When Neb awoke Anna was gone and the place where she had lain was cold. He looked around in a panic for the artifact and found it where he had left it on the bedside table. Stupid, he told himself. At least put it in your inventory. He still had not fully adapted to the Game. Stupid, he thought again, but for something else this time: Anna. She had snapped her fingers and he had come running. Dammit. But then an image came to him from their night, her perfect face angled slightly upwards, her eyes closed, hair damp with sweat, her arms around him, both of them moving together as though it was the thousandth time and not the first… What did any of it mean? Nothing, like she had said. Just two people in stressful circumstances. Almost certainly a one off. He sighed and went for a shower.

He had slept much later than he intended, and once he had dressed he did not have long left to examine the artifact. No more of the runes were highlighted with the Main Scholar skill, and he assumed it worked only once for any given set of runes. He sat thinking about location and integer numbers, the two concepts that had already been revealed. And it was not just integers, but integers in the context of energy. What did that mean? He examined the artifact as long as he dared, and came up with nothing. He sighed and stood up. It was time to get back in the Game.

He took a last look around the beautiful hotel room with its bright marble and dark wood and golden morning light. ‘Fuck you,’ he murmured, not sure who exactly he meant it for. It was still almost ten minutes to the meeting time, but Neb wanted to be there early. He didn’t want Buzz shouting for him, or to draw any attention to himself whatsoever. He just wanted to remain completely invisible. He opened the room door and stepped out. Mallory, Meathead and Anna were already there.

Mallory was instantly on his feet, arms in the air, half-singing in his deep voice. ‘PLAAYYYAAAAAA!’ he yelled. ‘KABOOM, BABY!’ Then he grabbed Meathead and bent him over the table and dry-humped him while smacking his ass, and Meathead fake-moaned in ecstasy. Anna just watched them tolerantly with her beatific, unshakable smile. Neb felt a red heat spread in a wave from his neck to the top of his head.

But then, somehow, he managed to lift his head and smile back, and when Mallory offered him a high five he smacked the big man’s hand as hard as he could.

‘All right shut the fuck up you animals,’ said Grey sleepily as she came out of her room. ‘What’s all the commotion?’ She looked around at the scene and instantly understood it. ‘Oh,’ she said, and smiled.

Buzz arrived at exactly the right moment for Neb. The commander also read the scene in a glance, but said only: ‘Food, then debrief. Move it.’

For both Meathead and Mallory eating was higher up the priority list even than harassing Neb, so they pushed past him to get the breakfast buffet at the other end of the room, still laughing.

But the mood changed once Buzz started the debrief. Their offensive capabilities had been bad since they arrived, but now they were at crisis levels. A full inventory showed they had about ten percent remaining of the pistol rounds they had brought from Earth. They still didn’t have any rifles, and Meathead’s plasma cannon was completely out of charge.

‘It’s not a fucking good situation,’ Buzz said. He spoke quietly and even looked a little tired, Neb thought. ‘We’re going to get to the military base on the map, even though’ -- he glanced at Neb -- ‘the chances are it’s going to be a clusterfuck. We need to move with stealth, and get there undetected.’

Neb was willing to bet that every military-minded player in the Game would head for the base. There would be a lot of traffic. And moving by stealth? Meathead and Mallory were about as stealthy as two small earthquakes. Neb still felt that the right call was to go to the library. But then, maybe he was just projecting his own desires, trying to make the personal seem strategic.

They left the suite behind with twelve minutes left on the hotel clock, and just over fifty-five hours left on the Game clock. Looking at it was beginning to give Neb a stirring of anxiety. They had to find a way to the gate, and then through the gate, and he suspected that neither of those things was going to be straightforward.

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‘Thank you for staying at the Plaza,’ Milletson said with his handsome smile as they left. ‘I hope we see you again soon.’ Neb thought of the wasp-creature they had seen pushing the luggage cart, and shuddered.

‘Good luck, team,’ Ver said, at the door. ‘I hope we meet again soon.’

