"Why, just because James seems to be abusing the fabric of space-time, do you automatically assume that I had something to do with it and now that I say that out loud I realize how silly that sounds, my apologies Kathleen, you were right to come to me." -Paul Saunders; CommodoreHUSTLE, Endgame-

  _____

  “Ben.” Alanna’s voice was politely inquisitive, the kind of stretched out single word when a person was just poking their head into a room to ask a short question.

  This was how Ben knew he was in trouble. “Alanna.” He said with trepidation, trying his best to look like he was hard at work at his laptop, and not at all intimidated. Not for the first time, he felt like he really needed to get one of the purple orbs that made people less bothered by cold; despite being from the Climb, Ben abruptly found the Lair’s open warehouse space to be chilly. “Whaaaaat can I do for you?” He asked.

  ”Where’s my boyfriend?” Alanna asked, still in that easygoing tone. “And don’t make the joke. You know which one.”

  ”Oh!” This was easy, Ben waved a hand over his shoulder at the simple question. “Alaska. I thought he would have told you?”

  ”He did. What part of Alaska?”

  ”Fairbanks?” Ben double checked, just in case this was a trap somehow. “Yeah, roughly fifteen miles south of Fairbanks, in the middle of an area that is somehow not designated as a national park. Why do you ask?”

  Ben wasn’t looking behind him, but he could hear Alanna nodding contemplatively. “So, is that the same part of Alaska that falls under the purview of the headline that reads ‘Oversized Winter Storm Set To Devastate Unprepared Alaskan Communities’?”

  The friend stopped typing, fingers frozen over the keyboard. Alanna watched as he straightened up, his head silhouetted against the glow of his laptop even with the updates to the briefing warehouse’s lighting improvements. Then he leaned back down again, terrible posture resumed as he started rapidly running his fingers with technically inhuman speed across the keys.

  ”Yes.” He answered suddenly.

  ”I’m teleporting to Fairbanks.” Alanna no longer sounded placid. She clearly wasn’t angry at Ben, but she had a kind of fire in her voice that indicated that she wouldn’t be letting this happen uncontested.

  How, exactly, she planned to punch a winter storm into submission, Ben wasn’t clear on. But he’d never actually gotten a full accounting of Alanna’s abilities, only that she was capable of deadlifting a refrigerator. So maybe? Weather patterns seemed outside of the realm of just physical strength, no matter what the anime the humans kept sharing with him would have everyone believe.

  So Ben assumed this was hyperbole. But he also assumed she wasn’t quite kidding about teleporting there. And while he knew that JP probably knew, there was always the chance that he didn’t. And since JP wasn’t answering his barrage of skulljack-assisted phone calls and texts…

  Actually that was a warning sign all on its own. “Yeah. I’ll come with you. We should maybe bring some others for backup.”

  ”I’ll get-“

  “Others who blend into Fairbanks.”

  ”…I’ll get… uh…” Alanna had to really think about this one. “Marlea?”

  Ben closed his eyes, trying to figure out if that was a bad joke, or a good idea. “Sure.” He exhaled. “I’ll meet you in the armory part of the vault in an hour.” As Alanna strode out of the room, leaving a trail of new people and veteran delvers alike curiously wondering why the amazonian responder was in a hurry, Ben tried a different phone number, and got no response there either.

  Holy shit, he needed Planner to recover. Or find a new assignment to get in on their operational command. Because he liked his job, and he liked moving people around on missions and delves and stuff, but Ben was not ready to do it all himself.

  He also needed to grab someone else to come along for support, and all his actual friends were iLipedes. Maybe… “No, this is a terrible idea.” Ben muttered as he looked across the warehouse to the zone of whiteboards, desks, and maps under the control of the Winter’s Climb delvers. “I’ll just ask. It’s fine. He barely recovered from a case of human-blow-up disease. He’ll say no.” Ben stood up and took measured steps over to the delver planning area, where Ethan was currently talking to Clouded-Sapphire-Sky about the timing on getting through ice gauntlets.

  ”So there’s always long breaks in the pattern.” Ethan was saying. “Which is great, because once you can sort of feel them out, it’s a good time for camraconda delvers to leapfrog ahead. Gives you guys a moment to rest and reposition, while the rest of us… oh, hey Ben!” The young human man gave a puppy dog smile to the obligate friend that Ben wasn’t fully sure was because of his magical nature. “Here for delve stuff?” Ethan asked. “Cause I’ve got a great idea for-“

  ”Sorry, hi Ethan, no.” Ben held up a hand. “Alanna, Marlea, and I are heading to Fairbanks to try to link up with the rogue group there. Apparently there’s some sort of storm coming through, and I already can’t get any of them to answer their phones. So-“

  ”Oh damn! Do you need me to watch stuff while you’re gone? I’ve always wanted to do the dispatch thing with the headset and the cool collected voice guiding people through certain death.” Ethan seemed way too happy about that.

  Clouded-Sapphire-Sky thought so too. “Too cheerful.” She said with a shake of her head, the digital voice the newer camraconda was using not quite calibrated to her personality yet. But then she turned on Ben. “How often does that happen? I would like to less cheerful do that.”

  Ben restrained himself from pinching the bridge of his nose. He was trying to not get used to being human. It was, technically, all he’d ever known being, but the fact that it might change at any time made him feel like he should avoid forming any habits. Instead he just sighed, which seemed to be universal across species. “No to both of you. Ethan, we’re already taking Marlea, you delve with her all the time and might work well together, and you have cold weather experience, are you willing to come as backup?”

  ”Oh. Sure? Sapphire, you wanna come too?” Ethan shrugged, no regard for the inflictions he was supposed to be recovering from.

  ”I would stand out.” The camraconda rightly commented. “So yes. I will requisition earrings.”

  ”Ah…” Ben paused, trying to think of how to tell someone no.

  Clouded-Sapphire-Sky beat him too it, hissing in amusement. “Joke.” She said. “I do not like the cold. Have fun.”

  ”Wait, you don’t like the cold but you’re here working on becoming a Climb delver?” Ben couldn’t help himself wasting time on a sudden question he had.

  The black and white cabled camraconda nodded at him in a leisurely bob. “I want wings.” She said. “Among other appendages.”

  Ben had even more questions now. But he didn’t want to get into it. “Great. Cool. Good luck. I hope you get the style you want. Ethan, meet us at the vault in an hour.”

  He left as the young human - objectively older than him, but it sure didn’t feel that way - gave him a crisp and eager salute in a style that the Order absolutely did not use for anything. Ben needed to go get dressed in cold weather gear before he did something stupid.

