In an odd reverse of roles, Nick white-boarded the op while I mostly sat and listened. Not that the plan was perfect, exactly, but we had a familiar cadence when we brainstormed to solve a problem. So, barring any massive oversights, I held my silence while the others threw bristling glares full of barely disguised hostility.

I wasn’t particularly worried. Zero-team lived up to their name. Other than Nick, most of them were a few levels shy of level ten, and nothing about their mix of inexperience and conflicting sense of entitlement impressed me. Keith—the mage who’d nearly had his Adam’s apple relocated—could barely look at me.

He’d fold like an eight high when the chips were down. If he even made it that far.

It was difficult to understand why the Order bothered with Users of this caliber. They obviously cared about strength and power more than anything else. Yet they assigned a member of the court to daycare duty. Power structures were always uneven. The exact reason hierarchies exist. No matter how good you are at something, someone is always better. But the dichotomy between these Users and Cameron—who they’d willingly thrown away—was significant.

The plan itself was quiet. Discrete. Several teams were deploying at the tower in Region 5. The other, more experienced teams would start higher up. We’d be working our way up the lower levels, clearing the main path. But the real meat and potatoes were the ripples. Nick described them as tiny fractures within the dungeon, small undeveloped sections heavy with magic. They were hidden, but easy enough to identify if you knew how to look. And while they loosely followed the same basic logic as the tower itself—increasing in difficulty the higher we climbed—the chances of an aberration, loot and monsters inappropriate to the levels increased.

Our target within the ripples were planners. Tiny, near-transparent entities that shifted form, only identifiable by a pale white glow, apparently tasked with construction and maintenance on the chambers within the tower. Nick had a dimensional satchel that could store, in his words, a “Fuck-ton” of them.

Considering that they repaired damage to the chambers and regenerating monsters, I had a strong suspicion about what Hastur wanted them for.

For an Order of Parcae operation, it was oddly tame. They didn’t schedule us to kill Users or rip-off someone’s inventory. There wasn’t even a kidnapping to speak of. Perhaps because it was also Zero-team’s first official mission.

“Hold up.” Nick stared toward the doorway, then back to the small group, lounging on a series of stools and leather fold out chairs. “Give me a second. Review your notes—especially if you’re on the four-man. If you’re not—don’t distract the people who are. The game starts here, people.” He pointed to his head and walked towards the door.

A small burble of hushed conversation began as Nick walked away, reminding me of countless classrooms when the teacher was absent.

I ignored them. There was a man of average height waiting by the door for Nick, but in Nick’s presence, he looked completely diminutive. It wasn’t just the contrast. He was almost cowering. His long auburn hair was glued to his face like he’d just gotten out of the shower, and he made futile looking gestures. When he looked back towards me, his expression seemed to crack, desperation growing by the second.

Holy shit.

It was the guy with the crossbow in the tunnel. The guy who killed Jinny. And Nick was just there, talking to him. There was nothing in his body language that reflected he knew who the fuck this guy was.

Crossbow guy said something heated.

Nick offered a lazy stretch.

It was like they were having two different conversations. Only when he stretched behind his back, his hand clamped down on his arm hard enough to imprint the flesh—

Someone tapped me. Keith had apparently taken the intermission as an opportunity to move closer. I dismissed him as a threat almost immediately. There were entire beads of sweat dripping down his forehead in a stream.

“Hey man.” He said.

Hey man?

“Can I help you?”

“Look… uh. I’m bad with conflict. Terrible, actually. So this is really hard for me.” Keith trailed off.

I smiled at him. “I can bring my dog out. If you need an emotional support animal.”

“No no. No. Not trying to be rude—would love to meet your dog sometime.” Keith laughed and rubbed his neck. “But uh, more of a cat person myself.”

“Pity.” I was tempted to take it further, but Keith already looked ready to jump out of his skin. Any more and he was likely to go screaming and running out the door. I let my attention lapse and returned to the diagram on the whiteboard. “What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything, necessarily.” Keith pushed his glasses up his nose. “But since we’re going to be on a team together and all, I just wanna check. I do anything to offend you?”

I cocked my head. “Other than attacking me on sight?”

“Yeah. Awkward, sorry about that.” Keith struggled to continue, like he was wringing the words from stone. “but, like, I wasn’t the only one.”

“That’s true.”

“And uh, they got off kind of easy. Where I got the sense that we were a few complex analogue inputs away from a Mortal Kombat finisher.” His hand went subconsciously to his throat. “Yeah.” Keith said, in a voice that almost sounded disappointed with himself. “I just—I wanna know, are we cool? I didn’t do something to you, or piss you off somehow more than the others during the fight? Because if I did, I’m—“

“You always talk this much?” I asked.

“He does.” Halima said. She stared straight ahead at the corner of the room. Only her head was visible. The rest of her was submerged in a tub of ice on the floor, wedged between two stools. I’d heard of athletes doing something similar. One hell of a pre-game ritual.

In the short time we’d spoken, I’d already gleaned everything from Keith I needed. First, he was a punching bag. Had been for a long time, probably before the dome. He was scared of the team, scared of the man at the door, and unsurprisingly, scared of me. Nick might be the only person in the base he wasn’t scared of. And like any well-worn punching bag, he already knew this sort of approach wouldn’t work—anyone dead set on fucking your shit up is unlikely to change their mind if you ask them nicely. But defusing the tension between us wasn’t the point. He was testing the waters. Checking to see if I was holding a grudge, and if he’d needed to watch out for me in the mission.

I sighed. Offering Keith a little reassurance wouldn’t hurt, if it meant he stayed focused on the mission. “They were about to rush me. If our noble Ceaseless Knight hadn’t interfered, they would have. I just needed to give them a reason to think twice.”

Keith’s mouth quirked. “So… it wasn’t personal?”

“Yup.”

“Thanks man.” He said, oddly elated, then bumped my arm with his fist. “Oh god. Why did I do that—“

“Get your head in the game.” I snapped. “We’re deploying soon.”

“Right.” Keith focused on the whiteboard so intently, it looked as if his eyes might pop out.

“Myrddin has the right idea.” Nick returned, pointing at me with the dry erase marker.

“What was that about?” I asked, tilting my head towards the door. The bowman was gone.

Nick waved me off. “A family thing. Don’t worry about it. Now that the rest of you have had time to ruminate….” He uncapped the marker. “Let’s go over this one more time.”