Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

           Showing up to your own funeral is a lot less impressive the second time around. The first time, it's “a miracle” and everyone is hugging on you and crying and shouting “praise the beams” and it's a pretty good time. Your parents are smiling for once, your boss goes out of his way not to annoy the crap out of you (for a couple days at least), and for a while it really seems like pretty good luck that you didn't bite it. Once you crash funeral number two, things are a lot different. At that point, you may as well have died. There’s a lot less fanfare, your parents start mumbling under their breath about funeral costs, your boss bugs you about missing hours of your (unpaid) internship. It’s a pain in the ass. When you get to around five or six, you just kind of stop having funerals period. It’s cost effective and when you roll back into town after whatever tragedy you managed to survive this time, you slip back into the daily grind, like a misplaced cog into a machine. It’s a relief, in a way. Don’t get me wrong; people would still mourn your loss if you did die. You just never do. Most people don't learn these helpful little facts firsthand, but then, I'm not really most people. Most days I’m not even sure if I’m a person at all.

            The day I came back from the brink for about the eighth time, I woke up lying in an empty lot somewhere in the middle of town, my AA-12 shotgun on the ground next to me. It was nearly dusk, and the first stars of the night were glowing in the purple-pinkish sky. My head hurt like hell, but that was nothing special. It felt less like I had escaped the cold and eternal clutches of death and more like the time I’d had too many wine coolers after my cousin’s bar mitzvah. I did a quick inventory of my body parts. Just four, plus the head, of course. None added. None missing. My left ring finger was crooked. I almost panicked until I remembered that that had happened the last time I nearly met my maker. My teeth were all still firmly lodged in my mouth. I blinked slowly. Two eyes. Both can see. The hearing in my left ear was a little weak, but it had been that way for a couple years already. As far as I could tell, there was nothing funky going on with my internal organs. The only real thing wrong was the headache. Well, that and the fact that my hair was probably all over the place. But there’s never been anything I could do about that.

            I groaned as I sat up and took a look around me. A few bodies were littered in the lot. No one else was alive. At least no one else looked like they could be alive. Their limbs were frozen at odd, contorted angles and I could see flies hovering around their faces. I shakily got to my feet and went to look at the nearest corpse.  They were wearing a nice suit. Their eyes were missing. Their mouth was frozen into a scream and flies crawled inside and around it, wings unmoved by any trace of breath. I didn’t recognize this person at all. A newcomer? Maybe someone I just hadn’t met before? It didn’t matter, at least not now. There were no obvious wounds, at least none that I could see. I squatted down and took a closer look. A wallet was lying on the ground next to him. I picked up the well-worn flap of pleather and peeked inside. A license belonging to “Gregory H. Thomas” with a picture that looked nothing like the twisted corpse beside me, some punch-cards for a few sandwiches places, some change and 95 dollars in cold, hard cash. I pocketed the cash and the sandwich punch-cards and left the license. Hey, unpaid intern college students have to eat too. One of the coins, a quarter, started to roll away and I quickly stopped it with my hand. I flipped it over and saw an image on the tails side. Two trains looked like they were about to collide, but some magic spike descended from the sky to stop the impending metal carnage. Plus, there were some really fake looking mountains in the background. The phrase “Crossroads of the West” was written above the trains, and above that, “Utah, 1896”.

            Unlike most people in Night Vale, I actually knew what Utah was. I’d stolen an illegal book from the library when I was younger called “State Facts for Kids”. I’d nearly died to get my hands on that book, but it was worth it. I poured over that book over and over, right up until the day my parents burned it after they found it in my room. I don’t remember much about Utah, but I do remember that it had a lot of cool rocks and something called a “mormon”, whatever that was. But I knew that their police weren’t secret and wheat wasn’t banned and murder hasn’t ever been illegal in the entire history of ever there. It sounded like some kind of dream world, except it was real and it seemed like if I just tried hard enough, I could get out of the city limits and be well on my way to Mormonland. But I knew that was bullshit. It was like trying to touch the moon. No one who belonged here ever got out of this town for long. Even if they did make it out, they always came back.

            I looked at the other corpses in the lot and briefly considered searching them, but I decided against it. As much as I could have used the money, I was exhausted and while I didn’t really want to go home, I wanted to be somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t the corpse-filled lot with itchy, dead grass.

