Decision Made

  Decision Made

  P.I.V.O.T. Lab Chronicles™ Book Ten

  Michael Anderle

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2020, 2021 LMBPN Publishing

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design

  http://jcalebdesign.com / jcalebdesign@gmail.com

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact support@lmbpn.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US Edition, February 2021

  (Previously published as Decisions Made, Pivot Lab Chronicles Book Four)

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64971-599-9

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64971-600-2

  The Decision Made Team

  Thanks to the JIT Readers

  Deb Mader

  Billie Leigh Kellar

  Diane L. Smith

  Jeff Eaton

  Kerry Mortimer

  John Ashmore

  Jeff Goode

  Kelly O’Donnell

  If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editor

  The Skyhunter Editing Team

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Creator Notes - Michael Anderle

  Books by Michael Anderle

  Connect with Michael Anderle

  Chapter One

  Taigan scratched her scalp and yawned as she emerged from her tent. The weather—it had to be said—was completely perfect. The grass was soft under her bare feet and the air had no chill, but neither did it have the sense that the day would become oppressively hot.

  When she reached the firepit, it took her a moment to determine what was different. She looked around with a frown. Behind her was her tent—deep blue with a golden T embroidered on the tent flap. Across the fire pit from her was Jamie’s tent, red and with a golden J.

  Ben’s tent was gone. She looked at where it had stood. The grass wasn’t even tamped down anymore and it was simply gone.

  And so was he.

  She sat on one of the cushions around the firepit. Unexpectedly, she felt sad. He was a part of the real world, not something she could have made up in her head. He had sacrificed himself to save Jamie once.

  Also, he had been in the game longer than they had and she wasn’t entirely sure how well they would do on their own.

  “Are you okay?” Prima asked.

  Taigan looked up. “Yes. But I’m a little worried about doing this on our own.”

  Silence followed her admission.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to make things worse.”

  “No, you might as well say whatever it is. I’ll only spend time thinking about it if you don’t.”

  “Huh. Well, you said you were worried about doing this ‘on our own,’ but much of this will need to be you and only you. Jamie can come with you. It’s good that he is here. But only you can do the work to wake up as you’ve been doing so far.

  She stared at her hands for a moment before she phased out of the world briefly to the sleeping world where she could summon things and returned with a cup of cocoa. She sipped it as she thought.

  “I’m less worried about that,” she said finally, “than about all the things like us showing up in that tavern and people planning to rob us. We’ve never been on our own before and now, we’re not only on our own, we’re on our own in a world that doesn’t have any rules. Any person we run into could be a murderer or a demon, and it’s not like we can call nine-one-one.”

  “Ah.” Prima sounded thoughtful. “I hadn’t considered that.”

  “Yeah.” She drained her mug of hot cocoa. “I’m going back to the void. Do you want anything?” She stopped. “Right. You don’t…eat things.”

  “It was very nice of you to ask,” the AI said. “It is strange. I would think that logically, I would be annoyed that you had forgotten an aspect of my existence. However, I find that I am happy. I do not know why.”

  Taigan smiled up at her, then looked across the firepit as Jamie pushed aside the tent flap and emerged. His hair was, as usual, sticking up at crazy angles. Like her, he had been yawning and only brightened when he saw the empty mug in her hands.

  “There’s cocoa?”

  “I’ll get you some,” she said.

  A low table appeared before she could do so, loaded with a chocolate pot, a pile of pastries, and vats of scrambled eggs and bacon.

  “I make the meals,” Prima said plaintively.

  “Sorry, sorry.” She filled a plate and dug in with a happy sigh. “Perfect bacon, by the way.”

  “Thank you.” The AI sounded mollified.

  “You should try one of the raspberry things,” Jamie told his sister from around a mouthful of pastry. “It’s almost too tart for me so it should be perfect for you.”

  “Awesome.” She snagged one. “So, Prima. You told us we were looking for a key.”

  “Yes. I did tell you that.”

  “Were you lying?”

  “No. I simply sensed that you were about to ask me how to find it, and that is up to you.”

  She groaned. “So…we have to discover where we are. And how to get to where we need to go? And—crap, where we need to go. And what if we don’t guess right?”

  “We climb the wrong mountain,” her twin said, his words muffled by eggs.

  “Exactly!” She looked meaningfully at him. When he said nothing, she asked, “That doesn’t worry you?”

