The Siege Hammer came down.

  Then it rocketed back up like a missile, the ceiling collapsed all around me, and Tori glared at me, arms out. “Whoops! Sorry. And also, what the fuck, Hal?”

  The hammer hit the ground and bounced a half-dozen times before I got a hold of it and shut its Charge engine off. “Sorry. We’re in a dungeon, and I figured you weren’t interested. Thought you were a monster.”

  “I’m not, but there’s a voice coming from the right-side door. I was going to check it out, but since you’re attacking people, maybe I’ll just go back and—“

  “I’ll go,” Calvin said.

  “What?” I asked.

  Tori echoed me, staring at the old veteran. “You want to explore a dungeon and fight monsters?” she asked.

  “No. I want to figure out what the grafting process is, and I’ve got a bad feeling that Hal’s gonna be here for a while once he reads what I just read.”

  “Show me,” I said, shouldering the Siege Hammer.

  Calvin walked me back to the maze of bands ‘powering’ the ‘task’ boxes. Then he pointed at one that’d opened just before Tori had interrupted us. I skimmed through it. Most of it meant nothing to me—some rambling propaganda for ten-year-olds about the resource-gathering part of Integration. But the last line…the last line stuck out.

  Finding the value in even a Tier Six world is very important. The charge to create value for the Universal Order is passed down from expert to expert, a calling that touches the soul of every world.

  “What does that mean?” I muttered to myself.

  “Thought you’d find it interesting. I ain’t gonna sit here and watch you puzzle it out, though.” Calvin slapped my back, then started walking away. “Tori, let’s go. Grafting, right? I gotta know more about Grafting.”

  “Whatever, Calvin,” she said.

  And just like that, I was alone. Alone with a word puzzle.

  Word puzzles had never been my forte. Word searches, crossword puzzles, anything like that—you name it, and I struggled with it. That had lasted until my sophomore year. That was the year I started working on the station wagon, and the year I really started to understand machines as collections of components that all did different tasks. That last sentence…that wasn’t built for a ten-year-old exploring a children’s museum.

  No. There were clues in there. Charge. Create. Calling. World. Those words mattered. But there was exactly one word in them that mattered more than the rest.

  Down.

  The answer wasn’t on this floor of the dungeon—but that made no sense. A Whole New World was singular. There was only one floor. How could I go down when there wasn’t a way to go down?

  I stared at the grid of bands, flywheels, and ‘task’ boxes. Then I walked to the flywheel at the room’s center and tapped it with my finger. If it was solid, it’d sound a certain way, and if not…if not, it’d reverberate. The ringing that filled the room wasn’t a simple vibration, and it wasn’t the sound of solid metal being tapped. It was more bell-like.

  The Siege Hammer revved. I swung it, and it crashed into the flywheel. Metal shards flew everywhere, and as I stared into the open space below the floor, a bright orange glimmer punched through the darkness, and for the first time, I saw how a dungeon operated.

  Then the resonance hit, and it hit hard enough to drive me to my knees.

  I recovered slowly. The Heart on my Voltsmith’s Grasp started pumping faster and faster as the wave of resonant Charge hit it, and after a few minutes, I was upright again.

  The gap I’d broken was big enough for me to squeeze through, and so brighly lit by trails of orange Charge that I could easily see the bottom only ten feet down. I lowered myself on the sharp edge of the broken flywheel mount, thankful for the steel arm—otherwise, I’d have been cut to hell—and then dropped to the ground. This was an opportunity to figure out exactly what made dungeons tick, and I needed to understand.

  The moment I dropped, though, the resonance redoubled. This time, it wasn’t overwhelming. No, it was…different. Welcoming. Almost…holy?

  Church had never been a priority for us. Mom and Dad had taken us in for Christmas mass, Easter service, and pretty much ignored it the rest of the time. There’d been too much to do, and too few hands to do it all. And I hadn’t changed much after I moved to Chicago. But even though I hadn’t been a believer, the Cozad church still felt like an important—or maybe even sacred—place. Other people relied on it, and if it was important enough for them to give up a day every week, I could respect that.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  This was different.

  It took me a few seconds of letting the Charge’s resonance wash over me to figure it out. It wasn’t the same kind of welcoming level of sacred as Cozad’s church. Close, but not the same. I closed my eyes and focused on the feeling, then tried to remember any other times I’d felt this way. Three came to mind.

  The first was finding Brian’s corpse after Eddie had murdered him.

  The second was when Tori had covered Cindy’s body in the garage.

  And the third was when I’d buried Tommy on Northerly Island.

  I shivered. Then I opened my eyes and started looking for Voltsmithing components. The Whole New World dungeon was my first—and probably only—opportunity to figure out exactly what made them tick. Nothing else had come close, not even the Stronghold’s underground floor. There’d be an answer in here. But the weight of the resonant Charge around me weighed on me, and even as I searched the empty space, the truth started me right in the face.

