Realities stink.

  That’s just a fact. But it’s not just roses and oil or daisies and rot. When I Mergewalk, the first few minutes are the worst—except in the diseased body reality. I usually get used to it. Nose blind. It’s a background smell, and even though it’s there, it’s not a big deal after the initial punch to the sinuses.

  The part that I didn’t realize at first is that Reality Zero has a smell. Not the rotten fish and sea salt of Victoria or the moldering wet woodlands I’m in now. Not even the stink of hopelessness and cleaning supplies in basic living.

  It’s more raw. More electrical, like a burning wire or an overheating microwave.

  But it’s a very alive smell.

  Location Unknown, Reality One, Time Unknown

  - - - - -

  Reality One, according to James, was the first reality SHOCKS encountered.

  It wasn’t called SHOCKS back then. It was a government agency out of France or something. It became SHOCKS later. But at the time, it was a semi-forgotten, underfunded branch of an investigative wing of an agency with very little oversight. A department on paper, but really, just a couple of people who wanted to get to the bottom of some disappearances.

  They got to the bottom of them, alright.

  [Reality One was the first sustained merge the group that would become SHOCKS encountered,] James says. I’m half-listening and half-watching the strangest-looking city I’ve ever seen below us. There’s a road. It winds out of the hills and enters the skyscraper-infested city across a ditch that has to be a quarter mile wide. Some kind of smog hovers over the ditch like fog but greener. Then there’s a donut where people live. Kind of.

  I’m zoomed in with my optic aug, watching and thanking SHOCKS for the upgrade. There are people, and for the most part, they’re doing all the things people do. Moving around on what look like trains. Entering and leaving buildings. Walking along the street. They’re not human, though. None of them are quite the same size or shape.

  Then there’s the inside wall. It’s gigantic—easily as tall as the tallest buildings inside. I can see into it—kind of—but not all the way to the ground. I can hear the fighting from here, and I’m a good three or four miles away. Whatever’s happening in there, it’s violent.

  There’s a small hole in the bottom of the wall, and something leaks out into the city through it. It flows down a bunch of canals and into the gigantic ditch. From this distance, I can’t tell what it is.

  It’d be a normal city if not for the war, the flowing stuff, and two other things. First, all the buildings are bone-white—the same color as bleached cow skulls in the old Westerns. So are all the vehicles, the streets, and even the wall. The flowing goop’s mostly white, but it’s got chunks in it. From here, it looks like cream of mushroom soup out of a can if it went bad. I can only imagine the smell; it must be horrifying.

  I’ll find that out soon enough, though.

  The second thing is that there aren’t any restaurants, grocery stores, farms, parks, or even trees. Not inside the ditch, and not outside of it. It’s more barren than the God in the Machine’s reality.

  [So, after they secured the merge portal and realized that flintlocks weren’t going to handle the monsters on the other side, the Agence pour l'Inexplicable decided to build defenses around it and wait it out instead. One of those star forts from the pre-Napoleonic era, but the whole inside was built as a defensible maze. It became SHOCKS Control Zone Brittany when the organization split from the French government a few years later,] James says.

  I take one more look at the city, the skyscrapers, and the wall, then start walking down through the empty dirt fields. Wherever this is, it’s too familiar. I keep expecting devoured to burst out of the ground and chase me, or for there to be a massive religious cathedral around the corner.

  James has no such concerns. He keeps talking like there’s nothing to worry about. [SHOCKS kept the fort manned for a long time, until the flow of monsters trickled to nothing about eighty years ago. They’d been getting more intense, but then, out of nowhere, they just slowed, then stopped. SHOCKS had no idea why, and they couldn’t investigate before the merge portal collapsed. Based on the Halcyon System’s information, my guess is that they’d been fighting their own Merge Prime and lost.]

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “If they’d lost, I’d expect more monsters to come through. The city wouldn’t be in one piece, either. It’d be more like…like…”

  [Provisional Reality ARC?] James asks.

  “Yeah.”

  [That reality still had things living in it, though. It wasn’t abandoned, and neither is this place.]

  “But…”

  [Provisional Reality ARC was forgotten but not abandoned. This one is dead. Not abandoned. Dead.]

  I’m almost across the bridge when I see what he means.

  It’s made of bones.

  One massive spine runs down the center, between two ‘lanes’ of what could be traffic. Thousands of smaller ones branch off from it like ribs, but so close together there’s almost no gap—and what gap there could be is filled with even smaller, nearly human-sized ones, then even tinier ones that look like they’ve been smashed into sand and powder. The result is a smooth walkway nearly fifty feet wide—and a chill I can’t help but shiver from.

  There’s no way the people who live—if that’s the right word—in this city made this without getting the bone from somewhere. That spine’s from the biggest living thing I’ve ever seen. It’d dwarf the Fungal Lords by a few hundred feet.

  The road doesn’t pass through a wall or anything. There’s no security checkpoint. One second, I’m on the bridge, feet thumping against literal tons of bone, and the next, they’re on a white street that weaves through bleached bone buildings. The wall’s huge shadow covers everything, making it all feel a little gray.

  My hand drifts to the Revolver as I see my first local.

