My next few workdays were spent at my desk auditing crawler reports. After every gate, crawlers were required to capture a range of data to help the CDM better rate the estimated difficulty of gates or to uncover other patterns in how dungeons were structured. Satellites could log the mana levels of a gate with relative accuracy, but that was a crude estimator of difficulty.

  Two different combinations of monsters could have the same mana reading, but one combination could be far more challenging than the other. The bugbear wipe we cleaned up, for example, had the same mana reading as a bugbear dungeon that only had vanilla shamans, no necromancers.

  There were always rumors that better gate technology was coming, and the conspiracy crowd believed that tech had already been invented and buried to protect some unnamed billionaire’s interests.

  Me? I figured there was too much money in dungeon crawling for better tech to not get out if it existed. I didn’t doubt people were working on new ideas, but I wasn’t optimistic about what the future held on that front. We had been using more or less the same tech for fifty years. We got better at logging and analyzing data, but the method at its core hadn’t changed.

  My role in this CDM effort was to ensure that crawlers properly filled out their reports. If they didn’t, they would get reprimanded, which could eventually lead to their crawler licenses being revoked.

  When Grensmith grabbed me for a day of fieldwork, I leapt out of my chair as quickly as I could.

  “Have you done harvester audits before?” he asked as we pulled out of the garage.

  “No, sir. Only the training modules.”

  “Good. Everyone else teaches it wrong. You’ll have a better foundation this way.”

  I nodded.

  “What’s the highest-ranked gate you’ve visited?”

  “C.”

  “Our list today is all Bs and As,” Grensmith said. “These sites are different animals entirely. If a B gate pops up downtown, suddenly we’re rerouting traffic and have to make sure that the worksite is safe and secure for the workers as well as the civilians. It’s never not a mess.”

  Bridges, tunnels, and highway interchanges closing unexpectedly were regular occurrences. The one time you didn’t check your route before you left was the time you got stuck in gridlock at the Liberty Tunnel for three hours. Most people had automated alerts for changes on their usual routes, but everyone had at least one story where a gate opened right when they were between exits on the interstate, and then they ran out of gas waiting for traffic to move.

  The first gate was in one of the extended lots for the city’s professional football stadium, which was the most convenient location for a gate within city limits I had ever heard of.

  Grensmith seemed to agree. “This gate will be more orderly than you’re likely to ever see again,” he said as we pulled up to a guarded entrance.

  A temporary chain-link fence wrapped the lot, and I couldn’t actually see the gate from the outside, only mobile trailers and a collection of semi-trucks with empty flatbeds.

  He flashed his credentials out the window. The man at the entrance made a note, and then we were let inside.

  “Feels like a fortress, right?” Grensmith asked.

  “Definitely does.”

  “Harvest teams usually try to obscure as much of the gate activity as possible, so that’s why we’ve got this wagon circle of trailers. More than half your citations will be placement violations because these crews only care about the gate. If three driveways and a pedestrian bridge get blocked, they’ll go through with it because it’s easier.”

  Looking around at the expanse of the scene as we drove deeper, I said, “This looks like a lot of ground for two people to cover.”

  I had done all of the modules on these regulations, and they could be exceptionally granular. In the early days, workplace safety regulations didn’t extend to dungeon harvesters, and a lot of people got hurt and exploited. Now, most any rule that would matter in a factory or on a construction site applied to dungeon sites.

  Personal protective equipment like hard hats, eye protection, and gas detectors, for example, were just as mandatory in a dungeon as they were on more traditional hazardous job sites. For harvesters. Not crawlers. Crawlers were treated more like military mercenaries.

  Get the job done without dying. We don't care how.

  “We’re auditing audits,” Grensmith explained. “We do these at random or with problem harvesters because you’ll write a citation for blocking a street with a forklift, they move it, and then as soon as you pull away, they put it right back. So, when you start doing audits yourself, pull the history for every outfit on site. It’s hard to catch all the problems with a walkthrough, but if there’s oil on the pavement, you figure you got an oil leak, right?”

  “Right.”

  “These guys have a history of skimping on harvester security and equipment inspection logs.” He handed me a white hard hat with the CDM logo on the front and put one on himself.

  A young, clean-shaven man also in a white hard hat approached as soon as we stepped out of the SUV. His hard hat had the Dungeon Delvers Guild logo on both sides. They were one of the larger guilds in the country, and the Pittsburgh chapter was the largest guild in our region.

  “Enforcer Grensmith! Good to see you.”

  His flop sweat and darting eyes did a poor job hiding how anxious Grensmith’s presence made him. I was told that Grensmith was a stickler, which I experienced directly myself. If he was like that with internal procedures, he was probably just as harsh during inspections. He was not the enforcer you wanted to see walking onto your job site with a clipboard.

  “Showing an intern the ropes,” he answered.

