Lacey felt lighter than she had in a long time, her paranoia a puddle of discarded doubts about herself and others. She knew that it would be back, but she squashed it. Knowing that, she knew that she could do it again. What that meant for her future as a human being, she didn’t know, but she was cautiously happy to explore this way of living life.

  “Trugs is the only level not to clear yet,” Lacey tossed another packet of popcorn to another Elite, Tsume, one of the newer ones they’d summoned only last week. He’d made Elite, only days before, by leveling up past the dungeon level. This one had scared the crap out of his group, and he was obviously proud of himself for it. Tsume and Adam were busy grunting at each other, and somehow Lacey got the impression that Adam was consoling the other Elite on the lack of bloodshed at the end of his level.

  “Jerry’s got Kat and Bernard at the beginning of the trap levels,” Colt’s eyes were glued to his monitor, which was why Lacey had taken over the snack dispenser position. “They’re in the first trap reset corridor, but until I figure out how to make them non-combatants, they’re stuck there so we can watch the lead group.”

  The screen they’d been using to keep track of the lead members of the incursion showed Kat and Bernard instead. It told them that no one had entered the trapped mazes yet, but Colt was frustrated that he hadn’t figured out how to disqualify Kat and Bernard as foes.

  “Why not just set the screen up here to monitor the third closest adventurer to our control room?” Lacey suggested, taking the chance to grab a bag of Cheetos for herself.

  “Fine,” Colt grumped, setting the command on his pedestal rather than out loud. “But I’m going to figure this out. It isn’t just about watching the incursion. It’s the principle of the thing. We should be able to choose our friends.”

  “Maybe check the quests,” Lacey tipped the envelope of Cheetos to put a few in her mouth rather than get the cheesy powder on her hands.

  “That could work,” Colt muttered, and his fingers were flying through screens. Lacey was glad that she was the artist and not the computer person.

  “This place is awesome,” Kat was saying over the speakers. “Is that a vat of oil?”

  “Yeah,” Colt replied distractedly. Lacey shook her head and returned to her desk to toggle on her mic.

  “It’s set so that it puddles into the chamber upon activation,” Lacey explained the trap mechanism. “The emptying of the vat signals to the Spunk that runs it to drop a torch from the ceiling into the oil.”

  “That’ll singe some eyebrows,” Kat whistled softly. “How come I haven’t seen that trap yet?”

  “I tend to test them out in the maze corridors first,” Lacey sat at her desk, her gaze now flicking between the screen showing Kat’s exploration and the furthest part of the incursion. Ginger was watching the Trug level. “I didn’t like the fact that it was easily disarmed by someone catching the torch. We reworked the trap so that it’s harder to disarm, but I keep the prototypes scattered around a bit.”

  The incursion was starting to meet up at the lowest dungeon level, but several groups were dammed up at the Trug level. The lower levels were running into the Trugs that the current group had supposedly killed. Trugs regenerated, so most of the rooms that group thought they’d cleared were not so clear for their buddies behind them.

  “Jerry, now that we can see the lead group by watching the third, let’s move Kat and Bernard down to the army level,” Lacey instructed the Elite, then gave a little chuckle. “No need to give Kat all my secrets all at once.”

  “Awww…” Kat complained, but she was smiling.

  “That and you’re distracting my Spunks,” Lacey teased Kat. “They get nervous around Thieves like you.” The Spunks were more annoyed than nervous, but Lacey was being nice about it. The Spunks took pride in their traps, and having their prime enemy seeing all their secrets was making them grumble.

  “Valid,” Kat tried to give big smiles to the Spunks she passed, but they weren’t easily won over. “You guys are doing a totally great job.” The Spunks only pretended to smile, taking care to cover what they could of their traps.

  “And there’s no need to warn the incursion that you are here. Trap corridors are supposed to be silent,” Lacey reprimanded Kat’s enthusiastic volume. “No one’s near right now, but they will be soon.”

  “Right,” Kat whispered, but it still echoed along the corridor. Bernard’s lips twitched a bit, but he, at least, kept silent.

  “Got it,” Colt frowned at his screen. “You were right. It was in the quests, and it's one we might finish without the dungeon closing, but it’s a pain.”

