No Signal

The corridor narrowed between walls of fitted stone that sweated a thin film of moisture, and Erica had been counting steps for the last two hundred without deciding whether the number meant anything. Her legs ached in a dull, spreading way that started at the ankles and crawled upward with each footfall, the kind of ache that belonged to a long hike and not to walking through a basement. The pack on her shoulders had grown heavier by the hour, its straps biting into the soft skin above her collarbone, and she had adjusted the fit six times in the last half mile without improvement.

Ahead of her, Maren stopped.

She held up one fist, held it there, then turned sideways and pressed herself against the wall where a shallow recess cut into the stone. Erica had walked past three similar alcoves in the last stretch and dismissed each one as too shallow, too exposed, too close to the corridor’s curve. This one extended back far enough to swallow a person standing upright, with a natural lip at the entrance where the stone jutted inward. Maren ran her fingers along that lip, ducked her head inside, and stayed there long enough that Erica’s pulse kicked up a notch.

“We’re stopping here,” Maren said. She stepped into the alcove and dropped her pack against the back wall with a thud that echoed. “Defensible enough. One way in.”

Freya was already sliding down the opposite wall of the corridor, legs folding beneath her before Maren finished the sentence. Her braids had come loose at the ends, blonde strands fraying against the dark stone, and she pulled one across her lap to twist it back into shape with fingers that weren’t steady. “Oh thank god, my feet are dying. Are my feet dying? They feel like they’re dying.”

“Your feet are fine,” Callum said, but he sat down hard against the corridor wall next to her, the long sword across his knees clattering against stone as he landed. He winced at the sound and adjusted the blade, then leaned his head back until it touched the wall. His eyelids drooped. The freckles across his nose stood out sharper under the cold blue cast of the lichen overhead.

Taki drifted in last, her hands still cradling the small orb of light she’d been maintaining for the better part of an hour. The glow had thinned to something sickly, a candle’s worth of luminance that turned her face wan and drawn. She set it gently on the ground between all of them like a pet she was reluctant to release, then sat cross-legged beside it and rubbed her wrists.

Erica stepped into the alcove behind Maren and eased her own pack off one shoulder at a time, rolling the soreness out of her joints. The alcove smelled like wet chalk and old air. She pulled her module notebook from the front pocket of her pack and held it in her lap without opening it, running her thumb along the spiral binding’s teeth. The metal was cold. That was something she could verify. The metal was cold, the stone was wet, her legs hurt, and the five of them had been walking for what felt like six hours but was probably three.

Freya’s hands stopped moving in her braid.

“Where’s my phone?” she said.

Nobody answered. Taki’s light flickered once on the ground between them.

“My phone,” Freya said again, louder, and she started patting the pockets of her jeans with both hands, quick and frantic, then turned to search her pack. She yanked the flap open and rummaged through it with more force than the contents warranted, pulling out a coil of rope, a waterskin, a bundle of cloth that might have been bandaging. “I had it in my back pocket. I always keep it in my back pocket. Where is it?”

“Freya,” Erica said.

“Did it fall out? Did I drop it somewhere? We have to go back, we have to——”

“Freya. When did you last have it?”

Freya’s hands went still inside the pack. She stared at Erica with wide blue eyes, and Erica watched the calculation happen behind them, the frantic retracing of steps and moments, the dawning recognition that the question had no good answer. Freya’s mouth opened. Closed. She sat back on her heels and pressed both palms flat against her thighs.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know, I had it when we——was that today? Was that yesterday? How long have we been down here?”

“Three hours,” Erica said, though she wasn’t certain. “Maybe four.”

“My mom’s going to call,” Freya said, and her voice had gone thin. “She calls every Sunday. She’s going to call and I’m not going to pick up and she’s going to think——”

“Freya.” That was Callum, quiet and level from his spot against the wall. “Take a breath.”

Freya took one. It shuddered on the way in.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I don’t have my phone. I don’t have my phone and I don’t have service and I don’t——god, my contacts. My photos. All my photos from last year, that whole folder from——”

“You’re spiraling,” Maren said from the back of the alcove. She hadn’t moved from her crouch against the rear wall, her arms resting on her knees, her face half in the gloom beyond Taki’s light.

“I know I’m spiraling! I’m spiraling because my phone is gone and I don’t even know where——”

“The phone’s not the problem,” Maren said.

That landed. Freya’s mouth snapped shut. She pulled her hands out of the pack and held them in her lap and stared at the ground, and the silence that followed had weight to it, a physical thing that pressed down on all of them. Erica opened her notebook.

She needed to do this. She needed to lay it out. Her handwriting was small and neat, the product of years of legal document preparation, and she turned to the second page and began a list at the top.

Supplies.

“Okay,” Erica said. “Let me just——let me think through this. We have four waterskins, one mostly empty. We have Taki’s light, which is——how long can you keep that up, Taki?”

Taki looked at the orb on the ground. She tilted her head, and the light bobbed gently with the motion. “I’m not sure. It doesn’t work the way I thought it would. It’s more like——I hold it and it stays, but I can feel it taking something.”

