Hord blinked a few times and nodded. His hands came together in front of him, and he held one with the other.

“Have you had anything to eat yet, Hord?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Well, I brought in a load of food, and there’s a breakfast barbeque happening just off the parking lot.” I paused to take a sip of my stolen water. “I brought back yarsp meat.”

Hord’s eyes widened, and he began blinking. Then he looked down at his feet. “Boss say no.”

“Well, the boss doesn’t always know best. Do they Hord?” I set my hands on the counter as I asked. “Are bosses so smart you should listen to them no matter what?”

His forehead screwed up in frustration, and Hord raised his hands in surrender. “No. I not that dumb.” He sighed. “This my job, Tyson. Boss say I make you go, not let anyone in today.”

“If Mr. Sada fires you, I’ll hire you. You have my word. You’re a good worker, Hord. And loyal to a fault. What do you think of Tribe BlueCleave?” I asked.

“BlueCleave? You think I be part of BlueCleave?” His eyes were wider than usual, and his mouth hung open.

“It’s not my call, that would be up to Rayna. But you can work with them, live here.” I tapped on the counter with a finger, looking at my water bottle and trying to think. “Look, Hord, listen. I need to talk to Mr. Sada. I’m not going to allow you to stop me from doing that. This offer is just in case. I’m not going to send you back to Storage or wherever you came from if you don’t want to go. That’s all.”

He nodded as I spoke. “That’s all.” Hord repeated my words as I finished, and I shook my head.

“Hord. Go get some yarsp barbeque before it’s all gone.” I shoved the water bottle across the counter to him and he caught it to stop it from falling on the floor. The hobb pushed the bottle back from the edge and let go of it in a hurry, as if it might burn him. Then he wiped his hands on his pants, being very careful to keep both hands away from his sidearm before he finally turned around and left through the front door.

“Good call, Hord,” I muttered. I walked around the counter and grabbed the other bottle of water, carrying it with me as I climbed the stairs. My footsteps down the hall felt heavy, and slow. I realized I was dreading the coming conversation.

Then I heard Mr. Sada’s voice. “You get rid of him, Hord? You can have some food now.” I stopped outside the bedroom door and shook my head, one hand on the knob. Then I took a breath and pushed open the door.

“Nope. I sent him to the campground,” I announced as I entered.

Mr. Sada was on his bed, in his own robe, with the TV on, and a feast on the nearby end-table. He had another lobster, accompanied with fries and a shrimp cocktail. Beside it was a lump of pale white meat, I assumed Hord’s intended ration. The makeup counter had a dusting of new cocaine on it. There was also a bag, mostly filled with the white powder, but it looked like he had spilled, because great streaks of it were present as well. I walked over to the nearby window and set the bottles of water down on the sill.

He held up a finger to me and fished his phone out of his pocket. “One second Tyson. Important call I need to make first.”

I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall by his oversized bedroom window. Mr. Sada muttered something to the phone and then nodded at it. I saw a gray face in it before he started screaming.

“YOU’RE FUCKING FIRED!”

With that outburst, he angrily hit a button on the device and threw it to the foot of his bed, while staring at me.

I sighed and fished my own phone out. “Call Hord, please.”

The deity in the device frowned and turned into a tunnel. Hord was on the other side, his eyes wide as he looked around. He was in the campground, already most of the way to the parking lot.

“Congratulations, Hord. You’re the newest employee of Silken Sands. Check in with Rayna, she’ll get you started.” Afflqwst jumped into action and added Hord to the employee lists, under Rayna’s jurisdiction.

I hung up before he could respond. Then I prepared and sent a text to Rayna, telling her to get Hord doing something useful.

She sent me a single letter back in response, “K.”

Mr. Sada was glaring at me fully by the time I pocketed my phone again. “You’re an asshole, Tyson.”

I nodded and shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. Doesn’t matter, I needed to talk to you, and I’d rather not kill him in order to do that.”

He turned and pouted, staring at his TV. Another news program was on, but he clearly wasn’t paying attention to it. Merely trying his best to avoid looking at me.

“So. Spider City,” I started.

“Belongs to me, Tyson. Has since before you even started working here,” he snapped back.

“Spider City is the only way we have to keep surviving, Mr. Sada.”

I tried to be gentle with my delivery and managed to keep my frustration out of my voice. He didn’t respond. Lee’s words rang through my head. I gritted my teeth.

“What you did was extremely dangerous, Mr. Sada. For you, me, the whole place. There’s dozens of people out there now, living here, and helping us. Or trying to, while you eat lobster and French fries. What are you doing?” I asked, more animated.

“What do you mean, what am I doing? I own the whole place.” He shifted on the bed, still refusing to look at me, but his voice was calmer.

