““Here is a lesson about prophecies.” She said it softly, but the rushing winds carried the words to her students. “If you fight them, they’ll put you on like a jacket and wear you as a costume as they dance ruin through your life. But if you grab them by the scruff, then you can be the one wearing destiny as your cloak.” -strangelittlestories, The Witch Of Stolen Tomorrows-

  _____

  “Mmh. ‘M up.” James muttered, fumbling for his alarm with one hand and just kind of loosely slapping Alanna in the stomach. “Sorry.” He tried to pry his eyes open, rolling and adjusting his angle, which meant he instead hit the Anesh that was snoring with his arm curled over Alanna’s supine form. This failed to wake Anesh up, so James, still battling sleep, decided to try the other direction. Rolling over and demolishing the igloo of blankets he’d built for himself, he reached blindly for the edge of the bed, only to find some kind of warm tube pillow or something in his way. Finally opening his eyes to the dark room, James bit back a yawn as he tugged the pillow out of the way, and got rewarded with a breathy waking gasp from Keeka as it turned out what he was pulling was one of the ratroach’s sensitive tails. Realizing what he was doing, James flopped to his side before he accidentally crushed the black furred figure that blended into every single blanket in the bed, and in doing so, landed his hand on a different Anesh’s face.

  James fucking gave up and just shoved himself down to the end of the bed, inch by inch, and let his idiot body flop bonelessly to the floor.

  By the time he’d done that, he’d figured out that his alarm was in his head and not something that was going to wake anyone up. Not literally in his head; even with the compact and secure forms of the skulljack braids, James hated wearing them while he slept. Instead it was just him imagining things because he knew he needed to get up today.

  Standing up, James looked back at the messy landscape of the big shared bed. Anesh laying on Alanna, Keeka curled up around a different Anesh’s back, the mantis form of Ganesh resting on the headboard like he was a piece of stationary art, it was nice. James loved these people, a lot, and he wished he could have just cuddled back up with them.

  But not right now. He was gonna have a full day today, and that meant getting out of bed and throwing himself into it.

  James got dressed, the old ritual of preparation refined to include shield bracers, telepad pockets, and a concealed holster. He was mostly silent as he went about it, only making noise when he had to fumble through a drawer for a specific shirt he wanted to wear. He wasn’t sure why exactly; it wasn’t magic, it was just comfortable and maybe James just wanted to feel comfortable for a bit.

  Stealthily holding the door’s handle as he shut it behind him, sealing an appreciable portion of his polycule in the bedroom, James padded down the hall to the kitchen only to find Sarah already eating a bagel. “Morning.” He said with a tired smile. “Surprised you’re awake at…” James didn’t even bother trying to check the time. He just assumed it was some wretched hour.

  ”I’m trying to-“ Sarah cut off with a yawn that would put a grizzly bear to shame. “Aaaawm… I’m trying jogging!” She said, James’ old friend showing a distinct lack of enthusiasm. “Gonna let Alanna drag me in her wake.” She added as she bit into her bagel.

  ”You know you can say no.” James reminded her. “I did! And then…” He coughed lightly.

  Sarah narrowed her eyes at him. ”And then she roped me into it. Unsatisfied with just your big soft boyfriend, she had to get me to exercise too!” Sarah shook her head. “But you know what?” She admitted in a softer tone. “I think it’ll be good for me. I kinda… I stopped trying, you know?”

  ”The fuck I do not know.” James rolled his eyes at her, keeping his voice down so he didn’t wake Auberdeen who was giving canine snores from the couch. “You, of all people…”

  Sarah smiled into her bagel as she nibbled at the edge in James’ direction. “I love where this is going! It sounds like you’re gonna say a lot of nice things about me!” She pointed the remaining half of her breakfast at him like a baton. “But I mean for dungeons. For action. I used to be a delver, and I… I still sometimes go on delves, but I’m not… you know.” Sarah shrugged. “Some exercise sounds nice, if I’m gonna fix that.”

  James felt himself nodding, but it took his brain longer to catch up and stop the motion. “You wanna?” He asked.

  ”I wanna be an adventurer.” Sarah said, her smile lighting up the room. “I wanna do things that scare me again. I wanna… I wanna lotta things.” She put on a silly voice as she said that last part, but the meaning of it was openly earnest. Sarah was tired of how she’d been doing things. Tired of helping people while not taking the help herself. Tired of sidelining her own magical life. Tired, even, of ignoring her skulljack when she could be doing cool fun things with it.

  James caught a lot of the hidden meaning. He and Sarah were, very often, on the exact same wavelength. “I cannot wait to see what happens when you take the training weights off.” James admitted with a smile. “I assume you’ll be doing my job within a few days, which is great, because I need another paladin or twenty.”

  ”I’m not that ready!” Sarah laughed, a brilliant chime of happy embarrassment.

  Her best friend in the world nodded at her, smiling, but one hundred percent serious. “Not yet.” James told her, before shaking off the drama. “Anyway, enjoy your jog. Remember! When you feel like you’re about to die and Alanna is a cruel tyrant of a pace setter, you can just down an exercise potion!” His smile turned coy. “Also where is Arrush?” James asked. “He wasn’t in bed. But Alanna was?”

