It was a long ride. Exiting the cramped confines of the City, the EIU-controlled car pushed north, where hovel by hovel the outlying boroughs gave way to the wintry forests of Reformed Massachusetts. Vy, taking a cue from her driver, slept a good deal of the way, though from time to time she would roll the window down to feel the rush of the wind against her face. The cold air was like a salve against thought; she needn’t think about the task at hand or the danger that the graduate students were in or the news of Edston’s part in all this, whatever it might be.

She could just breath.

It was nearing dark by the time the car arrived alongside campus. In that time, another city had risen around her—not the City, with its imposing grandeur and bustling isolation, but a smaller, more intimate metropolis from a bygone era. People used to call it Boston, back before the Pillar erected one of its uplink towers at the center. Now it was better known as Reztown, home of the Reservoir, from whence the City’s AI signal originated. Situated on a harbor, the squat cityscape was cut through by rivers now frozen in the dead of winter. Stuffing her short hair inside of a knitted cap—she was glad she brought that change of clothes after all—Vy peered out the car window at the sheets of river ice suffused in the mixed light of the fading sunset and the streetlamps.

Just then, a ping from the control panel. Turning, the car traveled past university buildings that loomed on either side. However, rather than pull into any of the parking deck entrances, the car instead came to a gradual stop alongside a row of modest, nondescript dwellings crammed between two taller, more modern buildings. Well, not “dwellings” per se but privately owned businesses, the facades of which were adorned with configurations of fresh snow—laid across the window ledge of an info merchant’s store front, or collected in the hollows along either side of an EIU repair shop’s stoop. Regarding the establishment in front of which the car now sat idling, the snow was lining the top of a flickering sign: The I/O Tavern.

So their meeting place was a pub. . . . Vy should have expected as much from graduate students, not that it changed anything. Her job wasn’t to pass judgment on the choices of others so much as it was to turn those choices into a paycheck. With one last look of pity at her snoozing driver, she threw her bag over her shoulder and stepped out of the car to make her way up the icy stairs and through the pub’s heavy wooden door. Inside, it was like the world was running on a different calendar. Gray remnants of slush at the immediate entrance notwithstanding, the bar was the very definition of cozy—an atmosphere of clinking glasses and lighthearted babbling from the people in attendance, the smell of cheap but warm food. In the nearest corner of the medium-sized space sat an antique jukebox modded with an EIU to read the mood of the patrons in attendance; and judging by the key of the track in question, it was a pretty good mood.

As Vy entered the room, the music swung toward a mysterious chord; the faintest hint of dissonance beneath layers of upbeat sonic revelry. The caretaker of the EIU, AKA the bartender, looked up at her amidst the slinging of beers to and fro.

“What can I get you?”

Vy opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, a voice broke out over the cacophony of the crowd at the other end of the bar. “She’ll have another round of what we’re having,” the man said, indicating with a thumb over his shoulder one of the tables in the back-corner of the pub. She recognized the voice immediately as that of the man from the phone call, Elliot. In keeping with the timbre of his voice, he had a friendly, good-natured look to him; a squarish face topped with dirty-blonde bangs and the kind, unassuming smirk of a person who thought they were an inch shorter than they actually were.

“You’re Elliot, I assume,” Vy said as a matter of formality. She pushed through the crowd to head to his side of the long cherry wood bar.

“And you,” he said with a widening of that smirk, “must be our guardian angel, Vy ‘Not-Thornheart’ Thornheart.”

“At your service,” she deadpanned, nodding toward the back table. “Shall we?”

The table in question was partied by three others, two females and a male. Above them, a low-hanging lamp cast sharp shadows across the faces in attendance—the first, a bright-eyed redheaded woman who was engaged in conversation and resting her chin on her thumb and forefinger in concentration; the second, a smaller, demure brunette of foreign descent, listening but not speaking across the documents splayed in front of her. Both were sitting opposite the third person, the aforementioned male, who at the moment of Vy’s arrival at the table was tapping the documents with his finger, his voice hard to hear over the music but not so much that you couldn’t discern the words, nor the quality of an unmistakable croak.

