We cleared out a handful of Sunnysiders near a ranch style home not far from the kiosk, then set up shop on the driveway.

  There was a grill out back, and after a thorough round of power-washing with Hydro Fracking Blast and Fluid Dynamics, I was confident it was safe enough to cook on. Anything that didn’t get blasted off by high-pressure water would get reduced to ash under the cleansing fire of open flame anyway.

  Turned out, Ed had a few premium steaks stashed in his Spatial Storage. No clue where he’d got them, and I felt a little guilty tossing them on the grill, but Ed insisted he’d been saving them for a special occasion.

  This certainly felt like one.

  We hadn’t really had a chance to celebrate the death of the HOA—we’d been too busy dealing with the fallout from the battle. Reinforcing the shop, rescuing missing Delvers, putting out fires both literal and metaphorical. Now felt like as good a time as any to take a little breather. Especially with no way of knowing what kind of nightmares were waiting for us down below.

  Ed tossed on an apron, then he and Jakob set to work grilling the meat. I hadn’t eaten a steak in months and the smell wafting from the from the flames left my stomach rumbling in anticipation.

  Harper discovered a badminton set in the garage and, with just a little effort and a helping hand from Croc, she got the net erected. I was shocked to see that the lawn was no longer made from human hair but seemed to be genuine grass—green, soft, and perfect. With the HOA no longer in the picture, the entire floor seemed to be changing. Healing. That alone brought a smile to my face. Even though killing the HOA had been hell, we’d managed to accomplish something genuinely good here.

  I idly wondered what that would mean, long term, for the Sunnysiders. Would they become more human and less horrific given enough time?

  Ed had told us that, once upon a time, the Dwellers of this level had been relatively peaceful and normal—or at least as normal as any Dweller could be. Would they return to what they once were? I wasn’t sure, but I was hopeful all the same. It was distinctly possible that this floor could eventually wind up being a paradise for stranded Delvers looking to create a life for themselves.

  Croc assumed its “humanoid” shape—easily the mimic’s most unsettling form—and before long Harper and Croc were batting the birdy back and forth, giggling and laughing the whole time. Harper played without shoes, running her toes through the grass with a look close to ecstasy plaster across her face. She used her new Tactical Zoomies Relic to flit around the yard, while Croc grew several extra arms, allowing the mimic to wield four rackets at once.

  Not that it helped much.

  Even with the extra limbs, the mimic was badly outmatched by Harper’s expertise and sheer speed.

  Temp and I found several foldable lawn chairs and set them up in a line facing the street. Once we were done, I dispensed frosty cold beers, direct from Spatial Storage. While the others worked and drank, I started sorting through our available supply of fireworks.

  Roman Candles, Bottle Rockets, Spark Fountains, and Ground Spinners, plus several, larger showstoppers. Aerial repeaters—appropriately named Freedom Screamers—Saturn Missile Batteries, and one as large as my thigh with caution stickers plastered all over it called, Cosmic Hemorrhage.

  Croc was thrilled at the available selection, and I was just as giddy with anticipation.

  As I’d already told the mimic, fireworks were objectively badass. There were few things a crayon eater from Ohio like me enjoyed more than watching shit explode. It’s one of the things that had drawn me to the Marine Corps in the first place.

  Jakob pulled the steaks from the grill and served ’em up, still steaming, on dishware raided from the kitchen. Surprisingly, no one had been able to find silverware, so we ended up eating with our hands like barbarians. That only made the experience better, though. Something that would stick with me as a fond memory even when shit got bad, which I was sure it would. For a few hours, at least, things were normal, peaceful, and good. A bright shining light in a sea of darkness and misery.

  Croc damned near inhaled its steak, but despite that, the joy radiating off the mimic was almost palpable.

  “This is even better than the Rat Meat with the dry rub,” Croc groaned. “It’s so tender and the flavor profile… What kind of seasoning did you use?”

  “For a good steak,” Jakob said, wiping greasy fingers on a handkerchief, “all you really need is salt and pepper. The salt helps draw the excess moisture out of the meat, then you just let it sit and the brine soaks back in. It makes the meat extremely tender and flavorful.”

  “Agree to disagree,” Ed said with a shrug, before dosing the steak with a liberal amount of hot sauce he’d raided from the store. “Everything is better with hot sauce… And Doritos.” He fished a handful of chips from a blue bag, crushed ’em up, and sprinkled ’em right on top.

  Watching Ed commit profane blasphemes against the steak was easily one of the most disturbing things I’d seen on the twenty-fourth floor.

