as she slumped back.

  ”You’re safe.” Charlie said calmly, with his normal voice. Alice had told Dance that other humans thought he sounded detached sometimes, or like he wasn’t paying attention, but Dance just thought he sounded like Charlie. “Don’t break anything.”

  Alice’s eyes focused on their teammate as she stilled, and then sank into the hospital bed. “We’re alive.” She stated.

  And wow did that make Dance wish she had her voice right now. But no, all cybernetics were off limits while Deb did some kind of doctor thing about them, so camracondas were having a quiet day or two. She couldn’t even hiss properly because the exhalation required would strain the compression wrap around her midsection. But she really, really wanted to point out to her mom just how stupid that statement was.

  Of course they were alive. They couldn’t die, that wouldn’t be fair.

  ”We are alive.” Charlie confirmed with a nod. “Despite our best efforts.”

  ”Speak for yourself.” Alice groaned out. “My best effort was mostly just trying to call for help. And…” she held up her left hand over her head, looking at the bandaged appendage. “…I’m missing fingers?” The human woman’s voice came out as a very small squeak.

  Charlie nodded and pointed over to the whiteboard on the wall of the room that had copied diagrams of a human and camraconda on opposite sides. Both figures were marked in red in a few places, and more notes were written in neat penmanship in the margins for any nurses that would need to know at a glance. “You also picked up some stitches.” He remarked. “How do you feel?”

  ”Like I needed stitches.” Alice said, still staring at her hand. “What happened? Catch me up.” Charlie glanced over at Dance, doing that thing that the humans sometimes did when they didn’t want to talk in front of her, which Dance had been firmly pushing back on over the last month. She wasn’t that young, and if she was going to be helping, she wanted to be on their team, not just a mascot or something. “Hey. You alive buddy?” Alice waved her intact hand between herself and Charlie. “Come on, what happened to us? Things are kinda fuzzy. We found the dungeon, right?”

  ”We did.” Charlie confirmed dully.

  Alice started to smile before realizing she was missing teeth too, the grin stretching over her face sending forked bolts of pain into her gums. After smothering several curses and making some pained sounds, she cleared her throat and held her good hand up over the edge of the bed. Arm straight up, fingers flat. “Awesome. High five.”

  ”Excuse me?” Charlie asked.

  ”High five! We found a dungeon! Success rate above zero!” She wiggled her fingers at him, wondering if there was an orb for psychic powers so she could drag the stupid wheeled stool he was sitting on closer with her mind. “I mean, maybe next time we can do it without getting ambushed, but-“

  ”I’m quitting.” Charlie said with an actually emotionless stare.

  Dance tried to twist to look over at Alice, and got most of the way there. Charlie had told her this too, and it was stupid, and dumb, and she was really interested in how much Alice was going to set their teammate on fire with her words or possibly magic.

  But Alice didn’t look angry. Instead, she just looked… sad. “What happened?” She asked, a lot more seriously.

  ”The people we found were delvers. They just weren’t on our side.” Charlie said bluntly. “We got far enough away that I think they didn’t want to waste time on us. Or assumed they could pick us off later. I called in before everything started.” He spoke like he wasn’t really thinking about the words. Or like he was deliberately trying to not think about them. Charlie was more interested in staring a hole in the cabinet at the back of the room than meeting Alice’s eyes. “And then they opened up the dungeon.”

  ”What, the Underburbs? They knew?”

  He nodded slowly. “They didn’t just know. They put up anchors and drew it out into the city.” He looked up. “A lot of people died.”

  It sounded so imprecise coming from Charlie. Dance could tell he was hurting; he’d been like this after Utah too, but not this bad. She gave a tiny hiss toward Alice, trying to urge the woman to fix this somehow.

  Alice paled as she listened. “They got us out, though. Did… what happened? Where’s my braid? Or just my phone?! Is the city gone? Are we going to be okay? Why are you quitting now?!”

  ”The Order mobilized in full force, and put down the incursion. Your braid is off limits because of potential secondary infection vectors, for now. Your phone is missing. Springfield is still there, mostly. And no.” He paused to breathe. “No. We are not going to be okay. That’s why I’m quitting, and why I want you and Dance to quit too. We’re not knights like the others, we aren’t safe, and we aren’t ready. We can just go somewhere else, and live out the end of the world together, without this. Because nothing is going to be okay again.”

  Alice stared at him with the same kind of expression she’d had since waking up. Like she hadn’t woken up, really. Like the lingering sleepiness and the stabbing pain and the fuzzy memory of blocking a fucking sword strike with her hand had all come together to make sure she couldn’t focus on anything.

  But even through all that, she latched onto something out of place with her partner’s words instantly. “There’s no possible way you have enough information to make that claim. Not you.” Dance writhed herself into something like a frantic nod. That’s what she had been trying to say, too! And now Alice was awake and could say it for her! “So either you’re a mimic, in which case… I dunno, this feels like a Prince thing. Or you got hit in the head hard enough to give you specific brain damage that messed with your favorite philosophy. And that’s tragic!”

  Charlie didn’t rise to the bait. He just stared straight ahead, hands scratching at themselves. “Or maybe I’m just afraid.” The man said quietly.

  Alice didn’t buy that for a second. And when she answered, she didn’t have the same quiet patience that Charlie was showing. ”We’ve been on almost every delve, either together or alone. I’ve seen you do shit without blinking that most people would freeze up on. I know you’re afraid, dude. Because you told me, when we started this. You told Roberto and me that after the Office, you were only afraid of one thing!”

  Dance had never heard this part. She wanted to know, but couldn’t get their attention without thrashing in a way that would hurt. So she just stayed still and listened.

  ”I was being dramatic, for emotional effect.” Charlie said, trying to keep his voice steady. But Alice and Dance could both see that he was struggling to suppress both exhausted tears and overwhelmed laughter. “I’m afraid of normal things too. Things like being eaten by a dungeon, or killed by some psychopath. And some things changed, like now I’m afraid of losing people that matter to me.”

