Maxi woke up with a headache and not gasping for breath. Not being permadead was a plus. Being burnt alive didn’t sound like a good way to go especially because the last time fire did her in she was cocooned by an ooze that had protected her from the inferno. She coughed and realized that she was coated with dust. Considering that her shirt hadn’t cleaned and mended itself yet, she hadn’t been out very long.

  There was also a fruity taste in her mouth. She pulled off her glasses to wipe the dust off and discovered the source of the flavoring. Daisuke was huddled in the rubble with a juice box also coated in dust using his phone as a flashlight. Maxi did the same and noticed that they were trapped in a pocket of debris.

  There was stone, metal, rebar, and wood on all sides of them. A couple of large chunks prevented the mass from coming down on them. Maxi had always heard of people trapped under rubble after an earthquake surviving for days. She never imagined she would be one of them. Daisuke sipped the last of the juice box and tossed it aside. A gash on his cheek mended.

  She checked her stats and saw that the item replenishing her psy points went away after she lost consciousness and some of the healing Daisuke had given her got her out of the critical zone. While she had enough points for a Mind Shard, she couldn’t teleport. Not that she would have been able to get them out because it had to be something within her line of sight, and there wasn’t much to look at from her perspective.

  She crawled over to Daisuke and sat next to him.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Let’s just hope Janitorial gets to us before the NPCs,” Daisuke said without looking at her.

  “Why? Either way, we’d get out of here.”

  “But our friends won’t. Bodies found by NPCs stay dead. Can’t have people coming back from the dead.”

  “This is the point where’d I’d normally rant about how fucked up that is, but I really don’t have the energy.”

  “They have to think of the bigger picture. Can’t exactly have someone declared dead in a national tragedy walking around a week later.”

  “Then we better get Janitorial looking for us,” Maxi said and attempted to contact Terry but her connection wasn’t going through.

  “We are probably under too much rubble to connect to the network,” Daisuke said, “but Janitorial has a way of finding employees. They have a knack of inserting themselves into emergency responses from the NPC world. It’s just with an outbreak this big, they are going to have their hands full covering it up.”

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  “That’s what I like about you,” Maxi joked. “Ever the optimist.”

  “More like a realist.”

  “Look, if it’s any consolation. I’m sorry about what I said.”

  “About me being a demonic entity? If I had concerns about my co-worker, I probably would have handled it with a little more grace and dignity but you didn’t have a choice considering the circumstances.”

  “You’re not mad about that?”

  “No, I know you’re not delicate and a bludgeoning object doesn’t have any choice but to be blunt.”

  “Thanks I think. You know, you’re welcome back. It hasn’t been the same without you.”

  “I don’t think that would be best.”

  “What are you mad about then?”

  “I never said I was mad,” Daisuke said. “Those are your words not mine.”

  “What I’d do to piss you off?”

  Daisuke smiled and laughed. “It’s not what you did. It was what I did. I redirected my failure on you. For that I’m sorry.”

  “Wait, wait,” Maxi said, feeling her blood boiling. “Are you saying that I just spent the better part of the week beating myself up for something you did!”

  “Not everything is about you.”

  “You have a funny way of showing it. Wait, is that about the day you were in the severroom, are you embarrassed?” Maxi was about to grin and tease him, as embarrassment for her had always been a reason to poke further or make herself part of the joke if she was the one feeling it. Part of growing up in a sarcastic family was that humor was equally a healing tool and a weaponized one. However, she saw his expression. His face wouldn’t just sour the milk, it would strike a cow dead.

  “You’ve probably realized by now that my father was the owner of Kaze Motors.” Daisuke said. “What you didn’t realize was that he was one of the few NPCs rich and powerful enough to know what I do for a living.”

  “But what about the company secret clause?”

  “Multidimensionals can’t operate with no one from the NPC world knowing about our existence. We are just outside of the sphere of influence.”

  “Wait, you’re saying the President of the US has monster briefings each morning?”

  “I don’t know which NPCs know about the company, other than some of them show up to the Holiday party. But the point is that people who are doggedly devoted to the truth are either killed, recruited, or neutered by the Hacker branch so they end up looking like crackpots. But what about the people who can’t be recruited and are too visible to be killed, and throttling their internet presence will just raise more questions? Those people become people of interest to the company.”

  “And that’s your father?”

  “Was my father.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Maxi said.

  “You didn’t know because I was the one who killed him and it was my quest…” Daisuke began.