  At least this itched the instinct he had to drain resources from people. Though intellectually he knew that the Order’s supply of coats was sourced from at least three different dungeons, and no one had paid a single cent for anything in the forty foot deep closet that had appeared upstairs one day and was now labeled ‘coat check’.

  _____

  When the wind picked up, James and Hugh had headed back toward the camp, moving back through the fence with a perfectly normal wave to the gate guards. If there was one thing James would give these guys, it was that having no strong emotional reactions sure helped them have great trigger discipline; he could still feel through the dungeontech he was wearing whenever anyone aimed at him, and so far, no one had. Not even when Hugh was low-key threatening him. If he didn’t know better, he assumed they didn’t actually want to shoot anyone at all.

  Actually he didn’t know better. So maybe that was just literally true.

  Knowing that he wasn’t going crazy with regards to the mental influence was nice. But knowing that it was something that even Priority Earth members didn’t seem to understand or know how to manage was distressing. Or as distressing as anything could be, really. It was a data point at least.

  Having everything reduced to just information again, except for his appreciation for the crispness of the wind and the smell of the living world, was hard to get used to. On the one hand, he could see how someone could become reliant on, if not addicted to this feeling. There was nothing in the way of just loving the experience of being alive on Earth. No anxiety, no… no depression even. That was worth keeping an eye on; if he missed his antidepressant dose he was almost certainly going to have trouble when he left. But it was so easy to not need to listen to a hundred different impulses all the time.

  And on the other hand, he didn’t have those voices. Except the ones that he had resonance with, or that Zhu shared with him. James did not like that. His emotions were important to him, both in terms of helping him understand the world, and in driving him to act when he otherwise would have accepted doing nothing. Giving that all up just because it was simpler seemed wrong.

  Giving it up for, like, a shift at his old job? That would have been great. Maybe that had been the intent here. Slap down a suppression field, and keep everyone focused on their work. Take away the fear that would naturally come from resisting an armed oligarchy. And then when the day was done, or the job over, take it away.

  One of the only hard rules James had given the Order was that they didn’t make life to be tools. There was a very small grey area in that, though, which was that assignments were life that could only grow from being good tools in the first place, and while they were tools they weren’t really alive. This was like an inverse of that same grey area. What happened if you were alive, and you really, really felt like making yourself into an effective tool for a while? This would be the perfect method for it, if it could be turned off.

  But it never turned off. It even lingered on people who left, though James had certainly noticed that Edgar had gotten less and less passionate about defending the living ecosystem the closer they’d gotten to the camp, so proximity clearly mattered.

  James split off from Hugh, the other man giving him a reinforcing reminder of his ‘new’ job as the two went their separate ways. He took the opportunity to barrage a few other patrolling guards with questions. Asking them about their main jobs here, how they felt about being armed and about maybe shooting at people, how they got their assignments, how long they’d been with the group, his growing list of ‘usual questions’.

  What he got mostly came out as consistent but bland reinforcing answers. They didn’t really fight anyone or go on missions anymore. The anymore was important; some of them had been here for years and they remembered operations to sweep coal plants for their specialists, or intimidate the board members of a company that wanted to drill for oil off Alaska’s coast, but even then, they’d never shot anyone. Only a couple of them had ever fired at someone at all, and it had been in response to someone breaking into one of their previous camps and killing a member of the Wolfpack group that worked with them.

  James was glad for the emotional suppression for that one. He wouldn’t have been able to resist looking sheepish otherwise.

  Their jobs were the same mix as everyone else; a little self-directed to get stuff done, a little self-sustaining as they passed on their daily orders to other people when they needed a break. It was a weird vision of anarchy in action, and it didn’t really work perfectly, but it wasn’t not working.

  He stopped his questioning when the first snowflakes started to fall. Fat fluffy spots that would have been gentle if they didn’t mix with the wind and immediately get down to the business of slapping people in the face. People like himself.

  James could have stood outside and stared at the dance of snowfall under the glow of the halogen lights all night - which was saying something considering that night would be lasting another eighteen hours, technically - but he did have survival mechanisms that didn’t need emotion to work. So he set aside his grinning enjoyment of the simple act of watching snow, and headed into one of the cabins.

  The layout was different than the one he was technically staying in. But, like all the others, it was something that had a blend of elements coming together into a final product that was very out of place. Not like a dungeon; this was definitely a human construction. But while the building was a study and rustic log cabin, it still had warm electric lights, a small bathroom, and a fireplace that had been burning for a long time without anyone adding more wood to it.

  ”Close the door.” One of two people sitting at the cramped circular kitchen table waved at James as he entered, and he readily complied, letting the sharp chill of the outside finish its skirmish with the toasty inside. “Another new guy?”

  ”Yeah, just got in today.” James answered with a friendly affect. “What’re you two up to?” He asked.

  The man raised his head, owlish eyes blinking as he considered the question. “Playing cards.” He said.

  “Neat. Having fun? Or is this more of a gambling thing?” James felt like there was something off about the way people here approached recreation.

  Both men slowly shifted, one of them propping his bearded chin up on a closed fist, while the other scratched at a bald head under his toque. “Well it’s better than doing nothing.” One of them decided, and his friend nodded. “Want in?”

  ”Will I be losing money?” James inquired as he sat down, moving a carved wooden chair across the surprisingly clean carpet.

  ”Yes.” “No.” Both men spoke at once before looking at each other, then back at James. “Yes.” They both agreed.

  The bit of James’ thoughts that were zeroed in on treating this whole place like a puzzle to solve made the independent decision that this was fucking weird behavior for people who couldn’t experience strong emotions. But as they dealt him into the first hand, the puzzle of the game and the friendly lying that came from any game of poker - even one where James was rapidly and effectively counting the deck - began to pluck at the strings of his feelings.

  James didn’t actually like poker, of any variety. But by the fifth hand… he was having fun. Which wasn’t what he’d expected at all. Maybe the people who were cheering for the hockey game earlier did enjoy it. So the list of things he was capable of having complex emotions about while here grew to encompass general recreation.

  As they played, despite the fog of feeling making it harder, James asked questions under the guise of friendly banter. If anything, it got easier when the people were more aware. The two men - Earl and Buddy - were long time members. They were also the first people James had met and talked to who actually named the group as Priority Earth, which maybe meant they were long time members.

  ”So what’s the story here?” James asked idly, the pleasant vibe and warm fire making him feel comfortable being a little vague.

  ”Oh, ya know.” Buddy replied with a chuckle as he watched James fold the hand, unaware that James was aware of most of what was in his hand. Not even through card counting, just through the reflection from the quartered window behind him. “You watch everything get worse and worse, and no one does anything. And one day, someone says, what if we did something? And then you follow that dumbass to Indiana and next thing you know…”

  ”I’m not that big of a dumbass.” Earl griped. “And it wasn’t just me, either. I’m just the last one left.”

