The Charge engine whined away as I drove the Explorer through the streets of Chicago.

  Four weeks ago, I would never have tried this. We had a setup in the shop where we could run vehicles on a treadmill, sort of. It was perfect for testing repairs—we didn’t have to take a client’s car downtown, or on Lake Shore Drive—or worse, the interstate—and run it until something went wrong. We could even run it while hooked up to computers for the newer cars and trucks.

  But rebuilding the test treadmill for a Charge-based world was too much work for a single SUV, and I wasn’t planning on building more. Besides, the streets were safe. It wasn’t like anyone else was on the road.

  Anyone that wasn’t a monster, at least.

  I’d popped the moon roof out. The Explorer hadn’t had a moon roof when it came in for transmission work, but after a few minutes with a metal saw, it sure did. And as I worked the SUV onto Lake Shore Drive, Tori stood on her seat and cast spells like a Humvee turret. She wasn’t gaining any experience—even when the eight-lane mega-road turned into a dirt path and the Concrete Falcons were replaced by four-winged armored alien butterflies—but the SUV needed the protection.

  I couldn’t get it a hair over thirty-five miles an hour. It wasn’t like the engine started screaming. It kept whining at the same speed no matter how much gas I gave it. It just. Wouldn’t. Work. Not any harder than thirty-five. I didn’t have the Charge in the engine for more.

  So Tori had to act like a gunner. Or more accurately, she got to act like one, and I got to drive the Explorer. While I maneuvered it around stalled cars—and occasionally through them when I figured they were rusty enough—I couldn’t help but think about Andersonville.

  It wasn’t home. But it was where I’d spent my nights for the last three years. Mrs. Faren wasn’t a bad landlady. She hadn’t jacked up my rent even once. According to her, she knew I couldn’t afford it, and it’d be a pain in the ass to rent to anyone else. I was polite and clean. Mostly. If you didn’t count oil and sweat. I’d kept my attic clean, at least.

  But I’d never really formed any ties with anyone in the area. When I wasn’t working at Cindy’s, or at the small engine shop, or in the kitchen, I was…well, work didn’t leave me with the time or energy to make friends in Andersonville. So the only person I wanted to check on was Mrs. Faren. She’d probably be around, somewhere.

  The other nice thing about driving through the stalled cars was that I could let my mind wander and focus on the three big problems in my future.

  First, and most immediate, we needed to break through the bottleneck and start working on Tier Four dungeons. It was the best way I could see of making it too difficult for the Fireborn Crusade to invade us when this ceasefire stopped. And that was the real issue. Longer-term, we needed to deal with the Fireborn Crusader and break his hold on the rest of his cult.

  We hadn’t had cults in Cozad. But some of the neighboring towns weren’t so lucky. They were nothing but trouble. Sure, at first, they were just a bunch of folks buying up farms, but eventually, the fences went up, and the creepy stuff started as they tried to muscle more people out of their family farms. And they weren’t even magically powered.

  Second, we needed to start tracking down a Waypoint. We still had five days to find as many places where one might be as possible, but I had a bad feeling that the Fireborn Crusade already thought they had one. If that was the case, there might not be another one in Indiana or Illinois. So that problem could very easily lead right back into the first one—and it might force us to solve them both at the same time. I hoped not; that sounded like a headache, and I already had one of those. A big one.

  The Consortium itself.

  And Integration.

  By the time we got to Andersonville, I had made exactly zero progress on that last problem. And the immediate problem that had stopped the Explorer in its tracks was nothing if not distracting.

  “Uh, Hal, I’ve never seen anything like that,” Tori said. She lowered herself through the moon roof and opened the passenger side door.

  I was already out of the SUV, staring at the biggest fog wall I’d ever seen.

  It covered the entire street—and all the buildings to either side of it. All of downtown was trapped inside it. From here, only the vaguest outlines of downtown were visible through the barrier, which ran cleanly through the block-long shared-wall buildings, slicing them in half. I had no idea how far the fog wall reached, but I’d have been surprised if it wasn’t the entire main street.

  The only exception towered over it. Someone had built a wooden tower on top of the Swedish-American Museum, and a yellow-and-blue flag waved above it. “Bet that’s the Floor Two boss in there,” Tori said.

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  “Or it’s something else. This dungeon feels…off. Look at the fog colors.”

  I pointed them out; there was a swirl of something reddish-orange across the massive wall, then a purplish color. Something about the dungeon had changed, and change hadn’t meant anything good in Integration so far. “That’s trouble.”

  “Think it still has my necklace?” Tori asked. She was here for one piece of loot, and one piece of loot only: the Battlemaiden’s Mark. It wasn’t an upgrade to the Perfection’s Gaze helmet, but it did something similar; instead of stacking increasing damage onto her attacks as she focused a big target, it’d give her faster and faster casting the more casting she did. She called it a machine-gun mage build, and according to her, its major weakness should be the amount of Body it’d take to avoid exhausting herself.