“Energy? Stamina?”

“I think so. Like holding your arms overhead. It gets heavier.”

Erica wrote: Taki’s light—sustained, cost unclear. Her pen moved to the next line. “Food. We have——does anyone have food? I have half a bag of trail mix. That’s it. I packed for a session at a table, not for——” She stopped. Her pen hovered. The trail mix was in a ziplock bag in the front compartment of her pack, the one she’d grabbed off the kitchen counter on her way out the door three hours ago or four hours ago or a lifetime ago. She could see her apartment. The counter with the coffee ring on it. The mug she hadn’t washed. The stack of index cards for her session notes, color-coded by faction, sitting in the tray beside the microwave.

She blinked and the image dissolved. The alcove was cold and dark and Taki’s light was guttering.

“We have trail mix,” Erica said. “Callum, did you pack anything?”

“Two protein bars. The kind that taste like compressed sawdust.” Callum hadn’t moved from his position against the wall, but his eyes were open now, fixed on the ceiling. “I grabbed them off the counter before we left. I don’t remember deciding to grab them. I just had them.”

“That’s something. Freya? Maren?”

“Nothing,” Freya said. She was still looking at the ground.

Maren shook her head once.

Erica’s list was growing. She wrote: Food: trail mix (half bag), 2 protein bars. Water: 4 skins, 1 near empty. Light: Taki, cost uncertain. Weapons: Callum’s sword, Freya’s bow (10 arrows), Maren’s——

She stopped. She didn’t know what Maren had. She’d been carrying something. Erica had seen it.

“What do you have? The weapon.”

Maren held up her right hand. Tucked along the outside of her forearm, held in place by a strip of cloth wrapped above the elbow, was a short blade. It wasn’t a knife. The edge curved wrong for a kitchen knife, and the handle was wrapped in leather that had been darkened by use. Erica didn’t know where it had come from. She hadn’t seen Maren pick it up.

“When did you get that?” Erica asked.

“Found it,” Maren said, and that was all.

Erica wrote: Maren—short blade, source unclear. Her hand was pressing harder into the page. She made herself ease off. The pen continued: Shelter: none permanent. Navigation: none. Way out: unknown.

Unknown. She stared at that word. Her chest tightened behind her ribs, a familiar squeeze that started small and expanded outward until her next breath required conscious effort. Unknown. They didn’t know where they were. They didn’t know how deep. They didn’t know which direction led out, or whether out still existed, or whether the world above this corridor still had a kitchen with a coffee ring and a mug and a microwave and an apartment that was hers, that she’d earned, that she’d filled with the specific clutter of a life she’d built for herself——

“Erica.” Callum’s voice.

She looked up. Her pen had stopped on the page. There was a small dent in the paper where the tip had pressed too long in one spot.

“You’re white,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. You’re doing the thing where you list everything and then it gets to be too much and you——”

“I said I’m fine, Callum.”

He held her gaze for a beat, then nodded once and looked away. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, slow, his fingers digging into the muscle there. The gesture was familiar. He did it when he was thinking through something he didn’t want to say.

“I haven’t thought about it,” he said.

Freya looked up. “Thought about what?”

“Any of it. The outside. My apartment. My job. My——” He paused. His brow creased. “I haven’t thought about any of it until right now. Not once since we got down here.”

“That’s not weird,” Taki said quickly, leaning forward. The light bounced with her. “We’ve been stressed. Survival mode. Your brain prioritizes what’s in front of you, that’s——I read that somewhere. It’s a stress response, totally normal, your amygdala——”

“No, Taki. I mean I haven’t thought about it. Not like it slipped my mind. Like it wasn’t there to slip.” He pressed both palms against his knees. “My apartment is on Miller Street. I’ve lived there two years. I have a routine. I water the plant on the windowsill every Tuesday and I have a specific coffee mug and I leave my boots by the door because the laces smell and I don’t want them near the couch.” He was speaking faster now, the words coming in a rush that Erica had never heard from him. “I know all of that. I can tell you all of that. But when I try to think about missing it, there’s nothing. Like the homesickness circuit got cut. What does that mean?”

Nobody answered.

Erica’s pen rested on the page. She didn’t write down what he’d said. She didn’t know how to categorize it.

“I bet I know what I’d miss,” Taki said, and her voice had the bright edge of someone trying very hard to redirect a conversation. She tucked a loose strand of black hair behind her ear and held up one finger. “Ramen. Real ramen. Not the instant kind. The kind from the place in Shimokitazawa where you sit on the floor and the broth takes twelve hours and they only serve forty bowls a day.”

“Oh god,” Freya said.

“And tamagoyaki. The sweet kind my mom makes. She rolls it six times. I counted once. Six times, and she uses the copper pan because the nonstick ruins the edges.” Taki’s eyes had gone distant. She was smiling, but it wobbled at the corners. “And melon bread. And yakitori from the stand near the station. And those rice balls from the convenience store, the ones with the——”

“Taki,” Erica said gently.

