Oh my God, the picnic basket.

  Things that are apparently not picnic foods: pizza, scrambled eggs, spice gum drops.

  Things that are: hamburgers, potato salad, deviled eggs, brownies, French bread and soft cheese, grapes, cherries, apples, more cheese, potato chips, fried chicken, chocolate-chip cookies, and s’mores.

  Honestly, the s’mores were overkill. Jack somehow convinced the basket they were picnic food—he was having fun trying out all kinds of random crap, most of which didn’t work—but the melting toasted marshmallow and chocolate was like heaven.

  And also disgusting, in that way sugar is when you’ve had way, way, way too much to eat.

  I lay back on the hard ground and looked up at the woven mesh of vines overhead. We hadn’t tried to make a roof for our enclosure. It was more of a three-sided, camouflaged fence than a lean-to. My Wild Sanctuary ability had considered it an acceptable improvised defense, though, so a roof of vines covered us. Beyond that, tree branches, and beyond them, the sky. I couldn’t see it, but it somehow felt like it might be getting lighter.

  There were no roses on the sanctuary this time, and no glow either. Plenty of thorns, though, and the vines seemed darker, more foreboding. I wondered if the ability took clues from my mood. Digging the pit had been peaceful, therefore glowing roses? Building the fence had been annoying as hell, therefore black thorns and a denser weave? Maybe. Or maybe it just manifested what I thought I needed, like the so-called Law of Attraction.

  Hmm, maybe those Law of Attraction people had been early multiversal spies, put on the planet to dupe us all into manifesting the System somehow? Or maybe I was starting to need a nap.

  “Hey, I think maybe it’s getting light,” Jack said. He was sitting at the edge of the fence, keeping watch for goblins. “Maybe we should go check out the stronghold now, see what we’re facing.”

  “I don’t think I can move,” Emma moaned. “Those s’mores…”

  But I heard rustling so I knew she was getting up anyway.

  I sat up, too, with some reluctance. Zelda had been curled next to me, a tight ball by my knee, but as I pushed myself up, she lifted her head and rested it on my leg. Her tail gave a single thump on the ground.

  I opened my HUD and glanced at the countdown timer. 55:16. About time for a goblin, if we were still in a clearing.

  “Aren’t you exhausted?” I asked Jack.

  “Nah, just one more all-nighter. Although usually my all-nighters are a lot more sedentary.” He laughed quietly.

  “You have to stay up all night for school? In high school?” I asked, surprised. I’d pulled the occasional all-nighter in college but they were rare and usually dictated by circumstances outside my control.

  His laugh was a little louder. “No. I am in college, not high school, but also, no. All my all-nighters are for gaming.”

  “Oh. Duh.” I should have guessed. “Well, good, you’re practiced.”

  “It’s a little different in the real thing.” He paused. “Well, ‘real,’ so to speak.”

  “It’s a lot different,” Emma said. I heard her yawn, but then sounds that indicated she was standing, moving outside the enclosure, stretching. I guess that meant we were moving.

  “You ready to go, Z?” I asked Zelda, stroking my hand along her soft back.

  She rolled over, exposing her belly, suggesting, as clearly as daylight, that perhaps more snuggling was in order instead.

  The way she was communicating with me was so strange. I’d always been one of those people who talked to their dogs and supplied the dog’s half of the conversation, too. Sure, maybe I was wrong some of the time, but when you paid attention to your animals, you could mostly tell at least their mood, if not exactly what they were thinking or saying.

  But it was different now. It felt like she was speaking. Real words, not just impressions.

  “You want to hunt goblins?” I said to her.

  She rolled all the way over and bounced to her feet. Let’s go! Time to go! Let’s do it!

  “All right, looks like it’s unanimous.” It was maybe not quite unanimous. There was a part of me that thought hiding out in this little sanctuary for the next fifty-odd hours seemed like a reasonable plan. Maybe ten percent of me. Possibly twenty. But the other eighty or ninety saw the rationale in trying to succeed with the goals we’d been given.

