Charge, Create, Down, Calling, Soul.

  What did it mean? I had no idea, but the dungeon had to have a clue somewhere inside of it. Even breaking down word puzzles into their components wasn’t effective if I didn’t know what the components meant or did on their own, so, as I hurried further into the glowing orange mist, I tried to take in everything I could.

  The problem was, there wasn’t anything to take in.

  Other than the orange Charge hanging in the air, the passageway was all but featureless. Rivets and welding bubbles were the only features on the steel walls, and the floor was solid—not quite concrete, but something similar. Even the ceiling was utterly and completely nondescript. The feeling of urgency and sacredness pushed me forward, though, and I felt my way down the hall as glowing orange Charge blurred my vision.

  The passage led under the A Whole New World dungeon, toward where I assumed the locked door to the Archive was, then underneath it. I walked probably three hundred feet before hitting a roadblock in the form of a massive, off-white wall with glowing purple sections. It reminded me of the side of the Waypoint Beacon, and I stared at it for a moment, then fished around in my inventory until I found the parts for a Charge Converter.

  Then I stuck it in place, backed up, and waited a few minutes for the wall to overload and collapse. Tori and Calvin were busy upstairs, and I had time to spare, but the waiting was excruciating.

  When it happened, exploding into hundreds of sharp ceramic shards, the resonant Charge changed yet again. It wasn’t urgent anymore. Now, it was simply expectant. It hung in the air, waiting and…watching.

  Charge had never had emotion before.

  I readied the Siege Hammer. There was every chance that this was an ambush; it was a dungeon, after all, and I’d walked into a few traps before. Then I stepped through the impromptu door I’d created.

  “Holy shit,” I said quietly.

  Charge flowed through the entrance all around me, gathering in a half-dozen gigantic batteries attached to the floor. As it poured into them, they started to glow, and the feeling of resonance spiked until it was almost unbearable. Then, when they were so orange they were almost white, it swirled up spiraling conduits toward the ceiling high above—so high I couldn’t reach it even with the Siege Hammer. Gears and levers clicked, and liquid Charge poured into Emitters, Lens Arrays, and Coils, painting a picture of bright, burning orange across the ceiling.

  Then a device I’d never seen in my life started consuming all of it. It popped. Sparks poured down onto the fake-stone floor, and the Charge seemed to vanish all around me. My hair blew in a sudden wind, and when I looked behind me, the force rushing into the room was all but blinding.

  The Charge hadn’t vanished. No. The machine over my head was simply consuming so much of it that even the sheer quantity of ambient Charge in the air wasn’t enough to keep it fed. For a moment, I had an insane thought: would this drain the Voltsmith’s Laboratory?

  Then the device activated, and part of me relaxed as the rest tensed.

  On the one hand, the…Charge Projector was the closest word I had for it…was emitting almost as much energy as it was consuming. Now that it was fully operational, it looked almost self-sustaining. Not quite, but there was no such thing as perpetual motion, and I supposed that was true for Charge, too.

  On the other hand, the Charge Projector was projecting a face—an almost uncannily human face. It was all orange, and it reminded me of Voril’s for a moment. Then its lips moved, and words appeared in the air in front of it.

  The World Engine bids you welcome, Voltsmith.

  The Solemnus Archivist: Level Seventy-Five Dungeon Boss (Rank One)

  Current Difficulty: Matched

  The Solemnus Archivist has carefully documented her people’s struggles as her world meets a new, terrifying one. Her work has led to untold breakthroughs in understanding, and yet, she fears that all of it will be lost to the rubbish pile of history if she falls. She cannot allow that to happen. She will persist.

  Myriad: This boss’s Elite state consists of innumerable members of a swarm, and will continue swarming until conditions change.

  Oppressive: This monster’s lair oppresses intruders, reducing their damage dealt.

  Backed Up: This boss is backed up and cannot be killed in its current form. It must be eliminated in another way.

  Tori narrowed her eyes at the dungeon’s boss. Somewhere behind her, Calvin was hiding. The brambles had broken through, and A Whole New World was slowly drowning in Solemnus Six’s native flora—or at least the flora native to the part that had grafted onto Lake Michigan’s west coast.

  And, even worse, now Tori had a boss to deal with.

  “Alright. Don’t suppose you’re going to make this easy?” she asked the all but skeletal orc standing in the doorway she’d just kicked open. In one hand, the orc carried a book. In the other, a staff lit the room in a light, almost lilac color.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  And from somewhere behind her, Tori thought she caught a flash of orange.

  The book flipped open. A page appeared in the air over it. Before Tori could react, it caught fire, burning purple for only a second before a spell manifested in the air in front of her. Massive lines of energy swirled and crackled, cutting across the room. Tori Pushed herself to the side, slammed into the wall, and wiped blood off her cheek where the spell had nicked her.

  Then she balled her fists and glared. “Wrong answer, bitch. I’m pissed off, and this dungeon’s in the way of making me feel better.”

  Magic welled around Tori as she started casting. Another page ripped from the book. And a moment later, she couldn’t see anything except the Solemnus Archivist, her spells, and burning pages from the boss’s book. Concrete and drywall shattered, paint melted, and the entire dungeon seemed to shiver as the two mages opened fire on each other.

  My mind raced.

  The massive orange face hanging mid-air stared at me silently. It was…the World Engine? What did that mean? Nothing I’d learned about geology, the planet, or anything else Cozad High had seen fit to teach me had implied there was anything like a World Engine—or even what that was.

