“Oh look, Owen Walsh making friends again.” It was a woman’s voice. Familiar.

“Mandy?”

“Yeah, like the song. How are you holding up here?” She didn’t sound winded from climbing the stairs.

“Eh. Hungry, thirsty. Bored.”

“Hold out your hand.”

The smooth, cool ridged plastic of a water bottle brushed my fingertips. I grabbed it and drained it in seconds. “Thank you,” I said when I could breathe again.

The cage vibrated as she grabbed the bars. “I wasn’t expecting an artifact from the Iron Conclave,” she muttered. “Those people can build. Watch your fingers.”

She strained: not a big yell, or even a groan. But I could tell she was trying to rip the door from the silver cage. “Hup,” she said at one point, trying again. No response from the cage. Not even a groan of bending metal, much less a clang of breaking bars.

“Don’t…ah…don’t get hurt,” I said lamely.

“This is the strongest me I can make. Okay, it needs to rest up. Talk to me, what did you find out?”

“Sean is his kid.”

“Ohhhhh.” She sighed. “That’s interesting. That’s starting to make some sense. His dumb kid, and he’s…what? Punishing his kid by forcing him to be here?”

“Training him, I think. They argued but Sean was definitely not the boss. He said he wants Sean to be a leader.”

I heard her hands rubbing together in the dark. “What’s your take on that?”

“It really doesn’t hold up. He’s not helping Sean in any way I can see. What’s his big plan, does he even have one?”

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me that. You’re observant, and people don’t try to kill you or run screaming when they see you like when I visit. Do you remember me at all?”

“No. I’d remember an avenging superpowered shortstack.”

I heard the smile. “That’s me. I was the first one to get in his face about all this. He made me take what he called the Big Dive.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The Big Dive.

“This world…are you cool if I say the word ‘Magic’? Things get magical here. I took the dive, and then I … something happened. This isn’t my body, it looks just like it though. My actual body is far away, and these are animated remote Mandies I make. With magic.”

“Mandies. Like…drones.”

“Yep. I’m sort of a water monster, I guess. This world wants people to do certain things, that’s my theory anyway. It picked me for…do you know what an Undine is?”

“No.” I couldn’t help myself. “Are you in pain? Do you hurt? What happened to you? I mean…not that…” I trailed off. This girl didn’t need sympathy from a doofus in a cage.

“Well, it’s me, an Undine. Harrigan is something else. He’s the first of us, the first human here. He brings in one person at a time.”

“Why? How?” I was getting mad. Mandy had been hurt by Harrigan, seriously hurt. All the idiot manliness hormones in my system were raging for vengeance.

“Why I don’t know. But how? He’s got magic, like me, but he’s not a water-controlling sort of…mini kaiju. His thing, okay, ready? It’s gonna get rough.”

“Rougher than this?”

“Good point. He can make people from nothing, from out of the empty air. I’ve seen him do it. But he has to start with an existing recipe, he can’t just whip someone up. That’s the point of his Isekai phone thing. It…records a recipe. It allows him to make a copy.”

I suddenly wanted her to hold my hand. Without my asking, her short fingers found mine and I wrapped both my mitts around hers. She was cold but it felt good.

“How did you find this out?”

“He went on a kind of supervillain rant about it. He made himself sound like the good guy, of course. Who doesn’t? And I saw him bring Cassie in. Bones and meat and skin and hair, all laid on, layer after layer. It was pretty gross, frankly.”

Cassie. She was the yoga instructor that Armand was into. “Does he…the girls…does he…”

“I wouldn’t put it past him. I brought something you need to see. So to speak.”

Something hard tapped at the bars. I felt for it. It was smooth, a long cylinder with knobs at either end. Organic. “A bone.” Maybe two feet long, a little less, about an inch thick. I tapped it against the bars, tink tink. “A human bone? A femur?” I remembered Mom’s medical books. “A femur.”

“Down there are tons of human bones. Piles of them. And a few water bottles, I guess.”

“Definitely human?”

“Oh yeah.” Steel was in her voice.

Jeff Harrigan had the power to make people appear. Out of nothing. With magic. A nasty, nasty thought hit me. It wouldn’t go away. “You say he recorded recipes for people with the Isekai App.”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure. He bragged about it.”

“And a recipe is just a list of instructions. You can use it as many times as you like.”

“Yes. Yes, Owen.”

“Whose leg bone is this?” But I knew. “How many times has this happened? How many times has Harrigan made us in this place?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“This is from me. My leg.”

“Yeah.”