The Bounty: Mandala, #3

By Edward Eidolon

Book three of Mandala, the mind-bending series that melds the mundane and the magical, the real and the surreal, the brutal and the beautiful.

 

The Spirit demands, the flesh be damned

A thief on the run with an otherworldly score, hunted by assassins from beyond the edge of reality.

As the job goes from bad to worse and the city erupts in machine gun fire, Gradie tries to carve out a place on the team, and prove he has what it takes to be a Hardworlder.

 

About the Series:

Join an unlikely group of friends as they deal out death across realities, wield memories as weapons, and discard identities like shell casings. Journey from bizarre dreamworlds to dusty back offices, through brutal gunfights and interdimensional conspiracies, alongside free spirits and lost souls, in a saga that blends action thrills and surreal fantasy into a mind-bending saga that asks, who are you?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward Eidolon
• Release date: Sep 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223784463

Book preview

Cooper

His steps beat dull sounds out of the carpet as he ran down another hallway. This one was all grey and steel, but it felt just like the others before it. The bent-off hallway at the edge of an old motel, broken lights and hanging numbers. A long vacuum-streaked strip at the center of a multistory chain hotel, sterile and breathless. The one with a mirror ceiling and maroon carpet, amber light sparking off brass fixtures. And others. His memory had lost hold of whatever had been before them, and his life was now enclosed by their walls. He took doors at random, trying to break out, but they didn’t lead to the kinds of rooms they should have.

They lead to suburban homes flush with midday sun. They threw him into a superstore frozen food section, where he scampered across linoleum towards the back stockrooms. They opened onto alleys behind strip malls, and warehouse rows between looming pallet racks. Empty, watching places, that always ended in another door, another hallway.

And there were always his pursuers.

He tried not to think of them. If he did, and remembered or realized who they were, their solidity in his mind would create their solidity behind him. Now, they were only unnamed unformed things which could never get as close as the definite objects and scenery he ran past. He hoped.

Then there was the voice.

Hurry the fuck up and use one! I can’t make forever! They’re on you!

He knew what that meant. He clutched the coin. He told himself the same thing he had told himself in every hallway in his entire life.

The next door will wake me up.

But this time, he said it not in panic, but in relief. Like ‘oh, that’s right.’

And it did.

The alarm screamed in scratchy chimes. A default tone, broken into something original by the shattered state of the phone. He had been having the same dream for weeks. Sometimes it was just one hallway that went on forever. Sometimes he would get stuck in one of the spaces, and the world would roll up on itself, trapping him in a single layer of darkness.

But he knew the dreams were just copycats. His mind was afraid of that other dream, the first one, and was recreating it in pieces every other night, maybe as some kind of coping mechanism. The one thing it could never get right was the voice. Now, it was usually just his own voice. He couldn’t remember what it had sounded like the first time, or what it had told him.

The dream fell out of his mind during the first seconds of waking and was gone by the time he had tapped off the alarm. Hunger, and that vague irritation, like being squeezed by your own thoughts in opposing directions, moved in and kicked out the dreams and anything even remotely dreamlike. He got ready for work.

His apartment was furnished in plastic and glass. Bottles and containers. There was a bare spot on the carpet where the Playstation had been before he sold it. Looking at it reminded him of the break-ins he had done the past week. Minor, stupid shit. He had taken just enough to put some weight in his bag. It was all still in his trunk. He had dreamed, or maybe just imagined one time near sleep, that someone had broken into his car and taken all of it. It hadn’t bothered him. Once it was his, he didn’t care about it. Having something stolen from you makes it yours, even more than owning it does. When it had been in his trunk, it had belonged to the people he had taken it from. When it was taken from him, it was his, and he couldn’t value anything he had, not even in dreams.

But the stuff was still in his trunk, for now. So it wasn’t his yet. But the idea that it could be his so easily took some of the value out of it. Cheapened the things.

He shut the gun in the center console and drove out of the lot. Dying scattered fragments of last night’s rain clouds, purple fingers with silver bottoms, flaked off the sun, and the sky vibrated like something wonderful was going to break out of it at any moment. Maybe to tell him his life had been a joke that was coming to an end. But all the buildings and lots and cars were still grey in the dimness, and the sky sealed up as he drove.

