McDouglas emailed me late Sunday night, asking me to see him first thing Monday.

  The email subject was “Monday,” and the body read, “My office before anything else.”

  Writing emails like that should be illegal, and I was thankful I didn’t see it until that morning. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have slept a minute. I would have been up imagining all of the terrible news this meeting could possibly have. Did he catch on to me hunting already? Or did I mess up somewhere else? Did they think I leaked the gate crasher news because the other interns knew?

  I knocked on McDouglas’ office door.

  “Come in. Shut the door.” He wore a pastel blue polo shirt today. “Chapman says you take good notes. Is that true?”

  “Sure.”

  “You grew up in a doom cult, right?”

  My head tilted involuntarily. “Yes…”

  McDouglas gestured for me to follow. We went up four floors to the eighth. I would have asked him what was going on in the elevator ride, but that asshole made us take the stairs. He practically ran up them.

  This was one of the floors for the investigation department.

  A few quick turns later, we stepped into a conference room with a giant white eraser board covering one wall. Another wall was a map of southwestern Pennsylvania. A few of the pins were connected by yarn, red or yellow, to several pinned headshots and notes I wasn’t close enough to read.

  Chapman was there already, as was an older gentleman I had never seen before. Fifties, perhaps? He had a perfectly trimmed white beard and a look of perpetual annoyance on his face. Two younger men were in the room as well. One of them I recognized as an intern investigator from one of my culls.

  “This is Intern Enforcer Gray,” McDouglas said. “Gray, this is Investigator Dempson. He’s a crotchety Lead Investigator that shouldn’t be taken seriously.”

  Dempson shook my hand. “McDouglas was in investigation a ways back. He couldn’t keep up, so he went Enforcer.”

  McDouglas and Dempson both laughed.

  “And you know Enforcer Chapman.”

  I nodded.

  They also introduced me to the two other investigators, but I don’t remember their names.

  “Your case,” McDouglas said to Chapman. “Ready when you are.”

  We took our seats. Chapman got up and stood in front of the evidence board with the map.

  “Investigator Dempson,” she began, “How much did McDouglas share with you?”

  “Only that you have a potential lead on CKers. I’m coming into this fresh, if you didn’t mind starting from the beginning.” By context, I gathered that “CKers” stood for “crasher killers.”

  “I haven’t seen most of this either,” McDouglas added. “Starting there is good for me too.”

  “Should I start taking notes now?” I asked McDouglas softly.

  He nodded at me, disappointed I needed to ask.

  Chapman began, saying, “To date, we’ve struggled to find any confirming evidence of these rumored CKers. We have several missing persons we are chasing down, but connecting them to any one gate hasn’t been possible. Missing persons are often reported days later, so we can’t pinpoint a concrete crash day, let alone drill down to a specific gate.

  “On Saturday, the CDM helpline got a call from a woman claiming to be a grandmother worried about her sons and grandsons. She knew for certain they intended to crash on Friday, but it was Saturday night and none of them were home yet. Talking to her more, we learned that they were all in the same church community, and she was so worked up she shared that several church members had been crashing gates when they could.

  “Half a day missing isn’t much of a runway for starting an investigation, but I got pinged that she mentioned gate crashing, read the transcripts, and called her back. She was anxious, yes, but she was lucid, not hysterical.”

  Chapman turned to reference the evidence board.

  “Each pin on the map represents a gate that was active that day, all ranks. We know they left at 6 p.m. from their community on Friday. Any gate with a string, red or yellow, closed after 7 p.m. and was within an hour and a half drive of the community. For clarity’s sake, the earliest close was 9:05 p.m. We have people checking each location for abandoned vehicles. We have the descriptions from our tip to narrow that down.

  “Next, red yarn represents gates we think are the most likely candidates. Yellow represents any gates out of reach for their rank. And the red and yellow strings wrapped together are E gates. Technically, they might have crashed an E gate, but the grandmother was certain they ran Cs and Ds. she didn’t know their levels.

  “Two independent, three Furious Few, three Mill Rats, and five Dungeon Delvers parties had rights for this collection of gates. I have the headshots for every crawler associated with each gate and a brief rundown of their level, affiliation, class, and any priors–crawler, civil, federal. These are photos of the crashers we think are missing.”

  Chapman pointed to a group photo with a few faces circled. It looked like it was taken at an outdoor picnic. Four men with streaks of gray hair stood arm in arm with two men that struck me as college-aged.

  “This was taken three months ago. Most recent we have. Her four sons are between 40 and 55. The two grandsons are 19 and 22. If the tip is right, that means one of these parties may have killed them.”

  Dempson said, “They could have been killed by monsters.”

