True to his word, Wade had called into a small storefront run by the Blightbanes. They knew she was coming but needed a bit of time. It was down the street from Old Man Whither's General and Hardware Store. It was their recruiting station, and a room in the back with a TV and VCR could be used for small trainings and the written portion of the certification tests.

  It was a nice pce with cheap carpet. Clean, with interesting monster hunting equipment up on the walls, dispys full of products, and pamphlets aplenty. Shilloh came here on occasion herself. They had big supply networks and good discounts once you got to a certain level of certification (best deals on bear mace in the town).

  Unfortunately, the small, neat office was perpetually pgued by vandalism, mostly in the form of sidewalk chalk dispying embarrassingly emotional poetry and song lyrics making fun of the organization's name.

  My life was a BLIGHT.

  The sun was a yellow stain.

  You make my world bright.

  So you are my BLIGHTBANE.

  Next to the original poem was a surprising, good cartoon drawing of a man wearing eyeliner weeping as he screamed at the moon. Someone had added a speech bubble from his mouth and written, 'On all levels except physical, I am a wolf Blightbane [howls at the moon].'

  In fairness, it really was a stupid name for an organization. She stepped over the lyrics to Crawling In My Skin by Linkin Park and snorted. The original group had just been some random people who banded together to survive The Vault opening its second yer. That yer had been the one with the cryptos. Urban legend said the founders were not all native English speakers, while others said the organization's name was the unfortunate immortalization of teenage folly.

  Once inside, she found a small group of Egret scouts in child-sized uniforms swarming the main office. Four went into the backroom for Blightbane level two and three certifications. The rest waited.

  She heard two kids who couldn't be older than elementary age very seriously quizzing each other on the four most common self-defense tools to carry and the core parts of a house emergency pn. It filled her with a mingled impression of cuteness and depression. Why should a nine-year-old need to talk about when to use bear spray versus imbued silver mist?

  She grabbed a pamphlet and tried to distract herself while waiting for others to take their turn at the counter.

  The pamphlet was pretty basic stuff. If they lived in a proper city with so much urban development that the core never saw cryptos, this might all be avaible on the internet. But this far out in a frontier zone—and with interstate shipping so much more dangerous—they were lucky to even have brochures.

  Some of what they talked about was the history of M-day and each subsequent yer of The Vault that had opened. Some of it was about how to cope with finding your other self. That one filled her with nostalgia. She had read loads of material about finding your other self back in the day. Hell, she had actually helped as a reviewer on ones meant for people of her species.

  It had kept her sane while waiting to be relocated into her current life. Thinking about who would be reading them tended to make you grateful and reminded you that it could always be worse. For all her lot in life had been rough, at least she hadn't been in the first wave. She hadn't accidentally set a hospital on fire only to have 911 backed up in every city, in every district, in every country of the world. Just the thought of what her grandma had to have gone through sent a shudder down her spine.

  Shilloh had the benefit of being told that it was possible and the basics of finding her other self. Admittedly, back then, they thought only one in ten thousand people discovered their Other Self. So, she was unlucky enough to ride through the panic when they realized that the numbers were much, much higher.

  And those numbers still weren't done revealing themselves yet. The first level of The Vault held so many souls, so many random citizens, that humanity might spend centuries with people still spontaneously finding their other selves once they had grown, experienced, and developed into a person whose soul sufficiently matched one still cradled in The Vault.

  The only people who knew the details of that yer—of any yers in the transdimensional lifeboat—had sacrificed themselves in the ritual that sent it careening through the void toward a compatible reality. A reality, they must have thought while smugly sipping fine teas and combing well-waxed mustaches that could use a gradual, tiered apocalypse. A civilized apocalypse, unlike whatever catastrophic bullshit was scheduled to end that civilization.

  Fucking assholes.

  Shilloh's Other Self hadn't even known an apocalypse was coming to her original world. She just cared about the next festival day and the complex art of multigenerational forest trails, which she had been proud to say her vilge was famous for.

