2044

Ally Fey / LUCAS Gray

She concluded as Jace sat next to her, pleased with the end of the chapter. Ally had finished and leaned back next to Jace. He had a look to him that was mixture of pride and joy. It was a feeling meant for the both of them—LUCAS sure felt something akin to it in how confidently Ally had told her story. He could tell more than anything how long those words had been waiting to burst out of her—breaking down the walls and desiring life on the air.

He nodded to her, “I’ve got that logged for you. I…am astounded at the level of detail you put into it. I would definitely love to hear more.”

“I don’t know if I have any more in me tonight,” Ally said, chuckling. “I think I’d even change a lot of it if I had it in front of me now.”

“Change? I don’t think I noticed anything wrong with it,” Laven said.

“I’ll admit, I wouldn’t have thought I take much to stories about magic and dragons,” Roshe began. “But considering the path life has shifted me on you can say I’ve been made an interested party by association.”

“That means he liked it,” Laven nodded, “At least, when translated from macho man.”

“Thanks guys,” Ally said, recoiling the slightest bit into herself. She was clearly not used to positive reception toward her ideas—not for a long time were those parts of her accepted freely. “I think it’s fine for a campfire story, but if I were writing it down I would definitely change how the beginning is. It’s…how do I explain it? It drags a bit; it spends a lot of time building the continent itself in a big lore dump and I could probably work that into Jace’s story more naturally. Introduce him earlier and work it in so the pacing doesn’t tank early on.”

“This isn’t why I couldn’t ever be a writer,” Roshe said. “The fact you’re thinking of that after telling it is exhausting to my brain.”

“I understand the mentality,” Laven said. She reclined and looked at her right hand as some of the lights began to dim. “When I used to paint I would always want to do better. I’d think about remaking old paintings to see if I could do them better or in a unique way. The feeling of satisfaction with art is a very strange concept. You’re never really fully satisfied, just satisfied enough.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly,” Ally said.

“I see,” LUCAS said, looking up to the stars above and thinking on the words that ran through his mind. Something in the database connected and he could swear he saw the mental image of Jace—it was as if he was importing Jace as he was here and using that data to build the scene of the story—constructing the world of Seraphen. It still looked like it was in the early stages, perhaps he could let it run its course and make a gift of it to her. He smiled and looked back down to Ally—that would be one best made a surprise, though.

“I think I am going to head in, thank you again for listening. It has been…a really long time since I told anybody about this, and it means a lot to me.”

The group nodded back in reciprocation as she got up, Jace vanishing next to her—a sight that caught Roshe off guard.

“Don’t think I’ll get used to that,” he said.

“It’s shockingly easy to,” Laven said. “You’ll see it soon enough.”

“Well, I’ll be the judge of that,” Roshe said, placing his hands on his knees and propelling himself forward. “I’m retiring myself. I plan on keeping alert of sounds outside but it’s going to come to a point where I succumb myself.”

“Thank you Roshe,” Laven said. “We’re going to be taking turns ourselves keeping watch so I’m sure one of us will be up when you do fall asleep.”

He nodded them off as he went inside and finally the both of them were alone in the dark with the fire crackling in the moonlight. The embers sparked golden against the violet sky above. They sent shimmering sparks as the yellow fire glowed to a silvery gray at the base of the flame. It looked like a majestic painting—LUCAS was sure if Laven were in the mood that she could make something ethereal with the inspiration.

“So.” Laven said, letting it hang out in the air. “This isn’t quite how I imagined this day to end.”

“I…yeah,” LUCAS settled on. “It has been pretty crazy. But I think I’m feeling the most confident about our chances if that makes any sense? I don’t feel scared—at least, as scared as I used to about it.”

“That’s good. I’m incredibly happy about that,” she said, smiling brightly. “I was very hesitant to feel that way at first. I think I have trained myself to be suspicious of a good thing. Typically I worry that things will turn out rotten before it has even the chance to turn out right. Me believing in you was the first time I decided to move against that feeling recently, but that feeling exists within me after years of building up that tolerance. It’s not an easy habit to break with new situations. But after tonight I feel like I am open to accepting this group of ours as something good—something positive.”

LUCAS was thinking on it all, he understood what she had said and what she was feeling. He placed a hand on her lap, and she placed her hand over his. It made him feel good, and he hoped—no, he knew that it did her too.

