"Hang on a second," I said to Rosa. "Something didn't quite add up here. How come you haven't already been speaking to Juana?"

Rosa colored and looked down at the table. "I felt ashamed because she's there in trouble and I'm here safe."

That could make sense, but I felt a rush of suspicion. Rosa was close to her sister and her mother. She was in a good position to overhear many of our team's strategy meetings. She'd always played her cards close to her vest, the perfect candidate for a mole.

If Waters was to be believed, someone inside our organization had been filling him in on the details of our plans for months now. I didn't like to think this way, to be suspicious of everyone who had worked and fought beside me. Waters was probably lying. It was the sort of thing an asshole like him would do, just the same as I had lied back and told him we were working for one of the alien organizations. He wanted to keep me off balance, to make me doubt my allies, but I still couldn't quite shake my worries.

"How's this work?”

“You tell me what you want to ask Juana, I ask her, I'll tell you what she says back," Rosa said simply. "It costs Juana a couple of soul coin per message."

"How come?"

Rosa shrugged. "It's just how it reads. Says she has to tip her server, which is me, I guess.”

“How about I ask you to speak to my grandpa instead? You've served him plenty of times, and he's right there in the thick of it."

Rosa blushed. "So, that tip thing? It is a hundred times as much for men, and when I try to target your grandpa with it, the system tells me that there's an additional surcharge on top of that because he's a, and this is the system I'm quoting, 'a dirty old man who should not be trying to pick up a waitress.'"

I couldn't help it. I let out a belly laugh. It felt good to relieve my stress, and my worries about Rosa seemed suddenly foolish. "The system does like to screw with us, doesn't it?"

“It does.” Rosa shook her head. "Anyway, I could talk to him, but it sounds like the soul coin cost comes out of our personal funds, not the guild's."

I did some quick math of my own and checked my own balance. I hadn't bothered in weeks. There wasn't anything I needed to buy. The guild provided me with my ammunition and food. Most of what we technically earned went to Veda, and I dumped the rest of it back into guild coffers every few weeks. Juana had an accountancy program running to keep track of who had donated what. My funds were pretty low, about 2,500 soul coin. If Grandpa had a similar amount, that wouldn't get us very far, not with the kind of costs Rosa was talking about.

"All right, Juana it is," I said cheerfully, and began to compose my message. "Tell her…" I paused, feeling awkward again. I wanted to speak to Juana myself, to make sure she was doing all right, and to reassure her that I was doing everything I could to get her out. But right now that didn't feel like much, and I was going to have to relay it through her sister. Not an ideal way to communicate. "Tell her we're working hard to figure out a plan here, but we need some inside information. What does she know about how Waters shut the guild down? Oh, and you might explain to her how it is you're communicating so she doesn't waste money asking about that."

“Right.” Rosa's eyes crossed. She had a look of intense concentration on her face for a moment, then she relaxed. "Well, that was me sending the message. You better give it a second to let Juana respond."

I waited, drumming my fingers on the table. Time ticked by. It had to have been five minutes already. I glanced at the clock and found it had been not even two. I swore under my breath. Then Rosa held up a hand.

"She answered. She says, 'Tell Shad we've been waiting for him to burst in with some high-risk, high-reward plan for the last couple of hours, and that I'm disappointed to have won my bet with his grandpa that he'd come up with a more sensible scheme. There's 18 of Waters' gang here, but they have access to their abilities and we don't. None of us know why. When Waters was letting me speak to you, he put me in a corner and draped a silver cape around me. That let me access my chat and other abilities, but they had weapons on me, so I couldn't do much. I don't have an advanced Inspect. All the cloak told me was it was a Mantle of Friendship. As soon as he took it off, my chat was gone.'"

"Okay," I said. I turned to my other chats and pulled up Veda's. What does a mantle of friendship do?

A minute later she replied, Never heard of it. Running a search now.

I turned back to Rosa. "Okay. That's useful information. Is there's anything else they have to tell us that's interesting?”

