“Is your flamethrower working properly?” I asked Jamal as he awkwardly backed himself into the truck.

“Oh yes, Mr. Carl. It is quite primed and ready to cause much melty inconvenience to any nasty cars who attempt to get to the finish line before us.”

“Okay, good.”

I turned to Hedy. “Thank you, Hedy.”

The little gremlin smacked me in the ass.

“Why you sayin’ goodbye, boss? It sounds like I ain’t going nowhere if you actually win. You’ll be stuck with me for the next floor, too.”

I smiled sadly at the small gremlin. I patted her on the head. “Nevertheless, thank you. You’ve been a great asset to the team.”

Elle: Ah, hell, guys.

Carl: What’s wrong?

Elle: We just got a notification that the Bleak Congregation left the realm. It says a new team will replace them for the final heat. This screws up all our math.

Donut: THAT MEANS THE MINISTER OF BLOOD-LETTING GOT ACCEPTED INTO THE UNHOLY CHOIR! HE’S BEEN WORKING SO HARD! I KNOW THIS IS A BAD THING, BUT I’M VERY PROUD OF HIM.

Elle: You do realize that dude was evil incarnate, right?

Donut: JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE DRESSES LIKE A FUNERAL PROCESSION EJACULATED ON THEM, IT DOESN’T MEAN THEY’RE BAD. HE WAS A VERY NICE PERSON FOR AN UNDEAD NPC. HE SAID WE CAN DO A DUET IF HE EVER RECORDS HIS “REQUIM FOR THE VILE” ALBUM.

Elle: He would change the lyrics to his songs so they were about sacrificing babies to the dark lord.

Donut: HE TOLD ME THAT WAS A METAPHOR.

We watched Bruna step from the garage and move toward the starting line, Osvaldo sitting stubbornly on the back.

“Do you think anybody told him the plan?” Donut asked.

“Most of his friends are dead or have taken a deal,” I said, watching the man. “He got a bum deal, and it really sucks. But he had a way out, and he refused to take it. But, yes, Donut, I would guess he knows the plan.”

“Okay,” she said, her voice small. She downed a Size Up potion, watching the back of Osvaldo’s head.

While we waited, Dwight appeared, awake and sober. His vine trailed a wheeled cart behind it. On the platform was a spinning high-tech-looking missile launcher.

I grunted with amusement. That goddamned unicorn.

Donut sighed. “Osvaldo took the splooge like you thought. Also, his dexterity is really high. It’s 285 with all his buffs. He has a Deflector ability, and his Jump skill is level 15.”

“I figured,” I said. “What about Puddle Jump or Phase?”

“He has Puddle Jump, but it’s only level 8. So it’ll have a ten-second countdown. I don’t see any Phase or Teleport abilities, but he might have a scroll. Oh, wait. He has Launch. That’s level 14. And Super Speedster.”

“Damnit,” I said.

We’d spent some time game-planning the situation as if we were in Osvaldo’s shoes.

We had to assume that he knew the plan, despite us keeping him out of the loop. I was pretty sure I knew what he was going to do. It was a good plan. It was a smart plan, even if a little fucked-up. I couldn’t see any other options if I were him, especially since he had to wait for us to first blow open the path. We had to be ready for it.

“I hate this, Carl,” Donut said.

“I know.”

Jamal was the only mercenary we were adding to the heat, and that was only as a backup in case something went wrong. I was driving with Donut firmly ensconced in Dorota, who was still muted. Despite the four-hour timer, if all went to plan, this final heat would take less than a minute to complete.

But only if they didn’t pull any last-minute fuckery with the rules. I was girding myself for whatever it was.

Pontiff: The new croupier at the top-floor casino used to be a wall rat. His name is Mitch. He’s an ass, but he’s a crafty one. I bought a portal-examination spell from the market and waited at the casino for someone to open the new Nothing slot. I am not sure what the results mean. I just spoke with Rosetta regarding this, and she has a new theory based on the numbers I relayed to her from the scroll results. She suggests that if I step into the portal, and I do not die but I stay hired as a mercenary, then this portal is not what you want it to be. But if I step in, survive, and am removed from your employ, it suggests I have been brought from the holding area into an area of the dungeon outside the playing field. That suggests the original exit plan is still viable.

Carl: Okay, thank you. It’s not necessary for you to try to kill yourself for this. The final race is starting.

Pontiff: I am not so certain. Carl, I am going to do this. I keep thinking back to the type of person I once was. I have made a change. But knowing what I know now, I know simply changing myself is not enough. I do not know if this will help you, but no matter what happens, you will have information. And this information may help those who I once called “friend.”