Buzz didn’t answer and walked straight through him, causing the avatar to jump out of the way reflexively even though he was non-corporeal. ‘So rude!’ he muttered, and then ducked as Mallory swung an open hand through the space where his head would be.

‘Wish I had a fucking working grenade,’ Mallory said to Meathead, glancing back at the hotel.

Outside, the long dim hall was deserted. It was the moment of maximum dissonance for Neb, when he could see into the luxury of the hotel and the grim darkness of the corridor at the same time. Then the hotel door closed gently, the hotel clock disappeared from their overlays, and a sign appeared on the door: Closed.

‘Here we fucking go,’ Meathead said.

They made their way down the corridor for what felt like a very long time. The sameness of it made it hard to know how far they had gone -- they saw no other doors, and heard nothing. But at last the light started to change, and in the distance they saw a bright square of sky where the tunnel sloped back up to the surface.

‘Anna, Mallory -- recon,’ Buzz said. ‘Quick and quiet.’

The two took off at a run, keeping close to the walls, listening intently. They both had their pistols in their hands, and watching the way Anna moved as though the weapon was an extension of her body was distracting for Neb. He forced himself to control those thoughts.

Mallory and Anna were back after only a few moments. ‘The tunnel exits in the long grass,’ Mallory reported. ‘Could be an army ten meters outside and we wouldn’t know.’

Buzz took this in but didn’t immediately react. Neb could see the commander was worried. The goblin creatures may have figured out by now where the humans had gone, and they’d be looking for revenge. How far had the team traveled under the zoo through the tunnel? There was just no way to know for sure. There could be a lot of grass still to travel through.

Buzz and Anna talked quietly about next steps. No-one else seemed vaguely tired but Neb took the opportunity to slide down the wall to the ground. Anna was fully focused and had not so much as glanced at him strangely all morning. He found himself staring at the wall of the tunnel opposite in an effort to distract himself, wondering how the tunnel had been created. The Main had vast planetary-scale terraforming machines, he knew. The wreckage of several of them had been found, and one was an ‘official’ site where the Main had left an audio recording giving some limited information about the machine itself. The site had come with runes which were understood to mean something like farming and change. But then at another site -- this one discovered and excavated, rather than left out in the open by the Main -- a different symbol seemed to mean change. The whole system of Main symbology was exasperating, though of course it was also endlessly fascinating to people of a certain disposition.

Neb sighed quietly and looked around at the others, and when he looked back at the wall his Main Scholar had triggered.

He closed his eyes and opened them but it was definitely there. ‘What the fuck?’ he muttered. He got to his feet. No-one paid him any attention. Mallory was doing something with his pistol. Gray and Meathead were on duty watching the approach from either direction. Buzz and Anna both looked strained and were still deep in conversation.

Neb went to the wall and examined the spot closely. Sure enough there were three runes there, easy to miss. One of them was highlighted in his overlay, and the explanation read: A symbol that in most contexts means release.

His heart pounded. ‘Release’ as in ‘release an animal’? Activating something with that description could be pretty fucking bad in a zoo environment. He reached out and touched the symbols gently, running his hand over them as if to wipe away any dust. But immediately all three glowed golden in color and there was the sound of machinery activating.

‘Oh fuck,’ Neb said aloud. He had thought the runes were labels, but they were actually control points. He kicked himself for his stupidity. He slapped his hand on the runes several times, but nothing changed. Whatever process he had set in motion continued to happen. He stepped back, almost stumbling.

‘Uh, guys…’ he said.

A crack of light was appearing as a panel started to open, and then a warning klaxon sound started up.

‘OH SHIT!’ Buzz yelled, seeing what was happening. ‘POSITIONS!’ The golden line on the wall was getting wider. ‘Doc! Can you stop this thing from opening? What’s in there?’

‘I can’t stop it,’ Neb said, the words catching in his throat. ‘The symbol was something about release, but I…’

They all backed away from the opening panel, their pistols feeling more inadequate than ever. The line of light drew out a rectangle, and then an entire panel moved out from the wall and slid smoothly and slowly upwards towards the ceiling.