Clarabelle didn’t even try to stop us.

She saw us walk in, and she held up her hands and said, “Nope.”

“Does this door go to the top level?” I asked.

“It does now . . .” She paused and lowered her hands. “Wait, Carl?” She burst out laughing. “If you’re planning on intimidating the guards, maybe you shouldn’t be the one leading the charge.” She looked me up and down. “This would be strangely adorable if half the club didn’t die every time you guys entered.”

“It’s even more embarrassing for us,” muttered Donut.

Clarabelle eyed Samantha, who was currently zipping around Louis, whispering in his ear. Her attention then turned to Lucia, who stood in the back. Lucia was now chewing on her nail, looking back and forth nervously, and I knew someone else was in charge of her body.

“Some of you are permanently banned,” Clarabelle said. “And a couple of you don’t even have a pass. The guards aren’t going to like that too much.”

“Oh, honey, we’ll take our chances. Won’t we, Louis?” Samantha said. “This is our favorite club.”

I didn’t respond as I pushed through the door.

Entering the Desperado Club.

The thirty of us moved in. The music blared, but it wasn’t the EDM beat it used to be. Instead, this was more of a frenetic jazz. In one corner, an entire band played. They were an eclectic mix of races from a Naga drummer to a cretin upright bassist to a succubus singer woman wearing a cowboy hat. The rest of the band featured a guitarist, a drummer, a pianist, and multiple horn players who all bopped to the beat. All around, a group of NPCs in what appeared to be 1920s gear danced.

The generated NPCs were all different. They’d once been mostly young, mostly attractive humans and elves and other similar races. But now it was a strange mix of the monstrous, all bopping and dancing, sitting at individual tables and dancing on the small redesigned dance floor. Smoke filled the room. They all looked up at our entrance.

There were multiple guards. It was no longer cretins and gnolls, though there were some mixed in the crowd of security personnel. This was mostly a mix of orcs and hobgoblins and trolls, monsters similar to those sitting at the tables but larger.

The guards all moved to block our path. Soon, we were surrounded by guards, though we outnumbered them.

Chris stepped forward. He held up a hand.

“Hi, Clay,” Chris said, looking at a cretin standing in the back of the crowd. This was the bass player from the band, and he’d put his instrument down at our entrance and stepped forward. The band continued to play without him, but the sound now fell into the background.

The cretin pushed past the guards and looked Chris up and down. “You different.”

Chris held out his arms. “I’m a werewolf now.”

“Like Altered Beast,” Clay-Ton said.

Next to me, Donut gasped. “Oh my god. Hi, Clay-ton!” She gasped again. “Wait, how did you get here? Are Sledgie and Bomo and Very Sullen here?”

The cretin shook his head. “No. Contract ran out. I don’t know where they is. I said I no more want to fight, and they let me be in band.” He turned to the other guards. “But I will fight today. Chris and Donut and friends pass. If you stop them, you stop me.”

“Yo, Clay? You need backup?” This came from the succubus in the cowboy hat behind the microphone.

“Maybe,” Clay-Ton said.

The guards all looked at each other, confused.

“Hamed will kill us,” said one of the guards, a level 65 troll named Klonder.

“They are crawlers, and it’s tenth floor. If you try to stop them, they kill you,” replied Clay-ton. “I work as guard a very long time. Late-stage crawlers you don’t try to stop.”

Klonder looked back at his fellow guards, and he took a step back. He bowed to Chris. “Welcome to the Desperado Club.”

The casino was through the same door it always had been, but once we pushed inside, it was completely changed. The games themselves looked mostly the same, but the room now seemed a little more high-end than it was before. Strange gold leaf covered everything. Several murals covered the walls. The largest mural stood in the back, and it, strangely, showed a family of Bopcas standing in front of a mushroom house. The painting featured a Bopca couple, and the woman was clearly pregnant, but she also held a tiny swaddled baby. Just past them were dozens more similar families. They all cowered as they looked up in the sky. While the painting was ornate and well-done, it was completely out of place. The other murals featured random wartime scenes, mostly featuring orcs and Crocodilians. It was all very strange.

