Once we were about half a kilometer away from the slot canyon, I halted. The kids gathered around me, all chattering excitedly. I held up a hand.

"All right, hang on, one at a time."

Sage stepped forward. She looked me over, eyes narrowing. "Who are you? I’ve never seen you before, but you're a member of our guild. You don't look much older than us, but you've got a class. I thought they weren't letting underage kids pick a class."

"My name's Colin Trevelyan,” I said. "I just arrived. Your brother recruited me, actually."

Sage's eyes went wide. "Oh! You're one of Shad's special projects. Where are the rest of you? Are you here with Shad?" She looked around as if expecting me to produce her brother from my back pocket at any moment.

"No, long story. Your brother's here somewhere. I came after him. His team entered three days ago. There's been no communication since. Half of them got killed and respawned outside, but they have no idea what's going on."

Sage nodded. “I was guessing we were in one of the fragment levels.”

Good, so she knew what was going on and had a quick head on her shoulders. I looked the group over. Sage seemed to be the youngest of them, probably about 13. Her hair was back in two long braids. The others were closer to my own age. There was an orc boy and the weirdest looking alien I've ever seen. We exchanged a round of introductions.

"How'd you get stuck in that canyon?" I asked.

"We were doing a quest for a raven," the blonde girl, Greta, told me. She smiled at me. "I'm really grateful that you came along when you did. We were awfully stuck and were kind of worried about what'll happen if we die. We didn't come in through the front door, so no telling if Kronos has managed to back us up." Her smile transformed into something fiercer. "We might lose our classes."

I held up a hand. "Wait, hang on. You just told me they weren't letting kids choose a class."

"Apparently the fragment has other ideas," Sage said. "Everybody here got a class and we've been getting skill seeds, too. I already had a class,” she explained. "From the exploit."

"Right, I've heard all about that. What was the quest?"

As if in answer, an enormous raven flapped down from the sky, settling in front of Sage. It croaked. Sage produced a nest from her inventory, in which rested three eggs. The raven croaked and bowed its head in gratitude. A moment later, in a puff of golden sparks, it vanished, taking the nest with it and leaving behind a single long black feather.

"Ah," I said, "this connects with the story your brother found. Excellent."

Sage picked up the feather. It vanished into her inventory. "What are you talking about?”

“Come on," I said. "Let's keep moving. I'll fill you in as we go." I explained what I'd found in the town and how it looked like her brother's team were now held captive in the Lost Spaniard's mine. Sage's expression was hard to read, a mixture of amusement and perhaps worry.

"It's going to drive him nuts when I come to save his rear," she said, but I thought she sounded a bit concerned.

"We'll be careful," I promised her. "Whatever's got your brother, we'll figure it out."

We all shared class information. Greta sounded excited as she read mine. "You really have a ton of versatility here, even with that nerf to weapons. All right, we've all got a good set of base skills, so I think any skill seeds that drop, we need to feed to Colin so he can transform and get more abilities. Your class is most effective when you've got a lot to choose from."

"You're good at analyzing how classes work together?" I asked.

"My new class has that as a focus. I don't know that I'm good at it yet, but I'm going to be," she said, sounding determined.

The orc boy grunted. He gave me the eye as we went. I was getting the impression he didn't like me very much, but I didn't know why. I was impressed with how competent the kids were. Though I supposed most of them were my age, so I shouldn't think of them as kids. Sage was the youngest here, and she had more experience than the rest of us put together.

Sage said, “You think this raven feather and whatever's at the mine are the last of the elements we'll need to summon the fragment?”

"Assuming that the fragment is taking the role of Coyote, which I think is your brother's working guess here." I nodded. "Yeah."

"Then let's get in there, rescue Shad, and get home before Grandpa and Juana get too worried. I'm kind of surprised Grandpa didn't come with you."

"It's politics," I explained. "The new air marshal isn't so sure she wants to risk anyone else. I don't blame her, but I know your Grandpa is aching to be here."

"We'll just have to get back to him in one piece," Sage replied.

We flushed out a couple of creatures as we went along. I somewhat regretted that we hadn't killed all the necromancer's minions during our escape. They probably would have dropped lots of seeds. Even so, my repertoire was growing nicely.

The rolling-sagebrush-covered land rose as we approached the Lost Spaniard's Mine. I kept a sharp eye for enemies and saw nothing but the occasional bird flying overhead. The sun was nearly unbearable. Sage had given me a hat from her inventory. It seemed she had tons of stuff in there, and that helped. We drank as we went. There was just no relief from the beating sun. Sage told me that it hadn't moved for all of the time they'd been in there, which she guessed to be at least a day and a half.

