After a few hours, the mecha’s basic systems were in place—and I was exhausted. I’d been splicing wires, welding plates, and stripping down old sports cars for cockpit parts for the better part of the day, and I needed a break.

  The mech suit wasn’t going to be functional today, no matter how hard I pushed, but if I got a good break in, I could hit it hard tomorrow and get it up and running. The rail gun and grenade launcher both worked, and I’d almost calibrated their controls. At this point, the last challenge was in the arms themselves, and that would take a whole day.

  Museumtown awaited.

  When I got there, Calvin and Jessica were both glaring at each other across the stairs. I nodded. “Ma’am. Calvin.”

  “About time you got here, Hal,” Calvin stood up, glare shifting to me and not letting up in the slightest. “Bobby’s heading southeast.”

  “The Crusade?”

  “Yep. No one in town had the firepower to stop him, so we had to let him go. We need to figure out our next move.”

  Jessica cleared her throat. “And you’re part of that decision-making.”

  “I am,” I said, sitting down and ignoring their pointed, irritated stares. “Let’s hear it.”

  They let me hear it. The conversation with Bobby. All three of their stances—Calvin’s interest in our closer neighbors, Bobby’s fixation on the so-called greater good and survival, and Jessica’s willingness to pass control over to the Garden folks. Their reasoning behind their positions. And at the end of it, they did exactly what I’d feared they would.

  “We need a tiebreaker, Hal,” Jessica said.

  Calvin nodded. He still looked pissed off, but he coughed once and started talking. “Yep, we do. All three options are…viable. I hate to admit that, but they are. We could pass control off to the Garden and focus on your Beacon. That’d probably work, and it’d get us to the next Phase, assuming the Garden survives it. But I don’t like it. It’s not that I don’t trust those folks. It’s that I trust them to do right by them. Been a lot of people like that, and they’ve got the idea. We need to take care of us first.”

  “Calvin, we’ve already—“ Jessica stopped, took a deep breath, and looked at the ceiling. “We’ve already litigated this. Grabbing up the other Chicago settlements is a good first move if we want to be in charge of what the new world looks like, politically. But I don’t think we’re—“

  “I know. You don’t know if we’re the right people for the job. Who is? Gerry and Ryan?” Calvin sighed and turned to me. “This is why we need a tiebreaker.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  But I didn’t. No matter what they chose, I’d be treating Phase Three the same way: hit Rank Two, tinker with the beacon, fight when I had to, and try to figure out Integration itself instead of just surviving its phases. My priorities were so different from the rest of the council that they were more closely aligned with Bobby Richards than Jessica Silvers or Calvin Rollins. Right now, that was a problem—and it was one I’d have to solve.

  On the other hand, it was an easier problem than the Waypoint Beacon itself or the mecha’s arm controls. This was one I could solve quickly and efficiently, and without causing more conflict. “Jessica, your main worry is having to shape the future, right? And Calvin, you don’t trust the Garden?”

  They both nodded slowly.

  I stood up. “Okay. I’m not a politician. Never have been. But there’s an easy solution to this. We follow Calvin’s plan, but keep talking to the Garden. Figure out who they really are, what they’re about, thank them for helping us out with our beacon—all that stuff. Bring in the West Side and Rat’s Nest, and maybe start scouting out the farmlands in southwest Illinois.”

  “Already have been. We had a few Runners out toward the end of Phase Two,” Calvin said quickly.

  “Right. That’s good.” I held up a hand to try cutting Jessica off. To my surprise, it worked—but she looked upset about it. “Sorry, ma’am. Don’t mean to interrupt, but Calvin’s option keeps us flexible. Surrendering to the Garden doesn’t, and neither does a real, aggressive smash-and-grab into the farmlands. Until we know the lay of the land and what our neighbors want, we need the flexibility.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  She nodded slowly, still looking unhappy. “I suppose I see what you mean, Hal. I don’t like it, though.”

  “Not asking you to like it, Jessica. But you asked for a tiebreaker, and that’s my vote.”

  For a second, I thought she’d argue. Instead, she waited a minute, then kept going. “Alright. Say we’re following Calvin’s plan. What’s our first move?”

  “The West Siders. We need them in the fold, because we’ll be moving through their territory to check out the farmland,” Calvin said. “Then the Rat’s Nest people. Still don’t know why they sat out the Battle of Whiting.”

  “I don’t trust them,” Jessica said quickly.

  To my surprise, I nodded. “I don’t either. Something about them felt off, and they still owe Tori and me for taking care of a dungeon problem of theirs. But I don’t think we need to trust them. We just need to find an agreement that works for both of us.”