Everything was much fancier since the remodel. The decorative stairwell to the lower casino floor remained open, and even the balustrade appeared expertly carved. Multiple glittering chandeliers hung from the ceiling.

There was much more furniture in the room, almost like they’d cleared out another room and were storing things here. A line of antique-looking chairs took up an entire wall. A group of tables with no games on them stood in a line.

The croupier behind the Wheel of Fortune game was not the same guy as last time, though he looked as if he could have been that guy’s bigger and meaner brother. The simple table from before was now wide and long, made of some dark wood covered with gold leaf. Gargoyle-like patterns were etched along the sides. The wheel itself appeared unchanged, and it looked out of place in the room

The description of the croupier was strange.

Mitch Fiorelli. Level 120. Desperado Club Wheel of Fortune Croupier.

Also, the guy who will tea-bag you.

This is an Enforcer for the <Redacted>.

You may not further examine soldiers of <Redacted> until <Redacted>.

Huh, I thought. I assumed this had to do with whatever weirdness Hamed had going on in the Cosmic Lounge. Either way, this dude was a much higher level than I was anticipating. Across the way, the other dealers were of similar levels and physical build.

CARL: Donut, do you see that weird description? Take a Size Up. If anyone else has some sort of examination skills, let me know.

Donut: IT SAYS HE’S PROTECTED FROM THE EXAMINATION! ALSO, I CHANGED THE SPELLING OF YOUR NAME BACK TO NORMAL.

CARL: Weird. Okay.

“Oi,” Mitch said, looking at me. “No pets in the casino.”

I growled at him.

“He’s my service doggy,” Samantha said.

Mitch regarded me, then shrugged. “Aight, then. Y’all ready to do some gamblin’? Ten thousand gold a spin!”

“Wait,” Louis asked, examining the twenty-four-spot wheel. “Does ‘tea-bag’ mean what I think it means?”

“What does ‘tea-bag’ mean?” Samantha asked.

“It’s, uh, like a domination thing.”

“Ohhh, sexy,” Samantha said. “I’m going to tea-bag you, Louis.” She blew into his gills.

“Stop,” he said, pushing at her. “Don’t you understand? I’m leaving. You’re never going to see me again.”

“Wait,” Samantha said, turning. “What do you mean?”

Mitch grinned and gave his wheel a little spin. The reward spots were much the same as the last time with only a few changes. There were multiple negative options on the wheel. I knew the more one bet, the less negative options there would be. There was still a two-spot “Nothing” space on the wheel just like last time. But like Pontiff noted, it was now in quotes. This was in addition to the newly added Dirty Tea Bag along with some really unfortunate ones, such as “All your limbs turn to spaghetti for five minutes.” My personal favorite, “Vomit blood for ten minutes straight,” remained on the wheel.

I wondered about that Nothing spot. Surely Splash Zone wouldn’t have missed it. He had been specifically looking for it. Bucket Boy had been there. He was now back in our garage, the sole remaining member of the group of strippers. He’d insisted it wasn’t there the first time. That made me nervous because there was no clean explanation for it.

Not unless they had been deliberately hiding it before. But if they had, why was it there now?

“What happened to Tito?” Donut demanded.

“Dontchu worry about Tito,” Mitch said. “And if you want to learn what the Dirty Tea Bag is, you gotta drop some coins and find out.”

Behind us, the roulette wheel was in full swing, just like usual. The NPCs playing the game happily cheered as if they hadn’t a worry in the world. A line of slot machines jingled merrily past that.

“I have a better question,” I said. “What happened to our friend Pontiff?”

Mitch smiled big, revealing a mouth full of white teeth. I remembered Tito, the previous croupier, had only had a few straight teeth in his whole mouth. From Imani’s hand, Jacobus the starfish let out a squirt of water.