“I don’t know what has shocked me more,” LUCAS said. “The fact that Roshe wasn’t out to get us or encountering a person from an alternate timeline.”

It made Laven burst out laughing. “I think he’d hit you if he heard you say that.” She covered her mouth with her hand and let it out. “God…just how weird is that?!” she looked to him. “I mean, actual proof of multiple timelines. That’s not something you just take lightly. I was handling it fine in the moment because it was clear she needed someone to reassure her that things were going to be okay but like…what the fuck?”

“I…am increasingly conflicted by Ally’s presence here. She is a lovely individual, but I am constantly reminded that this same person separated only by time is supposed to be our target. I am hoping beyond all hope that nothing we do in regard to that negatively affects her here. I know it would come down to a level of priority if that were the case,” LUCAS said. “I would assume that someone’s probable future shouldn’t affect their past…but I am not anywhere near qualified to be able to say that definitively.”

“Considering what we’re facing—beasts that have no regard for an entire universe much less individual life, we have to be prepared to meet their match. If it comes down to it where we can save the universe, but it erases her place here, we have to be strong enough to make that choice,” Laven said. She looked sad as she turned to him. The crackling fire seemed to respond to her by snapping within the wood and shifting the logs inside. She sighed, “But that doesn’t mean that I think we should offer her up at first available opportunity. I really like her, and I want to try everything possible to avoid that first.”

LUCAS nodded. “She deserves to be happy. We deserve to be happy. We deserve to live.”

“That’s the eternal call to action, isn’t it?” Laven asked. “The declaration against the gods themselves.”

“Thinking of them as gods is the surefire way to ensure whatever plans they have in mind will work out for them.”

“That’s true,” Laven said. “They’re nothing more than cowards running away from their own problems—forcing them onto us.”

“More than cowards,” LUCAS said. “Willing to torture life for infinite time in order to preserve their own. They’re despicable. Putrid. I’m not going to stop until each one of them realizes the damage they’ve done, and I eliminate them completely.”

“You know, you sounded like something of a badass there,” Laven offered him a smile.

“I still got to work on it, trying it on as it were.”

“Mhm,” she nodded, and started to laugh. He joined in, and the both of them knew it was probably best they put out the fire and retire to their shack like the others had. LUCAS stood and let the final smoke rings shoot out above into the violet sky as the fire hushed to a final good-bye.

LUCAS stood and followed Laven back toward their own shack. The shacks themselves lent little to actual privacy, but LUCAS was able to confirm the others around—even Roshe had nodded off into their slumber. The night was perfectly cool—a rarity for the environment around them, and one they would take advantage of.

A moment of respite among chaos and turmoil.

LUCAS had knowledge of the feelings they had each shared between each other, but zero experience of what those feelings did to him and how they affected everything high and low. It wasn’t that Laven taught him what she had felt, but he give what she had asked for—what the two of them had between themselves.

When they finished he looked her in the eyes and saw her as she truly was beneath everything—beneath the layers she built up in defense of the world. Beneath even the covenant of the butterfly. He saw her depths and he knew that she was seeing him in much the same way.

They stared at one another for a moment longer before simultaneously resting to their sides and embracing each other. LUCAS has vowed to take the first watch, so he sat with his scanners running in the background as she fell under.

He noticed the scrambling of small creatures out from time to time, but they didn’t approach close enough that he could determine what they looked like, but their only purpose was to forage for easy food—not anything they could provide at the strength difference. The fire had long been put out so creatures searching for warmth would have to wait until the sun rose once again.

After some hours had passed Laven had woken up and held him close as he ventured into the depths of slumber. His mind forayed into the innards of the databases within him—playing back memories for him to see and scan through.

He saw images of the Roulette Game run through his mind and he without fail began running side tangent searches for the remaining survivors out there in the world. It wasn’t anything he had willingly decided to do—it just happened at the snap of a finger.

Aria Fleur—when he had seen her she was not even a full adult, and yet she had been on the streets as long as she had been alive. She knew how to take care of herself and was as deeply entrenched in the underworld as a girl her age could have been. Of course, decades have passed since those days. She would be in her sixties now if she still was out there. He had a feeling she was—she had a tenacity about her that wouldn’t be snuffed out. Though, he didn’t really consider that fair considering most of the time he knew her—he did so as a corpse at the bottom of the ocean. He surfed through the hallways of his mind searching for any relevant tags he could use to pin a location down, but then he realized his database had cut off abruptly. He was limited to their current landmass—the land that used to be the American continents.