Work was a discount department store next to a gym in a long strip of storefronts. Pan Asian restaurant. Nail salon. Cell phone store. Another smaller strip right-angled the lot, and shedding treetops and a blade of horizon bridged the gap. The lot was on an elevated piece of land, and Cooper wondered if a thousand years ago, murderous nomads had camped here, eyes and arrows facing outward. He had often imagined, in the 2pm boredom of the workday, the strips transformed into a post-apocalyptic fort of salvaged rifles and shackled sex slaves, and himself in command. It was something to do, at least.

He parked in the center of the concrete dip and his boots were good and muddy by the time he got to the door. They were still opening inside and he passed Drew and Micah stocking shelves. He waved at them with a bag of breakfast burritos.

You late as fuck and coming in here with donuts? Micah yelled. Drew tried to glare, but could only manage enough testosterone for a frown borrowed from a worn out divorced dad watching his kid ignore him.

Whataburger don’t sell donuts, girl, you know that. Cooper kept walking and shook the greasy bottom of the bag at her.

What do you mean ‘I know that’? Micah was way on the heavy side, but her smile said she knew some guys liked it. Cooper didn’t, but he smiled like he did.

You the Whataburger expert, girl!

What the fuck does that—

He turned down the aisle before she was done and her voice faded to mumbles that Drew answered with some pathetic attempt to endear himself to her. Cooper laughed at the empty rows, and the sound bounced off the far wall and came back broken. It reminded him of the dreams and his hair stood on end. He made it to his desk in the backroom at just short of a jog.

He clocked in at the buzzing twenty-year-old desktop. Eventually. The cursor lagged like a crippled dog straining against a leash and he thought about putting his heel through the CRT screen for the hundredth time. While he was scrolling through emails and closing out of antivirus alerts, his manager Jefferey stood droning in the doorway, his voice about as attention grabbing as the overhead lights or the film of dust on the filing cabinet. But Cooper got the gist of it.

Finish the returns and reports from Wednesday and yesterday before anything else. A couple O.K.s and a weak my bad and then Jeff was fucking off down the hall.

Cooper gave it a second, then slipped a folded sticky note with SKU numbers out of his wallet, and got to work.

The game was simple. Steal shit, get paid, stuff the evidence where it can’t be found. There were a few ways to go about it, but he had his down comfy.

Hire a junkie or two. Let em do their thing, for a while. Get all your ducks in a row, paperwork wise. Warnings. Write-ups for tardies, no call no shows, sleeping in a stall for half an hour. Things that show the new guy is one of those people. A puzzle where the only missing piece is theft shaped. Even a child could put it together. And the best part is, they put the last piece in themselves. All that’s left after a few months is to roll all your theft into their theft and have it stamped by LP and the higher ups. Damn, what a shame. But, just the way it is now. No one wants to work, and the ones that do, well, good eye anyway, Cooper.

It was a good deal all around. The junkie gets a few months of paid role playing, even gets to keep a lot of the shit if they’re smart, and the cops don’t even get called most of the time. Maybe unemployment gets signed off on accidentally too. Nothing to sniff at. So good, if they were brought in on it, they might’ve even agreed to it. Oh hell yeah, lets do it! Only loser is some corporation. Maybe the store cuts overtime for the tryhards. Tough shit. It was so easy, Cooper had started having visions of other him’s running the same game in every discount outlet in the country.

And that’s not even counting all the shit he rolled into shrinkage or their almost weekly snatch and runs. Shit, half the boosters running out the doors probably used the same reseller he did.

It was going pretty good.

A noise down the hall turned his spit to battery acid, till he realized what it was.

God damned Drew slamming the fucking bathroom door like a little bitch.

But, it hadn’t sounded like that at first. It had sounded like the door to something, some indescribably empty and endless place, shutting forever, trapping him inside of it.

Whatever the fuck that means.

It had been like that the past few weeks. The whole world had felt sloped downward, like some big bad god was sitting on the end of the table, trying to send him rolling off towards a dark pocket without an exit. Maybe it was being clean. He had heard you could only do it for so long, despite what the NA guys told everyone. Had to do it in stretches, like fasting. A little bit longer each time. The weed and coke just weren’t really doing it anymore, and every time some wrinkle faced booster wandered in to cash out a gift card, he felt meth at his shoulder.

Or was it something more?

Push

He tapped off the alarm and took the phone apart, then ran the pieces under the tap and left them in the sink. With the blackout curtains opened, the house revealed itself in descending memory.

