Time until next Challenge: 10 days, 16 hours, 40 minutes

  Ariel, how long did I sleep?

  

  I don’t remember that at all.

  

  Ariel had done that? Of her own initiative? I was touched.

  

  Ah, that made more sense. Well, thank you for listening to her. I appreciate it. How long until we need to get moving again? Any changes?

  

  Almost two hours. I glanced across the lobby, which had been packed edge-to-edge with a sea of mattresses that continued down the hall toward the hotel rooms. No need to wake anyone yet. Better for them to rest if we’re not in danger. Titans haven’t been a problem?

  

  Part of me wanted to ask how those Titans had been handled, but… we were all sleeping safely, so I knew nothing had gone too seriously wrong. Finding out exactly how things had gone well wasn’t time-sensitive. I still wanted to know, but Ariel’s words reminded me of another thing I’d been wondering about since yesterday afternoon.

  Carefully, I wriggled out from under Vince’s arm and picked my way over the mattresses, looking for Priya’s familiar face. At first, when I didn’t see it, I thought maybe she had left or fallen behind, but then I spotted Anju asleep on the mattress next to ours. I frowned at the empty space beside the young girl. If Anju was still here, Priya was also. But where?

  “Priya is in the employee breakroom behind the front desk,” Pointy said, a tight beam of sound meant for my ears alone.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, counting on the turtle to hear the near-silent vocalization.

  “Not hard to guess who you were looking for.” The little plush’s tone was wry.

  I waved in acknowledgement and levitated a stray pillow to hold onto for balance as I set my feet in strange configurations in the narrow gaps between mattresses. I couldn’t hold myself up directly through telekinesis, but there were workarounds. Experiments in the Quarry had suggested I could sort of fly if I put almost all my focus into it, lifting lightweight shoes and a vest and handholds that bore my weight. It wasn’t comfortable, but I still regretted the fact that the twotwos outside kept me from really putting it to the test. Who hasn’t dreamed of flying? Maybe my version was uncomfortable, awkward, and not particularly combat-viable, but I could do it! I could fly!

  Maybe I should fly across the last few mattresses? Nah, I hadn’t been sleeping in my vest or shoes. If I tried to lift myself up via clothing that hadn’t been reinforced, there was a good chance it would rip, spilling me right onto some poor unsuspecting sleeper. Careful walking would be just fine.

  I could hear a murmur from behind the door. It seemed more rude to make noise by knocking than to barge in, so I quietly pulled it open and slipped inside, shutting the door quickly to keep the light from the room from falling on anyone’s sleeping face for more than a split second.

  Four people sat in a medium-sized room at a round table, each with a steaming mug of tea. Jim, my driver, was among them, along with two people I didn’t know. The last person was my friend, Priya. She looked up as I entered, her face stricken. I’d barely let the door close behind me before she was apologizing. “Meghan, I’m so sorry! I know our being here is making things more dangerous for you, but I just didn’t know what to do!”

  There was an empty chair beside her and I pulled it back, the legs making obnoxious squeaking noises as they ground against the tile. I blinked at her a couple times, shaking my head to try to clear the sleep from my mind. She was… sorry… because she had an Intensifier, I guess? But she felt she had to be here? I rubbed my forehead. “I’m sure you have good reasons. Um, is there any more hot water or tea bags? Maybe something with caffeine?”

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  “Tons!” A young man across from me pushed himself back from the table and opened a cupboard. “What do you want? Orange Mint, Lemon Ginseng, or… oh, no, you said caffeinated. Uh. We’ve been going through that, but we still have some Earl Grey.”

  “That’s fine.” I didn’t really like Earl Grey, but I wasn’t going to be picky.

  “I just didn’t know what to do,” Priya repeated. “I still don’t. Anju’s been so good this whole time, but when she realized that Micah was going with you, she just… refused to listen. Refused to stay behind.”

  “And you couldn’t stop her?”

  My friend stared at her cup of tea as if hoping answers would float up in the rising steam. “We tried. I’m strong enough that she can’t break my grip, but she’s strong enough to fly carrying me. It’s not like we could lock her up anywhere, not with the Quarry crumbling. There wasn’t a lot of time to figure things out before we started following you. I’ve been trying to convince her to leave, but I’m worried about making her. I could keep her in place for a while, but she’s fast enough to catch up to you. With the twotwos in the air, it's far too dangerous for a solo flyer, but I’m worried she’d risk it.”