  “What is it?” Lacey flicked off her mic, noting that the lead group was starting to get moving. If they moved forward, they’d be right on Kat and Bernard’s heels through the maze levels.

  “It’s on Goblin fletching, of all things,” Colt waved a hand around. “We’d have to have Goblins make 1500 arrows or crossbow bolts.”

  “Make arrow?” Ginger popped up from her monitoring to ask. “We make arrow fine.”

  “This is a lot of arrows,” Colt muttered. “And we need our Goblins focused on the incursion.”

  “Goblin arrow makers not busy,” Ginger shook her head and pointed to the back valley. “They out there.”

  “Sounds good, Ginger,” Lacey grabbed the Goblin’s attention.

  “They have to make them in the dungeon, not outside,” Colt called out to Ginger as she dashed outside to gather her workers. Ginger only acknowledged him with a thumbs-up gesture over her shoulder. “How many fletchers do you think she has out there?”

  “It doesn’t do any good to try to do the math with Ginger,” Lacey waved off his concern with gentle chiding. While Ginger had gotten better at math, she wasn’t going to be able to figure out the production speed of her workers in any recognizable way. Goblin math consisted of what they could count, and most could only count to about five or so. “We’ll figure it out soon enough when they get back. In the meantime, it looks like the lead group is moving.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Colt went back to his monitor. “Not to the mazes.”

  Lacey looked back down and saw that the higher leveled groups that had gathered consisted of a little more than half the army. They weren’t going down. They were headed back up the dungeon. “Maybe they’re being smart and headed back to the Trug level.”

  “How would they know to head backwards?” Colt asked.

  Lacey flicked on the speaker from that area, and they soon learned that the plan required them to wait for a specified time period and then go back to help anyone stuck. What it meant was that the army was gathering together before they took on the mazes. That didn’t make any sense to Lacey. The mazes had narrow corridors, and it would take a Thief to Disarm those traps one at a time. That’s why she was using them as a delaying tactic.

  Ginger returned with the Goblin fletchers. Lacey took the time to set them up in her old bedroom. The five Goblin fletchers found little places to set up their tools, while the workers laid out their bundled materials and then rushed back outside to get more. Ginger was fussing at them that the arrows didn’t need to be good, just plentiful. Once they got a rhythm, Lacey could do the math. Someone elsewhere must have been making the shafts and arrowheads because the bundles of supplies included them. All these Goblins had to do was attach the feathers and arrowhead to the shaft. This took them about a minute per arrow. That might slow down if their supplies dwindled, but Lacey figured that it would take nearly five hours for them to create 1,500 arrows.

  “Do they have the supplies to keep making arrows for five hours, Ginger?” Lacey asked.

  “More Goblins make supplies out there,” Ginger answered, hands on hips as she surveyed her Goblins’ work. “They keep up.”

  Ginger and Lacey went back to the control room together to break the news to Colt.

  “It’s better than I expected, honestly,” Colt ran a hand through his hair. “Good job, Ginger.”

  “Thanks Colt,” Ginger beamed and went back to her position.

  “Most of that group went back, but they left a few of their best trap pickers to start on the mazes,” Colt reported.

  “They can only work one or two at a time, so why are they getting the whole army together before tackling the trapped mazes?” Lacey asked out loud, sitting back at her desk.

  “They have something sneaky planned,” Colt shook his head, and blinked up at her blearily. “I just can’t predict that guy.”

  “Get yourself a soda and give your eyes a break from the screens,” Lacey waved her arm at the table. “I can watch for a bit. Maybe fresh eyes will see something new.”

  “You think there’s a way to speed up those fletchers?” Colt whispered to Lacey so that Ginger wouldn’t hear as he passed her desk.

  “What for?” she mumbled back, smiling innocently to Ginger when she looked up. “We’re still way ahead of the game here.”

  “There’s only three hours left on Dom’s timer to dungeon reset and he hasn’t renewed the coupon,” Colt rubbed a hand over the back of his neck.

  “He’ll play another one when he needs it,” Lacey argued. “That’s what I’d do.”

  “What else would you do?” Colt pressed Lacey, backing away from her desk. “You’re the cleverest person I know. How would you get around the trapped mazes?”

