Exel nearly bumped into Slooky who was stepping forward, snagging the knife Lott had in her hand. Without expression, he plunged it into the assassin’s chest before pulling it free again.

Tap.

A small blade fell to the dirt behind Exel, dropped from a stunned hand, which body soon followed it to the ground.

“Assassins have one job, you know,” Slooky said, wiping the blade on the clothes of the assassin and flipped it back over into Lott’s grip. He turned to meet Exel’s eyes, expression hard as stone. “How brave of you to turn your back on them.”

He turned to Slooky, the reality of what had nearly come to pass racing through his mind, his jaw tense as he glanced toward the dead person on the ground next to them. In truth, he hadn’t expected it, wouldn’t have even guessed. His eyes stayed glued to the small little thing that might’ve ended him. It was ridiculous.

But Exel couldn’t ignore the reality that had come to pass. His mouth opened slowly, words seeming to stick to the roof of his mouth as he said them.

“By your hand–”

“Forget it. We’re almost there.” Slooky said, cutting him off with a hand. He looked up to the sky, gaging the hours of sunlight left in the day. “Let’s go. We should get there before nightfall. Or we’ll have to camp out in the open.”

Bags were lifted onto shoulders and they trotted out of the cave and down along the path, Slooky leading the way. Not one of them looked back.

And so, left unnoticed, something tiny lay in the dirt.

It flashed lightly, red, even as the footsteps of the Ghosts faded into the distance.

Slooky stopped walking and the others followed suit, looking to a door surrounded by dirt. It looked like thick metal of some kind, right on the side of the mountain. The path leading to it was covered with flat stones and rocks that jutted up out of the dirt, it was all placed strangely, randomly. The whole of the area, an entire semi-circle leading to the mountain, were full of it, that odd sort of pathway.

But the door…

It looked severely out of place, like it had just landed there in a wind storm. It didn’t even have the appearance that it worked, considering the rust buildup on the outer edges, and the uneven tilt to the right.

“This is…it?” Exel asked hesitantly. “Does that even go anywhere?”

“It does kind of look like it was just thrown there.” Bue tilted her head, concern drawing her brows low.

Slooky sighed before stooping down and brushing aside some of the dirt on the rocks in front of him. Unconcerned and curious, Bue stepped forward, past him.

He noticed a second too late, her foot touching down on a white flat stone.

“Don’t–”

“Woah!” Her startled cry cut him off as she jumped back just in time. Eyes drawing to the dirt around the door that suddenly looked very different, she took another hesitant step back away from the arrow where her foot had touched down.

“What the hell, man?!” Exel cried, eyes wide. “I thought you said it was safe!”

For once, the most serious one of the group, Slooky turned, looking up at him before rising back up to his feet. For emphasis, he stepped to the left, landing on a circular stone without looking. Everyone held their breath, grimacing, waiting for the next arrow.

Which didn’t come.

“I was going to warn you,” he said slowly.

“Before or after we died?!”

He ignored the comment and set his foot down on the next stone, directly in front of him.

“Follow my footsteps. Can’t promise you’ll be fine if you don’t.” He shrugged, lifting his hands high. “Most of those arrows reload automatically. The ones that don’t are a pain to maintain.”

The rest of them exchanged glances before following him in a line, careful to recall exactly which stones were stepped on. Slooky paused a few times, humming to himself as he lifted a hand, bouncing it along in front of him as if recalling the exact pattern visually in his mind.

Carefully, in a line, they made their way several feet into the minefield of traps and triggers. Occasionally, Slooky would tap a square, just to make sure it was entirely safe. One opened up a pit, to which he tapped a few times along the edge and the stone slid back into place, hiding the hole again. Another set off a row of sharp spikes, up through tiny holes in the rock, the tips coming as high as their knees, nearly poking him in the nose as he crouched next to it.

“Right. That one.”

He took them around, a path that clearly wasn’t a pattern of any sort. It was random. Every bit of it. Only known by those who’d been through it before.

Holding up his hand for everyone to stop, he frowned, dropping down to a knee as he examined the path. He looked ahead, as if recognizing the next part, but as his gaze drew back to the stone in front of him, he frowned.

“Hm…”

Bue, peeking around hesitantly, called his name in concern.

“Slook?”

He tilted his head. “Did this get changed?”

Without a word, he reached a hand back. Right behind him, Exel handed him one of the blades they’d acquired through the assassins. Flipping it around in his grip and leaning back, keeping himself clear of any potential surprise attack, he tapped the center of it.

In an instant, the handle of the blade was nearly ripped from his grip, caught up and bent by a shiny foot trap, made of materials from Fallacy, in a style similar to that of a bear trap, only…

Worse.

Purisng his lips, Slooky gently tugged on the blade. It didn’t budge, wedged in the grooves and spikes that had captured and destroyed it.

“That’s not right,” he muttered. “Hm…”

“Slooky,” Sarah warned in a no-nonsense kind of tone.

He waved his hand.

“It’s alright. I’m just… this is new.”

Creak.

Slooky, recognizing the sound, looked right to the source, expression changing, eyebrows lifting. By the time the rest of them followed his gaze, another startling noise had taken over.

