“Don’t let Mongo puke on the dashboard!” I yelled.
Mongo puked on the dashboard.
We hadn’t had a break. We’d gone straight from the frantic chaos of the end of the ninth floor to our lawyers to this without a rest. I had dozens of boxes to open. Achievements to go over. A fan box. An impossible god quest that was about to come to a head. Friends to check on. War mages to worry about. An Agatha problem.
Lucia Mar, who somehow had over 100,000 kids in her head. I didn’t even know if she was still here.
It was too much.
For the moment, I ignored it all and pretended like I was driving. Just driving and nothing more. Not racing for our lives,though even that part was strangely okay. It was so absurdly normal compared to the army-sized fights of the last floor that I felt a strange calm come over me. There was comfort in this straightforward anxiety. This danger—at least for the moment—was just between myself and Donut.
Right now, if I made a mistake, I would die. Donut would die. And that’s it.
There was not a thing I could do at this very moment that would result in the death of thousands, and I could have cried at the relief I felt.
But I knew. I knew that feeling was both temporary and false.
Slam, slam, slam.
No. Don’t think of that.
But how could I not? How many times now in just the past five minutes had Donut wiped her paw on something? How hard was I trying to ignore it?
Slam, slam, slam.
Peace to you all,Justice Light had said. How? How?
But then I thought of Katia, finally free. I remembered those who’d taken deals. Of that moment when they’d rained streamers and flowers on me and Donut, all of us pretending to ignore how much was at stake.
There was hope. There was escape. And if not, as Justice Light had shown, as all those who’d come to our aid on the previous floor had shown, there was also the possibility of vengeance.
But first, we had to survive this goddamned tenth floor.
I mentally counted the opponents again.
The muscle car. The bear. The bug. The minivan. The dog. The tumbleweed.
I was missing a few of them. Nine teams. I didn’t know if they’d zoomed out ahead of the muscle car, or if they’d been like us and were still stuck in their garage when all this started.
It was already clear we weren’t going to be winning this heat. What had Zev said? First place got to pick three upgrades. Whoever won would immediately have an advantage. We certainly couldn’t afford to lose, but from the sounds of it, second-to-last place would be almost as bad. We couldn’t afford to let the viewers pick our upgrades, either. The viewers were all dicks.
Something loomed up ahead, but still in the distance. Something dark. I glanced at the GPS again, and nothing had changed.
“Donut?” I asked.
“I see it,” she said. “It’s the entrance to a cave. It’s very big. I see movement, but I’m not sure what.”
A new message came in. One I instinctually read before I could push it away.
Prepotente: Carl, Donut, everyone else, I come with a warning. Obviously you do not want to come in last place. But do not, I repeat, do not kill or otherwise prevent any of your opponents from crossing the finish line. In fact, I suggest you help any wayward stragglers should one have already fallen.
Donut: HI, PREPOTENTE! WHAT DID YOU PICK?
Prepotente: I went with the obvious choice, and I chose biological. One would have to be an imbecile to have picked mechanical.
I exchanged a sour look with Donut as I gave the other messages a glance. From what I gathered, Zhang—who was with Li Na—was the only other one who’d picked biological. Elle and Imani had picked mechanical. Chris, whohadbeen in Li Na’s party but had apparently left near the end of the previous floor, had also picked mechanical, as had Louis, Britney, and Bautista, who were all together.
Florin hadn’t yet answered what his choice was, though it sounded like it was just him and Lucia Mar—who, as predicted, had not taken a deal—which likely meant Lucia had been the one to choose. I’d thought that Jurgen was also in their party, but he was somehow now paired up with Prepotente.