“You and I, Hector, we have been children. Revenge is for children. It is our duty to grow up, don’t you think?” -Isaac, Castlevania-

  _____

  “So where are we going this time, captain?” Pao’s eternally cheerful Chinese accent asked as the active members of shield team three went through the process of triple checking their gear. “Another dungeon raid? A warzone? The prison of earth? Some other version of a hell?”

  ”Hawaii?” Rada asked hopefully, the Slavic woman healthier than when the team had first met, even with the new splotchy Underburbs scar covering half her face. “If we’re voting, I vote for Hawaii.”

  ”Have you ever been to Hawaii? They have bugs the size of your head there!” Pao made a mock gasp, running the tips of his fingers under his chin like a swooning Victorian.

  ”So smaller than we’re used to?” Rada shot back as she focused on securing her duffel bag.

  Evans gave the smallest amused shake of his head as he could, leaning on the door to the armory room, arms folded. He was, nominally, the captain to these people, but that didn’t mean they weren’t peers. And close ones, too. They’d been through a lot together, and they were ready to go through more. “No one needs to hear about who you’re dating.” He settled on saying.

  Gillar’s head came up from his locker. “I do!” The kid was the youngest of them, barely twenty years old. “I’m perfecting my strategy for flirting with camracondas, and I need more intel.”

  Not missing a beat, Evans continued. “No one should need to hear about who Rada’s dating.” He corrected. “And we’re going to Saskatoon.”

  ”You made that name up.” Pao accused him. “Americans aren’t that creative.”

  Visha elbowed him on the way past as she stacked her completed gear check on the growing pyramid stack of duffel bags. “It’s in Canada. Saskatchewan. Get a geography lesson.”

  ”Lesson or Lesson?” Kent pronounced both words identically, the normally stoic guy shaped like God’s perfect linebacker taking a rare opportunity to get a word in.

  ”I think she made up Saskatchewan too.” Pao added.

  Evans restrained the impulse to pinch the bridge of his nose. He was too young to be tired of their bullshit already, and he wanted to at least pretend that his authority and respect was something he’d earned. “We are going to Saskatoon to act as backup for paladins Lyle and… uh… Spire.” He had no idea how to use camraconda last names, and calling her ‘paladin Behind’ felt like the dumbest fucking idea ever. “There are two identified hostile forces in he AO. One is a splinter, successor, or copy of the original Status Quo. Called by the locals as ‘gatekeepers’, they use our leveler gear. Shield bracers are in play, and they favor nine mil for their guns.”

  ”You’d think that they’d mix things up, since they know how their own stuff works.” Rada offered a dull tactical opinion.

  ”They probably do it so that they can minimize interference with friendly fire.” Gilllar pointed out. "The bracers. Settings?"

  "Most sitting at level fifteen, but they're the bad version so their cooldowns aren't as good as they should be. Still decent though. Set to a variety of things, mostly bullet calibers and martial art strikes, nothing weird."

  Gellar nodded, continuing to dig for information. “Group two?”

  ”Shadow people. Called umbrals, or maybe umbral? Spire didn’t specify. They’re really actually solid shadows, and they have a limited ability to flatten themselves onto surfaces.” He didn’t say ‘as far as we know’, because if he ever started he’d never be able to stop. “They’re also tool users, so watch out for getting shot by them too.”

  The team collectively groaned, six different people using their own personal culturally familiar words to swear at Evans.

  ”I didn’t make the rules.” He told them bluntly. “The city isn’t a warzone. No armor. We’ll be split in two squads. Squad one will be hunting Status Quo, squad two will be doing the job we were actually hired for and providing security for the paladin team, while they try to set up diplomatic contact.”

  ”Question!” Pao held up a flattened hand, palm out.

  ”No, I don’t know why the team with two of the least killable humans in the Order needs protection.” Evans answered. “I assume because there are more killable people in the group.”

  Pao chuckled from deep in his throat. “No captain, I wanted to know why you believed that we’d just be doing security.”

  Rada came to Evan’s defense. “He is very young. Young people are idiots.”

  ”I’m your age.” Evans rose to the bait and quickly regretted it.

  ”Yes.” Rada said with a firm nod. “I also made a stupid choice.”

  Evans forced the briefing back on track. “We’ll be going the same way they did. Multiple vehicles teleporting outside the suspected range of the detection, and then driving into town. The umbral can obviously follow people directly, but we don’t think either side notices us entering. There’s evidence that they can spot people trying to leave though, which means they’re either doing a great job following certain people, or they have some other detector set up, probably on the highways.”

  ”Limited?” Kent’s question was quick and to the point.

  ”Dunno. If it were the Order doing it, then it would probably be expensive and inconvenient. But every time we run into someone else doing something unfair, they seem to get the best version of it.” Evans conceded that it was a little weird that the best gear the Order had was all stuff they’d plundered from worse people. He wasn’t exactly complaining, but it would be nice if they could have a dungeon give them something unfair in their favor before a big fight for a change. Evans wrapped up the briefing, going over the known sites, including sharing a map on their team’s gated skulljack link, broke down the profiles of anyone to be on the lookout for, and capped it off by reminding them that this was, again, not a war. “Be alert.” He told them. “But we don’t shoot first. Got it?”