“The tuna ones.” Taki’s voice had dropped. She was looking at her own hands. “I used to grab one on the way to school. Every morning. I’d eat it on the train and my mom would tell me not to because of the smell and I did it anyway because I was a brat.” She laughed, a small sound that didn’t carry. “I can’t eat that anymore.”

The silence that followed was worse than the one before. Freya’s jaw was set tight, her teeth clenched behind closed lips. Callum had gone still. Taki’s light flickered, and in the brief dimness Erica saw every face in the alcove wearing the same expression, the one that said the list of losses was longer than any of them wanted to count.

Erica looked down at her notebook. Her list was still there, sparse and inadequate. Way out: unknown. Below it she’d started writing something else without noticing, a half-formed word in the margin that she couldn’t finish. She traced the stroke of the pen and couldn’t read her own handwriting.

She missed her apartment. She missed the index cards. She missed the specific weight of her mechanical pencil in her hand, the one with the knurled grip that she’d ordered from a Japanese stationery site and waited three weeks for. She missed the sound her refrigerator made at two in the morning when the compressor kicked on, the low hum she’d grown so used to that she only noticed it when it stopped.

She missed knowing what day it was.

“I miss my books,” she said. Nobody had asked. The words came out flat, matter-of-fact, and she didn’t look up from the notebook. “The ones on the shelf by the window. I had them in a system. Chronological by purchase date. People thought it was weird but I could find any book in the dark by remembering when I bought it relative to what was happening in my life that month.”

“Purchase date,” Freya repeated, and there was something in her voice that was almost a laugh. Almost.

“It’s a good system.”

“It’s a deeply Erica system.”

Erica almost smiled. The motion died before it reached her mouth.

The alcove settled. Breathing filled the space where talking had been. Callum shifted against the wall and the sword on his knees scraped stone, a small sound that made Taki flinch. Freya worked at her braid again with renewed focus, her fingers pulling the blonde strands tight. Taki sat with her light and her loneliness and the list of foods that had started to sound like a eulogy.

Maren hadn’t spoken in a long time.

She was in the same position, crouched against the back wall of the alcove with her arms on her knees and the short blade still strapped along her forearm. Her face was half in the gloom. She’d been so quiet that Erica had almost forgotten she was there, which was a skill Maren seemed to possess naturally, the ability to occupy a space without filling it. Her blue-gray eyes were open and fixed on the entrance to the alcove, watching the corridor. Always watching. The set of her jaw was hard to read in the low light, but her shoulders were drawn up, tight, the posture of someone braced for impact.

Freya stopped braiding. She looked at Maren.

“Hey,” Freya said. “What about you?”

Maren didn’t shift her gaze from the corridor. She took a breath. Let it out through her nose. The pause was long enough that Erica thought she might not answer at all.

“Freya,” Maren said. Then, quieter: “Don’t.”

“I’m asking. You’ve been sitting back here not saying anything and I’m asking.”

“I know you’re asking.”

“Then answer.”

Maren’s eyes closed. Opened. She looked at Freya for the first time, and the look on her face was the kind of thing Erica recognized from depositions, the expression witnesses wore when asked a question whose answer they’d been trying not to formulate.

“My daughter,” Maren said.

Two words. The alcove went very still. Taki’s light steadied, and in the quiet Erica heard nothing but the slow drip of water from the corridor ceiling and the sound of her own pulse in her ears.

Freya’s mouth opened. Nothing came out. She looked at Maren with an expression that crumpled at the edges, and then she looked away, and then she looked at her own hands, and none of those places had anything helpful in them.

Maren went back to watching the corridor.

Erica’s pen was on the page. She didn’t write it down. There was no category for it.

The sound came from the corridor. Not the drip of water they’d been listening to for the last twenty minutes, not the settling of old stone. Something with weight behind it, a footfall that compressed grit against flagstone in a rhythm too deliberate to be structural noise. Callum heard it before anyone else because he’d been staring at the corridor entrance with the particular focus of someone whose hands needed a task and had been given a sword.

He stood. The motion was stiff, his legs protesting after too long sitting on cold stone, and the sword came up in a guard position he’d seen in the illustrated chapters of Erica’s module but never drilled. His elbows sat too high. His grip shifted twice before settling.

“Something’s coming,” he said.

Erica’s head snapped up from her notes. Taki’s orb of light, hovering near the ceiling of the alcove, pulsed once and brightened. Freya rolled sideways and grabbed her bow from where it leaned against the wall, fumbling an arrow from the quiver with fingers that hadn’t yet learned the motion. Maren didn’t move from her spot against the far wall. Her eyes opened, and Callum saw her hand close around the hilt of the shortsword at her hip.

The thing that stepped into the alcove entrance was not in Erica’s notes.

Callum had read the bestiary section cover to cover twice. He’d memorized the stat blocks for the dungeon’s first three levels, and nothing in those pages looked like this. It was bipedal and roughly human-height, with skin the color and texture of a scab, dry and ridged and dark. Its head swept up into a pair of horns that curved backward like a ram’s, and between them its forehead was lumpy with bone growths that caught Taki’s light and threw it back in greasy yellow. Its mouth was wrong. Too wide, filled with teeth that didn’t match, some flat, some pointed, some broken. Its arms were long enough that its knuckles almost grazed the floor, and its hands had too many fingers.

