The pockets of Jessica’s white trousers were her only line of protection against the cold so she jammed her hands inside, thumbs and all, and allowed her face to take the brunt of the chilly wind. She almost wished she’d grabbed that stupid blue jacket.

  “Y’alright, Jessica?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh… cuz of what Harrow was saying?”

  “Yup.”

  “He seems like a jerk.”

  Jessica rolled her head side-to-side. John was correct, but even he was getting on her nerves. What she wanted was to be alone for a while where no one would spy on her and her actions weren’t forced from her at swordpoint. Or gunpoint, in Harrow’s case.

  That was perhaps the most frustrating part out of all of this: The feeling that everyone else was choosing what happened to her. In hindsight, she was starting to appreciate Sir Hayek’s blunt, physical oppression. At least he had left her with the ability to quietly plot her own actions, one chemistry reaction at a time.

  Meanwhile, Morkal, who she’d imagined to be a friend of sorts, had been secretly informing on her and probably nudging her toward Harrow. Riza had been doing likewise by manipulating Jessica’s need to help others. Had the lizard girl planted herself in slavery knowing Jessica would rescue her? How much of that crap about her tribe being wiped out was a lie?

  And then there was Harrow, who was an unholy synthesis of all of them, manipulating her from a distance both emotionally and physically. He claimed to want to free serfs and slaves all the while holding a gun to her head.

  In retrospect, even Naga had pressured her into sharing her body heat. And while John and the Serf family had taken her in and cared for her, the only reason she got into their good graces was by being useful. If she hadn’t given them soap, would they have bothered to save her from execution.

  “Wanna talk?” John asked.

  “John, could you please just leave me alone?”

  “Nuh-uh. My ma’ says when folks get like this the best thing for ‘em is to talk it out instead of stewin’ on it. Cuz if you’re thinkin’ about it wrong, how’re you supposed to figure out how to think about it right if ya only got yourself to talk to?”

  “You can’t force me to talk about my problems,” Jessica said.

  “I can’t,” John said.

  She expected a ‘but’ after that and then some explanation, but he stopped there. He couldn’t get her to talk to him if she didn’t want to. That’s all he was saying.

  Jessica’s thoughts turned to all those adventurers she had called selfish and violent. Really, she was jealous of them. She’d been jealous of them and their freedom from the moment Sir Hayek chased her down a hill and threw her into serfdom. How much of her disdain for adventurers was just that jealousy? Their actions were their own. They were free. She wasn’t. No wonder they had no desire to leave Tushita.

  “John, how come you don’t just run away from being a serf? It’s not like you’ve got social security numbers or anything here. You could just leave. Hell, you’re an adorable, inoffensive teenage boy with a golden retriever’s lack of personal boundaries. If you walked into any Adventurer’s Guild branch you would be scooped into a female adventurers’ party before you knew what hit you and then you could live out your dream of adventuring. So why don’t you?”

  “Cuz I’m a Barleyfielder,” he said, scuffing his shoes on a patch of dirt. “I belong with Barleyfield.”

  “Why?”

  He looked up at her with the same confused expression he’d had when Harrow was explaining the metaphysics of the Tapestry.

  “Dunno! I could choose to be a rambler I s’pose. Heck, Barleyfield’s had a few who up and left cuz they didn’t wanna be a part of it. I can’t rightly blame ‘em. But I chose to stay cuz that’s just what I chose. Barleyfield’s a part a’ me and I’m a part of it.”

  “So you could’ve made a choice and didn’t?”

  “As I see it, freedom’s like money, ain’t it? There are folks who hoard it all up in case they might need it some day and other folks who spend it all up and get in a bind. Some folks don’t have much when they’re born cuz they’re born a serf like me. But the little bit I got, I spend on Barleyfield.”

  “Spend on Barleyfield…” Jessica muttered, balling her fists in her pocket.

  She’d spent her own freedom on it too. Nothing had stopped her from running away and abandoning the Serf family to be executed except for her choice not to. Of course, Jessica didn’t choose to put their lives on the line. But did worrying about that really get her anywhere? Was there really some hard kernel at the center where she was able to make a perfect, unconstrained choice?

  Jessica shook her head. “Your mom’s a smart lady, John.”

  John nodded with pride.

  When Jessica barged back into the tent Harrow was talking quietly with Morkal about something happening in a place called Chikukuni.

  He looked up at her with a smirk. “Well, that didn’t take—”

  “If you want my help building your artillery piece you’re going to shut up and start cooperating with me too. This is going to be a collaborative effort. Understood?” Jessica said, brushing past him to throw on the blue jacket that was left for her.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Oh? Did someone tell you my plans?”

  “No,” Jessica said, going over to the pile of papers on his desk and holding up one of the schematics. “I saw these earlier. I wasn’t sure what to make of them at first because your notation sucks, but I’m assuming if you’re this desperate to recruit a chemist it has to do with chemistry. This bit here: 17Cr5Ni. That’s chromium and nickel, right? You’re testing steel alloys for use in artillery shells.”

  Harrow’s eyebrows raised. “I am. That’s a good catch.”

  “You’re trying to replicate HF-1 steel but both your chromium and nickel proportions are too low. You’re looking for something like 20% chromium, 10% nickel, 2% carbon. The rest iron. That being said, you’re also barking up the wrong tree. HF-1 steel is preferred because of controlled fragmentation. It increases anti-personnel lethality. It doesn’t decrease stress fractures. That’s a mechanical failure of the firing mechanism.”