  Rada’s frown twisted her face into a visage of undirected anger, her thoughts prompted by the comment but not about it exactly. “Are we getting replacements?” She asked.

  There were seven people in the room. A shield team was supposed to be ten, even if they had trained in a multitude of ways to handle situations while understrength. There were people missing. Not dead, not like from team one. But while most of team three had recovered from the damage the Underburbs threw at them, one of them wasn’t going to be in action for a long time, and two of them had quit.

  The fact that they could quit at all had been kind of a shock. They’d read their contracts, obviously. Had it explained. But even Evans had sort of assumed that this was a commitment like the military demanded, and when their teammates had opted out, it had hurt. Some words had been exchanged over the matter. Pointedly.

  But at the end of the day, shield team three needed new members. Three of them. And they’d get them, too. Eventually, they might even feel like they’d been there the whole time. But not right now.

  ”We’ll have rogues riding along.” Evans said, evading the question. “But it’s just us otherwise.”

  ”Caaaaan we…” Visha asked, accent making her drawing out of the words richly smooth, “perhaps not have the rogues along?”

  ”One of them will be Rho if that helps.”

  Kent gave a single firm nod. ”It does.” He said, settling the matter.

  The echo of the statement by the rest of the team made Evans wonder exactly what Rho knew that he didn’t. Maybe it was just being a dog. Even if Rho wasn’t really a dog, he did a great impression, and everyone loved dogs. Evans finally gave in to the impulse to roll his eyes at his team. “Assemble at the swap point, we leave in thirty.” He ordered.

  _____

  “I was doing something important.” Yin complained as she and Ben rode along in the back of one of the convoy’s cars.

  Calling it a convoy was aspirational. They weren’t in a defensive formation, because why would they be? They were on a Canadian highway, where their biggest threat was rogue moose.

  Not moose that were in the rogue program. But moose that were hostile to their cars. She felt the need to clarify that, even in her head.

  ”You were planning a museum heist don’t lie to me.” Ben said without looking up from his laptop.

  Yin had no clue what her friend was working on now. Or why he was doing it in a way that was sure to make him carsick, instead of just using a skulljack. “You can’t prove that.” She challenged.

  This was a game between the rogues. A kind of open consent to spy on each other, just to get practice both hiding and discovering secrets. Low stakes stuff, generally, and it probably would have fallen apart instantly as a game if someone was actually doing something dangerously unethical. Hell, it would have fallen apart if someone was cheating on their partner. Or maybe not. Maybe they would have just gotten practice in navigating a different kind of social bullshit.

  ”I can prove that.” Ben replied, a dull orange light flowing around him as a ghostly serpentine leviathan of mouths and hands formed in the car. “You’re spending your time off staking out an art gallery downtown, and your public storage on our servers has a bunch of stuff on security systems and route timing.”

  ”Hello.” Debt announced his arrival. “Can I join the art heist?”

  ”Fine, I’m planning an art heist.” Yin grumbled. “But it’s not like I’m gonna do it, I just thought it would be fun to map it out. Also Debt are you even supposed to be here?”

  ”I don’t know. No one told me I couldn’t.” The assignment replied, hands rippling down his shark-shaped body more like fur than limbs as he gave a cascading shrug.

  “I should have gotten in the van with Rho.” Yin continued complaining. “This one’s got adventure written all over it.”

  Adventure was for delvers, and paladins. Rogues didn’t get in adventures, rogues got shit done. Rho understood that, just like her. You could be smug and triumphant when the job was done, but you didn’t fuck around when you were doing the job.

  Debt being here felt like fucking around. Yin didn’t like it.

  So she spent most of the rest of the ride figuring out who the new guys that they were babysitting were. And rapidly figured out that the shield team that she’d been aware of but never interacted with was worryingly competent. The thought struck Yin that they might be here to babysit her, and she instantly decided that this was JP’s fault somehow.

  The boss had also complained about being interrupted doing something important, but in his case, it probably was. Surveillance on a pillar sounded like the kind of thing Yin would rather never do at all, even if several days of his ongoing stakeout had turned up no sign of the Chain Breaker.

  And Nate, or Other Boss as Yin had tried to get the rogues to call him, was probably the best at the whole stealth routine, because he’d failed to get tapped for this. Unlike the dozen of his subordinates that were along for the ride in this little convoy.

  So Yin was feeling a little inadequate as they rolled into Saskatoon. But she didn’t let that bother her, because once the city firmly established itself around them and they were off the highway, it was time to be on the clock.

  _____

  James woke up, and decided he didn’t want to move anymore.

  The hotel bed sucked, because hotel beds were never as comfortable as they could make them look in the advertisement pictures. The sheets were stiff and abrasive, the pillow was just kind of a lump. Bad all around.

  But getting up would mean acknowledging that every single part of him ached.