“Let’s do it this way,” I said, trying to change tactics. “Why would you tell Hord not to let me in to see you?” He glanced at me and scowled, but didn’t answer, so I continued. “You knew I was going to be pissed when I found out what you did to Spider City, and you were trying to avoid having this conversation. You know you did something wrong and are trying to avoid having to deal with that.”

I walked over and grabbed the chair from his cocaine and makeup table and turned it around to sit in.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he snapped. “I just fucked up the first few and knew you’d yell at me over it, cause you’re a self-righteous prick sometimes.”

I shrugged and nodded. “Sure, maybe,” I said without smiling. “Really not the core problem though is it?”

Mr. Sada looked at me and snorted a laugh, before turning back to his TV. “My trees, my spiders, my campground.”

“That you’re not doing anything to help,” I snapped. “You sit in here eating expensive shit and shoving coke in your face all day, and then have the fucking balls to act like you deserve anything but a broken nose for that? Fuck that. Fuck you.”

“Fuck you! Fucking . . . fucking asshole!”

His face was turning red.

““How dare you! I fucking took you in. I fed you and made you better. You owe me! I shoulda never hired you, asshole! You’ve been a fucking problem for me since day one.” He sat up, straightening his robe. He began swiping through BuyMort, angrily waving notifications away.

“No, you’ve been a fucking problem for you since day one. I’ve done everything for you man. I’ve never forgotten and I’ve taken turd after turd from you to keep you and the rest of us alive. I’ve bent over backwards so far that even our own goddamn allies are talking about us.”

Mr. Sada’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared.

I sighed. “That reminds me. We need to pay Buy-Mort to sweep the place for bugs or to defend us against sateliite-based eavesdropping or something. But that’s later. This is now.”

Mr. Sada looked away, staring at the wall. I felt heat rise to my cheeks, my face burning.

“You know what happened to me last night?”

He wouldn’t look at me, so I stood up and knocked the chair over violently. He shuddered and his eyes shot to it, pregnant with fear. They shot up and met my eyes when it bounced from the floor. “I got ripped apart.”

I ran my fingertips along the side of my neck. “One of your fucking slimes engulfed me and ripped away the flesh on both sides of my neck until it got to my fucking jugulars.” Then I slapped myself in the stomach. Thankfully, it didn’t jiggle. “Another one ripped my fucking guts out, before I could kill it. That’s not even the first time I’ve been disemboweled this week!”

He blinked rapidly, focused on me again. “I . . . uh . . .” Mr. Sada was no good under pressure. Especially when he was so obviously in fear of his life.

I can honestly say that I don’t know what I’d been planning. Murder maybe. Exile. Seeing him there, curling in on himself, eyes wide and child-like, his fucking fine food and toys scattered about the place, it took a lot of steam out of my boiler. He needed to go, that much was certain. But was I really going to toss this man-child into the wilderness to starve, or gut him while he lay here, defenseless?

Dude was fucking lucky. Any other person would be gone by now. And that was saying something because it hadn’t even been a week yet. How someone could fuck up so hard, so fast, was beyond me.

A rogue thought drifted around the edges. Maybe I could have Hobb do it. No, fuck. I threw the thought aside. This was major moral shit. If anyone was going to do it, it would have to be me. I was the most biased judge on his side. If I killed him, it would mean he had deserved it.

“Your idiot move of allowing the Sleem to live here led to me nearly getting killed for about an hour straight while I did some impromptu exploration of the underground base. Big complex, by the way, they were totally doing shady weapons research down there back in the day.” I stopped to take a breath and realized I had him enraptured. He was listening to every word I said, finally.

“And then today, getting food for everyone, I was shot several times, had to kill three men from our own world, and got ripped up by crazy wingless wasps the size of tigers.” I waved a hand at his wall clock, above the bedroom door. “It’s not even nine AM yet!”

Mr. Sada was subdued, somewhat. He was still blinking rapidly, and I realized he was crying as he took a big phlegmy sniff. “I don’t belong here, Tyson. This isn’t my world. I just want everything to go back to how it used to be.”

I tossed him the pack of tissues from his cocaine desk.

“That world is gone for fucking forever. Not your fault. Sure as hell not mine. We have to change. Adapt. Evolve. We have to think, Mr. Sada. We have to make things fucking work. And we have to think about not just ourselves, but everybody.”

I paused. His tears were flowing harder now, and he was audibly gasping.

“Look, Mr. Sada. I’ve been getting ripped apart and put back together every day since this shitstorm started. You’re right. This isn’t your world. You couldn’t survive what I’ve been surviving. You can’t do what I do to keep this place going. That matters more than the concept of ownership. Just because you used to own this place before BuyMort, does not mean you can do whatever you like. Sometimes doing whatever you like can get you, or others, killed. For fucks sake man, you need to grow the fuck up. Because if you don’t, you are going to have to leave. I don’t owe you anything. Not anymore.”

