Dungeon Exploiter

We tried everything to keep Jane out of it. I want the record to show what everything was.

Joe found a doctor willing to write her unfit for field work. She wouldn’t file it. Falsified medicals are how they fired her friend in compliance. Rob offered to delete the assignment from the routing system entirely, using methods. She asked if the methods would survive an audit. Rob went quiet. That settled that.

I walked into the routing office and volunteered to take her place. The clerk pulled up the order and shook his head. Assignee: locked. No substitutions. Somebody had checked the box that exists for exactly one reason. The reason is me.

“If I don’t go, they route the next name in the queue,” Jane said at dinner, the night before. “There’s a kid two slots down. Certified for a month. So I go.” She looked around the table. At all of us. “Besides. I’ve read your files. I know what you do on Saturdays.”

What we do on Saturdays, as of that one, is walk down a corridor of doors to the very last door. Door ONE. No stencil. No label. Just a small painted sun, gone gold with age, at a child’s eye height.

The calendar entry had said it plainly. Others admitted at own risk. The door was always open.

Bev met us at the corridor with a thermos and her navy cap on.

“Twenty-three years indoors,” she said. “You’re not leaving me up here.”

Tim’s mom dropped him off herself. She has never done that. She looked at me through the window, the way she looked on the day of the tupperware.

“Nine o’clock,” she said. “Especially tonight.”

“Every time,” I said. She nodded once. Treaty renewed. Tim took the soup.

* * *

The level behind Door One was a meadow, and it was morning there.

I’ll say this carefully, because it’s going to sound like a children’s book. It is one. It can also kill you.

Green hills under a sky with one cloud in it. A path of honest yellow dirt. Flowers the size of dinner plates that turned to watch us — not hungry, just interested, the way sunflowers do it.

A gingerbread cottage on the first rise, smoke curling from a licorice chimney. And far off, at the center of everything, a white spire that the whole meadow leaned toward, the way a room leans toward a fireplace.

The quiet layer had never been quieter.

INSTANCE 001 — unnamed.

Build: v0.1.

Rules: posted. Read them.

Everything here is exactly what it looks like. That was the design.

The rules stood on a wooden sign at the meadow’s edge, burned into the plank in the patient handwriting.

THE RULES

1. Tolls are paid in true things.

2. Do not lie in the meadow. It can hear you.

3. Do not clap.

4. Guests may leave whenever they wish. Guests rarely wish.

5. Be kind to the unicorns. They have had a hard time.

Bev read the sign twice, top to bottom, and put her hands on her hips.

“Finally,” she said. “Honest signage.”

“Do not clap,” Rob read. “Why would we — what happens if you clap?”

The path answered him. A cluster of lights drifted up over the rise like dandelion seeds, each trailing a sound like a music box winding down. Fairies. The real article. Where they passed, the big flowers folded themselves shut, politely, the way you close a window before weather.

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FAIRY (swarm)

Volatile. Applause-triggered.

Yield: 0.3 kilotons of wonder, detonated.

Rule 3 is not a metaphor. Rule 3 is the containment protocol.

“They explode if you clap,” Joe said slowly, watching a dozen drift over us like lanterns. “The most delightful thing in the world, and appreciation sets it off. Who BUILT this?”

“Someone who’d met people,” Liya said.

She’d been quiet since the door. Riding my shoulder with her tail around my neck. But the meadow did something to her I’d never seen. It knew her. The flowers turned for her the way they turned for nothing else. Twice, at forks in the yellow path, she pointed the way before I’d found the signage. The second time, she caught me noticing.

“I’ve been here,” she said. “Before you. Before her, even. Everyone starts here, Jon. This is the first one. This is what they grew all the rest from.”

Jane walked the path doing her actual job. Field verification. The honest kind. Writing down what was true. The meadow liked her for it, I think — rule two cuts both ways, and she hadn’t said one false thing since the door. Most people can’t manage an hour in a place that hears lies. Jane did four.

Where the form wanted a condition rating, she wrote one word: kept.

Like a garden. Like a grave. Kept.