“Oi, you’re talkative for a service animal. You know Pontiff? You just missed him.” Mitch leaned in. “He gave me a thousand gold tip just to turn the wheel to the Nothing spot and let him jump in. Weird as balls, that. But the powers that be didn’t stop ’em, so whatchu gonna do?”

“Where does the Nothing go if the Nothing is broken?” I asked.

Mitch shrugged, eyes going glassy. “Beats me. That’s why we got quotes on it. All I knows is, it ain’t here. You go in the hole, and you’re gone. You want to gamble or not?”

If we could do this without violence, I was going to seize the opportunity. We only had three hours left before the end of the race, and who knew what was happening with the bugs? We had to get back there. “If I give you a thousand gold, will you do the same for us? Will you allow some of my friends to jump in?”

Mitch contemplated.

“Sure,” he finally said. He started counting the people in the room. “But it’s two thousand. Each.” He smiled. “Plus a 20% tip to ol’ Mitch for breaking the rules.”

Donut: I DON’T KNOW IF WE EVEN HAVE THAT MUCH MONEY LEFT.

Imani: We have it. Barely. We’re running low. I don’t like this, though. Something feels wrong.

Prepotente: I have significantly more money than that. I am more than willing to lend you some at only 10% interest.

Donut: PREPOTENTE, WHAT DID I TELL YOU?

Prepotente: You said never give away something when you could sell it. And always start 20% higher than you’re willing to go. That’s why I’m willing to go down to 8% interest.

Donut: NO, NOT THAT. I MEAN, ALWAYS BE WILLING TO LEND A PAW TO THE TEAM.

Prepotente: I must say, Donut. Some of your advice can be a little contradictory.

Donut: MY GOODNESS, IT’S NOT THAT HARD. DON’T DO SOMETHING IF IT’S GOING TO UPSET ME.

CARL: I agree, Imani. I still don’t understand why the guys earlier didn’t see the spot. It’s been bothering me this whole time.

Louis: Maybe the stripper dudes told the boss guy that you were looking for the Nothing spot, and they added it afterward.

CARL: That does make sense, but why?

Donut: BECAUSE IT’S A TRAP.

Damnit. Of course this was a trap somehow. But what sort of trap? This was too important. What did we know? Louis’s suggestion seemed to make sense. If they added the spots back to the wheel after in hopes that we’d come back, did that mean the portals didn’t really go to this holding area? Would my Examine Portal skill work? Pontiff had purchased one, and he had gone in.

It was starting to dawn on me how this scam could possibly work. This was a trap. But to sweeten it, they would’ve had to send Pontiff to the correct place just in case we had a way to communicate post-transfer.

“Hang on,” I said to Mitch. “We gotta pool our money.”

The biggest issue with all this was that we didn’t know what this Hamed guy wanted. He’d deliberately set us up to murder his wife, Astrid. But when their children—Anaconda and Damascus Steel—had gone hunting for him, they’d seemed to change their mind and join his cause. And now the other strippers had done the same. I didn’t trust him, but I trusted them. But only if it really was them, and we hadn’t had a chance to talk.

I sent a rapid group of messages out.

Imani: No. No way, Carl.

Chris: Yes. We will do this.

“Okay, then,” I finally said. “We have a deal. But let’s just send one person at first.” I took a step back. There was a spot you had to stand in if you were spinning the wheel, and we needed to make sure nobody was on it. “We have a magical communication spell,” I lied. “We’re going to send one of us in, and if it’s not what we think, we’ll have to come up with something else.” I gave the guy a big smile. Or I tried. Instead, I just wagged my tail. “For the inconvenience, my friend Prepotente here is going to give you an extra-big tip.”

“I am?” Prepotente asked.

“Sure, pal,” Mitch said. “But it’ll be five thousand gold for a test run.”

“Okay,” I said. “Pony, pay the man.”

