Author: Tower Curator

 

 

“Deeper… and deeper. Let your body and your mind calm. The tension in your shoulders, in your arms, in your chest… just let it all go and step to the third… step… now. Relax.”

Sensory deprivation chambers always felt strange. They were small cylinders. More like metal coffins than actual chambers. Half-filled with water, the occupant was intended to relax and float on top, removing most sensations of gravity and the upward force of the ground or chairs or beds. With the water and air both the same temperature, a warm and near-body temperature, there wasn’t much tactile sensation against the skin either. A neutralizing agent mixed in the air ensured that there were no odd smells or tastes.

The only sense not deprived at the moment was the deep voice of her hypnosis technician.

“Deeper and… deeper. Picture your worries as mere light bulbs easy to… reach out to turn them off. One… by… one. Until you find yourself totally without anxiety in your darkened environment and step down to the second… step… now. Relax.”

Hypnotism always seemed like a silly thing. Dyna wasn’t sure what other people felt during the sessions. Melanie had taken her out to a local fair about three months ago. There had been a hypnosis show with a dozen people up on stage. The hypnotist there had not been affiliated with the Carroll Institute, but he still had the volunteers barking like chickens and singing like elephants.

They had to be audience plants. Even exposed to hypnotists and hypnotism sessions on the regular, she couldn’t ever imagine herself acting like that out in public. At the institute, hypnotism sessions tended toward the ‘sit down and relax, be a better person, accomplish what you want, session over’ variety. Far less funny, but at least Dyna didn’t feel revolted at the idea of participating.

Not that she felt they really worked. None had unlocked secret psionic potential.

Though she did have to admit that the sensory deprivation tank was a novel touch. It definitely made the experience feel a whole lot stranger. She couldn’t quite picture this staircase of deeper relaxation or the light bulbs of troublesome thoughts, but she couldn’t remember ever feeling quite so… at peace.

Honestly, it was mostly the voice. Harold was a balding, middle-aged man who wore a fairly traditional pair of glasses. Unassuming in his position as Doctor Cross’ assistant, he was the kind of Mister Cellophane that most people wouldn’t notice. With the one exception of his voice.

“Deeper… and… deeper,” he said, voice smooth and rich. “There is only one step left before we reach your sanctuary. Picture a time before yesterday’s incident. Imagine yourself at peace as you take the final… step… now.”

Dyna blinked.

Dyna blinked again.

The sensory deprivation tank, in fitting with its theme of depriving the occupant of their senses, lacked any light. It didn’t matter if she had her eyes open or closed. Frankly, it was a bit difficult to tell if she had her eyes open or closed. She actually had to think about it.

And no matter how she thought about it now, Dyna couldn’t help but stare at the door in front of her. A simple wooden door. One without windows or a carved pattern. The only feature of the door was a simple brass handle.

Behind her, Dyna saw the ten steps she had taken down to reach the door. She could remember stepping down them one at a time, but… she hadn’t imagined herself doing so with the hypnotist’s voice. Picturing literal pictures in her head had never been something she could accomplish. When someone said to picture an apple… she knew what an apple was. Red, round, a little stem coming off the top. She might even consider the sweet taste of the crispy and juicy fruit.

But she wouldn’t picture it.

Odd as it was, Dyna didn’t feel unnerved. She relaxed. This was how it was supposed to be. Reaching forward, she turned the handle and… stepped deeper into the room now.

A sanctuary?

That was what Harold had said would be here.

Dyna wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or bad thing that her mental sanctuary apparently looked like any given room of Psychodynamics. Not quite as fancy, but the predominant parts of the architecture were made from wood and brass. A long couch and a smaller chair, both fashioned in red leather, sat around a small pit of fire. Shelves of books lined one wall while another wall looked like it had been ripped from a coffee shop, complete with a counter and rows of flavoring bottles and bags of beans. Some mental projection from when she had worked in one?

At the far end, past the pit of fire, a grand window occupied the far wall.

Dyna had been thinking her sanctuary was rather… plain. Not special enough. Rather like her, actually. And yet, the window…

The sanctuary floated in space. Not space like she had ever seen it from Earth, with general darkness dotted by a few faint lights, but something far more fantastic. A nebula of swirling clouds in a rainbow of hues. Stars burned bright as they shined through the clouds. And far out in the distance, what Dyna would have called the horizon had there been a horizon, a single sun-like ball of light dominated the vista. Except instead of being a perfect ball, it was like someone had pinched the light on either side, stretching it far out to infinity on the sides while leaving a small bulge in the middle.