  Dance tried to hiss and ended up making a high pitched chime by accident. Embarrassing, especially since it got their attention. Alice just jutted a thumb her direction though. “Dance is right. We’re not quitting. Not now, not for this. So if you quit, you’re losing us anyway. So you’re being irrational!”

  That wasn’t even close to what Dance had tried to ask. She wanted to know what Charlie was afraid of, because it seemed important. And if it wasn’t important, then it would be a funny prank in a week when everyone forgot they’d told her.

  ”It’s not irrational. You got your hand cut in half, Alice, you aren’t dumb, you know how dangerous this job is.” Charlie challenged.

  Alice nodded. “Sure do. And you know what? You just told me it’s worth it.” She jabbed a finger in his direction, jerking the monitoring equipment cable attached to that hand with it. “The city is still there! The Order - we - did it!”

  ”It can be someone else.” Charlie was almost pleading.

  And it didn’t work. “It could be.” Alice agreed. “But it won’t be. We were there. We found the dungeon cult, or whatever we’re going to call these sh- uh… these jerks. Sorry Dance.” At the moment, swearing was the literal last thing Dance cared about. “But we did it, man. If it wasn’t us… maybe whoever was there would have been too slow. Maybe they wouldn’t have made it. Maybe there just wouldn’t be a scout team at all, and we’d be hearing about the latest mass murder on the news.” She shifted in struggling movements to the side, trying to use her shoulder to pull herself up. Charlie rose on reflex and moved to help her, letting Alice brace herself on his arm as he adjusted her pillow. “It’s gonna be me next time too.” She told him. “It can be us.”

  Charlie froze briefly, sighing as he moved away. He hesitated at the door to the girls’ shared room. “I don’t know if it’ll be me.” He said. “I don’t know.”

  ”We can talk about it later.” Alice promised. “Like over dinner? I’m starving actually. You think they’ll let me out of here before all the pastries for today are gone? Marjorie’s doing some kind of donut thing all week and I bet they’re still good if the new ratroaches didn’t inhale them all.”

  Dance rolled back to her other side, slumping into the long pillow that was bracing her in place. She’d been doing a great job not thinking about doughnuts, and Alice ruined it. She’d been waiting for one all day, and then the day had turned into getting kicked through a wall and being sedated for surgery. There was no way in heck she was getting anything with chocolate on it. Despite not feeling hunger the same way humans did, Dance still had a craving, and now it was back in the front of her mind.

  ”What?” Alice asked, trying to reach across the gap between their beds. “Hey, Dancey, you okay? Hey, don’t be mad, okay? We’ll work this out, it’s not-“

  ”…Yeah we’re not getting out of this floor for a few days.” Charlie told her suddenly. “So we will have time to talk about it.” He admitted with a sigh. “But also she’s been sulking about the doughnuts ever since she woke up.” He shrugged and turned away again. “I’m going for a walk. Try not to rip your stitches. Either of you.”

  Alice let her head drop back with a groan. “Well shit.” She said, before looking over Dance’s direction again. “At least there’s enough hospital that we can go for walks, I guess? When my legs do what I tell them again anyway.” She paused and then nervously lifted her blanket to make sure her legs were still attached. “Okay good.” Alice muttered softly. “Hey, it’s gonna be okay.” She said louder.

  Dance didn’t know if her mom was trying to convince her, or herself. Not that it really mattered, because Dance didn’t know if she believed it. Charlie seemed upset in a way she’d never seen him before. And they could’ve even fix it with baked goods this time.

  Her whole body hurt. And now her lens must hurt too, because something was wrong with it, and Dance was leaking around the edge of the glossy surface.

  She was tired and hurt enough that she fell asleep without noticing, holding on to a vague hope that things would just be better when she woke up.

  _____

  As with every action the Order took, there was an accounting to be had afterward.

  Not a moral or ethical one; they had done the right thing by their standards, and while there would be debriefs and verifications, the need for the fight wasn’t in question. And certainly not an accounting with the local or even federal authorities, who were… passive in how they had dealt with the Order of Endless Room’s presence and exfiltration.

  No, this was a much more literal accounting. A tally of gains and losses.

  It was also a chance for Karen to spend time with her daughter, since neither of them were going to be leaving the Lair’s interior for a few days. Even though it was certainly not an exciting chore they were working on.

  ”All of these ones are empty!” Liz told her mom as she set a plastic bin full of shield bracers on the table, next to all the other plastic bins filled with their own treasures.

  ”Mmhhm.” Karen looked up from the form she was filling out. “You made sure to-“

  ”Write all the levels down, yes mom.” Liz laughed easily, and Karen smiled back at her child who was comfortable enough now to not take work requests personally. “I’m old enough to know how to count you know!” She turned the bin to show the paper taped to its side with the end tally. “See? There’s this many, and I didn’t even have to use my fingers.”

  Karen just gave her child a long suffering smile. “Thank you honey.” She said simply. “Do you need a break?”

  Liz shrugged as she smoothed out the dress she was wearing. ”Nah, I don’t have anything else to do.”

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  ”Well, if you’d like to ‘hang out’ with your boyfriend, I believe he’s counting seed rounds for us.” Karen offered. She still hadn’t really ‘met’ Morgan in an official capacity. Nor had she met Color-Of-Dawn. And despite knowing most of the shape of her daughter’s relationship, she was following James’ advice and not prying. Letting Liz tell her at her own speed.

  Mostly. Karen was still reminding Liz that she did know things from time to time. And right now, that knowledge had her daughter blushing underneath her foundation. “N-no thanks.” She said awkwardly. “I don’t actually like touching bullets. I always think they’re going to explode.”

  ”While I could tell you that they won’t,” Karen said as she stood to pick up the bin Liz had finished counting for them, hoisting it over Texture-Of-Barkdust’s head to move the bin behind the folding table and into the sorted pile that needed to be returned to the armory, “I’ll admit that I much prefer a daughter that doesn’t want anything to do with firearms.”

  ”Yes, also, bullets do explode. That is what they do.” Texture-Of-Barkdust supplemented Karen’s words from where she was working on her own part of the process.

  ”Well now I really don’t want to!” Liz giggled. “What else can I count?”

