The pain tore through him, shooting Jay back into his own body. He reflexively tried to grab his leg where the pain came from but ended up with a glove full of leather from the diving suit’s pants. Blue boxes flashed in his eyes.

  Stop screaming, Alister said. It couldn’t have hurt that much. And you’re very loud in such a small space.

  Jay choked off the verbal reaction to the pain, semi-literally as attempting to inhale again made him cough. “Has it been an hour?” he asked, between sputtering coughs.

  “What?” Another voice asked, coming in through the helmet’s communication enchantment. “What do you mean an hour?”

  No. Someone was attempting to contact you. The large man with the shield, Alister elaborated.

  Shit. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it, Warinot.”

  “Don’t worry about it?” The guardian seemed incredulous at the idea. “You were screaming so loud I’d be surprised if you had a voice tomorrow and you want me not to worry about it? Did you jump off the cliff after I explicitly told you not to?”

  “No. Just got nipped. By one of my own snakes.”

  “You took a snake in your diving suit? Where were you even keeping it?”

  “He likes to wrap around my arm,” Jay said. “And besides, there’s plenty of room.”

  Warinot scoffed. “Plenty of room, maybe, if you call the wrinkles in the sleeves plenty. Those air enchantments weren’t built for more than one breather.”

  “He –” Jay cut himself off. Saying that Alister didn’t breathe wouldn’t be a good idea. Even snakes needed oxygen. “He doesn’t breathe much.”

  “Maybe so. Still, you need to find something else to do with it for future dives. Sooner or later, you’ll need even that extra bit of breath.”

  “If you say so,” Jay said.

  “I do. Now get back here. If you’ve been spending all that extra breath on an animal, you probably need an extra long inspection.”

  “Sure.” Jay started moving away from the trench’s edge, limping slightly from the residual pain of Alister’s bite.

  I have plenty of health left. Why did your bite actually hurt? he asked the skeleton.

  Health is odd, the parasite replied. There has to be hostile intent for the shielding effect to trigger. Since I was doing it to bring you back to yourself, nothing.

  That doesn’t make any sense, Jay objected. How does it tell?

  What, you think it spends all that time gathering information on everyone without being able to see why people do the things they do? Otherwise it would block any healing you could get too.

  I guess, he replied. I do think next time you’re going to have to go into the [Crypt], though. Can’t have people getting suspicious about how I can keep a snake in my suit without causing extra strain.

  Hmph, Alister grunted. If I must.

  The light had begun to come back. It seemed more gradual than it had been going down, like the light was reluctant to return. Jay knew that wasn’t how light worked, but it was still what it felt like. At least he wasn’t seeing any more of the sinuously thin glowing things anymore. Wherever they’d hidden, they were staying there.

  At one point, he could have sworn he felt Agensyx overhead, but didn’t find him when he looked. The spirit didn’t respond when he tried asking either. It was a little bit odd, honestly; after they’d left Steelgate, he basically hadn’t said anything. That was definitely something he would have to get to the bottom of once he was back on dry land.

  *

  The rest of Group One looked at him oddly when he finally trudged his way back up into the full light. Most of them were out of their suits already and the few that weren’t were in the process of shucking theirs, so clearly they’d been back for a while already. Whatever training Warinot had taken them through probably hadn’t taken anywhere near as long as Jay’s own adventure, and likely hadn’t been nearly as harrowing either.

  He could still feel [Lesser Resurrection] at work, too, back out in the sunken city. He couldn’t tell what it was doing or even if it was doing anything, but he could feel it. It wasn’t still casting, so he didn’t have to improvise a way to hide the wisps of magic that flooded out from his hands when he used it. He was very thankful for that.

  “Carter!” Warinot called from his tent where the original semicircle had been. There were only four of the larger tents left up, but the ones that had been taken down had left dead grass where they were. “Get in here.”

  That didn’t help the looks he was getting, though it did shift some of them from wariness to pity. Everyone knew the experience of getting chewed out by an authority figure; no one wished it on anyone else without good reason. Even if the person on the chopping block was the slightly-older-than-you guy with the weird snake.

