Neverland wakes had almost become ceremonial in their routine.

  Florence used her Key to restore the dead bodies to the best of her abilities—which was to say they ended up looking nearly lifelike—and then put them on the bar’s tables. When corpses couldn’t be recovered, the Crawlers usually settled on pictures or the occasional illusion hologram spell. The Association had to use more space than usual since they had to display three corpses instead of the usual one.

  As far as Matthew could recall, today would be their first full team wipeout. Deaths had actually gone down since they implemented the balanced color party system so Crawlers could cover each other’s weaknesses.

  The Association first began by holding a minute of silence for the fallen, followed by crappy eulogies. Matthew hadn’t been all that close to the Old Town team, so he mostly stuck to playing the piano while listening in now and then. The Doc, who always took losses very hard, sorrowfully recalled how each of the fallen had first joined the Association, stressing their courage and devotion in fighting for people who would never learn of their sacrifice; Florence tried to give a speech, but broke down in tears halfway through; Crypto, less emotional, simply recounted their heroic deeds during the March Raid and how some people wouldn’t be standing here today without their fallen allies; and Charlie, true to himself, complained that Bomberman owed him money he would never be able to get back. “Those three meant a lot to me though,” he added at the end. “And not just financially either!”

  Then, once everyone had their turn, they put on the snappy music and served drinks. The dead pool money went to whoever called the Old Town team’s demise and towards paying for the alcohol. Lou still refused to serve Matthew’s crew, but allowed them to bring their own beer from the nearby supermarket.

  “This is so fucking wrong,” Maggie complained while sitting on the piano’s edge. She had exceptionally agreed to attend the wake and meeting—more to keep an eye on her new protégés than because of any kinship towards the Association—and clearly regretted every minute of it. “You’re all drinking to people’s death?"

  “We can’t weep all the time,” Matthew replied while he continued playing the piano keys. Music always managed to soothe his soul. “It’s our way of bouncing back.”

  Maggie shook her head in disgust. “Doesn’t it get to you?” she asked him, her tone quieter than before. “All these deaths?”

  “It gets to everyone, Maggie.” Well, except maybe Charlie. “But if we show it, then it becomes like a depression serpent eating its own tail. This way, at least, we can tell ourselves we can still be happy.”

  Maggie scowled in disdain at first, but then began to mull over his wise point as she sipped from her beer bottle. “We never held one for Perse.”

  Matthew missed a key, then resumed playing. “No, we didn’t,” he replied. “Maybe we should hold one. Jack is visiting next week.”

  Maggie would have likely crushed her bottle if it had been made of plastic instead of glass. Instead, she settled on cracking it. “If you suggest a gathering for old times’ sake, I’ll vomit on your piano.”

  “Joke’s on you, it’s Lou’s.” Matthew couldn’t say he hadn’t expected that reaction from her. “I thought maybe it would help Ulysses leave his house, while he still has one.”

  “It won’t. Jack was a selfish ass long before he chickened out of the fight. You and Sam were the only ones who got along with him, till she dumped him and left for the USA.” Maggie frowned. “Are the USA still a thing?”

  “They are, but they lost Texas and Arizona to the Mexican Empire in the sixties.” That little tidbit had earned Matthew a big fat four out of twenty on his last history-geography test. “Are you still in contact with Sam?”

  Samantha ‘Sam’ Brown had been the team’s Blue back in the day. She, Maggie, and Perse used to be extremely close until… until the incident.

  They all took their near-death experience at the Mall hard, but Sam had been in outright denial. She pretended they never had powers and that Perse died from a car crash the last time he saw her. Then she and her family left for the USA and everybody lost contact.

  Maggie shook her head. “Last time I talked to her, she had become so delusional that she insisted we had all hallucinated having powers. She won’t or can’t access her own Key anymore.”

  Did she put a hole in her head too? Matthew wondered grimly. The Doc warned him that subconscious repression could weaken a Key through the power of Disbelief. Sam’s trauma might have suppressed her own magic. Maybe that was what I was trying to do when erasing that door from my memory. Lying to myself that everything was normal.

  “Hang out with Jack if you want, but I don’t want to see his face,” Maggie said in between sips. Her gaze lingered on Crypto, which then turned into a glare when she found her speaking with Petro, Sasha, and Amélia. “Not while he keeps hiding from Dungeons.”

  “I’ll see if I can cast an invisibility spell on him,” Matthew mused. “You’re going to join us?”

  “Those three will die if I don’t lead them,” Maggie replied, which was the closest thing to a ‘yes’ that she could muster. “I’ve been thinking about what happened at your house. T’was a warning; the leaks in a ship’s hold kind.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Yeah, I figured as much.” Matthew took a deep breath. Liv and the Doc had left the party early after the eulogy to examine his notebook in the bunker’s backroom in case Articat’s exposure to that black Flux had left any marks. “We… we nearly ended up trapped in the Mall after blowing up the Major Chicken Dungeon.”

  Maggie’s head snapped in his direction. “How?”

  “I don’t know. We destroyed the Dungeon and then ended up in the Mall instead of outside.” Damn it, he had missed another key. Talking about that awful place never failed to throw Matthew off his game. “I thought it was a coincidence, but now… I’m not so sure.”

  Maggie set her empty bottle aside, a deep scowl on her face. “This is getting too big for us to fight over details.”

  Matthew nodded and then spotted Kari walking towards them. “Hey, wanna take over the piano?” he asked her. “I’m getting a bit tired here.”

  “I’d love to, but Crypto wants to meet with us in the backroom first,” Kari replied. “John is already there.”

  “I’ll take over,” Maggie said as she moved to take Matthew’s place on the piano bench. “I picked up a few things during our band days.”