Now and then we found trees that offered some relief. Underneath their spindly branches we took breaks to spare ourselves. The kids were looking pretty peaked. Even Sage barely talked as we went.

At last, we crested a ridge and the land opened up beneath us. We were at the edge of a canyon. It was hundreds of feet deep, but wide enough on the bottom for meadows of waving grass on either side of a snaking silver river. On the far side was a sheer cliff with a talus slope at the base. At the foot of the talus a cluster of ramshackle buildings were clustered inside a stockade.

"Everybody get down!" Sage hissed. I looked. She had dropped to the earth nearby. I followed suit.

"What’s wrong?” Greta asked.

"We're skylined up here, that's what," she said. "If anyone from that camp is watching, they would easily see us." She motioned everyone to creep back down the slope. Then, when they had gone, she beckoned me forward. Together, the two of us crept up the ridge and looked over.

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"So you think this is where my brother is?"

"I'm almost certain of it," I said. I studied the canyon wall above the encampment. There was a series of wooden platforms jutting out of the sheer face of the rock. I could make out opening that I realized were a mine.

Even as we watched, people emerged from the mine. Four prisoners pushed a pair of mine carts, two on each. Two of the prisoners, I thought, must be NPCs. Their ragged trousers and worn shirts hung from their thin bodies. They looked human, probably Native American.

The other two, though, were definitely our people. One wore a gray and white digital camouflage uniform, same as most of Joint Task Force Ganymede. We were too far off for me to make out his insignia, but he had a close-cropped blonde crew cut and he looked young. I guessed he was one of the enlisted men. The other was a woman dressed all in black with long, dangling black hair that fell in her face and an over-the-shoulder oversized book slung over her back.

"That's Hester," Sage said. "She's on Shad's crew. They're here, all right." Standing around, nominally guarding the prisoners, were three orcs, two lizards, and a tall, thin elf, all wearing conquistador armor and carrying long arquebuses. They stood on the wooden platforms, bored looking, as the prisoners dumped the mining cart into a bucket that dangled from ropes. When they were done they returned with the cart into the mine. The dangling bucket stated a jerky motion down a long sloping cable toward the encampment below. It was a skyway. The buckets looked small from here, but I guessed they were big enough to hold multiple people.

"It just looks like they're mining rocks to me," I said.

"That's what ore looks like," Sage said. I could practically hear her rolling her eyes.

“Right, but there's not actually any ore here.”

“There are no orcs here either," she pointed out. “Clearly it's symbolic of something.”

The NPC bad guys forced the prisoners to reverse course and push the mine carts back into the mine.

"Well, at least we know they're there for sure," Sage said.

"I count at least 20 aliens wearing armor in the camp. No telling how many more are in the mine."

“We do know how many prisoners," Sage said. "Twelve NPCs and six of my brother's crew."

"Not necessarily," I corrected. "If that NPC count is incorrect, like if a couple of them got killed or escaped, then there could be more of your brother's crew inside. Your grandfather said that over half had been kicked out of the instance, but I neglected to ask how many of that left."

She sighed. "Yeah, you and my brother are going to get along great. Always forgetting to ask for the details."

"This is my first time, after all.”

The two of us crept back down to the other waiting kids where I detailed what we had seen. "So what's the plan?" Greta asked at once.

"The plan?" The human boy, Brian, asked. He threw out his arms. "Look, this isn't the Goonies or some other stupid movie where a bunch of kids waltz in and thwart the bad guys. This could be a life or death situation. Experts went in there and got themselves captured. What makes you think we're going to do any better?"

"Because we have a different goal," Sage said. "Shad was trying to play the game. Free the prisoners and get whatever the objective was. We're going to go in there, blow shit up, and then get them out." She turned to me. "Right?"

I chewed onto my lip as I thought about this. Something Sage had said was resonating, but I couldn't quite catch hold of it yet. "Just a sec.” I pulled open my spellbook, looking at my abilities. There were a lot more of them now, but I couldn't quite arrange them in a way that made sense to me.

"Sage," Greta said, "I hate to say it, but I think Brian might be right. Look, I know you want to save your brother, and I know I'm as guilty as anyone else of going a little overboard with the classes, but this is a wake-up call. We're not equipped professionals. We're students."

The orc shook his head, growling. "You would flee from a challenge?"

"Yeah," Sage said, seizing on his opening. "There you are. Rok'gar, you're on my side at least."

"Of course," the orc said happily.