  Karen checked the spreadsheet. She had her own staff, as well as several volunteers, sorting through the returned and sterilized equipment from the deployed knights, but there was a lot of categories of things that needed to get checked over and tallied. When it was just a normal delve, or a transfer of something to Research, Karen tended to let the groups run their own logistics, because there was only so much that could get lost. But when it was a hundred people coming back and dropping off multiple shield bracers each?

  Well, her goal was a zero percent loss rate. And also at this scale, it was much more important to know how much had been lost or used up in the field.

  ”You may count gloves, if you need something to do.” Texture-Of-Barkdust told Liz with a warm cast to her digital voice. She was very glad that she was outside of the part of the Lair where skulljacks were currently off limits, because Texture-Of-Barkdust needed to talk to get anything done today, before small amounts of chaos compounded and made them lose large amounts of material.

  ”Magic gloves?” Liz perked up.

  Karen shot down her daughter’s hopes. “Normal gloves. If you could help Smoke bring everything that’s ready up from the building’s laundry, that would be appreciated.” Liz groaned theatrically, but still nodded in agreement before she bounced off. Karen watched her daughter go, moving through the members of the Order with a familiarity that had been growing bit by bit over the course of long days. She set her pen down, and found that she was overwhelmed by an emotion she didn’t have a word for as Liz spun around a pillar in the mostly open and empty basement room. Her daughter aware that something had happened, but not dragged down by it. She was here to contribute, and she was closer to Karen than she ever had been before.

  ”What are you thinking?” Texture-Of-Barkdust asked from at Karen’s side.

  ”Hm?”

  ”You have been unmoving for almost a minute.” The camraconda woman said as she used the side of her head to slide two stacked plastic bins over to the table’s edge for pickup by someone with more arms than herself. “And I would like to know if you are okay, or if I should be concerned.”

  Karen exhaled and picked her pen back up, twirling it deftly between fingers that were acquiring new wrinkles with what felt like every passing day. “Elizibeth is growing up in front of me.” She said simply.

  Texture-Of-Barkdust looked over at the human. ”Ah. Yes.”

  ”Should I… am I doing enough to keep her safe?” Karen asked suddenly.

  ”You moved her into one of the more fortified buildings on this planet.” Texture-Of-Barkdust reminded her cohort. “How could she be safer?”

  ”She won’t be here forever.” Karen said as she pretended to review her numbers. “She’s going to college. She’s going to college now, Liz leaves for classes four days a week.” Not that Karen had memorized her daughter’s schedule or anything. “I could teach her how to defend herself…”

  Texture-Of-Barkdust picked up the incredibly subtle hint Karen was alluding to. “You are worried that this will happen to her. That there will be another Underburbs.”

  ”Won’t there?” Karen asked, stress gripping her throat. “There just was.”

  ”We keep her safe by doing this.” The camraconda replied simply, sweeping her snout over their folding table from which they commanded an army of clerks. “We are not alone. We support the knights, who support the paladins, who support all of us. That was the promise that is being delivered on. We- you are not alone. Liz will never be alone in her life, while the Order stands.” She hissed to punctuate her words. “So we count things. And make sure we do not run out of the tools we need to keep her safe.”

  Karen felt like that might be slightly overdramatic. She wondered, briefly, if Liz was learning her love of drama from Texture-Of-Barkdust, or if it was working the other way around. “Maybe.” She said out loud.

  ”You are smiling.” Texture-Of-Barkdust told her, which was enough to get Karen to reassert her professional sternness. “Which means I am correct. Now. What is the current tally for the shield bracers?”

  It wasn’t good, that was for certain. Which was enough to set Karen’s mood back, even as she let herself fall into the mindset of organized numbers.

  The Order had lost people. Not a first, but it still hurt emotionally and practically. But those losses weren’t the only ones.

  Shield bracers were drained to almost nothing; there were probably no more than thirty charges left across the entire Order right now, and that number would be at least a week in recovering to an acceptable level. Not only that, but many of them had been destroyed. Leveler items that were imbued by blue orbs inherited the rule of being annihilated by any kind of damage, it seemed, and that meant that going into a combat situation was a terrible idea. Karen had already begun drafting a proposal for vote that they stop all imbuements on tactical leveler equipment, but it was coming a little late now when they’d lost over two dozen bracers. Some of them were even the original ones from Status Quo with the dramatically faster cooldowns, too.

  Those weren’t the only items that had been destroyed. Only two earrings were lost, but sixteen of the gloves had been taken out of operation. Not all of those were imbued either; they just got ruined by being used as gloves, protecting hands from bites or claws and paying the price for it. On top of that, the current count for lost Office dungeontech was sixty items and climbing. Glasses, shirts, and pens were the most common losses, but there were a few more esoteric ones in the mix as well. Many of them hadn’t had backup copies, either for size reasons, or simply because the copy ritual was the gold standard for the Order’s economy, and most things were less important to duplicate than cures for cancer.

  Also in the destroyed category was armor. That was fine, as far as Karen was concerned. Every piece of body armor, every kevlar pad or ceramic plate or shell covering that was ruined and needed replacement, was a living body part that didn’t. It cost much much less, both in money and in suffering, to refit every knight with a fresh set of protective gear, than it did to have all of them suffering from blood loss and broken bones.

  Less fine was the damaged weapons. Everything from blades to rifles were replaceable too, but there was a certain special problem when it came to guns that were bound to leveler bracelets. A lot of those bracelets were still months away from being able to accept a new weapon, which meant they were now useless. Unless, for some reason, they had their own imbuement that would let them bind to a crossbow of all things. Karen didn’t know if it was worth it just to keep the other abilities in rotation, but she was fairly certain that no crossbow in the world was as effective as the high caliber battle rifles the Order was using to exterminate invading dungeon monsters.

  It wasn’t her job to measure combat effectiveness, but this felt like a problem. And fortunately, she could bring it to someone else’s attention now, while there was time to course correct before the next disaster.

