The days that followed the arrival of Constance and her men left little time for relaxation. Eight hours on watch sounds like a typical workday, but the truth is a different matter entirely. Most apparent is that most jobs didn't require constant attentiveness to keep the threat of death at bay. I realized early on that the shifts we were on were too long. When Val and I were on watch we'd walk a circuit of the block. It left their camp unobserved for an uncomfortably long period, but not so long that they'd be able to scale the wall before we made it back around. The real problem was how frequently I found myself getting distracted, despite my best efforts.

Spare time not taken up eating or sleeping was spent on my todo list, made all the more urgent by the arrival of our guests. And I'd get sidetracked thinking about how I might enchant the new batch of communication books, or what I might say to Cassius about the power situation, only to realize I couldn't recall having walked the last section of wall. Of course, Val and I would talk, and that would keep us both a touch more attentive but we could only keep that up for so long. Eight hours with only each other and the threat of invasion to keep us company was trying for both of us.

And then Cassius, the damned workaholic, went and got the elevator circuits sorted and the building powered. We both put in plenty of mental effort before the switch ever got thrown, frequently joining each other on watch so we could talk. We decided which floors would or would not receive power, settling on the top two and bottom two, along with other matters like turning off power to systems rendered redundant by my magical upgrades.

Once we figured out the elevator system's emergency settings, turning one of them into a kinetic battery proved a little easier than we thought. The emergency panels had controls to activate earthquake and fire modes, which were exactly what we needed. When we needed to get power out of the 'battery', a Move Metal enchantment would turn on fire mode. If left to run all the way through, it would send the elevator to ground level, though the same enchantment would turn fire mode back off when the power draw lessened. To add power to the battery, we enabled earthquake mode. For some reason we both found completely incomprehensible, earthquake mode sent the elevator to the very top of the shaft.

Because the top of a tall building is exactly where I want to be in the event of an earthquake.

In any case, it suited our needs. Between the kinetic battery and some careful management around how we spun the generators, we found that the building's power was reasonably stable. Not that I had a multimeter to hand, but the lights didn't flicker or blow out, and more sensitive electronics like the televisions seemed perfectly happy to run with the power we were giving them. Not that any of us had time to watch the handful of blu-rays we'd come across while looting the hotel.

Rather, our mental efforts were replaced with the physical, as we spent our so-called free time helping everyone get moved to the ninth floor. It was necessary, particularly for the added security, but it was hard on me.

Sometimes people find it hard to believe that I weigh a thousand pounds, after all, how can a human body take such strain? And the truth is, it can't. Not in the long run. But I do tip the scales at half a ton. A normal weight for someone at eight feet- if you consider anything about being eight feet tall normal -is between three-fifty to four-hundred pounds, and most of them are on the thin side. My myostatin deficiency means I'm about as muscular as a human can get. If that were my only other freakish trait, I'd probably be a much more reasonable five hundred pounds. But the mutation that affects my skeleton makes it eight times as dense. In a normal human, the skeleton accounts for about a seventh your total body weight. Which means an increase in bone density by a factor of eight results in a doubling of total body weight. And that's how an already absurd five hundred pounds becomes a ludicrous half-ton of human.

So while I have little difficulty moving a few hundred pounds of belongings to and from the elevator, indeed, I can lift a hell of a lot more if I need to, it put yet more strain on already overtaxed joints.

I knew there was some pain medication in the cabinet, but it wasn't worth the trouble. Short of choking down half the bottle, it wasn't going to do much for me, and I wasn't going to waste what little we had to get a few hours reprieve when the same pills could last any of the others for a week or two.

So I took it easy and spent the time working on finishing our new communications system. Cassius was quick to understand what I taught him of modular enchantments. As I drew parallels to software development, imagining each enchantment as a function or method, he understood them as components. This one a motor, that one a solenoid, and so on. It was necessary to tie generator speed to the kinetic battery status, but he also applied it to help me prototype a few ideas surrounding communication.

Being the nerds we were, the two of us jumped straight to the coolest and therefore most complicated solution, a pair of glasses with a heads up display. We made it as far as Hello World before we realized this was way outside what was feasible, at least for the moment. Unable to use Create Light to draw on the lenses, we tried Move Earth, which moved graphite dust around to form pixels. With the text that close, it was all but unreadable. It did work though, and anything drawn in chalk on the piece of slate we enchanted would appear in miniature on the lens.