  ”He’s in my bed.” Sarah said, before flicking the last of her bagel at James in an effort to silence whatever lewd thing he was about to say before he could say it. Her effort worked too, as he was busy chewing the morsel he caught in his teeth, and Sarah could actually explain herself. “He needed some more space, and I didn’t want him trying to sleep on our big chair. We need a bigger bed.”

  ”They don’t make beds that big.” James shook his head. “What we need is a room that’s just pillows and blankets.”

  ”So a camraconda nest? Are you finally gonna-?”

  ”I’m not body swapping with a camraconda.” James mumbled, missing the point of Sarah’s joke entirely, his brain still not really awake. He used to need coffee, for that. And he also needed to get moving. James took a long breath of the pleasantly still morning air of their shared apartment. The two of them relaxing in silence together for a little bit before his phone started to buzz with his actual alarm and James killed the buzzing. Stretching out his arms, he let his Energy upgrade take center stage and pull him into the world with clear eyed focus. “Okay. Have fun with the run. I’m heading out.” He told Sarah.

  ”It’s a jog.” She insisted. And when James gave her a pained look and a shake of his head as he approached the door, she insisted harder, as if that would help. “It’s just a jog! James? James! It’s just jogging right?”

  _____

  Too much had started happening, all at once.

  There were dinosaur dragons over the Atlantic. There was a missing dungeon that had vented its population into a hundred-plus square miles of Oklahoma farmland. There were two hundred more umbral that wanted to move to Townton, on top of another two thousand that also needed the Order’s help wanting to integrate into their home city. There was a ratroach the size and demeanor of a light battle tank being contained at the secondary site over in Yamhill. They were going to begin logisticor shipping operations in a month, and James still needed to give a dramatic speech to the workers making it happen.

  Also while he was sleeping, Uruguay’s minister of public health had apparently called and tried to set up a meeting, so there was that too. Vex had also called, the oil domain spellcaster reaching out to the Order after enough time to consider their offer of mutual aid.

  On the magical development front, they had a sudden new understanding of Horizon spell creation, and also, Deb had declared a moratorium on absorbing more Route Horizon gears until she said otherwise, which was something James definitely had to check on. There was a new potion that let someone painlessly detach a body part with only the side effects you’d get from suddenly not having that body part; there was talk of its use for emergency amputations and shaper surgery alike, and James felt like he should have some pointed questions about both of those.

  There was some new information about the umbral magic that James really needed to get into his brain, and a whole fucking training doctrine to redo with the twenty new spells and twice as many pieces of gear they’d gotten in the last month, and a box full of orbs he was supposed to eat at some point as part of his paladin breakfast diet.

  There was a manifested bear in the basement, courtesy of a Library totem - or generator as they were calling them now apparently. James had no words for that one. That wasn’t his problem.

  James could have taken any single one of these things, and turned it into a whole day of casual conversations and relaxed planning sessions. He could have, for example, discussed umbral magic with Tylor and a reluctantly-still-present Jubilance down in Townton, eating at the new Indian place that he really liked along with a few umbral that also really liked the food there while they caught James up to speed and hammered out the legal and social fiddly bits of how to apply that magic.

  But he wasn’t going to do that. He wasn’t going to do any of those things.

  Instead, as if it were just another day, James was going to go to an abandoned hotel in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road two miles off the highway somewhere in northern California. He was doing this, not because he planned to get ambushed by a werewolf in a building that looked like it was definitely either a werewolf den or just super fucking haunted, but because it was the lastest place the rogue team had moved their collected information.

  The third place in eighteen hours. Constant hops, different styles of scrutiny, different styles of movement, anything to throw off potential pursuit. Not that pursuit by a pillar was something you could probably shake, but, if there was a method they could do that would work, then they’d done it.

  As far as they knew, they’d gotten away without the Chain Breaker ever knowing they were there. But one of the precautions they had taken was not even looking at the recordings that Myles and Yin had made of what they’d found. Those two knew, but they couldn’t erase their own memories, and so they’d split up on their own, while JP had kept the copies. Just to see, if they were tracked down, who was tracked down first.

  But nothing. And if there was going to be a response… well, the Chain Breaker didn’t seem like she was exactly the kind of person who went in for ‘restraint’ that much. They would have noticed by now, especially since they had confirmation that she’d shown herself in one of the open booths by the club’s bar; a person-shaped ball of power drinking a daiquiri and lounging like she owned the place. Which she just might.

  The precautions bordered on paranoia. But was it actually, if the pillars could do whatever they did? Kiki could, when she wasn’t intentionally draining herself talking to Clutter Ascent, feel wars and weddings happening on the other side of the planet. The Right Person At The Right Moment had implied that they could see the future, or at least partially predict the shape of it. So the idea that the Chain Breaker might be able to trace a picture of her secret base wasn’t that outlandish.

  And yet, a day later, there had been nothing. No reprisal, no sign that Yin and Myles were even detected at all. Just a series of recordings that were waiting to be looked over and discussed; and then, if that still didn’t get them ambushed and murdered, turned into the foundation for a new chapter in the Order of Endless Rooms Operations Manual.

  James just had to figure out which Scooby Doo villain was going to lunge at him out of the shadows of the empty hotel he was walking through after his teleport, and find the room that JP was holed up in. Waiting for him to arrive, so they could scowl at a screen together.

