Nathan was out when I got home, which was unusual. He normally beat me by a few hours.

  First Megan acted weird, and now Nathan didn’t come home? Was he avoiding me?

  I texted him. “Hey. Are you okay?”

  “ya. getting that sweet sweet OT money baybeh”

  Ah. He picked up another shift. I was reading too far into this and inventing problems that weren’t there.

  Maybe. He could be working overtime and avoiding me.

  With Beth at work, entertaining myself was entirely up to me. I decided to pass the time studying wild goblins. I was still not medically cleared to pick up voluntary culls, so this was as close to training as I could get for now.

  This probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but I found relatively few videos of people hunting wild goblins. Nearly all of the content was about dungeon goblins, which made sense. Crawlers rarely did wild hunts, and viewers liked the steady action of a dungeon. Hunting outside of a dungeon meant long stretches of inaction.

  If I was streaming my Daisytown run, for example, watching me creep around town would make for terrible television. Even worse television? Watching me hide behind a bush for an hour, hoping the goblins searching for me would go away.

  One of the channels I found was exceptional, however.

  Six brothers from Michigan moved their families to Canada to claim a plot of government land. This was the same program my old church intended to use. Landowners were responsible for closing any gate under B-ranked, lightening the number of gates the government had to manage while also reclaiming territory for humanity. The concept sounded smart to me.

  The brothers recorded themselves running gates, but they also recorded the process of making their new homes safe from monsters. Until the majority of the monster population had been driven off or killed, the brothers were technically moving their families into the wilds, so they were motivated to root out any wild monsters nearby.

  Keep in mind that this was a resettlement program, as in, all of the land the government gifted had once been inhabited. If you’re picturing dense forest and babbling brooks, that’s not what this was. The brothers had a whole suburban neighborhood, a strip mall, and an office park on their land. That meant lots of places for monsters to bed down and nest.

  Two of the brothers were mages, and they briefly discussed bombing every building with spells. Ultimately, they decided that leveling them outright would make a proper, safe cleanup more difficult. Setting an old building full of asbestos on fire wasn’t the best decision when your family was all around breathing it in.

  A party of six level 13s didn’t have any trouble fighting goblins, nor were most of their tactics transferable to a low-level solo archer. They did talk about goblin traps at length, though, and that was a trove of knowledge I desperately needed.

  First of all, goblins weren’t engineers, so their traps had limited sophistication, narrowing the scope of trap types you had to be wary of. Their traps were simple tripwires, deadfalls, and sometimes pit traps. Goblins wouldn’t dig their own pits, but they would take advantage of an existing pit if they could.

  One pit trap the brothers found was a hole in the living room floor of a house, and another was an old cistern. Goblins only had so many options for covering up a hole, so avoiding pit traps distilled down to being infinitely skeptical of stepping on top of any sort of ground cover–leaves, sticks, rugs, tall bent grass, etcetera.

  Spotting the other kinds of traps was trickier. The key was to think about the best places for traps as if you were a goblin. If that dim corridor would be a great place for a tripwire, check for one. That door left ajar would make for a nice deadfall setup, so look.

  The glass bottle trap I walked into? That was a deadfall mechanism used as an alarm. Goblins liked to put those in places where your sightlines of the battlefield were especially limited. In other words, when the alarm went off, you were in the worst position to see the goblins moving against you. That was probably why I never saw the goblins around the trailers.

  I had to practice thinking like a sadistic asshole when I moved through an environment. If a sadistic asshole would do it, then a goblin definitely would too.

  At some point, a few hours and countless videos later, I sat back. Was I this certain that I was going back out again?

  Yes. Yes, I was.

  Enforcer Chapman didn’t pull me into being her notetaker the next day. She did, however, assign me to a large, tedious project. Going back five years, I was instructed to confirm the status of every suspected, charged, or convicted gate crasher. By status, I mean if they were living, dead, or if their status was unknown, as in there was no record of them dying, but they abruptly stopped paying taxes or accessing their health insurance.