He hadn’t thought to search past before—nothing thus far had required him to search of the rest of the world. But…it was so simply shut off to him that now he desired more. He wondered if there was a way he could reconnect himself—because reconnect was certainly the word for it. It wasn’t that there was a lack of programming inside himself—but the rest of the world was severed from him. Taken from him.

He backtracked around the corner and returned back to the central hub—the center of his current focus. The Roulette Game served as a hub that inspired several different doors for him to travel down. The irony would have been simply too much for him if he had a writer’s brain like Ally. But instead, it stood as a grim reminder for those out there who continued to fight. It was a reminder of what they came from. It was a statement of what he had come from.

Simon Nagatomi would have been a little older than Aria. It was ever more unlikely that he was still alive out there in the world based on his past habits and lifestyle habits, but if he was still out there, it was most likely that he returned to Japan. Which, like with Aria, would be out of his scope of knowledge. It was a shame, because he had really grown to appreciate Simon’s tenacity after learning of his struggle in remembering each of the cycles they had played through. He felt a sort of kinship to that—and wondered what sort of relationship they would form if he knew that, and his neck weren’t torn to shreds as Abel’s was on that hundredth cycle.

Sophie—she was a wildcard. LUCAS had opened her door and found many split pathways and forked trails as soon as he stepped inside. It was clear that her pathway of information opened up into a labyrinth full of dead ends and traps. It would take a sizable effort and many hours in order to determine the truth through the lies. He figured no other method fit her truly. For now, he would leave the door unexplored as he did not have that time or guile to begin unraveling the maze within, but he did keep tabs on it to return. It was a tasked he was determined to reach the end of, if not just to tell Sophie that she could rest easier knowing Sakonna was taken care of.

He turned to the final door—one that he cared to open at least. AI’s door did exist there, and he was sure if he opened it up he would see the older Allison Fae there working alongside, but he had to restrain himself. He felt such anger toward her that he figured he would lash out. Not only would that do irreparable damage to his internals, but it could be invaluable in their search to find them, so he needed to be sure that when he opened that door he could control himself. He…was not sure of that yet, so the door remained closed.

Levi, however, was the strangest out of them all. Levi was like LUCAS himself—as he was but a prototype of the system that became his own. In a sense…would that not make him like an older brother of sorts? He thought on it and figured he would open the door. He stepped into a recreation of the German village that had been itself a recreation of the same location that Sakonna herself had fallen to when she came to this planet all those years ago.

He sensed something he hadn’t immediately in the other rooms—there was information and plenty of it in the village itself. At the center he found the core that—to him looked almost primitive.

It was Levi. He hadn’t a need to even guess at it, there was something about it that just read to him as the man who lived an easygoing life until the move-in of the cartel to the modern-day Steinschild. It had always been a question how much of that story was fabricated for the guise of his memory, or how much was taken from the real-life village but standing here LUCAS knew that it had been entirely fabricated. And yet, just as how he was entirely fabricated, that so much didn’t matter.

LUCAS held his arms out and encompassed the light—encasing it in a small sphere between his hands and looking down at the data—while not dead, it was heavily damaged. He did not thing that it was irreparable, though, and an idea came to him. He sat down, and for the rest of the night began to work silently.

He worked on pulling as much of the data from his memories back into active data consideration and was fully satisfied when the glowing yellow light shifted slightly to a green color. He looked down at the light and brought it down to the ground, pushing the core into the village’s center itself. The world around him began to glow white. LUCAS was blinded temporarily as he felt the world around him beginning to shift. Even the ground under his own feet was unstable. It started to fade back to its usual colors, although he was moved to just outside the gate at the front of the village. He was looking at the gigantic statue of Sakonna in the center of town.

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Back then, he learned through Abel’s eyes that the statue was created for fear of the monster that lived in the mountains above. Humans in that time told terrible stories of how Sakonna would terrorize the people down below solely for her own recovery—after her choice to assault their world had unexpectedly caused her to rest. It was the epitome of his hatred of the Creatures of the Night. A statue emboldening fear was the exact sentiment he fought against.

His anger faded as a figure started to appear before the statue—building itself before his very eyes. The tall figure regarded him with a smile, curly hair with a confident stance—one unfamiliar to him, but more than welcomed.

