Tori raged.

  Quietly.

  Jessica was working her healing magic down below on some poor bastard who’d had a run-in with a monster and hadn’t leveled—or who just didn’t know about the Body trick. It had interrupted another screaming match, and she was pissed.

  She’d played enough DPS classes to know how this worked; if you were behind when the raids opened, you didn’t make the team, and if you didn’t make the team, you only got further behind. She hadn’t been on the cut list in four raid tiers, and she wasn’t about to get cut now, but Hal was out there pushing into the next tier of dungeons while Jessica kept her pinned down in here. And worse, he’d agreed with her.

  “This is bullshit,” she muttered for the hundredth time.

  She had to get out there and kill some monsters. Sitting here wasn’t doing anything for her.

  Below her, she could hear the usual moaning and groaning as Jessica healed the guy. It was never quiet—healing hurt almost as bad as getting the injury in the first place. But right now, that was to her advantage.

  Tori slipped down the ladder and disappeared into Museumtown. If she hurried, she’d get to the Adler Planetarium before Hal finished clearing it. That’d be the best-case scenario—a free-ish carry through a Tier Two Dungeon with a good chunk of boss experience and some gear. She’d catch up—or at least not fall behind. And even better, she could prove that she deserved to be—

  Tori hit something. Hard.

  She found herself on the cement, a familiar-looking, wrinkled face staring down at her from behind a salt-and-pepper beard. Calvin’s hand reached down to help her to her feet.

  Flushing red, Tori took it and let him pull her back up. “Sorry, I didn’t see you. Aren’t you supposed to be looking for the twins?” she muttered.

  “I saw you, though,” Calvin replied. He grinned. “Took the hit on purpose. Where you going? No, don’t tell me. I’ll guess. The planetarium, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Calvin shook his head. “This about your mom?”

  “Step-mom,” she said reflexively. It sounded dumb even to her, but she couldn’t help it. “And no. It’s about me.”

  “Come have a sit-down. We’ll talk through this.” Calvin pointed at a nearby bench. When both he and Tori were sitting, he continued. “She’s trying.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you’re not happy about it, and you’re acting like a kid.” Calvin held up a hand as Tori spluttered. “No shame in that. You are a kid. And she cares about you. That’s why she’s acting the way she is. You’re both acting how I’d expect you to.”

  “So what?” Tori crossed her arms and glared back at the trailer in the distance. “She doesn’t get it. Hal does, but he’s bowing to her on this.”

  “What doesn’t she get?”

  “The messages all told her what we had to do,” Tori half-shouted. “Advance and uplift. That’s what we have to do, and she won’t let me.”

  Calvin nodded sympathetically, and Tori suddenly felt like she wanted to scream as he kept talking. “She won’t let you advance. She’s spending all her time uplifting, though. Combat isn’t the only route to making it through this.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m not focused on advancing, either. My level doesn’t matter. I ain’t going to fight anyone’s battles anymore. But that doesn’t mean I’m not useful. You could use your powers to uplift, too, instead of advancing,” Calvin said. “But that ain’t who you are, is it?”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s what I figured. Luckily, what Jessica wants and what you want aren’t opposed—not really.”

  Tori shrugged. “I don’t care what she wants as long as I get some dungeons in. I won’t fall behind. I can’t.”

  “Great,” Calvin said. He sighed and rubbed his temples. “So, here’s what we’ll do…”

  Destroying a few planets—even the big Saturnites and the Jupiter-looking laser-shooters—wouldn’t matter. If I wanted to survive this, I’d have to aim for the stars.

  But first, I’d have to get to them.

  Half of the glowing suns were already being drained by the Three Bodies, their energy siphoning off into the black hole to be fired in two trails of energy that burned everything in their path. With every second, the black hole grew.

  Two Tasers fired, using every bit of energy that I’d stored up. They hit one of the stars and dumped their Charge into it; it swelled like a water balloon, glowing a bright white as the energy spike burned its energy off. Then it collapsed into a tiny white point like the pinprick stars overhead. The whole section of the maze went dark. I was out of ammo, but at least I’d figured something out.

  The Three Bodies found me a second later.

  I dodged the energy beam as it cut across the floor. The other half was burning a squiggly hole in the sky—the glowing red trail drowned out the pinprick stars, but not the fiery orbs around it.

