"Grandpa!" I yelled, running down the corridor. As far as I could see, in front and behind, the corridor stretched empty, yawning archways on both sides, like open mouths. "Grandpa, where are you?"

I tried for my chat interface, but it didn't respond. "Where'd he go?"

There was no sign of Ames either. I cursed at him in my head. He hadn't told us what the hell we were supposed to be doing here, and now Sage was gone, Grandpa was gone, I was stuck in an entire level full of brainwashed zealots who seemed to regard the reality engine as some sort of god.

A voice in my head was whispering, Let me in. I can speak with you. "Not a chance in hell," I thought back furiously. "If you want to help, show me where Grandpa is."

The voice didn't answer right away. After a minute, though, I felt a shift of pressure, like an outlet of breath. Very well. Come.

Up ahead, a beacon of purple light bloomed from a doorway, jetting out into the hallway. I skidded to a halt in front of the arch. It looked just like any of the others. In here. The light died away, leaving a black entryway.

I plunged through the door. The room beyond was a grotto. The walls were smooth, worked and shaped. Along the walls were shelf niches, stacked three high like long, narrow benches.

A pit of worry grew in my stomach. There was something familiar about these. I had seen pictures that reminded me of this, pictures with bones. This was a catacomb.

In horror, I looked into the closest niche. A woman lay there, her hands folded across her breast, her eyes closed. If she was breathing, I could see no sign of it. I touched one hand with a single trembling finger. It was warm to the touch, but she didn't respond. I thought I could feel a faint pulse.

Dry-mouthed, I looked at the next niche. This one was a man in his fifties, about the oldest I had seen here in the Reality Engine.

"Where's my Grandpa?" I said aloud. No answer.

I went niche by niche until I found him halfway around the room, in the bottom row. Like the others, his eyes were closed, his hands folded. His face looked worn and drawn, like he'd been a few months ago before all this started, while the cancer was eating away at him.

I fell to my knees beside him. "Grandpa," I pleaded. I wanted to shake him awake, but was afraid what would happen if he didn't respond. "Grandpa, wake up! I'm here!"

"He can't hear you. I'm sorry." I turned. There was a person here, shimmering, wearing white robes, with a hood pulled up around their face.

"It's you," I said. "Isn't it? The Reality Engine. We spoke before."

"You spoke to part of me," it said. I noticed it didn't use the "I, we" construction that the other being had employed. “I am a different part. The Watcher. Cronos, your people call me. My job was to watch and wait for our children to return. I slept too deeply, and when I awoke I was in chains.” The figure held up its hands. Shining golden chains shimmered and shifted around its wrists, winding and curling like snakes.

"Why did you take him?" I demanded.

Cronos looked pained. His, her, whatever, face fell. “I am trying to understand you, our lost children. Some of you hear me easily. Others not at all. The ones who come here are seeking peace. But not all find peace in the same way. You spoke to my acolytes earlier, those who are trying to learn to understand me, so that they can help me rescue the rest of your species.” He gestured at the sleepers. “For these, it has become too much. They seek a different kind of peace. Oblivion.”

"Bullshit," I said. "Grandpa's not looking for oblivion."

"Is he not?" Cronos asked. "He puts on a brave face for you and your sister, but he is old and tired. He has many cares. Perhaps he seeks to set them aside, if only for a few moments."

"Then you can let him wake up now."

"He must choose it.”

"Grandpa, it's time to go. We need to get Sage.”

"He can't hear you."

Anger boiled up in me. Helpless rage about this entire situation from top to bottom. Anger at the aliens, the system, this reality engine, whatever it was. I'm at being not in control of my own future and fate.

"Then you let me talk to him," I said.

"I can bring your mind to his," Cronos said. "Only he can decide whether to heed you."

"Do it," I ordered.

"You might want to lie down."

I slid to a seated position, resting my back against the stone wall. There was no way I was going to climb into one of those coffin bunks. I leaned my head back.

"Do it," I said again, and the room around me dimmed.

***

I was standing in the living room of Grandpa's trailer. It looked different than it had the last few times I'd seen the place. Cleaner, more organized. There was a smell of baking beans in the kitchen.

In front of me were a pair of people I recognized right away. One of them was Grandpa. He looked about how he did now, in his mid-50s with his dark hair in two braids falling behind his shoulder. But his face was twisted with hatred and fury like I'd never seen it before.