  Also—and a solid 50% of me felt this way—I was gonna be bored out of my mind if we spent another fifty hours sitting here. I’d never last. I was willing to kill goblins just for the entertainment value.

  Did that make me a psychopath?

  Never once in my long history of psychiatric disorders had anyone ever suggested that might be the case. Even my ex-husband, who was, in my opinion, overly free with the armchair diagnoses, had never tried that one. Too sensitive, sure. Not sensitive enough, never.

  And yet… on with the goblin mass murder, amirite?

  “We should use the primer,” Emma said, still sounding sleepy. I heard rustling, which meant she was digging it out of the picnic basket.

  The basket was weird. You could use it as a storage container—it held the can of spray paint, the lip balm, and assorted other goblin loot—but if you thought about food when you put your hand inside, the food appeared. Assuming it was picnic food, of course.

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  “Here.” Emma passed me the tube of Goblin Glow.

  I squeezed some out onto my fingertips, then spread it across my cheekbones. Should I use it like blush or like sunscreen? It didn’t come with directions, as far as I could tell, so I spread it around my face, feeling slightly stupid. Then, feeling even more stupid, I squeezed out a little more and dabbed it on Zelda’s back, before passing the tube over to Jack. If it kept us safer, maybe it would keep her safer, too.

  “So what’s the plan?” Emma asked. “And before you answer that, could we all just visualize, as thoroughly as possible, a picnic with iced coffee? Specifically, a venti triple-shot caramel macchiato? Like, just imagine yourself sitting on a red-checkered tablecloth in a field of flowers with the birds singing and children playing and a giant coffee in your—oh, score! It worked! Nice job, my fellow… eh.”

  “What’s the ‘eh’ for?” Jack asked.

  “Oh. Ah, fellow sufferers. That’s just—work lingo, I guess. The joke for the middle-of-the-night peeps. Fellow sufferers.”

  “Highly appropriate,” I said. “Fits us to a T. From now on, we’re Team Fellow Sufferers.”

  Jack snorted. “Maybe we can make a guild.”

  “First things first.” Emma slurped from her drink. “I’m gonna be real. I’ve got no idea how we beat those goblins. I didn’t think we could do it when there were four of us, including a warrior. No offense, Olivia, but I don’t think roses are going to cut it. But I can lead the way to the stronghold and we can take a look. Maybe you guys have some ideas that I’m missing.” The doubt in her tone was clear.

  If I had a coffee of my own, I would have tipped it to her in acknowledgement. Instead, I said, “Marginal viability. And yet, here we are.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “My first message from the System. Individual viability, marginal. I took it to heart.”

  “Individual viability.” Jack sounded thoughtful. “Oh.”

  His ‘oh’ was a masterpiece of layers. I heard surprise, pleasure, gratification, embarrassment, and maybe a hint of pride, all in that one tiny word.

  “Let me guess,” I said. My words were not rich with subtle nuance: just pure dry amusement. “Not marginal?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Excellent, then it’s up to you to keep us alive through this next part, okay?”

  “Ha.” Emma laughed. “Oh, I found mine. I’m optimal. I guess that’s good news?”

  “EMT training, bound to be useful at the end of the world,” I replied.

  I was surprisingly unbothered by the discovery that they were more ‘viable’ than I was. It wasn’t like getting a C in a class you’d studied for when your friends got As without doing the work. It was more like getting a C in a class where you thought the teacher was an idiot and you were willing to say so. Sometimes you do the crime, you take the time. I felt weirdly proud of being marginal. It was like the System wanted to label me too soft-hearted to live and I wanted to say, fuck, yeah, I’ll take that assessment.

  Except… well, I was going to go kill goblins.

  Perhaps I was having an identity crisis.