  We ate in companiable silence, enjoying the meal even under the ominous glare of the bloodmoon. The scent of grilling meat did attract a few unwanted party crashers—in this case a trio of Kannibal Kids, who emerged from the cornfields like deadly wraiths. We set our beers aside and slaughtered the feral children in a pitched battle that left corpses and body parts strewn across the lawn. But even that couldn’t ruin the good mood.

  Once they were dead, I claimed the bodies and we went back to our meal.

  “I never had this,” Jakob said thoughtfully while slowly devouring what remained of his steak. “Friends, I mean. A community. I was never exactly what you’d call popular. Spent too much time buried in books to make friends. Even when I finally got to university, most of the other students were more interested in getting drunk and partying than anything else.” He grimaced. “Meanwhile, I was holed up in the library or locked away in the lab.”

  He gave a dry laugh and shook his head.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” He said. “It took getting exiled to an interdimensional world of living nightmares to finally find what I was missing back in the real world.”

  In a rare moment of solidarity, Temperance reached over and squeezed Jakob’s hand.

  “For what it’s worth, I never had this either,” she said, her voice sad. “I’ve also never seen fireworks. They came along well after my time.”

  “What was it like?” Croc asked. “Where your from, I mean?”

  Temperance considered the question for a moment before answering.

  “Bleak and gray,” she finally answered. “In some ways it was an existence even more miserable than this one. My world was hard. Filled with hunger, sickness, and paranoia. If we had a bad year and the harvest was less than expected, our root cellars would be empty, and people would starve. This”—she gestured to her empty plate—“is an extravagance beyond imagination. Everything was hard. All the time. It’s no wonder my people saw witches and demons everywhere they looked. They needed to find a reason for their suffering. And if they couldn’t find one,” she added after a long moment, “they invented one.”

  “So you didn’t have badminton or barbeques?” Croc asked.

  Temp laughed, but there was nothing humorous in the sound.

  “Heavens above, no. There was work, there was duty, and there was church. Ours was not a life meant for pleasure. Ours was a life of toil.”

  “So what did you do for fun?” Harper asked, sounding genuinely curious.

  “Fun was something of a foreign concept,” Temperance replied. “Particularly for women. The boys and men would hunt or fish. The children played cup and ball from time to time.”

  “Cup and ball?” I asked, arching an eyebrow.

  She smiled then, “A simple game where you would attempt to catch a ball in a cup. Riveting, I know. As for the manly folk, they spent their evenings smoking or playing Nine Men’s Morris—a sort of strategy game that involved placing stones on a wooden board.”

  “That sounds terrible,” I said.

  She shrugged. “As I told you, the fine folk of Salem were not built for fun, and we certainly weren’t spoiled for options. Not like you with your video games, television, and badminton.”

  “Yeah, but what about you?” I asked. “What did you do when you had some time for yourself?”

  “Chores mostly,” she answered. “There were always so many chores to be done. And in the rare moments of free time we did have, we were expected to do productive activities. Sewing, knitting, quilting.” The ghost of a smile flashed across her lips. “As hard as it might be to believe, I was a mean hand at cross stitching. We would sing sometimes, too. Mostly psalms or hymns, but it was one of the rare things I found joy in.”

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  In all the time I’d spent with Temp, I’d never heard her sing.

  Not once.

  Now I was curious.

  “Care to sing something for us?” I asked.

  Her smile disappeared entirely and she shook her head. “No. I don’t do that anymore. Not since I Noclipped. That’s part of a life I’d rather forget.”

  I didn’t press the issue, and the conversation slipped into an uncomfortable lull, her words dampening the mood.

  But if there was one thing that could dispel the cloud cast over our gathering, it was fireworks. I killed the dregs of my beer, pulled my ass out of the lawn chair, and meandered over to our stockpile of exploding fun.

  I didn’t have a lighter, so instead I had Ed’s parrot, Woodstock, help me with the fuses.

  “Kill it with fire,” the bird squawked as I finished setting up a line of Roman candles.

  “You got it little buddy,” I said, before pointing to the fuse. “But only this part, okay?”

  The bird whistled and nodded enthusiastically, her chest burning with a golden glow, before belching a small column of flame that ignited the fuses, one right after another. They hissed and spurted as we scrambled back to a safe viewing distance. The Roman Candles screamed, sending up a flurry of brightly colored orbs that left trails of shimmering flame in their wake.

  Croc hooted, its tail waggling, and Harper clapped enthusiastically, but it was Temperance who really caught my eye. Although she was a self-described killer, hard as nails and always ready for a fight, there was something innocent and almost child-like in the way she watched the fireworks streak skyward like falling stars in reverse.