It looked at them the way a dog looks at something small and moving.

“Erica,” Callum said, not taking his eyes off the thing. “What is this.”

She was already flipping pages, the module’s spine cracking under her thumb. “I don’t—it’s not in the bestiary. The first-level encounters are goblins and slimes, this shouldn’t be here. There’s no demon entry until level four.”

The thing took a step into the alcove. Its feet made a sound like wet leather on stone.

“Okay, it shouldn’t be here, but it is here,” Callum said. “So what do we know about demons in general?”

“Resistant to fire. Weak to—” Erica flipped another page. “—silver and cold iron, which we don’t have. They have darkvision. They’re aggressive but territorial, so if we can get past it—”

“Can’t get past it. It’s in the doorway.”

“Then hit it until it stops moving.”

Freya loosed her first arrow. It was a disaster of mechanics. The bowstring caught the inside of her forearm on release, and the arrow’s trajectory pulled hard left, striking the stone wall of the alcove entrance with a sharp crack. The shaft splintered. The demon’s head turned toward the sound, tracking the impact site with dull interest.

“Shit,” Freya said, already reaching for another arrow. Her forearm was red where the string had caught it.

Callum moved forward. He didn’t decide to move; his body made the choice for him, the same way his legs had decided to carry him between Freya and Maren’s ex-husband in a parking lot three months ago. The space between him and the demon closed in four strides, and then he was swinging.

The sword was heavier than practice made it feel. His form broke down the instant he committed to the strike, his feet planting wrong, his hips failing to rotate with the cut. The blade caught the demon across the upper arm rather than the neck where he’d aimed, and the edge bit into that scab-textured skin and stuck. It didn’t go deep. The resistance was like hacking at a frozen cut of meat.

The demon looked down at the sword embedded in its arm. Then it looked at Callum.

Its too-long arm came up and caught him across the chest. The blow was casual, almost lazy, and it sent him staggering backward. His shoulder blades struck the alcove’s back wall and his lungs emptied in a rush. The sword came free as he stumbled, and he felt the edge notch against bone when it pulled loose.

“It doesn’t care!” he called out. The impact spot on his chest throbbed. “The blade’s not going deep enough.”

“Try a different angle,” Erica shouted from behind him. She was still reading. “The module says demons have weaker joints. Hit it where the limbs connect.”

“The module says a lot of things that aren’t helping right now.”

Taki stepped forward with her hands raised, palms out, her fingers spread wide. The light orb above her contracted and then lurched sideways, pooling into her hands with a sound like tearing silk. The energy was unstable, crawling up her forearms in forked lines that made her gasp, and when she released it the bolt went wide. It hit the wall six feet left of the demon and blew a fist-sized crater in the stone. Dust rained from the ceiling.

“I missed,” Taki said, and her voice was thin and high. “I missed, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

“Do it again,” Maren said from across the alcove. She was on her feet now, shortsword drawn, circling along the left wall toward the demon’s flank. Her movement was quiet, each step placed on stone that wouldn’t crunch.

Callum pressed forward again. He kept his grip loose this time, remembered to bend his knees, and aimed a horizontal cut at the demon’s midsection. The thing didn’t dodge. It didn’t need to. It brought one of those oversized hands up and caught the flat of the blade between its palm and fingers. The steel rang. Callum’s wrists absorbed a jolt that ran all the way up to his elbows, and for a second they were standing chest to chest, Callum pulling and the demon holding, and he could smell it. It smelled like copper and something burned.

“Freya, shoot it while it’s holding me,” he said through his teeth.

“I’ll hit you.”

“Hit it more than you hit me.”

Freya’s second arrow flew straighter. The string still caught her forearm, and she hissed through her teeth, but the arrowhead took the demon in the shoulder. It sank in an inch. The demon flinched, and its grip on Callum’s sword loosened. He ripped the blade free and jumped back, stumbling over his own feet, catching himself on one knee.

The demon pulled the arrow out of its shoulder with two fingers. It looked at the arrow. Then it looked at Freya with an expression that passed for recognition.

“Oh no,” Freya said.

Taki fired again. This time the energy cooperated, or she did, or something between them found a fraction of alignment. The bolt struck the demon in the side of the head, just below the left horn, and the impact threw a spray of dark fluid across the alcove wall. The demon staggered. One of its legs buckled. Taki made a sound that was half laugh and half sob.

“Did I get it? Did that hit it?”

“You hit it,” Erica called. “Do it again, same spot, it’s hurt—”

But Taki’s hands were shaking. The light gathering between her fingers stuttered and went out, and she stood there with her arms still raised and nothing to release. Her eyes were wet. “I can’t. It won’t come, I can’t hold it—”

The demon straightened. The wound on its head was leaking, but its leg steadied, and its mouth opened wider than a mouth should. The teeth inside were different lengths now, as if they’d shifted.