  And those assholes decided to fuck up both of her lives. They hadn't been smart enough to leave the monsters behind. Nope, they had made cryptos the second fucking yer of The Vault. Out within a decade of the first yer destabilizing the world and not more than three years after the deities had broken out early of their own yer.

  And the designers certainly hadn't been smart enough to think about people like her and hers. The ones born human in every single way but their capacity to grow into something else. Something rare, powerful, and unique.

  Something harvestable.

  Even worse than being harvestable was being almost human enough to have every mature member of her species locked in a different yer of The Vault, all the powerful ones unable to protect their young as they bloomed.

  Shilloh breathed slowly as she folded the pamphlet and picked up another one: The 20 Most Important Monster Tracks to Know! She liked it. The writers had to include steps like sniffing dirty hoof prints and nearby trees as part of identification. It didn't calm her, though. Instead, her eyes unfocused, and she found herself thinking about Project Rich Bitch-Savior.

  Four months. That was how long she had to get enough money for the nd auction. Four months before she could afford an opportunity.

  Her mind started wandering. If she managed to pull off this big upset, how would she integrate those different chunks of property? Or maybe she was thinking wrong. This could be a central vilge for her people to move to once they left The Vault and a series of satellite locations. Pces for trading outposts, watch towers, and the seeds of future vilges.

  By the time the scouts cleared out, she was still tired, but her focus was back. The employee at the counter finally got to her and informed her that there was a back entrance to a restricted section where she could turn in proof of death for bounty money.

  Wade had already let them know she would be turning in some stuff for him, so there were no holdups. It ended up not being a ton of money. But it was more than she had this morning, and that was what mattered.

  Slow growth. That was the way. It was her advantage over everyone else: time and vision.

  ~~~

  With a prideful sense of asceticism, Shilloh used a small fraction of the reward to visit a wine bar for many small samples instead of buying herself a bottle. She needed to be up early tomorrow. With all the stress she had been under, bringing a bottle home could end up with her staying up till 2 am doing that thing where she wasn't quite reading or watching TV but switching the second she was bored for more than three seconds by either.

  The wine bar was attached to the West End Market, a two-story building centered around a food hall with several small storefronts and quirky shops. Space was tight, and getting spots there was highly competitive. Only the best survived, and—baring one local coffee store—absolutely no chains or pre-existing commercial successes were allowed to rent space.

  Shilloh usually stayed away because she would spend all her money on the pce selling fancy cheeses. But tonight was worth a special toast, and this was the pce to do it. There were a few foodtruck sized shops that only did a one or two things, but they did them amazingly well. And, on top of that, there was a constant churn of new pces trying their hands and either failing or moving to rger spaces after unching their stores here.

  The West End Market was a happy pce—if a little busy for her taste. It was getting dark, and there was a rge outdoor area with picnic tables and small tables. On all sides were couples going on first dates and older folks who had spent countless nights sitting in those exact spots pying chess.

  Shilloh was also pleased to realize that she had been single long enough to come to terms with it and find joy watching the happy couples. There had been a time when seeing cute couples bummed her out or made her inexplicably annoyed. Now, she could give them a silent mental salute and smile at the giddy happiness they radiated.

  Really, life was pretty good. Stressful, but good.

  She was tired from being paid to prance through the woods all day, had a goal that motivated her to work hard, a magic lynx that was her friend, a gss of wine, and would go home to a very cozy forest cabin surrounded by ominous and somewhat poisonous pnts. That was a damn good life,

  Plus, she could smell the fancy ramen store next door. It did the very best mimosas on Sundays and refused to take reservations from anyone. If she got a big payday from this project with the Blightbanes, then she might even treat herself to a meal there.

  She had everything she needed—though a little extra sleep would be welcomed. But who cared about sleep? Wine was nice, and no one here looked twice at a tired woman who let her hair down, sipped at something she couldn't pronounce, and let her forehead fall until it quietly bumped against the bar.

  "Hey!" a voice said in her ear with a malicious amount of cheer. "I never finished telling you about how huge Nick's cock is!"

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