            I picked up my shotgun and walked to the sidewalk, quickly checking my bearings. The sign for the Moonlight All-Nite Diner peeked over the roofs of the houses. I managed to crack a smile. It was as good a place as any to spend my “paycheck”. I dragged my carcass down the street and enjoyed the fresh, cooling air of the evening. A few cars passed by, but I was alone on the sidewalk. That was fine by me. Anyone I passed probably would have crossed to the other side of the street anyway. The combination of my disheveled state plus my resting bitchface wouldn’t have really endeared me to the common citizen. But the common citizen isn’t particularly endearing to me either, so we have an easy truce.

            When I reached the diner, the buzz of the hokey florescent lights sounded like a chorus of non-existent angels. There were few cars in the parking lot other than the employees’ vehicles, so it looked like I’d have the place to myself. The luck just wouldn’t stop; someone up there, or down below, or trapped in the dark ether that made up the universe must have been looking out for me. The little bell above the door tinkles softly as I swung it open. I found the nice wrap-around booth in the corner towards the back completely empty and dove without hesitation. The smell of vinyl seating filled my nose as I just laid there, totally ignored by the wait staff. I listened to the hum of the dishwasher in the back and the muffled Tom Jones song leaking out of the speaker while I tried to get my head to stop spinning. The thought crossed my mind that I was, in the words of Michelle, gonna have 'hella' joint problems when I got old, but I mentally shrugged it away. There's no use in entertaining weird fantasies like 'getting old'. Old Woman Josie was the oldest full human in town, and she just hit 58 last week. That's practically ancient here, but on the outside, 58 is practically mid-life. What is even the point of living past that anyway? More discount meals at Denny's? Drowning in a million punch-cards to a million different sandwich places?

            A buzzing sensation against my thigh snapped me out of my thoughts. Groaning, I sat up, dug my phone out of my pocket and looked blankly at the screen.

(1)               NEW MESSAGE

            It was probably from Michelle. I went into my mailbox and opened it.

            hey herd you died. sucks. wanna meet up later?

            Yes. Definitely Michelle. I texted her back.

            I'm at mland. come eat greasy diner food while I complain.

            I snapped my phone shut and descend into the seat again. A waitress came over and cheerfully asked me what I wanted. Her voice so sounded stiff and mechanical, I figured she must have been a leftover robot employee from the Dystopian Hell Days. I muttered something to her about curly fries. Those were the only remotely kosher things on the menu anyway. She nodded and bounced away as I dozed off in my seat.

            “Wake up, loser.” My eyes snapped open to see a brown pair staring back at me distastefully. Standing before me was the closest thing I had to a best friend, Michelle Nguyen. She had her hands on her hips and a cool expression on her face, but judging by her disheveled jet-black hair and rumpled sweater, she'd gotten here in a hurry. This was the only hint I was probably going to get that she was happy to see me and that she'd been worried. I didn't really mind. I was never in the mood for fanfare anyway.

            “Hey, Michelle.” I sit up, muscles painfully straining the whole way. Michelle slides in the seat opposite of me and sits with her small hands folded in front of her.

            “So, I heard about your death on the radio and all, your dramatic demise at the hands of the zombie cult Alfred Bradley started out of his basement, but give me deets.”

            “I don’t really remember. I woke up in a lot not far from here, surrounded by dead people. You know, as you do.” I stared at the steaming plate of curly fries in front of me. They must have been delivered while I was dead to the world in my seat. I had forgotten about the phosphorous fire incident of ’09 when I ordered them, so I picked at a few of the small ones with extreme caution. “I’m in one piece, though. And I managed to score some cash.”

            I reached in my pocket and pulled out the wad of money I’d lifted from the wallet. Michelle reached over and plucked one of the bigger fries out of the basket. “Lucky. We should call Derrick or Skye and have ourselves a little shindig to celebrate your triumphant return or something.”

            I rolled my eyes and snatched the fry out of her hand. “If we threw a party every time I managed to avoid death, we would never stop. I don't really feel like turning into Andrew W.K., so let's not.

            “But you know, you’re pretty amazing,” Michelle said. “You've survived for so long that you managed to get six whole credit hours. Six! The only other person to do that was...”