“Levi, it’s been much too long. I’m so happy to see you.”

“Long? I don’t…” Levi began. His gray eyes began spinning as he began to process the information around him.

“Let me take you through it slowly,” LUCAS said. “I fear if you try to learn everything at once you may throw yourself off for some time.”

Levi looked back at him and then nodded, and then crossed his arms. “Do I know you? Am I supposed to?”

“I don’t think you would if I was going to be specific. You might know someone who looked like me. Abel was with you in the Roulette Game, remember?”

“Yes, he was…very nice. He tried to take care of everybody—little tyke was so young, too.”

Hearing his father called a tyke brought out a smile from him out of his control. LUCAS nodded. “Yes, he’s my creator. You can liken it to a father if that’s easier for you. Physically, I’m based off of his older brother, Cain.”

“Quite the naming scheme for those two brothers.”

Another smile came forth, but this one had dark roots, and LUCAS was not unfamiliar as to why. Maybe it was that irony that he smiled. Either way, he continued. “Yes, their parents were very much into the power of names—and after hardships of their own determined to imbue their children with as soulfully powerful names as they could muster. I’m not them, though so I don’t want you to get confused. My name is LUCAS. The next part is a bit harder to grasp so I want you to repeat back to me what I just told you.”

“I knew Abel,” Levi had begun. He thunk a moment further and then looked back, more confident. “But you are not Abel, you merely look like his older brother, Cain. Your name is LUCAS.”

“Yes, good.” LUCAS said, nodding his head. “The longer you’re awake the easier it will be to retain information. For now, we’ll take it step by step.”

“Awake,” Levi said. “Where…am I?”

“We’ll get there,” LUCAS said. “First, I have to explain what you are.”

“What I am?”

“Yes, there’s many ways to explain this in a way you wouldn’t understand. I’m going to try my best to find a good enough explanation that sits well with you to be able to understand the rest.”

“That answer…is unsettling,” Levi said.

LUCAS looked back at him; an unsettling look on his face. “I really am sorry, that is going to continue for a bit.” He took a sharp breath and started to explain. Levi listened with no shortage of questions in response to each major point covered.

“I’m…not a real person,” Levi said, distraught at the reality of his situation. There was a look of distress plainly on his face.

“You are a real person,” LUCAS countered. “It’s hard to hear that the things you believed to think were your past were made up by someone else, but that doesn’t mean you have to continue living the way your creator bid you.”

“What use is there to that? What would I be able to believe if everything I had believed turned out to be a lie? How can I ever be sure of anything?”

LUCAS nodded, “I understand how that feels. I wonder that to this day. I get the fear of not knowing what to trust when you are so different from everybody else that exists out there…but that’s one thing you and I have in common.”

“How do you handle the conflict of your creation? Levi asked.

LUCAS cocked his head as he thought about the question. “It is hard. Like…really hard. It’s a prevailing thought that returns time and again to my mind, but the way I make sense of it is to manifest my own future.”

Levi looked confused, unsatisfied with the answer.

“Think of it like this. You were constructed by some very bad people in order to test some very bad things. This is the truth of your creation, but it is not your responsibility. It is not your fault, and you shouldn’t feel bad about what happened here. You will feel bad about it because you have free will—you are separate to them. You are intelligent. Which means you can be good. And you feeling bad about that is proof you want to be good. What has happened in the past is done and so the most important thing you can do is work to be better than your creators.”

“How can I do that from here?”

“I…am working that one out still,” LUCAS said. “You are limited right now because you don’t have a body out there anymore.”

“I…blew up. Right?”

LUCAS was about to nod, thinking of the events of the hundredth timeline of the Roulette Game, but he stopped as he remembered a key point. “I am unsure. I’ve seen you blow up in quite a few timelines. I think…you may not have been in our current time, though. The others escaped…Abel notwithstanding.

“Wait…so I do have a body out there?”

“You might. If it hadn’t blown up, it would still be in SubCon. The facility itself has blown up…but…it’s not necessarily impossible it could be salvaged.”

“LUCAS,” Levi turned to him quick, a desperate look in his eye. “Do you think you could check? I would give anything right now to have a place to exist…to do better.”

LUCAS stared at him, the fire burning in him was inspirational. But he knew he couldn’t turn back to return to SubCon right so quick. “I will, but I can’t at this exact moment.”