Two-story late aughts construction. White noise carpet and off grey walls. The upstairs like a single space, with rooms that gave easily to doorways. From the bed, he could see clear across the hall into the office, where window blinds glowed overcast grey. Mortgage signed three years ago. Lately, a steady stream of offers by pickup truck investors with warehouses full of new kitchen tile and adhesive backsplashes, all ignored or laughed at or cussed out. Home. A piece of a distant, fragmented childhood recycled into the afterlife. That he loved it made the abandoning of it more powerful, a more fitting sacrifice towards the birth of a Spirit.

He got dressed in dark clothes with lots of pockets, very unlike the suits and athletic wear and Dallas nightclub douche attire that made up the rest of the wardrobe. They stuck out like something willed into being. He felt electrified putting them on, and leaving the rest behind.

It had been a rough awakening. Dropping into a specific Hardworld was more complicated than the free-form priming he had done in training, and he found many of his abilities hazy or out of practice. This self owned an assault rifle, a pistol, and a Mossberg pump for home defense, but hadn’t been to the range or done any force on force or airsoft in months. The market had just been too crazy.

This Gradie had made a small fortune trading cryptocurrencies with ridiculous names, a skill developed during a period of righteous solitude, and which had allowed him to live the kind of life Gradie dreamed about in the Real. The memories pulled on him as he walked through the house. The trips, the girls, the messages from high school acquaintances looking for advice or something else. His upcoming two week Maldives vacation, the plane boarding in an hour, primed to prevent any contact from his few friends and long ignored family during the job. He stuffed the shredded tickets under the trash and thought of aqua beaches and how long it had been since he had called his sister.

The SUV honked outside, and the memories lost their power. His spirit jumped up at the sound, eager to charge out into whatever waited in this new world. Being in a Hardworld on a job was nothing like dropping in for training. It was like the whole world was open to him. Like his real life was about to begin. He sped out the door in a way that stirred up hazy memories of flying through an impossible city at impossible speeds.

Outside, a soft morning was breaking on a suburban street that could have been anywhere in the state. The sky hummed a weak blue between fragmenting clouds, and a silver-grey brilliance smoldered just over the roofs across the street, either an invading overcast or the last remnants of the retreating storm. Dog barks and kid’s shouts zipped through the cool air like bullets let out blindly. House faces held pieces of last night’s shadows in their grouts and under their gutters. Hedge bushes and fruitless trees only ten years free of their metal stakes sang in sunlight tones from wet leaves on their heads, while their undersides grumbled in sleepy darkness.

The horn honked again, and Gradie thought he saw the sun jump two inches up the sky as the sound rattled his joints.

The SUV was all black with silver trim, like one of its parents had been a hearse, and parked in the driveway at an angle, unable to fit otherwise, with the driver’s window facing him. The window rolled down with a billow of smoke like a magician was going to pop out of it. Sam let her cigarette tipped hand hang down while the last of the smoke slithered out the side of her face.

What are you wearing!

He was wearing a black trench coat over black pants and a dark navy oxford. The twins had told him to dress for rain, because it created a natural liminal moment that made using a fragment easier for some Hardworlders. Now, Gradie thought they might have been fucking with him. No one else had ever said anything about Hardworlders being able to affect the weather, though there had been a rainstorm the night before the office—

You look like a flasher! she laughed and shook her head, drawing lines of smoke in front of her face.

Unable to think of a good enough comeback about her mechanic coveralls, he smiled as if she was only mildly annoying and walked around to the passenger door. It didn’t open. He stood there looking at his reflection for a bit before the window rolled down.

Why did you wear that? You’re gonna blow our cover! She looked up at him with those grey-blue eyes, the same color as the departing storm, and he realized it was too hot for the fucking jacket.

It’s supposed to rain, he said.

So wear a poncho or something! She smiled like he was telling a joke just standing there, and he felt his cheeks warm.

This is what I’m wearing. You gonna open the door? He was suddenly terrified his daydreams of trench coat shootouts would spill out of his eyes, so he made them hard. She looked away and put out her cigarette.

The center doors unlocked.

All right. He was fine with not sitting near her, if that’s what she wanted.

He pulled himself in and slammed the door.

So what, do you have a chauffeur fetish or something? he said into the awkward silence.

What?

Gradie started to repeat himself and she gunned the gas. He realized as he was flying into the center console that he should have buckled in before trash talking the driver. The SUV slammed into the garage door and Gradie ended up with his face an inch above the cupholder ashtray and Sam’s latte. His knee burned from the impact with the ac vent in the console.