  “None of these parties reported crashers or anything suspicious in the dungeon.”

  “Which is what you would expect after a CK. It works against them to report crashers if they killed them.”

  Chapman nodded. “We brought Intern Gray in to take notes on our meetings and to act as an assistant to McDouglas. He is also from a church community, and we thought that perspective could end up being helpful.”

  “Do you have anything to add?” Investigator Dempson asked me.

  “I’m not sure what’s relevant. The community they’re from wasn’t mine.”

  “We know the limitations,” Dempson replied. “Were there crashers in your church?”

  “Not when I was there. I heard recently they were buying gates to level and call themselves ‘demon hunters’ instead of crawlers now. In about a year, they plan to move to Canada for a property resettlement program. They have to clear most of their own gates as part of the deal.”

  “Buying?”

  “That’s what I heard. I haven’t heard anything about crashing, but I’ve also been out for six years.”

  Dempson nodded sagely. “Imagine those six men were from your community. What kind of people would they be? Angry? Quick to violence?”

  I shook my head and had the sense he was guiding me gently with his word choices. “Angry sometimes, but not in general. If they were from my community, they would all fully believe that the world ended when the gates showed up. They are ‘Soldiers for the Lord’ in a literal sense, and their mission is to drive satan and his demons out of this world so that it can become heaven.”

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  “Duty and righteousness,” Dempson said.

  “Yeah. That’s a good way to describe it.”

  “How isolated from society are these communities?”

  “They’re not all that cut off. They will go to the grocery store in town to shop and gladly use any technology that makes their lives better. They dress a little weird, more conservative and a little formal, but look like anyone else otherwise. News, books, movies, games–anything media-related they block out. Satan would use that media to infiltrate the Lord’s army, so approved content only was the policy.”

  Dempson stroked his beard. “Thank you, son. If anything else comes to mind that might help, speak up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chapman passed a folder to McDouglas and a folder to Dempson. “I’m heading up to the church community to see if anyone else knows anything more specific about the crashers. I’d like for you to interview the party captains on our suspect list. I split them up for you already.”

  McDouglas and Dempson both nodded as they flipped through their respective files.

  “We’ve already informed all sources that we needed to speak with them and are in the process of bringing the relevant members in. They do not know this is about crashing. For the indies, they didn’t answer our calls. You’ll need to chase them down.”

  Chapman put both hands on the conference table and leaned forward.

  “Any questions?” she asked.

  “No,” McDouglas and Dempson answered in unison.

  McDouglas bumped my shoulder. “Come on. We’ve got rats to talk to.”

  McDouglas shared a nugget with me to make reading the crawler intel more interesting: Anyone who took caster as a multiclass was definitely a nepotism hire because martial classes don’t get recruited. He felt that was important to note because these individuals were the most likely to be diehard loyalists. They would do anything to protect their families.

  When I asked him why he believed that, he said that martial multiclasses were more likely to have extreme emotions. Getting a martial class inside of a guild family was like being born with a birth defect. Growing up a fighter when your brothers and sisters were born casters was tough on a kid.

  If someone was going to overcompensate to cover something up, it would be the crawler with a chip on their shoulder.

  We needed two straight days to conduct all seven of our interviews. The tricky part was that we couldn’t mention crashing directly in any of them. If crawlers got too suspicious of our interest, they might be even more careful, which meant fewer chances of catching them in the future.

  We talked to the Mill Rats first. Their headquarters was in the Strip District, a riverside Pittsburgh neighborhood known for unique shops and a weekend market that was so busy many people argued they should just close the main street, if not permanently, then for the duration.

  The historic buildings were all red brick mills, factories, and warehouses, and for a moment, I thought about Brownsville. It probably looked something like this in its prime.

  The Mill Rats headquarters was an old factory converted into office space. The interior was high-end and modern, like any other office for a high-profit operation. This was a far cry from the dingy floors I associated with the CDM idea of an office.

  Recapping all of these interviews isn’t worthwhile because they each gave us the same story. They showed up. They ran the gate. They went home. Other than the crawls being different types of gates from one another, they were remarkably ordinary.

  Save for one detail.

  “Think any of them did it?” McDouglas asked.

  “I’m not ready to accuse anyone.”

  McDouglas grinned and nodded. Was that a test? Did I just get it right?

  “How about suspects worth looking into?”

  Here were my choices from the Mill Rats:

  -Martin Kielar, male, sixty years old, black mage.

  -James Donas, male, thirty-one years old, black mage.

  -Robert Rectenwald, male, forty years old, spellsword.

  Other than the spellsword being a little bit of a dick, I didn’t see any holes, problems, or even moments where they looked suspicious. The only detail that differentiated them was how they handled run footage. And I could picture how he reacted when we asked him for it.