  The rest of the inventory was focused on expenditure, not losses. Which was a little bit easier, and didn’t need to be quite so precise, though Karen insisted on it wherever possible. Bullets were just meant to be used up, though, and so knowing what their current supply sat at was really more about knowing how much they needed to purchase or ‘print’ using the leveler bracelets.

  The seed rounds were somewhat more unique. The bracelets refused to carry across their magic, so knowing how many the Order had brought back was important. Most knights were sent out with only one of them, if that, because ‘loading’ the things was an existential crisis waiting to happen. But because they duplicated themselves if they killed something, there were a few more empty ones brought back than had been issued.

  Karen had Morgan doing a double check of the number, but it seemed like, while they’d used up eight thousand rounds of mundane ammunition - without the bracelet reload counted - they’d brought back two hundred seed rounds to balance the scales.

  Much worse on the expenditure side of things was orbs. Counting out and sorting the unused equipment kits into bins had let them amass what looked like a huge supply of yellow and blue orbs, but appearances deceived. There were over twelve hundred blue orbs spent, and a third that many yellows absorbed as a safety net. While that much could be harvested from Officium Mundi with a single week long delve without too much issue, the problem was that those blue orbs were copies. Specific tools that represented a significant expenditure of the Order’s most valuable resource - copier time - to produce and maintain a stock of.

  At least the potion situation was easier to manage. The simple answer was, no one wanted to risk any lingering infection from the Underburbs in something that couldn’t be decontaminated. So any potions that weren’t used on site were destroyed, which meant that the cost in that department was a nice even number. And, much to Karen’s relieved satisfaction, it was a replaceable number too. Potion production was growing every week, and that meant that even for a fight of this size, the cost in exercise, hardening, and ghost potion was easily replenished.

  The day stretched on as Karen kept her eyes sweeping over spreadsheets and numbers. Verifying counts, organizing returns, validating decontaminations, and tallying up the final cost. Others came and went, and she wasn’t so stupid that she didn’t take breaks, but Karen and Texture-Of-Barkdust had their collective sight on things from the first count of bracelets to the last check of how many logos statues were used up.

  It was, in a word, expensive. The cost to deploy, if they put it in dollars, would have been demoralizing to even look at. Market rates for orbs were hard to determine, but Karen did know there were market rates for potions, and just from that, the expenditure from fourteen hours of action came out to over thirty million dollars.

  If she were still who she was when she’d been an accountant working for a certain technology company, then Karen would have had an aneurysm.

  But when her daughter came back from pairing off gloves to be stacked in the armory next to the helmets and boots, and asked if Karen and Texture-Of-Barkdust wanted to maybe get a late dinner together, and if it was okay if Liz brought Morgan and Color-Of-Dawn along, Karen shelved every concern about financial growth and balance sheets.

  The only way her daughter would be safe, in this new and terrifying world, was if there were people like the Order who cared enough to keep her safe.

  Which meant there was no such thing as too high of a cost.

  Karen got about thirty feet into the hallway that led to the elevators before she and Texture-Of-Barkdust started discussing how that wasn’t technically true, and then started working out the simple variables for what would be too high of a cost, on a practical level. It was an engaging mental exercise, even if Liz did roll her eyes, as was her wont as a teenager.

  _____

  Mercy had been busy enough for the whole day that she was starting to wish she knew how to manifest multiple forms the way Planner did. But Planner was older and more ingrained than she was, which gave them a depth to their ability to influence the world that Mercy couldn’t match yet. Not only that, but Planner was a meme in the minds of dozens of people, while Mercy mostly just lived in a few.

  One day she might match Planner. It wouldn’t be difficult to spread across more minds, especially here in the Order where there would probably be a whole host of volunteers. And there was plenty of structured information for her to feed on to maintain the skeleton of her identity. But she felt like she had a lot of growing to do first. Personal growing, that was. Learning who she wanted to be, and what she wanted to be to others.

  Mercy wasn’t one of the intentionally incepted assignments in the Order. She had started out as something combative and disruptive, and a lot of her path to being a person had been her deliberately trying to figure out how to be something opposite that. It was how she’d ended up with Deborah, and then later adding seeds of herself to Aaron, Rivers, and Limit-Of-Hope. A little human-tilted, but having a camraconda and ratroach in her foundation gave her a broader perspective and helped Mercy define for herself what it meant to be anti-disruptive.

  If she wanted to spite the thing that had made her to be an annoyance, then she would be the opposite. She would be someone who soothed. And if the greatest disruption to a life was injury, illness, and death, then she would become part of the group that flattened and smoothed out those disruptions. It was simple, and she understood that, but the simplicity made it very easy to keep to her basic guideline for who she wanted to be.

  What it didn’t do was make her more powerful. Which she hadn’t thought she was in a hurry for, but when she’d participated in her first field deployment, all of the comforting and motherly persona she’d been trying to build had cracked in the face of the pain and terror the Underburbs brought to the table. And while she’d done what she could, it hadn’t felt like enough, and she knew that she wasn’t the only person who felt that way; not just because she was inside the active thoughts of all of her hosts, but because she heard it, over and over, from the various members of the Order in quarantine upon their return.

  And now her precious medical wing, the place that she found the intersection of who she was as a person and what she was as a purpose, was crowded. And she had more and more to actually do, but only one manifested body to do it with.

  So Mercy was prioritizing. Triage was not an unthinkable thing to her; the simple reality of life was that sometimes there would not be enough for everyone, and balking at that only meant that there would be even less instead of making the most of what was available. But that didn’t mean she enjoyed the process of choosing who to appear to.

  Mercy wasn’t as hands-on as the more physical doctors, either; her role was more like a therapist, with the added benefit that she could pluck memories out to know exactly where pain was coming from, and smother senses that were causing more problems than solutions. So she flitted through the hospital halls at human-knee-level, moving from room to room to find the people who most needed someone to talk to. Helping the increasingly harried medical staff with the unconscious patients, and then when those worst cases began to resolve, helping the staff themselves by realigning their mental processes in a way that was similar to sleep.

  Normally she refused to do this, because if Deborah had the option, the woman would only sleep once a week. And that was bad for both her body, and her domestic life, and Mercy believed in holistic well-being.

