Jack froze. He went so stiff that I could see him not breathing, right up until the moment he took a deep breath and relaxed, his shoulders dropping. In a tone as even as a good therapist would use to say, ‘and how do you feel about that?’ he said, “I am not using you. And I am not going to stab you in the back, I swear.”

  Emma’s follow-up noise was disgusted and disbelieving. “A rogue? Really? And we’re supposed to believe that you’re not a back-stabbing asshole?”

  A pained expression crossed Jack’s face.

  I took another bite of the turkey Pub sub I’d pulled out of the picnic basket: lettuce, onion, and mayo included.

  Zelda rested her paw on my knee.

  I gave her the look, the one that said, “Seriously, you beggar? You can’t possibly be hungry.”

  She gave me back the look that said, “But it smells so delicious.”

  Resigned, I pulled off a piece of turkey and handed it to her.

  She’d best not expect this treatment once we got home. Between her, Riley, and Bear, if I gave in to every pleading look, I’d starve. Under the circumstances, however, and given that this might be our last turkey sandwich before a brutal death by angry goblins, I was willing to share.

  “I took Saboteur,” Jack said. “Traps, sabotage, strategy. I’m not looking to be a bad guy just because I took a stealth class. It felt…” He looked down and then away, one hand reaching up to stroke his face, almost like an old man touching his beard.

  But then he said, “I didn’t much like being burned,” and I realized he was remembering the feeling of his melted face.

  “Burned?” Emma asked, sounding surprised.

  Oh, right. We’d never really talked about what had happened before we met. Jack had mentioned being injured, and my search for a healing potion, but not how it had happened.

  “I attacked Olivia at first sight. It was reflex, but I got my fireball bounced back on me,” Jack told her with a nod toward my shovel. She’d seen the shovel in action throughout the course of the day, so she knew it wasn’t exactly your standard garden tool anymore. “I don’t know why I didn’t die. It was…”

  I finished chewing my bite of sandwich and filled in the blank for him.

  “Horrific. It was horrific. And you didn’t die because—” I ripped off another piece of turkey, a bigger one this time, and handed it to Zelda. “—this one killed the goblins that would have killed you while I hunted for a healing potion.”

  “Yeah. That.” Jack’s chuckle was faint. “Anyway, I always play a mage. My favorite kind of character. Every game. But now that it’s real… fire hurts.”

  “Well, duh,” Emma muttered. “Shouldn’t you have picked up some fire resistance?”

  “I did. Three points already. Probably by ten in the skill, I’d be immune, at least to my own fire.”

  “So?” she demanded.

  “So other people wouldn’t be. You know what would have been worse than getting hit by my own fireball? Which, I gotta say, shittiest experience of my life to date, so when I say worse, I mean it.”

  “What would have been worse?” Emma asked, a long-suffering expression on her face.

  Jack nodded toward Zelda. “Killing the dog. No, worse, burning the dog alive. That reset button was designed for people like me. Not because I want the extra stats, although I’m not complaining about the extra stats, but because, in real life, I don’t want to burn people or dogs or even goblins. The goblins are smelly, disgusting, rancid monsters, but I hate the way they scream when they burn, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life, no matter how short it turns out to be, listening to that sound.”

  Remember what I said about thinking Jack was okay? Yeah, that again, only times two.

  He looked away, maybe ashamed of his vehemence. Or, worse, ashamed of the sentiment. I wondered if he could have told Matt and Sam that he didn’t want to listen to the sound of goblins dying? Maybe not, but I was glad he could admit it to himself.

  “I’m not worried about you backstabbing us,” I said, giving Zelda one last piece of turkey. “I do understand Emma’s concern, since she’s been there, done that, way too literally. Like the actual stab in the back part of back-stabbing.”

  I nodded in her direction, hoping she understood the sympathy in my words. I didn’t want her to feel like I was taking Jack’s side against her.

  “But I trust you. Which, given that you threw a fireball at my dog,” I mock-glared at him, “says that you have redeemed yourself. In my eyes, at least.”

  I dropped the mockery, giving him a crooked smile. “That said, let’s talk about attacking the stronghold at night, because I’m not seeing how that works out well, either. It feels like a suicide mission to me.”

  “Disrupt, deny, defeat,” Jack recited, a little too glibly.

  “Is that a quote from something?”

  “Uh, maybe? I don’t know. It’s a strategy for when you can’t win an open conflict.”

  “Degrade, destroy, deceive,” Emma added. Closing her eyes, she reached into the picnic basket, then pulled out an empty hand with a sigh. “All those D words are military jargon. Reality check: there are three of us and about five hundred of them.”