  He had serious rehabilitation to do on his reputation if that was what stuck around. It hadn’t even been two days, so it shouldn’t be too late to turn it around. Jay hadn’t even been sure how to respond to that idea when it showed up while they were eating the night before.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  His brainstorming of ways to make himself seem more normal to the rest of them, at least for however long it took him to get what he needed out of this place and leave, came to an end as he reached the large canvas tent. Jay shrugged his way through the flap and found the big man polishing his shield.

  Warinot looked up when he entered and nodded slightly. “Good. No unnecessary delays.” He rubbed the rag across the last corner of the shield, leaned in close, then nodded again. This time the nod seemed to be aimed more at the shield than at him. “Then we have some things that we need to talk about.”

  Jay played it cool, pretending that just hearing such a vague phrase hadn’t sent his heart into a fit of palpitations. “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that you stowed away getting here.” He paused for a second to set down the shield on a rack that was clearly built and reinforced to hold the thing’s massive weight, then kept adjusting it as he resumed speaking. “Like the fact that you aren’t supposed to be here at all. Like the fact that every time I look at you, my Class pings you as either someone in desperate need of protection or of someone I should keep everyone else as far away from as possible.”

  Shit. The idea of hiding out hadn’t lasted long, had it? Jay scrambled for something to say.

  “Well, I’m definitely the extra the blond guy mentioned,” Jay started. “And I guess you could call what I did stowing away. Not like there was a cabin for me, you know? Last minute additions don’t tend to have that luxury. I don’t know anything about that last thing; I don’t have much of a clue about how guardian abilities work.”

  Warinot raised his head to meet Jay’s, eyes narrowed. “How do you not know how guardians work?”

  Shit again. Was that supposed to be common knowledge?

  “I grew up isolated,” Jay tried.

  “Isolated in a place with no guardians? Not even a town guard?”

  “No?” Jay said, having meant it to be a statement. It came out closer to a question.

  “Hm,” he grunted. “Was it a cult?”

  “Potentially. I’m, uh. Not entirely sure.”

  The guardian grimaced. “One of those, then.” He seemed to have made some inference that Jay didn’t fully understand from that, but if it got him out of that situation, he wasn’t going to complain. “I hate to hear that, mostly for your sake. They gave you your Class?”

  “Yeah?” Jay was determined to roll with whatever the group leader had assumed; he seemed sympathetic to it, so that should help if nothing else did.

  “Right. They tend to do that. Here’s what we’re going to do, Jay. You keep anything still lingering in your head from that cult’s trash to yourself and I’ll stop digging into whether you should or should not actually be here. Just don’t go acting out, alright?” Warinot leaned in. “Between you and I, there’s a few forceful personalities in this group already. No need to get them riled up.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Jay said. “Who are the ones you’re thinking of?”

  The guardian laughed. “No, no. You don’t get out of social activity that easily. Figure out who has a hair’s breadth of patience on your own if that’s what you’re interested in. I’m sure it won’t be too hard.”

  Jay nodded.

  “Since you missed me explaining this to everyone else, drop your suit on the table behind the tent to the left. That’s Elyra’s. She’ll let you know if your scaled friend was draining too much air from the storage. I’ve also let everyone else know not to kill any snakes they see slithering around out here, so any of your pets should be fine.”

  “Thank you,” Jay said. He knew both that they’d probably still freak out if they saw Alister and that Agensyx could take care of himself if he ever came back on land, but it was the thought that counted.

  Warinot waved the thanks off. “Just don’t purposefully disrupt the necessary parts of anyone else’s Class and it’ll be even enough.” He took a breath, tapped a finger on his knee, and then spoke again. “You’ve now been under the longest of anyone in this group except me. See anything interesting while you were down there?”

  “Define interesting.”

  The big man gave him a flat, unamused look.

  “I saw a city of some sort. Some giant ball of creatures. That’s about it,” Jay said.

  “You hit the right angle, then,” Warinot replied. “The city is our first big target once everyone’s had a chance to get used to each other and become acquainted with the practical requirements of this job. Unless things got more mixed around than anyone knows, that should be Vresbus. Bosi says it was the main trading center on this side of Ayor.”