            Her voice trailed off as her face blanched. We fell silent and the air was filled with nothing but the dishwasher's hum and Tom Jones' smooth tenor. I could see the regret reddening her face, and I wanted to tell her that it was okay, that I was over it and we didn't have to walk on eggshells anymore. I wanted to lie, but I couldn't bring myself to. I just picked at my fries and let the silence continue as we both mulled over what had happened.

            Dana had been one of the longest surviving interns in Night Vale Radio history, like me, but she was different in more ways than I could name. She would never have approved of my little search-and-find earlier. She had so much respect for the dead, for the living, for those stuck in the hazy space between. She survived because she was kind and smart and hopeful, not like me, who only managed to stumble through disaster after disaster with a combination of good aim and sheer dumb luck. She deserved so much more from this dumb town than she ever got, even now that she’s the mayor. Now she’s juggling all this BS bureaucracy on top of trying to stay alive. I’m sure that why she hasn’t called since she was elected. She’s just busy, is all. She didn’t forget me. She couldn’t have.

            But I still can’t forget the look on her face the last time she saw me. She had come by the station to give Cecil an announcement she needed him to make on the show. I’d just come back from the break room, rancid coffee in both hands with the beans smashed just the way Radio Overlord Cecil liked them. As I opened the door, she glanced in my direction and her voice caught in her throat and died, just for a second, before she cleared her throat to continue. The eyes that had once been full of life and hope now looked hollow and sunken in by the despair of either small-town politics or existential grief. Probably both. For a moment, she seemed to want to say something to me, maybe a quick “How have you been?” or some other kind of impersonal acknowledgement, but she continued to expound the importance of spider literacy to Cecil, who was leaning against his desk and listening with rapt attention. I had set the coffee down on the table and hauled my butt out of there before Cecil could ask me to do anything else, or before Dana looked at me again with those empty eyes. I’d been dying to see her for so long, and it killed me that when I finally got the chance, I had to see her like that. That wasn’t the Dana that I knew. That wasn’t the Dana that I…

            “Hey!”

            Michelle’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts. She picked up a handful of my fries and started munching on this with wild abandon. I winced, but her jaw didn’t get blown off, so I started to relax a little. Maybe the phosphorus thing only happened on Tuesdays or something.

            “Let’s not be angsty emos about this, alright? Our My Chemical Romance days are over,” she said with her mouth stuffed with partially chewed fries. “What’s done is done. Dana’s the big girl on campus now, and we’re still miserable peons stuck in the endless hellscape that is small-town America. Nothing we can do about that. Besides, there’s plenty of other proverbial fish in the proverbial sea, right?”

            I snorted. “Yeah, I guess, but the proverbial sea of proverbial fish is small, and getting smaller all the time. Remember that cute cashier from Taco Bell I was talking to? Went to the Whispering Forest and never came back.”

            “Well, no one says you can’t date a tree.”

            “This is coming from someone who made out with a fern.”

            “That was one time.”

            Just as I was about to lay into her about the Fern Incident, my phone buzzed. I jumped in surprise and took a look at the screen. It was a text from a number I hadn’t seen in a long time. I opened it and stared at the words on the screen for so long that Michelle started waving her hand in from of my face and singing “ground control to Major Tom” over and over again, but I could barely hear her. Without warning, I grabbed my shotgun and strapped it to my back, slid out of the seat and dashed into the cool, night air, heart pounding in my chest like I’d already run a mile. The AA-12 smacked against my back with each step, sending shockwaves of pain through my body, but I didn’t care. I didn’t know what was going on or why or how or anything thing else about this situation or my entire wretched existence. But I did know one thing.

            Dana wanted to see me, and I’d be damned if I was going to miss this opportunity, even if it killed me. Again.

Chapter Text

                I finally stopped in front of City Hall, my legs so weak that they were about to give out on me. I couldn’t have run the whole way, of course, but I managed by alternating between lightly jogging and desperately sprinting. I wheezed heavily in the middle of the plaza, doubled over in exhaustion. You’d think I’d be in better shape after all the daring escapes and action-packed doughnut runs I’d done, but here I was, soft and floppy as an overcooked noodle. After I caught my breath and tried to make myself look somewhat presentable, I strode up to the huge imposing doors at the front of City Hall and stopped. It took me a moment to admit to myself that I had no idea how to get access. I’d never covered stories at City Hall. The only ones stupid enough to do that were Cecil and a few interns who were, clearly, no longer with us. I figured it would be easy enough, though. All I probably had to do was whisper something arcane-sounding. That’s pretty much how you get access to everything in this town.

