Character · Book 6, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride

Carl

The narrator. Twenty-seven, ex–Coast Guard, a marine technician in Seattle, six foot three; on the night the world's buildings vanish he is outside in boxer shorts, a leather jacket and his ex-girlfriend's pink Crocs, coaxing her cat out of a tree, which is why he enters the dungeon without pants and soon without shoes. Crawler #4,122. He fights bare-fisted and barefoot, discovers a gift for improvised explosives, and gets angrier at the people running the show than at anything in it.

Segment appearances

Arc

Squads and ghosts

Book 6 opens on a floor that is not a dungeon at all: a recording of Havana three weeks before the end, with intangible people whose clothes fall off when Carl walks through them, and a card game he did not ask for (ch. 1, ch. 4). Donut is squad leader; Carl is, by the rules' own word, a minion (ch. 42). He spends the first weeks doing what he does — flagging a monk seal on the beach, vaporising a fleeing duende with his first Daughter's Kiss, building a crab trap out of a U-Haul (ch. 6, ch. 7, ch. 24, ch. 25) — while the floor works on him from three directions at once: a divine back patch left by a celestial box, charged with the essence of the fallen (ch. 3), a god's messages he must copy before they vanish and may not repeat (ch. 17), and the river, louder every day, that a spider's fifth eye finds through a simulation's safeties (ch. 28).

The bargains

He flags a god at the blink and gets SlugPox for it (ch. 15); a goddess in a hidden channel offers Katia's life for Odette's presence on the battlefield and he scratches his left arm (ch. 17); a high cleric who may be the AI washes his feet on the sun and makes him a martyr (ch. 18); a church lends him a million gold for a ring against the slugs and calls the loan interest-free with an asterisk (ch. 56). He accepts a contract from a hidden guild to kill the Desperado Club's assistant manager so that Katia's box will open, and does it — tears her wings off as she moves to shield him, and hears 'I was almost done' (ch. 31, ch. 32). He lies to his friends at a kitchen table with Bautista in the room (ch. 18), and to Donut about being fine (ch. 28).

The trailer

Phase two puts the key in a trailer in Iowa, spliced in from a summer: a motorcycle with a dent, flower pots in a woman's handwriting, a bicycle cut in half at the property line (ch. 44). Inside, his father in a hospital bed, and a six-year-old brother he never knew he had, and a stepmother with morphine in the alliums (ch. 45). He whispers in the dying man's ear, loots the bedroom to the dresser, promises the boy he will not be forgotten, and burns the drapes: 'This was pretty much exactly what I needed to see' (ch. 45). The boss the AI builds from it — nine heads, most of them people he knows, Asher among them — pisses him off more than it breaks him (ch. 46); what breaks him a little is learning afterwards that Bea knew about the boy (ch. 47). For the first time he is angry at her, and not at himself.

The homestead, and the river

He rides his father's Panhead alone to a homeless shelter on Christmas morning because a vanished sponsor circled a breakfast, hears half of a Residual's speech, and is yanked to Orren's office (ch. 49–ch. 51). He names, on a church lawn with twenty friends, the darkness since the Masquerade: loneliness (ch. 63). Phase three costs him a key to a hand swap (ch. 56) and gives him Ren's flamethrower, her pet and her oath to make them pay (ch. 59); he teleports by pushing spider automatons into a doll's head (ch. 57), and, when three squads in four have no key, reasons with a goat into a way out that means making a Demon Prince as strong as possible and being sucked into the sky (ch. 61, ch. 62).

The Missing Piece

He runs between a demon's legs, hands the deck to himself for three minutes, coaches a crab to fertilise an ocean, and teleports head-first into Samantha to burn his own health down to the Martyr's Path (ch. 68, ch. 69). A Golden Combo meant for a totem lands on him instead, and Shi Maria wears him for three minutes: she reads his inventory, eats his friend's eye with his hand, and tattoos herself above his sternum (ch. 71). He wakes bald in Louis's arms, level 73, having hurt Mongo and Katia, with an eye in his chest that blinks and hides (ch. 72). His last act on the floor is an Emergency Action Item phrased politely, which hands the Faction Wars votes to the audience: protections off at 98%. 'You wanted a slaughter? […] Don’t worry. It’s coming' (ch. 72). Then the patch speaks — a centipede in the skulls — and the sky opens, and he swears to a brother he never met (ch. 72).