Going public with what we knew about core breaks was one thing. I was all for that. It was probably the right thing to do; the information was buried in the public GC archives, but while some delvers were aware of it, it wasn't common knowledge. Most delvers never advanced even close to fast enough to get the warning. But the risk was there, and delvers needed to know about it—especially the Traynor delvers.

But Ellen didn't want to stop there. She wanted to implicate Bob—not the Traynor Corporation, but Bob—in a cover-up that put people at risk. Even as she laid out her rough plan, she said, over and over, that it wouldn't be enough to dethrone him. It wouldn't be a victory, just a move on the chessboard.

I didn't like that. We needed something better than a gambit. The game had progressed too far to take risks without a good chance of victory. We needed a check—the kind that led to a mate.

The seven of us sat in the dirt for a long time, getting more and more annoyed with each other as we strategized. An hour in, Jessie was tired, and Yasmin looked like she wanted to fall asleep, too. "Ellen," I said, "We need to step back. Let's meet up the day after tomorrow—"

"Today," Jessie said.

"What?"

"The day after today. It's after midnight."

"Okay. Sure. Let's meet up the day after…let's meet up tomorrow and figure something out when we're actually thinking. Right now's not the time, though. Everyone's tired. Let's go home," I finished.

Ellen wanted to fight about it. Her eyes narrowed. Then she glanced at Yasmin, whose head was balanced on Jeff's shoulder and whose eyes had just shut. He shrugged with his other one. "I'll get her to her place. Kade's right. We're done for the night."

I stood up and helped him maneuver Yasmin's half-asleep butt into Sophia's back seat, then pulled him aside. "How are you doing?"

"I don't know. I talked to my parents today. It was tough. But I think I'm doing better," he said.

"Great. I'm happy for you, man."

He shrugged again, then nodded to the car. "Yasmin wasn't completely sober when that kid called me. I'm going to get her home and make sure she's all set for the night. Don't worry about me."

"I wasn't going to, Jeff. See you around."

Ellen was waiting by Deimos when I turned around. "Jessie's already waiting, Kade. She won't stop yawning, and it's driving me crazy. Let's get going."

I nodded and hurried to the passenger seat. As soon as I got in and buckled up, Deimos revved to life—and so did Jessie. "Okay, so, good plan, but bad execution, no matter how you slice it. Next time, we need a better plan for if the backup plan doesn't work. I'm thinking probably a better briefing for Stephen, too. He had no idea what was going on."

"Jessie," I interrupted, "were you…?"

"Faking tired? No. Ready to go to sleep? Not even close. I'm way too hyped up about this. It's like a spy movie or something. Your plan's solid, but I have some ideas. They're half-baked. Let me finish them up, and I'll share later, when I'm not tired. Are we really going to—"

Ellen cut her off. "Nope. You two maneuvered me into being done. We're done. If you're not ready to sleep, let's do something else—literally anything else. Something that's not thinking about Bob."

I nodded. "Jessie tricked me, too, Ellen. But I agree. Let's do something."

"How about the GC center? It's always open. We could get a study room and—"

"No," Ellen and I both cut my sister off.

"I think maybe we need to actually take a break from the delving stuff," Ellen said. She thought for a minute, Deimos's idling rumble and the drum-and-bass music filling the cab as we sat there. Then she punched something into the console, and the car rocketed to life.

Fifteen minutes later, we stood in an elevator—one that'd take us to the top of the 303 Wall. "You're sure we can do this?" I asked. "It sounds illegal."

"It's not illegal. Just frowned upon. Crossing the wall into Wickenberg without a permit? That'd be illegal. But looking? Looking isn't a crime."

The elevator opened, and light poured in from below.

It was almost one in the morning, but the mix of glowing purple and bright halogen yellow-orange lit the green fields below us in a nearly-noon light that forced me to blink. The wall here overlooked Wickenberg, Lake Pleasant, the White Tanks, and in the distance, a purple, A-Rank portal. Massive walls almost the size of the one we stood on had been built around it, with only one exit. That exit was a canal filled with water. It ran into a building and then out into fields that filled the valley as far as I could see.

The Wickenberg water portal had been there for years. Close to two decades. And it had made Phoenix a functional, viable city in the middle of the worst desert in the West. Even if the water was temporary, it could still water the valley's crops.

"Bob owns that," Ellen said quietly. "He has a majority stake in—"

"If I can't talk business, you can't, either, Ellen," Jessie warned her.

