The three of them awoke refreshed and each of them yawned and stretched. Lyle cooked sausages while Justin and Zaara wandered over to take a look at the ruins of the hut. While the remains were still surprisingly hot, the teammates were able to make some progress sifting through them with long sticks they had set to soak in water overnight.
“It smells all kinds of weird,” she said.
“That’s probably the goo,” he told her.
“I can’t wait to see that. I bet it’s gross.” She sounded intrigued. “I keep wondering what she was. I can’t think of any myths that talk about something taking a human form that’s green and covered in…what did you call them?”
“Tentacles.”
“Right. I’d never even heard of tentacles before.”
“Boy, would the Internet surprise you.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. I—you know what, forget I said anything.” He turned the remains of a book. “It’s a shame we didn’t get her books out.”
“I don’t think so.” she shook her head. “This place reeks of bad magic. You don’t want to know how she did her spells.”
“Didn’t you want my mom to teach you death coils?” he asked her and moved a piece of what he assumed had been the table. He must be close to the witch’s remains now.
“That’s death magic, not bad magic.”
“You’ll have to explain the difference to me.”
“You really don’t know? Well, the clerics would say there’s no difference.” Zaara rolled her eyes. “But there is. Bad magic—no, let’s start with death magic. Death magic simply kills things, right? It’s like you made a sword but you made it out of death. You don’t burn someone to death or stab them to death, you—”
“Death them to death?” he asked.
“Yeah, basically.” She shrugged. “It’s not bad any more than fire is bad. Death happens. It’s all around us like magic. I suppose the only difference is that you couldn’t use a death coil for anything else.” She shrugged. “Still, it’s a spell you throw like any other spell.”
“Sure.” Where was the damned body? Justin continued to shove pieces of wreckage out of the way.
“Bad magic isn’t done with magic. If that makes sense.”
“It really doesn’t.”
Zaara thought in silence for a moment. She dipped her hands in the water and pushed a piece of the wall off the pile. “Ha. If you move quickly enough, you don’t get burned. Um…bad magic uses the life force of things to make a spell work. You can do it with anything, including a person or an animal.”
“A plant?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. I guess so.”
“Well…” He gestured broadly at the area around them.
“Oh.” Zaara looked around. “Yes. Of course. That makes sense. You know, I wonder if she wasn’t right when she said the werewolves were draining the forest. If the curse had to be maintained and the energy came from living things…yeah.”
“What a charming woman.” Justin scanned the mess around them. “Why do you say clerics don’t see the difference between death magic and bad magic?”
“Because they both kill people.” She shrugged. “To be fair, they would also say killing someone with a fireball is equally as bad. They don’t think mages should be trained for wars and they don’t think there should be wars at all. Or bandits. Or…you know, whatever. The problem is, that doesn’t help when you’re dealing with one.”
“That’s very true.” Justin dropped his stick and sighed. “Okay, I cannot find this body. It should be here.”
“If it were a puddle of goo…maybe not?” She scowled. “I guess I don’t know.”
“You didn’t see this stuff. It was as gross as hell. It smelled—it smelled so bad. There’s no way we wouldn’t see a mark on some of the boards or something, or a…chunk of tentacle.” He shuddered dramatically.
“What are you saying?” Zaara stared at him. “She was dead when you left, right?”
“I cut her in half and she collapsed into goo that caught fire.” Justin waved his hands. “To me, that means dead.”
“I…well, I can see why you’d think that.” She nodded. “I probably would, too. But you’re the person saying she was dead and saying her body should be here if she were, so I’m not quite sure what to do with those two pieces of information.”
“Oh, this is a nightmare.” He stared at the ruins. “If she’s still alive, that is a very, very bad thing.”
“Let’s think about this logically.” Zaara leaned on her stick. “The curse on the werewolves was released, so whatever happened to her, she wasn’t able to maintain that.”
“That’s a good point.”
“I know, right? Second point…I believe the key is right there near your foot.” She pointed. “I don’t think she’d have left that if she ran away.”
He crouched, scrabbled in the ashes, and hissed when his hands tingled with the heat. After a moment, he picked the key up and juggled it between both hands. “Good. That’s good. Any third point?”
“Yes. I think the sausages are ready.” She set off, using her stick to balance herself as she leapt across patches of water.
Over breakfast, they relayed their findings to Lyle. The dwarf, mistrustful by nature, was inclined to believe that the witch was still alive.
“Ye can never trust a witch to be dead,” he said gruffly.
Justin had also begun to suspect that most dwarves could be described as deeply pessimistic.
“What do we do, then?”
“We get the hell out of here,” his friend retorted. “The ruins are crawling with wolf-bandits…or bandits that used t’be wolves, or—”
“The bandits formerly known as wolves,” he said.
“Ye have an odd way of speakin’, lad. I say we go to that stash of treasure we found when we were creepin’ around and get it out of here before anyone else finds it. Keep the key and pretend we never saw this place.”
“Hmmm.” He considered the suggestion. While making their way back to the witch, the team had stumbled across a buried hoard of treasure, something he was sure they would never have found if it hadn’t been for Lyle. They had covered it as well as they could and gone on, afraid the wolves might catch up if they didn’t. Now, however, it might be worth returning for it. “Good enough. Shall we?”
