It feels like a few hours since the world changed.

  We need to rest, regroup, reassess, and reset. Maybe Sadie and Baco don’t have to, but I do. I’m hungry and tired. I have to come to terms with this altered reality, whatever it is. I’ve been able to survive a few hours. Now, I have to figure how to survive for days, at least. Sooner or later, I’m going to need to sleep. The middle of a minotaur’s labyrinth seems a poor choice for a B&B. Getting out of this labyrinth is a priority. The lack of information is a problem. We will need more food soon. I’m not going to be butchering Sirens. There is so much to figure out.

  I swing my spear a few times, but it never turns into a sword. I guess it has to stay as a pokey stick of some sort.

  The passage we’re in is extremely rough. There are boulders, big chunky glowing mushrooms that could be used as basketballs, the usual drippy walls, and the ground is uneven. I wouldn’t want to break into a sprint for fear of turning an ankle. Although I would probably heal that in about twenty minutes, one of the major perks of this place.

  I sit on a low rock. Baco snuggles up against the side of the rock, his chin on my wet sneaker. Sadie leans against the far wall of the corridor.

  “Sadie, do you sleep?”

  “No, Dom, I’ve been awake my whole life. Sleep? What’s that? Never heard of it.”

  Is there a sarcasm setting I can access? Surely my Domination skill allows me to keep my own bondlings from being snippy.

  “Next question,” I say, resisting the urge to tell her to Sit. Stay. “Maps. Any ideas?”

  I am really hoping that she can give me the command to the system for a heads-up display. She digs into the fold of her toga, walks over and hands me a small white rock.

  “What is this?”

  “Chalk,” she says. “You can make a map.”

  Not what I meant, but it’s a lot more in the way of supplies than we had before.

  “These mushrooms,” I say pointing to a glowing basketball. “Let’s gather some, put them on sticks and use them like torches.”

  I grab a brainy thing, plucking it without effort. It flickers and I watch the glow fade. That’s useless as a light source. My fingers start to burn like I just washed in chili oil.

  I wipe my hand on the nearest patch of moss. “Well, that answers the next question of can we eat them.”

  She turns and grabs a rough root looking vine on the wall and follows it down the hall for a bit. She finds a nodule, gives a sharp tug and comes back to me.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “Try this.”

  In her hand is a small leaf wad, smaller than a ping pong ball. I take it. Something inside is gently glowing. After peeling off the leaves, I’m holding a pale, dark green something.

  “They have pits, but you can eat them,” she says, peeling her own.

  I pop the little thing into my mouth and carefully chew around the pit. It tastes something like unseasoned broccoli and smells of fresh cut, wet grass, overly vegetal. They’re chewy, almost gum-like in a calamari kind of way. It’s not something I would order at a restaurant, but food is food. If it’s free, I’ll eat it. It feels wrong to eat boar with Baco around, so boar hunts for food are out of the question.

  “Let’s gather some more of these little things,” I say, “If we keep them in our pockets, do they go bad?”

  “They stop glowing, like the big one did, but that’s about it.”

  We pick a few handfuls of glolives, my new name for them. Sadie tucks some into the folds around the belt of her toga.

  Baco regularly laps up water from the trickling puddles. Doesn’t seem perfectly sanitary, but I take the opportunity at the Siren’s lake to get a few swallows in my cupped hand. I’d like to boil it out to make sure there are no parasites or anything, but I seem to have left my cookware back in California. If I did get a little sick, I think a quick rest would fix me right up.

  Air, food, water. Shelter is still on the iffy list. This goes back to finding a way out.

  There’s an old trick to not get lost in a maze. Hedge-maze hand. If you go into a hedge maze, or a corn maze around Halloween, it’s easy to get lost and disoriented. But, if you hold a hand against a wall, and always guide what turn you take by keeping your hand to that wall and not crossing a passage that would make you remove that hand from the wall, you will always end back at the entrance you started at. Eventually. So for a right-hand hedge maze solution, we would make every right hand turn we come to.

  Only problem is, that could lead us back to this corridor, and not an exit, since we aren’t at an entrance to begin with.

  “Psst,” Sadie hisses. She looks at me and taps her shoulder. Then she points at mine.

  I’m not wearing a shirt, so I have no idea how I did not feel a foot long centipede thicker than a hotdog climbing over my shoulder.

  I stand up and swat the thing off. I grab my spear. There’s another one dangling from my forearm. I glance down. I have a half dozen thick wormy things with hundreds of hair-like legs crawling up my legs and on my stomach. Swatting crazily, I spin in circles trying to get these things off. I slap one off my side and it nips at my fingers with tiny but respectably sharp pincer jaws. It feels like getting bit by a staple remover. Not deadly, but certainly not comfortable.

  They slink along the ground and I skewer each with a quick spear stab. They curl up when they die. Sadie smashes a few under hoof and Baco starts slurping up their remains like he’s at an all you can eat pasta buffet.

  I stand panting and look at Sadie. “What the hell was that?”

  She shrugs. “Crawlers.”

  I run my fingers over my shoulder. It tingles oddly. I’m numb wherever they touched. No wonder I couldn’t feel them. They numb you so you don’t know they’re on you. The numbness fades after rubbing my skin a little bit. I kick one out of Baco’s reach and give him the stay command before he gobbles it. He is not happy, but obeys.

  The crawlers have a hard outer shell, dark brown, and tons of feathery legs. I can’t find any eyes on the thing. When I touch the legs, I momentarily lose feeling in my fingertips.

  “This will be useful,” I mutter.

  “Why, Dom? They’re gross.”

  I start running the spearhead up and down the sides of my specimen, removing the legs. I hold the fuzzy clump of legs to the spot on my thumb where one nipped me and the pain subsides.

  “They’re medicine. Pain relief when waiting to heal.”

  Ding.

  You have gained the Salvewright (Level 1, Emerging) skill.