  James was glad the suppression kept him from being surprised. Otherwise he might be a little bit thrown off by the fact that the two guys playing poker in one of the residential cabins were the founders, as opposed to any of the people who were working on tactics or logistics or even just someone like Hugh who was aware of the magic.

  ”Raise.” James commented as he listened. “So why Alaska?”

  ”Indiana didn’t appreciate our innovative methods of pollution control.” Earl grumbled in his deep southern accent. “So we went where no one was looking. Hired some people for transport. You know, the grey boys out there.”

  ”Boys and girls.” Buddy corrected as he flipped his cards into the pile, not at all frustrated to lose a round. “Equal opportunity mercenaries. What a world.”

  ”I’ve gotta ask…” James started.

  Earl gave a throaty chuckle. “Do ya?” He half-asked.

  ”…how do you… or we?… afford mercenaries with a helicopter and an anti-aircraft gun?”

  ”One day in and you’re already thinking like one of us.” Buddy nodded appreciatively as he shuffled the deck, cards flicking between his fingers as he pulled some casual but impressive sleight of hand. “We stuck them in the cabins that pay their salary. It works… enough. Also the gun’s ours.”

  James stopped moving, and slowly let a breath out, as if making sudden moves might ruin the source of information. “So… the buildings are magic.”

  ”Wow, really?” Earl’s sarcasm definitely would have been mean if any of them could feel more of themselves. “Cards?”

  ”Two.” James pitched some of his hand as the conversation and game continued. “Well, if magic is real, at least it’s convenient.”

  “You seem interested.” Buddy said with a placid lack of emphasis, tugging on his beard while staring at his cards.

  And James almost froze. It was only through the lessons he’d gotten from Nate and JP, training that had drilled certain response patterns into him for situations like this, that he kept himself calm. Because it was suddenly very apparent that he was being questioned in reverse, and just as his interest had drawn suspicion from the one other person resistant to the effect, now it had gotten him attention from the people who might be at the center of it.

  There were only actually, like, thirty non-Wolfpack people here. So this was bound to happen if he kept asking questions and those people did exist. But it was kind of jarring to get them this early. And to in turn be recognized, or at least, probed in return. James kept calm though, mostly because not being calm wasn’t really an option unless he wanted to experience one of his resonant emotions. “Magic seems cool? Especially if it makes buildings like this. I mean… I guess you have reasons, but it seems like not having to actually generate the electricity you use would go a long way toward minimizing human impact on global ecosystems, right? So why is it just here? Something about Alaska?” James kept his voice steady and the chatter inside what he hoped was the realm of card game banter, while also flipping the question back around.

  Why, he implicitly asked, are you fucking around here, instead of spreading this around?

  Earl chuckled again, jerking a thumb at James as he looked across the table at his long time insurgent companion. “Kid’s a thinker.” He commented. “What’s your name, new guy?”

  ”Wally.” James gave his cover identity, though he wasn’t sure why he bothered since no one had even approached questioning him on anything.

  ”Alright, Wally. You wanna see what makes this place tick? Hang on.” Earl grunted as he got up from his seat, folding the hand and leaving the others to amuse themselves while he was gone.

  As the card game started to stall, so too did James’ ability to latch on to the feeling of amusement and friendly banter. And he could definitely tell that Buddy felt the same thing, which was why when Earl returned, he found the two of them playing Go Fish and making up rules for wagering their stacks of chips on it. “You sure we wanna share all our secrets here?” Buddy asked his friend as Earl threw a three foot wide rolled up paper on the table. “He’s new new.”

  ”You a spy?” Earl asked James directly.

  ”Probably.” James answered. “I mean, I guess you could call what I’m doing ‘spy stuff’. But I’m not James Bond or anything.” He had not meant to answer that close to the truth, but the words had come out anyway. In his head, Zhu began bleeding tension into James, the navigator preparing to manifest and fight their way out of this place if it came to that.

  But Earl just gave a guffaw. “See Bud? He’s fine. Besides, who’s he gonna tell?”

  ”Maybe he steals the… helicopter.” The way the pause was situated, James knew, knew, that the man had stopped himself from saying ‘teleporter’. “Ah fuck it. Wally, you’re too curious for your own good, you know that?” He asked as he went back to shuffling the cards with unneeded flair.

  Earl unrolled the paper, revealing an architectural diagram that looked somewhat familiar to James. “Alright. Magic, right?”

  ”It’s a blueprint.” James stated, thankfully getting help in feigning being unimpressed.

  ”It’s a magic blueprint.” Earl was actually grinning, clearly having a great time showing off. Maybe that was why he was doing it in the first place. How often, after all, would any of the actual members here in the camp ask about this sort of thing? If he was anything like James, and it felt like they could at least be friends under better circumstances, then he’d be chomping at the bit to explain his special wizard bullshit. “How dumb should I make the spiel for you Walt?”

  James flicked his hand of cards, half-focusing on the game so that he could fully focus on the conversation. “I mean I’m not hopeless.” He answered. “Also Wally, please.” JP had given him that point of cover, James might as well use it.

  The man nodded, combing fingers through his beard. “Right, right. So when we get - got - these blueprints, they’re blank. Just paper.”

  ”Not just paper!” Buddy couldn’t help himself from contributing, it seemed, even if he had spoken against the new guy being told anything. “The stuff won’t rip, won’t get wet, won’t… well it’ll burn, but…”

  Earl flipped his friend the bird. “Yeah, found that out the fun way.” He snipped. “So you use it as a blueprint. And some of the good ones will help you with it, but you can’t be an idiot. The better your design, the more of these marks it gets. See?” He pointed to parts on the outside of the structure’s floor plan; circles and lines, with tiny writing underneath. “The better you execute, the more total power you can bring in. Here, touch this.” Earl tapped one of the circles.

  Intently interested, James complied. “Feels like normal draft paper.” He mused. “But I… oh, interesting.” The ink on the page had moved under his touch. The circle and its internal marks rotating almost like a dial. “May I?”

  ”Go nuts.” Earl was grinning widely.

  James twisted his fingers, and the lights in the cabin dimmed. As he turned the dial back, the light came back up and revealed his own excited grin. “Well!” He looked across the other marks, his eagle eye barely letting him pick out some of the words labeling them. Fireplace, repair, alarm, moisture, truth; the whole sentences seemed like full descriptions and he could see numbers in there too, but without leaning in he wouldn’t be able to read them too closely. “That’s very cool.” He said.

