As Dave had predicted, the grenade didn’t hurt me. I ran through the burgeoning flame, seized hold of the arrow through Dave’s wing—I couldn’t see it in this mess, but my aim was true—and I yanked it out of the ground, bird and all.

  I ran toward the exit with the skewered bird in hand.

  “Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow,” Dave said, helpfully.

  “What the hells were you doing?” I growled at him, darting between the stones that led back to the Gem Baths.

  “Well, it was either let her kill me lying down, or kill us both,” Dave said. “I’d much rather take my killer with me than just die, you know.”

  “Where were you? When I was about to die to Wapum?”

  “Are you going to keep asking stupid questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. I was pinned to the mother-doing-her-son’s-laundry-even-though-he’s-old-enough-to-do-it-his-own-damn-self ground.”

  Every now and then, the system had trouble translating one of Dave’s curses. Every time, I was left with questions that weren’t worth asking.

  “I see Hergvor made it to you,” Dave commented as the smoke cleared.

  I came to a rough stop, looked at him, then set off again. Was he the one that switched Hergvor to heal mode?

  But if he had been, then why had he been halfway across the map while Hergvor was right next to me? Hergvor couldn’t run while he was in heal mode. He stayed where he stood. He only ran—and fought—when in follow mode.

  “Did you switch him to heal mode?” I asked tentatively, slowing as I came to the very last pool in the Gem Baths, the one that had clear water over a mass of violet gemstone.

  “Me? No. I just saw him run past. How did he find you, anyway?”

  He should have lied there. Should have said it was him. If all that with Bridget was a sham to make him look like he hadn’t abandoned me, then wouldn’t he take credit for switching Hergvor’s mode?

  “It’s in his program,” I said. “He’ll find me anywhere I am, as long as he switches to follow mode. It’s the Tendua who will have more trouble.”

  To punctuate this comment, Hergvor jogged up behind me. I was about to step into the pool, but I gave the area one final scan. We were at the bottom of the Gem Baths, and there was a boiling river with a pathway next to it that led out of the place. I knew that, when I walked along the river, the Acolyte Agamani would appear to bar my bath. She was the area’s main boss, and a part of the storyline. She wasn’t level 99, thankfully.

  But, just before the spot where she spawned, a mini pavilion stood. It was really a shop, with a horseshoe of tables piled high with souvenirs, shaded by a striped canvas tarp. A platform of wood kept the wares clear of the water rushing past it.

  I jogged over, and found an NPC manning the place. She had the name Dori hovering above her, along with the level 12 and the title MERCHANT EXTRAORDINAIRE. In the game, her interaction icon would be different to indicate that she was a merchant, but there was no icon here.

  Still, she did exist in the game, although she was a lot younger and peppier than the woman the Conduit had chosen to replace her. This woman here was old and frail.

  “Come one, come all, to Dori’s Riverside Hoard of Curiosities!” she croaked. “Special discount today—20% off everything!”

  This came not in a peppy voice, but the shaky, slow voice of a woman on death’s door. I made a fist and looked away from her. She didn’t deserve to be trapped here like this, especially not so close to a boiling-hot river. I didn’t think she’d last long in this heat.

  Items littered the tables, but I could perform a basic loot action on each table to see what it contained. Unlike a normal loot menu, this one came with prices.

  “Anything good?” Dave asked.

  “Just watch the HUD for Bridget while I see what she’s got.” I was at least reasonably sure that Dave didn’t want Bridget close, whether he meant to betray me or not.

  Dave looked back at the Slain Crags entrance. “I dropped that grenade, you know. She probably has it now. Did you see her, after you blew her to bits?”

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “No, but she’s not in bits, or we would have won the Level. You’re lucky she didn’t know how little damage those grenades do.”

  “I am known for getting lucky,” Dave said.

  I tuned him out, my mind whirring with suspicion and relief and confusion and too many of the memories that came with those emotions. What had Bridget meant when she’d said took you long enough? What had she expected me to do?

  She didn’t see me as her enemy. She just wanted Dave. She has always just wanted Dave.

  I shook myself and scanned through the items that Dori had on offer. As Dave had warned me, most of them were crap, and the prices were insane even on the crummy stuff. Dragon scales, which could be pulled off the hatchling, were going for hundreds of gold.

  “Is the auction function active?” I asked Dave.

  “Depends. Are there shitty items going for thousands?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then yeah. Viewers are bidding on them. You can still buy that stuff, though. If a player pays the current top bid, they can buy any item outright, so long as it’s been posted for like an hour or something. You’ll also have more money than most viewers—they have to pay real money for every gold they use here.”

