Reeve rolled her shoulders as she walked, wishing she could put down her naginata, even if for just a few minutes, but not trusting the Martyr Difficulty world or her luck. Dusk walked to her right, their shoulders nearly touching, a partially cast defensive spell held ready in the half-elf’s hands.

“It’s just so hard,” Reeve said quietly, “to take them anywhere.”

Dusk didn’t respond.

“Like, could we just go somewhere, once, one world, where they didn’t start a fight with a horde of gnomes?”

Dusk let out a short, nearly inaudible snort and continued her surveillance of the skeletal trees that loomed over their path.

“And, the gnomes were so predictable,” Reeve said. “It was like I could see their little, tiny attacks from a mile away.” She spat to the side. “Shooting fish in a barrel. But, with a naginata…and the fish—“

“—were gnomes,” Dusk said, “yes, I understand your macabre metaphor.”

“And it’s not just this…world they don’t get. They don’t get anything about me and my friends. Like when Devon broke up with Brit on monkachat and started going out with Millie, my mom thought I was upset that Devon’d done it on monkachat instead of in person, but I didn’t care, I was just frustrated at the time about a totally unrelated thing in-game, with this party member who was totally blowing up all our actions with NPCs. And, I mean, everyone breaks up with everyone online anyway. We’re not…,” she glanced over her shoulder, “Luddites.” Bringing her gaze back forward, she found Dusk staring at her.

“If,” the half-elf said, “you expect me to be able to provide counsel on matters of the heart, you will be disappointed. My sister and I have always been unlucky in love. We’ve felt ourselves much like the fair maidens in the parable of the serpent, the dairy cow, the goat, and the ogre.”

Reeve took a turn staring at Dusk, before returning to the source of her frustration. “Do your parents constantly embarrass you?” As soon as the last word had left her mouth, Reeve grimaced. She glanced at Dusk and found the half-elf looking back at her.

“Well, my father is a good man but was crippled when our farm horse kicked him, breaking his back, leading him toward poverty and the need to apprentice us to a mage who, evidently, made poor choices resulting in his abduction and apparent death, and my mother…there let me skip over the minor embarrassments straight to her leaving my sister and me to join a war in a distant land and, it turns out, raise an army to overthrow a relatively peaceful empire in the name of raising a new empire of questionable intent under elfin hegemony.”

Reeve rubbed the tip of her nose with the side of one finger. “Yeah, I guess we’re both dealing with some things.”

They walked in silence past a half-dozen of the lifeless trees.

Reeve’s thoughts drifted back to her own parents. “I also do not feel great about the fact that my dad dispatched so many of the gnomes with a spatula. Nobody should die like that.” With her free hand, Reeve mimed swatting at targets moving low to the ground.

“The plain-featured fighter,” Dusk said, glancing sideways at Reeve, “your mother? One must acknowledge that she was indispensable in our final escape from the gnomes’ cellar.”

Reeve walked in silence, her jaw tight.

Dusk glanced at her again. “You know of what I speak, surely?”

Reeve did not respond.

”When we reached the end of the tunnel through which we were fleeing and found it collapsed? Although you, Leaf, the dwarf, and I cleared stones from the collapse as quickly as we could, the fighter stacked them neatly and efficiently behind us just as quickly as we freed them. It was wondrous!”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“If it had not been so, we would quickly have been swamped by the product of our labor, unable to proceed further.”

“Really don’t want to talk about it.”

“And, into the bargain, the wall she built of the stones served as a barrier to those pursuing us, giving us the narrowest of margins by which we finished clearing the debris and made our escape.”

Reeve began wishing that something would appear from the darkness to attack them so that they could move on from the topic.

“It was as though the fighter had spent countless hours learning to fit together oddly shaped objects in a most efficient way.” Dusk shook her head in astonishment. “The fighter was never a stoneworker in the past, nay?”

“Did I hear someone talking about Tetris?” Walter said from a couple yards behind them.

“Not. Talking. About. It.” Reeve said through clenched teeth. A moment later, she felt humid warmth on her neck and glanced over her shoulder but flinched away from the haggard muzzle of the mule on which her parents rode.

“Could you back off a little, please,” she said to her father.

Walter leaned forward and rested his head on the mule’s neck. “I think he needs a rest,” he said.

“We have to get out of this forest before we run into any more nightmarish chimeric creatures some sicko dev thought up. Mule’s have amazing stamina, he’ll be fine.”

“Your mother and I must be pretty heavy for this poor guy, Evie. And he only has three legs.”