  I went name by name, cross-referencing the crasher list against the Social Security Administration database and the National Death Index. Though I wasn’t privy to the next step, I had a guess as to what it was: See how many of the dead and unknown status crashers disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

  We had no real baseline for what a normal amount of crasher disappearances looked like–at least as far as I knew–making my assignment the very beginning of that effort. If crawlers recently became more ruthless about dealing with crashers, then the data would reflect that spike somewhere.

  These records couldn’t account for the crashers with no prior records who disappeared in gates, which in my mind was significant. Surely the majority of active crashers were the ones who had never been caught, but I had no real basis for that, and this investigation had to start somewhere.

  None of the other interns mentioned anything about crasher killers or rumors of that ilk, so I didn’t either. I was instructed not to reveal anything I heard, and I intended to listen.

  Don’t misunderstand me, though. I desperately wanted to gossip about crawlers killing gate crashers, but being able to keep my mouth shut was a prerequisite for pretty much every possible position I could earn in the CDM. Guarding secrets was definitely a requirement for Unsung Heroes. They kept their secrets so well that I gunned for a job I actually knew nothing about.

  Thankfully, Megan wasn’t at her desk very much that day. McDouglas pulled her out for some fieldwork, but the brief time she spent sitting next to me was tangibly awkward. I could feel her deliberately ignoring me, and she didn’t speak to me once. No hellos or good mornings. Only an uncomfortable glance.

  “Want to get some lunch?” Saito asked at some point.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I’m pretty swamped,” I answered, giving myself a five-minute break to scroll around on my phone. “I think I have to pass today.”

  “Missing person rates?”

  I glanced over my shoulder to see Saito looking at my phone screen.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Saito said. “That was really rude. I didn’t mean to look. It just caught my eye.”

  He did seem genuinely embarrassed by his behavior.

  I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. I was curious about it, so I looked it up.”

  “Learn anything interesting?”

  “On average, there are six hundred thousand missing persons reports filed every year. The majority end up solved or canceled. Only something like one percent are never solved.”

  Saito thought. “I wouldn’t have guessed reports were that high, but it makes sense, I suppose. A lot of those cases have to be things like kids running away or old people wandering off, so they probably get found quickly. Six thousand unsolved? That’s a really small fraction of the country’s population.”

  “Three hundred million against six thousand,” I replied. My thinking had traveled a path similar to Saito’s. “So something like .002% of the population each year.”

  “Interesting. Well, want me to get you anything while I’m out?”

  “I’m good. Thank you, though.”

  The more records I parsed, the more I began to imagine who these crashers were. I hadn’t crunched the numbers or anything, but most crashers were between eighteen and twenty-five, or they were older than forty. Very few crashers fell into the age ranges in between.

  Kids like me trying to get a leg up and older people desperate for money, perhaps?

  My spreadsheets couldn’t answer those questions, of course. I could tell you how old they were, where they were from, their general criminal record, and their gate-crashing record. I knew nothing, however, about who they were or the lives they lived.

  Still. I found myself hoping this rumor was baseless. A few kids trying to squeeze a level or two out of D and E gates didn’t deserve to get massacred by professional crawlers.

  On my way home from work, Beth texted me: “Heading in now to cover an earlier shift. Still closing, so I’ll be late. I made a bunch of mac salad. Tell Nathan he can have as much as he wants too!”

  He would definitely be happy to hear that. When I got into the apartment, though, he wasn’t around. I waited a couple of hours, ate far too much mac salad, and finally convinced myself to address whatever issue had Nathan avoiding me.

  I texted, “Beth made mac salad. It’s fair game.”

  “thanks!”

  “Is everything okay? Megan’s been weird at work, and I kind of feel like you’re avoiding me.”

  “we’re cool”

  “You and I are cool, or you and Megan are cool?”

  “both. i’m getting dinner with her now and then doing another OT shift. can we talk about this tomorrow night?”

  “Talk about…?”