Dyna stared out for… she wasn’t sure how long. The real sun would have burned her eyes out. This? It calmed and relaxed her.

Though she had a task to do. Dyna couldn’t sit around staring forever. She needed to look around her sanctuary… now. She needed to check for any changes, any alterations of what was here. Any additions of new objects. Or any removals, where an object should have been but wasn’t anymore. And she needed to look… now.

Dyna couldn’t remember visiting this place ever before. She couldn’t simply play spot the difference. Perhaps something would feel out of place?

The bookshelf struck her as the most obvious area to look at. Large enough to occupy an entire wall and filled with books? It would have been easy to slip in an extra tome. Or change the title of a tome. Or remove one, though that might leave a small gap.

Given the number of books, she could have spent a short eternity searching through every single page. So she didn’t. Instead, she walked past the shelves slowly, casually looking from one shelf to another. Curious about what was inside the books, she picked up one. Dyna couldn’t read the words on the spine. Not on this one or any of the others. There were definitely letters there, but they swirled and twisted like she was looking at them through a haze.

Text lined the pages of the book. Much like the cover, she couldn’t read a single word of it. That fact didn’t bother her. In fact, she was fairly certain that she had heard somewhere about how it was impossible to read something while in a dream. A hypnosis-induced trance probably counted as a dream.

Flipping a few pages, she found more than just text. An image inset in the book. Unlike the text, she could see the image mostly fine. It was of a water park. Six young children were playing in a large pool. Various shadowy figures hung about in the distance. If this was a memory, she had to assume that the shadowy figures were just random people unimportant to the scene. The children, however, were off. Much like Id, Dyna could see their faces and their eyes and mouths and so on, but putting it all together just didn’t quite work right.

Thinking a little harder, Dyna tried to remember the event. The one stark memory that stood out to her at a water park as a child would have been one of her elementary school friend’s birthday party. It had been… El. Emmanuel, though he just went by El. The moment the name came to her, the image in the book cleared up. One of the children’s features changed. The skin tone darkened from a neutral tan, the now obviously brown hair curled, and she could now see his bright smile as he splashed one of the other children.

Their faces remained blurred. Dyna figured that she could clear them up as well if she thought hard enough, but the memory wasn’t that important to her or to the current situation, so she moved on.

Dyna flipped through a few pages, finding more scenes from the birthday party, and just about closed the book and shelved it again. Before she could, her flipping stopped at another image.

Dyna’s stomach dropped.

The image looked like it was from the same birthday party. Perhaps out in the parking lot as they were heading home. But there was something about this image that struck her as odd…

An adult stood in the background, among the shadowy figures representing the crowd, but not shadowy itself. Like every other person in the hazy memory, Dyna couldn’t identify the features on the adult. Unlike the others, it wasn’t because their face was hazy.

It was like someone had taken a black permanent marker and scribbled out its eyes and nose and mouth and hair. Not like a censor bar, but each individual part of its face had been blacked out. Dyna, horror fanatic that she was, didn’t think she had seen anything more unnerving. Especially because, despite lacking a face, Dyna could tell that it was staring at them.

Dyna flipped a few more pages until she got to the next picture. Also in the parking lot, but near a car. Like the people, Dyna couldn’t tell the specifics. It was large enough to hold six children, however.

And yet, that figure with the blacked out face was still in the image. Closer than before. No longer part of the shadowy crowds.

Dyna flipped the pages again.

The figure stood next to the car door. It wasn’t their driver, as Dyna could see another adult—this one with a mere hazy face—sitting at the wheel. It just leered over the children as the first of the six piled into the side door.

Dyna flipped forward..

And promptly dropped the book.

There was nothing in the image but the scribbled face of the figure. A close-up, like it was staring at her through the book of memories.

Stomach churning, Dyna bent and flipped forward.

The tight feeling in her chest didn’t disappear even though the figure did. The next scene was one from the inside of the car with all the children. She could clearly see El. The others were around as well. Except… Counting, Dyna only made it to five. One of the six children wasn’t there.

Closing her eyes, Dyna tried to think back. Had… someone been kidnapped in her childhood? One of her friends? That seemed like a fairly important memory and one that she wasn’t likely to forget, but she came up blank. Not only that, but El, the only clear child, was obviously laughing. He had a hand on another’s shoulder like they were pal-ing around. If someone had just been kidnapped…

Dyna quickly skimmed through the rest of the book, but couldn’t find any sign of the missing child nor any sign that anyone else noticed.