  Earl nodded, his smile slipping as he sat back down and carefully rolled the blueprint back up. “So, you asked something.”

  ”Yeah. Why just here? Why not everywhere?” James mind, sharpened on the logistical challenge of upending known systems with magical boosts, went to work on ideas right away. “Even if it’s just electricity and climate control, which it can’t be, you could do that for every new apartment tower and start taking percentage points off of how much power we need to generate as a species. The more of these you make for different structure types, the farther it could spread, and the more we could cut down things like carbon emissions, or even trash generation. You could…!” James trailed off as he saw the morose looks on both men’s faces. “…you could do quite a lot. But you aren’t.” He let the statement sit as the idly grabbed the deck of cards and shuffled it repeatedly with far less skill than the previous dealer.

  Earl nodded silently, while Buddy sighed before waving a hand over the blueprint on the table. “I’ve got all the reasons in the world for ya.” He said with gloomy despair. “They’re bespoke, artisanal magics.” He pronounced that word very wrong. “They take more work than they’re worth. We don’t have more than the number of cabins here anyway. Getting more would be… well. But those aren’t the real reasons.”

  ”Don’t fucking bother the new guy with this shit.” Earl snapped out.

  ”You bothered him with magic, I’m bothering him with reality.” Buddy snarled back, the atmosphere in the comfortable cozy cabin going from friendly cards with the snow slapping against the windows outside, to tense animosity, in a split second. “You want me to shut up? Huh?”

  Earl slumped back in his chair, shrugging listlessly. “It doesn’t matter.” He said.

  And when he said it, James saw. The exact moment when the man let the emotional suppression flatten him down into a dull grey slab. The enthusiasm, the excitement, even just the casual fun of the card game, all of it was gone, but so too was the turmoil and depression. And he was, in the horrible way JP had phrased it a few days ago, back to being an NPC.

  As Buddy stared at his friend, ignoring that James was even there, there was another moment. One where he was clearly struggling with making the decision to keep talking anyway, and not do the same thing Earl had just done. He turned and locked eyes with James. “I think we should kill everyone who ever made a buck off of oil.” He said bluntly. “Every fucking parasite that wasted the country’s… the world’s time… ruining electric cars and sabotaging solar panels? Letting everything get worse and worse while they paid people to bulldoze sacred sites to run pipelines through? Just shoot all of them and feed them to the ocean.” He sighed, his anger not quite holding on, the embers of it flaring up briefly before dimming. “How about you?”

  ”I…” James felt his heart lurch. He’d been asked a question that he needed to answer. And yet, even though he felt the magic, and suspected he know what dial on the blueprint was causing it, he couldn’t fight. But also he didn’t really want to. “I think death is final. I’d rather no one die at all. But I think self-defense is acceptable, and when someone is killing you slowly, you don’t wait for them to speed up before you fight back. So I get it.” What he did not add was that he thought they could do better. Especially with the product of whatever dungeon these blueprints came from.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  ”You’re a good kid.” Sighed the man who couldn’t be more than five or ten years older than James anyway. “You speaking from experience there?”

  ”Yeah.” Was the simple answer. James wasn’t sure if that answer was going to destroy his cover. But after that, the supply of forced truth seemed to be used up.

  Buddy nodded slowly. “Well. Earl here wanted us to try peaceful. Or peaceful enough. Nonlethal. Blueprints aren’t the only trick we… eh, fuck it, forget that part. Point is, we started that way. And we got in trouble for it. Getting our asses chased to Alaska didn’t mean we got away.” He looked away, ignoring the cards James had dealt him, seeming to be fully in control of whether or not his own emotions were impacted. “You ever come to your senses at a job, realize you were fucking it all up, and quit?” He asked.

  That was exactly what James’ cover story was, so… “Yeah, that’s familiar to me.” James answered. Both for the persona, and because that was kind of his experience at his old call center, technically. Though Officium Mundi was what ‘brought him to his senses’.

  ”Earl and I woke up maybe a month ago.” Buddy said, confusing James as he tried to line that up with anything. That wasn’t when Harlan would have gotten the Wolfpack here back, nor when the Order had raided the camp the first time. In fact, nothing that he knew of would have changed then. So either an unknown effect, or just random timing. “Realized we were thinking like monsters. Realized we’d been used.” Buddy slid the hand of cards back across the table in a messy pile. “So we quit.” He stated.

  ”You quit… what? Being Priority Earth? Fighting?” James raised an eyebrow, the questions echoed in his heart by Zhu’s own curiosity.

  Buddy shrugged. “Everything.” He said. “Earl and I remember it all. Everyone else… eh, who knows. They’re doing their own thing. But they don’t need us. We just keep the lights on, keep the feelings turned down, and… try to forget.” His expression started to slip. The grey suppression sliding back into place. “Look at me. Talking too much.” He grunted as he stood. “Get some sleep new guy. Someone’s gonna want you to help shovel a lot of snow tomorrow.”

  ”My bunk’s two cabins away.” James pointed out.

  ”Just take one here. No one gives a shit.” Earl’s voice was hoarse as he sat, unmoving, in his hewn wooden chair, staring at the surface of the little circular table.

  And with that, the conversation closed, and James was left to his own devices. Walking away from the card game and the explanation of a bizarre magic feeling… like he’d just learned something both shockingly important, and also weirdly understandable.

  All this. The weird behavior, the change in patterns, the crushing mental effect layered over this camp, all of it made a lot of sense with just a shift of context. That these weren’t people who were mobilizing again for further insurgency action, but instead, people who were running from something. Running from something that had caught their scent in Indiana; Indiana where there was an inoperable coal plant currently occupied by a giant hypnotic flower. Running from something that had… what? Made them lean into the terrorist part of ecoterrorism?

  The Order had tracked this group from New York, originally. Where they had been, honestly, not even close to the most important thing happening in the town. They weren’t even a player in that game; more like a piece on the board. One more unit moved around the map to cause damage or chaos as pillars and shadow agencies went to war with each other. Had their involvement been unwilling?

  The grim fact, James realized as he took one of the spacious private rooms with a bed covered in rough blankets that no magic was helping with, was that JP was right. The thing JP was right about was a problem too, but him being right at all when it came to personal philosophies kept throwing James off.

  What he was right about was that James didn’t care about the well being of people who sacrificed the future to buy the present. They weren’t exactly enemy soldiers, but when a person looked at a spreadsheet that said that in order to grow profits, they’d have to make business decisions that would lead to thousands of deaths, and then shrugged and signed anyway? James didn’t want them dead, but he did want them stopped. He wasn’t quite up to “throw them in a woodchipper”, as JP had put it, but it had been a grim road of seeing the world get worse around them while the Order struggled on. And he was getting… angrier. Even if he was managing it nicely thanks to both a good community, and some good orbs.