Mitch looked down at me, an amused expression on his face. “Is the dog really the one in charge here? I guess that’s better than the cat.”

“Excuse me?” Donut demanded.

CARL: Be calm. This can go one of a few ways if this is a trap. Be ready.

Prepotente moved forward and made a show of digging money from his inventory.

Chris turned to Imani. He reached up and put his hand against her face. She tossed the starfish at Elle and grabbed Chris’s hands with both of hers and pressed them against her cheek.

We all fell into silence.

“It’s not as warm as usual,” Chris said.

“You’re wrong,” Imani said, eyes glistening. She turned and kissed his hands. “This isn’t goodbye, Chris Andrews. But I want you to promise me something. If you get the chance, I don’t want you to hesitate. You take it. You see that exit out of the dungeon, and you’re still in this body, you run. You run and you don’t look back. Don’t worry about anything else. You get out, and you live. Promise me that. Even if it’s just you, it will all be worth it. You hear me?”

“I might turn back to a rock,” he said. “Or I might turn into a dog.”

“I don’t care what you are,” Imani said. Her butterfly wings wrapped around them both, like a cocoon, removing them from our sight for just a moment, and when she opened her wings back up, she was pressed tightly against him with his arms wrapped around her.

“I love you,” Chris said. “I always have. No matter what happens next, I love you. That’s the most important part.”

“Ah, very sweet,” Mitch said. “But can we get this moving?”

This was risky, but I was gambling that this Mitch guy was going to do the same thing he had done for Pontiff. He’d choose a “real” spot to show us he wasn’t lying. We were doing it this way to make sure there was a real spot. Alternatively, he was bluffing and we were about to get attacked. Or there was a portal, and the guards would charge and try to push us in. Clay-Ton wasn’t there, having gone back to his band.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Mitch turned the wheel and manually moved it to the Nothing spot. This was the only two-space slice on the whole wheel, and he moved it to the first of the two wedges. Each wedge had four “clicks” in the space, and he moved to the very last click in the first wedge.

He held the wheel in place, and then he hit a button on the table. The whole wheel buzzed as it tried to turn. The area under the “stand here” spot opened up, and a black portal appeared, thrumming into place.

The moment it opened, I remembered the last time I’d been near the real Nothing, and there’d been this heavy mental pull. I would’ve known the portal was there even with my eyes closed. It was said the Nothing drove one insane after just a few short minutes.

I didn’t sense anything like that with this one. It was just as inert as a regular door, with only blackness within.

I quickly examined the portal using my neural implant:

Warning: Your neural implant is working in incompatibility mode due to recent changes to your wetware system. Please see your Valtay representative for repair. Only limited details available.

Unknown Manufacturer Enhancement Zone Subspace Portal.

Type: One-way portal. Open Access.

Can you pass this portal? Yes.

Environment on other side of portal: This portal leads to a stasis chamber.

Visual Analysis? Unavailable.

I wagged my tail. Despite my implant not working correctly, this was pretty much what I was hoping it would say. Hopefully the implant would go back to working correctly when I stopped being a damn dog.

“Portal only lasts about fifteen seconds,” Mitch said.

Florin: Lucia just said the magic on that one spot is different. I think you’re right, Carl. Chris, I think you’re good. She said there’s only magic flowing to that one spot, though. Very weird.

“Bye, Chris!” Donut called.

Chris stepped forward, turned, waved, and dropped away. But just as he dropped, Britney also jumped forward. She, too, disappeared without so much as a word.

It happened so fast, I barked with surprise. That had not been part of the plan. Goddamnit.

“Oi!” cried Mitch. “You cheat!”

I held up a paw. “Pony, give him another five thousand gold.”

Elle: Oh shit, did that just happen?

CARL: Anyone else going in there needs to keep an eye on Britney. Samantha says she needs to make it to the fifteenth or twelfth floor to activate that broken memorial crystal she has.

Prepotente: Interesting.