The gingerbread cottage was staffed. Everything is staffed. A mimic ran it — a treasure-chest-shaped grandmother of a thing, assigned, per its tag, HOSPITALITY, sometime before the concept had a department.

It fed us. It and Gobi understood each other totally and immediately, one acquisitive species to another, and they traded — one ketchup chip for a butterscotch that I’m confident predates the apocalypse — with the gravity of ambassadors.

Bev and the mimic got on like a house on fire, by which I mean they compared storage philosophies for forty minutes and both took notes.

And the unicorns kept their distance. White shapes on the far hills, drifting away whenever we crested a rise. All but one. A big one, alone, standing by a dry streambed. It didn’t graze and it didn’t drift. It watched us the whole length of the valley with its head low.

Where its tears fell, the stones smoked.

Acid, the forums say. The acid unicorns of Instance 001. Stay clear of the water, the old reports say.

It wasn’t guarding the stream. It was standing where the stream used to be.

* * *

We reached the spire at four minutes to six.

Up close, the white spire was a wellhouse. The oldest structure I’ve seen in any instance anywhere. Marble gone soft at the edges, like sucked candy. And the well beneath it, dry.

Not broken. Dry. Dry the way the bull’s planter was dry. Dry the way the streambed was dry. Dry the way every fountain below the tile line has been dry since before I ever went down a ladder.

The whole level was still arranged around remembering water.

Jane’s wrist buzzed. Her form had grown one final field, in a font I knew. Small. Courteous. Colorless.

FIELD VERIFICATION — final item.

Q: Is the well dry?

(You are the 41st to be asked. The previous 40 said yes and left. You may answer anything. See rule 2.)

“It’s dry,” Jane said, out loud, to the meadow. And then — because she is who she is, because her whole doomed career has been one long honest addendum nobody reads — she wrote in the margin:

But somebody keeps checking. So it isn’t finished being a well.

The meadow went still. All of it at once. Flowers. Fairies. The far white herds. The smoke over the cottage stood straight up, like held breath.

At six o’clock exactly, the lamps came on.

There were no lamps. Then there were. A line of old iron lights, running from the wellhouse door down a stair inside the well — a stair that had not been there a breath ago — each lamp catching in sequence, down and down, past where light should stop mattering. Up out of the dark came the air I knew from the bottom of the MegaDepot. Slow. Patient. Large.

Every screen we owned cleared to the same two lines.

ASSESSMENT (A7): commenced.

Come down. Bring only what’s yours.

And then Rob’s phone rang.

Not a notification. A ring. His scraper, screaming up through the last bar of signal in the world, one alert, the kind he builds paranoid and never expects to fire.

PERIMETER: Door ONE — breached (again).

Party of six, armed, capture-rated.

Venue restriction SURFACE ONLY: overridden by client.

Rate: tripled. Final notice appended: “Before six-thirty, or never.”

The hunters were in the meadow. Behind us. Between us and the only door home — and the third offer had a clock on it now, and the clock said before six-thirty, and somewhere back across those soft green hills, a man had finally decided that the basement was worth the risk, as long as he didn’t have to come himself.

Behind us, across the whole valley, the yellow path rolled itself up like a ribbon. Unhurried. House lights coming down before the last act.

Tim checked his phone. No bars. No clock. He put it away and squared up like his mother’s son.

“Nine o’clock still applies,” he told the well. “She was very clear.”

Liya stood on my shoulder. She weighed nothing. Then she weighed something, the way she does when it counts.

“Rule one, all the way down,” she said, to everyone. “Everything you carry past this point had better be true. And everything true you carry, you’d better be ready to pay.”

Bev tightened the strap on her thermos, looked back at the smoke rising off the hills where the hunters were burning their way toward us, and then down the lamplit stair, and did the math out loud, because somebody had to.

“Six of them behind us. One appointment below us.” She put her cap on properly. “I’ve worked worse Saturdays. Count us down, box kid.”

I counted us down. Seven, plus a tiger.

It was the last count I ever got to make where the number came out whole, and I didn’t know it, and I’m glad I didn’t know it, and we went down.