  If Priority Earth were their original form - angry, yes, and certainly willing to cause damage, but not willing to blow up buildings full of civilians - then James would probably have no qualms at all about allying with them. Or recruiting them, even. Yeah, it actually sucked for the employees of those power plants that got stuck in biological stasis pods and slowly had their presence in other people’s minds drained away. But it also sucked for the people who got cancer because of the radioactive dust produced by those same plants. Who should be prioritized? The ones complicit in the harm, or the ones suffering it? James felt like he knew, even if he didn’t like it.

  But the Priority Earth he’d seen today, the one that was a fragmented machine, a skipping record that was stuck on the same track, it was…

  It was what? Sad? Scary? He could barely feel anything at all, even if he was supposed to be analyzing this as he laid down to sleep like he was told to. But he could tell that the pure logical facts here didn’t add up to a clean answer. They were dangerous, but they weren’t evil. They were violent, but they weren’t monsters. They were broken. But they weren’t letting go.

  Something still wasn’t adding up. The full picture wasn’t in place. So James would go back to questioning tomorrow. Try to answer all the questions without collecting too many new ones. Like figuring out why Hugh didn’t know what was going on when he should if he had been here long enough to know Buddy and Earl. And trying to understand if the group even was one cohesive group at all. Maybe also trying to sort out where the Wolfpack fit into this mess.

  Until then, the sound of fiercely determined snowfall and heavy winds lulled James to sleep.

  _____

  “JP.” Alanna drew out the start of her friend’s name as she slid up next to him where he was standing on a wide hotel patio and looking out over a grove of spindly yellow-leafed trees. There were three separate parallel streets of varying widths and utility between here, and the similar form of the airport runway that JP was observing, but right now, all of them were buried in at least two feet of snow and the airport was occluded behind a wall of grey. The flickering flitting swarm of snowflakes something Alanna never really experienced growing up in Oregon, but had certainly had a few encounters with on Winter’s Climb. “Fancy meeting you here. Outside.”

  ”Mmphpr.” JP looked up at Alanna with bloodshot eyes. “Oh good. You’re here. Punch the snow away please.” He said before massaging his temple and leaning forward on the splintered wooden railing.

  He and Alanna were the only people out here on the patio. Probably because of the snowstorm that had ambushed Alaska and half of Canada. Currently he was sheltered under a patio umbrella that none of the hotel staff had closed, but the protection it provided was purely decorative as far as Alanna could tell. She was still getting slapped by a few hundred particles of snow every second. And while she didn’t get cold like other humans anymore, she did still dislike being sodden.

  ”Punching an entire storm system isn’t in my power set yet.” She told him. “I’m still working on the flying part of the flying brick archetype.” Alanna brushed frozen powder off the sleeve of her coat. “Where’s James?”

  ”That way.” JP said, pointing in a seeming random direction with unerring confidence. “He asked nicely to join their group, and they let him.”

  ”You are shitting me.” Alanna was sure there was more to it than that.

  JP just shook his head, a slow and ginger movement. “Not this time. Sorry.” He said, barely speaking up over the wind of the storm. “He’s not in trouble, as far as I know. He hasn’t called anyway.”

  ”Yeah, man, no one can get ahold of either of you. Have you gotten a call in the last day?”

  ”…No.” JP closed his eyes, and for a second Alanna wondered if the guy had just gone to sleep. “I should probably check in.” He admitted.

  Alanna had shown up prepared to be worried, but right now, she was more concerned. “You look like shit.” She told JP. “What’s up? Talk to me here.” She craned her neck, looking around the empty patio with a hefty layer of snow covering the slats and only her footprints out showing any recent disturbance. “What are you even doing out here?”

  ”Two things.” JP held up his fingers in a V. “I’m waiting to see if a flight lands, even though there’s supposed to be a complete shutdown due to…” he waved the fingers around them. “And also, I’m hiding from DeKay.”

  Snapping to attention, Alanna’s eyes widened for a moment before she narrowed them and began scanning the interior of the hotel through the thick glass door behind them. It looked so warm and inviting inside, orange light and Christmas decorations already half put up. But she was out here, close to freezing despite her upgrades. “Why is DeKay here?” She asked.

  ”Because McHarn and his team are smarter and faster than I thought.” JP admitted. “I think they might be like an adventuring party now. Though there’s four of them, not three.”

  ”It’s never really three people.” Alanna muttered. “So four people who might know you? No, only McHarn and DeKay would, right?”

  ”That’s statistically bullshit.” JP verbally parried. “Also the other two aren’t here right now anyway.”

  Alanna nodded. “So you’re waiting for a plane?”

  ”Yeah. There’s a gang of bank robbers that’re using a house in the western part of the city as a safehouse after their jobs. I’m keeping an eye on them.” JP said. “I think they might try to fly in anyway today, but there’s a reason that they chose out here.”

  ”Sure.” Alanna threw her hands up. “Sure! Fine! Whatever! What the fuck is going on in your life dude?!”

  ”I’ve kind of lost control of it myself.” JP admitted. “Also please don’t yell. I haven’t slept, and my head hurts, and I want to die.”

  Alanna softened. “Hey. Okay. How about… you get back to the Lair, and get some sleep. I’ll lurk out here and watch for your ersatz aircraft, and Marlea and Ethan can stalk DeKay and make sure she doesn’t fucking murder people in the name of her blood god or whatever.”

  ”And McHarn.” JP reminded her. “Also DeKay’s god is capital-D-Democracy. As far as she knows.”

  ”Yeah, I know what I said.” Alanna said with a slight sneer. “DeKay’s idea of democracy is one where you secure it by shooting anyone that doesn’t fit the mold. But yeah, I’ll get Marlea on it. I don’t think any of the feds know her faces.”

  JP’s shoulders slumped as he let himself relax briefly; no one around to impress except Alanna, who he had long ago given up on looking cool in front of. “Thanks.” He said, closing his eyes and just listening to the snowstorm for a while.

  ”Oh, hey, before I get rid of you… actually two questions. How are you not covered in snow?” Alanna asked.

  JP held up his hand, where a half dozen tiny feelers from a ghostly half-manifested assignment were sunk into a plain band of a ring made out of green light. “I borrowed Chris’ authority and Sartori is helping it cover me.” He said, as if that were an acceptable explanation. “Second thing?”

  Alanna needed to see if Zhu could do that for her with her authority next time she had him. Though from the way JP was treating it as a party trick, it seemed likely that it wasn’t a full on force field. “Uh, yeah. The other two? Where are they?”