I waited a minute, maybe two, as he got his blubbering under control, pulling at tissues and wiping his eyes and nose. He looked up at me, his face a mirror of the man who’d saved me so long ago. A man who didn’t belong here.

“I’m sorry, alright? I went broke again last night and it scared me.”

“I get that, I really do,” I started, my voice softening. “I just wish you had talked to me about it, before you ruined our spider ranch.”

He wilted. “I left a bunch of them.”

I tried to be gentle with him. I felt sorry for him, for who he was and the circumstances he’d been put in. The guy was way over his head, and this new world clearly didn’t favor his type. But I just couldn't. I was angry. I was put into worse circumstances than him and I was putting myself out there on the front line every day to make things work.

“What you did was fuck up the market, Mr. Sada,” I screamed. “You sold a bunch of spiders and eggs when the plan was to sell just the silk. Now the silk market is fucked, cause a bunch of other affiliates bought your spiders and eggs, and are now running their own ranches and will be selling their own silk. You shorted our futures.”

Tears began to flow again. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“I know. But you never think to ask or even consider extending trust to me at all. I’ve been killing myself to keep you in cocaine and lobster, and it’s starting to feel like the suicidal behavior it most assuredly is.” I shook my head and leaned back in the chair. “It’s getting really difficult to keep you rich and alive, Mr. Sada. You keep tripping me up.”

In the silence that followed, I pulled up the affiliate page and followed the links to the price of silk.

It was stabilizing, finally. Still significantly lower than it had been, but it had gone back to a decent price range. “Alright, here’s my take on it. You and I are not boss and employee anymore. We’re partners. I need to acknowledge that I fucked up here too. I should have told you about Spider City and my plans for it. That was me not trusting you, which I need to face up to. That was my fuck up.” I looked him in the eye. “We agreed to be partners, and I didn’t trust you.”

Mr. Sada blinked as I finished. He looked between me and his TV screen a few times before he stared at the bed hard. “And I fucked up by selling so many of our producers.”

I cocked my head at him. “I would argue you probably should have run it past me first, as an act of trust and equality, but yes also that.”

His lips pursed again, and he shook his head. “No offense, Tyson, but I know you hate my guts.” I winced, but he continued. “No, really. I get it. People hate the rich just for being rich. It’s not like it was my fault I’m better at making money than most others. It’s a skill set. We’re all told at a young age how the world works, it’s not my fuckin fault most people didn’t listen.”

With a short sigh, I raised a hand to stop him.

“I don’t hate you, Mr. Sada,” I said with a tiny shrug. “To be fair, that is a recent development. I never hated you for being rich, I hated you for being callous and self-centered.” He frowned and met my gaze and I continued. “And I kind of hated you for tapping that ring on everything. Super annoying. But that’s basically it, man. You saved my life, and I’ve never forgotten that. In a way, that makes this all so much worse. Because people keep telling me that I need to get rid of you, and if I really honestly hated you, I would have done that already. I want this to work. I really want you to stop trying so hard to get us all killed. Me in particular. Just real talk, it’s getting old. I want so hard to save you.”

Mr. Sada stared at me for a few minutes after I finished talking. He finally sighed and rubbed his forehead. “I gotta lay off the coke, huh?”

“Well, shit. I dunno. I’ve had to lay off Phyllis’ good weed. Mostly.” I shrugged at him. “Mostly what I need is for you to start acting like we’re a team. And in the interest of acting like a team, I have really good news for you.”

He looked up, his features brightening somewhat.

“I found a spaceship for you. It’s underground, and once we get it all fixed up, it's all yours.” I finished my statement with a clap. He jumped.

“What do you mean fixed up?” Mr. Sada always made a specific face right before he started whining, and he was making it then.

I waved off his complaints. “It got damaged in the Sleem fight, but with a functional affiliate, which I’m working really hard to get set up, we can pay for repairs and upgrades easily. The Sleem keep it kind of spare and disgusting, so we’ve got some work to do. But it’s a ship! It’s a free ship, just for you. Even big enough to live on it and go on zany adventures, all by yourself.”

He smiled, just a little. “How big is it?”

My eyes widened and I puffed out my cheeks in thought. “Uhh. I didn’t measure it, but big. There’s this giant hangar down there. That ship has to be at least the size of this house, though.”

His smile grew. “What color is it?”

“Oh. Uhh. It was really dark, but I think it’s dark green. It can teleport too, you’ll love it.” I waved a hand dismissively, and his smile grew.

“Okay, that sounds pretty good. You found that for me?” His eyes peaked hopefully, looking up at me.

“Yeah, Mr. Sada. I found it, and immediately thought of you. The Sleem were full of shit, they never needed to repair it, they just wanted to use our base as their base. Hide in plain sight from folks like the Dearth Conglomerate.” I shrugged at him. “They were trying to use you.”

