With Erika’s aura running, it was much easier to disassemble the Grovetender’s Heart. It shut off the moment it got close to her, and I popped the casing open. The Charge inside of it didn’t rush out. It didn’t move at all. Instead, it seemed to stay still, like a weird electrical liquid.

  She stared at the device as I tinkered with it, pulling off the tiny gears and cogs with a needlenose pliers. I had the full model up on my lab’s table, along with the half-finished chamber I’d been building, but now that I could get a better view, I was definitely going to take advantage of it. And I was also going to take advantage of an extended time inside of Erika’s aura to try to better understand the resonance I’d been picking up.

  “What’s so special about this?” Erika asked. She looked at the table, where the Charge model hung mid-air.

  I shrugged. “You’re not picking it up, are you? Tori and the others couldn’t see it, either.”

  “No. What?”

  “I’ll answer that, but you have to answer one of mine,” I said. Jessica had recommended this. “Deal?”

  “Fine.”

  “Okay. Here goes. What was your Hardcore Tutorial like? How did you get that class?” I finished popping a gear free and looked at its housing. That was copyable. I could do it. It’d just take some effort—and maybe some new tools. I was willing to give it a go, though.

  “No.”

  I stopped for a second. “No?”

  “That’s right. No. Ask something else.” Erika stared at the floor. Her hand was on her sword’s grip, knuckles white. So was her face.

  “Alright, how about your kids. Who are they? How old? What are they doing in Wyoming?” I already knew the answers to a couple of those questions, but it wasn’t about whether I knew the answer. Jessica had said it was all about building rapport. Convincing the person that they’d be better off with other people.

  “Nate and Larissa. He’s twenty-three. She’s nineteen. U of W offered a good scholarship to Nate, so he took it. Then Larissa made me pay out-of-state tuition so she could follow him. Otherwise, I’d have replaced the Explorer and gotten there. He…” she trailed off. Then she cleared her throat. “What’s special about the table?”

  “It’s not the table. It’s the whole room. You actually could have started the Explorer—if the lift wasn’t trapped under it. It would have made it to the door, then lost power. Not because of your antimagic whatever, but because I don’t have Charge invested in it.”

  “Oh. Charge.” Erika nodded.

  “Wait, you know Charge?” I asked.

  Erika nodded again. “Yeah. That’d explain it. I…I got offered a Charge class in my Tutorial, but I turned it down.”

  I waited, but while Mom and Dad’s trick had worked just fine on Tori, it didn’t make a dent on Erika. She just snorted, like she saw right through me.

  Instead of pushing, though, I just let the silence hang. It was better for my focus if I could really dig into the Grovetender’s Heart. As I did, Erika watched me like a hawk. I wasn’t worried about her, though; I had everything she wanted, and if she needed to see what I was doing, that was fine.

  After a minute or two, I triggered the Lab’s music system, and Motley Crue filled the room. Erika raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you too young for this stuff?”

  “You’re never too young for the classics, ma’am,” I said.

  She chuckled. “What are you trying to do here?”

  “Okay, you’re going to be interested in this. I’m trying to build a Charge system that feeds batteries. If I can do it for a small cost, I might be able to power the Explorer without investing a third of my personal Charge into it.

  “Right now, I can run creations without being present. If I can power them, too—and if I can do it for cheap—then I can let you take the truck.” I pointed to the Grovetender’s Heart. “This thing runs on Charge. All the ‘magical’ items we loot from dungeons do. So if I can—“

  “That sounds wrong,” Erika said. “My class shuts down magical items.”

  I nodded and pointed to the Heart again—and specifically, to a small wire I’d uncovered. It connected the battery to a device I’d seen before—a Refiner. “I think there’s a fundamental difference between how the System or the Consortium uses energy and how I use Charge. They’re not interchangeable. So, when I encounter a Refiner, I’ve learned enough Principles of Voltsmithing to use it a certain way, but when the System puts together an item, the part works totally differently, with different results.”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “Hmmm,” Erika said noncommittally.

  I shrugged. She wasn’t following, and that was okay. I just needed to talk through it. “It’s just a theory. I can’t test it because I don’t know any other classes that craft armor and tools like this. Alchemist sort of does, but the only Alchemist I’ve seen was dead.”

  “Right.”

  “So, right now, I’m trying to figure out how the Grovetender’s Heart should work, so I can see about building a copy of it that’s big enough to power the Explorer. My current model is…well…” I pointed at the crude chamber I’d been working on. “It’s not ready. Not even close.”

  “But you think you can make it work?”

  “No. I know I can make it work. I think I can make it work in three days—and that’s counting on clearing at least a couple of dungeons in that time. But it’s not an impossible puzzle. Nothing is.”

  Erika stared at me for a minute as I worked on pulling the Refiner carefully away from the Grovetender’s Heart’s backing. I wanted to see the connections, to see if I could modify it for more flow in a larger structure. After I was done with the needle-nose pliers and had put them down, Erika cleared her throat. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “I figured out how to fix your SUV two days after the world ended.”

  “Really? What was wrong with it?”