Psionics?

Memory alteration could certainly have everyone acting like nothing was wrong. And that blacked out face. That had clearly been unnatural.

Was that from Id? Had the woman scribbled over memories while in her head?

Dyna… didn’t think so. This was something old. Something that had happened at the time, not just yesterday.

Putting the book back, Dyna reached for the next, wanting to know if some memory held a clue as to the identity of either that figure or the sixth child. But before she could grab the next book, she noticed something on the shelf above. Dyna couldn’t read the spine. She couldn’t read the spines of any of the books, but this one was like someone had taken a paintbrush and dragged it over what regular text might have been there.

Dyna grabbed the book, noted the same paint smeared across the front, and opened it up.

Every page had been defaced. Someone had taken a paint roller and covered each page. The swirling text and the images were impossible to see, let alone attempt to make out.

Turning pages like the album was a flipbook, Dyna didn’t find a single page that hadn’t been blacked out.

But, nearing the end, a small slip of paper fell from between the pages.

Bending, Dyna picked it up.

“They don’t want you to remember,” she said, reading the readable scribble of handwriting aloud. “They want the control.”

Grabbing a pen from… well, it didn’t really matter where from. Pen suddenly in hand, Dyna wrote the same message on the backside of the paper.

The handwriting didn’t match. She hadn’t thought it did, but this confirmed it.

Dyna hadn’t left this message for herself. Someone else had done it. Id? That person with the blacked out face? Who was they? The Carroll Institute? They were the first they that came to mind given that they were about the only they Dyna knew of that had the technology and personnel capable of manipulating memories. But…

But the Carroll Institute wasn’t her enemy. Were they? It had to be someone else. Those men who followed her, Id… The figure with the blacked out face. Who was that?

It couldn’t be the institute.

It…

Dyna blinked and, finding herself in a pool of water, promptly splashed around in an attempt to keep from drowning. Her hands slapped into the hard metal of the deprivation chamber’s walls, making her realize that the water was less than a foot deep. The lid of the chamber cracked open, forcing her to blink from the light that now poured in.

A few technicians rushed to help her, leaving Dyna feeling more embarrassed than anything else.

“I’m fine,” she said with a groan as she sat up in the tank. “I just…”

“Did you find anything amiss within the confines of your mind?”

Dyna, squinting as one of the technicians handed her a towel, looked to where Doctor Cross stood safely behind a pane of shielded glass. She didn’t give him an answer right away, choosing to pat at her face with the towel while she thought.

There was definitely something amiss within her mind. A kidnapped childhood friend. Some memory that she couldn’t even imagine what it might have been. And that note.

Doctor Cross was looking for some evidence that Id had implanted subliminal messages or trigger words and situations that would cause problems.

Who could she trust? The Carroll Institute? Walter? Cross? Id—certainly not.

Ruby… Ruby couldn’t have anything to do with this. She was too young to have been involved in that event at the water park and she didn’t exactly seem friendly with most Carroll Institute personnel. Dyna did have to wonder what Ruby would do if the Carrol Institute decided to rewrite someone’s memories.

“No. I… I don’t think so. There was…” Dyna slowly lowered the towel from her face. What could she say? She wasn’t sure. Her thoughts were a mess. She…

She needed to call her mother. Back home in L.A., her mother would have a half-dozen scrapbooks chronicling Dyna’s childhood. Perhaps one of those would have a picture or reference to that sixth child. Dyna could barely even remember her classmates, though she assumed that most of that was simply because of her age at the time and far more prominent high school memories feeling more important. Or at least more recent.

There should be a class photo with all the names of her schoolmates somewhere.

“I don’t think anything changed during Id’s visit,” Dyna eventually said. She had nothing more than a gut feeling that it hadn’t been Id who blacked out that book. That felt like something that had been done a long while ago as well. Perhaps not at the water park, but sometime between then and now.

“Well, don’t put too much stock in what you saw. I certainly don’t,” Cross said with a chuckle. “Hypnotism is the least scientific of all our admitted pseudoscience.”

That earned him a long glare from the shorter man at his side. Harold had a glare that could kill. Not that Cross paid him or his glare any attention.

“Your other tests came back clean enough. Whatever this Id wanted, it apparently did not involve influencing your mind. Perhaps she was looking for information? Though I wonder what you could possibly know.”

Dyna wondered that exact question. What had she known?

And who had taken it away from her?

