“Hal, you’ve got this one, right?” Carol asked. She stared at the Red Furnace as it belched out heat.

  “Nope.”

  “What do you mean, nope?” Tori asked.

  I shrugged. “I mean that the Red Furnace just blew my running theory out of the water. I thought all of this stuff followed the same rules as my creations, and that if I could apply those rules to these structures, I could… never mind. I thought I could figure out how dungeons work. But the Inner Gate and the Red Furnace operate under totally different rules. It’s a puzzle, but I can’t see the art on the pieces, only the edges.”

  “So you can’t shut it down, then?” Tori asked.

  “I just said nope.” I paused. “What we can do is try to solve it like a normal party would. There’s a bypass somewhere. It doesn’t need Charge to activate. We find it, the Red Furnace shuts down.”

  Tori rolled her eyes, and I started walking the perimeter of the room. It stank of red-hot metal and burning flesh, even though all the dead orcs had disappeared and left behind experience orbs. As I collected mine, I leveled up to Sixty-Eight. Both points went into Charge, as usual.

  The walls weren’t wooden here; even the bramble roots had been pared back and burnt off. Instead, they were stone, smoothed to a polish and covered with a thin layer of soot from the Red Furnace. A thin band of iron ran the length of each wall, at about chest height. I brushed the ash and dust off of it, revealing a repeated pattern, but what it meant, I couldn’t make heads or tails of.

  Carol and Zane wandered off toward the back of the furnace, Zane casting spells on both of them. They looked like they were pretty comfortable, and the heat seemed to build up around them and shimmer like it was trapped on something, so I left them to that part of the room. Tori checked the door passageway over closely, but it was obvious from the beginning that her mission was hopeless.

  And Erika…

  Where was Erika?

  “Uh, Tori, have you seen Erika?” I asked.

  “She was supposed to be taking care of stragglers in that last fight, Tori said absentmindedly.

  “But did she?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. I didn’t see her.”

  I nodded seriously. “And I haven’t seen her since before the fight started. Do you think she’s okay?”

  Tori rolled her eyes. “Do you think anything here could hurt her with her antimagic bullshit?”

  “Yes. A lot of things could hurt her.”

  Tori didn’t have a response, and after a moment, she went back to searching for the Red Furnace’s trigger. But nothing in the room seemed to be a shut-off switch. After a few minutes, I stopped. “Okay, new theory. Let’s keep moving, try to find the way to the Work Floor, and if we find any caves, we’ll search them, too.”

  Tori stared at me. I stared back. After a second, she shrugged. “Fine, have it your way, you mutinous cur.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Tori fell in behind me, and we headed back down the tunnel.

  I didn’t expect any boss-level enemies on the second floor, and the orcs didn’t disappoint. There were plenty in the Level Sixty-Three to Sixty-Eight range, but nothing outrageously strong, and nothing that the four of us couldn’t out-muscle—just groups of Mechanists and Hammerswingers, with an occasional Juggernaut wandering the long, winding tunnel.

  The place looked nothing like the Union Center. We hadn’t watched much in the way of sports—if it wasn’t the ‘Huskers, Dad didn’t want anything to do with it—but I’d caught a few Bulls games, and seen enough post-game stuff to know that the locker rooms were a lot nicer than this. This was straight out of Solemnus Six.

  As we searched for the way to the Work Floor, I kept my eyes open for two things. First, a way to shut down the Red Furnace. And second, Erika Samson. She had to be around here somewhere. But the only sign we had that we were even on the right track was when the tunnel forked into two separate rooms.

  One housed a dozen or more glowing dots on my Bio-Electric Scanner.

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  The other was empty.

  “That way,” I said, pointing toward the empty room. A low burning sound filled the air from behind its shut door. Tori fiddled with it, then, when it wouldn’t open, she slammed it with a Push. It popped off its crude hinges and crashed into the room like a missile from a catapult.

  I raised an eyebrow and shot her a look, and she shrugged. “Oops.”

  The room was empty. Whatever the metal door had hit, it was nothing but a pile of scrap metal now. But the rest of the room housed a few dozen suits of light, metal armor that, even piled against the walls and lying on work stations, I knew covered the vitals and nothing else. Leather straps and dark iron plates to protect chests, thighs, and heads. Absolutely nothing for stomachs, arms, backs, or any other part of an orc’s body.

  The ‘suits’ of armor on the work stations were half-finished, leather stitching abandoned and rivets driven in but not connected. Some of them had fallen to the ground and hadn’t been picked up. And on the floor were nearly a dozen small weapons.

  “No bodies,” Zane said quietly. I glanced his way; his eyes traversed the room, back and forth, taking in the scene.

  “Think she was here?” I asked.

