We could lose.

  We could definitely lose.

  “Get behind me,” I screamed at Jack, my throat sore from all my previous screaming. “Behind me!”

  What the hell was so hard about relative directions? Behind me meant not in front where the attacks hit him first, not beside me where the goblins could still get a clear shot at him, and definitely not crumpled on the ground next to me where he’d landed after the level fourteen goblin—fourteen!—nailed him with some kind of bone-breaking spell.

  Goblins had magic. Who knew?

  “Drag him back,” I screamed at Emma. This wild sanctuary was the most bullshit sanctuary I’d created yet. Ten seconds of dragging Warden’s Edge along the ground, declaring that the line I was marking was defensive was worth about a minute of shelter, barely enough time for the vines to trigger, but if I could just get the goblin to focus on me, it would be the precious minute we needed.

  One minute, that’s all we needed.

  “Me, you asshole!” I screamed yet again, dreading the moment when the monster turned his attention to Zelda. “Zelda, to me! Cut it out, damn it!”

  She was going to get herself killed. Worse, she was going to get herself killed trying to protect me. She barely reached the goddamn goblin’s knees. And she was trying to chew on its ankles. What good was that going to do? A fleeting memory of some Greek hero passed through my brain—something about ankles?—but it disappeared before it fully formed as I screamed at the goblin again.

  It was so stupid. They were all so stupid. They dismissed me every time, focusing on the guy with the knife, the dog with the teeth. Ignoring the woman with the shovel.

  And okay, a shovel against a sword is not great. A shovel against magic? Also not great.

  My shovel, though, was a goddamn Legendary weapon, and if this last stupid goblin would just pay attention to me...

  Finally, finally, finally, it did. Almost dismissively, it tossed its spell in my direction.

  Rebound hit first.

  Verdant Reprisal triggered a half-second later.

  I fell to my knees in relief.

  I was gasping with adrenaline overload, panic reaction, and sheer oxygen shortage from our racing retreat into the forest.

  For the first time in my entire life, the thought floated into my mind: I am too damn old for this shit.

  “Kill it, kill it,” Emma yelled.

  Oh, hell, the stupid thing wasn’t dead? I straightened and looked at it. Uncanny valley, my ass. This was a green human being, impaled upon some truly horrific bougainvillea vines. Its eyes were wide, desperate, but not pleading. Furious, maybe. I reminded myself that it had attacked my dog—forcing myself to forget that actually we’d killed quite a few of its people inside its own campsite—and swung Warden’s Edge at it with all my strength behind the hit.

  Its head flew off. Like a ball being hit by a baseball bat, with the added benefit of appalling green blood spurting from its now headless neck like a fountain of green chocolate.

  Okay, not chocolate. I don’t know why that thought even crossed my mind, except that I was somewhere beyond reality in some kind of floating zone of horror.

  The little System notice floated into my view, serene, surreal.

  Goblin Wizard Level 14 killed, 525 XP.

  And then it disappeared. I’d lost track of the number of notices I’d seen, and I was pretty sure I had at least one level up waiting for me, but I hadn’t had time to look at it. Or been desperate enough, which was more or less how we’d been using our levels, only taking the next level when death seemed almost inevitable.

  Always almost, at least so far.

  “You okay?” I called out to Emma as soon as I caught my breath. I automatically checked on Zelda. She was fine, sitting next to the goblin wizard’s body and waiting patiently for the people to get their acts together.

  “I’m good,” she called back. “Jack’s still down, though. You might need to boost the sanctuary.”

  I nodded without looking in her direction. I stabbed Warden’s Edge into the ground and tried to visualize myself building a wall. A nice solid wall, made of dirt. Was there a name for that? There probably was, some medieval vocab for the upper inside edge of a moat. I scooped dirt, tossed it inside the sanctuary zone. Scooped again, tossed again, scooped again, tossed again, picturing the wall with every painful step.

  My hands hurt. My legs hurt. My back hurt.

  One more shovel full. And then another.

  “Okay, we’re good. Olivia, we’re good.” Emma’s hands grabbed my arms, and I nearly smacked her, just out of reflex. Instead, stopping, I stared at her. What was she doing?

  “We’re good,” she repeated. She gestured toward the sanctuary dome. It was fully up, an enclosure with a roof, roses, glow, the whole shebang. “Jack’s recovering. He’ll be fine. He hasn’t leveled up yet, but he’s okay. Take a break, come inside.”

  I nodded, still wordless, still numb.