Stepping out of the deprivation tank, Dyna finished drying herself off. She had been given a kind of wet suit-like outfit to wear. It was tight fitting and a little embarrassing. Or it had been on the way into the tank. Now? Her thoughts were occupied. She couldn’t help but stare around the room. Those silver suits that everyone always wore around her suddenly felt far more sinister.

She didn’t want to believe that the Carroll Institute had been responsible for manipulating her memories. Or if they had, they had best have a good reason for it. But no other group fit that they definition. If Id had left that note, Dyna did have to admit that it was having an influencing effect on her. Id had probably left it vague specifically for that reason. It was probably the truth that they had something to cover up, but the use of the pronoun rather than simply stating who they was might have Dyna barking up the wrong tree, thinking it was the institute when instead it was… Who had Emerald mentioned? The Russians, Chinese, Indians, and dozens of smaller organizations?

Thinking of it like that, it could be nearly anyone.

That said, she wasn’t quite ready to voice her suspicions just yet. If it was the Carroll Institute, they could easily modify her memories again and this time, would know not to send her into a hypnotherapy session.

It was also possible that the blacked out book and the water park figure were two parts of the same incident. It didn’t seem like that. One had been a larger attempt at covering something up while the latter had simply been a kidnapper with psychic abilities. One book had used paint across the entire thing while the kidnapper merely had marker scribbling out his features.

Handing the towel off to one of the technicians, Dyna looked over to the room where Doctor Cross had observed the session. “I’m clear to leave, right?” she said, forcing a smile. “No offense to the interior decorators here, but I would prefer to spend the night in my own dorm rather than the… cell here.”

“It was a precaution for your safety, I’m told,” Cross said. “I believe you have a private room down in the Artificer Quarters.”

“Yes, but that’s empty, sterile, and has no natural light. Maybe it would be better after I decorate it, but I’m not exactly planning on going back into town anytime soon.”

“Wise. I have no issue with you living out of your dormitory. If you do venture into the city, I would advise you to take Emerald and Ruby along for the journey.”

“Not planning on it.” And that wasn’t a lie in the slightest. Although a seed of doubt had sprouted with regards to the Carroll Institute, swapping her trust to someone like Id sounded like the very most foolish thing she could do.

No. She had some phone calls to make. Hopefully innocuous calls.

Dyna’s eyes shifted to the burning red light set into the glass dome of the camera in the corner of the room.

Beatrice, she assumed, would be listening.

 

 

 

Emerald sniffed at the chill air biting her nostrils. Idaho Falls normally had a nature smell to it. Farmland, the Snake River, and the generally undeveloped area all gave it a natural scent. Without a large population and with the rising popularity of electronic vehicles—as slow as the people here were to adopt new technology—exhaust smog was effectively nonexistent.

At the moment, however, Emerald didn’t smell much. Cold air had a way of deadening the senses.

The natural senses, anyway. Emerald wasn’t looking for any natural smell.

All artificers had their own way of detecting artifacts. Some got feelings. Some saw things that weren’t there. Emerald smelled things. A purely mental smell. Tests had proved that, even in a sealed suit with its own air supply, she would be able to ‘smell’ nearby artifacts.

Of course, she doubted that they would still be here.

Standing on the roof of an old laundromat, Emerald replayed the events of three weeks ago in her mind. It was the third time she had been here since. Every time brought with it mild confusion.

Emerald mimed tapping the stem of her pocket watch. She swung a pistol, hammering at the spot where one of the men had been that day. The spotter for the sniper. At the time, he dropped without resistance. A blow to the brain stem ran a risk of permanent brain damage, but even the worst case scenario would have left enough for Psychodynamics and their mind technicians to rummage through.

Stepping forward, Emerald repeated her motions of stomping down on the sniper before he could react. With him in the middle of packing up a Remington 700 rifle—the civilian version—he hadn’t been able to react. Evaluating a lack of threat from both the men—the first of whom hadn’t moved—Emerald holstered her pistol and withdrew a fistful of zip-ties. Foot planted on the sniper’s back, he hadn’t been able to resist. She had his hands tied in seconds and his legs bound shortly after.

Turning around, Emerald started toward the spotter, who had been still unmoving on the ground, only to freeze.

That was where everything went sideways. As soon as she approached him, she had been the one on the ground with both of the others hale and active.

Emerald sniffed at the air again, less because she was trying to detect anything now and more in an attempt to stimulate her memory.