I was too tired, too emotionally spent, too stressed to argue with him.

Carl: Okay, Pontiff. Thank you for your help.

But then I had an idea. A just-in-case.

Carl: Wait, Pontiff. One more thing. I want you to tell Herot something for me.

We pulled up to the starting block. Unlike in the previous heat, we didn’t just suddenly appear in an AC duct. There was this strange moment when we changed size, and the effect was like a camera trick from a Hitchcock movie. Even though the apartment looked normal-sized from our garage, the closer I drove toward it, the larger the apartment appeared. We drove under the awning, and then we were suddenly in the large lobby of the building.

We were still tiny, but we were about three times the size as we had been before. We went from the size of a Lego brick to about the size of a computer mouse. We were under a curved metal awning, right next to Dwight. Osvaldo sat alone upon Bruna on the other side of the unicorn. We were close enough that I could reach out and grab the side of the vine.

“You’re going to suffer as you die,” Dwight said. The missile launcher attached to the back of his vine hummed. I wasn’t worried about the missiles. He wouldn’t be able to fire them until he was out of the starting blocks. The ceiling was much too low.

His GPS unit’s avatar was a tiny holographic fairy that he’d programmed to look just like the late Lucienne.

“You and your low-tier GPS are fucked,” the fairy said. She even had Lucienne’s voice.

I rolled up the window, not responding.

I reached over to the control panel of one of our new weapons, which we’d borrowed from another crawler’s vehicle, and I clicked over to the potion-delivery shotgun. I then warmed up the three-times-a-race hole-punch gun designed to pop a large hole in any shield for three seconds.

“Dr. Metcalf,” I said, “load up the updated potion that Mordecai made and time the weapon to fire the exact nanosecond the light turns green. Hole punch, then potion.”

You got it, boss. If it’s all the same to you, I’m going to add the electrical disrupter potion ball to the third cannon. That will fry that bitch of a GPS. I’ll show her who’s low-tier.

In addition to a few extra weapons, we’d managed to snag a group of three separate GPS upgrades. We had gotten one standard upgrade so we could now see our place in the heat, an integrated weapon’s control system, and a golden-tier cloaking upgrade that greatly increased her processing power, allowing her to overclock certain vehicle systems and, more importantly, make it so other GPS units could only see what we wanted them to see.

Still, the upgrades were more than enough to satisfy Dr. Metcalf. Her acerbic attitude had completely changed. Though she still refused to remove the gag on Dorota.

For the first time, we could now see the other teams at their own starting blocks.

The room was a typical massive lobby in an apartment building. There was a door to the outside, a bank of mailboxes, a bike rack, a pair of doors that led off to the first-floor apartments, the elevator door, the entrance to the main stairwell, and a few more utility rooms.

We were all lined up in a square in the lobby, with just one square-shaped awning after another with a small wall separating each heat.

The moment we entered below our awning, we were transported from outside the apartment to our space along the wall, facing the massive bank of mailboxes. I couldn’t see any of the racers on either side of us, but I started to examine all the heats directly across from us.

Strangely, I could see the multitude of cul-de-sacs behind each heat. I turned, and sure enough, I could see our own street with our garage in the distance. That was unusual and inconsistent with all the previous heats. Usually, once we entered the starting block, we were cut off from going back to our garage.

“Weird,” I said.

I spied a heat with a polar bear, a giraffe, and that same yellow AMC Pacer I’d noticed in a previous heat. I couldn’t see the driver, but I could see the polar bear was jockeyed by a pair of NPC orcs. The giraffe, likewise, had a single slime NPC on the back.

“Carl, that yellow car is team Yokai!” Donut said.

“Wait,” I said. “That means all three teams in that heat are NPCs.”

A horrible realization dawned on me. All that work, all that planning meant nothing if they were allowing NPC-only teams for the final heat.

Race starts in 4 minutes.

And then I saw it the same moment the message came in. The next two heats next to them, right in a row, a double set of gut punches.

“Oh no,” I said.

Donut gasped.

The grouping was a Cadillac floating on a cushion of air, Imani and Elle’s APV, and a red semitruck.

Imani: No. No, no, no, no, no.

Elle: Fucking hell.

Chris was now in the same heat as Imani and Elle.

It got worse.

The next heat over featured a gecko, an NPC-driven sedan, and a moped with Florin at the controls and Lucia Mar sitting behind him in the back.

Louis and Britney were now in the same heat as Florin and Lucia.