“Richard Key!”

The shrill voice had Bue moving back a step instinctively, nearly putting her onto a trigger plate of a stone. Lott half picked her up, keeping her from landing on it.

An older woman with gray hair stood next to the now open door Slooky was leading them to. She wore a simple shirt and pants, old and worn, with patches sewn in to fix holes. Even so, she emitted an intimidating aura, that of an elder. And angry. Something nobody wanted to deal with.

“If that’s you, stop setting off my traps!” the woman shouted.

“…Richard?” Exel muttered, confused.

It crossed his mind that maybe her age was preventing her from seeing them properly. None of them had that name.

But even more surprising than the name was the fact that Slooky responded to it, shouting back at the old lady like a disgruntled teenager as he stood back up.

“You put some kind of a freaky bear trap here! This wasn’t here before!” He pointed with offense down at the trap that continued to hold the blade he’d tapped against it. “What if I lost my whole foot to that?!”

“Don’t you backtalk me!” she scolded him, shaking her own finger in the air, aimed his way. “Last summer, a storm ruined those spikes I had there! And if you’d have stepped there with how it was before, you’d have lost your foot anyway!”

Tilting his head back, he groaned, hands on his hips.

“I’ll fix it, okay?!”

“You better! And get your scrawny behind inside before that storm gets here!” She inclined her chin to the sky, noticing the incoming storm. “Clouds show up like that for big boomers!”

A loud metallic thud ended the conversation as the old woman stepped back in and slammed the door shut.

“Geez.” Slooky breathed out.

Everyone looked at him, a mix of disbelief, confusion, and curiosity in their gazes. The one stared at noticed none of it, getting grumbly as they stepped over the trap he’d set off.

“And she couldn’t tell me if she put any other new ones?” he spoke to himself, pouting, tapping each of the next stones to make sure they were secure before placing his foot on them. “Of course not, because then I wouldn’t set them off.” He paused, glanced up at the door. “Scrawny?”

He let out a heavy sigh and thought to himself that he might as well become a scarecrow with how they all saw him. Skinny and tiny. It wasn’t like that was what he wanted to be, it was just his metabolism working overtime. He muttered to himself under his breath that he ought to go sit in a field and yell at birds or something. Might be worthwhile.

That would be, if fields existed anymore. Regular birds, too. The mutant ones weren’t scared of anything. Scarecrow-ing would be useless.

“Slook?”

“Hm?”

He turned briefly, acknowledging the others, all of which had heard him mutter under his breath.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah. All good.”

Without setting anything else off, they reached the equivalent of a doorstep, a square free of traps. They moved closer to the door, only to find it wasn’t just covered in rust, but full of dents, likely from the worst of the hail storms that passed through.

Slooky knocked on the least rusted part, right next to a handle that had been reattached several times, it seemed, as the sheer number of screws and holes in the metal told enough of a story.

The old woman opened the door, unamused.

He smiled.

“Hey. I’m home.”

The others exchanged glances.

Home?

Slooky’s home?

Such a thing existed?

The old woman just looked at him blankly.

Everything about the situation was insane. A safehouse. An old woman. Richard Key? But that wasn’t the end of the surprise. Even crazier than all of those things was the next word that came out of his mouth.

“Grams?” he called, worry tinging his voice in the silence that she’d kept.

She grabbed his elbow, pulling him in through the door.

“Let me see you.”

With careful eyes, she looked him over, making a tsk noise as she noticed the injury on his leg. When her gaze lifted to his again, up, as he was taller than her by several inches, she wrapped her arms around him, giving him a hug, her eyes closed.

The embrace was returned, Slooky letting out a relieved sigh.

“I missed you,” he whispered.

“I’m sure you did.”

He chuckled at her blunt tone as he let her go, smiling in a way none of them had seen before. It put all of his other smiles into a questionable category. All those times before… had he truly been smiling at all?

“And who are these people?”

She nodded to the rest of them, hovering in the doorway, halfway in, but not far enough for the door to be closed. Surprised, as if he’d forgotten about them, Slooky turned, his mouth opening and closing as he tried to figure out how to explain their existence.

“Ah, these are my…” He settled on words that weren’t too horribly far from the truth, especially since he didn’t want to have to explain the situation of the Ghosts. Not right now. “These are my friends,” he finished.

She lifted a brow, noticing his lacking confidence in his words. There was no smile on her face, no joke as she looked at him as though he were lying horribly.

“Okay, enough with that look. I have friends.”

The second eyebrow joined the first as she chose not to say anything more. Offended, he put his hands up, surrendering, wandering off without a word, navigating the room with ease, measured steps that took him around the furniture. He stopped by a shelf, taking a step back to look closer at one of the trinkets there. Poking one as if he’d never seen it before, he made a curious noise before moving on, disappearing down a hallway in the back corner of the room.

It was all too obvious, not even from his familiarity with the traps outside or his words exchanged with the old woman…

Slooky knew this place like the back of his hand. Knew how it worked, knew where paths led.

Noticed differences, as if they jumped out at him from his memories.

He’d lived here.

And not for a short while.

This was his home. His real one.

They all gazed around, fascinated and worried.