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter anymore, but it had nothing to do with the transmission and everything to do with the fuel inflow. The fuel wasn’t matching your consumption, and the symptoms looked a lot like transmission failure.”

  Then I started reassembling the Heart.

  “You’re done?”

  “Yep. I’ve seen what I need to see, and I understand the Heart now. The problem is going to be scale, but I understand enough Principles of Voltsmithing to make it work. I just need enough start-up Charge to get the system running.”

  “And for that you need…?” Erika asked.

  “Levels. I need levels. Or a different set of knowledge.”

  “One of those is easier to get than the other.”

  I nodded slowly. “Yep. You up for some dungeon-clearing?”

  Tori and Carol got back from their Tier Two, with Tori sporting a few cuts that sent Jessica into a panic—and a new bracer that covered her whole forearm all the way to her first knuckles. “It’s called River Guide’s Grip, and it’s got some cool synergies with my build. It lets my telekinesis stick to things better at longer ranges,” she said as Jessica worked her injuries over in her makeshift clinic.

  “Very nice. What’d it replace?” I asked.

  “Well…” Tori hesitated. “I’m not sure. I think I might rotate gear around depending on the fight. It sort of doesn’t work well with the Eyes of Perfection, but it works great with my spells, so it’s one or the other, I think. This is better if there are lots of enemies, and the Eye of Perfection works better against a single, big monster.”

  “I see.” I hesitated. Jessica was right here, and what I was about to ask was…it’d get her going for sure. But I needed to know the answer. “Jessica, I need to take Tori for a while. Probably either Carol or Zane as well. Maybe all three of them. We need four Tier One delvers for what I need to accomplish. Five or six would be better.”

  Carol blinked, but kept her mouth shut. Tori wasn’t as in control. “What are we doing? Where are we going? Is it going to be dangerous?”

  Jessica gave her the look, then turned on me. “Yes, Hal. Is it going to be dangerous?”

  I nodded seriously. “It is. But if we’re successful, we can finish up two or three objectives at once, and be ready for the beacons when they arrive. I want to remove the Tier Four dungeon in United Center from the equation, and I want to do it tonight.”

  “Why?” Jessica asked.

  “First, it’ll let us link up with the folks out in western Chicago. Carol and Zane got there, but their main concern is the orcs. If we take out the orcs, that lets us bring them into an alliance with us, and we’ll need their help. Second, it’ll take away an enemy at our backs. We’ve only got a few days before the ceasefire stops and we’re competing for a beacon. If we can remove pressure now, we can focus on our enemy later.

  “And third, I need the levels for more Charge. I think I’m on to something big. I don’t want to make any promises, because I could be exploring the wrong idea, but if I’m right, this war with the Fireborn Crusade may be a lot more even than we think.”

  Tori nodded, face set and serious. “I’m in. Ouch!”

  “Sorry, Tori,” Jessica said. She dabbed blood away from Tori’s arm. “What are the risks?”

  “Well, what’s in there is going to be tough. We need to bring our best people. If Bobby was around, I’d get him involved. As it is, it’ll be Tori, either Carol, Zane, or both, myself, and Erika Samson.”

  “Who?” Carol asked.

  Jessica’s face hardened. I winced. She wasn’t happy about this, and I couldn’t blame her. I headed her off before she could get started. “I think I have her figured out, Jessica. She wants her car back. I can make that happen, but I can’t do it without more power. She’s got every reason to help us, and none to hurt us.”

  “Oh! Tori said. “She’s the antimage?”

  “Yes, she’s the antimage,” I confirmed.

  “I don’t like this,” Jessica said.

  “Mom, you never like it, but it usually turns out okay. And Hal’s got some good points. It’s like, uh, an RTS game. We can’t fight two enemies at once, and we need to climb the tech tree. Except, uh…Hal’s our whole tech tree.”

  I took a breath and deployed my ace in the hole. “Jessica, Erika’s just like you. She’d do anything to get to her kids—they’re in Laramie—and I know you’d do whatever you could to keep Tori safe.”

  “Who are they?” Jessica asked.

  “Nate and Larissa. Twenty-three and nineteen. They’re out there, and Erika needs to get to them. I want to help her.”

  “And if you do? How does that help Tori?” Jessica asked.

  Calvin cleared his throat from the door. “Easy. If Hal can get the Explorer running for a fraction of the energy he’s putting into it right now, there’s no reason he can’t do the same thing to other vehicles, is there?”

  I didn’t say anything. But I did nod at Calvin.

  “And he could use that same power to operate weapons systems, right?”

  I nodded again. “Not at drone scale. It’s too small. But…”

  Calvin finished my thought. “But at, say, truck scale…”

  “Or tank scale,” Tori said. “If this works, you can build tanks.”

  “And that’s just the start,” I confirmed. “But it’s a long way from being done, and I’m not sure how they’ll stack up against System-empowered delvers. It’d go a long way toward equalizing out the Fireborn Crusade’s number advantage, though. I’ve got rough designs in my head, but I need more Charge to make even one of them happen, and the United Center’s our best bet for that Charge. What do you say, Jessica? A little risk now for a better chance later?”