  I started with the small ones—as was the custom of my people—and progressively worked my way up to the bigger and bigger ones, each successive boom more impressive than the last. I set off the sparking volcanoes and the manic ground spinners, which whirled and tore across the asphalt. I lobbed colorful smoke bombs by the fistful, and we ran across the lawn with fizzing sparklers that left trails of golden light when they moved. We took a short break after half an hour, grabbed a fresh round of beers, then continued with a bottle rocket fight.

  I laughed as Croc shot a rocket at me—only to have it shriek up in the air, then come back down right on top of the mimic’s head with a pop.

  Although Temp wouldn’t sing, Ed eventually broke out an old beat-up guitar, pulled from his storage space, and started picking at the strings with practiced ease.

  I built a bonfire using some salvaged timber, then we spent the better part of an hour laughing, drinking and caterwauling at the moon like a troupe of alley cats. Ed played a bunch of classic hits—everything from Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and an upbeat rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

  He and Harper both had surprisingly good voices, but the group average was brought down by the rest of us. I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket and Jakob sounded… well, very German was the kindest thing I could say. As for Croc, the mimic sang enthusiastically, but didn’t know almost any of the words, and managed to sing so off key that it sounded like a dog getting run over by a cement truck. It was fun though—something which was even rarer here in the Backrooms then Mythic Emblems.

  We also talked in between songs.

  Not about the important stuff: The next leg of our dive. The Flayed Monarch. The Franchisor or how we were going to kill him.

  No, tonight we were in a bubble, divorced from our grim world.

  Instead, we talked about the little things—the stuff that didn’t really matter but still meant something to us. Jakob told more stories from his university days. Harper shared highlights from her short-lived career as an ER nurse, including several unforgettable tales about patients who’d “accidentally” fallen onto suspiciously shaped objects that somehow ended up stuck in their asses. Even Ed opened up and told us about his time in Vietnam, while I shared about the batshit bachelor party that had landed me here in the first place.

  As the night stretched on, growing longer, Ed eventually stowed the guitar and we graduated to the fireworks with progressively more frantic safety labels.

  Danger! Use of this product may result in bodily harm, physical dismemberment, and probable death.

  Warning! Prolonged exposure may result in mild disorientation, spontaneous weeping, and spawn cosmic anomalies. Not covered by homeowner’s insurance. Or any insurance.

  Freedom Screamers, true to their name, howled like banshees as they lit up the night in hues of red and gold, green and blue. Then came the rapid-fire bursts, one after another, sparks tumbling down like molten confetti. My chest vibrated and the force of the overhead explosions rattled the windows. I didn’t care, though, and by the time it was done, I was grinning like an idiot.

  The Saturn Missile Batteries were even better—a barrage of miniature artillery shells shrieking upward like bottle rockets with a chip on their shoulder. Some exploded in perfect spheres of blue and red, while several erupted into pinwheels of brilliant gold that shimmered before fading into the dark. The last round of rockets formed a kaleidoscopic smiley face, though it melted almost instantly into a cloud of acrid smoke, the odor sharp and sulfurous like rotten eggs.

  We saved the best for last and Cosmic Hemorrhage turned out to be the showstopper to end all showstoppers.

  It didn’t explode so much as it unfurled—like the heavens had split down the middle. A wound bloomed high above, and from it bled a slow-motion cascade of impossible colors that physically hurt to look at. Electric blues that burned neon, reds so deep they bordered on black, ultraviolet streaks that danced just outside the edge of vision. It was like watching the cosmos bleed out in real time, hemorrhaging light from some far-off galaxy we were never meant to see.

  Everyone was dead silent as we watched. Not even a whistle or cheer. Just slack jaws and wide eyes, as we were all transfixed by the slow, swirling torrent of color dripping across the sky.

  It looked too real. And strangely alive.

  And then it appeared.

  The bleeding lights pulsed, bent inward, and coalesced into something massive. Something with wings and limbs that didn’t make anatomical sense, and an enormous head crowned with a halo of writhing tendrils. The blood moon dimmed, and for a brief moment the night was transformed into day—illuminated by the presence of the cosmic entity, half-formed and flickering like a god caught mid-dream.

  It was chaos, it was beauty, it was pure sensory overload.

  Then, just as suddenly as it started, it was gone. Fizzling with a flash and a final reverberating boom.

  “Now that was a firework,” Croc said as the light finally faded.

  “You bet your ass, it was,” I agreed.

  We all just sat there for a bit, staring up at the too empty sky.

  Ed finally broke the silence.

  “I’m not coming with you,” he said without any fan fair. Just a simple declaration of fact.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, turning to look at him.