  What was a World Engine, anyway? And why was it here? The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that this had to be another model—an incomplete exhibit or something. But that didn’t square with the feeling of sacredness at all.

  The words hung in the air for a moment, then shattered as they vanished—and as they did, I realized that the device wasn’t near perpetual at all. The projected Charge was electrical in nature, while it was consuming fluid Charge at an incredible rate. It didn’t have long. The face was already flickering, and as its lips kept moving, new words appeared, but only for fractions of a second.

  The World Engine, whatever it was, wasn’t fully functional. Whatever information it had hidden inside of it, I’d have to puzzle that out myself. The word puzzle continued.

  Charge, Create, Down, Calling, Soul. I added World to the list, then eliminated it and Down just as quickly. The Engine was clearly the World, and Down was a hint at where it had been hidden. That left me with four words to puzzle through.

  I let my brain drift. My mind cut off from my body except for my eyes and mouth as I watched the massive face’s lips try to make words. The Charge in the air kept flickering in and out, and lip-reading hadn’t ever been a hobby of mine. After a few seconds, I shook my head. “I’ll guess. The World Engine powers Earth?”

  The head shook. Then it flickered more.

  “No, that’d be too much. Its Charge has to do something, though. The World Engine doesn’t power…it…creates. That’s what it is. It creates?”

  It nodded.

  The terraforming. It had to be the terraforming and dungeon-building. That meant this was a Consortium machine, and it probably also meant that Voril knew about it. She’d been watching all of Chicago in Phase One; there was no way the Consortium wasn’t aware that something was happening here.

  Calling, Soul, and Charge.

  Calling, Soul, and Charge.

  I sat on the floor as the Charge face stared at me, closing my eyes and trying to think. The room’s resonance still felt holy, and I squeezed my eyes shut as three faces popped into my memory. Brian, in the moment we’d rescued him, Carol, and Zane from the Tigrilla inside the Twilight Menagerie. Cindy, telling me to go home and reminding me that the Explorer would be there tomorrow. The charred, burned face of Tommy, who’d forced himself through the Fireborn Crusader’s control to fight for Museumtown in its most desperate moments.

  When I opened my eyes, a woman’s face stared back—but it wasn’t uncannily human, like Voril’s. It was familiar, but it took me a moment to place it. She wasn’t my sister or mother. And she wasn’t Cindy. Tori was too young, and Jessica was too old.

  This woman was my age. Black hair in a mohawk. A small smile. She looked like the kind of girl who made a good cheerleader because she didn’t weigh anything. And a tattoo covered her neck.

  That was what did it; I’d only seen a handful of people who’d been tatted up after the Tutorials, and most of those had been bikers. The only woman with a neck tattoo so far had been…

  “Leana Collins?”

  The face’s brow wrinkled, like the words hurt her. Then she nodded slowly, and the projection started changing, flicking between dozens, then hundreds of different people faster and faster until I couldn’t recognize any features at all. They all blurred together into an amalgam of humanity that, occasionally, looked more orc-like, or like a rat man, or even the uncannily human, Voril-like structure.

  “Souls. The World Engine is souls?”

  Leana appeared again. She shook her head, flickered, then started changing even more quickly than before.

  “It’s not souls, but…it uses them?” No reaction. I kept thinking. Then I nodded slowly. “Charge is…souls?”

  Leana’s face appeared just long enough to shake, then nod. The answer was close.

  I went back to closing my eyes against the projector’s headache-inducing speed. Overhead, something popped, and an acrid smell poured down into the room. The feeling of resonance faded, and I coughed as the holy, expectant aura in the air slowly disappeared.

  Charge wasn’t souls. But it was something similar.

  My eyes opened, and the face was gone. The projector was still running, grinding as parts of it started to decay under the sheer amount of energy ripping through it. Words appeared. Not sentences, but words.

  Charge…Life Force…Calling…World Engine…Principles…Voltsmith.

  Then another pop erupted from above, sparks rained down, and the acrid scent redoubled.

  This dungeon has been compromised.

  Time Until Overload: 4:59

  4:58

  4:57

  I ignored the timer, reached down, and pocketed a small component that’d fallen from the ceiling. It didn’t matter; there was plenty of time to escape from the A Whole New World, and too much to learn to leave now. I needed to figure it out. That string of words meant something. So, as I headed for the doorway and down the tunnel toward the Integration Engineering exhibit, I spent the time thinking.

  The World Engine ran on Charge. Charge was…life force of some kind. Did the Consortium know about it? That felt important.

  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.

  The message implied that they did. I squeezed the Siege Hammer’s handle until my fingers ached. My throat ached as I tried to breathe through it. Focus. I tried to focus on anything—on the thin tide of Charge still moving down the tunnel, and the light from above pouring into the flywheel mount.

  When I’d picked Voltsmith, I’d wanted to, someday, understand the secrets behind Integration. At the end of Phase One, I’d made a promise to myself that I’d find a better way to do it. Even at that point, it was obvious that the way the Consortium was running its Integrations was a problem, and every problem had a solution. But those words…they weren’t just proof of that—proof that Charge was life force. They were proof that the Consortium, to some level, knew that it was powering the apocalypse with death.

  I had to decide whether I had the dead’s permission to do the same with my own weapons, in the name of fighting back against it.