  I scanned through the list of crafting ingredients. “Gods forbid I ever want to craft anything. Craftables are going for ten times what they do—I mean, what they should go for, in a game.”

  “Only the cool-looking ones.”

  He was right. Ugly items like rat meat were still cheap.

  “They keep them as souvenirs,” Dave explained. “So stuff like jagged blades and glowing orbs usually sell well. Anything to post to your Condo.”

  I had no idea what he meant by that, but it wasn’t important now. I didn’t like being exposed for this long. I was only taking the risk because I had out-leveled Bridget by 5 levels, and I didn’t think she could kill me in one go. Not without planning a trap ahead of time, and I didn’t think there would be a trap here.

  I flipped through to the higher-grade weapons and armor on offer, looking for anything worth buying, but there wasn’t much. What I did find had limiters that prevented me from using them, like Requires 25 Dexterity or Requires 10 Intelligence.

  However, the sheer amount of options suggested that this Auction House was connected to all the other Instances still running this level of the game. Most of the Hunters in my Instance were dead, and I’d gotten plenty of drops off the ones I had killed. It seemed a fair bet that none of them had sold hundreds of things here.

  I voiced this, and Dave said, “Yep. It’s all mixed together. But again, other players don’t tend to post things that their enemies can use, not unless they really need money. They know they could end up fighting anyone on the next level.”

  He was right about that. For now, it was a better idea for me to find new usable weapons as I went through the game; buying them here would cost more, and I was planning to learn to build weapons anyway.

  What I could never make were spells. I switched to that tab of the Auction House, and saw a long list of Rock Tumbles and Rat Bite grimoires. There were a few Healing Circle grimoires, which had probably come from the Tendua area, and some other spells that the fire naga and acid golems dropped. I couldn’t use anything that I saw, except Rock Tumble.

  Then a different word came up. There was only one copy of the spellbook, and the spell it taught was called Pinprick. The asking price was low, and when I read the description, I understood why. The spell was crap:

  Pinprick.

  Spell: Void Aura.

  When active, halves damage taken from any attack originating from a source more than 100ft away. This number reduces by 1 for each 1 point in Intelligence.

  It was useless because very few spells in Seven Keys could be cast from more than 25 feet away, much less 100. The kind of Intelligence I would need to make this useful was astronomical. I could think of only a few places in the whole game where this would be worth having, mostly places where turrets targets players who entered a forbidden area. Even those were far away.

  But this wasn’t Seven Keys. It was something else entirely. There were new rules here, new mechanics.

  I bought the spell.

  With that, I was all set. I closed the window and returned to the Astral pool. Hergvor trotted after me like a loyal dog, and Dori attempted to shout, “Thank you, traveler! Do come again—and with more gold this time!” but her voice was so frail that I could only make out her voice lines from my memory of hearing them in the real game.

  When I reached the Astral pool, I slipped into the hot, pleasant water. Hergvor started pacing the edge.

  Dave had walked up to my shoulder, the arrow still stuck in his wing. He looked about himself. “I thought we already chose an Aspect?”

  “We did,” I said. “But players are immortal in the pool, and we need to level up. Want that arrow out?”

  “What? Oh, sure.”

  I raised an eyebrow and pulled the arrow free, before I opened his menu to chest his health. I had an option to post that to the side of my HUD, too, and I did so. It populated under his icon to my right.

  “Heal yourself,” I growled at him. That wound had to hurt, but he hadn’t even flinched when I’d pulled the arrow out of him.

  “Fine, fine,” he said, distractedly. He started moving his head, poking and prodding at the air as he moved through my menus. “You gonna level up or not?”

  “Don’t sound so excited about it,” I said.

  For once, he didn’t answer.

  He did expect me to die back there, didn’t he? He did run away to save himself. He just didn’t expect to cross paths with Bridget. The grenade was just to buy time until Wapum killed me.

  That’s why he’d been so damn close to the Slain Crags exit. He had abandoned me.

  And instead of dying, I had saved his worthless life.

  Rage boiled in my core, making my heart thump, but now was no time to start strangling parrots. I didn’t think I could do it anyway, not to something so tiny and helpless, even if it was perfectly willing to betray me.

  No—instead, I would just stop trusting him. This might not be in my nature, but it was a switch I could flip. I’d had it flipped for most of my life.

  I should have never let him in. I can’t let anyone in.

  I tapped the Level-Up button, and the cascade began.