  “it’s too much to text. i promise tho it’s all good”

  So there was something. The disconnect I felt wasn’t entirely made up if Nathan had something big enough to share that he couldn’t text it. Confirming there was a something only worsened my anxiety, however.

  He and Megan were having dinner, suggesting their early days of dating were actually going alright. Maybe he was getting ready to move out and felt bad about telling me?

  Did I make an inappropriate joke or comment that bothered Nathan or Megan deeply?

  Was he regretting his offer to let Beth stay with us indefinitely and feeling bad about having to break it to me?

  Did getting assaulted by that crawler have more serious health consequences than I knew? Or maybe that changed his perspective on tolerating our friendship?

  My phone rang.

  “An E gate needs cullers by 10:30 p.m. Are you available?”

  I wasn’t medically cleared to do culls, and Grensmith said that would take me off the voluntary crawl list until a physician officially cleared me. If I was getting this invitation, someone messed up. Perhaps my medical status never made it into my records? Perhaps someone removed it prematurely by mistake?

  Whatever the root cause, I was not supposed to be getting this call.

  Instead of explaining that to the man on the other end of the phone, I said, “Yes.”

  “Thank you for your service. I am texting you the address now.”

  This gate was by far the most remote gate I had seen yet. Windy Gap was in the very southwestern corner of the state, and it felt more remote than any of the places I saw on my way to Daisytown. There were barely any homes or structures–abandoned or otherwise–along the way, and the roads had been more or less ignored by society. On two occasions, I had to navigate around a washed-out road, and that was on top of the obstacles the GPS knew to avoid.

  Bridges had failed and were never repaired. Mudslides, rockslides, and fallen trees were never removed. Supposedly, the state was required to maintain a certain percentage of roads in unpopulated areas like this because people like me used them to reach and close gates, but none of what I traveled that day had been repaired in at least three decades.

  On the way, I passed the time with a crawler podcast, lower-ranked influencers who still did well for themselves even if they weren’t the best at clearing gates. This episode was a recap of major news items, with one catching my attention more than the others: An outdoor mall in Baltimore was recently cleansed of goblins by the EPA.

  Apparently the Old Town Mall was a popular, walkable place in the city once upon a time, but now it was abandoned and most of the buildings condemned.

  That description sounded on point for the location of a goblin nest until you looked up the location on a map. The Old Town Mall was in the heart of Baltimore. There was a Burger King two blocks away, and the Johns Hopkins Hospital was only five or so blocks away.

  How did goblins penetrate that deep into the city without getting noticed? That was the troubling question on everyone’s minds. Like most major cities, Baltimore had a web of sewer drains, underground rivers, and old train tunnels beneath its streets, but the EPA team that cleared the Old Town Mall nest flattened the buildings in the process. If the goblins had access to the sewers, the evidence was now beneath a few tons of rubble. The EPA insisted the problem was solved, however.

  Searching the underground seemed like the logical next step, and a few guilds volunteered to help, but the city stonewalled the release of those records. Making maps of public infrastructure so easily available was a safety concern, they argued, because what terrorist worth their salt would pass that up?

  I turned the volume down when my GPS said I was close to the gate.

  I soon learned that the address I was given was actually the address for a rendezvous point, not the gate itself. A truck with a trailer was parked alongside the road when I arrived, and two men in their late thirties were just finishing unloading four ATVs.

  “Name?” the larger of the two men asked.

  “Carmino.”

  “Good. You know how to drive one of these?”

  “Yes.” Our church community had a few when I was growing up. We used them for getting around our farmland, mostly.

  “Excellent. We’re waiting on one more. I’ll be the captain. I’m a fighter. The guard is a brawler.”

  “Archer.”

  “I can read.”

  “Right.”

  After several minutes of no one speaking and only looking at their phones, I asked, “How far off the road is the gate?”

  “Three quarters of a mile, give or take,” the captain replied without looking up.

  “Do we know what kind of dungeon?”

  “Goblin.”