The next morning—or as close to it as we could get—the five of us sat around my living room. Jeff had cleared off his couch, and he and Yasmin had occupied it. Ellen had her chair secured. And Jessie and I had pulled up blankets and a kitchen stool, respectively.

Jessie started us off. "Before we get into…whatever happened last night, I've got more important stuff to say. Three things, actually. First, the ledger you two brought back from that portal world is impossible to translate. I know. I've tried."

"You're also a high-schooler," Yasmin said.

"Not the point. It's not an Earth language. I checked them all. Even the really old ones no one uses. They don't fit, and that lines up with what you told me from talking to the portal people, right? I doubt the GC will be able to translate their words any time soon unless those people help. So, that's the first thing. The second is the guild."

"What about it?" I asked.

Jessie pulled her laptop and flipped it around, a real estate site on full display. The building she'd pulled up was a towering five-story building, jammed up against Phoenix's wall and bordering the Surprise district. Its facade was rounded, with balconies that wrapped around its second and third floors before narrowing into window-lined upper floors. It was white—though that had been stained slightly yellow by the desert sun and sand, just like every white building in the city—with black highlights and tinted windows.

"The Portal Tyrants put this up for sale two days ago. It's pretty much as expensive as the GC building in the same area, but it's got one big advantage. The Tyrants were trying to expand into Surprise, and they fully equipped this place to act as a guild center. If we can come up with the money, we can get the guild operating now."

I pulled the laptop out of Jessie's hands—getting a glare in response—and flicked through the pictures. "Functional gym. Library's small, but if we connected it to the GC network, that wouldn't matter. First floor's pretty open-plan. Lots of space to put stuff, or to rent out? Is that a thing guilds do? Second floor's the gym, library, all that stuff, and the upper ones are offices—and bedrooms. Yeah, this place is perfect. How did you find it?"

Jessie smiled. "I've been searching every day for the last two months."

I wasn't lying. The building was perfect. But I'd also made a commitment to the Portal Tyrant, and I had no idea how to balance them. Was that commitment the same as my promises to the rest of the team—or to Jessie? I wasn't sure, but I did know that this was a unique opportunity.

"Okay. Let's do it," I said.

Ellen coughed. "Two problems. First, we're looking at twenty million for it. What's our current situation?"

Jessie grabbed the computer and fiddled with it. "We're actually sitting at seven million, but most of those donations are anonymous and over the last two weeks. Who's been donat—"

Then her eyes locked on the screen. "Not important. Seven million. That leaves thirteen to go. And I already checked. The Tyrants want it all up front."

Ellen fidgeted. I looked at her, and she shook her head. "I can't."

I stood up and put my hands on her shoulders from behind her. "I wouldn't ask you to put your money into this if we weren't on a time crunch, but we are, Ellen. Can you help us out?"

"No, I actually, literally can't. I was actually going to ask you for help before this. Bob cut me off last night."

"He did?" I asked.

"Yeah. We had a fight after I went back to the reception. He tried to put the pressure on, and I…well, it got heated. I've still got Deimos, and a non-negotiable weekly housing fund, but I'm in a hotel now, and I can't tap into the family funds anymore. So, uh, yeah. I'd gladly owe it to Bob if it'd get us all where we need to be, but it's not an option right now."

Ellen shook, and I started rubbing her shoulders, but she wouldn't relax. "Any other ideas?"

Jeff coughed. "Don't look at me. I've been all-in on this since we got back."

"It's true," Yasmin said. "I've been having to pay for his breakfasts and stuff—"

"When he's not eating them here," Jessie shot back.

"—when he's not eating them here," Yasmin agreed. "He's probably the mystery donor you're looking for, Jessie. But yeah, thirteen million dollars is a lot of money. We can't just come up with it overnight."

"I could if I just made nice with Bob again," Ellen said quietly.

"No one's asking you to," I said quickly. "You don't owe him anything, and I don't want you to have to."

"It's probably a temporary bump. If we wait it out, maybe he'll calm down," Ellen lied.

I knew it wasn't the truth, and so did she. Ellen's relationship with her father was beyond rocky, and this was the inevitable endgame for both of them. Eventually, she was going to break away from him, or he was going to get tired of her refusal to play along with his plans.

But we'd also talked, and the amount of money Ellen could throw around was enough that thirteen million was…it wasn't pocket change, but it wasn't enough to even put a dent in her father's accounting book. The Traynor Corporation was worth too much. Granted, he'd notice specifically because it was Ellen spending the money, and he'd hold it over her, but he could afford it.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

And we did need the money. The guild's future wasn't exactly at stake, long-term. But that building was perfect.

"Okay. Ellen, don't stress about the money. We'll find a way to make things work. I'll go talk to the Portal Tyrants and see if we can find a solution," I said. With Terrel Young stuck in Carlsbad, that was the only way I'd be able to talk directly to him—and if we wanted this to work, we'd need the Portal Tyrant himself backing us. I didn't want to talk to him and tell him I needed to back out of our deal. But I couldn't lie to him about it, either.

"Alright. That's something," Ellen said.

Jeff nodded. "Are we done here?"

"Not quite." Ellen stood up, and Jessie eyed her chair until the delver glared at her. When my sister backed down, Ellen continued. "We have another problem, and this one also has to do with my…with Bob. The Traynor team. They're in trouble, and they don't even know it yet."

After Ellen explained what she and I had learned last night, the room went quiet for a few moments. Jessie typed away on her laptop, and Yasmin stared at me for an uncomfortable amount of time. Then Jeff cleared his throat. "So, your dad's putting a guild together, and he's overaccelerating their growth. They're going to have an unknown number of core breaks over the next month or two. That's going to shut down that team almost instantly as soon as it happens. And this is our problem…why?"