  When I moved, it followed me.

  I kept moving, dragging the beam across the floor and looking up into the sky. Another planet monster zoomed toward me, firing its red laser as it did; I felt it burn, but the Charge Blade ripped through it, and a few swings later, I’d picked up its experience. But the Three Bodies were growing; I could feel its gravity pulling me in.

  The energy beam ripped across a pair of planets, annihilating them before they could break apart. Their experience orbs vaporized, too.

  The Three Bodies’ far beam hit the first star.

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  It exploded.

  The star swelled just like the one I’d shocked. Then it rippled out, flames covering the entire half of the room. A few tendrils of energy looped through space; the black hole sucked them in greedily. Everything shook, and my vision went white. I coughed dust out.

  When I could see again, the maze was gone. Barriers burned, and most of the planets and stars on the far half had vaporized. A few dozen experience orbs hung in the dark void, along with a single white point that pulsed slightly from the edge of the room.

  I blinked away the aftershocks as the other stars and planets started to slowly shift. The Three Bodies sat in the room’s center; the black hole had eaten the whole auditorium, but its growth had slowed with the supernova.

  I knew what I had to do. As one of the now-moving stars dipped low in its orbit, I ran toward it. The Charge Blade sliced into it like a glob of butter. The star disintegrated, swirling and whirling around my weapon’s blade.

  It melted away, and the half-dozen planets that had orbited it zoomed off in different directions like it had never even existed.

  The Three Bodies’ gravity pulled at me, and I ran for the outside wall. Two more stars started feeding into it, but its energy beams ripped across them as I fled, and after they exploded, the room went dark.

  Really, truly dark.

  And in the darkness, someone screamed.

  The gangers’ screams echoed through the room as I rushed toward them. Every wall was down, and the dark nook I’d left them in was exposed to the black hole. My feet slipped out from under me, and I scrabbled for purchase on the floor. As I did, one of the gate guards flew by. His scream cut off as he hit the black hole.

  His body curved impossibly around the glowing white disk. I watched in horror as he came apart—it wasn’t gorey, though. He just…stretched like putty. I’d had a toy when I was a kid that you could stretch and pull, and it would snap back into shape when you stopped. This guy wasn’t coming back from this, though.

  Then he was gone.

  I grabbed another biker’s wire-bound hands and dragged him away from the swirling, roaring void. Then I threw him. He crashed into the dungeon’s outside wall and went limp—but he didn’t start drifting back toward the black hole.

  The Three Bodies’ gravity ripped at me. I put my head down, gritted my teeth, and pulled myself away from it. Eddie’s third teammate disappeared, or at least stopped screaming. It smelled like burning metal and nothing at the same time.

  I used the Fast-Hoof boots and surged toward the unconscious man. Then, I pressed myself against the dungeon wall and waited for the black hole to starve itself to death.

  It took almost three minutes. The black hole tore at my tattered armor—it came apart and flew into the Three Bodies. The man at my feet started moving.

  And then it stopped. The room remained dark except for the dozens of glowing experience orbs from planets that I’d killed with the supernovas, and I held the Voltsmith’s Grasp up to cast a faint orange light over the planetarium.

  Boss Defeated: The Three Bodies

  Area Message: The Void’s Embrace’s second floor has unlocked. This floor will remain unlocked for twenty-four hours, after which time the first floor will reset.

  The Three Bodies had dropped two pieces of equipment. I also received another prize.

  Congratulations! For completing one hundred percent of a Tier Two Dungeon’s first floor, you have received the following reward:

  One [Voltsmith’s] Supply Box (Rank One)

  I pulled everything into my inventory as the room filled with a faint gray light. The surviving gangster hadn’t gotten experience from the fight, and I didn’t feel the need to share the gear with him. I’d check both pieces out later.

  Right now, my focus was on the gangster himself. A nameplate hovered over his head.

  Thomas Wright: Level 26

  Class: Ice Sculptor

  I blinked at that. I’d expected something violent-sounding, not artistic and precise. He was definitely one of Eddie’s men, though. The ill-kept beard looked like if one of our neighbors back in Cozad had let himself go for a month or two, and the man’s shredded biking leathers were covered in patches. I recognized the big one on his back. The Raging Bulls had been a problem in Cozad before—usually when heading to Sturgis.