  “No. I know she was here.” Zane pointed at a gash in the stone wall. Then another. “There was a fight. She won. It was recent. Look. The door’s open.” He stiffened, and his eyes locked on the door.

  Carol touched him on the arm, and he jumped, then visibly forced himself to calm down. “Sorry.”

  “You’re okay,” Carol said.

  Zane didn’t say anything, and after a minute, I kept moving. The fire mage was right. The room was an armory. The orcs inside of it had been in the middle of making that armor. They’d been ambushed and either forced out or killed. There was no way to know, but my gut told me they’d been killed. It made the most sense; otherwise, they’d have moved back in or called for back-up. The constant, machine-gun sounds of hammers on metal coming from everywhere would have drowned out a fight.

  Zane….Zane was an enigma, too. The only thing I knew for sure was that he wasn’t the same kid we’d rescued from the Twilight Menagerie. He was hurting, and that pain was getting channeled into the wrong places. But I didn’t know what to do with him.

  Carol did, though. She took the lead, dragging him down the hall we’d come from. They sat and started whispering and staring at each other one after the other, in rapid-fire bursts.

  “They do that a lot,” Tori said.

  “Right.” I shook my head and started focusing. There wasn’t any connection to the Red Furnace here—at least not that I could see, and my resonance senses weren’t going crazy. They weren’t activated at all, and I stopped to figure out why.

  Maybe it was because this place was fully Solemnus-Six.

  In the end, we found all three of our goals in the same place—a small room at the very lowest part of the tunnel.

  Erika waved us in quickly, then slammed the door behind her. “Quiet.”

  “Why’d you bail?” Tori asked.

  “Too loud. We need to keep it down, or they’re going to hear us. The door’s not open from our side, but the dungeon’s rules about leaving it probably apply to leaving a floor, too. Those stairs lead up—and I promise they lead to the Work Floor.” Erika pointed to a narrow set of stairs that weaved upward through the rocks. Halfway up, they turned into concrete and carpet, and a few feet past that stood a fog wall.

  “But why?” Tori whispered.

  “Because you four were going to take your time, and that’s not how you clear a dungeon.”

  I ignored them as they quietly sniped back and forth at each other. This room, unlike the rest, was resonant.

  The resonant Charge poured in from above, through the fog wall. But while almost all of it came from the Work Floor, a small amount trickled in from a tiny spot against the room’s far wall. There, a device made from planed, flat wood was bolted into the rough stone with iron spikes. It looked like a hollow square frame, and inside, a small spinning piece rotated freely, spoon-shaped blades seeming to catch air like a waterwheel. There’d been one of those in the ditch two farms over, and I’d always been fascinated with the way it lifted water upward into that guy’s fields.

  This one didn’t look like it was lifting, though. As I focused, the dripping flow of Charge came into focus. One drip per spoon. No more, no less. The device seemed to regulate itself.

  I stared at it for a second. It wasn’t alone; there were dozens of moving parts, levers, and buttons against the wall. Erika had obviously touched some of them before giving up. But she hadn’t figured out the answer—because there was more than one. Just like the Inner Gate, there was a code or combination to shut the Red Furnace down. I didn’t need that combination, though.

  “Uh, Tori?” I asked.

  She ignored me. Erika, Carol, and Tori were currently having a three-way fight, quietly yelling at each other. I spent about five seconds trying to figure out who was arguing what, then shook my head. Tori was too absorbed with her leadership over our dungeon clear to listen, and if a grown woman with a daughter of her own wanted to have a screaming match with two teens, more power to her.

  Zane nodded as he saw me give up. I did a double-take at that. It was the first emotion he’d shown that wasn’t anger or anxiety.

  So, instead of trying to convince Tori to stop, I reached out with the Voltsmith’s Grasp and let my gauntlet’s Charge mix with the droplets of it leaking onto the device.

  The screeching sound that echoed through the underground halls of The Stronghold’s second floor was almost deafening and almost instant. A half-dozen earth-shaking thuds followed it. Then silence.

  “Hal, what did you do?” Tori asked without looking.

  I sighed. “Why do you think it was me?”

  “Because the dungeon’s status just—“

  Before she could finish, an interruption rolled in.

  Objective: Stop the Red Furnace (1/1)

  Objective: Access the Work Floor (1/1)

  Objective: Survive (1/1)

  Completion: 68%

  Area Message: The Stronghold’s third floor has unlocked. This floor will remain unlocked for twenty-four hours, after which time the first and second floors will reset.

  I winced dramatically. Then I pointed at the stairs, where the fog gate blocking them had vanished. “Shall we?” I asked. Without waiting for a response, I hefted the Trip-Hammer and pushed my way up.

  The Work Floor—and the boss at the end of this dungeon—awaited.