  “I’m not coming with you down to floor forty-nine,” he replied, though now I could hear a hint of pain in his voice. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you for a while, but I just kept putting it off.” He sighed and stared at the bottle in his hands. “Can’t put it off anymore, though. Figure this was as good a time as any.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Is it something we did?” Croc added a second later. “It was Ponypuff wasn’t it? She said something to you. Probably tried to rope you into helping her summon her that dark god of hers. Vor’ghel, the Devouring Maw who Dwells Beneath. She’s always trying to trick me into summoning Vor’ghel.”

  Ed grinned and shook his head. “Naw, Hoss, it’s nothing like that,” he said. “Nothing personal. A couple of days ago, a group of Howlers approached me about the possibility of permanently relocating to the twenty-fourth floor. They already have Wraith’s blessing to leave, but they want me to help ’em get settled. Find someplace safe to live, help level up a bit. That sort of thing. I’ll be honest, I was on the fence about it, but with the HOA out of the picture, things are starting to change around here. Used to be, this place was a Safe Harbor and I think it can be again—with a little grit and elbow grease.”

  I stared at the Delver, studying his face, the cast of his features.

  He looked… lonely.

  Ed had spent years, maybe decades, by himself with no company other than Woodstock. And a pyro-parrot hardly qualified as company. But he’d been part of a community once, and I could see how badly he wanted that again.

  “But Ed,” Croc said, “we need you.”

  Ed snorted and rolled his eyes. “Like hell you do. Dan has already outpaced me and the rest of you will too before much longer. I might not look like it, but I’m old. Old and tired. My joints are riddled with arthritis that not even Zima can fix, and I don’t move the way I used to.” He faltered, absently picking at the label on his beer bottle. “Truth is, I’m a liability. And the deeper you go, the more of a liability I’ll become.”

  “That’s not true,” Croc said. “You’re not a liability. We couldn’t have defeated the HOA without your help. And we still need you. I mean, what are the chances that we find another Delver named Edward, who is also a literal vampire? Without you, we’ll never complete the cast of the internationally bestselling and beloved-by-all Twilight book series.”

  This time Ed laughed, gruff and sharp.

  “Should’ve figure that’s what you’d get all twisted up about,” he said. “But I won’t be gone. Not really. I’ll just be here.” He gestured broadly at the neighborhood. “Or at the store eating endless bags of delicious Doritos.” He reached down and patted the DeWalt Etheric Radio at his hip. “I’ll also have this. If you get in a bind, just give me a buzz and I’ll get to you. And I’ll bring hell with me.”

  Croc tilted its head thoughtfully to one side. “There’s no way we can talk you out of this?”

  Ed shook his head. “Mind’s made up.”

  Croc sighed in evident disappointment. “I suppose this will be just like the plot line in New Moon when Edward disappears, and Bella has to solider on without him,” the mimic said. “That’s my least favorite book in the series, but Edward does come back eventually. When Bella really needs him.”

  “Yep, it’ll be just like that,” Ed agreed, reaching over then patting the dog on the head. “You gotta understand, it’s not that I don’t want to come, I just think I can do more good here.” He paused again, as though considering what to say next. “There’s also one other thing. I’ve got a score to settle with those government shitheads from BEACON. I’ve been talking with Wraith and he has a few leads for me to follow up on. His intel is promising, and he seems to think they might have a way to get out of this shithole.

  “He promised to help me track those bastards down, but in exchange, he wants me to guide some of the Howlers down to Researcher Labs on twenty-five. Bunch of ’em are looking to become Transmogs.” Ed locked eyes with me, and I could see the war waging inside him. His desire to help us, pitted against his need for revenge. “I owe you all a debt I’ll never be able to repay, but those assholes have a lot of blood on their hands, and I can’t pass up a chance to make things right. Please tell me you understand?”

  Ed would never plead—he was too proud for that—but he was pleading now.

  In his own way, of course.

  “I do,” I said. “We’re all on different paths and, as much as it sucks, sometimes those paths diverge. We’re going to miss having you around, but you need to do what’s best for you. What’s best for everyone.” I looked around at the empty neighborhood. At the perfectly manicured lawns and the ramrod straight trees, their leaves rustling in a gentle evening breeze. “Besides, this is also good for the community.”

  I didn’t say it, but the truth was, we were at war and I needed an army. Given time, the Howlers who relocated here would become stronger and losing Ed in the short term was worth what we’d gain in the long run.

  “You don’t need it,” I said, “but if you’re asking for my approval—you have it.” I raised my half empty bottle in salute. “Here’s to new friends, new ventures, and found farewells.”

  Ed raised his beer in reply. “To new friends, new ventures, and found farewells,” he repeated, a sad smile never leaving his face.