“What I need is for someone to tell me the truth.”

I switched targets at the last second.

My body boiled under the strain, most of the mana I’d regenerated draining away.

All at once, I understood Keith in a way I’d never truly understood anyone. Fully grasped every neuron of his psyche, as I parsed through what made him tick, what drove him, the struggles he’d gone through and the utter absence of self-confidence, all tied to a hundred different threads that were just waiting for someone to come along and pull them.

Dodge backward.

Keith did, in the process doing what I’d pictured, rather than following the command to the letter. He leapt away from the edge and Nick’s descending blade, and stumbled a little. The movements were significantly smoother than standard-Keith, but it was clear his body couldn’t quite keep up with his mind and I needed to account for that.

Frustrated by the unexpected resistance, Nick roared and charged at Keith, sword stabbing out towards his chest.

Redirect his momentum

Keith grabbed Nick’s sword arm and pivoted, sending him stumbling awkwardly across the bluffs.

Nick reeled back a few steps, then leaned and spit, his face dark. The surrounding aura swelled out like crimson wings. I’d hoped that Keith’s sudden shift would snap Nick out of the rage, or at the very least, confuse him enough to contravene his tunnel-vision, but it wasn’t working. If anything, the sudden difficulty made him more motivated to follow through.

As Keith didn’t have the baked-in experience of Audrey or Talia, I micro-tasked, puppeting him through a series of short direct commands and together, we evaded Nick’s onslaught.

But this was just delaying the inevitable. Spinning a stalemate into a loss.

I needed to separate them. The question was how.

Ideas cycled through my mind until I landed on one. Something dangerous that I’d never consider in less dire circumstances, but all I could come up with on the fly.

I directed Keith to run a wide circle across the bluffs. As Nick chased after him, I scrambled towards the ledge and looked down, mind running through several calculations. There was nothing but ocean below, most of the rocks on the far left side.

With a fragment of a plan, I sent Keith the silver bullet.

Keith ran to the far end of the cliff, then threw his hands in the air and shouted a name.

“JINNY.”

Nick halted dead in his tracks.

I false-started, stopping to watch. All I’d done was send Keith a redacted image of Jinny’s death, along with instructions to shout her name. But now, Keith was continuing on his own. “That was her name, wasn’t it?” He asked breathlessly, withdrawing the wand from his inventory. “And this was hers right?”

Nick hesitated, color gone from his face.

“And you gave it to me because you feel like tainting her memory is the only way to get through it. Because you know she wouldn’t want you to do this. You’re a good guy, with a good heart. That’s why she loved you.”

I could have slammed a sledgehammer into Nick’s gut to less devastating effect.

His face scrunched up, his teeth clenching. “I don’t want to be the good guy. The guy who gets stepped on, fucked with, and fucked up because he’s not mean enough. I’m tired of being the good guy.”

Again, Keith shook his head, speaking entirely of his own volition. “We can’t help what we are. At our core. We can hide it. Disguise it. Push it so deep it might even take an entire lifetime for it to resurface. But you are what you are. Nature always wins over nurture, in the end.”

Nick shook his head several times, then set his teeth. He raised his sword arm.

Too slow.

I crouched low and took off like a rocket, supercharged Agility flinging me forward, eyes fixed on my target—Nick’s torso.

He saw me coming out of the corner of his eye and shifted suddenly, trying to alter his positioning to intercept me. But I was too quick. I snared his torso with both arms and let the rest of my weight slam into him.

Nick grunted, swearing up a storm as I pushed him back. Then the ground disappeared beneath us, and his eyes widened in realization.

Doing this for your own good, Nick.

Now in free fall, we plummeted towards the water. Audrey’s vines snagged on a few outcroppings and slowed the fall. My feet hit the water and Nick plummeted past me, leaving a trail of bubbles in his wake.

Shit. His armor.

I swam straight down, tearing through the water until I caught up. His eyes were open and urgent but he wasn’t moving, arms spread out at his side. Probably still stunned from the impact. I tore off the Operator’s belt and pulled it tight around his waist. Immediately, his direction reversed, and with urging he shot upwards, and I kept a hold on the belt, riding the buoyancy up to the surface.

We barely breached the surface before a heavy gauntlet struck me across the temple. I spun in a mess of bubbles and fury, struggling to right myself, ready to give as good as I got.

When I burst through again, though, I’d misread the aggression. He flailed in a panic, the top section of his armor pulled down by gravity, constantly threatening to upend him as he slapped at the water. Given what he’d almost done, it tempted the spiteful part of me to let him flail for a while.

I spotted Keith.

A dark shadow flitted beneath us. Something brushed my leg, too quick to make out.

Given that—whatever it was—was out here, on the outskirts of the dungeon floor proper, I wasn’t overly worried, but I knew better than to tempt fate. I glanced over my shoulder, and spotted a sandy bank a short distance away, hidden in the alcove of the bluffs.

Near-decade old rescue and CPR lessons came back to me piecemeal, and I did my best to follow what I could remember, starting with not approaching a drowning person from the front. Instead, I treaded water until I was behind Nick, and grabbed him roughly under the arms.

Crack

The back of Nick’s head smashed against my mask with enough force to stun me and nearly loosen my grip.

“Fucker! Stop! There’s something in the water—”

THUNK

This time, when Nick curled inward and threw his head back, I was ready for it. I tucked my chin, and the back of his head bounced painfully off the stable upper-section of my mask. He stopped struggling, and I tightened my hold, propelling us towards the sandbank with haphazard kicks.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the shadow. It was bigger than I’d originally thought.

“Audrey. Can you swim?”

“Nooooo.” My summon’s mental voice sounded utterly miserable, and I realized that from where she clung to my back, her head was probably well below the surface.

“Can you at least breathe?” I asked, monitoring the circling shadow. Now that Nick seemed to be panicking less—maybe he’d finally realized I wasn’t actively trying to drown him—I reached back, kicking and treading with one arm. Faster, but not fast enough.

Audrey sent back a complex reply, a composite of words and images. I gathered she didn’t need to breathe regularly, though being underwater was unpleasant, and if we submerged her for too long, it would kill her.

I felt bad for doing it—between Miles, the Crimson Nosferatu, and the Grimelings, this outing had been stressful on my summons—but I sent Audrey a picture of a net, and an image of her zipping towards a generic shark and wrapping it up.

Her response was reticent. “If I catch it…”

“Of course. Dig in. Assuming you can even eat that much, from the size it’s probably hundreds of pounds—”

The dark shadow made a second pass, and there was a tangible relief as the vines released from my shoulder. As the shadow retreated, a much smaller shadow followed it.

Good, Audrey snagged it. Assuming she could distract whatever it was for even a few minutes, we were probably in the clear. I’d need to compensate her later, especially if whatever was out there inevitably got the better of her. Something fancy. Sushi, maybe.

As soon as there was enough sand underneath us to stand on, Nick pushed me away. I let him go, crawling up onto the sandbar and heaving for breath.

shrieked. I rolled away, just as Nick buried a massive knife into my imprint in the sand. His aura returned full-force, spite radiating from it.

“Are you insane?” I scrambled backward, trying to keep away from him as he advanced. Now that the crisis was over, a dark curtain of anger descended over me. But Nick wasn’t listening. I wasn’t even sure if he was hearing me. He stomped across the sandbar like a malevolent automaton, his eyes dead, nothing left of him but rage.

I’d been more or less in hiding since the transposition started. Maybe even before that, if I was being honest. It’d kept me alive. Kept my family safe. But I was tired of hiding.

I took the mask off.