  ”Thanks Mercy.” Deb breathed out evenly as her body conformed to her mind’s refreshed status. The room held somewhere between two and three people, with the two women being the only ones aware and talking, and since Deb had absolutely no intention to take a nap anytime soon, Mercy had figured that fixing the mental exhaustion was the least she could do for her friend.

  As Deb’s eyes refocused on the printed pages of test results, Mercy swirled her impossible length around the woman’s legs and hips. Ethereal pink and white coils dotted with smiling eyes twining upward as she crested Deb’s shoulder and read along with her companion’s eyes. “No change. You have done nothing wrong. Please do not despair.” She said with the perfect calm that she was capable of projecting into her vibrant voice.

  Deb snorted, derisive of everything except Mercy. Of herself, of the situation, probably of Tyrone himself for getting hurt so badly he technically died. The not-quite dead man in question was the other person in the room; a body in a coma, along with the very carefully stored loot drop that he’d left behind. A singular large yellow orb that occasionally showed hints of other colors; red and purple and orange, yes, but also sometimes a stormy grey, and occasionally one of those colors would crumple like it was textured paper.

  Humans couldn’t let go of their orbs while they were alive. As far as Mercy knew, no one could, except for Rufus, and he had adamantly refused to explain the process for reasons that he also refused to explain. She assumed it was simply dangerous, and that knowing it was dangerous was too much of a clue, so he tried to hide that. A strategy which was, frankly, terrible. But Mercy wasn’t sure if Officium Mundi staplers were quite equipped for long term strategic planning in their deceptions.

  And yet here was an orb. Tyrone’s orb. The sum total of his magical collection. Or at least, the Office parts. Possibly.

  Death drops were not something the Order had a lot of knowledge of, nor the ability to experiment on. They knew that people who had cracked orbs dropped those orbs, and there was a known color priority for how they appeared. They knew that if someone had a Sewer lesson, then their book dropped as well. Did that mean that the orbs also contained any lessons that someone had? Well, no, it didn’t mean anything. But that was possible. Similarly, a Utah dungeon caster would drop their coins, but did those spell slots get folded into an orb if a more developed Order knight passed away?

  Every interaction and overlap suddenly came into focus for them, as the question stopped being quite so hypothetical.

  They also knew, in another odd cornercase, that if someone had any Underburbs skill points, then they dropped a skill crystal that presumably contained those points. Though the dropped crystals looked completely indistinguishable from the ones that granted skill ranks. And with the abrupt infusion of thousands of Underburbs skill points, that opened up a dire question of what if those dropped crystals were not inert, and were indistinguishable, actually.

  It would certainly explain reports that the enemy delver force had been openly talking about ‘harvesting’ their targets. Not just looking for the kill, but for something else besides.

  Was Tyrone’s orb tainted with that same condition? Was it a skill crystal, despite not being shaped that way? Mercy didn’t know. She didn’t know much of anything about the deeper points of their dungeon research, except what was important when it came to the mental and physical health of their people. Deb had a broader knowledge base, though, which she could draw on when needed.

  But right now, both of them were looking at a series of test results for a young human man in a coma, and wondering if he was already gone.

  ”The actual damage is… not enough to cause this.” Deb said, voice low in contemplation. The room being dark didn’t stop her from reading the results, and it all looked fine enough, and though she would have liked a full brain scan that wasn’t something they could risk sending him to a hospital for now.

  Mercy double checked the information. Broken leg, stomach wound, blunt force trauma to the back of the skull, severe blood loss, all of it was enough to kill a less durable human, but none of it explained the coma. Well, except the head injury. But that had happened early, and his purple orbs had protected him enough to keep fighting.

  ”I am aware that humans can perform past their limits with enough adrenaline,” Mercy mused, “but if it was the initial impact, then he would not have been able to stay on his feet for eight hours afterward.”

  ”Never say never.” Deb sighed dismally. “There could be very minor internal bleeding or swelling that only reached a dangerous point after compounding for hours. Or some other factor could have changed; even something as simple as him laying down to nap could have been enough to tip the damage over the edge.” She gnawed at the inside of her cheek. “But you’re right, it’s more likely that it was the blood loss that caused lack of oxygen to the brain. We need… we need a better field treatment for that.” Deb went quiet as she started thinking of how to hunt for specific magical tools to correct for a human having too much of their blood outside themself.

  Mercy didn’t think that was exactly the most healthy use of her time right now, and instead, tried to guide her back to the present. “The truth remains, my dear. You did not do this to the poor knight, and indeed, had you done nothing then we would not be having this conversation, as Tyrone would be quite dead as opposed to mostly dead.”

  ”Mostly dead still partly alive.” Deb muttered.

  ”Pardon me?” Mercy let one of her manifested coils slacken so she could drift in front of Deb’s chest and roll her row of eyes upward to gaze at her companion.

  Deb waved a hand absently. “Movie quote. I think it’s gonna get shown for New Person Movie Night in a week or two, if you wanna see it. My point is, I’d prefer him mostly alive.”

  ”Would that all people could be such.” Mercy agreed. “What is the next step, then, for mister Maston?”

  Dropping the pages of reports to her side, Deb sighed. ”I don’t… I don’t know, Mercy. It could be any of his injuries, or something else we don’t even know. Maybe he had a heart attack on the way back, for fuck’s sake.” She said. “Or something that isn’t even close to normal…” The defeat was hard to take here. It wasn’t like Tyrone was the only person who’d died today; a lot of people had died, some of them while Deb was actively trying to save their lives. Bleeding out or going into shock or detonating before she could do what was needed.

  This was different. And both she and Mercy knew it.

  The crisis was over. The mad scramble was through, and the immediate cases that had the choice of being seen to or dying rapidly had had that choice made. During the battle and its immediate aftermath, there had been no time to feel anything beyond the pull of the requirement. Mercy herself was still in a way riding that overflow of the strange force of willpower that still somehow tasted like it was an emotion itself. But now that things were quieter, there was plenty of time to doubt, to turn dark thoughts inward, and to feel the looming inadequacy.