"Right."

We watched from the top of the wall. Even this late—or early, if you were Jessie—tractors and people moved across the fields like ants. Scattered in between them were massive greenhouses; the fans' howling echoes off the walls below. Trucks moved crates from the fields directly through a gate in the wall and into…where? They couldn't be going through Surprise, but that was the closest district inside the 303.

I watched a truck disappear inside, then hurried to the other side. It didn't appear.

"Who was she?" Ellen asked.

"Who?" I asked.

"Alessa Noelstra. Bob said her name, and you lost it. You were ready to attack him right there. She was your mom?"

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"No." Jessie had stiffened, and her fists were balled. "No, she wasn't."

I took a deep breath. "Alessa Noelstra was…is…our mother. She and my father split, and he took a job in one of the Texas cities. Fort Worth, maybe? I can't remember. I was barely walking. Then she met Roger Gerald, Jessie was born, and her medical stuff came up. One day, Mom was just…gone. She didn't take her stuff, and Dad couldn't track her down. So it was just the three of us until it wasn't."

"She wasn't a mom. A real mom wouldn't have…"

Jessie had given me the same speech a half-dozen times, so I let her rant and stared out at the fields below. The trucks and tractors moved with a purpose that could only be familiarity; they'd done this same drive dozens or hundreds of times. My eyes drifted to the purple, A-Rank portal in the distance—and to the fight that had erupted at its base. Three teams of delvers and a wave of portal monsters were going at it, spells and skills filling the air. Not one tractor stopped its routine—not even the one working only a few dozen feet from the fighting.

You could get used to anything. Anything could become your new normal.

We had. And so had the farmers out there.

"So, if she'd been any kind of brave, she'd have stayed," Jessie said. She wasn't crying, but she was close. "I wasn't that bad. Kade's making it work, right?"

"Right," I said absent-mindedly.

My mother hadn't abandoned me, and she hadn't abandoned Dad. She'd left Jessie, specifically. Jessie, with the endless, unsolvable joint pain. She'd been a rough toddler and kid—in fact, she'd been rough up until she turned thirteen and started really investing in Dad's meditation lessons. That was when the treatments she was still taking twice a week had finally started working, too. So I understood Alessa Noelstra's decision.

She'd had to adapt, and she couldn't.

But I also understood Jessie's anger and frustration, because I felt it, too. She hadn't had to leave. She could have stayed with us.

And she'd chosen not to.

13 Years Ago

Roger Gerald's hand rested on Kade's shoulder. The six-year-old wouldn't stop shaking, and Roger couldn't tell if it was anger, fear, or something else. His eye was blackening, and his knuckles were bruised. The delver stared at his adopted son. He understood. Outwardly, Roger was a calm lake to Kade's raging hurricane.

The car's air conditioning belched out supercooled air as it idled in a convenience store parking lot. They sat in it, a pair of sodas untouched in the cup holders.

"Do you want to talk about it, Kade?"

"No."

Roger waited. The seconds ticked by into minutes. Kade picked up his drink and slurped on the straw. Then he coughed once. Roger's eyebrow raised, but it didn't look like the kind of cough someone got from a sprung rib.

"I hate them."

"You hate your classmates?" Roger asked.

"Yes. They're so…so mean."

"And that's why you fight them?"

"Yeah. They need to stop, and they won't." Kade paused. "But I can make them."

Roger relaxed in his seat. His hand left Kade's shoulder for the first time since he'd picked the kid up from school. It wasn't the best-case scenario. Kade was too impulsive to be this good at violence. It was going to get him in trouble. But at least the boy had a reason to fight—and he was picking people who…he didn't want to say 'deserved' it. No six-year-old deserved what Principal Andersen said Kade had done to that boy. But he wasn't starting fights for no good reason. That was something. Roger could work with that.

"Kade, you can't just fight people," Roger said for the first time. "That's not how people solve their problems.

"Why not? It's a solution," Kade said.

Roger sighed. "Because people have rules, and they need to follow them. And one of those rules is that powerful people don't hurt weak ones."

"But if they do, what do weak people do?"

"They…" Roger trailed off. He couldn't finish the sentence. "Just promise that when you get in a fight, it's for a good cause, and there's no other solution."