Some of the fire in his eyes dimmed.

“But I promise I will try. I do have something you can help me with in the meantime.”

“Anything,” Levi said. “What do you need?”

“Come here, follow me,” LUCAS said. “I’ll show you.” He turned and began to walk away but was stopped when he sensed he wasn’t being followed. Sure enough, he turned back to see Levi standing in place.

“I…don’t know how to move,” Levi admitted. “I’m not used to this. I can see I look like myself here but…I’m not.

LUCAS stopped and realized for perhaps the first time that moving in here was different. He stopped to think about the difference…and how he would explain it, but then realized it would probably be impossible—at least, right now. He walked back toward Levi and reached an arm out toward Levi, placing his palm on the man’s chest. Levi’s eyebrows perked up and his skin glowed with the green light that comprised his data previously. His form shifted and compacted back into the globular light.

“What happened?” Levi asked, the tone in his voice was panicked at first, but he seemed to calm as he saw he wasn’t in any imminent danger.

“Moving around in here is different than walking around in the world outside. I hadn’t even thought about it because it just comes so naturally to me, but I’ll fix that now. Moving isn’t a physical action here, because I possess no body in here—my mind is traversing these annals, so I have to imagine myself moving—which means I need to have a mental picture of the places I am moving to. I’m going to bring you with me because I don’t expect you to have a full map of the place here, but within time I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it.”

“Oh, okay, I see. Well then, let us away.”

LUCAS nodded and he gathered Levi’s core and moved back toward the centerpiece hub—the bubble of a room that comprised the main game that had united all of those people those decades ago. Levi had separated from LUCAS’ grasp and looked around.

“I…remember this. This is where the Roulette Game was played. That means…the place we were just at was Steinschild.”

LUCAS nodded. “Yes. This is a hub that is constructed to recreate the SubCon facility. Behind those doors here are information trails on each of the people that participated in those games. I’m sure you can find out yourself which one correlates to who. Aria and Simon are cut off—it is most likely that they have exceeded the distance at which these systems can track them. I’m going to work on expanding those networks out there.”

“What should I do?” Levi asked.

“it’s here…” He gathered up Levi once again and moved through Sophie’s door. The labyrinth constructed itself all around them and Levi slowly began to shift back into the form he felt most comfortable in. He craned his neck back as his eyes widened.

“That is…”

“Massive,” LUCAS finished.

“Yeah…this is for Sophie, isn’t it?”

LUCAS chuckled. “How’d you guess?”

“Only she would have layers upon layers of complexity to figure out anything about her…unless this is meant to be the easiest labyrinth and the other rooms were ten times as complex.”

LUCAS shook his head, “No, thankfully not. This is as complex as it gets. I am going to be honest and straight to the point. I’d like to find where Sophie is. The answer to that is somewhere in here, and I’d love to dedicate as much time as it would need to figure that out, but I have too much I have to be out there for to do that now. I’d like to ask for your help to see if you can make any sense of this place while I’m out there.”

Levi looked at him and flashed a grin—the older man nodded, and the same fire had lit behind his eyes. “You can count on me.”

LUCAS smiled. “You’re a far cry from the man I saw first enter the Roulette Game. I mean that in a good way. They tried to make you a scared toothpick who would break under the slightest bit of pressure.”

“I tell ya, I’m mighty scared,” Levi began. “There’s quite a lot about my current situation that terrifies me to no end on an existential level, but I’m trying to do what you said—trying to be better.”

LUCAS nodded, “That’s the best thing you can do.”

“I think I can move around here; it makes a bit more sense how you explained it. Is there a way I can reach you when you go…out there?”

“I…am unsure. I didn’t know you were in here before this, but I don’t think you were fully active. I’ll try to reach out when I wake up.”

“Wake up…so you’re out there dreaming this?”

“In a manner of speaking. My mind’s awake as my body sleeps.”

“And you feel rested from that?”

LUCAS nodded, chuckling. “Yeah it’s a strange thing, you know? Put my internals to minimum required values and I do feel better when I wake up.”

“That is something. I shall await being able to do that myself someday.”

LUCAS regarded him with a final nod as he closed his eyes and rose back to the surface. He woke to Laven running her hands through his hair. His eyes opened to her smile, and he returned one in kind.

