Wake Fluffy! His client’s out of her coma and our junior translators are reporting strange things being said. We need their expertise on that “English” language.

  – Radio transmission from Voices for Non-Citizens

  “A ton?!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How many?”

  My words alarmed everyone. Alexandra dashed out of her office, hanging around the doorframe with an expression of shock. The communication specialist raised her hands to her head and closed her eyes, focusing on a distant discussion. My kids looked worried.

  Vince looked a little excited.

  Dumbass.

  Ariel, can you give me more details? All legal varieties? How many is that? Have we seen any of them before in Challenges or Trials?

  

  “Four new types,” I said aloud. “Three are souped-up versions of the snakeropods, gasylosaurs, and milliceratops from the dino war challenge. Ariel, what’s the fourth? Another dinosaur? What capabilities?”

  

  “Flight and stealth? Is that all? The other Titans are dangerous to large groups. Fire from the D-Rex, sonic attacks from the bonefur, gas from the gasylosaur… even the snakeropod can send a dozen people flying with its tail, and the milliceratops could trample a group.”

  

  “That still doesn’t sound like something capable of mass destruction.”

  

  When I relayed the information, Vince went white, his apparent excitement vanishing. He spun to point a finger toward Alexandra. “You better send out an order: no one goes out alone, and everyone registers how long they expect to be out. We can’t just let people disappear, and we don’t have enough Rulers to track everyone.”

  Alexandra nodded, not taking offense at my husband’s commanding tone. “You’re right. I’ll draft something up. But we need to get an Announcement out about the increased danger right now. Marie, can you do that?”

  Her question was directed toward the military Communication specialist, who lifted a hand in acknowledgement and blasted out a quick Announcement, sharing what we’ve learned so far. Afterward, she looked up. “I’ve passed the information along to the Arsenal, as well. They’ll be sending it out through our networks. We’ll get the news to about thirty percent of the U.S. in less than thirty minutes.”

  Impressive. But… can’t we do better?

  For the group’s benefit, I spoke aloud. “Ariel, can you send out a system announcement like you did for the first Titan? I know you didn’t for the second…”

  

  I waited, listening.

  Nothing.

  I sighed. “Well, do that, then!”

  

  Four new Titans activated. Weakened versions of three Titans were seen previously in Challenges and were inspired by data gathered from our surveys of your planet.

  Face the challenges before you to grow in strength and earn rewards. Good luck!

  “That’s all you’re saying?”

  

  “Well… yes… but can’t you tell them any more than that?!”

  

  I growled in frustration. “Can you… No. I’m not falling into that trap again! This is an order: run planned announcements by me before you send them! If you’re limited in when you can send them out, we’re going to jam-pack them with information. Tell me if you can’t follow these orders.”

  

  My brief flush of satisfaction at passing a worldwide warning was washed away by sourness. If only I’d taken a little more care with my words! I know how literal Ariel is. She’s not a lateral thinker and she doesn’t take initiative. I’ve known her for less than two hours, and that much is already very, very clear.

  A hand landed on my shoulder. “Hey. You’re doing great.”

  “I’m not! I-”

  Vince interrupted me, voice soft. “You’re literally saving more lives than anyone else on Earth right now.”

  “But-”

  “You didn’t ask for this.”

  “Well-”

  “No one expects you to do it perfectly from the get-go.”

  “I-”

  “And you’re doing way better at it than the other four people in your position. Those slackers. Sleeping on the job.” He shook his head in mock judgment.

  “Vince!” I shrieked.

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  Micah looked horrified. “Dad, they’re in comas.”

  “Sounds like slacking off to me,” Vince said. He’s grinning, though. I know he’s being intentionally awful to make me laugh.

  “You’re terrible.”

  “Yeah. But you’re great.” He pulled me over to plant a kiss on my forehead. “This isn’t all on you, Meghan. We’ve got tons of people to support you, and a bus full of military brass and strategists who should be here within the hour.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Marie, the communications specialist. “I’m keeping an eye on them. They already had to stop and fight a snakeropod, and now they’re turning around because there’s a gasylosaur right up the road and not all of them have gas masks.”

  “We need to make more gas masks,” Alexandra said. “At least we have a lot of Matter Replicators these days.”

  Her last word is muffled by the sharp retort of Bunker Benjamin’s tankbuster gun. Then, the gun fires again.

  And a third time.

  The noise of the gun isn’t unusual, but the repeated shots in close succession are. Ben has gotten really good at taking out the D-Rexes and bonefurs in a single shot, not wasting our difficult-to-replicate ammunition.

  “Sounds like we have company above.” Alexandra pursed her lips. “I should go. A lot of decisions will need to be made, and I can’t be inaccessible. I’ll send an aide to take notes.”

  She hurried from the room. A gangly teenage boy carrying a clipboard and a folding chair took her place a moment later.

  I tilted my head upward. It wasn’t necessary - I didn’t even need to speak aloud to talk to Ariel - but it felt right. “Are the new Titans taking the place of some of the old monsters? Or did the overall number of Titans increase?”

  

  “So we just tripled the rate at which Titans appear?!”

  

  I put my face in my hands as another gunshot sent a tremor through the fort.