  Martin Kielar, over six feet tall and in his late fifties, had streaks of silver in his red beard. He had the kind of bulk where describing him as “big boned” was not a sneaky way to say he was fat. His frame actually seemed denser and larger than the average person, like he should have been an honest-to-god barbarian from the Dark Ages instead of a black mage.

  He smirked when McDouglas asked about footage. I fucking hated when people smirked.

  “Kielar was the only one who didn’t record his runs. The other two gave us the footage from their runs to review. He couldn’t because he preferred to crawl ‘old school.’”

  “Very good. We’ll confirm the footage is authentic, unedited, and not computer-generated, but they were quick and casual about handing it over. I’m confident it will be real. Why do I have that confidence?”

  I might actually be good at this, I realized. “CKs rarely get investigations. Anyone willing to CK has probably done it before, but I doubt they edit every one of their runs just in case.”

  “I agree,” McDouglas said.

  The next day, we interviewed the three party captains from the Furious Few who ran gates that night. The Furious Few chose two floors of a downtown high-rise for their headquarters, and any time I tell someone that’s where they’re located, I get questions about training.

  How do a bunch of crawlers train in a place like that? Wouldn’t that be a danger to the building?

  No guild or team trained inside the city limits. They were not allowed to. Their training facilities had to be a certain distance away from any active structure. Abandoned buildings didn’t count as “active,” so finding such a space wasn’t all that hard. With high-level crawlers controlling immense power, anything closer to civilization would be a danger to every civilian in the area.

  Training facilities rarely blow up, by the way. There were a few incidents in the early days of guilds–one in New York and one in Boston being especially catastrophic–so federal regulations came down to ensure it never happened again.

  Our interviews with the Furious Few went about the same as they did with the Mill Rats. We talked to three party captains. Two of them recorded runs. One didn’t. The biggest difference was that when we requested the run footage, a Furious Few manager stepped in. Oddly, it was the same woman from my time with Chapman. Her tip sparked all of this, and now she was unknowingly blocking it from continuing.

  We needed a warrant.

  McDouglas would put that in motion, but he believed the two captains who recorded were honest because of how easily they offered up their videos. It wasn’t until someone intervened that we were denied the footage. They could still be lying, of course, but that lowered the likelihood in his mind.

  For the Furious Few, our interview list looked like this:

  -Sarah Marron, female, twenty-eight years old, white mage.

  -George Baker, male, thirty-five years old, spellsword.

  -Darwin Collins, male, thirty-eight years old, ranger.

  Baker, the spellsword, didn’t have footage to share. He was lean and muscular but not bulky, like a pole vaulter or a swimmer. He didn’t smirk like Kielar, but he had a ridiculous mustache that he clearly spent a great deal of time shaping and curling as well as shiny black hair that went down to the middle of his back.

  The mustache itself wasn’t necessarily what put me off, but buried in all that wax was a distinct air of snobby superiority that I felt the moment he came in the room.

  He said he only recorded when he felt like it and wouldn’t commit to any specific frequency. Did he record half the time? Less? More? He couldn’t say.

  The very last crawler we interviewed was an independent captain living in McKee’s Rocks, a part of the city that had a reputation of being rough in places. He lived in a duplex with his wife and three kids.

  He never recorded his runs either. To me, he seemed exceptionally bitter, but McDouglas said that was common for indie crawlers. He saw it so often in innocent people that he ignored it when he interviewed anyone not in a guild or on a team. Anger and frustration were their default emotions, not indicators of something amiss.

  Not having footage kept the indie on our list simply because we couldn’t completely disqualify him, but McDouglas said the party members didn’t regularly run together. That happened a lot with independent crawls: Someone couldn’t make it for the run, so you called around until you found someone who could, sometimes a friend-of-a-friend kind of situation.

  Six relative strangers weren’t likely to agree to murder, McDouglas believed. The exception would be if the murders weren’t planned but happened anyway for some reason. At that point, they had no choice but to become coconspirators.

  The whole two days, I wanted to believe McDouglas was taking a special interest in my development, mentoring me for the Unsung Heroes, but that was beyond wishful. He had been just as interested in teaching me before I found those documents.

  Reading too far into something only ever ended in heartache.

  But I had made it to the fourth month of my internship. Saito was sent to Washington D.C. for an extended training on new data tracking software but would be back as a full-time enforcer eventually. A startling muscular intern named Peter Black replaced him. He played football in college, didn’t get picked to go pro, and was now trying to build a life without football. He was nice enough but was pretty quiet.

  Two more months, and I got my CDM pay bump. That was only eight weeks. I could handle that.