“Pack your bags and let’s get out of here,” I declare, jamming my portable spear through a belt loop.

  Sadie looks around the room. “Bags? We’re we supposed to be carrying bags?”

  “No, I mean let’s get ready to move on.”

  “Oh,” she says, scratching between Baco’s still-stuffed ears. “Was that supposed to be a joke or something?”

  “It was more like turn of phrase. Not like a joke. I guess.”

  “That’s better. Because it wasn’t very funny.”

  “I didn’t realize I was supposed to provide you entertainment. If I said, ‘Let’s get kraken’, would that be better? Kraken. You know. The giant sea monster.”

  She looks at me, completely expressionless, nodding. “So much better,” she drawls.

  Satyrs clearly don’t understand humor. She is not my target audience.

  “I think the system sets challenges in our way to deter us, or force us to train,” I say, picking my way over crispy crawlers to get across the room. “If we see two paths, we should take the more difficult one. That means things are going to get tougher. They have to for us to get out of here.”

  “It makes sense in an unconventional way,” she nods, following me. “Go where the door is locked, because it must be hiding something important.”

  “Exactly. I was thinking the hand signals are great,” I continue, heading through a hall that’s way larger in diameter that what we’ve been through. A moving van could fit here. “But we may need some more advanced tactics as the monsters get tougher.”

  “Right,” she says. “That way you’re not all, ‘Ow, my leg, I can’t walk, oh no, save me, Sadie.’”

  I stop and turn. “I never said, ‘Save me, Sadie.’”

  “See? Satyrs do have a sense of humor.”

  I open my mouth to figure some comeback, but I stop. I look at her horizontal pupils. “Sadie. I never said that.”

  One of her eyebrows goes up. “You didn’t?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Can you hear me when I think at you?

  No reaction.

  “Sadie, can you hear me thinking?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

  She grabs my shoulder and pulls me down until we’re eye to eye, puts warm hands on my cheeks and closes her eyes.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

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  “Shh. I’m thinking at you really hard. Hear anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  She lets go of my face. “Maybe you’re right then, and we do need some more hand signals.”

  Somehow, sometimes, we have a connection. We didn’t level up in telepathy or anything, but similar to the way I can feel when one of them gets wounded, we seem to be a little intertwined.

  We get to a large egg-shaped chamber with four passages leading out of it. I experiment jogging up each way and heading back. No changes, no weird magical replacements.

  “Can we make some plans before our next fight?” she asks.

  “Plans? Why? We’ve been getting stronger and better each step.”

  “Because what if when we get stronger, the other side is getting stronger than stronger?”

  “You throw fire, Baco charges, I use the spear. It’s a good plan and it works.”

  We come to a large chamber with walls covered in what I could only guess was seaweed. She folds her arms and stops walking.

  “You want some sort of combat guidance?” I ask.

  Sadie seems eager to learn some combat tactics. Baco is peeing on a rock. I’m pretty sure everything we work out together will involve him charging into the opponent and goring, because I’m not sure we can teach him anything else yet. Yet.

  I’m not a football guy who makes complicated plays. But if she feels more confident with some sort of structure, I can make up something super-fast, just to give her that confidence. They hammer the point home in every dangerous situation in every survival show: hesitation is deadly. I can make some commands for her and Baco and then everyone is happy. I take the chalk and draw diagrams on the floor. I don’t think we need it, but I have to have a tight team.

  “Can you read?” I ask, before things get too complicated.

  “Words and music,” she answers. That gives her more skills than most of my bandmates ever had.

  I draw a fanged face and then a line leading up to it and splitting. “So, if I call for maneuver Y, we each go different directions, splitting around the monster. Since I throw right-handed, you go left so I have clearance in case it’s tight. Baco will charge up the middle.”

  She looks at the not-football diagram. “Why?”

  “Yes.”

  She shakes her head. “Why is it called that?”

  “Because it looks like a Y. Easy to remember.”

  “No,” She points at the figure. “That’s an upsilon.”

  Yes, she can read. Greek. Things may be a little more complicated than I thought. I know a few Greek letters, and only because of guys I know who were in fraternities. I’m taking Greek 1 next semester, so I can read myths in original text, but I’m not intimate with it yet.

  Next semester.

  What would make me think there’s a next semester? If I’m going to learn Greek, it’s probably going to happen here, not in a class or lecture hall. I’m good at school. It has clear goals, and monsters don’t try to eat your leg. I’ll teach her tactics, she’ll teach me Greek. Wait…

  “Sadie, what languages can you speak?”

  “Never thought about it,” she says. “A few.”

  “I heard you speak to the Satyr. That was another language.”

  “Ellinika.”

  “Where I come from, we call that Greek. At least I think that’s what you were speaking. And what do you call this language that we’re speaking right now?”

  “System Language.”

  Now I have to wonder, if I only knew Japanese, would she speak Japanese? Or, more correctly, would I hear it in my own language? There seems to be some sort of translation module in play.

  “Do you know the System alphabet?”

  She bites her bottom lip. “I don’t think so.”

  Somewhere on the edge of magic, this makes sense. I’m not sure my non-magical way of thinking will be able to make sense of it. I have to accept that she can read what I call Greek and speak what I call English. And maybe guitar tabs.

  “Upsilon it is,” I say. “If I yell ‘Upsilon’…”

  “I run left around the target and attack from there. You go the other way, Baco runs up the middle. Like the letter.”

  Maybe this will work after all.

  “If I say Zeta?” I ask.

  She cups her hand in her chin. “I run away from you, diagonally back and toward the target and attack them from the side.”

  Like a giant Z. Perfect. We have easy attack plans and she feels like we’re coordinated. You don’t go on stage without at least some practice, and now at least we have chord charts, which is more prepared than 80% of the gigs I’ve played.

  “If I yell Pi?”

  “That means you want dessert.” She pokes me. “Told you Satyrs have a sense of humor.”