  James hadn’t really ever tanked anything like that with Mountain of the Self before. Hits, sure. Strong strikes from overpowered enemies were his version of a light workout at this point. But no one had ever thrown him out of a window. And it was shocking how, despite having been protected from it, everything still hurt so much. Like his entire body was one percent away from being entirely a bruise.

  He groaned and made a feeble effort to push himself up off the mattress, which didn’t go anywhere. As he became more awake, James became aware that Spire was speaking to someone from the other side of the room, and that he could hear the rushing of water from the shower. The bed was empty except for him. Which meant he didn’t really have an excuse.

  Swinging his legs out, he let Spire’s voice and the sound of falling water just wash over him as he sat up, keeping his eyes closed for a moment before opening them to the dim light of the hotel room. Dropping out of the bed to his knees on the rough carpet, James considered just falling back asleep down there as he reached for his bag and made the Herculean effort to pull out one of his exercise potion flasks.

  He looked at it for a moment, considering his situation, before deciding that his current state wasn’t actually the kind of injury that the potion wouldn’t play nice with. He still only took a small sip, letting the potion go to work on unfucking the burning in his muscles.

  ”Yes, he appears to be conscious.” James heard Spire say from above his head, where he’d unintentionally decided to take a short nap. “Though it may be a clever ruse.”

  “I’m awake.” James thought he said. “Hi Spire. Sleep okay?”

  ”You snore.” She said with a blunt strike to his ability to focus. “Are you coherent enough to hear an update?”

  James thought about it. And realized that if he had to think about it, the answer was probably ‘no’. “Let me get some water first. Or maybe breakfast.” He was so glad they’d brought food, he was starving and didn’t want to go down to the hotel lobby for a mediocre and overpriced buffet.

  He stumbled up to his feet, Spire watching him carefully until she turned away and resumed her conversation while James padded into the hotel bathroom currently flooded with enough steam to ruin every delicate electronic device that wasn’t an implant made of keratin. As fun as it sounded, he didn’t join Alanna in the shower. Just quietly hung out until she was done and then rinsed off himself, still feeling like his hair had some kind of Pepsi product in it even though he was certain he’d washed it enough.

  “Okay.” James said as he reentered the room, dressed in more than his underwear and trying to not be self conscious about the fact that he’d been walking around Spire in his underwear in the first place. Alanna was eating something out of a tupperware container on the bed, and she silently handed him a similar cube filled with pasta and a fork as he sat next to her. “I’m alive. Do we want the others in on this?”

  ”They are asleep, and I believe we should send them away until this is resolved.” Spire said. “Zhu?”

  ”Also asleep.” James said, checking the clock. Almost 8 AM. “Fill me in?”

  Spire started talking like she’d queued up an entire speech and was just waiting to hit the button. Quick and clear, she got the two up to speed on what had been happening in the two hours she’d been awake before them.

  The shield team and rogues had arrived in the city, and were getting to work. Rogues were currently tagging everyone involved in the ongoing kidnapping of the umbral, making a social map of things while they also kept an eye out for any information about motivations or a deeper explanation of a plan. Evans’ shield team, while not trained in the same way, was still sneaky enough to put up their own on-site surveillance of a number of spots in the city that they were aware of. The dungeons, the mayor’s office, this hotel. Two of them had even checked on Jubilance’s ex-fiance, just to verify that the man wasn’t dead.

  There had been a lot going on in a short amount of time.

  ”Okay.” James said as he took it all in. “If we’ve got this capacity, I want to do something risky. My first thought is that we just walk into the dungeon today and start talking. Either that, or go straight back to the mayor, and tell him the whole truth.”

  ”I disagree.” Spire said calmly. “At least for the moment. We are not alone. We should not be reckless.”

  ”…I kinda forget that sometimes.” Alanna muttered.

  James’ mouth pulled into a lopsided smile. “Me too. Good thing we brought someone smart and awake along. What do you suggest?” He asked Spire.

  Spire-Cast-Behind hissed shortly as she looked toward the dim grey morning light seeping through the hotel windows. “Follow the trails, but do not engage.” She said. “Assist the rogues, take our time, understand the sides in this conflict. Or at least how large they are. If we can identity leaders as well as outside agents, it becomes easier to create a confrontation that we can use to pivot things in our favor.”

  ”What, like, actively arranging another furball like in Utah?” Alanna asked with eyebrows arched as she scoured her hair dry with one of the hotel towels.

  ”Which time in Utah?” James muttered.

  A camraconda snout twisted to point in his direction. “What James says is accurate. A minimum of two times, that has worked in Utah. Each time, it has come out in the Order’s favor. This time-“

  ”Hey wait I got shot one of those times.” James tapped his avian replacement eye, a sharp reminder of shaper substance surgery.

  ”-this time we can make it happen on purpose, and not by happenstance nor ambush.” Spire concluded. “So. Who are we facing?”

  James ticked off on his fingers. “Local government actors, umbral, Status Quo three the return of Status Quo, and… the mayor? Drak actually seems like the weirdest person in all this. A dark horse election winner in a major city who’s taking marching orders from Status Quo but very obviously working with the umbral in a personal capacity even if he’s sort of literally selling some of them.”