  Zelda gave a tiny woof, not exactly a bark, just a statement.

  Emma’s laugh held an undercurrent of impending hysteria. “Okay, yes, four of us.”

  “I’m not saying we storm the front gate.” Jack gestured at the picnic basket and Emma shoved it in his direction. “I know that won’t accomplish anything. But we’re almost halfway through the scenario. We’re running out of time.”

  I opened my display and looked. The countdown timer was at 40:06.

  “Forty hours left,” I objected. “That’s still a marathon, not a sprint to the finish line.”

  “Yeah, and in the past fourteen, fifteen hours, we’ve killed maybe fifty or sixty goblins. I lost count. But if we spend the next eight hours sitting on our hands, we’ll be down to thirty-two hours left and still another five hundred goblins to go. We can’t win if we wait for morning.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “I can’t believe you think we can win at all.” Emma’s eyes were on the picnic basket as Jack pulled out a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. She sighed in exasperation. “How come anything you want is a picnic food?”

  “What were you trying to get?” he asked.

  “Black coffee. The fresh pot flavor at the start of a night shift when you’ve already been on for sixteen hours.” Emma stuck her hand in the picnic basket again. She rummaged around in it, then finally pulled out her lip balm. “Cherry flavor. I hate fake cherry.”

  “Mountain Dew’s got caffeine,” Jack offered.

  I pulled the picnic basket toward me, closed my eyes and imagined a different place. Camping. By the side of a lake. Waking up in the tent, a little chilled from a long night under dense trees. The smell of woodsmoke, the sound of leaves crunching underfoot as some early riser moved around. And then, the scent of coffee wafting into the tent.

  I kept my eyes closed, kept the visualization going. I’d throw a blanket down by the water, watch the sunrise, lean back in appreciation of the crisp morning, the beautiful scenery, the delicious coffee.

  I reached into the basket, and my hand closed around the cup, a tall, insulated metal mug. I pulled it out triumphantly. “Ta-da!”

  “What the hell!” Emma reached for it as soon as I started passing it to her. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. How did you get it to work?”

  “Camping wake-up. Close enough to a picnic, I guess. You’ve got to get either the blanket on the ground or a picnic table in your picture somehow.”

  “Yeah, an ambulance doesn’t quite cut it, I guess.”

  I watched as Emma took a reverent breath over the rising steam from her coffee. I didn’t want any, particularly, but I wondered how long we’d have coffee in Florida. It didn’t grow in the state as far as I knew, so if all transportation was down, with no planes, no trucks, no giant cargo ships...

  I guess maybe it depended on how many people died and how quickly. If the death toll was immense and fast, say three-quarters of the state gone in the next six weeks, there’d probably be thousands of cans sitting around on Costco shelves for the next couple of years.

  For some reason, my fellow humans seemed prone to stockpiling toilet paper in the face of disaster instead of coffee. Toilet paper! As if humanity’s priority should be soft paper to wipe our butts instead of stimulants to keep us moving. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that we were about to die out.

  Okay, not die out. The multiverse would save us with a million humans left. It was a horrifyingly grim thought, but it was actually a hell of a lot better than we did for animals on the verge of extinction. ‘Endangered’ meant a population in the thousands. A minimum viable population probably numbered in the hundreds.

  “Olivia?” Jack said. “Olivia?” He waved his hand in front of me.

  I shook myself out of my bleak contemplations. “Sorry. Daydreaming, I guess.”

  “Nightmaring, you mean?” Emma gave a bitter laugh. “Why isn’t there a word for contemplating purely negative shit? You didn’t look like you were lost in peaceful fantasies.”

  “Yeah, no.” I let out a sharp little blast of breath, trying to shake my thoughts. “Wondering how long we’ll have coffee back in the real world.”

  “Oh, my God.” Emma pulled the mug closer to her body, tucking it into her chest. “Fuck. That’s… yeah, okay, the second I get home, I’m looting. I know, I know, looters are shit, bad news, blah-blah-blah. I don’t care, doing it anyway. If I’m gonna survive, I need a stockpile of coffee.”

  “That’s actually a really good idea.” Jack sat back on his heels, looking thoughtful.

  “Looting?” Emma asked, eyebrows arching high.

  “No, planning our priorities for when we get back. We’ve got this little window of time, forty hours now, but when we get back, everyone else is in the thick of it. Knowing what you want to do, where you want to go, who you want to find…” Jack ticked off each of those items on a finger, before finishing, “it’s a good idea. Because it’s likely to be a shitshow on so many levels, and if you’ve got a plan, you’re gonna be ahead of the rest of the world.”