“. . . No, we can’t just assume that the system will store the direction of their travel after the last transmission. Frankly, I find it incredible that you don’t already know that; the data stream is auto-obfuscated, and no algorithm you or I or anyone else can come up with will interpolate that. Indeed, the only method I can possibly envisage to locate them is to replicate their original experiment to a T—”

The redhead shot a finger out as if a punch line had just paid off. “You mean unless we get lost ourselves?” a statement that had the man stuttering to defend himself, all the while nervously adjusting his glasses. But before he could muster that defense, Vy cut in.

“You won’t get lost. That’s why you hired me.”

“Thank you,” he spat, tossing a hand out in the direction of this newcomer. It was only then that he turned in his chair to face her. “And who are you?”

You could tell that this was a group dynamic Elliot was long used to. “This, ladies and gentleman, is our party member for hire—”

“Vy Hawthorn,” she said, nodding to each. Beside her, the bartender brought two handfuls of glasses and set them in between the scattered documents.

“Sam Brey,” said the redhead, taking the glass and toasting casually in Vy’s direction.

“Zaafirah Daher,” said the brunette, her accent diminished but not altogether undetectable. “People call me Za.” She said the nickname with a hint of a perceived insult in it, which she quickly blinked away with her long lashes.

“Alright, a lot of single-syllable names going around; so we’re efficient, at least. And you,” Vy said, turning her gaze on the croaking man, “let me guess—Dan, or Ed, or Chuck. . . .”

“Lambert Grady,” he said, suddenly self-conscious and sitting up straight. “Sorry to upturn the apple cart.”

“There’s a worm in every bunch,” she replied dryly, grabbing a chair from the stack of them to the table’s left and sitting in it. As she did, Elliot—who seemed to eager to take back the reins—indicated each person’s field of study. Sam was the glitch biologist; Za the simuphysicist. Lambert’s field Vy already knew, but as she attempted to say the word she found it harder to recall than she expected.

“And you are the archaeo . . . algo . . . anthro . . .”

“I’m an algoarchaeologist,” said Lambert, his dark eyes piercing beneath a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. He had an oval face topped with a little widow’s peak. “Anthropology is Elliot’s discipline—sorry, ‘techthropology,’” he finished, proving that though some things change, the academic’s penchant for self-posturing wasn’t one of them.

Vy was seated now with her bag in her lap and a glass to her lips. It was strange having a beer that didn’t boost your defense or alter your damage ratio. It was simply beer for beer’s sake. “Well, now we all know each other,” she said, setting her glass on the table. “So which one of you is going to bring me up to speed here? If what you say is true, and your colleagues are linked directly to the Iron through the Rez, I hate to tell you but we don’t have a lot of time. What do we know? Specifically, what do I need to know?”

In her line of work, one tended to keep things all business, all the time. Most clients were first-time envirts who envied others but lacked the fortitude to do the work themselves. As a matter of course, Vy didn’t much desire to know those kinds of clients beyond the scope of services rendered. Would the same hold true regarding these four clients? That remained to be seen.

Of course, Elliot was the first to tackle the question. Taking his seat on the other side of the table from Vy, he quickly recounted the tale. “Okay, so four weeks ago a group of our colleagues and the department head set out from the Rez. As far as anyone knew, it was standard academic research, nothing particularly groundbreaking, as is unfortunately usually the case. That’s a general problem in academia, you see, the tendency for bland ideas rise to the top.”

While he talked, Vy reached into her bag and pulled out a small leather-bound book and a writing utensil. She turned past the last used page in the book and began to write. “How many in total?”

Elliot hesitated, mouth agape. Vy could tell he had trouble switching gears. “Um, five total, counting your for-hire friend. . . .”

“Not my friend,” she said without looking up from her book. “Names?”

Once more, Elliot hesitated and Sam spoke up for him. “Real, or their avatar names?”

Vy’s eyes raised to meet Sam’s. “Do you imagine that Mr. and Mrs. NPC twelve-generations-a-peasant are going to know names like Izzy or Buddy? Avatars, please. Did they take on character classes? If so, I’ll take those, too.”

Elliot gulped; you could almost see the gears in his head grinding to a halt and switching direction. “Yeah, okay: the first is Ricter Von Grimblade, a soldier; real name—”

“Irrelevant. If he’s Ricter in the Iron, he’s Ricter to me.” While Vy jotted down the information, Elliot glanced around at the others as if for assistance. Paul upturned his palms in front of him as if to say, “This is your cross to bear, bro.”