  It’s…mostly bone. That’s starting to be less of a surprise than it should be. What’s surprising is how much metal there is—and how much plastic. The bone body’s fully exposed, but the metal gears in its joints hum and click as it turns two glowing eyes that look like bicycle reflectors to stare at me.

  I stare back. The thing—

  {Undying}

  The Undying watches me. The plastic covering over its head ripples in the breeze, faded yellow the color of mustard. The two orange-ish eyes wink out for a second, then glow again.

  And it continues on its way, eight-foot-tall legs thumping into the bone below. The thing is gigantic. It’s easily twelve—no, fifteen—feet tall. And it’s on the shorter side for these monstrosities.

  “James, what are these?”

  [The locals. They weren’t always like this,] he says. [I’m not sure what it thinks you are, but it didn’t recognize you as a threat.]

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “How do you know?” My heart’s beating a million miles a minute.

  [Because it didn’t attack you or scream for the big ones.]

  “The big ones?” I shiver and keep moving. If that’s a little one, I don’t want to know what the big ones are like.

  I head for an alley. It’s time for math, but I don’t want to get stepped on while I run the numbers. Not that the alley’s much safer. The moment I’m off the main street, the smooth bone buildings give way to broken shards almost up to my thighs, and for the first time, I can smell this world.

  It’s fetid, but not the same rot I’m used to. Not swampy. Not rotten meat. Different. Acrid and burning. Like flesh dipped in acid, then set ablaze. I can’t even begin to explain, but something about this world is…profoundly disgusting.

  And it’s coming from the alley.

  I duck through an open door into an empty warehouse. Not empty as in a few boxes. Empty as in the shelves are completely bare, I can see through them, and the dust is so thick it swirls around me with each step. The bone dust.

  I’ll be alone here, though. Which means I can finally work the numbers in peace.

  The biggest variable is the Undying. “James, how strong are they?”

  [High-Geren to low-Xuduo-Danger. Mostly because they’re almost indestructible. They don’t feel pain, at least not how we do. In fact, they’re little more than a metal case around a brain box, the sensory nerves to run sight, taste, and hearing, and what we think is technological necromancy powering their bodies. We’ve only had a few merges with Reality One since the mid-1900s, though, so we don’t have good records.]

  “Thanks.” I’ve only seen the one so far, but a city this big has to be crawling with them, and there’s no way they’ll all choose to ignore me. Eventually, one will want to fight or investigate why I’m not a bone-bot. Either way, I’ll have to fight back, and they’ll swarm me like the Devoured did, but way more dangerous and way harder to kill.

  So, solving for X. My best bet is to avoid contact as much as I can. That’d be easier if I knew what I was looking for, though. “What’s the point of this reality? What are we looking for?”

  [Your guess is as good as mine.]

  “Thanks.” I take a deep breath. “You said technonecromancy? Does that mean tech like we know it?”

  [Once again, I’m not sure.] James seems short all of a sudden. Nervous about something. [We should keep moving.]

  “Just a second. I’m not done thinking yet.” The equation’s coming together, but I’m still missing whole chunks of it. I think there’s enough to go on, though, so, with a deep breath, I leave the warehouse.

  The most important thing is the wall. The wall, and the stuff flowing out of its base. That’s got something to do with Merge Prime—it has to—so I need to investigate it. To figure out what’s happening in the donut hole beyond the wall. I have a feeling it’s a lot like Provisional Reality ARC’s attempt to freeze people in stasis and wait out Merge Prime—a strategy, but one that failed.

  ?Inquiries (5/5)

  ?Why was the Truth Club’s circle so interesting?

  ?How does Director Ramirez intend to weaponize the merge generator?

  ?How can I get Alice back in her body?

  ?Who is Alexander?

  ?How did Reality One fall?

  I finish the new Inquiry and get moving—but this time, I stick to the sharp, broken shards, even though they scratch at my legs through my beat-up leggings. The alley’s safer than the streets.

  Until it isn’t.

  The base of the wall looms over me. If I was a bit longer, I could reach out and touch it—it reminds me a little of the black wall of nothing in Reality 1421, where I first encountered a Voiceless Singer—only this one’s bone-white and bleached.

  There’s a canal running through a tunnel in the wall. It’s at least fifty feet tall above the popping, fizzing acid water, and some of the huge, half-dissolved bones floating down it are big enough to scrape the ceiling. The stink is worse here, too, and the sounds of fighting overhead are almost deafening. Something roars. I’d think it was alive, but it’s been roaring at the same tone and volume for almost two minutes solid.

  I need to find a way inside the wall, but my only option is the acid canal, and if it’s dissolving bones into slurry, I don’t want to know what it’ll do to me.

  One deep breath, and I throw myself onto the first half-dissolved set of gigantic bones. It rocks, and acid sloshes up the sides, hissing and boring tiny canyons into the shockingly slippery skeleton.

  And before I can get my balance, something attacks.

  It’s bone white. It’s impossible to tell what it is, but as its skin/exoskeleton/armor hisses and melts and its jaw/claw/saw screams, I recognize it—a thinling.

  What the fuck is it doing here?