  She tipped her head toward the headless goblin’s body. “That one’s yours. You might want to grab the loot.”

  I didn’t even want to look at the body. Its head flew. I hit it and it was like smashing a watermelon. The head just… flew off the body. How did that even work? I was no physicist, but whatever equation governed force in relation to the attachment of body parts to their bodies was probably going to need some revising.

  I stumbled my way over to its body and touched it with my foot. Not quite a kick, I wasn’t being intentionally disrespectful to the dead, but I was not bending over for another stupid protein bar, either. We’d stopped picking those up a while ago. Even with my fancy spatial treat bag, there were only so many protein bars I was willing to lug around.

  The body disappeared, leaving a box in its place. I stared at the box blankly, waiting for insight to hit me, for floating letters to appear above it and tell me what it was.

  They didn’t. Right, because I had finally figured out how to change what the sunglasses displayed, so now they only showed me labels for enemies. Okay, I say “I”—what I really mean is that Jack told me how to do it when I complained. It had settings, of course, just like every other magical System device.

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  I picked up the box. It was lightweight cardboard, colorful, relatively small. It reminded me of a tampon package, to be honest, but I was too tired to even read the label. I just staggered into the sanctuary and dropped to the ground.

  “Ugh,” I said as I landed. I lay there for a long moment, listening to my heartbeat.

  “What did you get?” Emma asked, sounding nowhere near as exhausted as I felt. Maybe she’d leveled up. Or maybe using a bow and arrows was less physically demanding than shoveling monsters to death. I tossed the box in her direction, still without looking at it.

  “You okay, Jack?” I said with a weary sigh. My throat still hurt from screaming at him. “That last pull…”

  “Yeah.” He sounded almost as bad as I felt. “I can level before we go out again, but it’s class choice, so I kinda want to take my time.”

  “You do that,” I muttered. Go out again? The thought was not fun. But I could level up, too, and when I did, I’d probably feel fine. Well, as fine as I could be with the feel of that goblin’s head cycling through my memories.

  I closed my eyes and felt a warm, familiar weight snuggling next to me, tucking her head against my shoulder. A wet tongue streaked my face with dog spit and I was too tired to even wipe it off.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Emma’s words made me feel like I should immediately launch myself to my feet and prepare for combat, but I didn’t move, because her tone told a different story. Her words weren’t a prayer, but her voice was as reverent as if she’d found a never-ending coffee fountain. I felt the corners of my lips tugging up, but couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes.

  “Please tell me you’ll share,” she said.

  “I’ll share,” I responded, making a less than halfhearted attempt to sit up before settling down again. “What am I sharing?”

  “I’m accepting that as a real yes, even though if you knew what I was talking about, you’d probably think harder.”

  I heard the sound of paper ripping. I yawned. Okay, maybe I should take a level. It was either that or a nap.

  “Yes!” She laughed and the sound was filled with delight. “Yes!”

  “Holy cow, what was that?” Jack asked.

  “Want one?” Emma asked. “Now’s your chance, because once Olivia sees what it does, you’re never getting your hands on it.”

  All right, clearly I needed to open my eyes. I turned my head and looked, and then I sat bolt upright, jostling Zelda off me.

  Emma was clean.

  Not “splashed her face with some water from my bottle” clean. Not “scraped off the worst of the grime with a handful of leaves” clean.

  She was clean like freshly-showered, laundry-service, straight-from-the-salon-manicure clean.

  Clean clean.

  “What is it? Gimme, gimme.” I held my hand out, wiggling my fingers demandingly. I wanted this loot desperately, irrationally, and with every fiber of my being. This was better than the spice gum drops I still hadn’t eaten, the sunglasses, and the duct tape combined. Maybe not quite as good as the picnic basket, but if I had to choose between three days of eating nothing but protein bars while clean versus all the picnic foods while covered in goblin guts… okay, the picnic basket might still win. Maybe.

  Luckily for me, I could have both.

  Jack was already reading his packet, as Emma handed me one from the box. “Wipe Outs,” he said. “Disposable cleanse spell cloths. It’s the shower wipes you wanted, Olivia, except magic.”

  I didn’t even bother to read the label, just ripped the packet open and pulled out the tiny piece of white fabric inside. It was ridiculously small, more like an adhesive bandage than a real shower wipe.

  I must have looked confused, because Emma held up her hand, revealing a white spot on the back. “Apply to bare skin and hold for a count of three.”

  I did as instructed.