Had there been an artifact present? She had smelled one on Dyna, but here…

There must have been a third person working with the two men. Someone far enough away that she hadn’t noticed but still able to render assistance to their team.

“Ruby,” Emerald said, “would you be a dear and…”

Trailing off, Emerald frowned.

“Oh.”

Emerald stood alone on the roof. Ruby was back at the institute. The younger girl had been spending a great amount of time there, hovering about the new artificer. Probably driving the poor woman insane.

It felt awkward. Every time Emerald noticed her missing presence, she couldn’t help but frown. For over a year, they had been side-by-side. Presumably, once they got a new assignment, the institute would put Ruby in her care again. Despite her artifact, Ruby wouldn’t be sent anywhere on her own. And if left alone at the institute… Well, there was a reason the administrators decided to send Ruby out into a potentially dangerous situation.

Shaking her head, Emerald knelt down on one knee and looked out over the road down below. She crouched right where the sniper had been, aimed in the same direction. It was the perfect vantage point for this road, looking down along its entire length. The men had chosen their spot well.

Too well, in fact.

How had they known to set up here? From the motel, Emerald had been well within reach of four different places that she could have chosen to take Dyna. Walter had given her the initiative of choice. Even if there had been a powerful mind reader lurking in the shadows, the time between Emerald deciding where to go to the arcade and arriving on this street had been only a few minutes. Not nearly enough time to get set up using any traditional methods.

Emerald glanced back to where they had pinned her down after that abrupt reversal of the situation.

A small smile spread across her face.

“Where are you?” she said, slowly looking out over the buildings. A mysterious third actor wouldn’t still be present, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t any clues to be found.

Especially not now that she had ‘borrowed’ some equipment from the institute. Stalking across the rooftop, Emerald popped open the top of a large attache case. Rather than documents or other mundane items, the entire interior was covered in electronics. Red, black, yellow, and blue wires stretched from node to node. Indicator lights in a variety of colors blinked and pulsed. Sixteen-segment displays burned a bright red, showing off the passive readings the device detected.

Someone else would probably think it was a bomb. Of course, real bombs never looked so fancy. A plastic bottle on the side of the road loaded with explosives, a sealed steel container that looked more like a cooking pot than a bomb, or even a few plumbing pipes strapped together. Those were real bombs.

This just looked like something from a movie.

Pulling a few thick metal rods from the case’s side, Emerald moved about the roof, extended the legs of the rods into small tripods, planting them down roughly where she and the two men had been. Once sure that they wouldn’t tip over, she returned to the case and flipped a thick red rocker switch to the on position.

It had been three weeks. The Carroll Institute had already sent a team out here. Several, in fact. The earlier ones had been to ward off civilians and the local police force while the ones that came later had investigated the scene for exactly what Emerald was looking for now.

Emerald couldn’t access the official reports. Her clearance level was apparently not high enough. The Carroll Institute had a great many secrets. Too many to ferret out on her own. Most were probably boring statistics or financial information. But classified reports that involved her? Emerald wasn’t just going to sit around with her fingers in her ears.

Given the passage in time, Emerald wasn’t expecting strong readings. Just a psionic signature that she could attempt to cross-reference with the institute’s internal database.

And yet, the indicator lights started flashing. The black and white wheel set into the machine didn’t just start spinning, it turned fast enough that touching it might end up slicing off the tip of her finger. A series of lights that formed a graph quickly maxed out. The top light of all columns turned red.

“No wonder they classified this,” Emerald hummed as she watched the sixteen-segment displays flash through numbers faster than she could process.

Even while using her artifact, Emerald would barely cause a reaction. Sapphire, the artificer with the highest active psionics, could only push the graph halfway to the top. Unbound artifacts reached higher than that, but to max out the meter? Seeing the device fail to settle actually made Emerald shudder.

Three weeks after the incident and there was still this much residual energy able to be picked up by a portable device? Emerald glanced down at the building beneath her feet, wondering if something inside might have acted like a psionic sponge, absorbing all the energy. But… that couldn’t be. The institute would have collected whatever object caused the issue and likely would have locked it in the Vault.

Could it be the building itself?

No. Even that, they would have blocked off access, buying out the place and shutting it down until they could figure out the best way to remove it from the street. It didn’t get much traffic, but Emerald had seen customers walk into the laundromat now and again.

It had to be residue from an artificer. One more powerful than any the Carroll Institute had produced.