  _____

  There was a lot JP wanted to say to James about this whole thing. About how, suddenly, it didn’t feel like it was a whimsical adventure anymore. About how it felt like they were rushing headlong toward their own ruin. About how it wasn’t paranoid when the pillars really could be out to get them.

  Not that they were, but that, at a moment’s notice, they could become enemies. People with too much power made emotionally unstable and mentally unpredictable by that same power. They were wildcards, and it was entirely, purely, untempered chance that they hadn’t already destroyed the Order of Endless Rooms.

  JP felt sometimes like no one understood the actual problem, because of the way James framed it. James turned pressure and stress into a joke, and so, anyone who didn’t know him was going to see him talking about the pillars and misunderstand his coping mechanism for levity.

  Organizationally, the Order was surprisingly resistant to outside influence, because they were closing in on being self-sufficient, and so it would take something like overwhelming violence to force them to either break apart or comply with a demand. And as someone who had met a pillar, face to face, JP felt like everyone should have to go through that nightmare process, because until they did, they didn’t really understand that if a pillar started killing people one by one, the Order would run out of people before the pillar got tired.

  JP kept this thought to himself as he waited for James to get the drones he used as an overwatch system stabilized. That was a trick he needed to pick up; his friend had always learned things he was interested in way too fast, but JP was used to being the guy that got good at stuff. James with a dedication to continual self improvement was actually pretty fucking terrifying to see in action.

  After that was done though, there was no more waiting. Just a series of organized files - all recordings from Myles and Yin, no physical objects taken from the Chain Breaker - waiting to be reviewed. Not even skulljack memories, just pure mundane camera work.

  With the two of them sitting on folding camp chairs in an empty hallway of an abandoned building, JP opened the first in the sequence.

  _____

  It wasn’t chronologically first. But it was the one that Yin had put as the most important when she’d been editing her footage. And the reason became clear very quickly.

  A grey door in a hallway with white painted smoothed brick walls, a few things taped up to the walls and one of those rolling garbage cans sitting blocking a third of the walking space nearby. The edit started with Yin having half pushed it open, revealing a room inside that couldn’t possibly have contrasted harder with the outside space.

  The room was some kind of manager’s office. A worn rug put down to make the concrete box a little more inviting, a desk and single chair, and a TV hanging on the wall. Yin’s focus stayed on the desk for a lingering second before she entered the room, her hands flashing into the body cam’s view regularly as she checked for bugs and traps.

  James caught the reason. The desk was empty. No papers, no computer, just a mostly empty bottle of some kind of vodka sitting there in the middle of it, and a remote control.

  The TV on the wall was on, too, and that was where Yin focused after she’d cleared the room. It was a paused video, a still image that looked like it was recorded on someone’s phone camera. The face of a young black woman, a little chubby, a lot exhausted, her hair a messy waterfall of curls, sat waiting. A notecard taped to the bottom of the TV read ‘hit play dumbass’.

  Yin hit play.

  “Hey me.” The woman on the screen said like she was being forced to pretend that was a normal thing to say. “How’s it going? Little confused? Yeah, don’t freak, but you might be a little fucked up.” She started laughing, most of the way down the path to frantic sobbing, before sucking in a breath and cutting off her own manic episode. “Welcome home you stupid bitch.” She added, waving with a hand. “Have a seat. I’ll leave you a drink.”

  ”What the fuck…” James could hear Yin’s muted whisper as she glanced back at the bottle on the desk.

  ”So here’s the deal.” The video continued. “You’re not gonna remember this place when you leave. When you eventually pull your shit together, and stop fucking crying, and step off? You’ll be the Chain Breaker again, and it’ll be like nothing happened.”

  What the fuck. James wanted to echo Yin’s statement as her view clearly showed her tensing up at the words.

  The woman on the TV stared into the camera like that was a normal thing to say. “In here, you’re Rhonda. For just a bit. No superpower, no voices, no… no need, and you can get drunk so don’t overdo it and leave some for the next us, got it? The only thing is, and I’m having to re-record this fucking stupid intro, you still can’t die. So stop trying, got it? Fucking idiot. You’ll feel less suicidal in a couple days, just keep your shit together.” She flipped the camera - and by association herself - off with a well-practiced motion. “Now that you know the doors aren’t gonna fucking bite your hand off, go explore. This place isn’t a killzone, it’s something the only good bitch in the whole team cooked up for us; you can go anywhere in here, just don’t touch the exit until you’re ready.” She looked down at her hand like she was trying to remember something. “What else? I forgot what was in the one when I came in, fuck me. Fuck us. Uh… oh, do the laundry and dishes on the way out. There. That’s it. Have a good break, you dumb bitch.”

  The video stopped. And James was pretty sure that if Yin hadn’t clipped her edit there, he would have seen her staring numbly at it for a while longer.

  He certainly was.

  _____

  The second file was from Myles, not that it specifically mattered. And it wasn’t a video, just a set of images in a slideshow.

  The reason for why was attached as a note. “Looking at the thing does something weird to video compression.” Myles had noted. “It still looks wrong in single frames, but less wrong.”