His chin stuck out and he glared at the bed.

“Don’t worry, I’m going back down there today to clear the rest of 'em out. Maybe even start using the base for something.” I paused until he looked up at me. “But I’m gonna have to ask you for some morties to do all that.”

His glare lightened and he chewed on the inside of his cheek. “I know, I know. I shouldn’t have sold all those spiders and eggs.” He pressed a hand to his forehead. “How much you need?”

“Millions. I’m trying to get this place up and running, which takes money for construction. Had to hire more people, which ups our food bill. We’re already paying close to half a mill for a couple days’ worth of everyone eating. And that’s IF the nice old hippies up the road manage to keep their heads. We really should get our own growing operation set up here. Maybe some livestock even.” I paused to take a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “And that’s not including the Sleem. I need some kind of large scale infestation management device, and the ones I saw before were expensive. Like hundreds of millions expensive.”

He flinched at that. “Well, I hope you’re not planning to spend everything.”

I shook my head. “Mr. Sada, I might need to. That forest was supposed to be an income stream. Not a single big sale. We have to get it repaired and get someone to be our spider rancher. Keep them healthy and cared for, so we can get back to selling silk. Which won’t be as much of a gold mine as it was before, but the market seems relatively stable if your grenade only did this much damage to it, so it’ll be something.”

Mr. Sada’s flinching face became permanent. “Plus my spaceship repairs and upgrades. That doesn’t sound like it would be enough for a long time.”

I nodded. “Might not be. There’s a chance we can use the Sleem in our basement to make money. Rayna says it's not uncommon, if you can contain them. Supposedly there’s a market for their corpses.”

Mr. Sada shrugged. “Makes sense, there’s a really thriving one for human bodies right now.”

It was my turn to wince. “They’re eating us, aren’t they?”

His eyebrows rose and he barked a short laugh. “Not as much as you might think, but yes. It’s primarily for experimentation. All the established affiliates want to learn as much as possible about us surviving Nu-Earthers, and there’s a shitload of affiliates.” He took a long, shaky breath and nodded up at me. “I am sorry for the spiders, Tyson, and I’m gonna lay off the coke. Been meaning to anyway. Do your shopping, let me know what the affiliate needs. I’ll do my part.”

I nodded at him. “And I’ll keep you looped in. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you before.”

“Thank you, s-“ he stopped. “Thank you, Tyson.”

My eyes narrowed, but I nodded and extended my hand. “Partners?”

Mr. Sada nodded, his expression serious. “Partners.” We shook on it.

“Alright, good. I gotta run, lots to do.” I turned back to the windowsill and retrieved the bottles of water, pressing one into his hands. “Don’t forget to hydrate.”

I grabbed my psychic phone out of my pocket but turned back before I hit the button to awaken it.

“Hey, Mr. Sada.” When he looked up, I continued. “There’s a hobb barbeque going on right now, I think it’s something they do frequently, if meat is available. You should go. Meet some of the new people, you might like ‘em.”

He froze, and then shook his head. “I think I’m gonna practice some social distancing, actually. It’s probably better if people don’t see or hear from me for a while. Might stop them from telling you to get rid of me. I dunno.”

“Well. It’s there if you want. Might do you some good to get out. Talk to some people.” I offered him a small smile and turned to leave. “You’re safe in here. Don’t worry.”

On the walk down the hallway, I called Rayna. The psychic deity in my phone was getting easier and easier to ignore. I was barely horrified by him anymore. When the tall woman answered, I could see she was at the barbeque. Ordo was behind her, poking at a bit of yarsp meat on the grill. “Yeah boss?”

“Hey, I talked to Mr. Sada. We’re good to go with the Sleem hunt today, so let’s get prepped for that.” I trotted down the stairs and grabbed my gear, tucking the helmet under my arm as I spoke.

“Yeah boss. You want to kill them, or try to contain?” She tore a chunk out of a well seared chunk of yarsp meat and chewed as she waited for me to answer.

I frowned. She had said it was a risk, but we were pretty fucked without an income stream, so I nodded and stopped at the basement door. “Contain. I have to deal with our visitor, and then run and pick up our new Knowles team, they’re going to get us up and running on the water and food front.”

“Mmm, boss.” She hurriedly swallowed her food. “Yarsps at the walls this morning. Small group, but more always come next time. Ravens sold bodies before we could do anything.”

I raised my eyebrows and sighed. Lee’s compound was closer to the national forest than we were. They seemed to be getting swarmed worse and worse each day, so I expected that would happen to us as well. “Alright. We’ll get some guns for the walls. Don’t worry about the ravens, I’ll talk to them so we can start harvesting the yarsps for ourselves.” She nodded, and I hung up.

Then I put my helmet back on, unlocked the basement door, and went down to talk to our new friend from the local militia.