  ”Oh.” JP gave her a sarcastic look, opening his eyes just to see her reaction. “Where do you think they are?”

  The question, asked in the tone of someone who was resigned to the worse case scenario in terms of total situational chaos, told Alanna all she really needed to know. She held up a hand, fingers splayed, before collapsing it into a fist with just her index finger pointed the same direction that JP had indicated at the start of their chat. “That way?” She asked. “Maybe fifteen, twenty miles?”

  ”Yep.”

  ”Shit.”

  ”Yep.”

  ”You know I’m not gonna sit here and watch for an airplane, right?”

  ”Yeah, I figured you were gonna go plow through the frozen countryside until you were reunited with your true love right at the moment he needs you most.” JP commented.

  Alanna pursed her lips at him. “Go get some sleep. Please. I’m gonna get Ben to start rotating checks every hour, so if you can find some other knights who aren’t wounded, on vacation, or both, maybe get them on standby for backup.”

  JP saluted her, fished around in his pockets, and then cleared his throat in an almost embarrassed way. “Can I borrow your telepad?” He asked. “Mine ran out.”

  ”Stop teleporting for dramatic effect.” Alanna ordered him as she handed him one of her backups.

  _____

  James became awake without any grogginess or lingering dreams. In fact, he wasn’t sure he had dreamed, which was odd when that was normal for him. Dreaming was where he hung out with Zhu, or discussed organization with Planner, or sometimes where he shared playful and vivid unreal environments with his partners if they were just having fun with the dreamer’s draught potion that they’d inherited the recipe for from the Alchemists.

  He actually had a small amount of that potion in a hidden pouch in his coat. Just in case he needed to call for help, or report something without blowing his cover. James didn’t think it was time to use it yet though; he’d learned a lot, but he still felt like he was missing the core secret of this mystery.

  Neither Earl nor Buddy were present as James rose and left the cabin, taking a moment to use the bathroom. It was a surreal experience, to know the cabin’s foundation was as ephemeral as simple dirt, the building in the middle of nowhere, and yet, the rusticly decorated bathroom being better put together than the one he remembered from his first apartment.

  Equipping himself with a spare winter coat, and opting to wrap his magical tie around his upper arm rather than wear it where someone might actually grab it in a fight, James stepped outside with the intention of getting breakfast from the main hall. What he found was a world of white shadows. Lines cut through the camp where paths had been kept clear, and something had made it so that more snow fell outside the fence than inside, but those lines were still practically trenches in the fluffed white ground cover. The sky, barely touched by the sun already thanks to the polar night, was further blackened by the roiling clouds that refused to give up after just one night of snow.

  It was still coming down. And James spent a good minute staring out the door, rapt at the complex dance of motion that the frozen precipitation brought. When he finally shook himself out of it and into action, he stepped out and down the wooden stairs without hesitation, unable to care about the discomfort of the cold the snow and wind visited upon him.

  Which was good, because if he had cared, it would have sucked. The wind had picked up and was probably doing at least ten miles an hour, whipping snow crystals like tiny knives into anyone foolish enough to leave cover. Which was a lot of the camp, really; men with shovels and wheelbarrows steadily keeping the paths between buildings clear. It was in the face of the natural world hitting them with this random event that Priority Earth and the Wolfpack unit worked together almost seamlessly; no one complaining or fretting as they helped each other keep the perimeter manned while also making sure the stationed helicopter was kept clear, and the Wolfpack’s living quarters were equally accessible.

  Even with the paths cleared enough to be walkable, James still had to move carefully so as not to fall. The snow was soft and his steps sank into it easily, but where people had walked and things hadn’t been quite so perfectly swept, there was plenty of ice waiting to send him on a face-first tumble. Many of the others he saw out working, shadowy shapes illuminated in the storm by the bright lights around the camp, moved with similar stances; keeping themselves centered even though their boots were far more suited for these conditions.

  When he made it into the big cabin that served as the center of the camp, he was already colder than was okay, and had snow in his boots. But the interior helped with that a little bit, even if James could recognize that it wasn’t quite normal. A place like this should feel more welcoming; but all the little touches that would have made it personal and cozy just weren’t there. No one cared.

  They did care enough to have food though. And he got a plate of beans and potatoes before sitting at one of the scattered tables. Specifically, the one next to Hugh.

  “Well?” The flannel-clad man asked directly as James joined him, before he’d even had an opportunity to stab a potato with his boxy camp fork. “Anything?”

  James sat his fork down. “It’s been twelve hours at most.” He said by way of explanation.

  ”And you’ve been talking to people for most of it.” Hugh countered. “So have you found anything.”

  ”I’m not really sure what I could have learned that you couldn’t.” James challenged. “Is there any reason that you aren’t just doing this yourself?” He noticed Hugh failing to answer and focusing on his food, and if James were more himself, he’d be concerned.

  Zhu, stirring in his thoughts, had no such restriction. “He is absolutely using you as bait.” He pushed the thought toward James.

  Hugh kept his eyes focused on his plate as he answered. “It’s suspicious if I do it. I’ve been here for too long, I’m supposed to know everything. You’re new.” New, and James and Zhu both assumed, expendable. “So. Tell me what you found.”

  “It’s probably not a person.” James said. “I think it’s a function of the buildings. But I also don’t think it’s malevolent. I haven’t talked to the… mercenaries… yet though.” He’d almost said Wolfpack out of habit. He eyed his own slowly cooling food with disinterest. There was one piece of the puzzle that Hugh might fill in for him. Something that everyone else he’d questioned had dodged or cut off before explaining. But this man was more invested in his equal task of finding an answer, and might indulge James. “What happened here, before? Was there something that changed, that would have made someone want to stop feeling?”

  Hugh’s answer was so casual, that for a moment, James didn’t really understand what he was being told. The emotional dampening was effective, but everyone else had wanted to avoid even thinking about this particular thing. So when Hugh just started talking, his intent to solve what he saw as an attack on Priority Earth overriding whatever lingering trauma he had, James wasn’t really paying close enough attention for the first sentence.

  “We killed about a third of our membership.” Hugh’s matter of fact voice was still kept low enough to not be overheard by anyone nearby over the sound of other conversations or the sizzle of bacon cooking in the kitchen. “That’s why so many don’t resist. It’s easier to not feel.”

  James raised his eyes up to the other man. Technically, he’d known that something like that had occurred, but no one here acted like a murderer, and it had been all too easy to forget. “Why?” He asked.

  ”Why did we kill them? They were the wrong kind of people.” Hugh shrugged. “Or at least, that’s what everyone thought. Right now, not caring about anything, boy it’s easy to see how bad of a choice it all was.”

