1

Before the tower shifted, the team waited patiently for Zack’s group at the top of the tower. In the nineteenth room, deep inside the tower’s basement, they sat on the dirt floor, shrouded in near-complete darkness. Aside from the portal’s green glow, the only other light permeated through the cracks in the courtyard floor, but it was so muted as to be almost imperceptible.

Angie, Sierra, and Vlad cast Fire Glow, allowing the spells to run off of their MPRs. That pushed away the gloom, providing them with a dim illumination. They talked about everything they had experienced that day, from discovering Heinrich’s body and encountering the Dryad tribe to Emma’s decision to leave the team.

“I still can’t believe she chose to stay with him,” Angie said.

No one responded, and the group fell into a hush as they relived the day’s event. It didn’t go unnoticed that Rachel curled into Armando’s chest.

Sierra stood up and walked to the edge of the stone guardrail, which ran along the opening to the lower courtyard. She stared at the mud that had accumulated at the base of the structure. There were mounds of it. Water leaked through the crevasses in the bricks that circled the courtyard. In some areas, the pressure was so strong that the water came through the cracks in a spray, sparkling like gold jewels in the amber light of the spells.

Sierra sighed as she turned back to the group. “You were right. The money is the furthest thing from my mind now,” she said, referencing the speech Damon had given the recruits on the day they met. She sat down and rubbed her sword into the compacted earth floor. It created a deep groove in the relatively dry soil. She glanced at the rookies. “Does anyone not regret getting into this?”

While her glum compatriots stared back at her, Vlad’s gravelly voice rose through the silence. “Some of us did not have a choice,” he grumbled.

Sierra grunted her agreement.

The mood of the team seemed to sink lower, affected, in part, by the dingy surroundings. Angie sensed the change and tried to encourage the members. “We’re going to find a way out of this mes—”

Just outside their room, the courtyard’s eastern wall suddenly disintegrated, showering large bricks into the darkened space below. The first few landed mutedly into the thick mud, then the crashing noise of stone on stone filled the confined space.

Alarmed, the teammates stood as water burst through the opening, flooding the lower basement floors almost instantly. The entire courtyard canted toward its east side, tilting at a twenty-degree angle. The members tumbled toward the room’s blackened wall, which had remained intact.

Armando landed near the portal to the twentieth room and grabbed Rachel, who was falling toward it. She slammed hard against his chest, and he could faintly smell her hair. “We have to get Zack’s crew out of there,” he shouted.

Damon, who was against the wall on the other side, rolled over Jackson to draw closer to the portal. As he was about to plunge into the portal, Zack’s arm burst through the green mass, desperately clutching at the brick wall.

As the members struggled to keep their positions against the violent tremors, Thao shot through the portal. She almost fell right back into it, but Damon pulled her in at the last second.

“What’s going on in there?” the orc shouted over the thundering noise of the tower’s collapse.

“We have to get them out of there,” she cried.

2

As Zack hung above the maw of the roiling glitch, holding Silo and Kylah above the glitch, something brushed against his arm. He looked up and saw Damon’s arm hooked around his own, stabilizing him. “Thanks, buddy,” Zack groaned, knowing the orc general couldn’t hear him.

He gazed back down. Silo strained as he struggled to hang on to Zack and hold Kylah at the same time. Runlets of sweat ran down his face. Beneath them, the glitch seemed to have awakened with a new energy. It swirled and rippled at the bottom of the sloped floor.

“Kylah, climb over our bodies. Go through the portal,” Zack instructed.

The young girl looked up at the veteran orc doubtfully, but a second later, she dug her fingers into Silo’s armor and clambered toward the portal.

Zack tapped his fingers against Damon’s arm on the portal’s other side, hoping the general would take it as a cue that someone was coming through. It appeared to work. Kylah was quickly pulled through the green mass.

With his arm aching, he turned to Silo. “Okay. You’re next.”

The British orc nodded and hauled himself upward. Zack groaned painfully. Still, as Silo entered the portal, the Marine used his other arm to heave him through.

