Beth, Jonathan, and I sat in the apartment watching old episodes of The Wilds: Alaska. Old for me and Jonathan. New for Beth.

  The party spotted not one but two frost drakes flying over a valley as they hiked below. Beth was so nervous for them, but Jonathan and I knew they would spend three episodes playing up the drama of frost drake sightings only for nothing of significance to really happen. They had another sighting, and they thought the drake had seen them, but then they didn’t see another frost drake.

  At least not yet. They could potentially show up again later in the season. They had plenty of distance to cover before the show was over.

  “This might sound like a strange question,” Jonathan began, “but what do you take away from a run? Mentally. Not so much the emotion but what you learn from it.”

  “Why is that strange?”

  “It’s very specific and out of nowhere.”

  I wobbled my head. “Okay, yeah, that’s unexpected. I don’t mind, though. Give me a second to think on it.”

  Jonathan returned his attention to the television. In some situations, that could be rude, like he couldn’t suffer the boredom of waiting quietly for me to answer. What I saw instead was an effort to make me feel comfortable and to give me as much time as I wanted.

  Shit. I was starting to like this guy.

  “I’ve not done a lot of runs, so I still make a lot of mistakes. I try to get something from that, and usually the captain or the guard isn’t shy about telling you when you’ve done something stupid.”

  “Like what?”

  “We were running a squid dungeon and-”

  “Squids? That’s a D-ranked crawl.”

  I nodded. “You know your dungeons.”

  “Didn’t you just get to level 4? How were you in a squid dungeon?”

  “That’s complicated, but the short version is they needed another body, and I was available. I went in level 2 and came out level 4.”

  Jonathan spun so hard the couch shook. “What?!”

  I held up my hands to try and calm him. “I really didn’t do much, and that’s not me being humble. That’s the truth. We had a bunch of frontliners, so I stood in the back. Not any serious danger for me personally. If I was in the frontline, I don’t know that I would have even been invited. Beakers are especially mean bastards.”

  “That’s nuts.”

  “Like I said, I was surrounded by babysitters. I got tunnel vision and didn’t watch low while I attacked high. Slimes got my leg, and one of the said babysitters peeled it off of me right away.”

  “Still,” Jonathan said. “That’s pretty cool.”

  “Thanks.”

  Jonathan was twenty-one years old. I was twenty-four. Why did I suddenly feel like a mature adult?

  After half an hour or so, Jonathan asked, “Do you think there will ever be a program that lets regular people crawl? I would love to at least give it a shot.”

  “I doubt it,” I answered.

  A knock came at the door.

  Standing, I said, “That’s dinner. Don’t worry about pausing it. I’ve seen this.”

  I waited a suitable amount of time to be certain the delivery guy was gone and collected our burgers and fries. Handing the bags off to Beth, I grabbed some napkins, a bottle of ketchup, and a jar of mayonnaise.

  Jonathan eyed the jar. “You like extra mayo on your burger?”

  “Dip my fries in it. I know, it’s weird.” I handed Beth the ketchup. I knew she would want it.

  “No, it’s…” his voice trailed off.

  Beth completed his sentence. “It’s weird.”

  “There are a lot of people who do this. I’m not alone.”

  “Sure, sure,” Beth teased. She paused to look at the bottle. “Do you remember ‘ketchup kaboom?’”

  I laughed.

  Jonathan glanced between us. “What is a ketchup kaboom?”

  “When Dor and I were kids, I was five? Maybe six?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, we were young,” Beth continued, “and for some reason I can’t remember anymore, we were wound up more than usual one morning. Dor and I are literally running laps in the house. As quickly as we could. Mom was making breakfast, and I guess she tried to get our attention but couldn’t. Then she goes,” Beth paused to put on an angry mother impression before saying, “‘Eat. Your. Breakfast!’ and she slams a bottle of ketchup on the table.”

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

  “Slams,” I repeated. “She isn’t exaggerating. That bottle came down like she was trying to stab something to death.”

  Beth grins. “The thing explodes. Plastic bottle, not glass, by the way. Ketchup flies in every direction like a grenade had gone off. Mom’s still pretty mad, but the ketchup kaboom stunned her. Dor looks at the ketchup all around the kitchen and casually says, ‘I can’t eat my eggs without ketchup.’ Mom stares at him for a few seconds and then leaves the room with the broken bottle still in her hands.”

  “Ketchup kaboom makes sense now,” Jonathan said. “It’s good you found it funny. I think that would have scared me to death if I was in your place and that young.”

  “Mom had a lot of angry moments,” Beth replied. “I think that’s one where we kind of deserved it, though.”

  “Yeah. When she was really angry, she would do things like look you in the eye and say, ‘You stole my youth.’”

  Jonathan’s mouth dropped.

  “Sorry. It’s funny to me now, but my face looked like yours when it happened. Anyway, I’m going to do some reading. Beth, is it cool if I use the desk?”