Yasmin nodded. "I agree with Jeff."

I cleared my throat and stared them down. "Two reasons. First, the ethical. None of those delvers understands what they're getting into. I do. We all do, on some level. This is going to kill some of them, put others in the hospital, and definitely end careers. If they don't know it's going to happen, that's not a risk they should be taking."

"This almost killed Kade," Ellen said quietly, "and he's the toughest person I know, mentally."

"Thanks, El," I said. "So, at the very least, that team needs to know the danger they're in, and based on my conversation with Bob—and Ellen's experience living with him—he won't tell them. Ever.

"Second, when that team's cores start breaking, Bob isn't going to recruit another random team to take their places. He's going to go after Ellen even harder the second their mage breaks. He'll probably pull some crap that forces her to join that team. We can't have that. Right now, we're a team, and we're a guild in all but name. We need to look out for Ellen, and that means—"

Jeff interrupted me mid-sentence. "Our team's not going to be functional for long either, Kade. I'm stuck, and Yasmin's only going to grow so much more. Raul and Sophia aren't on the S-Rank path, either. By the time you two are A-Rank, we won't be running portals together. Where does that leave us?"

"We'll continue to be a team," I said. "I'll keep clearing portals with you, and Sophia, and everyone else. I'm not abandoning you. You didn't abandon me when I was stuck with Stormbreak and trying to be a bad support, right?"

"This is different, Kade. I knew—and so did you—that you'd come out on the other side eventually. I'm stuck. There is no other side. I committed to getting C-Rank as fast as I could, even if it locked me out of the rest of my progression. And then, as I hit my bottleneck, you blew past me at double my speed. I'm not going to get strong enough to clear A-Rank portals. I probably shouldn't be in B-Rank ones. And it was for nothing. I could have hit C-Rank with you guys."

Jeff flopped onto the couch, head on Yasmin's lap. He blew out a long sigh. "Now I'm stuck, and I didn't get what I wanted."

I took a deep breath. "I'll ask Eugene if there's anything he can do for you, but—"

"He's not going to help. He wouldn't even help to save our lives. Why would he help with this?" Jeff stared at the ceiling as Yasmin ran her fingers through his hair, his eyes shimmering. "So, those are your two reasons? We should help them because it's the right thing to do, and we should help them because we're a team for a few more weeks until you two outpace us? There's got to be something else."

I thought about it for a while. Then I nodded. "There is one more reason."

"What?" Yasmin asked. She stopped playing with Jeff's hair for a moment to look me in the eye.

"Easy. Self-preservation."

"What?" Yasmin repeated.

I just pointed to Jessie, who was glaring at Jeff and Yasmin over her laptop screen. "Those delvers have families. They probably promised that they'd come home and that they'd be safe. I did the same thing with Jessie, and if I hadn't had a way out, she'd have killed my core-broken butt for lying to her. If I let these delvers destroy themselves, she'll probably kill me, too."

"Yep," Jessie said quietly.

Our living room was quiet for a minute. Then Ellen coughed. "Anyway, I think we need to treat the Traynor Corporation like an enemy, but the delvers like, uh, rivals. Bob's the one making the decisions. They're just in it for the power and money. If we can convince them that what they're doing is going to hurt them more than it helps, maybe we can cut Bob's power off—at least in this one place."

"And that solves your problem with him, how?" Yasmin asked.

"It doesn't."

The 'guild' meeting dragged on and on. Jessie listened, but other than the new building, she was out of her depth, and she knew it. All the talk about core breaks and massive, evil corporations was way above her pay grade.

Instead, she fiddled with her computer—and with the pictures she'd snapped with her phone. The first dozen pages of the elves' ledger were open in one window, while another had a spreadsheet and a third housed a jailbroken, semi-illegal translation program that was looking through the information she entered into the spreadsheet.

It hadn't been easy. She'd had to literally recreate the symbols in the ledger in a computer art program, then insert them manually into her spreadsheet. Then she'd had to assign random values to each symbol so the translation program could even pretend to run the numbers. And every time it had spat out results that didn't make sense, she'd had to talk to a different friend for solutions.

And she wasn't even close to solving it. She had—maybe—a handful of 'numbers,' but no letters, and no way of even knowing if the symbols translated across one-to-one. They almost certainly didn't.

As the meeting finally ended and Yasmin dragged a reluctant Jeff off the couch and out the door, she closed her computer and stared Kade down. "We need to talk. Alone."

Ellen looked at Kade, then at Jessie. Kade nodded and kissed Ellen on the cheek—forcing an eyeroll out of Jessie.

She waited until Kade's girlfriend was gone, then waited another few seconds. Then she cleared her throat. "Kade, while you were gone, I got a message for you. The person who gave it to me was very serious about making sure I got it to you, but not as concerned about when you responded. He claims to know you, and he knew things only you would know."

Kade's eyes hardened. "Who?"

Jessie didn't say anything right away. Instead, she unfolded a piece of paper, revealing a hand-written note. "Carter Richards. C-Rank archer, formerly with the Roadrunners. The message is…you'll see."

Kade took the paper and started reading it. With every sentence and line, his face darkened, and his eyes flashed. "Keep going," she said when he started to open his mouth. He had to read the whole thing, because Caleb Richter had demanded she make sure he did.

When he finally finished, his eyes stayed locked on the page for a long time. Then they looked up. "Carter…Richards…gave you this?"

"Yes. He said it was poison for poison, and something about an antidote."

"Right." Kade looked back, rereading, his lips moving as he did. Then he nodded. "I understand. He doesn't think it's his fault. He thinks it's hers."

"What? Kade, I don't understand."

"You will, Jessie. You will. Soon."

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