This was the part she hadn’t lived.

  Up to this point, everything had been about tackling the problems Penelope knew about. The only thing she knew for certain about the fourth floor was that the lightning strikes in the combat zones could wipe out an entire party. There were ways to protect the teams, but the monsters on the floor were immune to the electricity. If the team walked into a square at the wrong time, they wouldn’t be able to group up. And while there were caves in the squares that they could take shelter, there was nothing stopping the monsters from rushing them. Without a way to retreat, eventually, any team stuck in a cave would be whittled down and eliminated.

  “I don’t like it.” Patrick grumbled from his seat in the conference room. The balding man eyed the orange Elf on the other side of the glass. “We’ve been doing this for two months and he wants to swoop in and take over? What does he know about any of this?”

  “We can’t afford to fight a war in the Dungeon and with the locals.” Ula leaned back in her chair. The Hispanic grandmother looked even more tired than usual. The strain of the third-floor boss fight and constant mediating was wearing on her. Despite the extra stress, her skin had lost a few wrinkles instead of gaining more. The handful of gray hairs woven in random places present when they’d first been summoned were gone as well.

  Penelope looked around the room as she thought about the changes in each person. Riva had always looked much younger than fifty-four. Her jet-black hair fell just below her ears and her skin was pale and smooth. She was someone who already hadn’t aged like she should have, so there wasn’t a change to notice in her.

  Archer Storey was the only other person in his fifties, though he was sitting at fifty-one. The Tank had a full head of brown hair without a hint of gray, which was a contrast to Patrick, who was six years younger, almost fully gray and balding. But even Patrick had more red mixed in with the gray and his bald spots weren’t as large as they’d been.

  The others weren’t showing any signs of rejuvenation, though for those under forty, there wasn’t going to be a lot of change. Mostly they weren’t going to age much at all during the five years they were trapped under the dome. For those in their forties and fifties, they would slowly rejuvenate to how they’d been when they were younger, giving them extra years once the system was gone and they began to age normally again.

  “He wants us to wait a week so he can deliberate with his bosses!” Patrick slammed his fist on the table. “A week! He’s asking for those things to get out by taking a week off the countdown!”

  “We had ten extra days on the last floor.” Ula tilted her head. “We’ve got seventy-five days to finish the next floor. Even with giving him a week, that gives us plenty of extra time if we do two squares a day…” She motioned at the room. “And we’ve got the teams to do that.”

  “That’s…” Patrick folded his arms across his chest and huffed. Letting his displeasure be felt by everyone instead of finishing his sentence.

  “Cirdor is open to sending a team down there to assess the floor and give feedback to the surface.” Penelope held up her left arm. “He gave me one of these and asked me to lead a team to see what we’re up against.”

  “Why’d he give you something like that?” Frederica looked across the table at Penelope. “What makes you so special?”

  “You know how some people are able to get into some of the buildings, but most people can’t?” Penelope swallowed. “Cirdor explained that it’s because we have a little Elf blood in us. The reason I can get in here is because I have something inside me that is connected to their leadership.”

  “Inside you, but not in your blood.” Jeru chuckled.

  Shut up. Penelope did her best to ignore the blue man floating over the table. She tapped the wrist pad with her fingers. “That thing inside me is what lets me connect to this specific wrist pad. There are ones that are generic that he’s going to acquire for everyone in this room so we can communicate easier, but for now, I’m probably the only person between all of us and those in their colony who can use this specific device.”

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  Silence fell over them as they thought about what she’d said.

  “You have to have a pretty important ancestor.” Circe looked at the woman on her right. “Elves can live for a long time; do you think they’re still alive?”

  “I have no clue.” Penelope looked down at her hands. “That’s not something we have time to think about now. Maybe once we beat the Demon at the bottom of the Dungeon, we can look into our lineages and see what family we might have out there in the universe, but for right now, we need to focus on the problem in front of us, the fourth floor.”

  “You seriously don’t want to know if you have a great-daddy Elf ancestor out there?” Circe looked around the room. “Aren’t any of you curious?”

  “By the time we got out of our meeting on the first day, all the buildings had been unlocked.” Eldri shrugged as she looked at the young brunette. “None of us had a chance to see if we were the ones who could get into a building.”

  “But there had to be a reason that we were all brought here. Like there had to be something special about each one of us for us to get brought here.” Circe’s voice rose as she looked around the table at the others. “Is no one curious why that is?”

  Do I tell her we’re from the future? Penelope glanced at the blue Elf lounging on the table. Do I tell her we were about to die?

  “They’re going to see the date the moment they get a wrist pad.” Jeru nodded slowly. “Telling them now won’t give anything away that they’re not going to learn in the next week.”

  Circe never said anything in any of the previous loops. Penelope closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “She was also kept busy every day too.” Jeru clicked his tongue. “And while there is a setting to synchronize with the date on Earth, it should be showing the date based on the calendar on the Elf Homeworld.”

  Penelope opened her eyes. Everyone was talking at once in small groups. Each one discussing theories about why they were the specific ones who were brought to this world.

  What does telling them we’re in the past do? Penelope pulled her red ponytail over her shoulder and ran her fingers through it.

  “Honestly? Not much. Knowing you’re in the past only makes everyone seem even more like ‘chosen ones’.” Jeru chuckled. “Telling them that they were saved from death makes it a lot more difficult to prove. But you could at least have them thinking about something else for a while.”

  Won’t it be bad if the Demons figure out that we’re from the future?

  “Unless you plan on keeping EVERYONE from getting a pad AND have a way to isolate them from interacting with the locals, it’s something that’s going to happen eventually.” Jeru shrugged. “It hasn’t collapsed the loop yet. The presence of the system in a world that didn’t have one should signal to the Demon that what I did was a desperate attempt to contain them. Sure, we’re winning, but you have no idea what’s waiting on the last floor.”

  Considering everything kept getting stronger the deeper they went and the numbers kept increasing, Penelope had a good idea of just how powerful the Demon’s true invasion force was.

  The noise of all the conversations rattled her nerves. She knew that the declaration was going to be met with a lot of questions. Questions she had answers to but couldn’t prove. Questions that she couldn’t give the answer to because it would eventually destroy everything once it got back to whoever was in charge at the bottom of the Dungeon.

  “Pen.” Circe gripped Penelope’s arm. “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  “I don’t…” Her heart was beating in her ears. She’d done her best not to outright lie to people, to find ways to reframe the truth so she told them what they needed to know without telling them too much. The safe play would be to wait until someone figured it out on their own. But there was no way the people in this room would believe that she had the information at her fingertips and hadn’t found it. Then the question would become why she hadn’t said anything.

  Both options would raise questions, but putting it out there now would save her from having to explain why she kept it to herself.

  “Why we’re…” Penelope cleared her throat, but people were still talking too loud to hear her.

  “HEY!” Circe stood up out of her chair and banged on the table with her fist. “PEN HAS SOMETHING TO SAY!”

  Penelope held up her wrist and tapped the pad. “This thing says it’s November 23rd…” She swallowed.

  “So?” Frederica snorted. “We lost a week when that Elf brought us here? Big deal.”

  “Not a week.” Penelope cleared her throat. “It says the year is 2020.”

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