  This wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If it was, someone would have found it. Hell, given how I’d fought the Grovetender and Voril, we’d have broken through to this component, resonant Charge layer in at least one of those fights. Tori and I had torn apart dungeons trying to clear them. We’d know about this already.

  This was purpose-built—and so was that clue. The Charge to Create value for the Universal Order is passed Down from expert to expert, a Calling that touches the Soul of every world. It hadn’t been built for anyone to figure out. Calvin had noticed something about it, but not enough to solve it himself.

  It was built specifically for someone with a Charge class—a Voltsmith, or someone similar.

  The hole I’d hammered into the flywheel mount had been built for me, and so had this room full of Charge.

  I stopped searching the space for a moment. There would be no answers here—not about the nature of dungeons. But there would be something to learn. Instead, I focused on the words that stuck out to me, and of them, ‘Soul’ and ‘Calling’ felt the least like bait for a Charge class.

  Those were the answers. They had to be. If I could just figure out what they meant, I’d learn the secret A Whole New World was trying to share with me.

  The resonance shifted the moment my thoughts did. The sacred feeling of being at a funeral stayed. The welcoming feeling disappeared, though. In its place, the resonance went sour. It reminded me of some kind of not-music, the kind kids back at Cozad High listened to just to irritate their parents, with none of the intricacies of classic rock in its many forms, but under the discordant mess was a feeling of urgency.

  I needed to figure this out—and I needed to figure it out quickly.

  “God dammit,” Calvin muttered.

  Tori didn’t say anything, but she was thinking it.

  Grafting: A New Planetary Revitalizer had been Grafted. It was covered in brambles, so thick she could hardly even smash through with Gravity Wells and Pulls. And worse, it was growing fast. It hadn’t left the hall around the exhibit—which was a massive map of Earth with jigsaw puzzle-like squares piled up around it—but it was only a matter of time before it overran the entirety of A Whole New World.

  Worse than the brambles, though, were the orcs. There weren’t a ton of them, but they had bows, and they were shooting at Calvin and Tori. She couldn’t shoot back without clearing the brambles, and Calvin had already used his Armistice of Thorns. It had helped, in a way. The orcs couldn’t shoot through the mass of thorny vines around every fighter in the Grafting wing. But they hadn’t helped clear the room, either.

  “God dammit, Tori, we need to get moving,” Calvin said again. “We’re gonna be in trouble here, and Hal’s—“

  “I know!”

  It was all his fault. Not Calvin’s. Hal’s. If he hadn’t insisted on this stupid kids’ museum, Tori wouldn’t be fighting monsters a hundred feet from the room where her parents had broken the news that they didn’t want to be together anymore. She hated this place, and she tore at the brambles and the Grafted monsters with every bit of that hate.

  Soon, she’d get to the orcs, get this room cleared, and then finish off A Whole New World’s god damned, miserable, stupid-ass boss. And then she’d drag Hal out of whatever was so important that she had to be here, force him to start up the Runner, and get the hell out of here. Green Bay was calling, and she needed to answer.

  Voril hovered over Chicago in her meditation tank.

  The Voltsmith, Hal Riley, had left her area of responsibility. He’d headed north, into an area that had blue-beamed at the end of Phase One. The humans called it Milwaukee, and with its failure due to interference, there was no Integration manager in that area.

  She’d been busy, too. Chicago’s three major communities were all attempting to survive Phase Two in interesting and unique ways.

  The Rat’s Nest seemed to be digging in. They’d finally managed to get a clean reset on Norse Town, and its boss would be up just before the end of Phase Two. Everyone had moved into a pair of drainage pipes inside of the nest, and it looked like they’d be trying the same strategy Museumtown had used in Phase One.

  The West End people were spreading out instead. They were all pushing west, toward Des Moines and the green-beamed community there. Voril hadn’t been paying much attention to them, so she had no idea whether they planned to steal the Waypoint Beacon the people there had discovered or join up with them. Maybe both. They weren’t exactly organized.

  And Museumtown…Museumtown was looking everywhere except south.

  Voril understood that choice, of course. The Fireborn Crusade controlled those regions, and Museumtown stood no real chance of stealing a Beacon out from under them. But that was irrelevant. There was no beacon near Gary, Indiana.

  An alarm went off, disrupting Voril’s focus. She reached to disable it—not every crisis needed her immediate attention, and some were expected. Then she stopped, finger on the interface screen, button depressed but not released.

  “What are you doing, Hal Riley?” Voril asked. Then she started moving her pod through the air, flying north. The Voltsmith had broken a dungeon somehow, and she was the closest administrator to Milwaukee.