“You wanted to see me?” I asked, standing in the doorway to Enforcer Chapman’s office.

  “Shut the door,” she said.

  I moved toward the chair in front of her desk.

  “Don’t bother sitting down. We needed you for surveillance last night, but I learned instead that you were on a cull and thus not available. I found that odd, seeing as you have not been medically or psychologically cleared for crawls, but yet, you were in a dungeon.”

  “I wasn’t trying to skip surveillance duty.”

  “I don’t care what you were trying to do,” Chapman barked back. “You no-showed a shift. You ignored direct orders. And you violated multiple policies.”

  Oh shit. A second ago, my life felt reasonably normal. Now it seemed like I might not have a job when I left this office.

  “Am I missing anything?” she asked.

  “I don’t believe so, ma’am.”

  “You’re off my case. I can’t work with someone I can’t trust, so hand over any work-in-progress you have for McDouglas. You are suspended from culls indefinitely, even if you get cleared. Now, get out of my office.”

  My face tingled, like my heart wasn’t strong enough to get blood to it. The edges of my vision blurred. My breathing was heavy and hollow. My legs wobbled.

  That sense of progress I had been riding high on crashed in a blink. Did I…

  Did I just flush my CDM career over two extra dungeon crawls?

  Possibly my last ever dungeon crawls if that was the case. Even if I kept my job, I imagined Chapman had the power to get me shadowbanned. No crawls. No levels. No levels? No anything. Spreadsheets and databases were all that my future would hold at that point.

  When I sat at my desk, I stared at my screen with empty eyes.

  Megan shook my shoulder. “Hey. You alright? You don’t look great.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay…” I suspect she wanted to keep digging to find out what was really going on, but she swallowed her words and went back to her work.

  Chapman forwarded me a set of crawler licenses to proof instead of doing casework and CCed Enforcer Grensmith to inform him I had been kicked off the case and would thus be available for other work. Grensmith emailed me separately. The email didn’t say anything. It only had one attachment: tax records for guilds and teams, specifically their write-offs. I had done this exercise before, so I knew what to do with those too.

  Cross-reference the write-offs with the equipment registration and inspection records we had on file to identify discrepancies. If they had two backhoes in our records but their write-offs listed four, one of two things was happening: They lied to the Internal Revenue Service to get a bigger write-off, or they were rotating multiple pieces of equipment through the same registration, which was akin to using the same license plate on multiple vehicles.

  Thrilling material all around.

  I worked until 6 p.m. and had no contact with any enforcer in that time. Not Chapman or Grensmith. And not McDouglas, who I imagined was angrier than Chapman. He vouched for me, trusted me to be on his team, and then I got myself booted when we had only just started.

  Excellent work, Dorion. Really, some of your best yet.

  As soon as I got home, I tossed a blanket over Beth’s sheets and curled myself into a ball with the lights off. Beth was at work. Nathan was working overtime. I would have a few hours in the apartment by myself to wallow.

  Me and the stomp sisters, who were line dancing or building cheerleader pyramids on the floor above me.

  I miscalculated this one badly. I was warned from the start that Enforcer Chapman was a strict rule follower. Some part of my brain should have suggested I not cull if a surveillance shift was a possibility, but it didn’t. I heard dungeon gate and jumped on it.

  How bad was the damage? How much of this could I unfuck, if any?

  This could be a slap-on-the-wrist situation where I do shit work for a few weeks, and then everything goes back to normal. My relationship with Chapman was torched, though. I didn’t see that coming back. She lost all respect for me and wasn’t subtle about showing it.

  My phone buzzed. It was a text from Beth:

  “Mom and Dad are at Milly’s! What do I do?”

  I yelled loud enough that the stomp sisters briefly paused pogostick practice. Briefly.

  The universe was really pouring it on today. Mom and Dad had the magical ability to surface at the worst possible times, but usually it was calls, texts, or letters. I was not in the headspace to deal with them in person today.

  But Beth needed me.

  My father was in his sixties, and my mother was in her fifties. There was an eight-year difference between them, and that gap used to reflect in their appearance. After not having seen them for six years, they both struck me as well-worn but not frail. Even with my strength stat at 6, I suspected my father was still stronger. A lifetime of manual labor had hardened him, and he still worked just as hard as he did in his twenties.

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  Other adults at church made sure Beth and I knew that. They remarked on his strength and work ethic several times over throughout my childhood.

  My mother reminded me of my gram. Her ever-present scowl wore sharp lines into her face, giving her an even deeper air of judgment and disdain.

  She and my father were near the front of the bar off to the side, crowding Beth into a corner. Beth’s face was awash with terror and embarrassment. Her coworkers had a front-row seat for the family drama, and I knew Beth hated that. Even worse, she liked this job. Her mind must have been racing over how quickly this all seemed to be falling apart.

  Her eyes begged me to do something to stop this.