  ”If I didn’t know better,” Alanna said slowly, “and I don’t know better, then I’d say he was plotting something.”

  ”He is absolutely plotting something.” Spire stated confidently. “What?”

  ”Good question. Let’s go talk to him.” James said with a grin.

  Alanna’s hand caught the back of his pants as he made to move. ”Sit the fuck down.” She laughed at him. “Okay. So. We think teleporting around this place gets noticed, right? Why don’t we use that? If any of the three groups can actually do it, and this isn’t just coincidence, then we set up overwatch on a place, have someone teleport there, and then see who shows.”

  ”How is that less risky than what I said?” James asked, but he didn’t give anyone time to answer as he started building on the plan. “The big issue is that we don’t really have a way to identify the Gatekeepers. I mean, distinct from other people. We can’t just say ‘they have shield bracers’, because that’s literally what got me defenestrated.”

  ”I knew there was a word for that.” Spire hissed with restrained amusement.

  ”…But it’s still a great way to see if there is some kind of mass tracking spell going on, right?” James continued. “Spire and I were both firing off Move Person and Appointed Arrival, and that didn’t seem to draw attention, so does it just notice if someone comes in from outside? Not knowing what’s being watched is the problem here.”

  ”We should start abbreviating those spell names.” Alanna said, mostly to herself, as she stared up at the ceiling and debated going back to sleep with her head resting on the edge of the hotel bed. Then realizing she was causing another diversion from their planning, she took a breath, and asked the important question. “So. Where do we start?”

  ”Get Tylor and Joob out of here, and then grab a couple people off team three and start testing teleports.” James answered. “Spire, you feel like being obvious today?”

  The camraconda’s fangs glinted in her version of a wide grin. ”I already was more than a little, but yes, I am tired of pretending I do not belong.”

  ”Alright. I’ll go wake up our new friends.” James stood this time and wasn’t interrupted, heading out to handle the easiest part of the upcoming day.

  _____

  ”I’m not leaving.” Jubilance told him as the adjacent hotel room door swung shut.

  James pursed his lips as he followed, leaning on the corner of the cramped hallway and crossing his arms. “Look, I know-“

  ”You don’t know.” She said, turning to stare at him over Tylor’s head, her companion kneeling over his suitcase and working on working a belt through a pair of leather sheaths for a knife and a stun gun respectively. “You have no idea.” Jubilance flatly told him.

  ”What, that you feel like you fucked up? That you need to do something, anything to fix it? You think I, a mid-thirties dungeon delver who has survived roughly five full health pools worth of cumulative damage, don’t understand that?”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Tylor looked up as he finished working his belt through the proper loops on his heavy cargo pants. “Joob’s being dramatic and stupid, but we’re not leaving.” He said. “And you know why, because whatever this moron-“

  ”Hey!”

  ”-says, you do understand.” Tylor’s words sounded stilted, but he had a point to make, and he was going to drag himself across that line if it killed him. “We talked about this last night. We did fuck up. We did make a mess of things. Us running away doesn’t fix a goddamn thing though. We might not be up to your professional hero standards, but we’re not useless, and we’re. Not. Leaving.”

  ”You can’t kick me out of my own city.” Jubilance added defiantly.

  James nodded, not saying anything in response to either of those statements. He felt like there was something they weren’t saying to him, but he also felt like it wasn’t something he could verbally bludgeon out of them this morning.

  In general, they were a liability. The umbral could very easily recognize them as related to the Gatekeeper variant of Status Quo, and James knew for a fact that there were umbral who had directly been in gunfights with these two, who were probably still alive and in this city.

  And yet, James had an emotional soft spot for people who had caused irreparable harm partly because of manipulation by an external and more powerful force, who wanted to put things right as a way to patch up some of their own painful trauma over the experience.

  …That was probably a bad sign, that this happened often enough that he could recognize the pattern in action.

  “I’m giving you to Evans.” James said evenly. “If you want to stay, you get to help team three figure out how many people in this city are kidnappers.”

  ”…Fine.” Tylor said.

  ”I’m not following anyone’s stupid orders though.” Jubilance added, ruining the illusion.

  James sighed, puffing out his cheeks and resisting the urge to slap his own face and scream. “I’m not asking you to be a soldier, I’m asking you to work as part of a team for, like, one day. Could you just…?”

  ”Oh.” Jubilance’s defiance deflated at the sudden burst of frustration from the paladin. “Yeah, sure.”

  ”Great.” He silently looped Evans in through his skulljack connection. “They’ll be by in an hour or so. Maybe get breakfast or something while you wait.”

  ”Ooh, there’s a hotel buffet!” Jubilance said, getting a baffled stare from both of the guys in the room. “I’m gonna go eat a pound of bacon.”

  ”…sure.” James said, shaking his head and looking at Tylor.

  The bearded man sighed and stood up, clipping his taser into its holster. “I’ll keep an eye on her, while I continue to wonder how she’s barely more than a hundred pounds.”

