The Patrol Runner bounced across the road as Tori tried not to hyperventilate right behind me. I sat in the passenger’s seat, failing at the same task.

  She was strapped into one of the back seats with two leather straps that roughly approximated a race car’s harness, while up front, I had… nothing but a handle and a waist-belt. The handle wasn’t even all that well-padded, and for the first time since I’d lost my arm, I was okay with having a metal-and-Charge hand. It was the only thing keeping me steady in my seat.

  Calvin had been right. Driving was like riding a bicycle. He knew how to run the pedals, the steering wheel, and everything else. But in the fifty years since he’d been behind the wheel, he’d forgotten everything else.

  “Holy shit, Calvin!” Tori screamed in my ear.

  The Runner jerked across the road, oversized wheels leaving the asphalt for a moment as Calvin pulled in from left to right and dodged an overgrown delivery truck that was half-merged with a pile of thorn-covered brambles by a couple of feet. Then it swerved the other way to avoid another pile of rubble. Calvin hadn’t let off the gas since we started, and the Heart’s pulse was almost as fast as an idling combustion engine.

  It was a lot quieter, though—and somehow, that was worse. So much worse.

  “Calm your step, girl,” Calvin shouted over the wind. Then he drifted into the center lane and tore off in a straight line, heading north. We were already past Andersonville and making great time, but with every minute the Vietnam vet stayed behind the wheel, I felt our chances of surviving Phase Two shrinking.

  “I think she’s right,” I said.

  “Can’t hear you so good!” Calvin yelled.

  “I said, I think she’s right! Slow down!”

  “Look, you want to get to Milwaukee, we can drive for three hours or walk all day,” Calvin shot back. “This beats the alternative.”

  I didn’t want to get to Milwaukee. We had no idea what we’d find there. Survivors, maybe—or maybe just monsters from dungeon breaks and whatever Solemnus Six was grafting in as it expanded. The interstate was still mostly intact, but in a few places, the vines and thorns had overrun it. The Patrol Runner had been great for those sections; its armor was thick enough to protect us from most of the spikes, and it had enough power to break straight through.

  Not without some denting, but after a half-dozen roadblocks, it was in better shape than I’d hoped.

  We had to find a Waypoint Beacon, though, and Milwaukee felt like our best option.

  “Contact!” Calvin yelled.

  The Runner swerved as something slammed into it, and Tori yelled something her stepmom would have hated. She unbuckled and slammed into the turret’s harness. I readied the side-mounted Scorpion. “Try to get me into the fight!” I shouted.

  Then I looked out the window.

  Solemnus Archwyrm: Level Seventy-Five Field Boss (Rank One)

  Current Difficulty: Challenging

  The evolved apex predator of the Solemnus Six forests, the Solemnus Archwyrm hunts wherever it pleases. Its territory has no limits, and it protects every inch of it from intruders. And anything that moves is either an intruder or its next meal. In your case, it’s both.

  Field Boss: This boss has no dungeon. It stalks part of the overworld instead.

  All-Inclusive: Attacking this boss will alert anyone nearby.

  The Field Boss [Solemnus Archwyrm] has been engaged!

  The thing dwarfed the Redline Wyrm. It even made the version we’d fought on the road to Whiting look like a baby. It was a good twenty feet tall, with churning jaws that shredded the highway next to us and mole-nose tendrils that picked up motorcycles and pushed wrecked cars out of its way.

  “Tori, all you!” I yelled.

  “Got it!” She opened fire. The first grenade crashed against the Archwyrm’s hide. Aerosolized blood splattered against the windshield, and smoke poured from the thing’s side.

  “Jesus Christ, you dumbasses!” Calvin swore. He swerved. The Runner grazed something, and he hauled on the wheel to keep its tires under it as the Archwyrm erupted from the cloud of smoke.

  I stared at the wall of teeth and tendrils looming up behind us. It was gigantic. Even running along the ground, it seemed to blot out the light, and the sound, the sound of steel rebar and reinforced concrete being ground to dust, forced its way past my eardrums.

  Then Tori fired again. This time, the entire Runner shook as Calvin started losing power. “Dammit, you bitch, keep running!” he growled as the monstrous boss gained on us, bleeding from dozens of wounds across its maw.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  I reached across and flipped a switch, then another. Resonance built up as Charge poured into the Heart, then into the drive shaft. The Patrol Runner picked up speed.

  “Oh. Nice trick.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Hey, I lost power up here!” Tori shouted. “Out of shots, and it’s not reloading! What did you do!”

  Rube’s Principle said simpler was better, and that a machine should only be as complicated as it had to be, but Rube’s Principle hadn’t anticipated a multi-need creation, and fluid Charge’s versatility had opened up quite a few options. The basic concept was the same as my Voltsmith’s Grasp’s articulation, using the Heart to direct Charge, but in the Runner’s case, it only needed two possible destinations.

  By default, the electric Charge loop that ran the grenade-thrower and Scorpion received Charge first, then the drive shaft got the overflow. I controlled that by limiting the amount the weapons could operate with to 3 and 2 under normal operation. But Tori had emptied the grenade-thrower completely—against instructions—and that meant the Charge system was flooding it in an attempt to reload. That had been a major problem the crews from the three destroyed technicals had complained about. They needed power where they needed power, when they needed it.

  The override switch reversed the priority order, forcing Charge into the drive shaft before letting the weapons systems drink.