  “Hey,” Vince said. “At least we’ll get a lot more Money and Points. And prizes! Do the new guys drop anything good?”

  Ariel? Anything new and interesting rewards from these guys?

  

  Nothing new?!

  

  I frowned, disgusted. “She says they’ve got the same loot table as the bonefurs.”

  Marie gasped, making us all look over. She waved a hand at us. “Sorry. I just got my first glimpse of one of those stealth Titans. It dove in and grabbed one of the convoy guards.”

  “Is he okay?” asked Gavin.

  Marie smiled at him. “He lived. Flip was accompanying the convoy and managed to catch up with the Titan and knock it out of the sky almost immediately. She used her Specialty, though, so I’m worried about what will happen when the next one attacks. Meghan, is there any way to detect those things?”

  I passed the question along and listened to the answer. “Tons of ways, technically. It’s visible, just a grayish blue that doesn’t stand out very well against the sky. Life Sense shows it clearly, but it flies too high for that to give more than a split-second warning as it dives. It’ll show up to some of the other weird close-range senses too, like if people can sense metal or water, but those abilities suffer from the same range restriction. Echolocation will reveal something, but it produces a jamming signal that makes it hard to pinpoint. It’s visible in infrared but highly insulated with an outer layer that actively mimics the ambient temperature. Oh! She says it doesn’t have active defenses against ultraviolet vision.”

  Marie nodded absently. “I don’t think they have anyone with that kind of Augment with them.”

  “What senses do they have? I can ask Ariel how well they’d work.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  As she consulted, I leaned back. “Why is Arsenal leadership even coming here? In the past, they’ve carted me over to them.”

  Pointy shrugged. “Do you remember Colonel Zwerinski’s death?”

  I queried my Eidetic Memory and reeled a little at the barrage that returned. “I… Not until you asked. I remember now, though. They’re coming to bring a replacement for him?”

  It’s weird, grieving a death you temporarily forgot about. My feelings about Dane Zwerinski were complex, but I’m instantly certain that I don’t want a replacement. The Arsenal tried that before, and it didn’t work very well. Dane and Tamara Zwerinski belonged here.

  “I’m sure that’s part of it.”

  “Only part?”

  Pointy frowned. “Things have been busy while you were… unavailable. You’ve missed a lot.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. I scanned my memories. These are all the kids I have, right? And they haven’t suffered any new permanent injuries? No, they seem fine. “What do you mean?”

  “The Challenge frightened a lot of people. About half of Fort Autumn moved out immediately afterward. Then, the next day, more than half the people who left came right back.”

  “Moving out makes sense. Why…?”

  Vince spoke up. “Titans and Threats. Everyone who came back from the Challenge had a bracelet, and so Threats started appearing anywhere they moved to. That didn’t make them popular with their new neighbors, and most places are way worse at dealing with Threats or Titans than we are. Benjamin’s rifle is a significant advantage, and there seems to be some kind of cooldown on how quickly Threats can appear in a given area.”

  Ariel? Is there a cooldown on Threat appearance?

  

  “Ariel confirms the cooldown. The Threats we got here must have been pretty huge, though!”

  “They are,” Pointy confirmed. “There’s a space of several hundred feet around our Pylon that’s just a pile of churned-up wreckage. But we’ve got teams on standby to take them down quickly. When people go elsewhere, they have to fight the Threats and Titans themselves. They can’t rely on other defenders. It didn’t take long for a lot of people to decide that Threats and Titans were scarier than guaranteed Challenges. Especially since a lot of them kept gathering Novelty even after they left the area, and raising the Novelty of people in their new homes.”

  Ariel, you have control of the Threats, right? Can you turn them off?

  

  Well… reduce them as much as you can? Don’t deliver any new kinds of Threats.

  

  Part of me wanted to quiz her on what the next new Threat would be, but there were a million things that needed doing and we had literal months before we needed to worry about that. Instead, I pulled my focus back to my previous question. Why had we gotten onto the topic of what had happened at Fort Autumn? Oh, people had been trying to avoid getting max Novelty, but they’d already been screwed by having bracelets. That Novelty rise had spread through all of Fort Autumn, but it had started with me.

  “So they didn’t want to cart me over to the Arsenal because they’re trying to limit the, uh, Novelty impact?”

  “More or less.” Pointy said.

  I frowned. “I guess that’s why the hospital bed came here, too, instead of vice versa.”

  Vince frowned, his head twitching in affirmation. “Yeah. A couple doctors immigrated to Fort Autumn to check on you. Like, they moved here permanently. They didn’t want to risk spreading Novelty to any other patients.”

  “Like it’s a disease,” I muttered.

  Marie cleared her throat. “Ah… The leaders from the Arsenal are turning back. Until we get a handle on the new situation, travel is too difficult, and it gets much worse near Fort Autumn. For now, I’ll be acting as a communications relay. They are going to get together a dedicated team of guards for you, but they don’t have one ready right now.”

  Gunshots have continued to ring out, an irregular pattern that pauses occasionally, but doesn’t truly stop.

  There hasn’t been a minute since I heard about the Titans’ release that the fort hasn’t been under attack.

  Me and Fort Autumn.

  Neither of us can catch a break.

  “Alright,” I said. “What do they want to know? I’ll get as many answers as I can.”

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