After a moment, Rosa said, “Juana says they've been able to have a few conversations quietly where Waters' people haven't heard. Your grandpa's fine. He says his wrist is only sprained, not broken. Arjun kept bringing up something that didn't make sense to him. He said that he thought he understood how they'd done it, but not what they'd done. Then he mentioned that we'd had 16 peripheral members leave the guild over the last couple of days. He’d looked into it, and they'd all gone to the wrong outpost. She says, ‘Sorry, I don’t know what he means, it’s hard to have in-depth conversations right now’.” Rosa looked up. "Any of that make sense to you?"

It did not, and that frustrated me. I frowned. "I need help looking at our guild records and making sense of them. Do you know anyone with skills that’ll help out?”

Rosa shook her head. "Everyone I know like that was inside the instance already."

“Yeah, damn, same.” I tried to keep calm as I sent Frank a quick note asking him the same question.

Veda had replied back to our thread. Mantle of Friendship. It's a very rare pattern. Something one of Proxima's subordinate companies has made on a couple of exploits. It allows one organization, guild, company, whatever, to offer temporary membership to miners affiliated with other companies. So say you're a member of Sicaris, but you'd really like to get the benefits of Alabaster Sky for a few hours. You can get them to issue you a Mantle of Friendship, and the system will treat you like you're part of Alabaster Sky.

Why bother with that and not just join up as Alabaster Sky? I asked.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Politics, maybe? Someone who's got a strong reason to belong to their organization. I could see having done that, if I'd had an alliance with another outfit back when I still cared about my family's interests, I might have seen a benefit to keeping my own identity and just faking theirs.

Okay. Thanks.

Rosa looked up at me expectantly. "Anything else, Shad?"

"Not yet." Frank still hadn't gotten back to me. I got up and started pacing.

“The cloak that Waters put on Juana would have let him pretend she was a member of his organization while she was wearing it. The Free Human League. That says to me, whatever they did, targets Misfits Guild while exempting their own people.”

Rosa shook her head. “I guess. This is all out of my wheelhouse.”

I paced and sent a quick message to Warren Black. You and Linsey still outside the camp?

Yeah. There's a no-go zone about 20 feet across. Couple of Waters’ men patrolling your walls with cannons aimed down, warning nobody to cross.

You're still a member of his coalition, aren't you? Free Humans? Can't you get in?

The outer turrets are programmed to attack anyone, apparently. I've been tempted to try to trick one of the guards up there coming down just to test if it attacks them.”

That was an amusing image. If you do that, let me know. Is there any way you or Linsey could get inside the walls?

I don't see how. Why?

I need to know if whatever Waters is using to lock my people down affects other members of the Free Human League.

Black replied, Well, I'd be game if I could figure out a way past the turrets.

I paced some more. Why would Waters be trying to keep out the rest of his coalition?

Because he didn't trust them. He'd lost the confidence of people like Black. Maybe even most of his coalition. If they found out the scheme he was running, they’d never back him. He needed minions, but the more he had, the more likely someone would sell him out.

I sent Veda another message. Are there other ways to be members of two different groups at once? Like, say, if I had a coalition and I didn't trust most of them, so I wanted to make a secret inner guild of just my cronies, but I still wanted to look like I was a member of the outer coalition?

Oh, sure, Veda said at once. You're talking about a wholly owned corporate subsidiary. It takes a little bit of legal paperwork, but we use that sort of thing all the time.

So, suppose Waters and his toadies are in a secret inner guild, and they've programmed our outpost's defenses to attack anyone who's not part of their secret inner guild, even members of the Free Human League. What would that get them? No, wait. How would they actually have co-opted our defenses in the first place?

That would be difficult to do without conquering your outpost, Veda said. And they certainly haven't done that. It takes 24 hours. He would have noticed.

I hoped we would have noticed. I was missing something here. Veda, have you got access to our coalition's membership logs?

No, I'm a sponsor of Misfits Guild, but not a member or an officer.

Well, how do I get you that information? I asked.

Since you're the only guild officer currently online with the system, you have the ability to appoint backup coalition leaders, even people who are not members of your coalition, in a protectorate status.

Well, tell me exactly what to do. I want you to be able to look at our records and run some numbers for me.