  “We just had an audit yesterday.”

  “I have to quality-check our reports,” Grensmith said. “Not my call, unfortunately.”

  “No, no, I understand. If you need me, anyone on site here has a radio. Ask them, and I’ll be right over.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  All the harvesters going in and out of the dungeon had heat-protective suits, heavy-duty goggles, and special gloves. So this was a fire-type dungeon.

  Seeing workers ratchet-strapping dead fire salamanders for transport confirmed it. The monsters were roughly the size of cars and had to be loaded with cranes. If this gate had appeared in a neighborhood like Beechview with near-vertical Pittsburgh streets and lax parking rules, the trucks wouldn’t have fit, and definitely not a crane.

  But the harvest would still happen regardless, so I could see how easily regulations and procedures could fall by the wayside when the gate location was awful.

  Once all the valuable monsters had been extracted from the gate, the mining team would go in next. I saw a few of those teams starting to stage their gear, so the monster harvest for this gate was probably near completion. Fire-type dungeons often meant volcanic environments, and any dungeon with a lot of natural stone had potential for mineable resources.

  In addition to a range of ore types, dungeons might have rare gemstones. Any gemstone that came out of a dungeon was infused with mana, a process that couldn’t yet be duplicated in a lab, making them exceptionally valuable. A volcanic dungeon might have mana-infused onyx, for example.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Once the harvest was complete, the crawlers would return and beat the boss to close the gate.

  “I spot two code violations,” Grensmith said, crossing his arms.

  Great. A test.

  I scanned the job site. The obvious items seemed to be in order. I saw PPE on every worker. High-traffic areas were kept clear and unobstructed. Equipment and chemicals looked to be properly stored and secured. They had an alert system for when the main thoroughfare was off-limits for anyone on foot, such as when a small convoy of resources was on its way out.

  Shit. I couldn’t see anything wrong.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “You can run through the training again when we get back,” Grensmith said as if he was magnanimously letting me go outside for recess early. “First thing, any fire-type monster must be secured for transport with fire-resistant hardware. Those ratchet straps aren’t fire-resistant. They will probably be fine with fire salamanders, but about two months back we had a load of hellhound corpses break loose in the middle of I-70. They stay hot for a while, even after they’re dead. Heat went up, and the hardware failed.”

  I listened closely and nodded along.

  Grensmith pointed to a row of wooden pallets, lined up on their sides like books on a shelf. “Pallets have to be stored flat. You store them like that, they warp, and then the next thing they carry wobbles off and crushes someone.”

  Man, I wasn’t sure I’d ever notice something like that. Proper pallet storage procedure? That was entirely invisible to me.

  Next, Grensmith got me inspection records for every piece of equipment on site. The foreman offered me a table in one of the trailer break rooms, and I sat down to review several dozen pages. While I did that, Grensmith went into the dungeon to continue his audit.

  I looked for missing dates, inconsistent maintenance records, and falsified paperwork. If the crane had a perfect inspection history, then the maintenance records should reflect the effort it took to keep it in such good condition. Usually when harvesters forged one, they forgot to forge the other.

  Grensmith also reminded me to enforce formatting standards. Dates were to be written with hyphens and the full year, not slashes and two-digit year entries. All times had to be in the military format, which was rarely enforced by anyone but Grensmith, apparently. He gave me a ten-minute lecture about why that breakdown could snowball into the collapse of the CDM, but I could see a “pick your battles” argument on that one.

  I needed an hour to review everything, and the only issue I found was the use of the two-digit date format instead of four on a few records. Grensmith had me file a formal citation for the error.

  As I handed that notice over, I could feel how much the foreman loathed me. It occurred to me then that this could be another reason why CDM-trained crawlers rarely got picked up by guilds and teams. They spent the first legs of their careers pissing off the people who would decide whether or not to hire them later.

  That was a terrible way to network, and I desperately needed to speak with someone at a guild or on a team who could confirm my chances of getting recruited post-CDM.

  On our drive up the North Shore to the next harvester audit, I worked up the nerve to be direct with Grensmith.

  “I hope this isn’t out of line, but I’d like to learn more about how guilds and teams work. How do you recommend I find someone to talk to about that? I’d like to get the inside perspective, if that makes sense.”

  Grensmith glanced at me as he drove. “Looking to level up with the CDM and then jump to crawling?”

  I didn’t see any point in lying. “Yes,” I answered.

  He nodded. “I have a friend who’s in the Homestead Strikers. Are you familiar?”

  “I know that they’re one of the oldest guilds in the city. Nothing else.”

  “They’re an… interesting outfit. I can connect you with a crawler manager there, former CDM. She’ll shoot straight, but you should know their organization is a bit different from the modern crews.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “The Homestead Strikers trace their lineage back to folks who fought in the Battle of Homestead. Andrew Carnegie sent in Pinkertons and the National Guard to break up a mill strike, once upon a time, and it turned into an actual battle. A good many steelworkers died, and they took down a few Pinkertons too. The Strikers bring that sort of energy into crawling.”