  Which was why Mercy was here, with Deb. Because those who cared needed care themselves.

  ”It would be truly bad luck, if that were his fate. Or perhaps not, since he was actively being given medical assistance at the time.” Mercy tried to gently chastise her charge. “Well let us think. If it is not a normal cause, what abnormal causes could this be? You are, at this moment in time, this world’s leading expert on Underburbs pestilence, after all.”

  Deb focused. Partly of her own accord, partly helped along as Mercy sharpened her mind and helped guide her to what she wanted to be. Attentive, and clever. Deb provided the latter half on her own, Mercy just aided the former. “Well, obvious issues are out. His injuries were injuries, even the watch-hit. Which means none of the standard fever-and-lesions permutations. He also didn’t explode, obviously, so…” she trailed off, not wanting to finish that thought. “If it is something Underburbs at this point, it’s either a reinfection from a carrier, or it’s one of the ‘chronic’ problems. But we only even know about two of those. Right?”

  Mercy took the question as it was intended, and began performing her favorite trick. Assignments often tended to lean toward the function of their names, but the truth was, they were all the same species. And what they were was creatures that lived and swam in indexed ordered information. Human, camraconda, and ratroach minds were… not exactly excellent at that, but that didn’t make them bad hosts. However Mercy also had another source of organized information that was part of a deep human secret.

  Laptops. And filing cabinets. Printed reports, neatly filed. They were so easy for her to pull specific thoughts out of. If she ever needed a job outside of the Order, she, along with any assignment, could get an easy role as a living search engine that could outperform anything Google had on offer in terms of getting a real answer.

  ”Three.” She corrected Deb. “You are forgetting the one that James and Zhu were or are afflicted with.”

  The response was a grunt of annoyance as Deb crossed her arms, scrubs roiling with shadows under the pink light of Mercy’s form. And then the human woman froze, eyes widening as a hand snapped out to her side to rest on Mercy’s body. “Three.” She said sternly.

  ”Yes, three. There are-“

  ”No, Mercy! There’s a third thing! What did James and Zhu get stuck with? Remember?”

  ”Of course I remember.” The informorph said, radiating calm. “It was a mimicry of diabetes. An ongoing problem for the navigator, as he lacks any way to interact with the insulin required to cure it. We saw at least four cases so far tonight as well, but it is unclear what exactly caused it.”

  Deb pointed at the comatose body on the room’s bed, oxygen mask keeping him breathing, saline drip ensuring he didn’t dehydrate, a dozen different electrodes hooked to his chest that was marred by stitches and scars. “Have we given him any insulin?” She already knew the answer. “No, we didn’t. But I’ve met Tyrone before. The first thing he does after getting back? Eat. He snacks. A lot.”

  ”You believe this is a diabetic coma?” Mercy asked. “No, that doesn’t… make sense. Even with James, it took a month for symptoms to worsen, and at no point did he ever go into a coma.” She paged through different reports and medical records. “Ah, do hold please.” She said, stopping Deb before her friend could interrupt her. “Oh dear. He has a variant skulljack.”

  ”Yeah, it’s on his records.” Deb agreed without seeing the connection. “Why?”

  ”This happened previously.” Mercy said. “I wish to speculate.”

  ”Go for it.” The spark of hope in Deb’s voice was almost as painfully radiant as the one in her heart.

  Mercy obliged. “A knight is injured. Badly. He does not know if he will live long enough to be healed.” She paused. “No, that is not right. This requires another participant. A teammate, a fellow knight, sees his injuries, and does not know how things will end. This knight, wanting his comrade to survive in some way, decides to hedge their bets, so to speak.”

  ”…There’s no report for what happened to him,” Deb said, “but if they were cut off, and didn’t know if they’d be getting rescued…”

  ”And so the healthier of the pair, thinking that they might need to leave the wounded knight if either of them are to survive, attempts something. To save what can be saved, a bridge between minds is made.”

  Deb followed along. “But then they do get evaced. Tyrone’s injuries don’t kill him, but he’s still in a coma because… because the skulljack interaction knocked him out. And we didn’t know, and didn’t treat that. Shit, we need insulin.”

  ”It may not be correct.” Mercy tried to temper hope with reality.

  ”Yeah?” Deb said casually as she slid the room’s glass door open with the force someone would use on an object that had personally offended them. “Sure. I get that.” She said as she stalked down the hall toward the nearest secure cabinet. “But you might be right.” Mercy trailed after her, a living banner of a scarf that didn’t glow any less radiantly under the harsh fluorescent lights. “And if you are, then we just learned a bunch of important things. Like how that fucking blight doesn’t show up on blood tests like diabetes should. Among other things.”

  Mercy didn’t reply, instead just staying with Deb as the woman registered that she was taking medication from their supply, and returning to Tyrone’s room. Adding it to his IV with movements that were no less professional despite how tired her body was.

  The two of them watched together for several minutes before Deb’s shoulders started to slump. Nothing changing, nothing fixed. Just a theory that hadn’t panned out, like the last three things they’d tried so far.

  ”Deborah…” Mercy started to say, wondering where she was going with her own words. Wondering how to offer comfort to someone who wasn’t powerful enough to stave off death with willpower alone.

  Deb shrugged, almost casually. “It’s fine.” She said with clear denial in her words. “Once things open back up, I’ll just give him a networked shaper substance bath, and rebuild whatever’s broken. I know enough about how a brain works that I can put this right, I’m pretty sure. And-“

  Before Mercy could cut her off, before the infomorph could say that maybe Deb shouldn’t be performing brain surgery with anything from the Akashic Sewer, something changed.

  Something small, yet massive. The tiniest fluctuation on the comatose Tyrone’s EEG.

  And then more. Bigger changes. Then stabilization. A brain resuming normal human operations. Mercy could read the screen as well as any of the professionals she was connected to, and she saw exactly what Deb saw.

  ”Or that.” Deb said, shoulders slumping in relief.

  ”Or that, indeed.” Mercy said happily. “Now, as our young knight is both alive, and clearly asleep, I am going to prescribe my own treatment to someone in this room.” She stated.