That’s why you wear a seatbelt, Sam said softly. He heard her throw it in reverse. The garage door groaned and the tires yelled as they shot backward. Gradie guessed her next move and grabbed onto the passenger seat just before she slammed the brakes again.

Oops. There’s some play in the breaks, she said. Gradie reached forward and pulled the lever to drop the passenger seat back and climbed into the front.

Hey! No! Bad! Sam slapped the top of his head as he got into the seat. He reached up and caught her wrist. She made a face like a statue and moved her other hand onto her lap, where a pistol waited under her thigh.

Let go.

She pointed the gun at his gut. Gradie winced.

Are you fucking crazy?! You never point—

I know. Let go.

He did but kept his eyes on her. A honk from the street made them both jump. A mom in a coupe was waving out the window behind them.

Look, if you don’t like that I’m on the team—

Oh my god, I don’t care.

Then why do you care if I sit—

Because Luke is sitting up front.

I got here first. It sounded juvenile the moment he said it, so he looked off down the street, hoping the words had broken apart on the way to Sam’s ears. They hadn’t.

That’s nice. He’s sitting up front because if someone shoots at us, he can drop five of them before they finish aiming. Can you do that?

Maybe.

Well, maybe babies get in the back.

All right, Chives. Gradie started to open the door and saw Sam speeding away, leaving him on the road. He looked back at her and made a face like his hate was becoming too much for him. While she was raising her gun and looking him in the eye, he grabbed her latte and got out.

What the fuck?!

He pulled on the middle door and found it locked. Sam groaned and the lock chunked in the door. He got back in and tried to hand her the cup.

Sorry, needed some collateral in case you—

You can keep it.

He shrugged and took the stopper out. It smelled like peppermint.

The SUV lurched forward again and stopped suddenly. He slammed into the back of the passenger seat and the lid popped off the latte and spilled it down the front of his shirt.

Shit! He puffed his chest out to keep it from getting on his jacket. His hand was burning.

Hole in your lip? Sam asked.

Rather than say something that would get him shot, he opened the door with his clean hand and threw the cup on the road. He shook off his other hand and wiped it on his shirt, then carefully took off his jacket and tossed it on the seat. His hand was red and stung like hell. He swore at it.

There’s a first aid kit under the seats. Sam said, sounding just a bit sympathetic. Gradie shut the door and put his seat belt on with his burnt hand. The pain shouted at every movement. He sat there and stared at his hand while Sam sighed and started driving.

"This isn’t my body. This isn’t my pain," he thought to himself. When that didn’t work, he thought about how his hand had felt before the burn, and imagined opening doors and reloading without feeling anything. The pain lessened, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the endorphins. He thought about what it would be like to get shot in a Hardworld and swallowed.

There’s aloe vera in the kit, Sam said.

Gradie got the box out and put some on his hand. He noticed as he moved that his chest stung too, so he took his shirt off.

You are a fucking mess, she said.

Thanks.

Sorry I ruined your hitman aesthetic. Should we stop and get you some actual clothes?

Gradie looked out the window. Wood-paneled apartment buildings and water-stained corner stores ringed by the husks of old gas pumps zipped by. He got an idea.

Turn right up here.

Why?

I need a shirt.

Sam looked at him in the rear-view mirror but didn’t say anything. He reached back in his memory, suppressing the fear it wouldn’t work this time, and planted a subtle image, a sedan he had seen a million times driving to work, but kept the form vague. That was the paradox of pushing on a Hardworld. Pushing just enough to tell them what you want, but not so much they refuse to give it to you.

He saw it.

Here, that green Geo.

She pulled up next to it and he got out. The car had something stacked in the backseat half blocking the rear window, and he already knew it was laundry. He felt goosebumps roll over him.

I’m actually doing this, he thought. It had been so long since his win at the office, he had almost forgot, even without the sensation that it had happened to someone else.

He opened the back door and got in the seat with his legs hanging over the street. In one of the stacks, he found a heather grey shirt. Medium, mens. He pulled it on and closed the door.

Back in the SUV, he put his coat back on. Sam was watching him in the rear view again.

What?

So you just knew some dude left his laundry there? She sounded jealous, or maybe just doubtful. He thought about saying something like ‘it’s easy’ but nodded silently instead. He could see in her eyes that she really wished she could do it. Strange. She could make herself an expert driver, or a master mechanic, but couldn’t make a t-shirt appear in an old car. The self he had dropped into would probably have trouble changing a tire.