  “Then we decide which is the correct mountain and go to that one, right?” He shrugged. “Extra mountain climbing.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Taigan stared at him as she considered it. “If we make a mistake, we simply correct it. Huh.”

  “I’m glad you’re both here,” Prima said.

  “Aww, that’s sweet.” Jamie smiled.

  “Wait for it,” his sister cautioned.

  “Jamie helps when Taigan paints herself into a made-up corner, and Taigan helps when Jamie rushes in like a moron with no plan.”

  “There it is,” she said.

  “Hey.” He held a finger up. “We both do both of those things.”

  “Ooh, self-burn. Those are rare.”

  The girl snickered. “Okay, so we need to get a key that’s at the top of some mountain. I’ll assume there are many mountains and as we know, mountains are bi
g, so even the top of a mountain isn’t very specific.”

  “You’re doing surprisingly well with this.”

  “Thanks.” Taigan waited for the other shoe to drop.

  “Should I turn the game from Ridiculously Easy to Really Really Easy?”

  “Honestly, if there’s a setting easier than Ridiculously Easy, I’d go for that one,” she responded, her expression deadpan. “I’m lazy, you see.”

  “Seconded,” her brother said.

  “Humans,” Prima muttered just out of earshot, and the twins grinned at each other.

  “I suppose it would make sense to find an old scholar or something, right?” Jamie asked. “Someone who would know what the key was and where to find it. Which would be in a big city, probably. Or a monastery or something. Which first means we need to find someone to tell us where we are and where to go.”

  Taigan nodded. “So the question now is do we go left or right once we reach the road?”

  “Hmmm.” He looked around. “On the count of three, we’ll both say left or right, and maybe we’ll agree. Ready? One, two, three—”

  “Left,” they called in unison.

  “Sweet,” she said.

  “So…nothing about looking at the landscape or trying to remember which way you came, anything like that?”

  “Nope,” Jamie said.

  “I see now why humans haven’t achieved more, technologically and socially speaking.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Jamie stood and stretched. “I’ll get changed and pack up. Meet back here in ten?”

  “You? Get changed and packed in ten minutes? Oh, wait, did you mean ten hours?” His sister stuck her tongue out. “Let’s try to make it two or less.”

  “Jerk,” he muttered as he headed into his tent.

  Taigan grinned and entered her tent to change as well. She had packed the night before and put several packs of provisions in her bag as well as clothes, a blanket, a sleeping roll, and a waterskin. There were so many other things she could think of that she might want but the pack was already getting heavy.

  A tiny pouch of coins now lay on the bed, having winked itself into existence while she wasn’t watching. She tied it to her belt, made sure all her armor was fastened correctly, and pushed out to where Jamie hopped out the door with his pack undone and one boot not on yet.

  “Dammit,” he said when he saw her.

  “Thank you for doing it this way. It’s much funnier.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He glowered and yanked his boot on. “Let’s go. Thanks for the party, Prima!”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Thank you, Prima,” she echoed.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  The twins set off with a morning breeze rising around them. Rolling hills carpeted in greenery stretched on either side of the road, interspersed by some crops and more than a few stands of trees. It was a welcoming, quiet country, and Taigan was surprised to not see many houses.

  “Prima, where is everyone?”

  “You’ll simply have to find out, won’t you?”

  She glared skyward and waited for the AI to continue.

  “I make great effort to set these stories up. Excuse me for wanting to see them unfold nicely.”

  “Okay, that’s a fair point.” The girl sighed. “I only wish I knew we were going in the right direction.”

  “I think there are some people over there.” Jamie pointed to a distant patch of the road, not even visible but for a cloud of dust. “At first, I thought it might be smoke, but it’s very diffuse. I think there’s a caravan or something.”

  “Huh.” Taigan frowned. She could see the dust now, so faint that she hadn’t noticed it. She hoped they hadn’t been walking in the wrong direction all morning but she decided it would be better to know now if that had been the case.

  They were both beginning to get exceedingly bored by the time the other travelers came into sight. It wasn’t that they were in bad shape, only that they’d never spent an entire day walking. Worse, they had no idea if they were moving in the correct direction or how long it would take to get where they were going.

  As the group drew closer, Taigan saw that they all wore leather armor with glittering metal accents and rode horses that looked unusually large. She didn’t know much about horses, of course, but these tossed their heads and lifted their feet high, not to mention being glossy and with full manes.

