“Sweet, a level,” Tori said as the message came in. She was about halfway between Museumtown and the Millennium Park safe zone, and she was just as happy to stop running for a minute. With the Rust-Belt Wyvern dead, the next step would be getting her mom and the other healers out to the safe zone to take care of the injured—and to collect the dead. There were definitely dead.

  Tori winced. That’d be a problem for Calvin and Jessica-Mom. And for Hal. They’d have to figure that problem out themselves, though. She was much more curious about what a Level Ninety-Seven Field Boss was doing in Chicago. That was way beyond what a normal team should be able to handle at the beginning of this phase. It was definitely bigger than the thing she and Hal had fled from in the Mycopolis.

  In a way, it reminded Tori of an old griefing exploit. There’d been these monsters, back in her MMO, that had no leashing rules. Most video game monsters would just follow until they got to the edge of their ‘territory,’ but these ones would chase you forever. All a skilled player had to do was stay just ahead of them, and they could drag one into a city.

  Oh, and those ones were strong enough to one-shot the city guards. So, yeah, it was pretty rough when your faction’s town got flattened by a Dark Rover.

  Was that what had happened here? Tori wasn’t sure. But one thing was for sure—she was very curious. It definitely didn’t feel fair. Then again, though, the Rat’s Nest probably didn’t think their food situation was—

  The [Tier Five] Dungeon [Penitent Eye] has been opened!]

  What.

  No, actually, what. Not a question. There was definitely some bullshit going on, and whatever Hal had been up to in his little garage hideaway, he was almost certainly at least partially to blame. Tori sucked in a breath. “God dammit, Hal,” she muttered.

  Then she kept running.

  ?▼?

  “Jessica!” Calvin yelled.

  Jessica Silvers turned and looked over her shoulder. Her med crew was already assembling around the obliterated Field Museum, and she desperately wanted to follow them inside. People were hurt, and she could help them.

  But that wasn’t why she needed to get into the Field Museum.

  Yes, she’d been inside the Reliquary of Bones, but that wasn’t the Field Museum. Hal had explained to her exactly what dungeons were—or at least what he thought they were, and they weren’t the real thing. They weren’t even terraformed versions of the real thing. They were facsimiles, designed to feel right without being right, and to be mass-produced and reset over and over.

  But the Field Museum she’d just watched explode as what looked like a trillion tons of metal hit it wasn’t a facsimile. It was the real deal.

  She remembered every exhibit in the place. She’d worked on half of them. That building was her past, and not only hers, but Planet Earth’s. It was—it had been—a repository of human knowledge and understanding. There weren’t many untouched repositories left. Even before she’d been hired, museums were a high-pressure job; there were a lot of people who’d had opinions about exhibit contents, and threading the needle was a constant war.

  But she’d done a great job. She’d consulted with all the right stakeholders, hammered out loan agreements for items no other museum had access to from groups who were historically opposed to museums for very valid reasons. Those exhibits, even more than Tori, were her baby. She—

  “Jessica Silvers, snap out of it. We got problems. This ain’t the end. It’s just the beginning!” Calvin shouted in her face.

  She blinked and wiped her eyes instinctively. Then she took a deep breath. The fresh air hit her lungs, and she blinked a second time. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m good.”

  “You sure, Silvers?” Calvin asked. “We need you. The whole damn city needs you. Focus.”

  “I’m focused, goddammit!” she snapped.

  “Perfect. Listen, something brought that bird down. I’m gonna tighten up Museumtown’s defenses, get a squad moving toward Millennium Park, and bring those folks back in. See if you can figure out what killed the damn thing—and if you see Tori, tell her I need to see her, immediately!”

  Jessica opened her mouth to say something, probably along the lines of ‘You can’t tell me what to tell my daughter,’ but Tori’s voice interrupted their conversation. “No time. The whole fucking Millennium operation’s wrecked. Hal was in that Wyvern. Did it come—Jesus!” She cut off, staring at the Field Museum.

  “Were you at the Millennium Park? What happened?” Calvin asked. “Why weren’t you at your station?”

  Tori told them, and Jessica listened, trying to breathe. “And the dungeon?” she asked when her stepdaughter finally stopped talking. People were already starting to dig out the Field Museum’s rubble to look for survivors, and she was missing out on her last chance to see her hard work.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  But that didn’t matter.

  “I have no idea. But Hal was in that bird, and you’ve got wounded all over the place,” Calvin said quickly.

  “Right. Split everyone up. Tori, you’re here. Carol and Zane are in charge of the recovery out at the park zone. You four, you, and you, go with them. Heal who you can—smart triage.” Jessica barked out orders, then pointed at her double-stacked trailer. It was still in one piece, though one of the metal legs holding it up was folded in two from a chunk of marble the size of a washing machine. “The clinic’s closed for now. I’ll be in the field.”

  No one asked if she meant she’d be working to heal the hurt or if she’d be mourning the best job she’d ever had, and that was for the best, because she didn’t know how she’d have answered if they had.

  The mech was…

  Actually, the mech was shockingly intact.

  I’d gotten lucky. There were only a half-dozen or so Drake Guards aboard the Wyvern, and they hit me in small patrols instead of all at once, letting me reload between waves. It hadn’t been like shooting fish in a barrel, but it had been close. After a relatively quick walk through the massive steel dragon’s maintenance tunnels, I’d found what I was looking for.