Veda walked me through it. A moment later, she said, All right, I've got the records. What is it you want?

Arjun said something about people leaving but going to the wrong outpost. I want to know what that means.

Sure, I'll let you know when I've got it, Veda said.

"Juana sent me another message," Rosa said. "She says, 'I'm getting antsy. What's Shad up to? If he's about to try something stupid, let us know to keep our heads down.' And then she added a little winky face.”

The winky face did make me feel a little bit better. "Tell her we're working on a plan and that I've got everyone on this end in on it. I'm not just going to charge in there and blow things up until I know that'll fix our problems, which it won't right now. Tell her..."

I paused because I wasn't sure how to say the rest of it. There was no way I was going to have Juana's sister relaying anything personal between us.

Rosa grinned at me. "Got it. I'll send her that. And ‘P.S. Juana, your boyfriend looks like someone left him out in the sun too long. I think he's trying to be sensitive and affectionate, but has no idea how.’”

"Don't send that."

"Too late." Rosa stood up from the table. She gathered up my abandoned meal plate. "Look, you don't have to be here to send messages through me. Let me know if you need me to ask anything else. And you go punch faces or whatever it is you do."

"I kind of wish I knew what it is I do,” I said. But I understood when I was being kicked out.

I was two blocks down the street when Veda got back to me. I figured out what Arjun was talking about. Over the last week, Misfits Guild has gained and lost multiple players. That's normal, especially with all of the people coming on. Right after Juana implemented the lockdown on Team Tunnel Rat so no one else could join, you lost 16 players in a matter of hours. You know what happens when someone is inside another guild's outpost without permission?

The turrets fire on them.

If you're in outpost attack mode, yes. You were in outpost immune mode. So you just had the screen up. Intruders would be given a brief message telling them they were on another coalition's territory without permission. And then, if they did not remove themselves, be removed back to their own guild's outpost or to neutral ground if they were part of no guild.

Something wasn’t adding up here. I frowned, but Veda continued.

But these players weren't taken to neutral ground. They were teleported to an outpost, a specific outpost, the same for each of them. It belongs to a coalition registered with Proxima called Gloomwing Damnation.

That's pretentious and stupid, I replied.

Yes, well, it looks like it was originally an orc coalition that was bought out by Proxima earlier in Phase 3. The original founders all left. It’s headed by a group of Proxima's officials, and its membership roster is sealed. But we know these 16 were members because that's where they went.

Wait a minute, I said, frowning. They were members of Misfits Guild.

They were, until two seconds before they were teleported away. In that two seconds, they left your guild, joined this other one, and I have no doubt did something specific. I don't know what that was, but I'm betting you it's the key to what Waters is up to.

I felt a grin spread across my face as I curled my right hand into a fist. We don't know the membership roster of this guild?

No.

But you know the name of the 16 turncoats?

Yes.

Find them.

I am turning that information over to Colonel Ames. He may be able to locate them faster than I can.

Right. I'll be here waiting.

I didn't like waiting, so instead I messaged Sage. Did you find our Grignarian friends?

Yes. We're hanging out in that one level with the armadillos. The Grignarians have a farming base here. They really like scaring the armadillos into balls and then throwing the balls at enemies while enhancing them with various elemental powers. It doesn't hurt the armadillos, and I have to admit, it's kind of hilarious. I'm trying to teach them how to play baseball.

I snorted. Tell them that I have a feeling we're going to need an intimidation squad here in a minute, especially if they have any kind of devices that can inflict a whole lot of pain without killing anyone.

I could have spoken directly to the Grignarians, but since Sage was there, it seemed like a good chance to build up our communications channels and to let Sage feel like she was really part of this. You just tell us where to be, and I'll bring the face melting, Sage promised. Maybe they'll let me have one of those cool goo guns. I've been wanting to try it out ever since I saw what it did to you.

Don't remind me, I said.

A moment later, Ames got back to me. I've located three of them. He gave me names and locations.

I looked them over and selected one, then sent the information to Sage. Get your party favors. It's time to drop in uninvited.