  Things began to click together. The change in activity, the weird inconsistencies, the way even emotionally repressed nature enthusiasts were dodging certain conversation topics… this wasn’t a group of freedom fighters in recovery, or ecoterrorists rebuilding their ranks. This was a bunch of traumatized victims who’d woken up one day with the desire to murder their friends, and someone in this camp wanted nothing more than to forget it had happened.

  Or maybe… maybe the lack of emotions had come later. Maybe Hugh’s comment was telling him something else. That these people felt like they had to kill their friends and comrades, but logically knew they shouldn’t. And enough time feeling nothing was wearing away whatever had happened.

  If that was how this place worked, if it could be said to work given how many gaps it had, then maybe James should secure the camp and use it as a place to help the Mormon victims deprogram from their own brainwashing. It had fresh air and a beautiful view of the mountains when there was any daylight to see them with. There were worse places to be stuck with your thoughts.

  James had been waiting for Hugh to continue, but that was all the man was going to say, apparently. “Okay. Well I’ll keep digging. Probably talk to the soldiers today. Unless you have any leads for me?” He probed.

  Hugh nodded toward the door, currently open to the darkened storm going on outside as a pair of people entered. James recognized them as the two he’d been brought here with, both of them moving with the kind of mechanical purpose that he was getting used to seeing around the camp. “I think the guy there is a spy.” He said. “Maybe sent here by whoever is doing this to us.”

  ”Why?” James asked without turning his head. Or maybe he should. It was challenging to evaluate what his behavior should be. He had fieldwork training, but the man he was talking to wasn’t actually an ally and shouldn’t know that. And feeling nothing was actually making it shockingly hard to make certain decisions that he’d normally rely on his instincts for. “And if someone is doing this to you… us… then why send someone in?”

  ”I don’t know.” Hugh admitted without ego. “But he’s nervous, and sometimes too interested. I talked to him a bit yesterday. This isn’t affecting him.” His voice was still monotone, like he was discussing a spreadsheet of grocery prices and not someone tampering with his mind and feelings. But the dedication to the specific task made up for it. “We can corner him after he eats. Take him outside the fence for a chat.”

  ”We could do that.” James agreed. “Or I could handle it.”

  Hugh raised his eyebrows marginally. “Are you going to torture him by yourself?”

  ”What? No. What?” Even bland as he was, James was caught off guard. “Torture gets terrible results and doesn’t work. Also it has ethical problems. Like the part where it’s torture. No, I’m going to handle this my way.” He said, moving to stand before realizing he had eaten nothing and his hunger was gnawing at him like a caged animal. “…after breakfast.” He amended, beginning to mechanically eat his lightly seasoned food.

  As he ate, Zhu poked a thought into his head. “I don’t like this guy. Torture as a first option? Is that what humans look like without their emotions turned on?”

  James couldn’t clearly communicate back, but if he could, he might have told Zhu that a lot of humans didn’t need the dampening to jump to torture in the first place. Though it was worth something that he didn’t, but it highlighted that even if you could think clearly and logically, you still needed good logic and correct information.

  He ate quickly, dispelling the physical discomfort of hunger, before getting up without saying goodbye to Hugh, and walking to the isolated table that the two newcomers had taken. Sitting down without waiting for an invitation, James locked onto the small moment of worry that the man - Chip, he remembered the name - displayed. Worry that shouldn’t have been possible. “Natural immunity, or backup?” He asked in a low voice.

  ”Excuse me?”

  ”He knows.” Beth, the woman sitting with him who still hadn’t taken her thick coat off, said the words with a precision quiet tone. “But he’s quiet. Spook?” She asked James.

  ”Concerned third party.” He answered with the flat expressionless voice that a different version of him would have been annoyed with. “Why isn’t Chip here affected by the thing?”

  They both stared at him, before the woman made a decision and slid her hand out of her coat where she had been gripping a concealed weapon. “Backup.” She answered for them both. “Why aren’t you?”

  ”Oh, I am.” James said honestly. “I just have a different goal that I’m working toward. Just like you, I assume.” He aimed the question at Beth directly.

  ”Correct.” She said, the hushed honesty clearly not bothering her, since it was in service of accomplishing an apparently shared objective. “Our… boss… sent us here to determine if this was the source of an attack on our organization.”

  James nodded. “I’m in a similar position, and willing to share findings so far.” He stood up as he spoke, before adding in a normal voice that carried through the room. “Snow won’t dig itself. Come on, let’s make ourselves useful.” The other two moved to follow, though one of them grimaced in a way that James was pretty sure Hugh had noticed from across the room. He gave the man a tiny incline of his chin as he led the two spies out the door, updating his mental map of exactly how many conspiracies were going on around this place as he did so.

  Outside was still cold, and windy, and still snowing. And even if it was lighter than it had been, what snow there was still got flung around like frozen bullets. But that same weather swallowed conversation at range, and James too advantage of it to talk to the two vague spies.

  ”What are you looking for, and what are your intentions?” James asked as they retrieved shovels out of a covered shelter and started working on one of the less tread paths far away from any of the other work crews.

  ”You first.” Chip didn’t bother hiding his suspicion anymore. “How did you even get in here?”

  ”I asked.” James said. “It was easy.”

  ”We’ve been trying to find this supposedly stationary camp for weeks, and you just-!“

  James frowned as something about that registered in his memory. Were they with Malcom McHarn? It didn’t really matter to his task at hand, so he didn’t press. And the others were clearly expecting him to share first, as Chip cut his overt anger off. “I am here to determine if this group is a potential source of unprovoked violence, and to uncover what has been done to them.” He said, guided by Zhu’s constant reminders. Those reminders would have gotten really annoying by now, if not for the obvious. “Now you.”

  Beth answered in exchange, clearly having done specific analysis on her answer. “We are looking for evidence of creatures we call infomorphs.” She said. “We want to know if they’re responsible for infiltrating a fairly important part of the US government. Maybe more. And they might be hiding here.”

  ”Infomorphs, huh?” James prompted.

  Chip threw a half full shovel of snow off past the fence line. “Forget about that.” He said. “Why are you talking like you can make a decision about these people? Are you CIA? NSA?”

  ”CIA isn’t supposed to operate on US soil.” James pointed out, and got a sarcastic stare in reply that didn’t work on him, but was also novel just for being the highest concentration of sarcasm he’d experienced here so far. “No. Not government.”

  ”Oh. He’s an adventurer.” Beth didn’t sound disappointed, her voice as mechanical as the motions she was using to clear the path along with the guys. “This might be a problem.”