Elliot coughed. “Uh, next is Vaeri Fenlar, an elf ranger. Then there’s Ealwulf, a nightblade. The department head goes by Axshn the Illusician, and he’s a—”

Vy moved her pen back to the previous names, where she began to make additional notes. “—A summoner, yeah I kind of guessed that. Let’s see: a soldier, a ranger, a thief and a summoner. So I take it then that the nature of the research was to test the NPC’s reaction to outlaws. Am I right?” Her pen hesitated awaiting the table’s confirmation of that suspicion, but when no answer came she looked up from her book to find four blank stares. She cocked her head, reciting from memory lore old as (virtual) time:

"‘A soldier swings and strikes for thee;

a ranger fast and elven be;

the thief, a blade of night does lurk;

shadows growing in the hearth;

if you but hear the summoner’s tongue;

the Forbidden Ones this night have come.’”

She had figured that would jog their memory; however, upon finishing the poem, the group’s stares were no less blank than they had been. Vy closed her book and leaned forward to peer at them across the table. “You are aware of the quest line ‘Dusk of the Forbidden Ones,’ are you not? I mean, it’s only the most consistent legend among NPCs across all six continents of the Aeryn; even your lowly level-1 Iremouthian knows you don’t party up as a S-R-T-S unless you’re ready to have a target drawn on your back.”

Another round of stares and Vy could hardly contain her frustrations. “Wait a minute, you have journeyed to the Aeryn, right? Right? Lambert, did I not overhear you saying that we would need to replicate the missing group’s original experiment to a T? Are you telling me that I’m escorting a team of neophytes across the Hell’s Mouth, a team wired directly into the Rez, and add to that they being Forbidden Ones . . . ?” She had never been so unprofessional with clients before—but with this kind of blatant ignorance, she was willing to break her streak.

Keying off of her, the music began to become more aggressive. She picked up her glass and banged it on the table, splashing beer across the piles of documents scattered about. “Hello?”

With a long gulp, Elliot was the first to pipe up. “We’re only first years. The program doesn’t typically approve of excursions until your second or third.”

Vy yanked the knitted cap off her head and wrung it in her hands. “So that’s a ‘yes’ then? Lambert? Sam? Za?”

The three nearly jumped up at the sound of their names called. They quickly exchanged glances. Thumping all around, the melody of the music began to turn.

“The first year is primarily theoretical work,” said Sam, treading lightly. But this only paved the way for Za to break that demure disposition of hers.

“They’ve been out of contact for three days. Someone had to do something!” she said, exasperated.

As she did on the car ride up, Vy closed her eyes and focused on the rhythm of her breath. One. Two. Three. She opened her eyes again: Nope, still mad as fire. She lay her cap on the table, smoothing it out with her palm in an attempt to compose herself. Then she turned to face Lambert, who now removed his glasses and cleaned the lenses on his shirt. The music began to calm again; breathe.

“We’re just going to have to find another way,” Vy said at last, nodding confidently to herself. “Wired into the Rez, we’re talking about real consequences here. We’ll just . . . take to the forests of Beornwy. We can bypass the Mouth that way. It’s the long way around, but as long as you’re not Forbidden Ones we should be able to keep encounters to a minimum. You know, there’s a quiet little hamlet just north of Sige. They sell an elixir there that can increase your movement speed by—” She was concentrating so hard that she’d practically ironed her knitted cap flat. But she had just about worked everything out in her head when Sam threw up her hands.

“I’m going to tell her.”

Lambert tried to discreetly shush her, but Elliot waved away the attempt. “There’s no use hiding it anymore.”

Vy’s hands stopped. She looked up. “No use hiding what?”

Sam leaned into the table, turning her face down as if disclosing a secret. She spoke low as she could over the music. “These ‘Forbidden Ones’ as you call them. We have to be them. That is the experiment.”

---

Excited to know more before next week's chapter? Well, be sure to check out the first book in the I, Speedrunner series, The Infinite Lawman, available now on Amazon. While not a part of the series, Party Member for Hire takes place in the same universe--albeit some years before the events of The Infinite Lawman.

Thank you so very much for reading!!! See you next week :)