It had been clear for some time now that the system wasn’t allowing any heats to exist that didn’t have at least one crawler team, going as far as having heats with one team too many to make it work. I didn’t understand the math, but if a certain number of teams left us, most of the final heats—not including ones that already had more than one crawler team—would be one crawler team versus two NPC teams, which was the most desirable outcome.
As it was, we still had several final heats with multiple crawler-on-crawler battles, and it was almost pointless to talkone team into taking a deal if all that would happen was that they’d just be replaced with another set of crawlers. That is, unless we had enough crawlers take deals and more than 66% of the remaining teams were NPCs.
The thing was, Osvaldo was correct. Especially now. Despite what this Damien guy had just announced, with every day that passed, it sounded like taking a deal was more and more of a dangerous idea. Even forgetting the offered job itself, there was a very real chance those who took deals were going to step into stasis and never wake up again.
But was it more dangerous than staying?
All of these were impossible choices. But one thing was for certain. The dungeon was going to follow its own rules, and for this last heat, three teams would enter and only one would exit.
Carl: Is Elle talking to Louis and Britney?
Imani: She’s over there right now. I’m going to talk to Chris and the Erins. Florin is working on Lucia.
Louis had become crucial to the team. But everything past this was going to be all but impossible, and the odds of any of us surviving were very, very low. Louis couldn’t exit the dungeon via the Pineapple Cabaret because of his gills, but hewouldbe able to survive in the indenture system. That was his only realistic choice.
I took a breath, and then I sent it.
Carl: And what about you? You know what’s coming next. Elle already said she’s not going anywhere. But you’ve done enough, Imani.
Imani: Oh, fuck off, Carl.
Carl: Why? You know what we’re about to do on the 11th. Even if we survive, everything afterward is completely fucked. You also know Chris isn’t going to take a deal if you don’t. What about him? You’ve gotten us so far. You can rest now. You don’t need to go on.
Imani: I can’t run from this any more than you can. What about Donut? Are you going to try to talk her into a deal?
Carl: Yeah, I already brought that up and it went about as you might expect. She’s already pissed enough about me leaving the party.
Imani: I thought so. Carl, I know we’re fucked. But you know what? I think this is the right call. If we’re going to lose, I want to go down fighting.
I pulled back from the chat to see Hedy glaring at me.
“Okay. Sorry. We need a jumping upgrade,” I said to Hedy. “We’ll need to rocket up from the first floor all the way to the roof.”
She nodded. “That’s easy, then. For your final upgrade, we can improve your existing rockets to the Golden upgrade version. Better maneuverability can be used to increase your speed on the ground and can be on the whole time. Can launch the truck into orbit if you let it.”
“Okay, good. Unless you have a better idea, let’s go with that.”
[ 79 ]
Carl:Listen, Osvaldo. Let’s talk.
Osvaldo: Fuck off, Carl. I don’t give a shit what sort of big plan you got going on. I don’t want anything to do with it. Filipe and I aren’t going anywhere.
Filipe, actually,wastaking a deal. I didn’t know the Brazilian crawler at all, but he and Donut had been talking, and she’d convinced him to take one. He’d been the jockey for the sixth heat, so he wasn’t completely screwing Osvaldo, but he’d made Donut promise not to say anything until he was already inside the guild, which was where he was headed now.
Of the 989 crawlers remaining, representing 353 teams, we had confirmation that 715 were planning on stepping into the Outreach Guild and not coming back out.
These crawlers who were leaving were tearing apart their vehicles and trading upgrades, and they were all using Milk’s method to add a spell intoTheBook of Voodoobefore they disappeared, leaving the dungeon behind.
That left us, so far, with 274 crawlers and 103 teams. Of those, we knew of twenty-one heats that had at least two crawler teams in the final race, and we also knew of two heats where all three teams were all refusing to take a deal.
If Osvaldo refused a deal, then Imani and Elle’s team and Donut and I both had locked-in-place heats where we were both against one other crawler team for the final heat. We were up against team Sparkles and team Flamengo. And Elle and Imani were against a trio of Russian crawlers I didn’t know and the Minister of Blood-Letting and his Wienermobile.
Elle called the Russian guys the Tracksuit Troika even though that wasn’t their name. All I knew about them was that their car was a Cadillac and they mostly kept to themselves. They’d been under Jurgen during Faction Wars, and he didn’t hold a very high opinion of any of them.
Florin and Lucia had been the only survivors of their heat. Same with Chris and the double Erins and Prepotente and Jurgen. Louis and Britney had one open slot. According to Imani’s efforts, we had a pretty good chart of what our possible matchups were. We didn’t have a full picture of all the heats where the sole crawler team had died the last heat, so we didn’t know for certain, but Imani believed there would be anywhere from sixty-five to seventy heats for this final race. So if we wanted to ensure that the remaining empty slots didn’t create more crawler-on-crawler matchups, we needed to make certain at least thirteen more full teams took deals. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be anything we could do.
That wasn’t going to happen, and we all knew it.