  A Heart. A Heart ten times the size of even the ones I used to power the Runners. It had to be capable of pumping an absolutely gargantuan amount of fluid Charge through the Rust-Belt Wyvern’s systems. I applied the Charge Converter and waited as the machine flew. It activated, and we plummeted back to Earth as I tried to drag the mech to the back of the Wyvern.

  The safest place for kids in accidents was the back seat, and I was nothing if not kid-sized compared to the crash-landing Wyvern.

  I used the mech’s remaining arm to push a slab of steel upward, then shifted the strain to the machine’s legs as I walked it out of the way. The entire maintenance hall was trashed, and I didn’t have anything to cut my way free. The rail gun and grenade launcher had both been torn off by the impact, and I had no idea where I was, much less whether I’d need them to fight my way free. But I did know one thing.

  This wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. That dungeon needed clearing; it was definitely part of whatever was happening.

  The mech’s arm strained as I pushed on a slab of white stone. It collapsed from the pressure; two impacts rocked my cockpit back and forth, and the headache I’d been fighting since we landed redoubled. But I could see the sky.

  “Hal, that you?” a familiar voice asked.

  It was Calvin.

  And just like that, I knew exactly what the Rust-Belt Wyvern had aimed for with its dying energy. “The Field Museum? We hit the Field Museum?”

  “Yep. You hit the damn Field Museum. I’ve got crews excavating to look for survivors, and other crews trying to set up the Shedd as our redoubt, since this one’s well and truly FUBAR.” Calvin sounded pissed, but his face screamed relief. “Glad you survived. Tori told us where you were, and…well, we feared the worst, Hal.”

  “It’ll take more than a Field Boss to kill me, Calvin,” I said as I opened the mech’s cockpit and slid out, collapsing into a heap on the rubble. I reached out, pulled the machine into my inventory, and staggered to my feet. “What’s the situation?”

  “Dead and wounded everywhere, an unknown dungeon nearby, and an area message tellin’ everyone about it. It ain’t good, and I don’t know any more than you do.”

  “Great.”

  This was a problem. It was well beyond what the previous phases had thrown at Museumtown. Sure, the settlement had gotten wandering monsters, and there’d been the constant threat of the Watery Grave breaking and dumping its bosses right into the tent city for the first couple of phases, but compared to this, those were nothing. No, this couldn’t be typical Phase Three behavior. And if it wasn’t, then I could only think of one explanation that made any sense.

  “This is a trap,” I said.

  “That’s what I figured, too. Ain’t fair in any way, shape, or form. Question is, what are we gonna do about it?”

  “I have no idea. The first thing is, I need to rebuild my weapon systems. That’ll take time, though. Can you get Tori? I need her to help clear this dungeon. If Bobby were here, he’d already have bet his life savings that it’ll break, and when it does, the Rust-Belt Wyvern will be the least of our worries.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Calvin said, “But she’s pretty damn essential here. Artillery support, mining out the rubble safely, and all that crap.”

  “That’s all I can ask, Calvin. I’ll be in my lab.”

  The mech fixes were quick and dirty.

  I didn’t have time for upgrades. Switching out one of the arms for a blade or saw wasn’t going to happen, either—even though I had the Charge for it. I had a very, very limited amount of time to get the machine up and running, find the Penitent Eye, and get it cleared. So, for the last two hours, I’d stuck with what I knew, and the result was a mech that was almost identical to the one I’d had before. The arm’s metal was a little less dinged up, and the paint was from a different model of truck, but it was close enough.

  Then there was nothing to do but wait for Tori.

  Instead, I got Carol. Carol and Zane.

  She looked pissed, but one glance told me it was at the situation, not at me. “Calvin said to find you here. Said you needed help.”

  “I asked for Tori,” muttered, “But I’ll take anything I can get.”

  “Yeah, Calvin said that too,” she said. “I stopped and talked to her, and she’s got a pretty good idea of where the Penitent Eye is. She can’t go with us, though. There’s too much for her to do here. I don’t think her mom would kill her, but we both agreed you needed a hand.”

  “So, I get both of you?”

  “No,” Zane said quietly. “Calvin says we can’t leave Museumtown with only one powerhouse defender.”

  “So, I’m going,” Carol said quickly. She held up a hand as if she expected to be interrupted. It was aimed at Zane. “You are going to wait here, with Tori. Don’t try to change my mind, Zane. I wouldn’t let you go with him, no matter what. He’s already done enough to you.”

  I winced. Okay, maybe some of her anger was about me. “Carol, I’m fine with clearing this with you. Like I said, I’ll take any help I can get. But I need to know you can work with me.”

  “I can work with you.”

  “Okay.” I shrugged, then held out a very real, flesh-and-blood hand. “Welcome to the team.”

  She grabbed my hand and shook it—one pump, up, down, and done. Professional, serious, and cold. I tried not to wince again.

  Then Zane turned and headed for the door.

  “Don’t give me that, Zane! You know where I stand. You’re the most important person in my world,” Carol said. When Zane snorted and kept walking, she flushed. “Yes, even more important than Tori. I need you to stay safe, no matter what.”

  Zane didn’t turn around, though, and after a moment, the front door of Cindy’s Garage jingled as it opened, then shut. “Is he gonna be okay?” I asked.

  “Yes. He’ll be fine. This time.” Carol pulled a spear from her inventory. This one was new; the tip spun slowly, and a cross-bar halfway down ended in small axe-blades. “Let’s get this dungeon cleared. Everyone’s counting on us. It’s at the old police precinct. Tori said you’d know where that was.”