  It was ugly, but it worked. We pulled away from the Solemnus Archwyrm as Calvin floored it, and for the first time since he’d taken the wheel, I didn’t hate him for it at all.

  Two hours later, Calvin finally stopped outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  It was the first time I’d left Illinois in a long time, and I was shocked at how quickly we’d covered the distance. It was hard to believe that in just four weeks, my world had shrunk to Chicago, Whiting, and a few mythical places like Wyoming, Green Bay, and Cozad, Nebraska. We’d talked about the people we had in other places, but until the Explorer, we hadn’t had a way to find those people.

  But now, we were almost halfway to Green Bay.

  And Tori knew it. “You know, we could just keep going. I bet Green Bay’s got a Waypoint,” she said as we looked over the city.

  “No, we’re checking Milwaukee first. If we get close enough to one, we’ll grab it, and then figure out what to do with Green Bay.” I rubbed my eyes. “Right now, we’ve got to take care of—“

  “Why? Why can’t we go find my other Mom? My real Mom? She’s probably alive, and they might need this beacon. If it’s like the one in Whiting—“

  “How do we even know Green Bay made it?” Calvin asked.

  Tori glared at him. So did I.

  “I’m not saying we shouldn’t check,” he continued. “But we have an objective. Hal’s right. We take care of the people we already committed to taking care of, and then we go after the ones who might be there. Priority orders. Triage. Whatever you want to call it.”

  Tori kept her glare going. Then she looked out over Lake Michigan and the bramble-covered city right to our north. The city’s skyscrapers were overrun—where they were even skyscrapers. Most of it looked more like the cliff-and-waterfall surface of Solemnus Six. Even from this far away, the ratio looked way worse than anything in Chicago. Even the West Siders hadn’t let it get this bad, and they’d been dealing with the worst of the orcs. But Milwaukee didn’t look like it had kept a single dungeon in Phase One, or reverted any to pre-tutorial status.

  My stomach churned, and not from Calvin’s driving. Whatever had happened here, there wouldn’t be delvers—or at least, not ones who’d gotten a safe zone through Phase One.

  “Okay.” I tore my eyes from the city center and pointed down at the bay, where a glimmering light flashed off a glass building. “How about we start there? It’s still Earth-ish. We can check the waterfront, then the rest of the city. If there’s nothing, we’ll keep pushing north, try to get to Green Bay, and come up with a solution after that.”

  The glare shifted to me. Then Tori’s shoulders slumped, and she walked back to the Runner. The door slammed behind her.

  Calvin shrugged at me. “She knew the situation.”

  “Doesn’t mean she likes it, though,” I replied. “Ideas?”

  He nodded and touched his beard. “Yep. We get down there, check out Milwaukee, and keep moving. There ain’t a beacon in this city. No way.”

  An hour later, I had to admit that Calvin was right. There wasn’t a beacon anywhere in Milwaukee. We hadn’t gotten any notifications about one being nearby, unlike when we’d pulled into Whiting. Looking at the city, though, that wasn’t surprising.

  As we drove beneath the bramble-choked skyscrapers and cliffs that poured waterfalls down into the streets below, the sheer, overwhelming emptiness of Milwaukee started to press down on me. The city didn’t just feel abandoned. It felt alien. I’d lived in Chicago long enough to be comfortable with how it functioned. Even the Graft hadn’t changed the city’s layout, and enough had survived in the safe zones and reclaimed dungeons that driving through it, it had still felt like home—or at least Earth.

  Milwaukee didn’t.

  The resonance was wrong. It felt like the inside of The Stronghold, but everywhere. And the cage of vines and thorns tightening across the skyscrapers didn’t help anything. It felt like those trees that grew on other trees, slowly choking them to death. Solemnus Six was slowly choking this city to death, and its Charge flow was all out of whack.

  I filed that away. Right now wasn’t the time—but I’d be back.

  We turned on a street covered in vines, watched a trio of orcs run down the road, and motored our way toward the city’s waterfront. It was the only place that wasn’t either grafted or in the process of being grown over. And the center of the Earth-native sliver of Milwaukee was a shining building with round, white panels and glass walls, overlooking the city’s bay.

  “Oh god,” Tori muttered, “not another one of these.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “That…” She pointed at the building, face dark. “That is Discovery World.”

  “And?” Calvin asked.

  “And Discovery World is an aquarium. Remember our last water dungeon, Hal?”

  I sighed, remembering the Watery Grave. Then I looked at the building in the distance. It was by the water, but looking at it, it didn’t have the right…something…to only be an aquarium. “Is that all it is?”

  “No.” Tori went quiet. Then, after a minute, she kept going. “Okay. Let me…let me start over. That’s Discovery World. Mom and Dad took me there on the last birthday before things…before they decided they didn’t want to be together. It’s a kids’ museum. Lots of weird stuff in there, but I wasn’t lying about it being an aquarium.”

  “Thought they lived in Green Bay,” Calvin muttered.

  “Mom did, after the divorce.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh. So, I don’t really want to go see what Integration did to the last place I remember being happy with both of them.” Tori glared at the building. She’d been doing a lot of that recently.

  I thought for a minute. Then I reached back and put a hand on her shoulder. She stiffened and looked at me with narrow, red eyes, but I kept going. “Let’s give it a drive-by. It’s the last place we haven’t checked for a Waypoint. If it’s there, we’ll decide how to handle that. If not, no big deal, right?”

  Tori looked at the floor. Then she nodded slowly. “Right. No big deal.”