As he watched the apartment complex slide away, he took one last look at the sedan, and a stream of memories poured out at him.

He really had seen it a thousand times. He had even seen the owner open the doors without a fob. As far as his memory was concerned, nothing unusual had happened. Something about it made him uneasy, and he reached out for something beyond the Self. It was like resisting the urge to touch a wound for so long that you eventually do it with gusto.

His new memories flared up at him when he tried to remember the Real, and it seemed at the other end of a long hallway, dim and faint. The hallway was made of the Otherworld, and felt just as much like dream as the real did, so that he had to put effort into categorizing his memories.

Oh, here. Sam threw something back at him. It bounced off his chest and rolled into his lap. A small plastic case. He opened it up and pressed the earbuds in place one at a time, waiting for the chime that told him the seal was set. Something about the sound afterward was different.

I think these are glitching.

Nope. New hardware. Zoey and the boys worked their magic and now they amplify natural hearing. And they don’t go all quiet during gunshots.

Gradie noticed there wasn’t an echo of Sam’s voice either, another upgrade since the last time he had worn them in training, when they had mainly served as a convenient way for Philip to berate him.

Now, driving down the highway on a mission, the earbuds directly connecting him with the rest of them, he felt like he was part of the team. His heartbeat quickened and he smiled out the window.

They exited suddenly and pulled off the access road into the drive-through line at Starbucks. It was packed.

Johnny! I’m making a stop! Are you up yet? Sam whispered a melody and her voice was in stereo around Gradie’s head. He looked at his knees and focused on not getting red in the face. There was no answer in the earbuds.

You owe me a coffee. Sam motioned with her hand, and he took his card out, then thought about it.

Don’t you guys have millions in your account?

Them’s my millions.

He handed it to her and leaned back in the seat, trying to reclaim that feeling of rushing excitement and being a part of something strange and mysterious, but all he could think about was the sound of her voice in his ears.

Soldier

Back in the day, when he was first getting started, Luke had found it necessary to drop into the Hardworlds with a singular, focused affirmation.

I don’t wake up hungover.

Despite focusing more feeling and effort into priming sobriety than any other aspect of his self, he woke up with a pounding headache every time. Once, he had worked through an entire job withdrawing from opiates, and another time he had lost a job with SYS after throwing up in the point man’s interceptor ten minutes into an hour-long chase. Eventually, he had given up trying to fight or even understand it. Now he just dropped in with a simple prayer.

Let the hangover not be that bad.

Sometimes it did the trick, but he wasn’t sure if it had this time because he hadn't moved. He knew that only when he stood up, threw open the blackout curtains, and started moving around, would he discover the full extent of the hangover.

So, he was still in bed, after three phone alarms and two wake-up calls.

Joey…We’re waiting. Sam’s voice came out of the speaker phone on the nightstand (courtesy of EP) and stabbed him in the eardrums.

Annoying little bitch. What good is a redhead that cut it all off and hid her tits under coveralls?

No fucking good at all, he said to no one. Something moved in the bed, and he froze.

No fucking way.

What? she said. It was a cute voice, almost as cute as EP’s, which helped him keep from kicking her off the bed right there. Cute or not, it still knocked his brain around.

He closed his eyes and focused.

"The body does what it’s told. The spirit demands, the flesh be damned."

The iron chains on his head fell away. The aches left his muscles. The dryness in his mouth faded. Or at least they all shuffled off to somewhere he could ignore them. Sam said something through the phone again, but this time she was just a kid he worked with, almost a friend.

He got up and threw open the curtains.

Fucking shit! The girl pulled the covers over her head. Luke grabbed the bottom of the comforter and yanked it off the bed. She almost came with it and ended up sitting in the middle of the mattress.

A short-stack brunette with rug burns on her knees and red marks in other places.

I’m checking out, he said, but she had already slithered under the sheet. It clung to her body in a way that finished waking him up, and he wondered how long Sam’s stop would delay her.

Unless you want me to stay for a bit?

Fuck you, I want to die! How do you drink that shit?

Luke looked at the various bottles around the room and wondered which one she was talking about. A few of the labels triggered primal sensations of nausea and weakness that cut through his Spirits control and made him shudder.