  ”Yeah. Have fun.” James said awkwardly. “I’ve got a lot to get to, so I’ll probably see you later tonight to share information.”

  Tylor gave him a nod, not quite looking at James directly. ”Got it. I’m not gonna do anything stupid, don’t worry.” The fact that he felt like he had to say it did kind of worry James, but he appreciated a little reassurance.

  They didn’t say anything else as James let himself out to rejoin the others. Neither Tylor nor Jubilance were that kind of comfortably talkative with James yet.

  But they were trying to be decent people, or at least people who weren’t still making the same mistake, and he respected that a lot.

  _____

  The day passed shockingly quickly after that.

  And, for that matter, so did the next one. And the one after that.

  James had a few more moments where he tried to put forth the idea that they should give in to his preferred method of generating chaos, and just walk into a dungeon, but he wasn’t serious about it. He really wasn’t used to working with a support team on stuff like this, and having a real plan where they were proactively collecting information and getting a full picture before acting was new. But it was also very satisfying.

  It took a while though.

  After Zhu woke up on the first day, and everyone in the Order and also in Saskatoon got on the same page, they got right to work. Work that was methodical, and even somewhat boring, but that was often a fascinating series of puzzles to solve.

  The first question of can they see us teleporting got answered rapidly. And the answer was a tentative and unsure probably not? Whoever “they” even was, no one reacted when the Order did telepad tests inside the city. They decided to refrain from crossing in or out though, because if they did that too often, they’d spoil that they could do it, and if they ever needed to do it, then it wouldn’t actually matter if they could be tracked.

  The rest of the questions were a lot more personal, and they started flowing as the investigation crawled from person to person.

  Who knew who? How did they confirm that? How many phones could they wiretap?

  The answers began to create a web of interactions that James found amusingly similar to the iLipede that laboriously mapped out social contacts. And actually a version of that iLipede variety was in use, though it was often faster to just follow someone home and bug their phone than to find their icon on the iLipede and wait for the bug phone.

  Where did different people congregate? How many of them were involved with the umbral? How were they involved with the umbral?

  Bars, mostly. Some of the Parks staff had a movie watch party every week. Some of the cops had a board game night, which was also at a bar, but by the time they found that one James kind of wanted to see if they’d let him join. There were a few corporate board members and executives that played golf, or tennis, or some other sport-as-status-symbol. All of them though were involved with the umbral, and it took less than a day to figure out that they were under the impression that the secret was enforced somehow.

  And as for how they were involved, it was simple. They had captive umbral. All of them. Though the public sector had communal captives that they shared. The bound umbral were handed off in the early hours of the morning, well before sunrise, and were returned to the people doing the handing at around the same time. Which led to another important question.

  Who the fuck was selling people like this?

  That one was a lot more difficult. It didn’t seem like they were Status Quo, but they had a habit of vanishing out of sight pretty often, and no one had managed to successfully follow them, even Zhu or Leif, the independent navigator that had joined the rogues for this operation. They drove vans that seemed to always be decaled for a different perfectly reasonable sounding company, and they were experts at ditching tails to the point that the Order group was starting to wonder if they had been spotted.

  Tentatively, they tagged that group as being part of the Mayor’s faction, since selling umbral access was one of the only things they actually knew he was doing.

  The question of what the point was, and why anyone would bother, was pretty obvious though.

  Everyone who spent time with one of the captives in their trunk or closet, without fail, eventually showed off at least one active spell. To the point that they were now starting to add spell lists to the profiles of everyone that they were compiling. Most of them never went past four, but that was still a lot of magical flexibility.

  Jubilance and Tylor, when they went over how leveling up from their first dungeon went, listed off a lot of things they knew could do it. Winning fights, going deeper into the dungeon, making things out of dungeon material, all of that worked, though you had to do more and more for every level. James quietly assumed that the xp requirements scaled at a rate where you technically could farm entry mobs until you were level a hundred, but only if you planned to live for a couple millennia.

  Going off that, and the local behavior, it seemed like keeping an umbral captive worked just fine too. And, actually, was a pretty good nonlethal way to extract value from the dungeon. Though there was a serious issue of consent. Some of the umbral that they’d seen during the handoffs had looked… unhappy with the situation.

  So they’d established motive, if not exactly method. And after three days of determined work and subtly following connections and conversations, it was starting to look like they had at least most of the human involvement mapped out.

  Which was good. In addition to just knowing who was in need of mild behavioral correction in the form of a visit from a irate and heavily armed James, it was important that if they actually wanted to rescue anyone, that they know where to go to rescue everyone. Leaving stragglers, or worse, hostages, was just going to leave what looked like a large scale problem festering.

  As much success as they had with the more overt part of the human side of things, they had significantly less luck with the umbral, though.

  The same questions applied. Where did they gather? What were their goals? How did they operate?

  But the answers were not simple. It wasn’t until the second day that they even had any luck tracking a single umbral, and when they did, it was one that seemed to spend the majority of their time slinking around the city and doing their own spying on the same humans the Order was tracking.