The walk to the cache of treasure was slow. He wasn’t worried that they would be killed by the bandits. At the same time, he was certain it would be fairly awkward if they were caught making off with a large number of artifacts when the last person who had opposed the bandits for these ruins was now—theoretically—dead.
Luckily, the little cart the blacksmith had made for Justin provided them with a template for makeshift sleds, and they set about excavating with enthusiasm.
“There aren’t any stories about cursed artifacts in this world, are there?” he asked.
“Why, are there in yours?” Zaara raised an eyebrow. “And of course there are. Cursed rings, cursed amulets, all of that.”
“You only thought to mention that after I put on the amulet from the bandit leader?” he demanded.
“Hey, you didn’t think of it, either.” She shrugged and struggled to secure a chest of coins closed with twigs, which didn’t work well. Eventually, she gave up and ripped a few strips off the end of her cloak with a sigh. “What do you think these ruins were?”
“I don’t know.” He frowned. “The bandit said they weren’t ruins until two months ago, but there was dust in some of the rooms and we didn’t see furniture, and this doesn’t look like it’s been buried all that long.”
“Coins, goblets, jewelry.” Lyle shrugged. “Any rich person might hide this. It’s odd that they took the furniture and not this, which is more valuable and more portable.”
“I’m beginning to think you’re right,” he conceded. “This whole place has too many mysteries and not enough facts. I’m ready to be gone.”
The dwarf nodded se
riously.
They loaded what they could take onto the carts and sleds and returned to the road.
By the time they arrived, all three of them were in a very poor mood, not to mention sweaty and covered in mosquito bites. Justin had now achieved BUG CHOW level 3, which only vaguely helped his mood. He wondered if appreciating the AI’s sense of humor was a sign of delirium and decided it probably was.
Things improved marginally on the road, but not by much. They had to travel slowly to avoid tipping any of the cargo off, and their backs soon began to ache with the strain. Once in a while, they would rotate sleds, but the way they sniped at each other about messing up the equipment had begun to take the fun out of everything.
“Mo’ loot, mo’ problems,” Justin muttered to himself.
“Stop muttering!” Lyle snapped. “And get yer sword. I hear a cart.”
“Oh, shit.” He stood and panted. “Shit.” He looked at the side of the road while his brain worked furiously. They should haul the treasure to the underbrush and hide it, but he couldn’t see how to do that by the time the cart arrived. Besides, the thought of dragging it out afterward and setting off again was too much to bear. From the looks on the others’ faces, they were thinking the same thing.
A mosquito stung him and he thought back, wistfully, to the time when the swamp was a magic wasteland full of wolves.
To their surprise, they recognized the cart’s driver immediately.
“Ho, there!” the blacksmith said heartily. “I wondered if I’d find you here.”
“Are you coming to trade?” Justin asked dubiously. The bandits probably needed a good blacksmith as they rebuilt, but he wasn’t sure about the man’s chances of being allowed to leave later.
“Nah.” He drew the cart to a stop, swung down, and patted the draft horse's neck. “I got to East Newbrook and thought, ‘Now, those adventurers helped me and they’ll try to haul all that treasure back.’ I stowed my gear and here I am.”
“You’re not worried they’ll rob you?” Zaara asked.
“I’m the first master blacksmith to grace their town in four years,” he said seriously. “The mayor would give me his house if I asked. In any case, I see I came none too early.”
Justin was too tired to argue much, but he also studied the man suspiciously as they transferred the treasure. “This is an awfully big favor.”
“When I was on the way here, I remembered how much I liked life on the road,” their helper said contemplatively. “Nights alone by a fire with the open sky. A blacksmith can’t usually stray far from his forge, and who knows the next time I’ll have the time to leave East Newbrook. Plus…you could call it good business to forge a good relationship with wizard-slayers who might come through with plunder and stories. In every town I’ve served, I’ve made it a point to buy an ale for the adventurers whenever they come through and it’s never steered me wrong yet.” He smiled and hauled Lyle up next to him in the front seat. “You two, climb in the back and we’ll set off.”
“He’s right,” Zaara said when she and Justin were in the back and the cart started to turn. She gave a huge yawn. “My father always said the same about buying adventurers a beer. He said they were useful.”
“He certainly made use of me, I guess.” Justin yawned as well. Her sleepiness was contagious. “Stop yawning, dammit. Also, he never bought me a beer.”
“How about…I buy you one…when we…” A snore finished her sentence. She had pillowed her head on her cloak and passed out entirely, her cheeks still flushed from the effort of lifting and loading the treasure.
His stomach did the weird sideways leap it always did where she was concerned but before he could be overly troubled by that, his eyes drifted shut and he fell asleep to the sounds of the dwarf and the blacksmith singing folk songs. His dreams were full of gold coins and foaming tankards as the cart wound its way through the now-living forests.
“That’s it,” Jacob said as he stepped into the offices again. “DuBois says it will probably take twenty minutes or so to get everything hooked up in the truck.”
