Chapter 2

2: 2

I'd barely cleared the hall when Albert's voice came ripping after me, furious.

"Tamara Pruitt, don't you dare play hard to get with me."

"You think the network falls apart the second you're gone?"

"This little threat routine of yours? Watch me not care."

He raised his voice to the room.

"Warden, I move that Bianca take over all of Tamara's access, effective immediately."

"Bianca's a top-school grad. Young, quick on her feet. Worth a hundred of some rigid, low-level shrine-keeper who can't adapt."

Bianca's voice jumped an octave.

"Thank you, Albie! Thank you, Warden, for believing in me!"

"I promise the second I take over, I'll upgrade the whole office network across the board!"

"Give me three days and dream delivery goes up two hundred percent!"

A thin, scattered round of applause went up in the hall.

I didn't so much as turn my head. I stepped over the threshold, hooked right, and walked into the power room at the far end of the corridor.

In the corner sat an iron cabinet draped in black cloth.

Inside was the yin-yang relay I'd hunted down myself three hundred years ago, out of my own pocket, at Heaven's secondhand market.

Without that relay, the Underworld's junk servers couldn't even carry a 2G signal.

I threw the master switch. Every indicator light died at once.

I brushed the dust off my hands, shouldered my bag, and walked out.

I hadn't gotten three streets past the Warden Temple before the server-crash alarms behind me tore across the sky.

The clouds over the whole Underworld went dark red in an instant.

Bianca had just gotten the access, and the first thing she did was force open full realm-wide streaming bandwidth.

With no relay to split the load, hundreds of high-frequency channels jammed solid in a heartbeat.

The dream-delivery line blew on the spot.

Up in the living world, it was the Ghost Festival.

Hundreds of millions of the living were burning paper money and offerings like mad.

All of it was supposed to route through the 5G channel, convert straight into Underworld assets, and get distributed to the ghosts.

Now, with the port clogged, every offering turned into stranded data.

Outside the Ghost Gate, the burned villas, sports cars, and gold ingots piled up into a mountain, jamming the gates shut.

The ghosts inside couldn't get out. The offerings outside couldn't get in.

Down by the River of Forgetting, tens of thousands of ghost-soldiers massed at the head of the Bridge of Oblivion.

They gripped rusted spears, banged on their shields, and craned their necks to shout.

"Pay us! Pay us!"

"Where's our Ghost Festival bonus?"

"Get the paper money out today or we walk!"

The Underworld had descended into total chaos.

My phone started buzzing nonstop.

Albert had dropped ten voice messages in the work group, every one of them tagging me.

I opened one. Albert's voice came howling out.

"Tamara Pruitt! What exactly did you tamper with?"

"I order you to get back here and fix it. Now. This second."

"If this holds up something big, you'll be sorry!"

I opened our chat.

I sent over a screenshot of my first-class ticket for the vacation cruise to Penumbra Isle.

Then I typed a line underneath it.

"Wasn't I just playing hard to get?"

"I'm on my way to a seafood dinner."

"Take your problems to Bianca. She's the one boosting efficiency two hundred percent."

"You've got this. Rooting for you both."

The moment I sent it, I dropped Albert straight into the block list.

Powered off. Tossed the phone in my bag.

I slid on my sunglasses.

And boarded the luxury liner bound for Penumbra Isle.