  Their target didn’t ever make contact with another umbral, though they did have a phone which James had found perversely hilarious when he’d spotted it, and they made calls constantly. Though there was never an opportunity to get a wiretap on their device, frustratingly, but they were definitely making calls.

  The whole thing felt so bizarre. And for most of the first and second day of their sustained investigation, it was hard to think of the grey and damp city as the same place that Jubilance insisted was a clandestine battleground.

  By the end of the second day, it was a lot easier, because Rho, watching the post office that hid a dungeon entrance, had frantically sent out a group call to let everyone know there was an active firefight going on.

  It was over before anyone got there, even if they did teleport to the site. Rho shared his recording - the dog-level view of things an odd perspective for most of the crew that wasn’t named Spire - though, so they could see what had transpired.

  The fight had started when a group of four umbral had left the brick post office building by the roof. Rho hadn’t noticed them until two had dropped to the ground, apparently unbothered by the fall, and the squad of folded shadows had moved rapidly toward a car parked on the cracked road that ran between the rear of the building and a more elevated highway that cut through the city.

  Rho had followed around the building to observe, his status as a perfectly ordinary and clearly well cared for dog letting him get away with basically anything. Before the shadows had reached their own vehicle, an SUV parked farther down the street had launched into motion. One of the umbral was hit by it as the group was caught off guard, and the side doors had been thrown open to reveal human agents with familiar submachine guns.

  So they’d found Status Quo at least.

  The umbral hadn’t just sat there and let themselves get shot. They’d fought back with their own weapons, though they seemed mostly equipped with knives and not guns, and the fight had turned into a flurry violence as the shadows closed the distance to the car and started trying to take out their attackers.

  The Gatekeepers were wearing shield bracers, which did a great job of keeping them from getting stabbed in retaliation, and after they’d been set to keeping knives at bay did a terrible job of stopping the high caliber sniper fire that started hitting the car from a distant perch. The shots of that were brutally loud cracks to Rho’s ears, echoing over the city as someone took precise and deadly shots at the agents, leaving at least two of them dead before they were dragged back into their damaged SUV and made an escape.

  It took under a minute, so fast that even Rho hadn’t realized that he could have intervened. Certainly longer than the Order could have reacted to.

  The umbral also retreated, one of them leaking from holes in their form, another dead and being carried, body seeming to collapse down into a flat form. The survivors moved like they were in shock, clearly not having expected the attack.

  Evans pointed out that the Gatekeepers had appeared shocked too. This hadn’t been a planned attack, it had been a target of opportunity. They had not expected the sniper, likely whoever was watching the post office that Alanna had realized was there on their first day here. So the sniper was, if not an umbral, at least on their side. And the Gatekeepers had no idea where the eponymous gate was, or they would have been prepared and sent more than a car with four guys in it.

  But they’d at least gotten a lead. And by the end of the third day, they’d tracked the SUV down, and knew where at least two surviving Gatekeepers were holed up in a cheap motel just on the edge of the city’s legal boundary.

  They didn’t get into either of their phones either, but they did have the mayor’s office wired, so the Order was aware that one of the Gatekeeper agents had arranged a meeting the next day.

  And the mayor had immediately started making his own calls.

  And James saw an opportunity.

  In the past, the Order in general and James in particular had more than once had an issue with going to what should have been simple meetings and having them turn into chaotic messes where multiple different factions took the opportunity to flip the script on everyone else involved. It was often a great way to solve several problems at once, but it was kind of aggravating to have it come at the cost of resolving a single problem in a more diplomatic and satisfactory way.

  The plan, which had slowly been taking shape for the last few days, was to arrange a few of those normal conversations where they could find a diplomatic solution if one was possible. So it was a little ironic that this time, James was the one who was interrupting their own operation to take part in the multi-sided meeting.

  This time, as the problem.

  _____

  ”So that’s where we are, more or less.” James was sitting in the cube of an armchair that their hotel room had in the corner, his actual phone held up to his ear as he talked to his boyfriend. “The plan, such as it is, is to keep an eye on things, maybe step in and say hi if there’s a good opportunity. Nothing dramatic.”

  ”It’s impressive how much of a lie that is in such a small number of words.” Anesh sounded a little distracted on the other end. “I know you’re not expecting to get hurt, but… please be safe?”

  James smiled at the concern. “I’ll be fine.” He said, and then, realizing that sounded kind of dismissive, corrected to “I’ll do my best to not get shot.”

  There was silence from the other side of the call as Anesh’s phone filtered out the deep sigh he gave away from the mic. ”Somehow that is even less reassuring. Don’t think I won’t tell Alanna you’re planning on that.”

  ”I’m not planning, I’m being realistic.” James defended himself with an unseen smile. “Anyway, how’s home? I feel like this is the first time we’ve talked in days and that’s a little weird.”

  ”I haven’t yet been away from you for so long that I miss you, but it is odd.” Anesh agreed. “Home is normal. Everything is going along.”