  He held up his hands. “Alright, alright. You’re competent. I get it. We can discuss chemistry later. For now you can consider me an open book. What can I do to put your mind at ease? Would you like me to apologize on Riza’s behalf?”

  Jessica threw the papers down. “No, I want to know about you. And I don’t mean the stupid persona you’ve built up. Your name’s not Harrow and you weren’t some badass revolutionary on Earth. I want to know who I’m working with. starting with your real name.”

  Harrow bit his lip. His leg pounded against the floor like an overactive piston.

  “It’s Jeremy. Any other questions?”

  “I can see why you changed it to Harrow.”

  He smiled a pained smile and waited for her to move on.

  “Hey, no shame there. I met an adventurer who went by Jared. How’s that for an Isekai protagonist?”

  Jeremy cleared his throat. “Well, we’ve had portal fantasies with people named Alice, Hank, Lucy, Edmund, Jill…”

  “Yeah, cool.” Jessica leaned on the table. “How’d you die?”

  His reaction was once again to turn into a human internal combustion machine. She knew immediately he must have died in a severely uncool way. His knuckles turned white where they gripped the back of his chair.

  “Covid.”

  A snort leapt from Jessica’s nose. It wasn’t intentional, but she couldn’t help herself. He frowned at her.

  “Come on, dude. You have to admit there’s something funny about getting isekai’d by the ‘rona. Weren’t you like 20 something?”

  “Twenty-three and immunocompromised, yes. Is that funny to you?”

  “Kinda.”

  She might have been more sympathetic if Jeremy hadn’t tried so hard to put on airs and come across as a string-pulling mastermind. Poking holes in his act was too satisfying now.

  “So what did you do before you got isekai’d by Covid-kun, Jeremy? It seems like you’ve got an engineering background.”

  Jaw still tight from her ribbing, he replied, “Industrial engineering. I got my bachelor’s in Mechanical and I went back to get my M.Eng in Industrial. I got into union organizing through my GAU and I pretty much single-handedly unionized the college of engineering.”

  “Wow! Good for you,” Jessica said.

  “Are you done being sarcastic? By all means, take your time. Get it out of your system.”

  Jessica actually hadn’t meant it as sarcasm. She was a member of her own GAU, albeit a lazy member who didn’t do anything besides pay dues. Nonetheless, she had always recommended new chemistry cohorts sign up.

  She took a deep breath. “Listen, we got off on the wrong foot. Mostly your fault, but whatever. If you’re willing to be upfront with me about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and consult with me about what we do next, then we can work together. Otherwise you can throw me back in a pit. That’s the deal.”

  “Fine,” he said, thrusting his hand out with a force that said he was still aggravated. She shook at gently.

  “And one more thing,” Jessica added, “we’re not destroying the Tapestry just yet. Let me be perfectly clear: I want to know more about this world and what’ll happen if we do that. If it means Tushita will be destroyed with it I would rather be stuck here forever.”

  Harrow shrugged. “I suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. I’m not sure how you intend to look for that knowledge though. Especially when every adventurer on this continent wants to string you up.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “Oh, one more thing I’m curious about.”

  Harrow looked around at John and Morkal and then the front of the tent. His leg was bouncing again. This time it seemed more out of impatience.

  “This has to be the last ‘one more thing’. We have a planning meeting to start so let’s be quick, yeah?”

  Jessica clasped her hands behind her back. “So… you’ve been in Tushita for, what, 25 years now? That’s a pretty long time.”

  “Compared to the Original Eight it’s not,” he replied.

  “Sure, but they’re dumb teenagers. All they’ve done in that time is run around looking for quests and harems. What I’m curious about is what you’ve been up to, Mr. Industrial Engineer. Clearly you’ve got the metallurgy capabilities to be tinkering with steel alloys, let alone mass-producing firearms, so what have you done and where are your factories?”

  “J?rvistad,” Harrow said. “It was a trading outpost for nomadic animalar tribes when I gave up adventuring. This was twenty-four years ago. I took my knowledge of industrial processes, my experience in union organizing, and my adventuring job and I built a base for the revolution. What you see now is the fruit of a quarter century of preparation.”

  For the first time, Jessica was genuinely impressed. It hadn’t even occurred to her that another reincarnated adventurer might try starting an industrial revolution in a fantasy world, let alone have the expertise to follow through. Most people would have no idea where to begin, with or without the aid of a search engine.

  “What are the odds not one, but two people with the toolset to rebuild civilization would get isekai’d?” Jessica said.

  “Higher than you’d think,” he replied. “We both fantasized about it beforehand, didn’t we? That’s why the Tapestry drew us in. For us to end up here we both had to want to start an industrial revolution in an isekai world badly enough to end up here when we died. The weirder thing is that no one came along sooner.”

  “Huh? I don’t think I ever fantasized about that,” Jessica said.

  “You knew the composition of HF-1 steel. Either you’re a materials scientist or an inorganic chemist, but either way, it would be too convenient for you to somehow just know soapmaking and the Bayer process and cement-mixing and how to make rebar and so on.”

  “How do you know I can do all those things?”

  “Can you?”

  Jessica flushed. “It— I mean, yes, I collected some civilization-kickstarting ideas, but that was in case of, I don’t know, a world-ending apocalypse. Nuclear war, or—”

  “Jessica, you ended up here for a reason. Just accept it. You fantasized about being reincarnated in another world where you would use chemistry to outwit people and topple medieval kingdoms because you had Twain’s book kicking around in your head.”

  God-dammit, Jessica thought. He was right again.