So we fell back upon the old standby, enchanted books. Between the supplies brought back by Valentine, which included a great deal of loose parchment, and materials from the hotel, the multitalented Phoebe bound several blank books to work our enchantments upon. She worked the materials we needed for the magic right into their construction. Brass bindings, wrought in multiple parts, provided mana for several component enchantments. Communicate Metal was foremost among them and formed the foundation of how the book worked.

The initial pair of books that I'd created for Val and myself used Communicate Plant and Transform Plant to darken one book's page to match what was written in the other. It showed only a black and white gradient but otherwise worked well.

I was more ambitious with the new project and decided that I wanted to display in colour. So Communicate Metal, supplied by the brass fittings, was matched with Move and Transform Metal, provided by a few steel and zinc pins. Supplied with several varieties of metallic dust, Transform would control oxidization to get the colour as close as possible to what was desired. Move would put the dust where it was needed to form the image.

It was more than a vanity project. It allowed us not just to make a pair of books into real-time copies of each other, but to change pages after the fact. We weren't creating a magic smartphone, but Sense Body did create an effective touch screen. Or touch page, I suppose.

Each book had a couple hundred pages, though nearly all would be blank. In fact, only if the user tapped out the correct sequence on the cover would any of the pages come to life.

I set up each book to connect to any number of others, and I could add new books to the network so long as any single existing book was present. They'd handle communication between each other, but nothing would be displayed unless a page was enchanted to display the relevant information.

So if the book was the phone, then each page was an app. They were really lame apps, and the book would eventually run out of pages, but it was the best I could do at the moment. I'm no Steve Wozniak after all, and I'm barely Wallace Macaskill.

With the books crafted by Phoebe and the logic worked out by Cassius and me, the grunt work of actually doing the enchantment fell to me. Cassius had been a quick study, but he was still a little shaky with enchantment. True, Phoebe was ten times the enchanter I was, but the logic didn't come as naturally to her. Besides, my whole reason for coming up with modular enchantments was simplicity.

Not that simple necessarily meant easy.

It was simple to enchant each book to talk to each other, and then to enchant each page to translate that into something a person could interact with and read. But that still left me doing the same enchantment forty-nine times. Simple, not easy.

We decided early on that we wanted to run a team-wide group chat and separate person-to-person enchantments. But that wasn't just one page, enchanted as a janky copy of Signal. Instead, each conversation was its own page, and every book needed to be enchanted accordingly. So my book needed the group chat on one page, and six more pages for each of the solo chats. Seven books, and seven pages in each book. All this on top of the locking and communication enchantments that each book received meant I spent quite a while on the couch with a thousand-yard stare.

I'll rework it for better scalability in the next release, I promise.

However sore I might have been, Val and I were still committed to our turn on watch that afternoon, so when the time came, I pushed myself to my feet and took my first trip down the elevator.

Mental and physical exhaustion meant I found it even more difficult than usual to keep my mind on the task at hand, but Val's devious mind had already concocted a method of keeping me focused.

Ecstatic at the idea of working in colour, she described, in agonizing detail, just what sorts of drawings she had in mind for the future. Undeterred by my exasperated sighs and embarrassed silence, she continued, asking which of her ideas I liked the best and whether I had any suggestions.

Face bright red, I tried not to look at her. Which meant I was getting a pretty good look of just about everything else as she ran circles around me, giggling, and trying to catch my eye. She was impossible to ignore, not that I didn't try to, and by pretending to focus very hard on the task of keeping watch, I did a decent job of actually keeping watch.

Once Val ran out of ideas to draw, she began to recount tales from The Blushing Maiden, and I suddenly found that I preferred hearing about her drawings.

She told me, giggling all the while, of one misadventure involving one of the girls who pretended to get stuck squeezing through a hole in a wall. Having been on the internet, the reasons for this were obvious to me, not that Valentine would be deterred. She went on, at length, explaining just what the implication was, and I hoped every second that an army of elves would come boiling over the top of the wall.

The punchline of her story was when they realized that the woman really was stuck. Val was laughing so hard she could hardly speak as she related the struggles to free her friend, and even I was chuckling despite myself.

It was Amity who made it all bearable, who went the extra mile to make sure the rest of us were taken care of. Once she and Regina finished their overnight watch, Amity would cook us up a big breakfast while Regina waited patiently. They'd also get up early to make dinner for the rest of us before they went on watch. I could hardly find the energy to shower and fall into bed, so I was tremendously grateful not to need to cook.