                I leaned towards the doorknob and whispered, “The dark ones will rise” into the keyhole. Pretty uninspired, but hey. I’d been a long day. In an instant, the door flung open, and a heavy-set man in a gray uniform stood before me with a deep frown on his face.

                “You really could have just knocked,” he said in a dry voice. He had an exasperated expression on his face that implied no one ever, ever knocked and that it would be nice if someone did every once in a while, just for shits and giggles. I shrugged.

                “Knocking would have been so boring,” I answered, walking past him into the building. He slapped his heavily ringed hand on my shoulder to stop me.

                “And where do you think you’re going?”

                “I’m going to see the mayor.”

                He snorted. “Yeah, and I’m the Lizard Queen of the World. Do you have authorization?”

                I jerked my shoulder away from his meaty hand. I was never the type of person who appreciated random physical contact from strangers, especially security guards with a power complex. Still, when he was right, he was right. Apparently I had to have paperwork before I could stroll into the center of town politics with a huge shotgun strapped to my back. And here I thought this was a free country. I dug around in my pockets before flicking my press badge in his face. “Maureen Lowe, Night Vale Community Radio. I have a personal text from the mayor herself, if you’d like to double check, good sir.” I packed as much contempt as I possibly could into the word sir, which, given my experience in being contemptuous, was a hell of a lot.

                He took a close look at the badge and stepped aside slowly. I gave him my sauciest wink and continued to walk into the building, secretly relieved that I didn’t have to show him Dana’s text. I got the feeling that it was something meant only for my eyes, and while its contents weren’t exactly hearts and rainbows, it still made me feel uncharacteristically warm inside that there was something from her reserved especially for me. I tried telling myself that it was nothing to get all starry-eyed over, but when it came to Dana, my usual cold rationality went out the window.

                Speaking of cold rationality, I soon realized that I’d just blown past that guard without asking where the mayor’s office actually was. I didn’t really feel like dealing with Officer Lizard Queen again, so I was at a loss. I briefly considered texting Dana back and asking, but I didn’t want to make myself look like as incompetent as I actually was. Instead, I strode through the shiny marble hallway at a fast clip, glancing at the placards and attempting to get my bearings. Unfortunately, all the signs were written in Unmodified Sumerian, which I’d only barely managed to pass in high school via unscrupulous cheating. I may have asked a city employee, but I wasn’t sure. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if there were any city employees at all. The funny thing is, I was sure I passed people. I remembered the swish of starched pants and the click of high heels, but for some reason as soon as they went by, the experience was lost and it was like I was in the hallway by myself. It was unnerving, but honestly, what the hell wasn’t? The point was, I was lost, and I didn’t really fancy stumbling into something embarrassing, like an ancient blood-letting government ritual or the men’s bathroom.

                I reached the end of the hallway and found myself standing in front of a pair of frosted glass doors. The words “Building Directory” were written in large, black block lettering. Beyond the glass, strange ill-defined shapes shifted menacingly, reminiscent of the management back at the station. But when I opened the door, I found myself looking at a very ordinary office, complete with a desk, a couple chairs and some bookshelves packed with old, dusty manuals and junky memorabilia. A bored-looking blonde woman sat behind the desk, looking at her chipped nails.

                “Location of appointment?” she asked me without looking up.

                I stared for a moment, then tried my best to look cool and in control, like a decent radio professional should. “Mayor’s office.”

                She nodded and raised one wrinkled hand, then stopped.

                “I don’t recognize you,” she muttered. She looked up, and I could see her eyes were narrow with suspicion. “You ever done intra-hall travel before?”

                “Uh, no, but there’s a first time for everything, right?” I flashed my badge and what I hoped was a winning smile.

                “Right.” She looked back down. “Well, happy travels. Lemme give you a tip. You know Floo Powder from Harry Potter?”

                “Uh, yeah?”

                “It’s nothing like that. Clench up, honey.”

                She snapped her fingers, and I was violently dragged into a dark cold vortex that smelled a little like mildew-y carpet and felt a lot like pain.