  The following set of pictures were of a storage room, converted into a bedroom in a way that would have done the early Lair proud. Metal frames holding backup speaker systems and amps, adorned with coils of sound system cabling, lined the walls. A mattress with no frame, just a box spring, sat in the middle of the floor with a scattering of stained blankets on it and a collection of empty cans and bottles around it. One of those durable grey plastic garbage cans had been flipped over to be used as a nightstand, a stack of magazines and books sitting on it.

  What stood out to James quickly was the lighting. The pictures seemed to have a kind of blueish glow to them, but that wasn’t the right way to say it. They were just… lit. Things were visible. And it wasn’t from Myles’ own flashlight either.

  The next picture cleared that up quickly.

  On the ceiling, held in place by some kind of stage netting, was… a shape.

  An object.

  Geometric, but alive. Impossible, yet very real. Powerful, yet contained.

  And this one wasn’t just contained, but somehow harnessed. It was, disturbingly, a thing James could say this one about, too. Because he recognized the heart of a dungeon from the time he’d watched Blitzkrieg murder two of his knights in the heart of the Akashic Sewer.

  ”What in the fuck is that.” JP said, voice tight.

  ”Dungeon.” James answered, swallowing and double checking his drones. “That’s… that’s a dungeon. That’s what a dungeon’s heart looks like. Sort of. Myles is right, it’s wrong in the recording.” It didn’t quite look like it was supposed to be there, and as James and JP analyzed that image closer, the recorded image of the one known dungeon internal organ either of them had ever seen seemed to melt a little. Looking at it, processing it, was destroying the image itself.

  They moved on to the other pictures, some of them having degraded by a tiny amount as the dungeon was in the frame.

  Promo flyers for live bands and DJs on the walls, names of obscure garage bands and big acts alike. A cabinet with wire mesh doors that held seemingly random keys on its shelves and hanging from cords on hooks. A phone on the bed, the charger cable for it stretched across to the wall in a tripping hazard that was the closest thing to a trap so far. A shot of the back of the door, the bizarre omni-light of the seemingly complicit dungeon illuminating a whiteboard.

  That one looked like it had once been for tracking something, judging by the solidified lines marking out a chart, the scraped outlines of letters hinting at codes for things the club used to use all the time and had been lost with the sealing of these internal rooms. Now it had been wiped as clean as possible, and someone - the list of possible culprits was low - had written in bold black pen “you got this”.

  _____

  The next video was of the phone itself, Myles having taken it out of the room to record the screen while trying to keep things steady. JP and James watched as he deftly flipped through the smartphone’s various options and apps, finding it mostly empty except for the photos section.

  The photos section contained, instead of photos, more videos. Small clips, all of Rhonda, and none of them from the ‘bedroom’. There was a small bit of Myles speaking quietly at the start. “If the recording thing applies to her, too, then I think whatever she filmed in there is already gone. So it’s just bits from other rooms. Gonna play through them now in order. There’s usually a few months between these.”

  His finger hit the button, the oldest video playing.

  Rhonda was sitting where her introduction self had been, behind that empty desk. A splatter of thick red and brown sludge covered the white brick wall behind her head. ”Okay, still can’t die.” She told the camera, breathing heavily. “Felt like it though. Almost. Maybe I just can’t do it myself. Gotta find a way to… to bring someone else in here. Send a message out. Fuck.” The phone was tossed onto the desk, landing with a thunk that left the matte black metal edge of a handgun in frame before the recording ended.

  The next clip, same space but this time no blood, Rhonda looking more alert.

  ”This place is cool. Journals from past me are cool, but they’re all falling apart. Note to future me, when you find this? Stop filming vines in the bedroom. Also stop drinking in the bedroom. Responsible future you will be pissed about bagging the empties.”

  Next clip, this one showing the wall of the hallway swinging back and forth, Rhonda having abandoned actually filming and basically just making a voice memo. “Okay, venting time! Always feels better when future me has to hear it!” She declared loudly, her voice slurring like she was very drunk. “God damn is Long a stupid motherfucker! Can he hear me in here? Actually, wait, I don’t care! Fuck you, you stupid omni-pig! You listening? Can’t even do your fake job right! Nearly got me un-killed out there! Or… or… whatever happened to Adrien. You stupid… you…” the view of the video fumbled and shifted to a close up of her bloodshot eyes. “Fuck you Long. Get out of mmmmy house.” She added before the video cut.

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  Myles had to go through about ten recordings that just refused to play until the next one that worked, Rhonda clearly having ignored her past self’s advice. When he did find one, it was so out of context that James wanted to scream.

  ”It worked.” Rhonda said, leaning against the wall of the hall next to a Door. There were no doors in the space; there couldn’t be. But there was a Door, which probably would have been weirder to people who weren’t delvers. “It fucking worked. Hurt like hell, but it worked. I can… trick myself back in. Trick it back in. And now…”

  She went quiet for so long that if it weren’t for the bar at the bottom of the phone scrolling to show the video playing, James would have thought that was the end of that clip.