His partners nodded. They stood in the kitchenette of the office, and if Nick was reading Amber’s expression correctly, she felt as shell-shocked as he did.
“Final walk-through?” she said finally. “We should make sure we don’t forget anything important.”
“Sure.” He knew this was her way to cope with big changes. It had been helpful at least twice as often as it had been maddening, although the two sometimes overlapped. He, meanwhile, told too many jokes, and Jacob tried to manage everyone.
Who had ever decided to let three engineers run a company? It was madness.
It was clear that they had missed nothing in the big lab. With all the pods and servers removed and after a thorough vacuuming, the area looked oddly small. If it weren’t for the glass walls that enclosed the pod area, he wouldn’t have been able to remember what it looked like at all.
“I wish we’d been able to get all the tape marks off the walls,” Amber said distractedly.
“The landlord said this will be turned into a restaurant.” Jacob shrugged. “They’ll probably gut the place.” He hunched his shoulders. “No one will remember we were here, will they?”
“The people who heard Mary screaming will remember it,” Nick pointed out.
The other man cracked a smile, as did Amber, but he could feel their sadness.
“Hey,” he said, in a burst of inspiration. “Do you remember five years ago? We’d just had the idea for PIVOT. We were in my room—”
“We’d finished a pizza,” she said. “I remember because I’d started lifting that week and I wanted to order four more and you kept telling me to order one at a time.” She snickered.
“That was a lifechanging moment,” Jacob said. “Not a night we had pizza. Focus on the big picture.”
She laughed. “I’ll tell you that the next time you’re hungry. Or…I would if I wasn’t afraid to die. You get hangry, man.”
Nick watched them banter good-naturedly. He was glad they weren’t a couple anymore. The bickering that was so easy between them as friends had acquired a bad edge to it while they were together. He’d been worried their friendship would be ruined, but they’d both gotten over the awkwardness quickly.
“Did you picture any of this that night?” he asked them when they had finished their whispered argument.
“Any of this?” Amber shook her head. “Not a single part. Hell, when we got this place, I was over the moon. I couldn’t imagine having an office that wasn’t in my living room. As for the rest of it…” She looked out toward the corridor and they could hear the beeps of the truck and the occasional shout. No one sounded panicked. The Diatek crew seemed to view all of this as a fascinating challenge rather than merely another boring job, which had set the PIVOT group at ease.
“I know I never pictured it,” Jacob said with certainty. “I was sure we would do some good work, hit a roadblock somewhere, and all get office jobs.”
“You never told us that,” his friends said at the same time.
“I didn’t want to be a downer.”
Nick shook his head. “And now we’re working for one of the main contractors with the Department of Defense.”
“We also have salaries now,” the other man reminded them, “and we’re millionaires.”
They shook their heads.
“That one still doesn’t seem real,” she said.
“Live in the Bay Area long enough and it won’t be,” Nick joked. “Plus, what’s a millionaire around here? Nothing. Dime a dozen. We’d only be special if we were billionaires.”
“Given that we still own forty-nine percent of the PIVOT shares, that might happen.” Jacob shook his head in wonder. “What do you all think now? Do you think we’ll pull it off?”
“I think if it’s possible, we will,” Amber said. “Before, tons of stuff could have gotten in our way. Now, the only thing we have to worry about is whether we can think hard enough to
do it. Justin’s results are groundbreaking in and of themselves, and we should have a much bigger suite of test subjects within a couple of years.”
Nick whistled. “And then, before you know it, they’ll be flying drones in some kind of Ender’s-Game-for-Coma-Patients dystopia.”
“Why are you always so negative?” The other man threw an elbow at him.
“I’m a realist,” he said with dignity.
She snorted. “You’re both pie-in-the-sky dreamers. I’m the realist here. And I’ll tell you what, one of the first things we’ll do is hire an accountant.”
“Uh-huh,” Jacob said. “And one of the next things is you firing the accountant because you can’t stand giving up any of your work.” His phone buzzed and he glanced at it. “They’re all ready. Apparently, it was relatively simple. Wait a second, he’s still typing…he wants to know if there’ll be popcorn at the Diatek labs or if we should stop on the way.”
Amber burst out laughing. “That man. Anna Price has no idea how much of her budget will go to popcorn, does she? And he’ll weasel his way into getting that popcorn machine back, I know it.”
“I’m sure he was the one who bought it from us on eBay,” Nick said. “DrDPopcorn was the username, and it was created on the day we sold it.”
“Jesus.” Jacob rolled his eyes. “That man must give his financial advisor heart attacks.”
“This may surprise you,” she said as they left, “but not everyone has a financial advisor.”
“What?”
“Oh, you sheltered little rich boy.”
Nick waited until their voices drifted away, put his hands in his pockets, and looked around at the room. So much had happened there—their first whole prototype, the first test drive for each of them in the pods, and the marathon of late nights as they adapted the video game they had bought. There was no way to count how many boxes of takeout had been consumed there or how many pots of coffee.
He remembered that he’d always been excited to come to work, though. Even when the news coverage was snide about the cost of their product or when the initial sales numbers didn’t come in as well as expected, he had come in every day excited about the work—and even more so now that they had found a use for it beyond entertainment.
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