Maren hit it from the side.

She’d gotten close without anyone tracking her. Her shortsword was low, held in a reverse grip, and she drove it upward into the soft space beneath the demon’s arm where the ribs gave way to muscle. The blade sank deeper than Callum’s had. The demon made a sound, a deep wet vibration in its chest, and one of its arms swung backward and caught Maren in the torso.

The impact launched her. She hit the opposite wall hard enough that stone cracked. Her body bounced once and dropped, and she landed in a heap with her sword still in her hand and her legs folded wrong beneath her.

“Maren!” Freya screamed.

“I’m not dead,” Maren said from the floor. Her voice was flat and tight and she didn’t move. “Kill the thing.”

Callum’s chest hurt. His wrists hurt. His right knee was bleeding from where he’d fallen, and he could feel a bruise forming across his sternum where the demon’s first blow had landed. None of that mattered. He stood up, brought the sword back, and swung at the demon’s wounded side. The blade bit into the hole Maren had opened beneath its arm, and this time the steel went deep. He felt the resistance change, felt the edge find something that gave, and he pushed.

The demon twisted. Callum held on. He set his feet and pulled the blade sideways, not cutting anymore but wrenching, and the thing’s arm stopped working. It dropped to the angle of broken hardware. Taki’s light caught the wound and it was dark, not red.

Freya’s third arrow took it in the throat. The shaft stuck out at an angle that shouldn’t have been survivable, and the demon reached up with its one working hand and gripped the shaft and tried to pull. The arrowhead was barbed. It didn’t come free. Black fluid ran down the shaft and over the demon’s fingers.

Callum pulled his sword free and hit it again. Same spot. Same wound. He widened the cut, and the demon’s one working arm dropped to its side, and it swayed on legs that weren’t holding. Freya reached for another arrow. Callum raised the sword.

He brought it down on the back of the demon’s neck, between the horns, and the blade went through. Not clean. Not like the illustrations in the module. The steel ground against bone and gristle, and he had to put his boot on the thing’s back to pull it free. The demon dropped face-first onto the stone. It twitched twice. Then it stopped.

Callum stood over it with the sword in both hands and his arms shaking and sweat running down into his eyes. The blade was covered in something dark and thick that smelled like the inside of a furnace. His breath came in ragged pulls.

Nobody spoke for several seconds.

“Is it dead?” Taki whispered.

Callum nudged the body with his boot. It didn’t react. He nudged harder, rolling it partway onto its side. The eyes were open and flat and the mouth was still too wide. “Yeah.”

Freya sat down on the stone where she stood. Her bow was still in her left hand and an arrow in her right, unknocked, and she stared at the dead thing with an expression of dull shock. Her forearm where the bowstring had caught her was raw and starting to welt.

“That was awful,” she said. “That was so much worse than I thought it would be.”

Callum wiped the sword on the leg of his pants. The dark fluid smeared rather than wiped, and the blade was still filthy. He kept wiping. “Yeah.”

“My bolt hit the wall,” Taki said. She was standing very still with her hands at her sides, fingers curled into loose fists. “The first one. I could have hit someone. I could have hit one of you. What if I’d turned left instead of—” She stopped. Her chin dropped toward her chest. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I should have been better.”

“Stop,” Maren said. She was still on the floor. She’d shifted enough to sit upright, her back against the wall, one hand pressed flat against her ribs on the right side. Her face was pale and drawn. “You hit it. That’s what mattered.”

“You’re hurt,” Callum said. He crossed the alcove and crouched in front of her, the filthy sword set aside. “Let me see.”

“I can see it myself.” But she let him pull her hand away from her ribs. The fabric of her shirt was torn and there was a bruise blooming across her side, already darkening in the shape of the demon’s knuckles. Her breathing was shallow. When she shifted, she hissed through her teeth.

“Broken?” Erica asked. She’d come closer, the module still open in her hands, her pen behind her ear. Her face was the color of paper.

Maren poked her own ribs with two fingers and winced. “Maybe. Cracked, at least. Not through the skin.”

“We don’t have a healer,” Callum said. “We don’t have potions. We don’t have anything.”

“What we have is a dead demon and five people who can still walk.” Maren pushed his hands away and pulled herself upright against the wall. The motion cost her something; Callum could see it in the tight line of her jaw. She got her feet under her and stood, swaying once before she found her balance. “So we deal with that.”

Freya was staring at the body. “What do we do with it? Do we loot it? Is that something we do?”

Erica crouched beside the corpse with her module open. She held the book at an angle, comparing what was on the page to what was on the floor. “There’s no loot table for this. It’s not in the module. This thing is a variance I can’t explain.” She turned a page. Turned it back. Flipped to a different section and stopped. “Nothing. There’s no entry for demons on level one. Something pulled this thing down here or it wandered in from a deeper level, and either way it means the dungeon’s population isn’t following the module’s encounter tables.”

“Great,” Callum said. He picked the sword back up. His hands had stopped shaking, but his wrists ached, and the bruise on his chest throbbed with each breath. “So the manual’s wrong.”