Louis: It just said she’s left the party! Wow, that was quick. Goddang. She just jumped right in.

Events were moving so rapidly. It hit me then.

Li Na, Zhang, Tran, Bautista, Chris, and Britney. All gone. They weren’t, hopefully, dead. But they were gone. The odds I’d ever see or talk to any of them ever again were astoundingly low.

I turned to regard Louis standing there with Samantha on his shoulder, sobbing.

He was next.

“We can just push Florin and that scary lady in,” she was crying, rubbing her face on Louis’s arm. “We never even got to have our torrid affair! We were going to fall madly in love, and when it came time for me to go back to my king, you were going to be so upset, you were going to pluck your own eyes out because you just couldn’t stand the thought of ever looking at another girl again if you couldn’t have me. It was going to be, like, superromantic. But now you’re going to be all alone and without protection, and I don’t have anybody left to have an affair with except Carl, but he’s too broody for me. And, you know, he’s a dog now.” She blew out a whole stream of snot onto his shoulder. “Jurgen is no good because his Heidi sounds even meaner than Imani. Elle is too much woman for me to handle. Donut is too star-crossed with that orange kitty. Florin is a crocodile, and I’m racist against crocodiles ever since the cookie jar incident, and that Lucia is really a child. You never even got to visit Sam Town. It’s not fair.”

“Uh,” Louis said.

“What about me?” Prepotente asked.

“Ew,” said Samantha.

I just watched this go on, a heavy weight holding me down. Louis was next. Louis. The heart of our entire group. I thought of that moment at the Christmas party where he’d stood up to me for the first time, and it felt as if my chest was ripping open. That assassin had been correct to target him.

Louis and Imani were, indeed, the glue that kept the team together. No matter what happened next, we were losing something today.

Still, the more I thought about it, the more resolute I felt that this was the best choice. As bleak as all this was, Louis and everyone else’s odds of survival seemed so much higher than my own.

I turned to regard Donut standing beside me. I contemplated, just for a moment, doing exactly what Samantha was threatening to do. Tossing her in the portal the moment it popped up.

But no, I wasn’t going to do that. She would never forgive me. Plus, with Li Na gone, she was now the strongest crawler in the dungeon. By far.

Either way, we had to get through this next part.

“Well?” Mitch asked.

Donut: LUCIA IS RIGHT. IT’S VERY WEIRD. I TURNED ON MY MAGIC-FLOW-GLASSES THING AND THE ROULETTE TABLE HAS ALL SORTS OF MAGIC FLOWING TO IT, BUT THERE’S ONLY ONE LITTLE STRAND GOING TO THE WHEEL. THE WHOLE TABLE IS WEIRDLY EMPTY OF MAGIC OR ENCHANTMENT.

CARL: What other settings do you have on those glasses? Cycle through them all.

CARL: If those other spots don’t seem to work, then we’re going to get attacked. Everyone get ready. It’s going to go quick. Donut, you take out Mitch. You have Mongo, right? Unleash him. The rest of us will take out the guards. Watch the other dealers and the people at the other table, too.

I turned to Mitch. “It looks like it worked. We’ll send the rest now.”

“Pleasure doing business with you. But because you cheated, I’m going to need double the price for everybody else going from now on.” He paused. “Double from the five thousand. Paid in advance. How many are going?”

Donut scoffed.

Behind me, Imani was quietly crying while Elle rubbed her back. For this next one, it would be about twenty more crawlers, including Louis.

“Two hundred thousand gold?” I asked, growling. “We’re not paying that much. We’ll give you twenty K.”

Mitch crossed his arms. “A hundred thousand.”

Next to me, Donut suddenly gasped. She was turned all the way around, looking at the line of chairs against the wall. Her sunglasses flickered as she changed viewing modes.

Mitch sighed, staring down at Donut. “Fucking cats. I hate cats.” He raised a hand. “Boys.” He snapped a finger.

And that’s when the table tried to eat Donut.