Reeve stopped abruptly, took a turning sidestep to avoid the mule running her over, and then grabbed its reins as her father came even with her. “It,” Reeve whispered, the sound harsh, “had four legs when you started riding it. Remember?”

Walter sheepishly pursed his lips and sat up. He stroked the mule’s neck and then turned to look back at the small wagon they’d modified to provide partial support to the mule’s one-legged hindquarters. Reeve noted Thomanji'yheri, Leaf, and Bunce fanning out behind the parked mule to protect their flanks.

“Have you checked the Party Log?” Walter said. “I named it—“

“Do. Not. Tell. Me.” Reeve looked up the path. “I don’t want to know, don’t want to get attached.” She took a long breath.

“Milford,” Walter said quietly.

Reeve hung her head. “Can we please keep going? We’ve got to catch up with Dawn and Dusk Two or we’ll never get back to—“

“Reevita,” Wanda said, “could you tell me again what Devon has to do with this? In my message, I asked her to call back, but you said she’s in this world now?”

Deflating, Reeve leaned forward and pressed her head against her mother’s muscled shoulder. “You really want to do this? Again?”

Wanda ran a gentle, calloused hand through Reeve’s short, spiky hair, which still retained some of its resinous crispness.

Reeve did not remove her face from her mother’s leather armor as she spoke. “I’m pretty positive,” she said quietly, “that the Level 4 AIs that took over Dawn and Dusk are capable of manipulating the code of the game. Maybe more than that, maybe the operating system on my VR—”

“Mija, I’ve been thinking…” Wanda said.

Reeve deflated further, her back arching and her face sliding a few inches down her mother’s armor. She waited.

“If they can do this coding thing, can they help you log out?”

Reeve rolled her head slowly from side to side about the point where it rested against her mother, who continued stroking her head. “They don’t know they’re doing it. And they’re not really doing it directly. In the game, I think the code manipulation manifests itself as a different kind of magic. And the spell Dawn cast was a hack into Devon’s VR setup. Devon’s one of the contacts in my address book, so it would make sense—“

“So, she hasn’t gotten my message,” Wanda said.

Reeve tilted her head down and stared at her mother’s leg, the mule’s side, the dirt. “No, probably not. She may not even be playing in this story mode right now. Pretty sure she isn’t.”

“But,” Walter said, turning to speak almost directly into Reeve’s ear, “we could just wait in this world until Devon comes to play, and then she can get us out?”

“No, no we can’t wait.” Reeve stood slowly and looked between her parents. “Helia, one of the other Level 4 AIs back in my story mode, has Dawn, and I think Helia wants to use Dawn’s abilities to hack her way—“

“Dawn’s way?” Walter said.

“—no, Helia’s way, out of my system onto the nex. She may be able to go to any system that’s connected to this game’s servers. Maybe anywhere on the whole nex. And she doesn’t seem nice—“

“Dawn?” Wanda said.

“—Helia!” Reeve raised her free hand in apology as Dusk, Thomanji'yheri, and Leaf turned dark looks in her direction following her shout, which had felt like a signal flare in the inky wood. “Helia,” she said quietly, “seems like she may be a malicious AI, and if she got loose on the nex, real people could get hurt. All kinds of cyber systems too. It’s happened before, even with lower-level AIs.”

Walter pointed at the sky. “Out there?”

Reeve’s eyelids dropped a quarter and a small frown formed. “Yes. Out. There. I know you two were focused on me while I was in the hospital, but you remember how my accident was part of a much bigger attack on self-driving cars? Well, attack with self-driving cars?”

Both parents’ features tightened, and they nodded hesitantly.

“That was an AI that went rogue and started crashing cars into the nearest bridge abutment, guard rail…or other cars. It used last-millisecond changes in direction that the fail-safe onboard couldn’t undo. There were tens of thousands of deaths around the world. I was relatively lucky to survive at all. There would have been a lot more deaths, but within a few seconds the guardian AIs at the auto companies sent out kill commands to redundant, separate systems in the cars. That same rogue AI caused the simultaneous grid shutdown that lasted almost a week in most places.”

”So terrible,” Wanda said, staring at her daughter with an intensity Reeve found unnerving.

“This could be worse, Mom. That happened years ago. The AIs now are much more powerful. If Helia got out…”

“Bunce,” Walter said with a rekindled spring in his voice Reeve could not at first fathom, “spotted a campfire ahead, somewhere off to the right.”