“Good morning,” she said. “You must have been reciting a speech to the Queen of England.” His confused look made her laugh. “You were whispering in your sleep. I couldn’t make out much of what you were saying, but I could pick out a few words. You were dreaming about that game, weren’t you? I heard you say the name Levi.”

“It’s complicated,” LUCAS said. “I wasn’t dreaming. I was inside my own mind searching through the records and I managed to find Levi in there—the data that survived. He was there. I was able to bring him back and that felt…really nice.”

“That is amazing,” She said. “Where is he?”

“He doesn’t have a body yet. I think there’s a chance the one he had could have survived, but it’s way out of our way to find it. It might be better to construct a new one for him, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about that.”

“And what do you think on that? On his body being out there maybe?”

“I know it’s not something we should investigate now. It’s imperative that we continue on our path…but if there is a chance then I’d like to see if I can help him.”

“I understand,” she nodded. “I am not going to pretend to understand the mechanics behind constructing a new body, but certainly that would be…I don’t know, better than trying to excavate a broken facility at the bottom of the ocean?”

There was a knock at the door, the both of them turned to see Ally, holding herself nervously. “I’m sorry to interrupt…I couldn’t help but overhear—well, not overhear but overthink…”

Laven understood and nodded. “You understand the context?”

“A little,” she said. “Enough. I spent quite a few years learning metallurgy, and I tend to get senses of things by interacting with them. Maybe if we get the opportunity…I could help learn how you work. Then I could possibly help in making something like that.”

“You think so?” LUCAS asked. “I have a great knowledge of the technical side of things, I could explain why things work if you could figure out how to replicate that.”

“I could try. I’m not the best…but I could try,” Ally said.

LUCAS attempted to reach a connection point to Levi, he closed his eyes to focus, “Hey Levi, you there?”

He waited a few moments and heard a very faint reply, just a single word, “Yes.”

“We have someone here who might be able to help us build you a new body. It is going to be a bit as we’re still on our current task, but we’re closer than we were when I spoke to you in there.”

“Ok.”

LUCAS guessed he was still learning how to project himself to the outside, so he figured the answer was sufficient enough. He opened his eyes and then nodded to the others, “That sounds really good. Thank you, Ally.”

She smiled, “Of course, anything I can do to help.”

“Well, with that settled, I think we should get ready for the day, got a ride ahead of us.”

Ally nodded. She hadn’t fully known the scope of what they had spoken about, but enough of Laven’s thoughts slipped through the spaces where they slept that she could estimate with a reasonable level of accuracy the rest of it. Someone LUCAS had known was stuck without a body—someone most probably like him, and they didn’t know enough to be able to make him a new one.

“Brave enough offer, are you an engineer now?” Jace had asked in her own mind, keeping the conversation private.

“I don’t know a lot of things,” Ally thought. “But I have a great capacity to learn.”

“Well, if you want I could help out—another hand to help.”

“Can you tell me how to construct a robot?”

Jace laughed, “Unless you start taking some online classes I’m afraid I’m going to be all brawn for that problem.”

“What if I wrote you as a roboticist. Could you help me then?”

He chuckled harder, “I think that asks to the same question, love. Wish you could though. Silar sounds like an ass, but I don’t think he could fuck with a roboticist.”

“He probably wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about.”

“Too true.”

“Hey,” he said. “Thanks for telling my story. I’ll only dock you for the rest that still needs to come, but it felt really nice hearing it come from you out loud.”

Ally smiled at this, and she gathered her stuff together from her shack and met the group back outside the fire pit. Roshe and Bambo had completely torn down their shack and dispersed the remnants to the wind.

“Good morning ladies and Luke,” Bambo said, shielding his eyes from the sun above. It was barely rising in the sky yet still shone so brightly across the land.

LUCAS nodded in his direction and looked back toward Ally and then over to Roshe. “How was the night for you? It seemed mostly quiet from my view.”

“Quiet enough,” Roshe said. It was clear he was ashamed of how early he bit it. “I think I’m ready to go as long as I can if you can match me.”

“The ground was pretty hard, I admit. But I’ll live,” Bambo said. “I was up for a bit after ya’ll came back in and I got a route set for us. We can take a few shortcuts to cut down some of our time.”

“That’s great, where at?” LUCAS asked.

“I’ll overtake you and you can find out,” Roshe offered a challenging smile.

“Hm, shame, seems we’ll be taking the slower route,” Laven laughed.

“We’ll see about that,” Roshe scoffed.