  Now, they were gone. This ‘Thomas’ guy was the last one. Right now, he was unconscious. I could easily finish this. It’d be quick; one swing from the Charge Blade, and he’d be done.

  But no. Eddie had promised to go after people who mattered to me. This guy…hadn’t. At the very least, I needed to give him a chance to explain why he’d rolled with Eddie. After that?

  I hadn’t gotten that far, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Thomas was a problem, but killing him wasn’t the right solution. I could see that much. I couldn’t figure out a better one, though. If I let him go, there was a good chance he’d head straight to the guy in charge of Museumtown, and if he did that, my friends and I were screwed.

  I pushed that problem out of my head and looked around the planetarium.

  Now that the gray light shone across the half-circle and the dome in the middle, I realized that I hadn’t, in fact, destroyed the Three Bodies. Two brilliant-white stars swung back and forth around the completely collapsed black hole in a mirror of their pattern a few minutes before. I didn’t feel its tug anymore, but the floor below it had completely collapsed. It looked like a stretched cloth with a rock at its center, perfectly curved around the weight.

  The fog gate barrier that covered the door had vanished. I could leave. Or…I could continue into the void by walking along the curved floor.

  Instead, I walked around the room, picking up experience orbs. The dozens of planets were enough to level me twice, to Thirty-Five. I put all four points into Charge; I needed as much of it as I could if I wanted to build something new.

  Dark Orrery (Rare, Charge 5)

  Allows the wielder to cast Gravity Well once per hour. A physics-based class instead learns the Gravity Well spell as long as the Dark Orrery is equipped.

  Gravity Well: Pulls all enemies in a wide area toward a center point.

  Voyager’s Lenses (Rare, Charge 20)

  +3 Mana, +3 Awareness

  Allows the wearer to identify enemies’ weak points regardless of their Awareness. Only works on monsters below Level Fifty and Tier One bosses.

  The Orrery consisted of a half-dozen marble-sized orbs that circled around a central piece of round obsidian the size of a pinhead. When I pulled it out of my inventory, it hovered just over my hand; I couldn’t see any mechanical reason for the thing to work, and I couldn’t cast Gravity Well, either.

  I put it away and examined the Voyager’s Lenses.

  The stats were interesting, but the power felt both redundant for a high-Awareness build and temporary. I’d out-scale it soon. I couldn’t use Mana, either, and the system didn’t convert Mana on equipment into Charge. In the end, its main advantage was the dozens of obviously magical components inside of it: gears, a capacitor of some type, and what looked like a tiny transmission.

  If I disassembled it and got lucky with the Voltsmith’s Supply Box, I might have enough to build my gauntlet’s next stage.

  But now wasn’t the time. Thomas was stirring. And I had questions.

  So, so many questions.

  Tommy blinked in the gray light. The maze looked nothing like it had when the Voltsmith hit him from behind. He wriggled, but he was still bound with electrical wire.

  “Oh, shit,” he muttered. His head wouldn’t stop pounding. It hurt worse than it had ever hurt before—the throbbing even drowned out the dozens of other aches. He’d been thrown across the room and into a wall, for fuck’s sake. The single hammer blow shouldn’t have wrecked him this bad.

  “Oh shit is correct,” someone said behind him.

  Tommy’s heart dropped into his stomach; he couldn’t quite place the voice, but it wasn’t Eddie’s, or one of his boys’. In the worst case, it’d be The Captain. If it was, he was fucked. He flailed and struggled, and eventually, rolled over.

  It wasn’t the Captain.

  Hal Riley: Level 35

  Class: Voltsmith

  The man crouched next to him. His dark eyes held no warmth. Tommy tried to look away, but an armored hand lunged out and held him in place; he could feel the energy in that grasp. It was the same energy that had knocked Eddie on his ass.

  Tommy went still, heart hammering.

  “Very good. Now, you’re going to tell me everything you know,” the Voltsmith said.

  “About what?” Tommy couldn’t keep the edge of fear from his voice.

  The Voltsmith went quiet as if thinking. His grip slacked, and Tommy relaxed as he leaned back on the balls of his feet. Then he spoke again, his voice cold. “Everything.”

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