Neither did I have the energy to entertain Val, not that she was about to be deterred. She slipped beneath the covers and set to work. I wasn't sure she got much out of it, but I let out a contented sigh and enjoyed the eager little noises she made.

The past few days were not what I had in mind, imagining what my adventures might be like, but we were doing okay on the whole. There was more to do, and there likely always would be. But it was work we did for ourselves.

Besides, I couldn't imagine a better way to fall asleep.

I'd intended to spend the following morning enchanting more magical heaters, worried that inclement weather and vast swings in temperature would begin to wear away at the building.

Val had other ideas.

Having been given a taste of what she'd been missing for so many days, she was eager for more and leapt into my arms the moment the door was closed behind us. I was so startled that I almost dropped her, but got an arm around her waist before she could fall.

"Come on," she howled, "Put away your boring enchantments for just a moment and relax," Val squirmed around in my grip until she could get her arms around my neck, and nibbled playfully at my ear, "If yesterday is any indication, you're awfully pent up, and I don't think my job is done."

"Oh, so you're selfless, is that it?"

Val nuzzled my neck, "I've already told you that you can do whatever you like," she murmured.

I carried her over to the couch and set her down on the carpet before me. She knelt with hands on knees, all but vibrating with excitement as she waited for me to make up my mind.

I was just about to tell her to start taking off her flight suit when someone began hammering on the door.

Val's shoulders slumped, and she turned to regard the door with a tired expression.

I sighed and rose to my feet, ruffling her hair as I did, and went to see what the bother was.

I pulled open the door to find Cassius and Phoebe waiting beyond.

"Regina and Amity are back on watch," Cassius began, the moment the door was open, "But I'm pretty sure some shit went down in the Baroness's Camp, come on."

I checked over my shoulder to see that Val was following, and then hurried to join the others in the elevator.

Val slipped inside, and Cassius thumbed the button for ground level.

"Their camp was too quiet this morning," Phoebe explained, "We saw smoke from their cookfires, but they'd burnt down too low before we even began our watch."

"As if they'd lit them and left," Cassius continued, "Eventually we decided to try calling to them. We got nothing. There's no movement in the camp and no response from any of them. We can't figure out where they have the horses either."

"Don't they usually take them down the hill during the day to graze?" I recalled.

"Yeah, but there's no cover today. We would have seen them," Cassius insisted, "I think they blew out of here."

"We elected to inform you," Phoebe explained, "None of us has ventured below as yet."

The elevator chimed as it reached ground floor, and I followed them out to the section of wall that overlooked the camp. Regina and Amity were already there keeping watch, and looked up as we approached.

I found the camp just as they'd described when I reached the edge of the wall—a field of empty tents, and not a soul in sight.

"Alright, here's the plan. Val and I will check it out while Cassius and Amity cover us with the rifles. Regina, you and Phoebe are on patrol duty. If this is some ploy to draw us out, you two will spot them and let the rest of us know."

I received a round of nods from the group and headed over to the manhole cover. I rolled the hatchback aside and climbed down into the storm drain with Val close on my heels.

"I'll take point. You blast anything that tries to sneak up behind me," I instructed.

"Mmm, I love it when you're so commanding."

I sighed, "Priorities, Val. Priorities."

I dropped out of the storm drain and onto the grass, and after a moment to check that my immediate surroundings were clear, helped Val down after me.

Our first stop was the truck, which had been left within their reach for several days. Thankfully, our close watch on it seemed to have paid off, and while I'd need to remember to have someone check the fuel tank, it appeared they'd left it alone.

The smell of woodsmoke and blood wafted towards us as we approached the camp. Small circles of stone marked the cookfires that had gone unused and here and there tents flapped open in the light breeze.

We found the first body within one of those tents. The flap, meant to keep out the wind and rain, hadn't been fastened shut. I pushed it aside to reveal one of the elven men, still in his bedroll, with a throat that had been cut almost to bone.

Val and I checked each tent in turn, finding most empty, though the body count was growing slowly. We were at five when we finally reached the command tent, where the Baroness and her two knights had resided.

Lying face down in the dirt was an elven woman, her sword discarded to one side. It was the first body we'd found with a weapon, all the rest having been killed in their sleep.

I rolled the body over with the butt of my axe and found an unfamiliar face. It was neither the Baroness nor the bodyguard who'd accompanied her to our meeting.

"They could reach the city," I muttered absently, "Couldn't they? If they pushed their horses hard enough?"

Val wrinkled her nose at the stench of blood and death filling the tent, "Likely yes, but I think we both know that's not where they're headed."