“You’re… Luna? Can you hear me?”

  I was shouting my questions out into the forest, so to the others I must have looked insane. Truthfully, I didn’t care.

  “I don’t understand. I thought you said before you couldn’t talk to me.”

  My mind flashed back to the static shock I felt when we shook hands. How occasionally Stephanie would freeze in place, her eyes flashing back and forth across her vision. She must have been reading system alerts from Luna.

  “Is this permanent?” I asked through gritted teeth.

  I did not relish the idea of some entity riding in my brain and seeing my thoughts.

  The two police officers were looking at me with odd expressions, while Stephanie just stood there watching.

  “What do you want?”

  She had finally confirmed something I had been suspicious of for a while. My memories turned to piles of corpses and swarms of flies.

  “So this was all your doing. Do you have any idea how many people have died?! How much has been lost?!”

  It was impossible. A number of dead I could scarcely wrap my mind around. My mouth went dry. My feet faltered.

  “H… how?”

  “Why? WHY?!?”

  I needed to move. I needed to fight! I needed to run, to hide, to do ANYTHING.

  Instead, I sat down on the ground. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath.

  I still didn’t know if Luna was evil or good, or something in between. She was a part of the system; after today, I wanted nothing to do with it. But could I afford to ignore her?

  No, I didn’t think so.

  I’ll give you one chance, Luna. One.

  My thoughts. Luna mentioned that she could respond to my surface thoughts. So I guess when I thought in her direction, that was all that was needed.

  I took several deep breaths before standing and sauntering back through the forest without further words.

  What traps did Howard Greene leave behind? Is it the cultists?

  What followers did they choose?

  Interference? Thinking back to the day after I had been first brought into the system, I remembered lots of fires across the city, keeping first responders busy. Plus there was the global communication shutdown.

  Mechanically, I stepped over a large knotty root I remembered. We had just passed where I first met Kaitlyn, but there was no sign of any bodies. Perhaps they had already been taken by scavengers.

  Were the cultists responsible for the fires across the city and the cell signals not working?

  When I encountered the cultists in the past, they seemed… wrong. Like their minds weren’t working at full capacity.

  What god do the cultists we’ve encountered so far follow? What does he embody?

  That explained how they acted.

  Is there any way to undo the manipulation on them? It seems like an easy way to depower the cults.

  So, they needed to die. I hated that the thought filled me with a touch of satisfaction.

  So why get in contact with me? Why bother?

  I groaned audibly. There was always another problem to deal with.

  Alright. What does she need help with?