“The manual’s incomplete. There’s a difference.”

“Not one that helps us much right now.”

Taki had moved to sit against the far wall with her knees drawn up. She hadn’t spoken since her apology. Her hands were in her lap, and she was staring at the scorch mark on the wall where her first bolt had hit. The crater in the stone was real. The stone was real. The thing she’d done was real, and she was looking at it the way someone looks at evidence.

“I did that,” she said. Not to anyone in particular.

“You did that,” Callum confirmed. He meant it as acknowledgment. It landed wrong, and he saw her shoulders tighten. He rubbed the back of his neck. The muscles there were hard as wood. “Taki, you did that and it helped. You hit it in the head. That hit matters.”

“It was the only one that landed.”

“Out of two. Fifty percent isn’t bad for your second real fight.”

“I had three bolts in me,” she said. “The first went into the wall. The second went into its head. The third wouldn’t come at all.” She looked at her hands. “What if next time none of them come?”

Callum didn’t have an answer for that. He sat down against the wall next to her, leaving a foot of space between them. The sword rested across his knees. The dark fluid on the blade was drying to a crust that flaked when he touched it.

“Then we figure something else out,” he said.

Freya had moved to the demon’s body and was poking at it with the toe of her boot. “It’s starting to smell. Is it supposed to smell already? It’s been dead for like a minute.”

“They probably all smell like that alive,” Maren said. She was standing on her own, one arm wrapped around her ribs, the other holding her shortsword with the point resting on the stone. “Someone drag it out of the doorway. We don’t want to be sleeping next to a dead demon.”

“I’ll do it,” Callum said. He got up. His right knee protested, the scrape from his earlier fall still bleeding sluggishly. He grabbed the demon by one horn and pulled. The body was heavy and dense, and it left a dark smear on the flagstone as he dragged it into the corridor. He pulled it a good ten feet from the alcove entrance and let go. The horn was rough under his palm and still warm.

He walked back to the alcove. Erica had already started writing in the module, her pen moving in quick, tight strokes. She didn’t look up when he passed her.

“New entry,” she said. “Demon variant, unlisted. Physical description, combat notes. Weak to repeated strikes at existing wounds. Resistant to shallow cuts. Taki’s energy bolts cause significant damage on direct hits.” Her pen stopped. She looked up. “What do I put for weaknesses?”

“Maren’s recklessness,” Freya said.

“Hey.” Maren’s voice carried from across the alcove without force behind it. “I’m injured. Be nice to me.”

“You got thrown into a wall,” Freya said. Her voice cracked on the word wall. “You got thrown into a wall and you said ‘I’m not dead’ like you were reporting the weather.”

“What do you want me to say? I got thrown into a wall. My ribs are cracked. I’m still here. Those are the facts.”

Freya opened her mouth. Closed it. She looked at the bow in her hands and then at the welts on her forearm and then at the corridor where Callum had dragged the body. “Fine.”

Callum sat down again. The alcove smelled like copper and burned things now, and the scorch mark on the wall wasn’t going anywhere. His chest ached. His knee stung. His hands were steady. He hated that his hands were steady, that some part of him had already started adjusting to the idea that this was the shape of things now, that fights happened and people got hurt and you got up and waited for the next one. He didn’t want to be the person who was good at this. He wanted to be the person who read books and listened to his friends talk about their days.

Instead he had a sword with demon blood drying on it and a bruise forming on his chest and a girl with cracked ribs standing in the corner like nothing had happened. He set the sword down and pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw colors.

“We should sleep in shifts,” Maren said. “Something else might come.”

“Something else will definitely come,” Erica said. Her pen hadn’t stopped moving.

“Then we sleep in shifts and we deal with it when it does.”

Callum dropped his hands from his face. The alcove swam and then settled. Taki’s light was dimmer than before, a low glow against the ceiling that made the scorch mark look deeper than it was. Freya sat with her bow across her lap, running her fingers along the string. Maren leaned against the wall with her sword still in her hand.

Nobody felt good about it. Nobody said that they did.

Erica’s pen stopped.

That was the first sign. Her hand had been moving for so long that the cessation felt like a sound, a missing hum in the air of the alcove. She looked down at her fingers. They ached. The pen was warm from her grip, and the notebook page beneath it was full, and she had no memory of writing the last four lines.

The second sign was the text.

It hung in the air in front of her face, off-white and faintly luminous, the letters sharp-edged in a font she recognized. She recognized it because she had spent forty hours selecting it for her campaign documents. Garamond, 11 point, with a two-degree letter spacing adjustment she had applied because the default kerning bothered her.

Erica Callahan Level 2 Class: Dungeon Master

“You’re seeing this too, right?” Freya’s voice came from the left, tight with alarm. “The numbers. The floating numbers.”

“Describe what you’re seeing,” Erica said. Her own voice sounded far away.

“Stuff I don’t understand. Like a character sheet, kind of? Stats. There’s a stat called Constitution and it has a number next to it and I don’t know what the number means.”