               I landed on a plush carpet with a thud. It took me a minute (or what felt like a minute) for my head to stop spinning. When I finally felt like I could stand up without projectile vomiting my fries everywhere, I shakily rose to my feet and looked around. I was in a dimly-lit office crowded with expensive looking cherry wood furniture. There were way so many swirling shapes and patterns carved into the wood, and it made me dizzy to look at them for too long. Heavy black drapes blocked most of the sunlight and left only a small sliver of it to compliment the dull glow of the stained glass lamps scattered around the room. On the wall were paintings of what I could only assume were past mayors, but I never paid enough attention in Night Vale History 101 to be sure. Besides, they appeared to be portraits capturing the moments of their deaths, so they didn’t really look like they did in the textbooks. Most of their faces were contorted into horrible screams. Overall, it probably wasn’t the most cheerful office in the world, but I expected nothing less from the center of this bullshit town.

                I heard a quiet noise from behind a stack of papers on the desk. I slowly pulled out my AA-12 and crept towards the desk, my feet hardly making a sound. I knew it was probably Dana, but I hadn’t survived for this long by being sloppy. Suddenly, I heard the voice I’d been longing to hear call out.

                “Hey, don’t shoot.”

                I froze as Dana swept the papers away to reveal her smiling face. I relaxed. For a moment I thought I had really scared her, but she seems to be completely at ease. She had known I wouldn’t shoot the whole time. Sometimes I swore she trusted my instincts more than I did. From the tone of her text, I had expected her to look a lot more freaked out than she did, but she seemed relatively calm. There was a cup of tea sitting next to her and she gestured to it casually.

                “Want a cup? Don’t worry, I use my own tea bags. I’m pretty sure the ‘tea’ here is really just dried blood.”

                I nodded silently and watched as she busied herself with pouring another cup. My body felt stiff and frozen in place. I knew I should have sat down instead of standing around like some awkward statue, but I could bring myself to move.

                “Are you alright with orange blossom? I’m fresh out of Earl Grey.”

                I made some kind of noise that could possibly be interpreted as a yes. I could have punched myself. Here I was in front of Dana for the first time in months and I couldn’t even put together a coherent sentence. I desperately wished that things could be the way they used to be, when we could talk for hours about what ultimately amounted to nothing. But if the fancy office was anything to go by, those days were past us now.

                She handed me the tea, and I took it carefully so I wouldn’t accidently brush against her hand. Once I got a closer look at her face, I realized that I’d been wrong earlier. She wasn’t relaxed at all. Her mouth was too tight at the corners and her brow was furrowed just enough to be noticeable up close. There were a few strands of hair escaping her otherwise well-put-together side bun. Her eyes would quickly dart here and there on occasion, mostly to the darker corners of the room.  She looked more on edge then I’d ever seen her be, and we’ve faced death together on a regular basis, so that’s saying a lot.

                She jerked her hand a little too fast to gesture to a seat in front of her desk. “Make yourself at home! I know the décor’s a little rustic. I tried to update it, but for some reason it just kept changing back.”

                She shrugged and seated herself behind the desk as I sat down and laid my gun across my lap. It was weird to see her from this vantage point. Usually when I was staring across a desk it was at some professor talking down to me about my grades or good old Cecil Palmer feeding me some bullshit about my duties as a reporter or making me read his god-awful fanfiction. But talking to Dana like this seemed seriously wrong. At the very least, she was my friend. She was supposed to be by my side and not staring me down from across stacks of paperwork like every other adult in my life. I did my best to hide my discomfort, but she seemed to pick up on it. She smiled apologetically.

                “I’m sorry. I know this is sort of awkward.” She looked around, then abandoned her official mayoral position and flopped down onto the chair directly to the right of mine. “There. That’s better!”

                I smiled back at her. There was a chair to my left, but she chose the right one. She had remembered about my messed-up ear. It was the same old Dana, albeit with more municipal power and a snazzier hairdo. She sat quietly for a while, staring at the tea cup in her hands. Apparently I wasn’t the only one tongue-tied in this situation. Finally, she spoke.

                “I’m really sorry to have called you out here so suddenly, especially since we haven’t talked in a while. I miss spending time with you and the others, but I’ve been so busy ever since I became mayor, I barely even have time to sleep anymore. I’m not trying to ignore anyone, I promise! It’s just been…hard.”

                Judging by the way she said it, “hard” was probably the understatement of the millennium. Normally I’d cut in and tell her so, but I just sat, tea in hand, and waited for her to finish.