  ”Now I have to figure it out.” Rhonda said. “There wasn’t a question before. I can’t stay here forever, it doesn’t work; but I can’t be that thing and not lose my goddamn mind. But whatever, right? Big sis set me up with a repeating vacation, and that’s enough to keep me going. Great. Forget about it when I leave, have to leave notes for myself, cool, whatever. But…”

  The woman took a deep breath, one arm folding over her chest as she huddled in on herself. “But if I can keep luring myself back in? Maybe that’s a good thing?” Rhonda looked to the side, swinging the camera to point at the Door to the outside. “I’ve gotta figure out if I think the world should even have a Chain Breaker.” Was the last thing she said before that clip ended.

  “Shit.” JP muttered, pausing the video playback for a moment and turning to James. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  ”That she needs our help.” James said without hesitation.

  And JP had to remember that his friend was, on occasion, a moron. “No.” He replied, the word so fast it stacked on top of James’ own answer. “That if she’s sending notes to herself, then her forgetting isn’t a defense for us if we’re snooping.”

  ”Oh. That too.” James said, rubbing the back of his neck and running a thumb over his skulljack braid. “Well, there’s no high speed meat-seeking missile closing in on us that I can see. So we have at least a minute unless she just teleports in. Play the next one.”

  ”God I hate you sometimes.” JP muttered under his breath. “Not everyone… okay fine.” He restarted Myles’ recording of recordings, and let the rogue play the next clip.

  There were a lot of videos saved on the phone. And Myles, unfortunately, didn’t have the time to scan all of them; he and Yin were on a sharp time limit for safety, and they weren’t taking the phone with them or plugging anything into it. So the ones that looked like Rhonda drunkenly singing along to unheard music, or just having a good cathartic emotional breakdown for her own records, he skipped after a few seconds. It was about a dozen clips later that he actually watched a full one.

  ”Alright. This is me making a choice. And… and if you’re me, then you have to stick it out, okay?” Rhonda was standing in a room that they hadn’t seen yet, her phone propped up on something like a table, showing off herself and the wall behind her that had dozens of pieces of paper taped to it, thick sharpie notes with smaller addendums wedged into the blank spaces. The glossy nature of the pages probably meant they were repurposed band flyers. The woman was flipping a kitchen knife in her left hand, her right sleeve on her sweatshirt rolled up to her elbow.

  ”This is hard as fuck to do when you can’t see the whole world. Not that it’s easier when I’m out of my mind and screaming all the time, but whatever. What was my point here? Uh… fuck. Fuck fuck.” She looked away before snapping her head back up. “Right! Take notes! Leave yourself notes you dumb bitch! You have the time for it, don’t be lazy! This took three trips because I was basically starting over every time, so you better appreciate this!”

  ”I do.” James said with a small smile, watching the recording.

  Rhonda, thankfully, didn’t hear him and kept talking. “So here’s the fucking choice. If Chain Breaker me listens to Rhonda me? Then Rhonda needs to… needs to speak up. Okay? You, me, every Rhonda that sees this? We gotta speak up. So write it all down, everything the Chain Breaker is thinking and planning and seeing and wanting; put it on the wall. And if a decision coming up looks bad, then Rhonda needs to speak up!”

  She expelled the last words with a frantically rising voice, sweat glistening on her forehead and cheeks, before jamming the knife into her own arm and upping the pitch of the scream to a creation of pure pain. But this wasn’t a suicide attempt; instead, after the first cut, Rhonda kept going, slicing deep into the flesh of her arm, blood splashing to the floor.

  James stared at the scene in shock, before realizing as it just kept continuing that he was a slim margin away from throwing up. He’d seen gore before, made people into gore before, but this was something different. This was deliberate mutilation, and a kind of pain that was definitely supposed to stay private.

  When the video of Rhonda pulled the knife out for the last time, throwing it to the side to make a metal-on-metal clatter out of frame, her face was a mess of sweat and tears and mucus. But she still made an effort to hold up her arm, shaking like she was about to pass out. “Okay. Time to gooooo.” She slurred out. “Shoulda been drunk for this.” She added as she stumbled past, probably heading for the Door, and forgetting to shut the recording off.

  Myles scrolled through it, but just found ten minutes of the wall and all its conspiracy board notes.

  The last thing that they’d seen of Rhonda, she’d been showing off words roughly cut into her skin. Let V go, read her message to another version of herself.

  _____

  The other video was from Yin, and was another exploratory bodycam feed of her sweeping the kitchen space. The nightclub outside of this place, Fuego!, had a kitchen, which made it weird to see that there was another one in here. But maybe this place wasn’t quite so real or attached to the blueprints as the Order had suspected.

  The space was, in short, not in good condition. The swinging door stuck on the way in, and the counters were scratched and covered in a layer of dust where a lot of them had gone unused for a while. The most cleared space looked like a single stainless steel countertop that had an industrial can opener on it, and a pyramid of giant cans of fruit next to it. Nothing was organized, jars of spices and stacks of plates seemed like they were just left wherever was least inconvenient, and if anyone had ever swept the floor James would be shocked. There were tied off garbage bags piled against a wall, bulges of cans and bottles showing through as outlines, and from the noise Yin made it probably smelled pretty bad in there. It occurred to James that the Chain Breaker’s human self probably didn’t have the option for trash removal; a logistical nightmare that he’d also had the opportunity to contend with in regards to Townton, so he sympathized.