Reeve looked to where she’d last seen Bunce patrolling their flank. The honey badger was gone. She looked up the path and saw Bunce’s white stripe bobbing through the darkness as she trotted back down the path toward them. Reeve looked at her father. “You’re communicating with your companion now?”

Walter sat tall and shifted his weight from one sitz bone to the other. It also appeared to Reeve that he tried for a moment to hook one thumb into a suspender that wasn’t there, which caused him to glance down at the dirty orange robe he wore. The frustration at the missing suspender was short-lived, and he looked back at Reeve with a smile. “My non-anthophile companion and I are really gelling now.”

Reeve sighed and leaned back so that she could check on the rope that tied Walter and Wanda to each other and the mule. Cinching the knot a little tighter, she gave a pat to the mule, then her mom, then her father.

“Bunce reached Level 10,” Walter said.

“That’s great,” Reeve said without enthusiasm. “I made 16 yesterday when we stumbled into that nest of Giant Flying Spiders.” She looked at her father for a moment. “I put all my new points into Accounting.”

“Really!?” He said.

“No.”

She handed the reins back to Walter and rejoined Dusk, who stood staring alertly into the dark at the head of the party.

“You heard that?” Reeve said.

“I would be pleasantly surprised if the entirety of the forest did not,” Dusk said.

“You want me to go scout it?”

Dusk shook her head. “I would prefer if we remained together. The halfling and human become agitated in your absence.”

Reeve’s lips turned down in a resigned grimace. “They’re exhausting,” she said quietly. Waving the party forward, she and Dusk resumed their side-by-side advance.

The campfire revealed itself first as faint oranges and reds painting the underside of branches well off the right side of the path, visible as much from the stark silhouettes of trees that lay between as from the light itself. The party stopped. Reeve leaned close to Dusk and whispered, “Remember, my bet is that this version of you is going to be a little different, a little simpler in her thinking.”

“So you have said.”

“Just, let me try to talk to them first, and then we’ll see what we can do.”

Dusk nodded.

“And, Dad?” Reeve said over her shoulder.

“Yes, Hun?”

“Do not mention our Reavyr naming issue, OK?”

“No?”

“No.”

“OK.”

Hearing something in her father’s tone, Reeve watched the distant firelight and did not resume walking.

“Reeve?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“If I did mention the name thing, wouldn’t Viv come and figure out things are going wrong and help us out?”

“It’s possible, Dad. But it’s also possible that us being here on Devon’s system is entirely off Viv’s radar. We’re running a story mode, and the host player isn’t even present. I think. And if we glitch the low-level AI twins running in this world, we could be stuck here with no way to get back to my world while Helia does whatever it is she’s after, which I don’t have a good feeling about.”

Reeve watched the light and tried to estimate the distance.

“I guess I’ll just need to take your word on that,” Walter said.

“Guess so, Dad.”

Reeve counted the silhouettes of trees.

“You think the, uh, Dawn that’s in this world—you think she can cast a spell that will,” Walter’s words were slowing and Reeve didn’t know if he’d make it through the full, poorly comprehended thought, “take us back to your world? Story mode?”

“I’m hoping so. I don’t know if she’ll be able to cast the melióδin spell that our Dawn did, but the story mode our Dusk could take us to is different—I don’t know whose it is, probably a different one of my friends—so we need our Dusk and this Dawn to try to figure out how to get this Dawn to cast the spell that would take us back to my world, my story mode.” After a few seconds, Reeve looked back at Walter, who had pursed his lips. Turning back, she found Dusk looking at her.

“Your words,” the half-elf said, “are still mostly nonsense to me—“

“Not just you,” Reeve said.

“—but I may be beginning to see something of what you’re describing to exist behind the scrim of our world.”

Reeve looked at her for a while before responding. “I have a lot of questions about what that could mean. Also, when all this is over, maybe you could adopt me? You ever wanted a daughter who appreciated your ability to learn technology that, really, should be far beyond your understanding?”

“What are you saying up there, Evie?”

“Nothing, Dad.” Reeve gestured in the direction of the fire. “Let’s do this. Leaf, Thomanji'yheri, can you stay here with the pony crew?” The two nodded. Reeve looked at the honey badger. “Dad, could you try to keep Bunce here? I don’t want her to startle whoever is up ahead.”

“Sure, Evie.” Walter looked down at Bunce, who returned his gaze. Walter’s face became increasingly strained as he attempted to perform whatever communication he’d been able to establish with Bunce. Bunce stared back.

“Well, I guess they’ll be occupied for a while,” Reeve said. She and Dusk moved silently off the path.