Callum made a sound. Low, involuntary. His hands had gone to his chest, palms flat against his sternum, and his green eyes were wide in the dim light of Taki’s fading glow.

“Something happened,” he said. His speech had lost its usual easy cadence. “Something clicked. Like a bone setting. I felt it go into place.”

Taki was crying.

Not sobbing, not the dramatic weeping of someone performing distress. A steady leak of tears down her cheeks while she sat with her hands pressed flat against her thighs, her fingers spread wide, staring at something none of them could follow. Her mouth was open and her breathing came fast and shallow and the light above her flickered with each exhale.

“Too much,” Taki said. “There’s too much, I can see everything, I can see all of it at once, it’s too——”

“Hey.” Maren’s voice, flat and steady. She had moved. She was crouched in front of Taki, not touching her, hands visible. “Look at my face. Nothing else. My face.”

Taki’s eyes focused with visible effort. The tears kept coming. The light steadied.

“Breathe,” Maren said.

Taki breathed.

Erica turned back to the floating text. It had expanded. More lines had resolved beneath the first three, filling in details she hadn’t asked for, as though the display had been waiting for her attention.

HP: 14/14 | MP: 8/8 STR 8 | DEX 10 | CON 12 | INT 16 | WIS 14 | CHA 11 Class Ability: EDIT ROOM PROPERTY Description: Select a non-structural element within the current room. Alter one property. Changes persist. Cost: 2 MP per alteration.

“Erica.” Callum was on his feet. He had moved past the sensation in his chest and gone straight to practical, the way he always did, the mode that made him reliable in moments that should have been panicky. “What does yours say?”

“Dungeon Master.” She said it without inflection. The words tasted wrong in her mouth. “My class is Dungeon Master.”

Freya laughed. The sound bounced off the stone walls and came back thin and brittle.

“Of course it is,” Freya said. “Of course your class is Dungeon Master. You wrote the damn campaign. You built the dungeon. Of course the system made you the Dungeon Master.”

“That’s not funny, Freya.”

“I’m not being funny. I’m being accurate. What does the ability do?”

Erica read the description aloud. Her voice was steady in a way that surprised her. The Garamond text hung in the air and she read from it the way she read from her notes at the table, with the practiced cadence of someone who had been a game master for six years.

When she finished, the alcove went quiet.

“Rewrite room properties,” Callum repeated. He had picked up the sword again. His knuckles were white around the grip. “Erica. The changes in your module. The rooms that shifted. The corridors that rearranged themselves.”

“I know.”

“You did that.”

“I don’t know that.”

“Your ability is literally called Edit Room Property. The rooms changed. Your handwriting showed up in the margins. I’m not doing complex math here.”

“We don’t know that I——”

“Erica.” Maren had not risen from her crouch in front of Taki. Her blue-gray eyes cut across the alcove. “Read it again.”

Erica read it again.

“Changes persist,” Maren said. “Cost: two MP per alteration.” She paused. “How many rooms have changed since we got here?”

The question landed in Erica’s stomach like a cold stone. She had cataloged the changes. She had written them all down in the notebook, page after page of margin notes and corrections that appeared in her own handwriting. She flipped back.

The first page was clean. Her original dungeon layout, drawn in pencil, neat and precise. The second page had the first margin note, the one she hadn’t written. The third page had three. The fifth page had the notation about the alcove they were sitting in, a room she had designed as an empty transitional space. It was now a defensible shelter with one entrance and a clear sightline. She had designed it as a corridor.

She had not designed it as a room.

“I count nine,” she said. Her throat was dry. “Nine changes I’ve logged. Some of them I didn’t notice until we were standing in them.”

“Eighteen MP,” Maren said.

“I have eight.”

“So either you’ve been spending MP you didn’t have, or the system fronted you, or the changes aren’t all yours.” Maren tilted her head. “Which one scares you most?”

“The third one.”

Maren nodded once, the way she did when someone confirmed what she had already suspected.

Taki had stopped crying. Her face was blotchy and her ponytail had come loose, black hair falling across her forehead in strands that stuck to the damp skin. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and sniffed.

“I have a class,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “It’s called Envoy.”

“What does your ability say?” Callum asked.

Taki shook her head. “I can’t read it. It’s too much. When I try to focus on the text, everything else comes in too. The walls, the floor, the air, I can feel the stone and I can feel where the corridor goes and I can feel something deeper down, below us, moving.” She pressed her palms against her eyes. “It’s so loud.”

“Don’t force it,” Maren said. “Let it settle. It took me a minute before the text stopped overloading.”

Maren had her own text. Erica could tell from the way she had gone still, that particular quality of attention that meant she was processing something internal. Maren’s face gave away nothing. She had that in common with the stone around them.

“What’s your class?” Erica asked.

“Sentinel.”

“What does——”

“I’m not discussing the details yet.” Maren stood, her knees popping. “I want to think about it first. Everyone should think before we start comparing. This thing gave us information and we don’t know where the information came from or what it wants.”

“You think it wants something,” Callum said.

“Something that killed a demon and then handed out experience points? Yeah. Something wants something.” Maren picked up her sword and checked the blade for damage. “We should be careful about what we accept from it.”