  “And as of today, we have other flying Titans,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s… fine. Probably. With my family, you two, Marie and Byron, that’s fewer than ten Intensifiers. We had literal thousands in Fort Autumn.”

  “We shouldn’t be gambling with the fate of the world this way!” Priya muttered.

  I thought about that. “Yeah, probably. But… I’m glad you’re here.”

  The young man who’d said he’d make me tea offered me a mug. I accepted it with murmured thanks.

  Priya glared at me. “We’re adding to your risk.”

  I shrugged, holding the mug close to my face to breathe in the steam. “You’re also adding to my sanity.”

  My friend rolled her eyes, then seemed to give up, taking a sip of her own tea. “You’re an idiot, Meghan. But… thank you.”

  My own tea was too hot to drink comfortably, so I just held it close to my face with my intact hand, letting my half-formed fingers on my other hand drum against the table. “Maybe you can help me think through things, honestly. Yesterday was just so intense. I feel like there were things I was overlooking, but even when we got bigger breaks between Titans I was too anxious to really slow down and think.”

  Priya made a face. “I heard what you figured out about the Challenge. I can understand why you’d feel pressured. We don’t have a lot of time before things end, one way or another.”

  My tapping fingers slowed. There was something about that… something that seemed close to one of the half-formed thoughts I’d been trying to remember. I looked upward. “Ariel, how are we doing on land acquisition?”

  <37.2% liquid surface claimed. 12.4% non-liquid surface claimed.>

  “What’d she say?” Jim asked.

  “We got a little bit more of the liquid surface area, but we’re up to 12.4% of the land area.”

  “That’s amazing!” He clapped his hands together. “About 4% in a day? We just need to keep this up for another 4, 5 days to get to 30%. We’ll be done well before the Challenge.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m guessing a lot of people who’d been saving up dumped their funds yesterday, which’ll make it hard to repeat those gains.”

  “Huh.”

  My observation was a bucket of cold water on his celebration, and I hastened to say more.

  “It’s great for a single day! I’ll be thrilled if you’re right and we can repeat it. I just don’t want to relax too soon.”

  He rubbed his chin pensively. “Hmm. Yeah. Makes sense.”

  “How much do we need to gain to win in time?” Priya asked.

  “Not a lot,” I said. That mental math was easy for me now. “1.6% each day. I don’t think it’s technically impossible, so it’s just about bringing people together. Getting them not to waste it. Coordinating.”

  “And staying alive until then,” Priya said.

  “And that.”

  I sipped my tea, brow furrowing as I tried to catch the thought that kept eluding me. The others in the room fell quiet also, presumably lost in musings of their own.

  I sent Ariel a few questions, trying to get a better idea of the factors that might enable or prevent our win, but it was tough. Too much relied on human factors: how many people could we get in touch with, how cooperative they would be. Winning should be possible, if-

  I frowned. Winning.

  There was what was bothering me. We were thinking about “winning” by their rules, which would let us keep around half of our population - maybe sixty percent if we were lucky and didn’t lose too many people in the next ten days - and about a third of our own damn planet.

  I drained my mug, and slapped it against the table vengefully, handle cracking off. I ignored it. “We’ve been thinking about this all wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” Priya asked.

  “Winning by their rules still lets them own 70% of our land and a huge percentage of our oceans. We’re preparing legions of lawyers to make their lives a living hell, yeah, but they’re still going to kill almost half our species and steal most of our home from us. That’s not good enough.”

  “I agree,” said Priya. “But I don’t know what we can do to change our options.”

  I looked upward. “Ariel, you control the Shops, yeah? You sell the land to us? It’s really ours when you sell it?”

  

  “You want her to just give us the rest?” Priya asked. “You haven’t asked her for that yet?”

  “I’ve absolutely asked her for that, and for a billion Money. Got a hard ‘no’ on each of those. Here’s my new question, Ariel: if you can sell it to us, doesn’t that mean you own it all right now?”