  These people had money. What they didn’t have, it seemed, was anything to protect.

  “I don’t like this,” she said bluntly to Jamie.

  “You know, neither do I.”

  “Let’s see if we can get past them without engaging at all,” she suggested. Hell, it wouldn’t be that different from a normal day—lowering her eyes and trying to walk past some jerk who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Wasn’t this supposed to be a fantasy world?

  “Ho, there.” The voice was commanding.

  Taigan suppressed a sigh and looked up. The man on the horse was elven, she could tell from the faint strangeness in his features and the wildly odd coloring. His skin looked pale blue and his hair was as black as a void.

  “Hello,” she said before Jamie could answer.

  “Where are you traveling to?” His gaze scrutinized them both. “Fine weapons and fine packs but there’s little enough to the south. Nothing of value, anyway.”

  She wasn’t entirely sure what to say to this.

  Luckily, her brother had an answer ready. “We’re a little ahead of our caravan, that’s all.”

  “Oho?” The elf gave him a greedy smile. “And what would be in that caravan, boy?”

  “Nothing that need concern you.”

  “It concerns me if I say it does.” The elf looked at the rest of the riders, all of whom drew their weapons in one smooth, coordinated movement. “So you’ll tell me what’s in there and then you’ll come quietly with us, and we’ll explain more when we meet your family.”

  The elf thought he had it all in the bag. He certainly didn’t expect Taigan to thwack him on the head with her staff.

  “Not. Fucking. Likely,” she said.

  Very softly, she heard Prima say, “Oh, damn.”

  Chapter Two

  In all honesty, it was incredibly funny to see a group of men with drawn swords and fearsome armor, all looking like they had no idea what to do next.

  Taigan decided to focus on the funny part because if she didn’t, she’d have to focus on the fact that six well-armed soldiers were now only a few seconds away from being very pissed off.

  Or five who were about to be very pissed off and one who wasn’t entirely with it anymore.

  A thought came to her and she jerked her head for Jamie to move.

  “What?”

  “Get out of range,” she said.

  “Of what?” Despite the question, he was already backing away. He looked constantly from Taigan to the six soldiers, several of whom had now decided to begin turning their horses.

  That meant there wasn’t anything for it but to use muscle memory. She brought herself back to her father’s training and the way he’d helped her position her tiny limbs when she was four and five. She adjusted her grip on the staff, she wound up, and whacked the lead elf’s head like a baseball

  She was careful to angle the swing upward so she wouldn’t hit the horse as well. He dropped limply out of the saddle, the horse reared and pranced, and the other five yelled and spurred their mounts directly toward the twins.

  They dove in opposite directions.

  “Don’t hurt the horses!” Jamie yelled at her.

  “I didn’t plan to!” she called in response.

  It did complicate things somewhat, however. The horses were relatively unprotected, and they were also exceedingly dangerous and clearly well-trained. She had a sneaking suspicion that they were trained to trample people. As she watched, the five of them skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust and turned, ready to charge again.

  A wordless yell sounded, and J
amie raced directly across their path to tackle Taigan out of the way. “Behind me!”

  “What? Why?”

  He grabbed the saddle and reins of the horse that was now riderless. “I’ll keep them away from you—on this horse—and you deal with the leader and we’ll see if we can cut the head off the snake.”

  “Right.”

  “Help me up first?”

  Taigan dropped the staff and laced her fingers together. She boosted him into the saddle and winced. “Christ almighty, how much do you weigh? How do you look so skinny and weigh that much?”

  “Focus!”

  “Fine! Prima, remind me to mock Jamie later.”

  “Will do,” the AI said calmly.

  “Oh, come on!” he yelled.

  She was still laughing when a hand closed around her arm. With a shriek, she tried to run and tripped. It seemed immensely undignified when her face met the gravel, but the fingers loosened and she was able to scramble away.

  The elven leader crouched in the dirt and snarled his fury. Now that she was up, she could see that her trip had taken her out of the way of a sword slash. She gulped and scrabbled for the staff. Coming up empty, she did the only thing she could think of and hurled a handful of dust in the man’s eyes. He reeled back with a curse.

  Her weapon lay in the dirt a few paces away. She lunged to grab it and checked on Jamie. He was effectively distracting the other five, but it wasn’t clear how much of that was on purpose and how much was due to the fact that he couldn’t ride a horse very well.