  The side wall was covered in Rhonda’s notes. James wondered for a minute why she hadn’t put this out in the hallway where there was clearly a lot more blank space, but maybe she just wanted to stare at the pages while eating canned mandarin oranges or something. Who was he to judge, after all.

  Yin started scanning the notes, taking the time required to focus the camera on each page so that it actually got a good look at the words. Rhonda wrote with a heavy hand for the big concepts, but the smaller details were often written at weird angles, or smudged, or just incomplete, and if Yin had just swept her bodycam over the wall the Order wouldn’t know 90% of what was written there.

  The problem was, it was all keywords and nouns. And devoid of context, or even the basic courtesy of red string connecting pages, it was basically impossible to know what she was thinking when she put these here, stuck to the wall in the dust shadow of a fridge that had been removed before this place was ever a dungeon-powered sanctuary.

  Plant. One read as a central word. Big, mean. Makes ice. Other notes continued. Then at the bottom, a little context, as a treat; Long - targeting. Line - suspicious. Singer - dead. The last one had a black bar filled in over the original word. Pillars. She was tracking other pillars, or at least, thinking about them.

  On another repurposed flyer, with one of the edges folded up, she’d written: Second sunrise, big problem. CB can’t target it. Need to goad. Line maybe? Big sis can’t shoot it so not her. Find a lever before- The bottom third of the page was torn off. The kind of angry line that showed up when someone ripped paper in frustration, and not a careful rearranging.

  A third one just had a list. Telepath (dangerous). Zombies (fine). Ghosts (not real). Three (dangerous). Babel (real?)

  It felt, to James, like this wall held answers. Not just clues, but everything he ever wanted to know about the secret nature of the world, written out for the purpose of making changes to that world. It was just… it was written by a woman who seemed like she forgot what direction d’s and b’s went, and used the same character for j’s, v’s, and u’s all at once. Which would have made reading it difficult already, but was actually amplifying the bigger issue of the fact that she was using those scrawled letters to explain things to herself that she already knew.

  At the very top of the… pile… of taped up pages, there was one with the clearest message to herself. A list of priorities, or maybe tactics, that she referenced on multiple other parts of her scribbled planning wall. CB rules: hears all contracts, knows all JBs/tubs, lasts 3-5 days per hit, pillar pact on even with MoM and Stiff dead, can’t hurt ‘her people’ just like others.

  And again, it was like James was looking at the secrets to all things, and finding that he didn’t speak the language of convenient truth.

  But there was one little bit, in the middle of the whole thing, that had a big circle around it drawn so enthusiastically it had spilled over onto the wall. Not that Rhonda seemed to give a shit about the state of this place, so that could mean anything.

  Bugs/mini elephants. The central part declared. Bait LL. Moment says (cryptic) they don’t last after building gone. Do not take them out. Let them all go. Make them mine.

  The page had two other things on it. One was blood, dried read splatters from where it had been sitting on the table while Rhonda had sliced herself open, and not on the wall where it would have been safe. The other, was letters in yellow highlighter, drawn over the whole page in a way that looked less like a note and more like a victory lap.

  It mostly worked, mine now. There were a lot of exclamation points and underlines for that.

  Yin kept sweeping over the papers and notes, before moving on to check the rest of the kitchen. Dwindling supplies of cans of food and alcohol in a back room, piles of dirty dishes in the back with sinks that were bone-dry, an emergency exit that somehow felt like it was sealed shut forever. But James wasn’t watching that.

  He was thinking about the chanters.

  He was thinking about Js that looked like Vs.

  And he was wondering how long the Chain Breaker had been thinking about him.

  _____

  James stood on the side of an infrequently used road, surrounded by trees that hadn’t been in the way when humanity had punched a path through here. The thing about roads was, they were never really abandoned. If someone put down asphalt, it was because they knew people wanted to go that way. Governments didn’t spend money on pavement unless there was at least some reason.

  So he was standing less on the side of the road, and more in the middle of a tight parking lot for the abandoned two story structure that was almost entirely alone out here. A hotel built to catch weary travellers that took a wrong turn on the way to the gas station at 2 AM, maybe; rendered empty and obsolete by the existence of GPS or maybe just by gas stations open past midnight.

  There were a pair of drones dropping down to let James catch them. Their inorganic movements made it clear they weren’t the same species as Ganesh, just regular drones controlled by his brain, and hovering at arm height so James could snatch them out of the air. He did so with stiff motions, a blank expression on his face.

  The crunch of gravel behind him was preceded only by the crunch of the front door being shoved open; the plywood that had covered a hole in the glass grinding into the ground. “Hey.” JP said as he walked up behind James, a backpack with everything they’d learned over his shoulder. “I…” he let his voice trail off.

  After all, what were you supposed to say, after something like that? You doing alright seemed like it would be a little too stupid even for JP. He was perfectly willing to say things that sounded cringy as hell if it meant getting what he wanted; ninety percent of a good manipulation was basically killing your sense of embarrassment and asking directly for outlandish bullshit. But even he had limits.

  ”I’ve got some stuff to take care of today.” James said with a bland voice that would have made an inhabitor raise their eyebrows and ask if he was doing okay. “In light of recent revelations, it should be okay to share this within the Order.”

  ”We should talk about this.” JP said firmly. “Before you leave.” He added as a semi truck rolled by streetside, exhaust fumes briefly taking over from the smell of the living forest and rotting hotel.