  There wasn’t really any deception in Anesh’s voice, which was part of why James paused before answering. The casual way that his boyfriend had said that was just so very deeply telling about their shared lives.

  He cleared his throat. “Normal could mean a lot for us…” James said slowly.

  “Oh piss off.” Anesh laughed. “Keeka and Arrush are down in Townton for the week so they get to enjoy horrible weather-“

  ”Just because we’re used to dismal rain doesn’t mean everyone is.” James interrupted. “Especially not people with fur!”

  “…Alright I’ll give you that one.” Anesh admitted. “Have you talked to Sarah?”

  James scoffed. “I have literally talked to no one. I’ve tried calling a few times but everyone’s phones are always in other dimensions.” He made a waving motion that Anesh wouldn’t see, replying before his boyfriend could even say anything. “Yes, yes, not yours, you’re too smart to take your phone into a dungeon. Sarah isn’t though!”

  ”Ah, that’s true. She’s been spending all her time with Clutter and Kiki. One of me checks in on her a lot.” James could hear Anesh rattling around in the kitchen on the other end of the call while he talked, the sound of their refrigerator opening and closing as his boyfriend presumably hunted for some kind of snack. “Honestly it’s been quiet. Been on one short delve, myself, but mostly I’m just working on a Research project to create a… well, an orange totem CAD program.”

  “Ooh, that’s cool. Does it work?”

  ”No. I mean, not yet. The thing is, the totems can be expressed mathematically, but there’s a lot of variables that we just flat out don’t know yet. Momo’s vibes-based method is shockingly effective-“

  ”Alarmingly effective.”

  ”-concerningly effective yes, but it isn’t something that you can easy teach people. And for the oranges, we need more than just vibes.”

  James hummed. “Totems seem like the least safe thing we have, seriously.” He thought out loud. “Gotta go slow with them, even if Momo… doesn’t.”

  ”Oh, that reminds me.” Anesh said, and unlike when James used that line, he actually meant it. “The animals that the Stacks totem makes? They aren’t real.”

  James let out a long and satisfying groan of a sigh. ”Oh that’s a relief!”

  ”Infomorphs can’t find a mind, skulljacks will change the bodies but they don’t connect, no magic that works on people works on them, even potions don’t seem to do the right things to them.” Anesh talked like he was reading a report. And, to be fair, he might be. “Which is good, because I didn’t like the idea of having to even temporarily kill thirty two Siameses when we moved the project. A lot of people were concerned about that. Because a lot of people are concerned about every totem.”

  Now that James could understand. “Yeah, you have no idea how many of my daily outreach meetings are about reassuring people that our spatially distorted apartments aren’t going to explode and turn them into rotini.”

  He could almost hear Anesh wince. “Do you tell them about the backup totems?”

  ”Of course I tell them about the backup totems. And the earthquake testing. And the emergency protocols. And… actually that’s it.” James had a stray thought. “Hey, does Cam ever work with the construction team? I’m just now realizing that her ability to know how to knock a building down might be useful nonviolently.”

  ”I’ll add it to Bill’s pile.”

  ”Get that man an assistant.”

  ”We did. He scares them off.” Anesh complained. “I would do it, but… I don’t want to.” He admitted, affecting a tone like he was deliberately not being scared off. “Oh, when will you be coming home? There’s a thing with the transport ‘company’ that might be-“

  In the background of Anesh’s call, James heard the sound of a door closing, followed by an oddly echoing voice. “Is that James? Tell James I said hi!”

  ”…Aubs says hi.”

  ”Hi Aubs.” James laughed. “Are you being held at dogpoint until you deliver this message?”

  ”Yes.”

  ”Well, message received. Anyway, we’re crashing a party tomorrow, which should at least let us get a better picture of things. If I’m lucky, then it’ll be the most dangerous part of all this, and we can hand off to Recovery afterward.” James said. “But after that… I mean, I really want to do some dungeon things. I might get a chance tomorrow, but if not, maybe two or three days?”

  ”Please don’t die in a dungeon.” Anesh’s put upon voice was like a soothing sigh of concern to James’ ears.

  James chuckled back at his boyfriend. “Anesh please. No one dies in dungeons.”

  ”That’s concerning.”

  ”That I’m right?”

  ”That you believe it.” Anesh verbally stabbed James in his dungeon loving heart. “Just… please be safe. You’re not replaceable.” This time he was the one who didn’t wait to cut James off and answer the unspoken statement. “I know I am not replaceable either you knob, I’m just telling you to not die! Be mature about this!”

  The words caught James at just the right moment, so that when Alanna walked back into their hotel room, she found him howling with laughter, phone held out in a hand that stretched over the cubic arm of the chair. “Oh, is that Anesh? Hi Anesh. James, stop dying and say bye to Anesh.”

  James heaved in a breath and sat upright. “Hey, I gotta go.” He told their boyfriend. “Alanna has designs for me.”

  ”Ominous. But also I already know it’s just your planning session.” Anesh chuckled back at him. “Have fun. Remember you can call in the rest of us if you ever need it.”