She turned. "Amaya, Third Molt?" The two she addressed both hesitated. Then the tentacle alien gave a wriggle of all his tendrils. "I suppose so. Though it will be a shame if I am not able to survive to bring these memories back to my originator. He will be most interested in a look at a fragmented reality engine. If I should be incapacitated, but any portion of my body remains, I ask that you please place it into stasis in your inventory and deliver it to the individual who is my originator, the one formerly known as Greenwarden."

Sage looked taken aback, but nodded. "Okay.”

“Nobody's gonna die," Greta said firmly, "because we're not just going to charge in there without even a plan, are we, Sage?"

"No, of course not. Who do you think I am? Shad?" She sounded defensive. They turned to me.

"Well, Mr. Outside Expert?" Greta asked. She smiled at me. I finally got it through my head that her sideways looks and warm smiles all day had been an attempt to flirt. I wasn't used to that kind of attention from girls my own age. They usually looked at me with pity or disgust, but now that I was standing on my own two feet and sounding like an expert… It certainly boosted my ego.

"Wait a minute," Sage said, crossing her arms and jutting her chin forward. "You're asking him? He's been integrated for like ten minutes. I've been playing around with this reality engine for the last three years."

"Yes, but, Sage," Greta said, "he got brought in as an expert for a reason. We should at least listen to him."

I held up a hand. "Wait, that's it."

They looked at me. "What?"

"That's the problem. Sage, you said that we'd succeed because we weren't going to be doing what your brother did. That is, trying to play by the reality engine's rules. Going down there, setting things on fire, attacking them, that's still playing by the rules. It's a different rule set, yeah, but it's what we're expected to do here. The fragment has got it set up so we come here and we either walk down there and try to take them on or we walk away. Those are our two options. It's like a quest pops up and says, 'Here's what you've got to do,' and we do it or we fail the quest."

"So?" Sage asked.

"So that's not what we should do at all. We need to go outside the rules. We need to break the quest." I grinned and stood up. "We need to cheese it. And I think I have an idea how.” I swapped my abilities around as I spoke. Sage was looking doubtful. As I finished detailing my plan, I took her aside while the rest of her team began their preparations.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I don't know if this will work." But it was more than that. Her eyes slid from me to the rest of her team and back. I waited. Finally, she said, "Look, I don't know who you are. Some whiz kid my brother recruited, but I've been doing this for three years now."

And I had just swooped in and taken over. I nodded, and she went on. “I’m not convinced your plan will work. You're just not used to the rules we have here."

"I get it," I said. "I came in and started bossing around your team.”

“They're not all mine," Sage said quietly. "Rok'gar and a couple of the others were on a different squad. Besides, I was in school. It was pretend. I know the difference."

I held up a hand. "All the same, I came in here and started throwing my weight around and they listened to me. And you're resentful of that. I get it. You're right. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm completely new here.”

She chewed her lip. “I mean, yeah…”

I went on. I needed her on my side if we were going to pull this off. She was right; she was the only one here with any experience at all. “But that gives me perspective. Look, you can't cheese a reality engine. If the reality engine is paying attention, it can change things on the fly. I'm not going to be able to glitch the NPCs into freezing out and dropping a key I need in order to bypass an entire level. I can’t find an unintended code interaction, because the simulation is just too damn good. Those strategies are useless. Your brother didn't bring me here for that. He brought me here because I've got a fresh perspective on things."

"And what's that?" Sage asked.

"You're treating this like it's real. Because it is. I get that. And if we don't keep that in mind, we could get hurt or killed. But I've got to treat it like it's not real. Like the world could work in different ways. I'm not gaming the rules here. I'm gaming the engine itself. You say Kronos is a real being with its own wants and needs and desires. Well, I'm counting on that. And I'm hoping whatever part of Kronos we're dealing with here has a sense of humor and is willing to let us go with things. But this could go badly wrong. I would have preferred to suggest a plan that meant all of you stay here. But I don't think you're going to go for that, are you, Sage?"

"With my brother down there? Hell no. Besides, I keep telling you, I've been doing this for years now."

I had hurt her social standing with this group. Whether or not she was consciously aware of how much that bothered her, I could tell it did. The other kids were all a couple of years older than her, but they had been showing her a lot more respect and deference than sixteen-year-olds usually give thirteen-year-olds. I was threatening that. I didn't want to make Sage my enemy, but I also needed to get this job done. I softened my tone.

“What about it, Sage? Partners?” I held out my hand as I spoke.

Sage smiled. It lit up her whole face, her dark eyes sparkling. “Partners.”