  Deb blinked slowly. “What are you-“

  ”Go to bed, Deborah.” Mercy said with a sigh that rippled her whole impossibly long serpentine body. “And those that need you will be alive tomorrow when you wake.”

  There was a part of Deb that knew that she could argue. Knew she could push Mercy to fix her brain in place, and let her keep going. But there was enough of her that was still rational to know that her friend was legitimately correct that she was past her limit.

  The bed she claimed three rooms down never knew what hit it.

  _____

  “Are you alright?” Reed asked the non-pillar woman who he had tracked down to where Kiki had landed. He was still in Kyoo’s body, which was… maybe his body now. Both human and ratroach were more comfortable as each other than themselves, which was weird. Also weird was how sharp his sense of smell was now; and also that things that previously would have been gross to him like the scent of animal droppings or rotting vegetation were now just fine. Useful guides in the landscape. It made following Kiki a lot easier, as did the better night vision.

  The place he’d found Kiki was where her flight path had intersected a little game trail somewhere on one of the mountainous slopes near their temporary research cabin. Well, “near”. She’d gone about ten miles, at roughly five hundred miles an hour. This made tracking her a lot easier than just a better sense of smell did, because as much as she would have liked to be just a normal old lady, Kiki was actually the kind of woman who snapped trees in half if she bumped into them while running.

  Reed had cheated and teleported to somewhere near the end of the rough line of broken forest, then looked for her from there. He wasn’t the only Researcher out here tonight, just the one that found her first. He’d radioed it in, though the radios sucked to use with claws, and he wished he had cell signal. Or one of the better skulljack braids with a radio receiver in it.

  Finding Kiki, the first thing he’d noticed was that the woman was sitting in the loose dirt and mast of the forest floor, knees bent, posture impossibly stable. The second thing was that she had friends.

  This was a known quantity of her power. Probably a manifestation of the Kindness part and not the Kill ‘Em With bit. Sometimes, if Kiki was in one spot for long enough, she turned into a Disney princess.

  Right now she had a jackrabbit sitting in her lap, long oval ears flat as it let her pet it with gentle strokes, a pair of deer laying down on her left and a pair of coyotes equally napping on her right. There was also some kind of owl on her head, talons miraculously not tangled in her wiry grey hair.

  The small menagerie barely moved to acknowledge Reed’s arrival, except the owl, that shifted its neck in an almost robotic rotation to pin him with its gaze. Kiki didn’t really move either, she just kept petting the rabbit that Reed was pretty sure was capable of killing him in either body he’d ever been in, treating the coiled little herbivore like it was a housecat as she sat unbothered in the middle of the mountain’s trees and vegetation.

  Reed waited patiently, not approaching, mostly because he had socially locked up and didn’t know what the hell to do in this situation. At least it was dry up here. Some of the other Researchers were searching farther downslope, and there were parts of this area that got swampy fast.

  “Y’all shoulda told me.” The woman said, Oklahoma accent laid on thicker than normal. She wasn’t even out of breath from her explosive escape from the cabin, and their ongoing probing of her limits had established that Kiki had absurd control over her biology no matter her emotional state, so she wasn’t having a breakdown either. She just… wasn’t happy. With them. Which was new.

  And yet Reed got it. “I’d be angry too.” He agreed with a very badly performed shrug. These shoulders didn’t work right. “Can I explain at least?”

  ”Go for it.” Kiki said after a long pause. “If I don’t like it I’ll sic the owl on you.”

  ”Yeah, that’d… that’d probably work. I don’t think I could beat an owl in a fight.” Reed admitted.

  Kiki snorted. ”Aren’t you supposed to be some kinda knight?” She asked, knowing damn well from the weeks of time spent here that Reed’s superpower was putting the non in noncombatant.

  As much as Reed wanted to go down the road of correcting her, he knew she knew, and he also stopped himself because it wasn’t what was important. “There was a dungeon there.” He said instead. “One of the places that’s dangerous to you, and this one is really dangerous.”

  ”People needed me.” Kiki told him. “And maybe it doesn’t matter if they can hurt me. Maybe that’s what I wanted, you ever think of that? Dumb kids. You think you’ve got everything figured out, and that idiot paladin of yours sold me on it enough that I believed it too. You should have told me.” She raised her hand off the jackrabbit she was petting to shake her finger at Reed, the local fauna protesting by writhing until she resumed her affection. “I could have helped, or died, or both, and any of that would be okay.”

  She didn’t yell or raise her voice. She didn’t need to. Reed got it. “I just…” he faltered. This wasn’t what he was good at. Talking to people. Especially not like this. “I think we had good reasons.” He tried his absolute best not to sound condescending. That had been a huge problem for him for a lot of his life, and somehow, the shift to a totally different larynx hadn’t banished the habit from his voice. “I get what you’re saying. I understand, because you haven’t lied to us, right?”

  ”As far as you know.” Kiki said with a bitterness that caused her right arm from the shoulder down to shift and change into someone else’s limb before she brought herself back under control.

  ”Well, the dungeon? We call it the Stratified Underburbs.” Reed said, getting into his more comfortable territory of exposition dumping on unsuspecting sophonts. “And it has a signature move. It likes to make diseases.”

  Kiki frowned, fingers subconsciously scratching where the rabbit’s ears met their skull, much to the creature’s delight. “So it’s deadly, evil, and it likes to give people the flu. Not really selling me on why you kept me in the dark, kiddo.”

  ”Because you’re… you.” Reed motioned with all of his paws, waving them in Kiki’s general direction. “Look. I mean. It’s obvious, right?” From the look she gave him it clearly was not. “Okay. So maybe it doesn’t kill you, and you can help. That’s good. But what if it does kill you, and the dungeon that just ate something as strong as you is the one that makes bioweapons and sieges suburbs? Or what if it doesn’t kill you, and then a month later, you find out that you’re a special carrier for a disease that’s never going away?” He realized he was getting heated as he talked louder and louder, because the animals were all watching him now. The deer and coyotes staring at him with the same level of animal intelligence even if they didn’t move to get up from Kiki’s side. “If we told you… you’d have to go.” He added. “Because…”

  ”Because that’s me.” Kiki finished for him.

