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“We’re far from done,” said Michael. “We still need to explain to him what the job entails.

“Shooting people,” said Luke.

“Not all the time,” said Lindsey.

“Oh yeah, stopping other people from shooting someone.”

“Also not—” started Lindsey.

“If we’re gonna go over all the operations and shit, I wanna get some food,” Philip said, walking to the kitchen. Luke paused the game and stretched.

“Yep. I’m hungry as hell.”

“All right, let's head out back.” Michael stood up and everyone else followed. Some of them mixed cocktails on the counter or grabbed drinks out of the fridge. Philip took out a platter of dry brined steaks and headed out the door behind Michael.

Gradie walked through the kitchen and the espresso machine caught his eye. It was the same model he had seen floating through the void in what Philip had called “Michael’s little video”. It was just as jarring to see it here, smudged in spots and glaring under imperfect lighting, as it had been to see Michael and EP in normal clothes, moving through a real world like solid echoes. Sam interrupted his reverie by stomping out of the pantry with a bag of chips and a can of dip.

“Coffee bar is closed. The barista is snacking.” She nudged past him and out the back door. He followed her in a reflex, watching the sun set strands of her hair to golden fire, but stopped as he passed the dining room.

There was a long dining table, covered in cases, bags, guns, magazines, scopes, and other things he couldn’t identify. Four gun safes against the far wall hung lazily open, with other boxes and cases stacked alongside. A large scoped rifle that might have been an HK 417 was leaned against the near edge of the table. Its form had the same effect on him as the espresso machine, reminding him of that other world. The sensation of that other existence poured out from somewhere in the back of his mind and sloshed around the sharp reality in front of him; the light and sounds streaming in from out back, the subtle smell of espresso, the hard lines on the rifle’s Picatinny rail.

“We’ll play with those later, kid. C’mon,” Philip yelled from outside.

Gradie stepped out onto the covered tile porch where most of the team had already found seats among the mismatched outdoor lounge chairs. Philip was at the large chrome gas grill built into the outdoor kitchen, firing it up and arranging the steaks on the counter. There was another grill under a cover, a massive double-doored wood smoker at the end of the counter, and two large coolers and a wok station off to the side.

The concrete deck of an L-shaped pool surrounded the porch on two sides. Unkempt grass poked and bowed through the slabs at the far edge. The yard had no fence, and the grass sloped down and away into scratchy woodland where bright limestone and the orange clay of a storm ditch peeked through the trees in colors fueled by the high Texas sun. Far beyond the dusty grey-green haze, blue faces of the downtown skyline shimmered over sand-colored highways. A plane drew a soft white line across the sky, where silver and slate-colored clouds stood waiting, ready to do anything.

“Nice view, huh?” said Michael. Gradie nodded and leaned on one of the support pillars.

Looking out at the skyline, he felt the world shift. It was like the sensation of coming into the neighborhood, but hopeful and energized with a forward momentum, like driving to a friend’s house for the weekend. An excitement for something yet unknown.

His giddiness must have shown on his face. Lindsey smiled at him slyly.

“Feels good, right? The pull?”

“What’s that?”

“An illusion,” said Phillip. Lindsey ignored him.

“It’s the feeling of excitement, possibility. The mind’s reaction to existing in a place that will listen to it. It’s a kind of euphoria unique to the Hardworlds. It's why a lot of us keep coming back, despite the dangers.”

“Some of us actually enjoy the dangers,” said Philip as he dropped a steak on the grill.

“Speaking of danger,” said Michael. “We need to go over what the job is like.”

“Fun as fuck,” said Luke, laid back in a long cushioned lounger facing the pool. He held his glass up to the sky and watched sunlight flare off the facets of the carved diamond-shaped piece of ice and the amber whiskey that rolled around it.

“Not all the time,” said EP, sitting cross-legged on a reclining lounger. “It’s a lot of waiting.” She flicked her thumb across her phone and a drone whizzed by somewhere above the awning.

“Do you know why we go into the Hardworlds, usually?” Michael asked.

“To catch Demons,” Gradie said, and instantly regretted it. Whoever didn’t laugh looked offended or embarrassed to be next to such unbridled stupidity.

“Not for a minute, kid,” said Philip. We wouldn’t be having a fucking cookout if those bastards were still moving around.”