  “Can we step outside and talk?” I asked, coming up behind them. “Beth works here, and we’re being disrespectful.”

  My father looked down on me, and I was fifteen years old again, facing a man who to me seemed a giant, looming threat.

  “Why would you put your mother through this?” His finger jammed into my forehead. “Haven’t you sown enough evil in this family?”

  “We’re not here for you,” my mother added. “I pray for your soul every day, but you have to want to come back to the light. I won’t subject myself to another one of your verbal attacks.”

  “Outside. Please.” I attempted to physically corral them toward the door.

  My hopes for that succeeding were few, but they actually acquiesced, allowing us to relocate our family dispute from my little sister’s workplace to a very public Pittsburgh sidewalk.

  “The Lord is calling you, Beth,” my mother continued. “You’re letting satan deceive you, letting him turn you against us.”

  “I’m not going home,” Beth replied. “Please, please just leave.”

  “You’re abandoning your family,” my father said. “Why would you spit on our love for you like this?”

  Beth’s eyes quivered. Her words came in weak stammers. She couldn’t make eye contact. She was on the verge of breaking down.

  I attempted to put myself in the middle. “Mom, dad, you have to leave. We will come to you when we’re ready.”

  My mother looked me in the eye and said, “Satan, I reject you. I see your tricks. I see you possessing and using my family against me.”

  That was enough of this. “I’m calling the police.”

  “A mother and father can’t worry about their daughter?” my mom asked. “The police will side with us.”

  I showed her my CDM identification. “No, mom, they won’t. We work together.”

  That was a lie, but I hoped they didn’t know that. I reached for my phone and started to scroll through my contacts to sell it.

  My father glared at my mother. “The mission is greater than our family. Secular government could use this as an opportunity to sabotage the church, turning this moment against us.”

  She nodded reluctantly. “Oh, my sweet little Beth. I had such high hopes for you. You’ve broken my heart a hundred times over.”

  They turned and walked away, not looking back once as they grew more distant.

  Beth buried her head in my chest and bawled. After a minute she pushed herself away.

  “Shit. Fuck.” She tried to wipe the streaks away and collect herself. “That was so embarrassing. I can’t believe I have to go back in there and work.”

  “Take a second to breathe,” I suggested. “If a person isn’t from a screwed-up family, they care about someone in their life who is. You’d be surprised how many people around you see how much it sucks and know it’s not your fault.”

  She nodded shakily.

  “Want me to stay in case they come back?”

  “No, that’s okay,” Beth answered. “I need to grow up some day.”

  “That’s not what this was, but we don’t need to get into that now. Are you okay? Can I do anything or get you anything?”

  “No, I’m fine. I have to be fine. Thank you for coming down so quickly.”

  “I always will,” I said.

  Beth hugged me again. “Is that your mascara or mine all over your t-shirt?”

  “That’s not my color.”

  She laughed a little bit.

  “Proud of you. Call me if you need me.”

  I waited outside for another fifteen or twenty minutes. The chances of them coming back were slim, in my mind, but I was also certain they wouldn’t be this brazen. They never came after me in person, but I guess Beth was worth saving, so they came for her.

  My walk back to the apartment was slow. This day had taken everything out of me. I was so tired.

  I stayed up most of the night waiting for Beth to come home. I didn’t want to be asleep and miss a text or a call, and this ended up being a rough closing shift at Milly’s. She got home an hour later than usual. Other than pausing to give me a hug, she went to my room and shut the door. I did my best to pretend I didn’t hear her crying, for her sake. She wanted privacy for those emotions, and my apartment was so shit that the walls did nothing to protect her.

  My stress kept me up the rest of the night. I remember looking at my phone, seeing that I was an hour away from my alarm going off, and waking up to it ringing a moment later. That was forty-five minutes of sleep at most.

  If I could get through this next workday, I told myself, I could get home tonight and finish the wallowing I began the day before. Get through the day. Just go through the motions and wait for the clock to run out.

  I stood in the elevator, looking down at my phone, waiting for the doors to close. A vibrant lime green gleamed in my peripheral vision.

  McDouglas and one of his trademarked polo shirts had stepped into the elevator.

  I steeled my mind. Get through the day, Dorion. This is a tough start, sure, but the plan is the same. One second of life at a time, if that’s what it takes.

  “You really stepped in it with Chapman,” McDouglas said, his eyes locked on the floor display over the doors. “Keep your head down for two weeks, do your work, and this will blow over. She’ll make sure you pay your penance, but then it will be done and in the past. It’ll go faster than you think.”

  The elevator dinged, and he stepped out, leaving me behind.

  I probably should have said something, anything, in reply, but I was too surprised by his words to think straight. By the time I came to my senses, the doors were shut again.

  Which was great because that was my floor. I had to ride to the top of the building and pick up half a dozen people going down before I could get back to where I was supposed to be.

  But I dared to be hopeful. Maybe I hadn’t burned everything down like I thought.