The Chariot’s hatch opened, and I lowered myself to the ground. Taven Liu stood less than ten feet away, weapon in hand, but I couldn’t help but feel entirely safe. I didn’t have a scrap of armor unless I counted the Voltsmith’s Grasp. It hung from my shoulder, a replica of the arm Taven had cut off, shimmering with energy and weld joints. Other than that, I didn’t have any gear, just shredded mechanic’s coveralls.

  I’d put everything else into the Chariot.

  Tori and Bobby had posted up a few yards from Taven, in a rough triangle around him. Both of them tensed as he glanced at them, but he wasn’t a threat to them either. Charge coursed around him—electric Charge siphoning into the overloading system inside of him.

  “Something Dad taught me about machines—they’ll always do what they’re designed to do. Engines spin, gears mesh, and joints bend. They’re all dangerous—but only if you don’t stay within your limits. He used to let me help him fix the farm truck or the tractor. I’d hold the flashlight or hand him wrenches, but he never let me put my fingers inside the machinery. He said I’d know when I was ready—and that he’d agree with me.

  “Then, when I was fifteen, I bought a station wagon. It was a piece of rusty junk, thirty years old when I got it. Dad took one look at it, shook his head, and told me I was ready. I spent a whole summer rebuilding it by hand, and when I was finished, I realized I wouldn’t have been able to do it if Dad hadn’t put limits on me when I was younger.”

  “But what did you do?” the Fireborn Crusader asked. He sounded confused, unsure of himself for the first time.

  “The station wagon taught me something else. It wasn’t just limiters. It was that the world was full of problems and puzzles—and that every one of those problems has a solution. Whenever I found gears that wouldn’t mesh inside the station wagon, I could figure out a way to adjust their placement or take them to the shop and grind them down until they fit. When the windows wouldn’t roll up, I could take the door apart and replace the worn-out parts.

  “Every problem has a solution, Taven Liu. Every part should be fixable. But sometimes, a part’s too broken to be useful. Sometimes, using it would be dangerous. You, Taven Liu, are that part. You’re a problem, and the only solution is getting rid of you and finding a replacement.”

  “I refuse,” Taven said. I stared at him as his eyes flickered around the room—first to Tori, then to Bobby, and finally, to me. Then he shook his head. “I can’t lose! Not here! The Crusade needs me!”

  “No, it doesn’t. You’re a limiter, and it’s time to take those people’s limiters away. They’re better off without you.”

  He didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t anything else for him to say. He turned, raised the axe, and started running toward the Waypoint Beacon.

  I moved. Taven had been faster and stronger than me, but when the Voltsmith’s Grasp lunged out and grabbed his hand, it was like wrestling a sloth. The axe fell from his hand as the gauntlet closed around his hand.

  Charge surged out of his system and into the Voltsmith’s Grasp. I hung on as he thrashed, trying to throw me off of him. The flow was almost overwhelming, but long before I finished, Taven stopped fighting. His system was completely drained, and his body had burned out from the inside as he’d tried to activate his skills over and over with nothing to fire them. He lay on the ground, and when I let go of his arm, his body shimmered and disappeared, leaving only a blood-red experience orb that crackled as it made contact with the orange Charge around it.

  I reached out after a moment and touched it.

  Level Up! 75 to 82

  Seven levels. The fourteen stat points were almost heady, like drinking too much cider during a holiday dinner. For a moment, I wanted more. So much more. But Taven hadn’t been a system-created monster. He’d been a human one, and killing him had been necessary. I didn’t need more power, though. Level One Hundred would probably be my last milestone, and I was well on my way there.

  The learning was more important. I’d made serious headway this phase—the Waypoint Beacons, the hidden chamber below the Whole New World, and especially the nature of resonance—but I still had more to learn. The properties of Charge were still a mystery, and the hidden chamber had raised more questions about it than it had answered. And resonance made sense as the interplay between different forms of Charge, but how did it relate to the world engine? What was the world engine? I had so many questions—

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  “No big loss,” Bobby said quietly. I snapped back to reality.

  We weren’t done here. Not yet.

  Bobby Richards had everything he wanted out of this.

  Taven Liu was dead. The Fireborn Crusade was probably over—although not every member had joined the Crusaders under duress. There’d be a few true believers, and they’d hold some part of the Crusade together, but for the most part, the city southeast of Chicago was open for Bobby’s investments. New opportunities meant diversifying his portfolio and putting more chips on more colors.