  “All right, let’s just go as stealthily as possible and see what the stronghold looks like,” Jack said. “Then we can come back here and work on a strategy.” He glanced at Zelda. “Will she be okay? Maybe we should leave her here?”

  Zelda looked away from him in crystal-clear dog disdain. Not me tripping on sticks.

  “She’ll be fine.” My lips quivered with the laugh I was suppressing, but I pressed them together to hide it.

  It got easier to travel quietly through the forest the lighter it got, but it was still mostly dark by the time we reached the edge of the trees, the beginning of the stronghold. And stronghold it was.

  The forest ended abruptly, like someone had drawn a line in the dirt and announced, “Nature stops here.” Beyond the treeline stretched open fields with goblin campsites sprawled through them like a music festival designed by hoarders. The kind that hoard trash, not collectibles.

  My first thought was: We are so screwed.

  My second thought was: God, goblins are disgusting.

  My third thought, as my enhanced perception and maybe that tracking skill kicked in, was more analytical.

  The goblin campsites were clustered in groups around a central stone building that rose a couple stories tall. It basically screamed, “Rift Control Chamber Here,” although that was so obvious that it probably wasn’t. It was built with smooth stone blocks, narrow windows, and a style that definitely didn’t match the ramshackle wooden structures scattered around it.

  Those outer structures were pure squatter encampment chaos. Lean-tos made of tree branches and animal hides, fire pits surrounded by rough stone circles, piles of trash and debris. It looked as if there were at least six distinct camps, each with maybe a central larger fire, just going by how the structures were positioned.

  “See what I mean?” Emma whispered.

  “That is a lot of goblins,” Jack breathed out the words.

  Zelda pressed against my leg. So many squeaky balls. Let’s go! All the goblins!

  I put my hand on her back, not quite at the stage of grabbing her collar, but definitely ready to hold her back if she decided to jump the gun. “This is the just the planning stage, Z. No squeaky balls yet.”

  There weren’t actually a lot of goblins moving around, although a few were. Most were probably sleeping.

  If we had a bunch of bombs… which we didn’t. Or a nice tank… which we didn’t. Or maybe… yeah, no. All of my ideas faltered on the obstacle of that being a lot of goblins and us being not a lot of people. A direct attack, though, was absolutely out, no matter what Zelda wanted.

  The four of us stayed crouched at the treeline, hidden behind some brush, watching the encampments for several long minutes. If we had, oh, say, twenty-four people, a dawn attack would have been a brilliant idea, because the goblins’ ideas of security were remarkably lax. A few looked like they might be on sentry duty, but one was napping, two were playing some game in the dirt, and a fourth was facing the wrong direction.

  I wondered if the goblins had the same participant counter we did. Did they know they’d already almost won this stupid game we were playing?

  Jack jerked his head back in the direction of our sanctuary, and Emma nodded enthusiastically. The two of them headed off while Z and I spent one more moment looking at the stronghold.

  I wanted pots of stew we could drop poison in, if, you know, we had poison.

  Prisoners we could set free who would help fight for us. None visible.

  Giant tanks of gas that would explode with a little stealthy sabotage. It seemed unlikely.

  I still had my hand on Zelda’s back, but I lifted it with a sigh. With a tilt of my head, I told her we needed to follow Jack and Emma.

  Her tail lifted above her back, curving at the tip. I understood it as an objection as clearly as if she had spoken. It was dog for “What? No way.”

  I shook my head, smiling a little. Okay, the goblins were a disaster, but the animal communication skills were a delight. Or maybe that was just my bond with Z. The System hadn’t said anything about the soul-bond improving communication, but it clearly had.

  Still, it was getting lighter by the minute, and I didn’t want to get spotted by the hordes.

  “There will be more goblin killing soon, I promise. Just not right now,” I whispered to her, then tilted my head again in—well, not an order. A suggestion maybe?

  Dogs don’t roll their eyes. But the angle of her left ear was just as eloquent. She followed me away from the goblin stronghold, radiating disapproval with every step.