At eleven on Thursday night, somebody knocked on Javier Mendoza's door like they owned the building.
Javier was at his desk in a T-shirt and gym shorts with three pens lined up beside the green notebook and the forest biome packet open under the lamp. He'd been reading the same paragraph on burrowing ambush predators for twenty minutes. It wasn't going in. Nothing was going in. His gear sat by the door, packed and repacked, and he'd checked the daggers' edges twice and then a third time because his hands wanted something to do.
He opened the door.
Charles Leone stood in the hallway holding two cans of energy drink by their tops, the way people held beer at parties Javier didn't go to. He wore a guild-crested track jacket zipped to the throat and his hair was perfect, which at eleven at night seemed less like vanity and more like a medical condition.
"Mendoza." Charles held out one of the cans. "You're up."