  Reed nodded his conical chitin-banded snout at her, the motion incredibly uncomfortable but his habits too used to the human gesture to ever remember to avoid it. “And if we told you, and then gave you reasons to not go, and you agreed with us… that would be worse. For you. We still don’t know anything about what makes pillars start to get… uh…”

  ”Nutso?” Kiki volunteered. “Crazy? Bonkers? Wacky?”

  ”Sure. Those.” Reed didn’t think they needed that many synonyms but that was just him. “So… yeah. I guess we took away the choice. And I’m sorry, but we’d do it again! Just like we talked about, back in week two. You can be mad, and we… I’ll have to accept it, I guess. But you won’t have to break yourself.” He said it with as much conviction as he could. Which wasn’t really much; Reed always felt stupid saying the exact same lines that James seemed to deliver like he was born fully formed from the pages of a Forgotten Realms paperback.

  Kiki sighed as she shook her head, the owl perched there not even slightly bothered by the motion. “You’re right.” She said, and Reed let himself get his hopes up before she continued. “I’m pissed, kiddo. But… you’re also right about the other stuff.” She sighed again. “You know what the new problem is?”

  ”What?” Reed asked, wondering if it was that she was pinned down by an owl.

  ”Half my new friends want to eat the other half.” She said. “And I’m finding I… can’t get up.”

  ”Oh.” Reed said, the word coming out as confusion before anything else. Then, louder, “Oh.”

  Kiki rolled her aged eyes his direction, visible to his ratroach vision even here with only moonlight to guide him. “Yeah, oh. So what am I supposed to do about it? This… I’m a city gal, kiddo. This hasn’t come up before.”

  ”I’m not good at the whole thinking around pillar restrictions thing.” Reed admitted. “But why don’t you just feed the predators? I know wild animals aren’t exactly predictable, but they won’t just murder each other if they don’t need to.”

  ”Feed ‘em what?”

  ”Uh…” Reed hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I don’t really know. Maybe… can you safely get meat out of a deer?”

  Kiki stared at him with the exact sort of expression that his own grandma used to use when she was trying to figure out what the hell Reed and his brother were talking about when they went on long explanations of video games. “That is some industrial strength dumb you’ve got there.” She told him. “You know the worst part?”

  ”You can?”

  “Yeah, I think I can.” She took a deep breath, and reached out a hand to the largest of the nearby deer. Brown and white spotted fur pressing into her skin as she ran her fingers across the doe’s flank.

  Reed’s eyes - all of them - widened as he felt something golden and sustaining get pulled from the deer. First one, then the other. And then the jackrabbit for good measure. Kiki took the material she’d collected, thin invisible lines that only she could see linking it back to the original animals, and she started to braid it in her lap. Fingers moving in ways that neither humans or ratroaches could follow, leaving Reed in the dark as to what she was doing.

  But it didn’t take long for the friendship bracelet she was forming to take shape. An old pattern, one she’d learned a long, long time ago, on a school playground from a girl that was dead and gone now. Kiki finished the first one, and then reached the other direction, closing her hand around the ankle of one of the coyotes that was sitting up and yawning with a little whine. The animals didn’t stir as she finished the second, and then third of the bracelets, clasping them securely around the other coyote and the owl on her head.

  ”Alright, alright.” She waved a hand, shifting like she was about to stand up. “You lot get the heck outta here. Let an old lady have a break from petting your mangy fur.” The owl hooted, the shockingly loud noise nearly getting Reed to jump out of his sandals. “Mangy feathers then. No one’s ever happy.” The pillar grumbled as she waved a hand over her head and exiled the owl from her person, sending it flying to a nearby branch.

  One by one, the other creatures of the forest stood, and slowly moved away. Together, side by side. Even the rabbit. The owl flying from branch to branch overhead their group as they quickly got too deep into the trees for Reed to track them.

  ”…What did you do?” He asked.

  ”I don’t really know.” Kiki admitted. “I was just thinking some crap about being sustained by friendship. So I… did that. The bracelets are just decorative, I wove them together. The plant eaters will sustain the others, and the predators will protect them, and they’ll all be a little nicer. To each other, at least.” She looked down at her hands, clean despite the fur and dirt she’d been covered in, and shook her head. “By God, I don’t even know what I did.”

  Reed stepped closer, holding out the stronger paw that he had. ”I do.” He said as he offered her a hand up. “You did what you are.” He jumped as a twig snapped nearby, the nighttime of the forest startling him again, despite Kiki’s presence. “You… you ‘killed’ them. Or what they were. In a way. I’m bad at the poetry, okay? But you took away what made them what they were.” He gave her a fanged grin, saliva glowing in a crescent across his face. “You killed them, with kindness. And I bet they’re going to be wildly confusing to a park ranger at some point.”

  ”Okay, I was nervous for a bit there, but that’s a laugh riot.” Kiki admitted with a nod. “Still mad you didn’t tell me about the dungeon.”

  ”I think,” Reed said slowly as they started to make their way back through the ragged trail of damage Kiki had left, “that we should actually introduce you to Clutter soon. I know we’ve been stalling, but I don’t think we can afford it anymore.”

  Kiki nodded as she used the side of her foot to shove a four hundred pound chunk of exposed granite out of the way so Reed could follow her more easily as they walked slowly back toward the cabin. “I’ve been ready.” She said. “When?”

  ”When the quarantine is done, at least.” Reed was already panting heavily. “Also… I’m… I’m gonna teleport back.” He said as he struggled to climb over a log and flinched away from a beetle the size of his paw.

  ”Go for it. I need some fresh air.” Kiki waved him off. “And hey, kiddo? I’m mad. I’m real mad. But I forgive you. For this one, anyway.”

  ”Thanks Kiki.” Reed said, a knot untying in his chest. He hoped that was emotional and not some ratroach health problem he hadn’t encountered before. In neither of his bodies was he apparently prepared for going on hikes or being outdoors for more than ten minutes at a time.

  At least, he thought, things had worked out okay.

  For now anyway.

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