  I had no idea what I was supposed to take from that.

  “In case you’re struggling to keep up,” Grensmith said as if reading my mind, “they don’t trust outsiders, the majority of their people are legacy members, and they love an excuse to throw down.”

  “Thank you for the warning.”

  “Funny enough, groups like theirs drove a lot of the harvester safety regulations we’re enforcing today. This next gate is in an old mall, by the way. That sounds like it would make for a cleaner job site, but there are always squatters and looters causing trouble in places like those. Then we’ve got one in Squirrel Hill. That’ll be a disaster zone, and I expect you to catch every infraction I do.”

  When Grensmith didn’t seem to want to talk anymore, I spent the rest of the drive reciting regulations in my mind. Maybe I could pull it off and find all of the same issues he did if I applied myself.

  I could not, in fact, pull it off.

  The Homestead Strikers manager Grensmith connected me to was a short but visibly powerful woman with a shaved head. I was always terrible at guessing any age under fifteen and any age over fifty, but she looked like an exceptionally healthy sixty or so years old to me. I couldn’t guess her class, but I had a feeling her level was pretty high. Over 10 at least.

  Or maybe old women scared me. It’s hard to know for certain.

  “Grensy told me you wanted to get a better view into how guilds work,” Kara said as she led me through the guild grounds for the Homestead Strikers.

  The layout and scale of the place reminded me of the old steel mill I got to explore several days back for that Clairton E gate. Big buildings with sheet metal walls and rooftops. Wide lanes for tractor trailers and other machinery to move about more easily. Out-of-service railroad tracks running along the far edge of the property. The operation was massive, and most staff used golf carts to get around because walking would take too long.

  “Yes, that’s right,” I answered. “He also mentioned you were CDM at one point?”

  Kara chuckled and pointed me through a door. “Fifteen years of a forty-year career. That place is a meat grinder.”

  Kara’s office was in one of the sheet metal buildings, and it felt more like a factory foreman’s office than I anticipated. She and seven other crawl managers shared a space with one of the guild’s refineries, making the air smell metallic and giving every surface a permanent layer of industrial grime.

  Apparently, metals were the only dungeon resource the Homestead Strikers regularly processed in-house. Anything else brought out of a dungeon was sold off. Very few guilds processed any of the materials they harvested themselves.

  “So,” she said as she sat, “what do you want to know?”

  “I wanted to hear a perspective on the work from someone on the other side of the fence, and I’d also like to learn more about how you choose crawlers and harvesters to hire.”

  Kara’s eyebrow raised. “Crawling is the only thing you actually want to talk about.”

  “It’s the topic I’m most interested in, sure, but I do care about the other stuff.”

  “I’m not saying you don’t. The pipeline from CDM work to guild work is a pretty common topic, is all. With the right CDM resume, management and harvesting are solid exit plans. If you survived the bureaucracy of the CDM, any other office job feels downright utopian, and the brains of a guild will welcome you with open arms. Crawling isn’t open at all, I’m afraid.”

  “Is it that hard to get a chance?” I asked.

  “That’s the thing. There is no chance to get. Groups like the Strikers rarely bring in an outside recruit, and if they do, it’s a caster class of some kind. Otherwise, the crawlers are all the great-grandkids or whatever of the founding members. I worked my way up from associate manager, thinking I could get a shot at crawling once I was on the inside.”

  Kara paused to shake her head.

  “Nope. Didn’t happen. It’s the same story with any of the other CDM guys at any other outfit too.”

  Now I saw why Grensmith facilitated this conversation. He was giving me a reality check. I wondered if this was something he did to all interns who had goals like mine.

  “I’m sorry to come down on your dreams like that,” Kara said, sincerely sympathetic. “I wish someone had talked sense into me earlier. Adjusting would have been easier.”

  “You struck me as someone who leveled a bit.”

  Kara grinned. “Always nice to get a compliment from the next generation. Anyway, I never said you couldn’t crawl. You’re just not getting in with any of the major guilds or teams. I ran gates on my days off. Lost money on them most of the time. D and E gates are duds more often than anyone lets on.”

  “I see.”

  “Listen, crawler management isn’t a bad gig,” she said. “I don’t get to run dungeons, but supporting the crawlers who do gives me a little secondhand taste of it.”

  “What does that kind of work entail?”

  “My job is to ensure that my crawlers enter a gate as prepared as possible. That means keeping gear maintenance schedules on track, coordinating crawl logistics and timing, administering payroll, and sometimes making party-level changes so that the best combinations of people are working together.”

  “Oh, that does sound cool.”

  Cool for someone who wasn’t me.