  James powered down one of his drones, folding the rotors in and clipping it to his belt. ”What’s to talk about?” He asked. “The Chain Breaker considers us - or at least, some of us - to be her people. Has since we rescued the chanters. An event that her ego was aware of and nudged her id to take action on. That’s neat.” His hands were shaking, though he tried to just keep talking and hoped it would go away. “Her handwriting is shit, and it doesn’t get better when she’s stabbing herself. It was us. Me. She wanted herself to let me go.”

  ”I wouldn’t separate her personas in a Freudian way, if you want to do it at all.” JP said. “Seems more like there’s a limited window where she has real control of herself, using a variant of the technique that Kiki’s been doing with Clutter Ascent.” He hadn’t looked away from James, talking casually so as to bait his friend into keeping engaged with the conversation. “So a dungeon heart, huh?”

  ”Dungeon anchor might be a better term.” James said as he stowed the second drone and put his skulljack program into standby. “Remember the Sewer? Being forced to vomit its whole inside out into Earth didn’t actually kill it. Not right away at least. Though given who made the Chain Breaker’s little sanctuary, I’d probably bet that the dungeon that donated that one is dead.”

  ”What? You know who made it?” JP cocked his head, eyes narrowing. “How?”

  James looked around the parking lot, seeing nothing except a construction dumpster that seemed to have been abandoned here. He wanted a place to sit, like maybe a low brick wall or a planter box or something; there was a bench by the front door in the little driveway for unloading luggage, but it had been heavily spray painted after someone had tried to ravage it with a hatchet, so it looked like a crap option. He just settled down on the curb instead, sticking his legs out at splayed angles. “Process of elimination and circumstantial evidence.” He told JP as he lowered himself down.

  ”There could be more pillars we don’t know about.” JP pointed out.

  James nodded. ”Could be. But it’s Blitzkrieg.” He said confidently. “The Chain Breaker called her a sister when we met, and we know she can do something to dungeons. Through people, at least. She was doing it to the Sewer. Hell, she might have been wanting the Sewer to make another pillar safehouse.”

  “So she killed a different dungeon. At least a decade ago. Turned it into this, and made sure her… are they even friends?” JP looked away, trying to think of what it would take to drive him to that length.

  ”I think they’re on the same team.” James said as he looked past JP’s legs, lacking the energy to tilt his head up.

  ”Pillars.” JP repeated. “The way Rhonda’s notes were laid out, just from what we saw. It looks like they plan around each other doesn’t it? Yin was right, it’s theater. One of them can’t poke their nose into something, but another can, so they…” he trailed off. “Ah. Something comes to mind.”

  James winced at the tone of resignation JP had. “Well it can’t be worse than that.” He admitted.

  ”Cam.” JP said simply.

  ”Cam?” James found himself looking up at his friend, puzzlement taking over from despair for a moment. “Cam isn’t… involved in this, is she? Shit we need to tell Cam. This isn’t going to demolish her life is it?”

  JP sighed. “No you dumbass.” He said fondly. “The Chain Breaker didn’t… okay, think about New York Status Quo. Got a mental picture? Good. So. Tell me what part of them the Chain Breaker couldn’t just walk in and start stabbing.”

  ”…Ah.” James turned to stare between his knees, down at the accumulated plant detritus that had piled up by the curb. “Ah. She was baiting Lloyd in, not using him. She… you think she was arranging for us to rescue Cam?”

  ”I think I don’t think she thought about the chanters. Not that much.” JP said. “But that could be me fucking it up. I think we’ve talked to too many pillars so far who seem like they prioritize humanity over everyone else, and… man, I’m not the same as you. I don’t know if I can believe the way you believe. But good lord when you start shooting people who say that kind of shit, I’ve got your back, you know that right?”

  James felt a wash of emotion flow out from his throat. “That’s…” he didn’t know what that was. That was the most JP had ever expressed something to him, he was pretty sure. “Thanks.” He said, a little baffled. “I mean it, thanks.”

  ”Yeah. And the pillars act like that.”

  ”It’s so bleak.” James said, not in reply, just to say something. To say what he needed to get out, words burning inside him. “It’s so fucked up! Something fucking took these people and it warped them into… into ontological tools. They are what they do and they do what they are and they don’t get to be people? That’s so disgusting to me. Even baby assignments aren’t like that. And you know the worst part?”

  ”Some of them are actually evil?”

  ”No! Yes! Fuck maybe that is the worst part but no! The worst part is, aside from the fact that they probably didn’t even know what they were choosing, a lot of them chose things that are heroic! JP, think about their names.” James hoped he didn’t sound like he really felt, which was on the edge of crying. “The Chain Breaker, the Last Line, the Right Person At The Right Moment. Even Kiki! Kill ‘Em With Kindness. Maybe not all of them were dying at the time, but I’m willing to be this isn’t a pleasant process. And look how many of them chose… chose…”

  Idly spinning his lighter in his fingers, fidgeting with it to produce a few sparks on every loop, JP nodded along. “They picked things that really make humanity look like our best selves, huh?” He asked. “I don’t even… know what I would have said.”

  ”You?” James laughed suddenly. “You’d be A Friendly Face.”