  “And now it’s underwater.”

  “Yes it is. Nobody’s sure if we’ll be able to bring it up in one piece or not. We’re not even sure if it’s safe to try. With just the few of us here, we didn’t feel like going in was a good idea,” the guardian said.

  “What was with the dark haze in there?” Jay asked.

  The other man cocked an eyebrow. “You saw that? Didn’t know Tamer classes had much a use for magic.”

  “It comes in handy sometimes,” Jay said.

  “It does tend to do that no matter how else you get it,” Warinot agreed. “Truth is, we don’t know what it is. It wasn’t there the first time we came close and kept growing thicker every time we passed by. We were hoping it would dissipate by the time we needed to start clearing the city itself.”

  “It looked like it was roiling,” Jay mentioned. “And there were flashes of purple in there.”

  “That’s new.” He sounded perplexed. “Both of those are. Doesn’t sound like a good thing; I’ll have to ask Morios about it at some point. That man has forgotten more magical knowledge than I know and it’s not even his primary focus.”

  “He’s the healer, right?” Jay checked.

  “The best healer you’ll ever see. I don’t know of another tri-class healer. There are a couple of other triplicates around, but nothing focused in quite that direction.” Warinot sounded like he couldn’t praise the minotaur enough.

  “I’m not even sure what that means beyond the obvious,” Jay said.

  “Not much for me to say, really. It’s like class-to-subclass synergy taken to a much higher level. Takes a lot of effort to get anywhere near it, not to mention a healthy dose of luck, but sometimes it’s very worth it.”

  Maybe it was unfair to expect an answer to that question, but Jay still wanted to know more than that. He hadn’t even realized that three classes at a time was possible. Maybe that one Asanti had been right about the island’s library being incredibly limited. How many classes was it possible to have, then?

  “Alright, get out of here,” Warinot said. “I’ll start making dinner in a little while. Don’t expect that every day; this is going to be a rotating job. Same with all the other camp-wide chores.”

  Jay ducked back out of the tent and went around the back to go drop off the diving suit. Somehow, unclasping it was even harder than getting it on had been. The riveted buttons didn’t want to pop open, which was probably a good thing while underwater but was a gigantic annoyance now that he was actually trying to get out. The fumbling grip the gloves gave him didn’t help.

  Eventually he got it off and took a second to look at the bite Alister had given him. It wasn’t bleeding thankfully and didn’t even look that bad, but it was undeniably there. Hopefully it wouldn’t get infected or be too much trouble for him.

  As he walked around the far end of Elyra's tent to head back to his, a golden-furred hand dropped onto his shoulder.

  “So. What was that all about?” Oloros asked.

  “Don’t pressure him too hard,” Kor’vass objected. Jay didn’t see where she was. “But we would like to know.”

  *

  “So what did you think of that?” Warinot asked the air, keeping his voice to a controlled low level.

  “I think there’s something still off about your extra,” Kallin’s voice responded, whispering directly into his ear. “Keep an eye on him.”

  “I intend to. He never gave me a good reason to believe the cult was responsible for the strange way [Watcher] reacts to him.”

  “Do ex-cult-members normally give you odd results?” the blond man’s voice asked.

  Warinot shook his head before he realized the gesture wouldn’t be transmitted. “No. Not even current cult members tend to do that unless they were abducted.”

  “Something is definitely off, then,” Kallin agreed. “Something is also off about his giant snake.”

  “The one that keeps swimming around out there?”

  “No, the other giant snake,” Kallin joked. “Yes, that one. I may not be a Tamer, but snakes generally need to sleep. That one hasn’t stopped doing whatever it’s doing in over a day. That’s not right.”

  “That’s your concern?” Warinot asked. “Remind me how long you used to go without sleeping?”

  “I had artificial stimulants. A truly heart-stopping amount of them. That’s a snake. They don’t have those.”

  “Maybe they’re both worth keeping an eye on.”

  “That would probably be for the best,” Kallin agreed. “And maybe we try to keep him from leashing any more snakes while we’re here.”

  “Agreed.”