The other, a dark-haired young woman just as angry as Grandpa but somehow less bitter looking about it. I knew her too, though I hadn't seen her in almost 10 years and the last time I had her hair had been prematurely graying, her teeth half falling out, her eyes vacant, her skin pallid.

My mother, and from the look of it, younger than I was now.

She was screaming at my grandfather, “What don't you understand? I love Clay!”

“I will not allow you to hook up with that useless son of a polygamist cult,” Grandpa spat back. “He's only interested in you because his father and uncles have already locked up every pretty young white girl in their plural marriage schemes. He's young and horny and wants to screw anything that moves. He doesn't care about you.”

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"Don't you dare speak about Clay that way," she snapped. “His mother kicked him out of the house for dating me. Says I'm a dirty half-breed as well as a Gentile.”

"There you go," Grandpa said. "Nobody wants this. You're going to college next month and that's it. I won't have my daughter wasting her life here on the Strip with some inbred no-good redneck punk who dropped out of high school. Besides, Sheriff Watts tells me he’s involved with a car theft gang. He's gonna come to a bad end.”

"Clay knows his friends are no good and he wants out,” my future mother protested. "He's a good boy. He just doesn't have any opportunities. You could help him, Dad. He wants to enlist. Give him a few tips. I know he can make something of himself."

"Then let him do that. But away from here," Grandpa snapped. "I'd be happy to give him a few tips, but not while he's trying to date my daughter."

"More than date.” My mother raised her chin. "We're getting married, Dad." She looked so terribly young…

"The hell you are," he roared back. "Not without my permission."

"We don't need your permission. I turned 18 last week. Besides," she crossed her arms in front of her chest, looking angry, defiant, and scared. "There's something you don't know."

I felt my breath catch. I tried to move, but I couldn't. I wasn't really there. I was paralyzed, forced to watch this play out.

"I've heard everything I need to know already,” Grandpa snapped.

"No, you haven't," my mother shot back. "I'm pregnant, Dad. I'm pregnant, and I'm going to marry Clay, whether you like it or not. You can be part of our lives, or you can stay here and rot."

Grandpa stared at her, his mouth hanging open. He shook his head. "No. No, you can't." He took a step toward her, holding his hands out. "No, honey. That's not what you're going to do. You're supposed to go to college next month. Make something of yourself. Get out of here. See the world.”

“Fat lot of good seeing the world ever did you," she fired back angrily. "You're just another washed-up drunk Indian. I'm not going to college next month. Maybe it'll take me a few years, but Clay and I will make something of our lives. You wait and see."

Grandpa was shaking his head. "No. No, sweetheart. It's not too late. We can fix this. We'll make a few calls. There's a clinic over in St. George I can take you to. Get you away from here. Let that boy go off and do what he wants. You'll come to your senses. He'll come to his. You'll see the two of you are nothing alike. You've got a future ahead of you, a bright one. You don't want to be tied to that no account."

"I knew you wouldn't understand," she said. She turned, marched to the door, yanking it open in anger and slamming it behind her. My grandfather stared after her for a long moment before turning and roaring at someone I couldn't see.

"Maria, our daughter is dead to us. Do you hear me? She's dead! She's not to be spoken of in this house ever again."

***

The scene around me dissolved and I was left in darkness for a moment before a light shone on the couch from the trailer. Nothing else, none of the furnishings, just the couch and my grandfather sitting, his hands buried, his head buried in his hands.

I could move now. I crossed and sat next to him. "Is that really what happened?" I asked after a moment.

Grandpa grunted. "More or less.”

“I didn't know.”

“I didn't tell you. I was ashamed. It's my fault, you know. If I'd been supportive, maybe your dad could have gotten himself out of there and enlisted, made a future for himself. Instead he kept hanging with his old friends until he got caught with a hot car and a couple pounds of marijuana in the back seat. She moved down near Phoenix to be near him so she could visit, take you to see him after you were born.”

He cleared his throat, staring at the floor, while I just sat there, not knowing what to say.

“I was too proud to talk to her, too angry, too sure I'd been right all along and she should have listened to me.”

I wanted to say something, anything, but I was in shock. I knew my Grandpa hadn't cared for my dad but I wasn't aware of just how prejudiced he'd been. It was a side of Grandpa I'd never seen before. "You meant all that about him being, you know, inbred and all that?"