  ”Will do. Love you. Tell everyone I’ll be back soon. Alanna says she loves you too.”

  Anesh made a suspicious hum into his phone. ”Really?”

  ”Well, she made a bunch of hand gestures that I don’t understand, but I think it means she loves us.” James admitted, talking while he watched their girlfriend try to perform some form of advanced rules charades from the foot of the hotel bed. “It’s either that, or she’s giving instructions for disarming all the traps she left in the apartment.”

  ”Don’t worry, I figured those out.” Anesh said with such casual surety that James almost for a moment started trying to figure out what traps they did have in the apartment. “I’m hanging up now before you can banter more. Goodbye.”

  The line went dead, and James looked down at his cell phone before looking back at Alanna. “He really does know me.” He said. “Because I was definitely going to keep bantering about red orb traps.” James paused and then looked down at his phone. “Wait. Thirty two cats?” He murmured in concern.

  ”You know I only heard half that conversation right?” Alanna asked him, dropping her waving arms out of the air. “Anyway, get up, Ben got us a fancy meeting room this hotel rents out, and it’s time to go talk about a military operation in broad daylight.” She offered him a hand up, which James took, rolling easily to his feet. “Where’s Zhu?”

  ”Went with Spire already. He’s guiding her through the hotel in a way that avoids employees, so they don’t kick us out.”

  The words made James angry, even as he said them. He was getting sick of hiding the nonhuman aspect of the Order. Getting sick of how often people reacted badly. Getting sick of things not being even just superficially better. And he wasn’t even a camraconda; he could go anywhere and more or less be accepted, at least compared to half his friends.

  Most of the time they just ignored it. Punched through and pretended that everything was normal right up until the moment when the civilians around them gave up and accepted it. But when confronted directly with the tactical fact that a camraconda stood out among the one hundred percent human population, it just reminded James that even for most people who were on his side of the memeplex problem, dungeon life were more often targets than companions.

  ”Hey. Relax.” Alanna flicked him on the nose. “You’ve been getting angrier and angrier all week.”

  ”Just as long as we’ve been here, not all week.” James protested.

  ”It’s Thursday, dumbass, that’s ’all week’ and you know it.” Alanna gave him a playful shove toward the door, and the two of them started heading toward the borrowed meeting point. Using the hotel’s amenities felt a little more okay now, since no one had come back to ambush them again, so their odd form of evasion seemed to have worked. But James still felt weird about it. “You wanna talk about it?”

  James shrugged. “What’s to talk about?” He asked. “It’s fucking Utah all over again. It’s Status Quo Two all over again. It’s… they’re people. They’re people, and they’re being used as a commodity, and I hate that we’re taking our time to plan and scheme and get in position, and that I’m not just punching things until the slavery is gone.” The two of them got on the elevator, Alanna hitting the button while James hit his shoulders back against the wall with a heavy impact. “I’m actually surprised I’m angrier than you.”

  ”I am so fucking furious that I’m considering summoning Cam like she’s a pokemon and having her rip people’s arms off for me.” Alanna said calmly. “But also you fucking know why we’re doing this methodically, and it’s not just cause our good friend Ben asked nicely.”

  He sighed in reply, because he did know they had a good reason. If they half assed things, they’d miss victims. Just like they’d missed a lot of demons in Utah because they didn’t know. They called a cease fire before understanding that they were leaving people behind, and now they had to do a lot more messier cleanup because everyone who was invested in having slaves had seen the Order in action and taken steps to avoid them.

  That couldn’t happen here. They needed to hit the whole thing at once; the system in place, and every single person involved in it. Even then, they’d probably miss something. But a little preparation acted as a huge force multiplier.

  “Cam wouldn’t rip people’s arms off.” James said eventually just as the elevator doors opened, the two of them walking past a group of loud younger kids with a pair of exhausted looking adults trying to get them out of the way. James and Alanna just waded through the group like they were fording a river. “She’d be much more precise than that.”

  ”Fine. I’ll do the ripping.” Alanna pouted as they got clear, nodding sympathetically to one of the parents that they’d passed by. “I can probably pull it off.”

  ”…is that a pun?”

  ”It is now!”

  James smiled, letting the small moment of levity mute his anger at this horrific situation for a while. It made him feel small, really; the whole world was hanging in the balance, and he was here as a favor for two people, on a mission that might help, what, a few hundred umbral? Not for the first time this week, James felt the jaws of time closing in on him. A deadline, the deadline, coming up faster and faster.

  But they were here, now. He was here now. He’d seen something evil and he wasn’t going to turn down helping just because it wasn’t going to fix everything all at once.

  ”Alright, get in there.” He told Alanna, holding the conference room door open for her as they reached it down a weird back hallway that cut through the hotel’s structure and appeared to be mostly used to connect a janitor closet to the indoor swimming pool. The rest of the Order’s on-site team was already in the room, and Evans was casually waiting for the two of them to arrive, looking way too used to giving briefings to a bunch of chaotic idiots. “And let’s figure out how we’re going to save everyone perfectly.”

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