  Matthew immediately winced the moment Maggie began to play off-key, but Kari dragged him away from the piano before his inner musical instructor could come out. The two walked past the crowds of Crawlers gathered in the bar and overheard a few discussions.

  “—it’s the Swiss, I tell you,” Charlie said as he lit up his cigar. “They want Uncle Charlie hanging from a butcher’s hook!”

  “Could be the Russians,” Officer Kresnik replied. “I told you that cutting them out of the heroin trade was a bad idea.”

  “Nah, it’s the Swiss. You don’t know them like I do. Men like me traffick drugs and rack—protect homeowners. These guys?” Charlie shuddered. “They traffic Nazi gold and rob entire nations blind! Banking secrets, now that’s the real omerta!”

  “Why the long face, Charlie?” Matthew asked. “Did you rob a chocolate factory or something?”

  “Someone put a hit on Charlie,” Officer Kresnik explained.

  “Again?” Kari squinted at Charlie. “What did you do this time?”

  “What didn’t I do?” Charlie shrugged his shoulders. “Whoever wants a piece of me sent a professional. Some new guy called the Candlemaker.”

  “Because he buries the bodies in wax?” Matthew asked without too much concern. A few of Charlie’s ‘competitors’ had tried to take him out in the past and ended up as new names in the missing people list for their trouble.

  “More like he turns people into candles,” Officer Kresnik replied. “That guy’s filled more graves than Solonik. I would be on your guard if I were you, Charlie. Finding another weapon supplier would cost us time and money.”

  “Awww, I knew you cared.” Charlie gave the policeman a light tap on the shoulder. “Do you care enough to help me put that punk in the ground?”

  Officer Kresnik chuckled, his smile having a malicious edge to it. “We’ll see. That guy’s a cop killer, so he deserves a nap in the dirt.”

  Matthew pitied whichever mobster had been given the task of hunting down Charlie. A mundane person had little hope of killing a man capable of blowing his attackers up with a touch.

  In any case, Kari and Matthew walked into the bunker’s backroom to find Crypto, John, and the Doc sitting around a table there. The place used to be a bedroom of some kind before the Crawlers took over the place, and it still had a few bunk beds to show for it. City maps showing Evermarsh’s identified Dungeons adorned the walls, their numbers slightly lower than during their last meeting; the teams hadn’t stood idle.

  While the Doc analyzed Matthew’s notebook with a variety of White and Blue spells, Crypto and John looked at azure-tainted photographs of his lost house. The Doc had the foresight to take them before the incident, and now they were the only proof that Matthew’s home ever existed.

  “Please sit down,” Crypto said with a tone that broke no dissent. “We need to talk.”

  Matthew and Kari wordlessly join them around the table. Things had to be extremely serious for Crypto to skip the pleasantries.

  One of the photos vomited Blue Flux like a fountain until its surface shone. Its edges widened until they became large enough for an arm and then a shoulder to emerge from within. Liv crawled out of the shiny picture like a mouse from a hole, squeezing her way out the best she could.

  “I’d like a landscape picture next time,” she complained once she fully managed to extract herself. “These are way too small.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” the Doc told his girlfriend before charmingly pulling out the seat next to him so that she could join them. “Did you find anything?”

  “You were right, Finn.” Liv grabbed a cigarette and lit it up with a spell. “The bedroom, bathroom, and living room all had some of that dark Flux in them. It was just so little and subtle I didn’t notice it until I started actively looking for the substance.”

  “So Matthew’s house was tainted years before its disappearance?” John asked. “That would invalidate our first theory that it scrubs away time-displaced elements.”

  “I suspect it works the other way around, John,” the Doc said. “Black Flux does not erase timeline-displaced objects; rather, timeline-displaced objects produce Black Flux by their very nature, because they should not exist anymore.”

  “So that would make black the color of…” Kari scratched her cheek. “Nonsense? Incoherence?”

  “Paradox?” Matthew suggested. “Paradox sounds cooler than nonsense.”

  “Paradox would explain why no there has been no report of a Crawler tapping into that color,” Crypto noted. “It’s the color of what shouldn’t be. It does not exist in a fully functioning universe.”

  The Doc stroked his chin. “The fact that we haven’t recorded any Dungeon with that color would point that way as well. This eighth brand of Flux might be so fundamentally unstable as to harm them.”

  Matthew and his crew shuddered at the implications. How messy did a Flux color have to be that not even extradimensional predators would touch it?

  …

  Something so toxic even Dungeons wouldn’t touch it… could it possibly kill…

  “In any case, I couldn’t detect any of this black Flux on your creature, Matthew,” the Doc said upon returning the notebook to him, startling his student out of his thoughts. “I’d gladly discuss the mechanics of creating an artificial monster with you under normal circumstances, but right now I’ll have to focus on investigating this new mystery.”

  “It’s fine,” Matthew replied. In fact, he had the intuition this black Flux might hold the cure for the Mall infection... “If you find a way to recover my old house, I’d appreciate it too!”

  The Doc clenched his teeth. “I will do what I can, but I wouldn’t keep my hopes up if I were you.”

  Crypto joined her hands, closed her eyes, and then nodded to herself. Matthew had the feeling she had reached a certain conclusion; one they would dislike.

  “I have a mission for the three of you,” she told Matthew’s crew, the three of them immediately straightening up. “Auguste and I tracked down Tarantulas all the way to Chemtown. We suspect that it has been constantly moving from one Dungeon to another in order to avoid capture.”

  “You want us to kill it?” John asked with clear anticipation.

  “No.” It was strange how a single word could bring such silence. “I want you to capture it alive.”

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