  ”That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me!” JP said with a bright grin. “I don’t have a moniker for you. But I see what you mean. But, there’s also Aku. And Long.”

  ”Long might have trusted the police. I don’t want to assume he’s dishonest, I just think he’s wrong.” James shrugged. “Aku, same. He’s just an idiot. Well meaning, but bad at it. The kind of guy like my dad and uncle, who always talked about how when I ‘grew up’, I’d naturally agree with them on their bullshit racist political opinions. You know the type.”

  JP snorted. “James I fleece trust fund kids for fun.” He said.

  ”Still?”

  “A man needs a hobby!”

  ”You should record that. Package some .mems as a spiritual successor to Leverage or something.” James’ smile faded. “We’re getting off track.”

  JP stretched, before shifting his jacket back into place and dusting his collar off for no reason. “No we’re not. You were having a crisis.”

  ”It’s not a crisis, they need help.”

  ”Nick needs help.” JP said bluntly. “Because she asked. The rest of them are walking disasters. Fuck, Nick is too, but Nick asked at least. The Chain Breaker killed her own friends to get to her target. Lloyd abandons and kills Camilles like they’re solo cups. Aku likes Mormons. They don’t get our help.”

  ”Everyone means everyone.”

  ”Fine! Everyone means everyone but it’s first come first serve!” JP declared. “What are your thoughts about this?” He swept a hand back at the hotel.

  James didn’t even bother making a joke about the state of the building’s broken windows and interior that had clearly been used as a campsite at least a few times. “I think I sympathize with her. A lot.” He admitted. “But I’m not sure what we learned that was new here. Confirmed a bunch, sure, but…” James stopped talking, and took a breath. Collected himself. He wasn’t actually processing the information, just sort of emotionally flailing. That wasn’t what JP had asked, and it wasn’t what was needed from him. “Two things stand out to me.” He said. “One? The pillars. Or Pillars, if I want to say it like a proper noun. It’s not a species, Kiki isn’t a Pillar is she? She’s… of a kind, but they’re their own thing.”

  ”A social circle of sorts. If an antagonistic one.” JP sparked a flame from his lighter with cold fingers before twirling it again. “Yin’s a lot of problems in a small package, but she’s right. If we needed to trick you into a brawl to solve a problem, we would. And they seem to agree.” He looked away and sighed. “And at least two of them are dead. Wonder how that works. I bet their corpses are wildly radioactive. What’s your other thought?”

  “Well now my thought is at least they can die.” James said with his own sigh, raising a hand and provoking JP to help him off the curb. His butt hurt, and he was cold, and he wasn’t lying to JP; he did have stuff to do. “My other thought is that I want to know everything possible about Rhonda’s list.”

  “Which list?” JP asked as he hauled James to his feet.

  ”The list she had of… I don’t know how to say it. Magic, maybe?” James hummed. “Telepath, ghosts, zombies, three, babel.” He listed off. “At least ghosts aren’t real, according to her; Zhu will be happy with that. But the word three in there sets off alarm bells. So… when you guys spend the next week going over this footage like you’re scouring someone’s social media which I guess is literally what you’ll be doing kinda, I want to know if there’s any context.”

  JP looked down, then back up. “You think that joke about trios having magical powers is true?”

  ”I think it was never a joke.” James said bluntly. “I think almost every group we find that’s still intact has three people in it. I think I want to know, if that’s actually in play, what in the fuck the word ‘zombies’ is doing on that list.”

  There was a brief moment where JP thought about that, making a show of tapping his chin. Then he saluted, with minimal mockery. “On it.” He told James. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  Pulling out a telepad, James got ready to warp them home. He needed to pick up Zhu, and JP needed to get his own infomorph friend back too. They’d left them elsewhere for obvious reasons, so they’d have a chance if the Chain Breaker had showed up and started flattening people. He felt a lot more comfortable with the process now knowing that he had been watched. Watched or at least known about. In addition to it being a mild magical violation of his privacy, it was also just reassuring to know that she just… didn’t actually want to kill him. Not really. To the point that part of her, a very important part of her, had taken steps to keep James alive.

  In light of that, it didn’t feel like the world’s stupidest risk to go home a little early. They could recall Yin and Myles too, and give them a day off if James had anything to say about it.

  Or maybe not. There was a lot that needed doing.

  _____

  After that it felt like James had just stopped holding a solid ton of bricks over his head, and everything else was easy. Compared to a gut-wrenching series of revelations about the nature of their supposed opposition, diving into the rest of his day - a day where everyone expected him to be elsewhere and so nothing was required of him anyway - was just pure easy fun.

  The sad truth was, that despite this information being huge, it was also… very small. It didn’t do much of anything to change the Order’s operations. There were delves happening, research occurring, training being done, and a whole city being redesigned. The Chain Breaker hadn’t been part of that to begin with, and she didn’t factor in now.

  There just wasn’t anything that the information did to change what James needed to do. What any of them needed to do, really. What they needed was their first paladin solving problems. And James, after another conversation with Nate where the heavyset chef gave him a practical if blunt piece of advice, realized that despite everything changing, nothing had changed.

  So he picked up Zhu, mentally dusted himself off, and got to it.

  And after all that, the manifested bear in the basement was pretty easy to deal with.

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