Book Five, Chapter 49: The Crooked Hallway
As we walked back to the loft with our bounty of 1970s general store groceries, I still felt nervous about bringing newcomers to our base.
It was just an inherently risky thing to do.
We had dotted our I's and crossed our T's, but at the end of the day, all we could do was stick to the plan. And the plan involved creating a robust stable of players we could use to beat the game at Carousel.
That was the task looming far in the distance, somewhere past my current goal of rescuing Anna and Camden. We would have to attempt to escape Carousel and trigger its throughline.
I took a deep breath to push away the stress, and I could tell the three new players read something into it because, whatever they were talking about, they stopped. Isaac was practicing navigating with his scouting trope. He didn't seem to notice anything that wasn't an Omen.
"So, what's next?" Andrew asked after a beat. "What's the current mission?"
"There's a whole list," I said.
A long list that grew every time I thought about it.
As I walked down the road, my arms loaded with groceries packed into paper bags, a hole formed in one of the bags, and a glass bottle of ketchup popped out. I stopped and grabbed the bottle. It hadn’t broken, and though the bag now had a hole in it, it still seemed secure enough to contain everything else.