  I don’t have time to find out, because a second one appears—then a third. Then I’m shooting, balanced on the edge of the skeleton as the first thinling leaps toward me. It hits the side of the bone boat I’m riding, and the whole thing rebalances, rocking toward the acid.

  The Revolver goes off. Fire slams into the thinling, and it yowls as it falls into the acid, first its voice hissing, then its whole body. I’m too busy climbing and shooting to deal with it, and we’re all floating down the canal—and away from the wall.

  There’s no time to think. I jump for a piece of ribcage that’s still half-covered in slimy, melted meat. My feet sink into it. Rubber burns, the acrid stink meshing with the acidic sludge in a new smell that makes me want to puke over the edge.

  I shoot two more thinlings before I even stand up straight. The Revolver’s singing; it’s got gravity shells in it now, and one thinling gets yanked off its perch, only to be dropped into the acid a few seconds later.

  And the whole time, I keep moving.

  Move. Jump. Shoot. Dodge. It’s almost routine. The thinlings keep exploding, dying with burning holes, or falling into the acid. These aren’t a challenge. Even when some acid splashes onto me, it’s almost more annoying than painful, my Physical Anomaly Resistance taking the worst of it.

  [Skill Learned: Revolver Mastery 23]

  [Skill Learned: Physical Anomaly Resistance 13]

  Then the gap’s too big to jump, and there are even more thinlings. I take a deep breath, back up to the edge of the massive skull I’m standing on, and switch to my micromerge cylinder. A second later, the Revolver goes off, and I’m sucked through a tiny straw-sized, Jell-O-filled merge and into the tunnel. I land hard on a ribcage, hanging on to the ribs as the whole thing rotates.

  [Stability 7/10]

  James starts talking as I scramble up the side of a massive bone. [Revolver away. You’ve got separation. No idea how those got in here. Analyzing. Analysis complete. That’s…that’s interesting. Maybe…don’t put the Revolver away.]

  I perch above the acid canal for a moment, fishing the gun back out of my pocket. Then I leap to the next bone, and the next one. Eventually, I make ‘landfall’ on a bleached jawbone stuck to the side of the towering wall, and over the sounds of artillery, I catch my first glimpse of the city's heart.

  It’s a merge portal.

  It looks almost identical to the one Doctor Twitchy built in the JAMES Experimental Sector, except this one’s easily fifty times the size, and it keeps…ejecting is the wrong word…vomiting anomalies through it even as it shifts colors and shapes slightly. A constant rain of monsters, statues, animals, people, shimmering bits of nothing, and on and on and on, so fast I can barely describe it.

  None of it lives longer than a few seconds.

  This close, the artillery’s deafening. Explosions coat the whole sky gray. Only the biggest and fastest monstrosities make it to the acid canal, which spirals out from the center of the gigantic donut hole. The huge flamethrowers operated by creatures covered in yellow plastic take care of them. That’s the roaring sound I’ve been hearing.

  It smells like jet fuel, death, and dynamite. It sounds like the end of the world. And it feels like an earthquake. The walls around me won’t stop shaking. A massive beast made of fire—or maybe just wreathed in it—splashes into the acid nearby. I leap away. A massive shell slams into it, and it explodes into a thousand embers that go out when they touch the canal below. Other anomalies die quietly, or screaming, or fighting to escape the river. But they still die.

  This place doesn’t match my equation at all. I have no idea what’s going on here. But at least I know where the thinlings came from. And I know they’re already fucked, even if they’re still alive for now.

  [Unbelievable,] James says. [They haven’t lost yet, but they’ve given up on fighting Merge Prime and learned to live with it.]

  “This is living with it?” I ask, waving a hand at the massive flamethrower that’s filling the bright donut hole with both orange light and so much heat I can’t stop sweating.

  [The expression, not the reality.] James pauses. [The guns are keeping things from getting out of control, but they don’t have any interest in closing the merge portal. I can only imagine they’re harvesting all this somehow—or just turning it into slurry like the SHOCKS Control Zone Arkhangelsk folks attempted in the 2030s. That didn’t work for them, but at this scale? It’s possible they have enough disposal space.]

  I decide I don’t want to know what happened at Control Zone Arkhangelsk.

  Instead, I keep moving, sticking to the walls. If I stay in the shadows, I might be able to get a better look at the Merge Prime portal. If not…

  If not, I’ll figure out how to escape or try Mergewalking home. Either way, I won’t get blasted.

  The artillery and flamethrowers roar louder as I move farther from the exit tunnel, but no matter how far I go, I can’t see anything that gives me a better vantage point—just angled bone, steel trenches, and the acid canal below. The whole thing’s designed to give the monsters raining down nowhere to go, not to let them pile up.

  After almost ten minutes of dodging—or not dodging, sometimes—falling monster gore, I haven’t seen anything, and I’m filthy, and to be honest, the risk of getting knocked into the acid’s a little too much. “James, what’s the best way out of here?”

  [You want to leave already?] he asks, a little surprised.

  “Yes.” I take a deep breath of the stinking, gunpowder-filled air. “I still think the canal’s important, but we’ve seen everything we can where it starts. I want to see the other end.”

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