  I wasn’t here for anything. I shrugged. “Don’t know. Only one way to find out, and that’s to go in.”

  We went in, pushing through the fog gate.

  Tier Two Dungeon: Norse Street (Floor One)

  Objective: Defeat the Warband

  Objective: Survive (0/1)

  Completion: 0%

  Guarded Entrance: You cannot leave this dungeon until this floor is completed.

  Blood Sport: The announcers aren’t on your side, but may provide useful hints.

  Invaded: The residents of a grafted world are attempting to take over this dungeon. Some sections will be more difficult than predicted.

  The first thing that caught my eye was Blood Sport; Bobby Richards and I had taken advantage of that rule to learn something about the Consortium and Integration, and about the larger universe out there. I wanted to do the same thing here—I started to tell Tori the same thing.

  Then I stopped. The last rule—Invaded—meant trouble.

  When we’d tried to enter the Union Center dungeon, it hadn’t had the Invaded rule. But it had clearly been occupied by the orcs. The Norse Street dungeon was in the process of a similar invasion. We couldn’t expect everything to be easy. “Tori, listen, we’ve got to—“

  “Norse Street has a new set of challengers! Are they here to liberate the Raided City, or perhaps to raid it themselves? There’s only one way to find out!” the announcer shouted. The deafening voice echoed across the wide, empty street, and for the first time, I saw the caricature of Andersonville in front of us.

  The neighborhood had, for whatever reason, attracted a lot of Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians. So many, in fact, that it had turned into a sort of Norsetown when Chicago was starting out, similar to San Francisco’s Chinatown. The Swedish, especially, were proud of their culture, and I’d walked past the Swedish American Museum hundreds of times—but never been inside.

  It looked like ‘inside’ had been vomited up onto the main street.

  Wooden palisades made from spiked tree trunks lined the dirt path in front of us, with torches hanging from iron brackets lighting the way forward. Aside from the lit entrances to the palisades, everything else was dark; the smell of fresh-cut pine and something more metallic and coppery filled the air.

  “Never mind the Blood Sport. If we’re in a boss fight and it feels easy, we can draw it out a little to try and learn something, but that Invaded rule’s going to mean trouble.”

  “It’s like the timed dungeon affixes, but on shuffle,” Tori said. “In my games, I mean.”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Is the Runelord going to be up on the second floor?”

  “I hope so.” I started stalking down the main path, trying my best to ignore the bad feeling in my gut.

  “The attackers have nearly reached the shipyard!” the announcer shouted. So far, I hadn’t heard a single piece of color commentary. The two voices matched the ones from the Field of Warriors dungeon, but other than an occasional sentence agreeing with the play-by-play specialist, the color voice hadn’t said anything useful.

  But the play-by-play announcer was giving us plenty.

  “We’ve got a treat for you today, viewers! Today, Hal Riley and Tori Vanderbilt, number three and four in the region in level, are attempting a four-way race against the clock! In the first corner are our fan-favorite delvers and powerhouses.

  “In the second, we have the two dungeon bosses: the Warband, which blocks the way to the second floor near the Jarl’s Hall, and the Runelord, the king of Norse Street and powerful sorcerer specializing in runes. They’re the defenders in this race—the longer they can hold out, the easier Hal and Tori’s job gets. Unless, that is, they stall our delvers too well.”

  There were no crowd noises. I charged an armored, wolf-headed man with a short sword and a round shield. He went for a block and thrust. I’d seen that trick before, with Eddie, and I was ready; the Trip-Hammer slammed down on his shield, then revved. Something cracked in his arm, and then the shield disintegrated. So did his arm. And half his body.

  Wolf Raider: Level Thirty Monster

  The Minecraft experience orb wasn’t enough to level me. Not even close. But as we ran toward the village square, dozens of similar monsters surged from the open gates to cut us off. Tori and I were surrounded, and only her magic was making the fight manageable—otherwise, the sheer numbers would have overrun me.

  “The third group hails from a nearby dungeon that’s fallen to the graft with Solemnus Six. While the monsters attacking Norse Street aren’t alien to this world, they’ve been empowered by magic from the Tier Three Primitive World, and are cutting through this dungeon’s defenders like plasma blades,” the announcer bellowed.

  He continued. “And that’s a problem, because there’s a very interesting secret in Norse Street. Somewhere on the second floor, there is an exit to the dungeon—one that isn’t affected by the dungeon’s rules. It connects to a Viking fortress, and in that fortress are hundreds, if not thousands, of Homo sapiens. If the grafted invaders reach it first…well, let’s just say it could get messy in there.”

  “God dammit. Tori, let’s get a move on! Levitate and Crush, as many as you can!” I said. Then I revved the Trip-Hammer and waited for Tori to punch a hole in the defenders.

  When she did, it was big enough that I could have driven the Explorer through it. “There you go, Hal! Nothing for a minute—I need to catch my breath!”

  “Just don’t fall behind. We’ve got to get to the second floor, and fast!”