Eventually, Jessie finished going off about Alessa Noelstra, and I got tired of watching the tractors. Ellen led us back to the elevator, keeping mercifully—or tactfully—quiet except to maneuver one of my arms around her waist as the lift plunged back toward Earth. Then Deimos roared to life, and we were on the road again.

"I'm sorry," Ellen said quietly. Jessie's eyes had shut the second her head hit the headrest in the back seat, and Deimos was downright sedate as it maneuvered through the streets—at least by its standards.

"For what?" I asked.

"For…uh, for bringing up your mother. I know what it's like to have parents you're not proud of," Ellen said. "Bob is…"

She trailed off, and I thought for a long time. Deimos maneuvered through Surprise and onto the elevated freeway that ran above its old, tile-roofed buildings. I stared at the traffic. No trucks—much less ones with food in them. That didn't make any sense. Where did they go?

Then Ellen cleared her throat. I looked at her; her eyes were locked on my face, but she didn't say anything. She just waited. I composed myself and refocused.

"Bob's different," I said slowly. "He's still being a problem. Alessa is…she's a different situation. She's probably not in Phoenix, but if she is, well…she never contacted us when Dad died. As far as we're concerned, that's a pretty final statement. Bob won't do you the favor of going away."

"You don't believe that," Ellen said.

"I do," I said.

"No, you don't. You'd rather deal with Bob than with your mother," Ellen said quietly. Her hand snaked out and wrapped around the back of mine. "You're more straightforward than I am. I'd rather Bob go away. But if he's here, you can solve him. If he went away, you'd never be able to. That's what happened with…"

"Yep." I took a breath and rolled my hand, letting Ellen's slip into it and squeezing. "Yep. She left. Dad wasn't the same after that. Jessie never forgave her, and neither did I."

It was more than that. I'd been young. Six years old. Just starting school. And I'd…

Well, some kids behaved like Alessa. Others acted like Jessie when the first kind hurt them. And that was wrong. I couldn't help Jessie—her hurt was too big—but I could help the kids on the playground, getting bullied or lied to or abandoned. That made me angry, but it gave me something I could do.

So I had. It had been rage and fury—but it had been justice, too. Justice I couldn't have for Jessie or myself. Dad had known it.

"And that's why Bob…?"

"Yeah, that's why Bob went there. He knew I'd lock up. I don't know how he knew it, but he did."

Ellen was quiet for a while, and I used the time to force myself to think through the whole mess. And the answer I found was simple.

So what?

So what if she did abandon us? Dad had our backs, and then we had each others', and now we had friends who we could rely on. Ellen, Jeff, Yasmin, Stephen…we had people now—better people than Alessa Noelstra.

Ellen's AI-driven car turned off the freeway and started weaving through the Peoria streets. We passed the GC center and, fifteen minutes later, pulled to a stop outside of my apartment building.

I woke Jessie up, and she stood next to the car just long enough for me to get her chair before falling asleep the moment she sat down. I rolled my eyes and turned to Ellen. "Thanks for the ride and the trip to see Wickenberg and the portal. It was pretty cool."

"Of course, Kade," she said. Then she hesitated. "I know Jeff's got the couch, but—"

"I'm not expecting him home tonight. He was going to take Yasmin home, and he won't have a way here once he does."

"Right. Uh, anyway, I was hoping I could stay the night." Ellen blushed a little under the streetlight.

"Yeah, you can stay the night. It's late, and the couch is…" I trailed off. "Oh."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, oh." I took a breath. "Yes, I'd love it if you stayed over tonight, Ellen. I just need to take care of Jessie first."

"Of course, Kade," Ellen said. She ducked into Deimos, fiddled with the controls, and closed the door. The car took off, heading for a nearby parking structure and driving inside. Then she fell in next to me, arm looped around mine as I pushed my sister through the main doors and down the hall.

I fiddled with the door; it opened without my key. I must have forgotten to lock it when we left. That was unlike me, but then again, I'd been nervous about Ellen's plan to strike a blow against Bob, and Jessie had been excited about dressing up. Or maybe Jeff had beaten us home.

The lights were out. I flicked them on. "Jeff, you here?"

"Not quite," a voice said.

I froze in the entryway. Tallas's Dueling Blade erupted to life in my hand, and my armor rippled across my chest and arm. I pushed past Jessie's chair and into the living room as a hooded figure stood from Ellen's favorite armchair.

"Kade Noelstra, it's time for us to talk," the man said.

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