  Bobby Richards was a gambling man, but betting the house on one number on the roulette wheel was a good way to end up on the streets. If he could get a few small wins by spreading his resources a little thinner, that’d be better for everyone—and especially for Bobby.

  And, even better, he’d ended the fight against Taven with control of the Waypoint Beacon. That gave him leverage with Hal—and based on what he’d just seen, that leverage would be important.

  “God damn, though,” Bobby said as Hal stared at him, “what’d you do to him?”

  “I solved the problem,” Hal replied. He stared at Bobby for a moment, and after a minute, Bobby broke eye contact.

  “Christ Jesus, Hal, you burned him out. I felt it from here.”

  “Bobby,” Tori said from the third point on their little triangle, “We need the Beacon. Are you going to try to take it?”

  “Tori—“

  Before Hal could get going, Bobby cut him off. “Bobby Richards is a man of his word, Miss Vanderbilt. I won’t lie to you, I thought about it—and don’t give me that look. I’m not stupid, and neither are you. I could do a lot of good with this somewhere, save one of my other investments, but I don’t know if I could beat you both. That, and Museumtown’s stock just went up in my book. It went up a lot.”

  “So, you’re walking down that tunnel and leaving?” Tori pressed.

  Hal cleared his throat. “That’s not necessary—right, Bobby?”

  If Bobby Richards was ever going to make a move and betray us, the time would have been about two minutes ago—right after I’d burned Taven Liu’s system out of him. He could have gotten to Taven’s experience orb, boosted himself up, and taken me out while I wasn’t in the Chariot.

  That didn’t mean we could trust him with the Waypoint Beacon, though. I didn’t have the equipment to build something that could get Calvin, Tori, the beacon, and me all the way from Green Bay to Chicago, which meant I’d need to go home and get the other Runners together. Once I had all of that, I’d be free to build what was already in my head. That part would be easy—the three of us could go home, build the semi trailer I had in mind, and come collect our beacon.

  The problem was Bobby.

  I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t find another interested party—or that he didn’t already have one lined up. There were other towns in Wisconsin, after all, and it wasn’t likely that the Garden’s neighbors were all friendly. Ours hadn’t been, and I could see Bobby making an investment in someone else. Or, even worse, I could see them rolling into Green Bay and taking the beacon. As long as it sat in this dungeon, it’d be unguarded—and we couldn’t leave anyone to cover it.

  That was half of the Bobby problem. The other half was that he was doing the right thing. He was trying to help people besides himself. I didn’t want to get on his bad side; he was too important as a possible component for Phase Three.

  Tori, Calvin, and I needed to leave Green Bay knowing that the beacon would be there when we got back, and that Bobby was on our side. There was only one way to guarantee that.

  The Garden.

  Bobby couldn’t complain if we had them hold onto the Waypoint Beacon for us—it’d look like we were protecting it from getting stolen, and he couldn’t protect it by himself. The Garden also had its own beacon. They wouldn’t need two.

  One problem remained, and I couldn’t quite square it at first. The Garden was perfect for us, but what did they get out of it? Until I could answer that problem, I couldn’t go through with the plan, and we were stuck in our little triangle.

  In the end, there was only one possible answer.

  “Come on. Let’s head out,” I told Tori. “Bobby, you mind watching the entryway for a while? The Beacon’s yours for a while until we figure out what to do with it.”

  “Sure. Bobby Richards’s momma always told him to be kind to his neighbors, after all.” Bobby leaned against the Waypoint Beacon, and I relaxed a little. Then I walked down the dungeon hallway as Tori followed. We reached the gold-lit staircase quickly and descended to the first floor.

  The floor that had overloaded.

  It was utterly devoid of Charge, and even as we moved through it, the dungeon’s walls and ceiling faded slowly from existence, replaced by the same matte-grey light that illuminated most dungeons—and nothing else. The rooms of half-Earth stuff were gone, and all that remained was a simple catwalk leading to the entrance of the Hand That Feeds.

  I waited until we left to answer Tori’s wall of questions, then quickly explained what we were doing. As I ran through my thinking, she slowly nodded. “I knew you didn’t trust him!”

  “Wrong. I trust him. He was honest with us, back in the Rosehill Mausoleum. Bobby will do whatever he thinks has the best chance of getting people through Integration. He’s predictable. But I don’t trust him to do what’s right for us, or for Museumtown. I trust him to do what he thinks is right for his investments. Big difference. Now, let’s go talk to The Garden.”