  It was glorious. It didn’t heal at all; I still hurt. But instead of being sticky, sweaty, smelly, bloody, dirty—filthy, really, from head to toe—I was clean. I held up my hands and admired them, especially the white at the tips of my fingernails. No more blood, no more grime trapped under my nails, reminding me constantly of where we were, what I’d been doing.

  I plucked at my shirt and brought it to my nose and the smell of my detergent instead of my sweat was like some kind of divine perfume. Given that I use unscented detergent, that was really saying something. It was the smell of nothing, which was so much better than the smell of fear and fury and frantic desperation that I’d been wearing for days.

  My hair had been bundled into the world’s messiest ponytail for the whole time. I pulled the tie off and shook it out, then ran my fingers through it, lifting it up. Clean hair. Shiny, fluffy, silky hair instead of hair matted with dirt. It was a pleasure at least as good as any cup of coffee.

  I glanced at the countdown timer. 32:47. “How many are there in the box?”

  Emma spilled them out and counted. “Ten in the box, seven left.”

  “Two for both of you, three for me?” I offered.

  Despite Emma saying the loot was mine, we’d been sharing pretty much equally. Jack had said something about need or greed that I didn’t really understand, but according to the scenario instructions, none of the loot was going to last beyond the next thirty-two hours and forty-seven minutes, so it didn’t make much difference to me who carried what. The exceptions, of course, were the things that we’d come into our team with: the sunglasses were mine, the picnic basket was tacitly accepted as really belonging to Emma, and so on.

  Zelda huffed. Two for me.

  I stared at her. “You want a bath? You? Want a bath?”

  She turned her head and chewed on her fur, then gave herself a couple long licks. Turning back to me, she said, Not bath. Clean. Me, clean girl. Good girl, clean girl.

  Trapped by my own habitual sayings. How many times had I crooned those exact words while scrubbing an unhappy, but tolerant, pup? Clearly far too many.

  I sighed. “Okay, two for Zelda. One more for Jack. Two more for Emma and me.”

  Jack laughed. “That math works for me. These things are great.”

  Emma picked up one of the wipe packets, turning it over with a thoughtful frown. “I think you’re being generous. I didn’t get a single point of experience for that last guy. That’s the System telling me I was useless.”

  “I think they were waiting for us,” Jack said. “We got predictable.”

  We’d spent the night attacking goblin camps, following Jack’s hit-and-run strategy. The campsites were organized in loose groups. Tribes, maybe? Or clans? Bigger than family groups, unless goblins had really big families. Which, I guessed, they might.

  Anyway, one camp at a time, we’d gone in, killed a couple goblins, and retreated as soon as we made a stir. Jack had been using his Rogue abilities to sneak into the camp and get the first shot in. Yeah, backstabbing, but goblins, so that made it okay, right?

  A few had given chase, but when we got away from the stronghold area, we’d turn and fight. Surprisingly, Emma was a lot better with her bow in the dark. She thought it was because she wasn’t fighting the skill with her own ideas, but letting the intuitive knowledge imparted by the System work.

  It had been working well. Maybe too well. Because Jack stealthed his way into the last campsite and then all hell had broken loose. He’d run, they’d followed, and there’d been too many of them to stand our ground against. We’d retreated and retreated and retreated some more. In the end, obviously, we’d won. But it had been a harrowing hour or so.

  “If you hadn’t taken out some of the lower-leveled ones, we’d all be back home by now,” I said, my tone firm. I wasn’t going to let Emma put herself down. None of this came naturally to her.

  Well, I couldn’t say it came naturally to me, either. But I had two advantages she didn’t have. First, Warden’s Edge, which was clearly the best shovel in the universe. Or multiverse. Whatever.

  And second, Zelda. Not just her help, but her presence as motivation. I wasn’t fighting for some abstract ideal. I was keeping my dog alive, which kept me going when if it had just been me… well, that part about being back home was very tempting.

  Except what if Jack was wrong? What if death was real in this simulation? Or what if I made it home, but Zelda didn’t make it home with me? Would she be trapped in the simulation forever?

  Yeah, death might be an easy way home for Emma, but it was not an option for me.

  And Jack was still determined to win.

  Zelda probably was, too, but I wasn’t going to consult her. I ripped open her packet, held the Cleanse to her fur, and then admired the result. So soft, so sleek—it made me want to curl up with her and take a really long nap. Like an entire night long sort of nap.

  But the night was almost over, so instead, I should probably take a look at all those System notices.