  My plan was mostly to make sure my dogs were okay.

  Beyond that?

  Um…

  “Ugh,” Emma groaned. “You’re so…” She took a gulp of her coffee, then frantically waved at her mouthful of coffee before swallowing. “Fuck, hot,” she gasped, then said. “All right, goblins. Yeah, let’s go kill them, right?”

  “What?” Jack laughed in surprise. “What are you talking about? I thought you were opposed to attacking the stronghold.”

  Emma gave him a dead-eyed stare. “You just gave me a choice. One, think about reality. Two, make a suicidal attack against a camp of goblins that vastly outnumber us. Goblins. Like, little green monsters.” She tipped back the cup and took another swallow, gave another shudder.

  “Some of them are kinda big green monsters,” I said. The low-level goblins were small, basically knee-high, and clearly creatures way outside the uncanny valley, but the higher-level the goblins were, the taller they were, and the more they resembled human beings.

  Okay, green human beings, who strongly tended to the ugly side. None of them were getting more than a five or so on the beauty scale, even with an extremely gentle grader. Huge ears, big noses, oddly proportioned hands and feet. But still. They looked uncomfortably like people. Not inside the uncanny valley, where looking like people made them creepy and eerie, but right on the edge of it, where looking like people made them almost feel like people.

  Have I mentioned that I was having a hard time killing goblins?

  Yeah. That suppressed internal shrieking was only getting louder.

  And yet.

  Did I have a choice?

  Okay, obviously, everyone always had a choice. Death was always an option if life involved too many compromises that were simply unacceptable. I was not now—was not ever—going to be the person who took the last water bottle when a thirsty kid stood in front of me.

  But I had dogs. And no matter where I was or what the circumstances were, my priority had to be taking care of the animals who believed in me. Right now, that meant making hard, messy choices. It meant goblins had to die, so my dogs and I could live. I didn’t like it, but I was going to do it anyway.

  “Fine, killing goblins in the dark,” I said. “Let’s assume that yes, that’s the plan, and instead of talking about why and whether, let’s talk about how. Because that is a ton of goblins down there. How do we kill enough of them to make it worthwhile?”

  “One at a time,” Jack replied.

  I rolled my eyes. Zelda lifted her head off my knee and curled her lip at Jack as if to suggest that she also thought that was a stupid answer.

  He chuckled. “Quietly, then?”

  “That would be better than the screaming.” Emma took another gulp of her coffee. She looked about as miserable as I felt, except… she didn’t, really. She sounded miserable, but she looked great.

  We’d spent about thirty-two hours in this forest. No sleep, erratic food, way too much death and blood. Our clothes were trashed and the emotional roller-coaster of the System introduction had taken its mental toll. Physically, though, she looked like an athlete at peak performance level, skin glowing with health, eyes bright. No dark circles under her eyes, no outward signs of fatigue. It was not quite as close to the uncanny valley as the goblins, but it was close.

  “I think we do the same thing we’ve been doing all day,” Jack said. “Except in their camps. First, we take out the guards, as quietly as possible.”

  “How?” Emma demanded. “They scream. It’s awful. I know you’ve noticed.”

  He dipped his chin, acknowledgement of the hit, but Zelda stood, tail wagging, then dropped to her belly and commando-crawled in Jack’s direction. Will help, she told me. Silent killer, that’s me.

  I blinked. Okay, that’s not who I thought she was, but okay.

  “Maybe we lure them away if we can. Maybe attack from a distance, then move before they can respond. Maybe sneak up, get as close as possible, attack, then retreat.”

  That one, Zelda stood and nudged Jack’s hand with her nose. That’s what we do.

  He responded as if he was completely oblivious to her words, rubbing her ears and ignoring her input.

  “We hit and run,” he told Emma and me. “Wash rinse repeat. And we do it all night long. They’re not leveling up, so they need sleep. We exhaust them and we keep going. As long as we can keep leveling, we won’t need to rest, and it’s the only chance we’ve got.”

  “Do you seriously think we can win this thing?” Emma asked, her doubt clear.

  We win, Zelda said firmly, although she was clearly enjoying the ear rub. Never quit, always win.

  That was the terrier motto, I knew. Jack and Emma were having a serious conversation, but I couldn’t help smiling.

  “Finish the quest, you mean?” Jack grimaced. “Ask me again twelve hours from now. But I know we can’t win if we treat darkness as a reason to stop fighting.”

  And maybe we couldn’t lose if we had a terrier on our side.