  Trigger Spoiler

  Lacey closed her eyes and imagined herself in Dom’s position. They’d been so rushed that they’d been focused on reacting. There’d been no time for prediction. Lacey’s mind raced, but not where it was supposed to go. Instead, it went right back into the paranoia and self-recriminations that plagued her. It filled her brain with the fact that she should have been thinking like this before now. She should have…

  Her paranoia filled her mind with a thousand things that she could have done differently, but she was used to that. She’d just beat all this down not an hour before. How could it be coming back already? Lacey took a breath. New Lacey wasn’t going to hate herself for that stuff. She’d stomped it down before and she could do it again. So, Lacey stomped. It was like she was stuck in a room of mole holes, and she had a tiny hammer to fight every idea that popped up. People without paranoia would find this so easy, but to Lacey it was harder. She took another breath and tried something different.

  Instead of whacking the ideas that popped up, Lacey tried ignoring them. The game of whack-a-mole changed. Now her ideas popped around her, punching out at her in a way that made them impossible to ignore. There had to be a better way. How did Colt get her to focus?

  Lacey threw away her psychologist-approved coping mechanisms and focused on Colt instead. That calmed her down a little, but it didn’t stop the rampant moles popping up and claiming that she wasn’t a good friend because she couldn’t get it under control. Again, Lacey changed tactics. She kept her calm, but she nudged her imagination in another direction.

  That imagination wasn’t a bad thing, and it actually helped her fend off some of the more ludicrous self-recriminations. Not only that, but it helped her think of solutions. Imagination wasn’t bad, so why was her imagination so focused on all the wrong stuff? Well, paranoia focused on the wrong stuff. Imagination made up good stuff. Maybe if she focused on edging back the paranoia?

  That didn’t work at all. The harder she pushed it back, the harder it pressed back. Lacey changed tactics again. Lacey pulled instead. Fine. If paranoia wasn’t going to be leashed, then she’d let it go. The oddest thing happened. Wave after wave of imaginative thoughts poured over Lacey, but she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t even hurt.

  The waves of dread she’d felt at becoming overwhelmed washed away instead of drowning her. She wasn’t just a failure and a fuck up. She hadn’t let Colt down. He was asking her for her opinion because he valued her input, not because he was mad at her for not thinking it up yet.

  “Lace, you ok?” Colt was saying as he gently shook her shoulder.

  “Uh,” Lacey wondered if she was.

  “I’m sorry, Lace,” Colt left his hand as a warm touch of strength. “I didn’t mean to push you.”

  She realized she’d been shaking. Just another panic attack. That’s what they would have said. The only people that used the word “just” to describe a panic attack had never had one. There was nothing just about the sneaky little bastard that seized her brain and turned it into mush for a moment that felt like forever. Colt didn’t say that. Colt just left his hand there and waited for it to pass.

  “I think I am okay,” Lacey found her voice. The embarrassment tried to swamp her, but that she could beat back. It stayed back because it was Colt.

  “It’s just that you haven’t had a full-blown panic attack in a while, and I wasn’t thinking,” Colt tried to explain, hunching down next to her chair so that he wasn’t looming.

  She took a shaky breath, trying not to let the blame snag her again. “I’m sorry,” she said, almost automatically.

  Colt blew out a breath and waited.

  “No, not sorry, just,” she started.

  Colt offered her a sip of his soda. She took it and tipped back the bottle. It was cold. She focused on the feeling of cold. She found the taste sharp on her tongue with the carbonation and then sweet as it rolled down the back of her throat.

  “I’m good,” she stated, and she was better. Not great, but better. She handed his soda back.

  “Always,” Colt smiled up at her and it made her smile back.

  “I just don’t get why it happened now,” Lacey laid her head down on the desk. “Why not when Hughe was coming at us? Why not when Monty was two feet from me and out for blood? Those were so much harder than this.”

  “It’s just that great big brain of yours stuttering over a hiccup,” Colt took a drink and set the bottle on the floor next to him.

  “This is nothing compared to those things,” Lacey squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Neither are hiccups, but your brain just doesn’t know that,” Colt reminded her. “I think it was just bored and needed a bigger challenge than this idiot is posing.”

  Lacey laughed. It wouldn’t have been funny to someone else. It wouldn’t have been funny coming from anyone else.