“I didn't approve of him dating my daughter. He could have been descended from the King of Spain and I still wouldn't have approved,” Grandpa said. “But I didn't like his family. Those FLDS are bad news.”

"Yeah, but that's who I am," I said, trying to get to the bottom of how I felt. "I mean, it's my dad you're talking about."

"I know," Grandpa sighed heavily. "I know, and sitting here now, looking back from where I am, it all feels so stupid. I guess this whole experience has given me a new perspective on a few things because right now, compared to the orcs and wizard people, those weird tentacle face aliens, people like your other relatives are downright normal. I'm sorry, Shad. I tried. Everything I tried with you and Sage was to make up for failing when your mom needed me.”

There was a lot here for me to unwrap and I didn't feel like going into it right now.

I had a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach, seeing Grandpa at his worst like that. Knowing that he'd been talking about me there to my mom. Seeing me as an inconvenience to her future.

And that he hadn't been wrong.

“I’ve regretted this every day since,” Grandpa said quietly, not looking at me. “I’ve wished I could go back and fix things. But even if I did go back, I wouldn't know how. That's why I got so upset when you started running with the Hiasson boys. And that time Frank dragged you back after you wrecked Mr. Johnson's side by side.”

I shuddered at that memory. "I don't think I'd ever seen you that angry," I said.

"I was afraid you were going to be your dad all over again," Grandpa admitted. "So when you started talking about going into the Army, I might have pushed you a little too hard. I just needed you to get out of there, get off the Strip, find a bigger world."

“And now we have,” I said, gesturing around at the blackness outside of the couch where we both sat.

"Yeah. Funny how life works out."

We sat there for a long moment. "Why'd you come in here?" I asked at last.

"I..." he sighed. “It's like there was a voice telling me that everything would be all right. That I could come and rest and forget.”

"I don't understand what this reality engine is doing," I said. "It's trying to keep people safe, but then it's trapping them in their worst memories. And it's got some of them acting like cultists while telling me it needs me to help fight the aliens."

“I get the feeling it's trying to understand us," Grandpa said.

"But why?" I stood up, throwing my hands up and pacing around the border of the small lighted area. "Do all reality engines act like this? Veda hasn't said anything about all this. Are they all insane? Is that why they have to bring in their own external system and impose it on top?"

"Coming here was a mistake," Grandpa said firmly. He stood up. "I'm ready to leave," he announced, and the darkness disappeared, and we were back in the catacomb.

I scrambled up and gave Grandpa a hand off the shelf. He looked back at it with an expression, something like regret. “Now I remember why I came in here. Inside, it was like it dulled all of the pain. All I felt was numbness. It didn't hurt so much to think about those things.”

"And you're not going to think about them now," I said firmly. “We get out of here, we get Sage, we go back to what passes for normal here. We go find something we can shoot in the face, because that, I understand.”

I led Grandpa back through the door. We almost slammed into Ames, who was standing right outside, with his fist up as though he had been pounding on the empty space of the doorway. "Where the hell have you been?” he said. "Williams, I went back and you weren’t there. Followed you here but Cronos wouldn’t let me in.” He turned to Grandpa. "Major, glad to see he found you again."

“You’re working for it, aren’t you. The reality engine. Cronos, or whoever the hell he is,” Grandpa said.

“I am,” Ames admitted. "Some of the first Lotus Eaters reached out to me a few months back. They needed my help to recruit people who could get farther in. There's different pieces of this reality engine. They can't talk to each other. The alien system is interfering. If they were able to speak to each other, they might be able to accomplish something."

"Kick out the foreigners?" Grandpa asked sharply. “Take it back for ourselves?”

"I don't know about that," Ames said. "But they promise it would be better for us humans."

"Can you believe any of this?” Grandpa asked. "You've got Jonestown in there, and a couple of million sleepers who are experiencing the worst moments of their lives over and over again, and you haven't actually asked the reality engine what the hell it wants?”

I shook my head. “I want the plan. Details. Explanations. Goals. Not just this, 'Oh, we need people to fight and earn soul coins' nonsense. You said we needed to make it to Phase Three. I'm starting to see reasons why myself. But what is this is going to do for us humans, and why should I bother?"

"Good question," Ames said. "And it's one that deserves a full answer. Why don't we go upstairs, and I'll explain to everyone. Cards on the table. You can decide where to go from there.”