                “I know that text sounded kind of panicky, but well…I’m kind of panicking. Nothing has been easy ever since I became mayor, but lately some things have been happening that have me scared.”

                I held up my hand to stop her. “Are you sure your office is the safest place to talk about this kind of thing?” I asked. I looked around, trying to spot any recording devices.

                She shrugged. “What place isn’t bugged? The whole town is wired, my office included, but there’s a weird distortion that makes it impossible to hear conversations.”

                I relaxed a little, but not much. Weird distortions on recordings would probably mean shit-all to certain entities, but she was right. You could have a conversation in the middle of the sandwastes and it would probably wind up in some government database somehow.

                She took a small sip of tea and continued. “On top of everything else, lately I feel like someone is trying to hurt me. Well, it could be someone, or multiple someones, or not a someone at all, but a something, but either way, I feel less safe than I ever have. Last week, someone replaced my car’s steering wheel with a circular stone slab encrypted with an ancient spell that would have bound my soul for eternity. And they let the air out of my tires. Just this past Monday, I found a bunch of highly poisonous puppies in my file cabinet. I know puppy infestations are pretty common, but bulldogs aren’t even native to Night Vale. I feel like someone must have put them there on purpose.”

                Her hands shook as she held her teacup. Her eyes were wet with tears, but I knew she’d never let them fall. Not in front of me, at least. I wanted so badly to reach out to her, but my hands remained locked in place around my own teacup. I cleared my throat and tried to say something comforting.

                “You know you’re not alone, right? There’s me and Cecil and Michelle and everyone else. We’ve got your back. Always.”

                She nodded. “I know, and I love and appreciate all of you, which is exactly why I haven’t said anything.”

                She leaned towards me and dropped her voice to a whisper. “Whatever is happening, whatever is after me, it’s dangerous, way more dangerous than anything we’ve ever encountered as interns. I don’t want anyone getting hurt for me. But right now I’m at a loss. I’ve tried to figure it out on my own but I can’t. I just can’t. I feel like I’m going in circles, only it’s a spiral leading further and further down…”

                A few tears slid from the corners of her eyes. She looked embarrassed that she’d lost control and quickly wiped them away. She forced a smile that curved the glistening wet trails running down her cheeks.

                “Well, crying won’t do me much good. All it will accomplish is making my face wet. Besides, now you’re here! I’m not in this by myself anymore.”

                Her smile grew wider and more genuine, and I could feel my heart trying desperately to escape from my chest. I tried my best to settle my out-of-control pulse before I spoke.

                “So what do you need me to do? Say the word and I’m on it.”

                Dana pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “Well,” she started slowly, “I mostly need information. I can’t really do anything if I don’t know who or what is threatening me. I know you have access to all of Cecil’s contacts so…”

                “Done and done,” I answered with a lot more confidence than I felt. But right now, Dana needed confidence and I was gonna give her all I had.

                She laughed, then leaned over and hugged me tight. The shotgun slid out of my lap and fell to the ground with a dull thump. I promptly lost control of my heart rate again and nearly spilled my tea over the nice carpeting. You can call me creepy all you want, but damn she smelled good. The calming scent of chamomile and coconut oil washed over me, and it was all I could do to reach around and pat her on the back in the most platonic way imaginable instead of burying my face in the crook of her neck and staying there for five hours.

                “Haha, uh yeah, lemme just…” I stammered as I extracted myself from her arms and leaned down to pick up my gun. “I gotta, you know, gather my sources, call up some folks, beat the streets, do all that hardcore detective shit, so I’ll just…”

                I got up and shuffled towards the door, trying to one-handedly strap the AA-12 to my back again.

                “Call me as soon as you learn anything! And please be careful!” She called as I walked away.

                I managed to shout “sure thing” back at her as I slipped out the door and back into the hallway. I breathed a sigh of relief and rested my forehead against the wall. I was an awkward pile of garbage, but at least I had managed to talk to her face to face for the first time in ancient gods knew how long. I could still feel her arms around me, and my skin seemed to burn where she had touched me. But there was no time to dwell on that. I pulled out my phone and started scrolling through my contacts until I got to Michelle. She answered her phone in less than a second.

                “Good job leaving me with the bill, loser.”

                “I’ll pay you back later. Call up the gang. We’ve got some work to do.”