Freya had gone quiet. She sat with her bow across her lap and her blonde braids coming undone and her blue eyes fixed on something in the air that only she could see. Her lips moved without sound for a moment. Then she spoke.

“Ranger,” she said. “My class is Ranger. And I have a stat called Bestiary Knowledge and it has a number next to it and the number is zero, which is probably why that arrow broke. I don’t know anything about what we’re fighting.”

“Better than lying to yourself about it,” Maren said.

“Was that a joke? Did Maren make a joke?”

“Don’t get used to it.”

Callum sat back down. He set the sword across his thighs and looked at Erica. His face was doing the thing it did when he was working through a problem, his mouth slightly open, his eyes focused on a point slightly past the person he was talking to.

“Callum,” Erica said. “Your class.”

“Guardian.” He said it carefully, as though testing the weight of the word. “I have an ability called Intercept. It lets me position myself between an attacker and a target. I think that’s what I did with Taki. When the demon charged her. I moved and I didn’t decide to move, I just moved. The ability says it costs MP and I think I spent MP I didn’t know I had.” He rubbed his chest. “The thing that clicked. It felt like a lock opening.”

“So we have a Dungeon Master, a Guardian, an Envoy, a Ranger, and a Sentinel,” Erica said. She was writing again, the pen moving in short bursts across a fresh page. The act of writing settled something in her, the familiar comfort of documentation. “Five classes. Five party members. One of each.”

“One of each what?” Freya asked.

“One of each role. Tank, support, ranged, utility, control.” Erica underlined Dungeon Master twice. “These are standard party composition archetypes. Whoever or whatever built this system designed it with balance in mind. That means it expects us to function as a unit.”

“Great,” Freya said. “We can’t even kill one demon without getting thrown into walls.”

“One demon is data,” Erica said. “We survived. We have information now. The system gave us classes and abilities and we know what they cost. That’s more than we had an hour ago.”

“An hour ago we hadn’t been thrown into a wall,” Maren said.

Erica looked at her. Maren’s face was unreadable, her posture guarded, her left hand pressed against her side where she’d hit the stone. She hadn’t mentioned the pain. She wasn’t going to mention the pain.

“You’re hurt,” Erica said.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re pressing your ribs.”

Maren removed her hand from her side. She did it slowly, deliberately, the way a person does when they want you to know they heard you and they’re choosing not to care.

“We need to figure out the room ability,” Callum said. He was steering the conversation back, his tone even, his body angled toward Erica. “If your ability can change the room, we should test it. Small. Controlled. Something that won’t matter if it goes wrong.”

Erica’s stomach turned. The text floated in front of her and the notebook sat open on her knees and the pen was in her hand and every part of her wanted to say no. Testing an ability that rewrote reality inside a system that had kidnapped them and handed out classes like party favors was the kind of decision that should require planning and caution and at minimum a full night’s sleep.

But they had no full nights ahead of them. They had an alcove and a dimming light and a corridor that something else would come through.

“The scorch mark,” she said. “On the ceiling. From Taki’s fire. I can try to change it. It’s cosmetic. It’s non-structural. If something goes wrong, the worst outcome is that a scorch mark looks different.”

“Do it,” Callum said.

“Erica, if this thing——” Freya started.

“If this thing wanted us dead, it had a demon in here to do the job.” Erica was surprised by the steadiness in her own voice. Her hands were not steady. The pen trembled between her fingers. “We test the ability. We learn the rules. We survive long enough to figure out who’s keeping score.”

She looked at the scorch mark. It was an ugly black smear across the stone ceiling, roughly the size of a dinner plate, with tendrils of soot radiating outward. Taki’s misfired spell had painted it there during the fight.

Erica focused on it. She thought the word clean.

The text in front of her flickered.

EDIT ROOM PROPERTY — Target: Surface stain (ceiling) — Desired alteration: Remove — Cost: 2 MP — Confirm? Y/N

She thought yes.

Two points of something left her. It was not a physical sensation. It was a subtraction, a pocket of capacity emptying, the way a shelf feels lighter when you remove a book. She could feel the shape of what was gone and the shape of what remained, and remaining was six. Six points of something she had not known existed an hour ago.

The scorch mark faded. It did not flake or peel or dissolve. The black receded from the edges inward, the soot vanishing, the stone underneath emerging pale and unmarked, until the ceiling was clean. As though the fire had never touched it.

Nobody spoke for a long moment.

“Okay,” Freya said. “That happened.”

Erica looked down. Her notebook was open to a fresh page. The page had been blank. It was not blank now.

Her handwriting filled the margin, small and tight and slanted to the right, the same handwriting she had spent her life refining. The note read:

Alcove: cleared. Scorch removed. Room property edited (cosmetic). MP remaining: 6/8. Cost confirmed: 2. System logged.

Below that, in the same handwriting but smaller, as though the words were being thought rather than written:

You’re learning.

Erica stared at the two words until Taki’s light dimmed further and the alcove pressed in around them and Maren said it was time for the first watch.