  James didn’t exactly take offense to that, but it wouldn’t be helpful to his investigation if they had the wrong idea about him, especially in a negative way like this. “Well hang on. I adventure, but I’m not ‘an adventurer’. I have a day job.” Technically. “Look, it’s been a day or so. I know a couple things that might be useful to you, but I’m curious if you’ve talked to any of the mercenaries yet, or if you’ve found anything especially hidden that I can follow up on.”

  ”The mercs are scary.” Chip shuddered, and then shared a look with his partner that James didn’t like the shape of. “They seem like they like it here. Weirdos. Their part of the camp is empty though. Some of these cabins have cellars, but none of theirs. They’ve got a lot of guns in storage though.” He continued.

  Beth nodded, slamming the blade of her shovel into the snow and wiping at her forehead with the back of her gloved hand. “They’re called the Wolfpack.” She added blandly. “Their helicopter has a teleporter on it, too. Now. What do you know?”

  That was more than James had expected to hear from them, so he decided to reciprocate. “The cabins have blueprints that have a kind of sympathetic magic attached.” He said, just assuming they’d keep up with ‘magic is real’. “It’s where the lights and heat come from. Possibly also this effect.” He twisted a hand in the air, the shovel dangling from his grip. “But I haven’t looked at all of them yet. The group as a whole seems to have gone through something traumatic, but isn’t missing any memories.” He notably did not say ‘because of the infomorphs’. The fact that they knew that word sort of solidified it in James’ head. These guys were definitely from McHarn’s part of the FBI.

  ”Useful.” Beth said.

  ”Yeah.” Chip let out a breath into the slowly stilling winds. The storm had lulled, though the darkened false-night overhead made James think it wasn’t quite done. “Okay. When we get out of here, we’ll make sure you’re safe too. Sorry about this.”

  James arched an eyebrow. “About what?” He asked.

  ”We’ve got what we need. Debt. Wipe his memory of this conversation please.” Chip said.

  There was a pause, as James kept the eyebrow up, and nothing happened.

  ”…Do you need a moment?” James asked.

  ”Debt?” Chip’s voice was expectant, beginning to leak into worry. The novelty of seeing emotions on someone in this environment wasn’t that interesting, but maybe if James considered it to be entertainment, he could enjoy it. “You… uh… awake?”

  There was a flicker of shadowy light as a creature peeled itself upward from Chip’s shoulders. Debt had changed a lot since James had last seen him. He still had hands, which was sort of unusual for assignments; but fewer of them, and they were covered in ethereal coral and anemone growths. A body like a lithe shark, circling inward over miles and miles, covered in carefully watching eyes. An organic fractal pattern that was still definitely alive.

  Alive and nervous.

  “No.” Debt said as his first word.

  ”What do you mean no?” Chip asked, taking nervous steps back from James as his partner dipped her hand back into her coat, snow shovel stuck upward near her. “This isn’t the time for this game, make him forget so we can get this over with and get out of here.”

  Debt twisted, his pebbled body rolling to fix Chip with a hundred eyes. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” He asked. In his head and heart, James almost physically felt Zhu exploded with laughter. “Him?! Wipe his memory?! Is there anything else you want to add to the expense sheet after this? Want me to go to war with China? Maybe rotate Australia eighty or ninety degrees?”

  ”Hi Debt.” James waved. “How’s it going?”

  ”It’s been better!” The infomorph squeaked out, answering James apparently out of a sense of intimidated terror.

  In James’ head, Zhu continued revving with amusement. “Oh my god. It is so shitty that you can’t feel how fucking funny this is.” He told James. “I’m saving this. I’m storing this as a core memory, and you get to relive it later. Holy shit. Coming along was such a good idea, I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”

  “You know the snow’s slowing down. Slightly. People are going to see you.” James pointed out to the errant assignment. “Also how’s DeKay? Dead?”

  Debt vibrated slightly, ripples moving through his lightly spectral manifestation. “She is… improving. No one will see me. Hello. Please do not be upset.”

  ”I can’t be.” James pointed out.

  Beth, not covered by Debt’s apparent ability to filter out the emotional manipulation - James noted that for the future - gave him an appraising look. “Who are you?” She asked.

  James looked at her evenly, and made a decision. “Seeing as you just tried to blank my memory as part of your ongoing spy game, I’m going to settle on not telling you anything.” He said bluntly. “Good luck on your espionage. If you try to hurt these people without reason, I will be blowing up your cover and possibly whatever building you are standing in.”

  ”We could do the same to you.” Beth stated as Chip took steps back to stand out of her potential line of fire, Debt further huddling behind him.

  ”You could. I don’t think it’ll go the way you think.” James wondered if perhaps Hugh ‘threatening’ him into spying on Priority Earth from the inside might have been the best opportunity that was even possible in this place. “Anyway. Snow’s picking up, and I want to be inside.” He turned to leave. “Have fun shoveling. And Debt; you’re welcome to drop by sometime. Open invitation, as long as you’re not taking orders to mindwipe people.”

  The infomorph twisted around Chip’s torso. “I will remember.” He said as politely as possible, as James walked away from the group. Quickly, he faded back into his current host human who he was screening from the bizarre memeplex around this place. The less exposure to James, the safer he would be, statistically. And even better if he could convince his hosts to not antagonize the other human.

  As James walked away, he heard a distant call from Zhu, the navigator not willing to openly risk manifesting with the same casual nature as the terrified assignment. “So what now? I mean, your job is still figuring this shit out, but aside from looking at all the blueprints, what’s left to even check?”

  ”Well.” James said out loud, assuming Zhu could hear. “I’ll definitely do that the next time the cabin they’re stored in is empty. Assuming I don’t have to go through multiple locked mystery rooms to find them all.” He continued walking, unpacked snow crunching with that satisfying squeak under his boots. “But right now?” He approached the pair of separated cabins, past where the ground vehicles were kept, and to where the Wolfpack were currently working on hand to hand combat drills in a way that looked an awful lot like kids playing in the snow. “I figured I’d talk to someone dangerous.”

  He didn’t need to hear Zhu’s quiet reply to know that it was something sarcastic. Instead, James just nodded to the sentry that was watching the inside of the Priority Earth camp, and walked past as the grey clad soldier inclined their head back at him.

  The only emotion James really had, at the time, was that he was vaguely looking forward to being out of here. Because this was exactly the sort of thing that he intellectually knew he should be really getting a kick out of. And yet, as the Wolfpack unit’s commander greeted him with narrowed eyes, and the word “Paladin.”, James just felt nothing. This was just another part of the checklist, before he was done with the job.

  And that was annoying.

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