“We catch fugitives,” said Michael. “Who flee into the Hardworlds. Or we defend them from people trying to catch them, depending on the client.”

“So, you help criminals sometimes?” Gradie asked.

“It ain’t like the Real,” Philip said, “Where everyone’s generally on one side of the law or the other. There is no law in the Otherworld, just payment. And public opinion, so to speak.”

“We don’t defend the same kind of criminals that we hunt,” said Michael. “When we’re hired to drop someone out, the client gives us a reason, and we check it with our sources. None of that process concerns you, but just know we have agencies that let us know what kind of people we’re after.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“So, how does killing someone do anything?” said Gradie. “Can’t they just go into another Hardworld? Like one where they didn’t die?” He tried to get a handle on the model of the Hardworlds forming in his head.

“Remember when I said that altered states of consciousness let your spirit travel? Well, when you die, you drop directly into the Otherworld.”

Gradie leaned back and tried to put it all together. Sam set some rocks glasses filled with ice down on the small round side table next to him, along with a bottle of Jameson.

“Here’s a welcome to the team drink, buddy,” she said. Gradie felt his cheeks warm.

“I want him to remember this, Sam,” said Michael.

“Drink slowly.” She poured the drink and left the bottle on the side table, then sat down with her glass and started making ‘tch’ sounds until Bojo came out through a flap in the back door.

Gradie took a drink and rolled his understanding of the job around in his head.

“Why don’t you just take them out when they’re dreaming then?” he asked. “Didn’t Celeste say she could do that?”

“She can go into their dreams, yes,” Michael said. “But the dreamworlds are very secure, like the Otherworld. If we try to fight them there, they can just push us out, or if we do catch them, wake themselves up. And not all of us have the ability to get inside dreamworlds unbeckoned.”

Gradie rolled his ice around while he thought about that, and eventually decided to just ignore it.

“So, when we kill them, they go to the Otherworld, right? What’s to stop them from going right back in?”

“That’s when they get captured.”

“How?”

“Not your job! Let’s move on!” yelled Philip, as the sizzling sound got louder and moved through variations of rhythm.

“He’s right,” Michael said. “We have enough to cover without going over things you won’t be involved in. Anyway, the vast majority of our jobs are going to fall into two categories: Dropping someone out, or keeping someone from dropping out. So—”

“What other kind of jobs are there?” asked Gradie.

“Fuck me,” said Philip.

“He’s curious, unlike you, Mr. Boring,” said Sam. Gradie looked at her, but she never made eye contact, just kept staring out at the horizon like something was calling to her in the haze.

“Well,” Michael said. “Some people hire Hardworlders to change a world to their specifications.”

“Like make them a millionaire?” Gradie asked.

“Exactly. Or change world politics, or—”

“A bunch of boring douchebag shit!” Philip said. Luke laughed.

“Yeah, shits lame. Hiring astral warriors to alter reality just so some dude you don’t know can get elected.”

“They might want to live in a better world. Did you think of that?” said Lindsey, flicking ash past her foot before bringing the cigarette back up to her lips. Luke smiled at her.

“How many guys like me and Philip you think it would take to bring about world peace?”

Lindsey leaned her head back and blew a perfect smoke ring into the air. Philip shut the grill and came over with a drink in hand and a cigar already lit.

“There are also retrievals,” Michael continued. “It is possible to take objects—”

“Where're the steaks?!” Luke yelled.

“They gotta rest,” said Philip.

“Fuck that. Shits a myth!”

“Get it yourself then!”

Luke stayed where he was and finished off the cigar. Gradie was staring over at the counter where the steaks were resting, Michaels words rolling off his hunger-emboldened buzz, when his phone went off. The drink almost slipped out of his hand.

“Shit.” He sat up and banged his glass down on the table, then dug around in his pocket.

“It’s your baby mama,” Luke said, waving his hand like a jedi mind trick.

It was his sister. Her name floated off the screen and stirred up a flurry of memories that pushed the electric feeling of everything else out beyond his reach.

“Shit.”

“Answer it,” said Michael.

Gradie tapped the screen without breathing.

“Hello?”

“Gradie! Oh my god, what the fuck is going on! The cops just called saying they found your car on fire. Where are you?”