He stared down at the void for another moment, dangling precariously but finally free of the extra weight. He thought of Emma and what the glitch had done to her. Then he swung his left arm through the green portal and propelled his body to relative safety.

3

Armando grabbed Zack and pulled him to the wall. “The tower’s going down,” the former Marine corrections officer shouted, and Zack laughed at what he thought was an obvious statement. To his left, he could hear the rush of water and turned that way. Damon and half of the team lay against the wall, and behind them, muddy water was flooding in through the stone guardrail that faced the lower courtyard.

“We have to get out of here,” Zack hollered.

This time, the orc general laughed. “You think?”

With water swirling around their legs now, they stared up at the exit portal. It loomed over them.

“No time like the present,” Zack grunted.

“I’m the biggest orc…” Damon replied over the din of the rushing water.

“Not by much,” Zack argued, but the orc general ignored his comment and went on.

“I’ll brace my legs against the wall, over this portal. I want you to load the members onto me. Kind of like a human caterpillar. We’ll funnel them through the portal, then the stragglers will have to climb the dirt floor.”

“The Grimalkin should go last, then,” Angie yelled. “They could use their claws.”

Damon agreed, and Zack started directing the teammates on top of him. Because the floor was at a slope, Damon handled the accumulated weight of his teammates with ease. They moved swiftly with the flood level still rising. Within minutes, the members scrambled through the exit portal, leaving Keshon, Thao, and Sierra to bring up the rear. By then, the brown water was up to their necks. The Grimalkin trio dug their claws into the wet-earth floor and brick wall. They scaled the slope easily, leaping through the portal to the next room.

4

“Ah, fuck,” Nevan muttered as the group gazed at the tower’s highest bridge.

They had passed through the eighteenth room uneventfully, surprised that the tower hadn’t collapsed in that time. Now, the room where the veterans had encountered the Rukh was situated at the top end of a tilted bridge.

They stared across the space at the hole in the wall. The last of the daylight had vanished, leaving only the night sky. They directed their Fire Glow spells up the length of the narrow bridge. It shone a deep orange in the gloom. Far below them, they could still hear the rush of the water.

“If we can get to that room,” Sierra said, “we could climb out through the hole in the wall.” She shrugged. “Then we can just surf down the surface of the exterior wall.”

“Pizdets. Das a very steep slope to slide down,” Vlad said as he hung onto one of the stone guardrails.

“Yeah, but she’s right,” Hammer countered. “It’s the quickest way out and we won’t have to go through the previous rooms.”

Zack grunted. “Alright. Then how do we get from here to there?”

Sierra grinned and asked Nevan to remove his chain mail.

5

Like before, Sierra draped the chain mail over the Boulder and airlifted the members to the seventeenth room. From there, they slid down the tower two at a time. Sierra and Hammer went first, mostly because the mage wanted to direct traffic from the ground. As they started their rapid descent, the Alabama orc told Sierra to keep her head tucked in to protect it, and she followed his advice. They bumped roughly against the large brick surface, incurring scrapes and bruises along the way.

Seconds later, the orc and mage smashed into the muddy earth that had been displaced by the tower’s upheaval. They called for the next pair, Damon and Angie. From the ground, Sierra cast Dirt Squall to slow their descent and counter the forces of gravity. The trip ended up being so pleasurable for the couple that they held hands as they gazed at the indigo landscape.

Damon saw a fire glow coming from the village. “Wuh, wuh, we’re luh, later than wuh, we thought wuh, we’d be,” he stuttered as he bounced on the bricks. “Tha, they’ve started wuh, without us.”

Angie giggled at his unintentional Elmer Fudd impersonation. He smiled and squeezed her hand.

When they touched down on the muddy soil, Sierra asked Angie if she could do the honors with the spell. The rookie mage had depleted her mana, but the veteran hunter had more than enough MPR to cast Dirt Squall.

The rest of the team came down in twos. Zack and Thao were the last. The team started walking back to the village as the moon shone above them. The tower, which leaned over the border rip and the river, hadn’t toppled after all. Its black shadow lingered behind them like a drunken vagrant.