He grabbed the one with the label facing away and took a few swigs. That’ll have to do.

He got showered and dressed while the girl snored softly. His clean clothes were hung with his pistol in the empty closet. He pulled the earbuds out of the envelope shoved in the chest pocket of his plaid flannel button up and squeezed them in. A call chimed in his ears before he got his shoes on.

Yep.

You’re late. It was EP.

I didn’t get a time. Thought we were just doing recon today.

Maybe not. Boss is seeing some activity he doesn’t like. Maybe another team. Might have to jump on it.

Aight. Sure enough, the promise of simple job, no defense, no other teams turned out to be a pie in the fucking sky. Not to mention the god damned quarter.

Alan and Kate are out front.

Alright, I’m coming out.

Files are on your phone. She beeped off. Her voice had been rough and terse this time, as if she was trying to disguise it. He vaguely remembered telling her that having a little dove cooing in his ear all job was one of the perks, or something like that, in some resort bar one time after a client meet-up. But that had been aeons away in another world, and was even less than a dream here, and what with the hangover…

He went out the back door to the lot, and after stumbling a bit into the blazing daylight, he found himself up on a hill, like he had stepped out of an old horror movie castle, but instead of flying buttresses and machicolations, there was just the flat drywall of a hotel chain.

The land around was an alluvial plain of retail space. Concrete caught and expelled by the flow of the nearby interstate, formed into strip malls and mid-range restaurants. Luke took note of the important details, landmarks, weather, and filed the rest of it, memories that sprang up out from the self, away as trivia. He had been trained to move through the Hardworlds under the belief that it was something between a hallucination and a dream. It worked through a kind of brute persistence that fit some of the old-timers like a glove, but was only just good enough for him. Luckily, he didn’t need much. Even in the Real, he and his thoughts had never been close. What really worked for him, was the work. On a job, in a gunfight, giving chase, he never had time to get all philosophical.

The SUV waited at the edge of the lot, looking down on the sloping plain like a mirror-polished panther watching gazelles pull into drive-thrus. Sam unlocked the center door and he slipped inside.

There’s our sleepy boy! Did you forget we had work today? Sam said. Luke had found it best not to acknowledge when she seemed unusually pissed about something, so he went with the joke about it and hope she gets distracted strategy.

Them hotel beds are just too comfy.

He stopped halfway through climbing over the center seat when he noticed Gradie siting across from him, all black pants and combat boots and an actual trenchcoat over his wrinkled grey shirt.

Should I stay home from school today, bro?

She already made that joke. Gradie sounded disappointed.

No I didn’t! Sam said. And I wasn’t joking! We’re supposed to be low profile!

While the two of them went at it, Luke moved into the back, where the last row of seats had been taken out, and went through the compartments, pulling things out of bags and stashing them on his person. He got his plate carrier on between his undershirt and his button-up and found his SIG Rattler in a backpack with his mag pouch. As he was going for the pistol case, he noticed Gradie looking at him.

What guns do we have? he asked, like a kid asking about cheeseburgers.

Who said you get guns? Sam said.

Oh, I forgot I killed our last target with my bare fucking hands.

Here it is. Luke handed him a holstered Five-seven and a mag pouch. Gradie took it religiously and smiled in a way that set Luke’s hair on end.

Damn boy, are you in love? said Sam. Luke started closing everything back up.

Wait, is my rifle back there? Shouldn’t I get some plates? Gradie asked. Luke stopped and faced him.

"Nah, just put that on your hip, cover it with your matrix coat, and if any shooting starts get to cover-

What’s the point of—

Look, I’m not trying to box you in, man. Really. But I’m the shooter, alright? If shit gets bad enough where I can’t handle it, you and her need to get moving, cause you’re the backup.

I wasn’t the backup last job, Gradie said, obviously before he had thought about it.

Yes you were! Sam cackled.

Look, really, I’m not putting you down or being a dick or anything, Luke continued, headache flaring back up. One bad fight and we all lose, right? Just stay safe, take some shots if you can. I’m not saying don’t shoot. Shit, let em get it if you can, ok? But just be ready to duck out, you know, blend in with the crowd and get away, gotta be smart about –

He took an aspirin and more whiskey and cracked open an energy drink as he talked.

Gradie could tell he was being serious. Thinking about it, he had never heard him put anyone down without a playful smile on his face. He had started nodding and saying alright over and over partway through Luke’s explanation, and felt like shit by