Gradie scanned the faces around him, looking for answers to his sister's questions. Who were these people? He tried to connect his memories to the events of the day, but they missed each other and bounced around in his head. The world spun. Michael, whoever he was, stood up and watched Gradie like he was ready to pounce. The rest of the people set their drinks down, or stood up, or moved out of the way. Suddenly, Gradie remembered them.

They were drug addicts, deviants, and the clinically deluded. Victims of a collapsed mental health system that had never made the jump from the asylums to whatever should have followed, but instead had slipped down into greasy darkness, taking millions of people with it. Somehow, they had sold him a story designed to drag him into their own delusions. When did he meet them? The question brought out half-remembered hallucinations of floating things and an endless void, then something else. A party at a house clogged with the plastic, paper, and cotton refuse of a life lived at the edge of poverty and beyond the realm of hope. He had leaned against a smoke yellowed wall, over a mound of tied up Wal Mart bags holding bursting bundles of socks, shirts, toys, and scraps of nothing, talking to a girl as the broken world writhed around him, looking for a smile to tell him it would all be worth it in a matter of minutes.

They had been there, smiling at him, preaching at him, drawing him into their story with an unnatural command of the storm churning around them. That spiraling, sucking whirlpool, like murky day-old dishwater swirling downward after a clog freshly obliterated by a disposal. A ‘party’. The groaning terminus of broken lives. A sinking spinning thing, taking them all somewhere fast, that only they knew how to ride.

Now here he was, throwing his life away for the delusions of the mentally ill.

“Gradie?” his sister’s voice crackled through the air. He stepped back and Michael put a hand up. Philip waved with a smile.

“Bye-bye, kid.”

“Shut up,” Lindsey snapped.

“He’s outta here,” said Philip.

Gradie took another step back. He had to do something, or these people would bury him out in the woodland. Probably cut him up in the bathtub. Like they had done with whoever was living or squatting here before them.

He looked down at his phone, and froze. A memory floated up through the panic, of another phone call hours ago, and watching his car burn to ash and sludge. A voice screamed, but another whispered.

Hardworlder.

He threw the phone at the pool and it skipped once before dropping below the glittery surface, becoming a warped parallelogram-shaped shadow sliding towards the bottom.

He collapsed into the chair and looked back at the team. Everyone but Michael looked confused.

“Good job Gradie. You just avoided dropping out.”

“I thought y’all were meth heads I met at a party.”

“Oh yeah, that was a good one,” said Philip with a smile.

“You remember it?” Gradie asked, spilling his drink.

“Yeah, now that you pushed it.”

“Wait, I pushed memory?”

“Your self did,” Michael corrected. “Your mind will try and reconcile your memories with your past, if you let it. It rationalized our conversation as drug-induced ravings. Sometimes it's acting, or role-playing. Remember, the self wants to stay in the Hardworld, and to dissolve the spirit into itself.”

Gradie had thought of his selfs as mannequins or costumes he slipped into. Michael speaking about them as if they were alive sent a chill crawling up his neck.

“Normally, on a job, the rest of the team will have already pushed enough memory that it will be impossible for your selfs to have ever met, to avoid being tracked. But this time I wanted to leave you out in the tide. See how you did.” Michael’s smile was the best congratulations Gradie had ever gotten.

“How did you get out of it?” EP asked.

“Uh, I just remembered how it felt before. How certain I was it was real, I guess.” Gradie flushed and reached for the bottle.

“Good job bud.” Luke patted him on the back and headed towards the outdoor kitchen.

“Where’s the greenery, Philip?” said Sam as she walked up to the counter.

“There’s mint in the fridge if you want a mojito or something.”

“With the steaks, idiot! It’s your turn! You have to make sides too!”

“There’s potato salad right there!”

“Oh my God!” She slid open the back door.

“What, are you worried about your health?”

“It’s for my soul, Philip!” She yelled from the kitchen.

Gradie sliced into his perfectly medium-rare steak and looked back out at the flashing skyscrapers on the horizon, weaker forms of the crystal towers and suspended water pillars floating above another world. He watched himself gun down targets in a thousand different lives while another voice, rambling about family and jail time, died in the background. He took a bite of the steak, and his Spirit savored the flavor.