  “It’s your room.”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Yes, it’s cool.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I took my half-eaten burger and my french fries with me. And the mayo too, of course.

  Beth and Jonathan had entertained me all night and would want time to themselves, I told myself when really I was embarrassed.

  That happened to me a lot in college. I would share a story that I thought was perfectly benign, and the room would look at me with horror and pity.

  Then some well-meaning asshole would say something like, “I’m sorry you went through that.”

  I didn’t like people feeling sorry for me, but that wasn’t the worst part. For someone who already felt like an outsider, those moments made it clear that I wasn’t normal, that I wasn’t imagining that sense of separation between me and everyone else.

  I made a mental note that ketchup kaboom was one of those stories I shouldn’t tell.

  The judge denied our warrant. We had no definitive cause to seize or search anything. Choosing to not record a run wasn’t a crime, and our criteria for who was a suspect was too open-ended.

  McDouglas said he agreed with the judge, but he hoped the recent tensions around killer crawlers would tip the scales a bit. It didn’t, so I was tasked with reviewing crawl records going back five years for every party on our interview list as well as Dempson’s.

  Had these parties reported crashers in the past? If so, how many? Did an enforcer make any notes about that crawler’s behavior at the time of the report? Did any of these parties suddenly stop reporting crashers? If so, when?

  Martin Kielar, the sixty-year-old black mage from the Mill Rats, and George Baker, the thirty-five-year-old spellsword from the Furious Few, were still McDouglas’ top suspects.

  While several of the crawlers on our list had magic items of some sort, Kielar’s and Baker’s sounded extra nefarious. Kielar had a scepter of Greater Fear, and Baker had a sword of Scorching.

  Fear was a spell that did the opposite of the Taunt skill. If the targets failed to resist it, they were overcome by a sense of being under threat. Enemies weren’t sent fleeing for their lives, but they were hesitant and lacked confidence in their abilities.

  Greater Fear, however, was more aggressive, drawing on the target’s own fears for inspiration. We don’t know specifically how it affects monsters, but when used on a person, the spell amplified their deepest fear and triggered a minor hallucination relevant to the fear.

  Someone afraid of spiders wouldn’t imagine themselves covered in them, but they would believe that their enemies were moving in service of that fear. If they got too close, the spiders would come out.

  Baker’s sword of Scorching could transfer intense heat on impact. The effect had a cooldown, so it didn’t influence every strike, but if he hit an opponent’s sword and triggered it, his opponent would feel like their sword was a hot pan, fresh off the stove.

  It could do the same thing to sections of armor, like platemail or, say, most any helmet. Having your face cooked off by a red-hot helmet was a brutal way to die.

  It could have been a coincidence that McDouglas’ top two suspects had villainous-sounding weapons, but their sadistic potential was hard to ignore. Again, that wasn't evidence of anything. They simply fit an imagined narrative built around what I thought a CKer might be like.

  Toward the end of the day, McDouglas pinged me to see him in his office. His polo today was black, by far the least vibrant color I had seen him wear. I wanted to ask if, perhaps, his polos were some form of mood ring, but I thought better of it. Our relationship wasn’t like Nathan’s and mine, and his shirt was black. If it was a mood ring, black was a warning.

  “Stay close to your phone,” he said. “Chapman got stonewalled by the doomers. Investigators are watching the community to see if any of their other people decide to go crashing. If they were smart, they would take a break for a bit, but doomers don’t get described that way very often.”

  He paused and looked up at me.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine.”

  McDouglas continued, “The investigators are mostly handling the surveillance, but we’re on call if they need bodies.”

  “Anything I should prepare?”

  He shook his head. “You’ve done stakeout shifts before. It’s more of that.”

  “Understood.”

  “Keep up the good work,” McDouglas added as I stepped out of his office. “You’re on the right path.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  When I got back to my desk, I felt a little lightheaded, like I was in shock. Receiving praise from someone I respected must have been rarer for me than I knew because it felt like a cold drink of water after a day in the desert. Furthermore, McDouglas’ words in particular carried more weight for me because he was the only one who knew about my interest in Unsung Heroes.

  Saying that I was on the right path could have been a simple reassurance added to his praise, or he could have meant the specific path to this unknown position, giving me an ambiguous clue to both keep the secret and to keep me hungry.

  Extrapolating grand conclusions from a few simple words was a specialty of mine. Very rarely was I right, but I still did it often.

  Someone being too busy to speak with me at that moment was clearly evidence of their hate and disgust for my presence, for example.

  Therefore, McDouglas saying I was “on the right path” meant that I was already a shoo-in for this ultra-elite, top-secret position.

  Was it too early to get business cards? How about a mortgage on a new place for Beth and me?

  The money was coming anyway, so why not spend it now?

  Clearly I have enough self-awareness to recognize I am prone to this flavor of self-deception, but that self-awareness often comes later, after I have interpreted something incorrectly and gotten my hopes up.