  Silence.

  After a minute, I sighed. “You want me to talk to them, right?”

  “Right,” Calvin said.

  “Alright. I’ll do it. But I’ve got work to do here—my latest project’s close. I’ll head up to Andersonville tomorrow evening or early the next day. It’ll be a good test-drive for the new rig.”

  Jessica nodded. She seemed tense all of a sudden, and I cleared my throat. “Tori can come with.”

  “Great. She’s out with Carol and Zane, but they’ve been gone a while. I’m starting to get a little worried about them,” she said.

  “They’re tough cookies,” Calvin said. “They’ll be fine. Hal, thanks for breaking our tie—and not just because I won. Now that we’ve got a plan, we’re gonna get going on it.”

  “No problem.” I started heading down the stairs. “I’ve got a few things to try out with the beacon, then sleep. If you need me, I’ll be at Cindy’s.”

  “Got it. Stay safe out there, Hal,” Jessica said.

  Truthfully, I wasn’t worried about being safe at the Voltsmith’s Laboratory.

  So far, the only person who’d come there with any hostility had been Erika Samson, and she’d only been after her car. The building looked just like the rest of post-Graft Chicago—powerless, sealed off, and with encroaching thorns. That camouflage was my best defense.

  My second-best was the bots inside. They were hard at work when I arrived—two of them were fashioning rail gun bolts from actual bolts and loading them into rough magazines. The others were on grenade assembly duty. I ignored them after checking on their handiwork. Grenades had been part of my toolkit, on and off, since the battery bomb I’d used to melt a slime in the Hardcore Tutorial, and they’d been through a few rounds of improvement.

  The current generation hit harder, was more stable, and came in a smaller package than the previous ones—and that was perfect for my needs. But instead of working out a magazine system for the grenade launcher or tinkering with the mecha, I turned my attention to the Waypoint Beacon.

  I’d been hesitant to tear into the machine earlier. I still was. But I needed to make some progress on it, and the best way to do that was to get past the outer layers of gears, wiring, and conduit. I started with a one-square-foot space on the left side of the beacon, where only a few dozen gears spun, and most of them had minimal connections to others. Then I powered it down and slowly, methodically started disassembling the beacon itself.

  My goal was simple—get inside, take a look at it, and try to understand what was going on in there. The tricky part was doing it without permanently breaking the Waypoint Beacon. We might need it later, after all.

  It was slow work, but after a while, I’d opened up enough of a space to see what was inside. The tangle of conduit and wiring around what appeared to be a brass cylinder almost five feet tall obscured its purpose, and I was extremely hesitant to cut into any of that. It was so tangled that, unlike the eight-inch space I’d cleared from inside my initial square foot, I had no hope of replicating it. The closest thing I’d seen to it was the section of the Green Bay Botanical Garden that had been overrun by Solemnus Six’s brambles.

  And there was one more reason not to touch it. The Waypoint Beacon was depowered, but the internal systems were still packed full of Charge.

  I stepped back, lowering my tools slowly to the ground. The last thing I wanted was an overload in the middle of my lab—the one in the Urban Sprawl dungeon had been bad enough, but with the Voltsmith’s Lab’s power at its disposal, any overload could easily spread and become something more like the one in the Whole New World.

  Besides, I didn’t need to see more.

  The thing inside the Waypoint Beacon, at its very core, was a Charge Battery—one that dwarfed anything I’d ever seen outside of a dungeon. The sheer amount of potential Charge was overwhelming.

  It might even be enough to power the machine I’d stolen from the Whole New World dungeon.

  And that brought up an uncomfortable question. Charge, after all, was literal life force. The entity in the machine—the one that had claimed to be the World Engine—had told me that. I’d been putting off thinking about it, but the woman whose face had dominated the conversation had been Leana Collins, an alchemist we’d found in the Watery Grave dungeon. If the machine did what I thought it did, not only was Charge life force, but it was still alive. It still carried the memories of the people whose life force it had been.

  The question, then, was whether my use of Charge was causing the World Engine to hurt, and if it was, whether it was willing to accept that. I’d have to talk to it again—and I’d have to do it soon.

  So, the first thing was the mecha. Then, I’d head north to meet with the Rat’s Nest folks, try to talk them around, and get what they’d promised Tori. And then, after that? It’d be back here, to the Lab, to start rebuilding the communications device I’d recovered on our trip to Milwaukee.

  My schedule was filling up fast.