Emerald shut down the device. She didn’t get the psionic reading she wanted, but continuing to run it might end up damaging the equipment. Which would be more trouble than it was worth. The institute would already be displeased with her taking it on a small trip into town. Still, she wasn’t giving up. Not just yet. Something that powerful shouldn’t be difficult to locate. That the Carroll Institute hadn’t already done so likely meant that they were nowhere in the city anymore, but Emerald could at least track down where they had been and maybe find some information about where they were going.

Unfortunately, while packing up the machine, Emerald’s phone rang.

Noting the blocked number and the current time, she answered the call and held the phone to her ear without speaking.

“White nine-seven-seven.”

“Green dash eleven-eleven.”

“There’s been an incident,” Walter said, deep voice sounding a bit tinny on the phone’s speaker. It wasn’t able to replicate his heavy baritone.

“I was going to bring it right back,” Emerald said. “I thought you were off to the other side of the country anyway?” That was the whole reason she had waited until today to do this, after all.

Walter didn’t respond right away. When he did, his tone carried a note of annoyance. “What did you do?”

“You weren’t calling about… Oh. Nothing. I didn’t do anything at all. Just relaxing on my day off. You mentioned an incident?”

“Red and our mutual friend attempted to interview one of the guests. Something used the guest as an antenna, reached into our friend’s mind, and carried on a conversation. They are being detained and examined for residual effects, subliminal implants, and the works. A full debriefing will follow. I need you to ensure that nothing goes wrong before I return.”

“Sounds like things have already gone wrong,” Emerald said, mind racing.

Her eyes drifted down to the psionic detection machine. Coincidence? No. Absolutely not. Guests, in Walter’s barely-disguised metaphor, meant prisoners. The same prisoners who had been on this very rooftop. Whatever caused the readings on the machine likely was the same ‘something’ that reached into their friend’s mind. Dyna’s mind.

“This ‘something’ wouldn’t happen to be some incredibly powerful psionic force that can’t even be measured properly with our devices, would it?” Emerald asked when Walter didn’t comment on her observation.

“Green… What do you know?”

“Less than I would like to. What are we dealing with here? Psi-Corps? Some new toy from Maanasik?”

“Further details are under investigat—”

“You know something, White. I don’t like going into situations completely blind. Yet, for some reason, the administrators have classified all relevant documents higher than my clearance allows me to see. We had an agreement, you and I. You keep me in the loop and get me what I wanted and I’ll take care of your less pleasant jobs for you. This is one of those loops I need to be in.”

Again, Walter hesitated before responding. Probably trying to figure out what he could say without saying everything. Or anything.

“Just tell me this much for now,” Emerald said, “does this have anything to do with Red’s parents?”

“Unlikely. Neither have shown themselves in the last year and this situation is outside their demonstrated operating procedures.”

“They couldn’t change how they act?”

“That is possible, which is why I said unlikely rather than a definite no. I won’t say anything more over the phone. We can discuss this in person when I return.”

Emerald let out a short sigh. She wasn’t sure if it was a sigh of relief or frustration. Both, perhaps. She had a feeling that she wasn’t going to get anything else out of him. Waiting would have to suffice. At least an in-person conversation could forgo their round-about way of talking. “Is Red alright?”

“As far as I can tell, she was merely present and was otherwise uninvolved. You will have to speak with the security team or… Doctor Cross.”

“Lovely. My favorite person.”

Walter made a slight humming noise that might have been a note of agreement. Not that he would ever say so. “Ensure that everything goes smoothly. If threats present themselves, you may remove them however you see fit. I must continue my report here, unfortunately, and will still return as planned on Friday.”

“Yeah, yeah. I can hold the fort for a few days. Not like anything too dangerous is likely to happen at the institute.”

There might be psychics aplenty and dangerous experiments, but nobody rushed through the halls in tactical gear with suppressed Russian weapons.

“Be on your guard. We don’t know exactly what we are dealing with.”

Emerald’s eyes turned back to the rooftop. “Yeah. I am aware.”

“Good. White out.”

Emerald slowly shook her head as she pocketed her phone. Walter was right.

Ever since she got her artifact, she had been beyond confident in herself and her abilities. Even unable to affect things while time was stopped, she could still move and prepare. She could position herself in the perfect spot, start time for only the length of time it took to accomplish something, then vanish once again.

On paper, within the Carroll Institute’s databases, Emerald was listed as an eighteen-year old woman. But in reality, she had lived through several years worth of frozen time. Almost every moment of which she had spent improving herself. Marksmanship, athletics, endurance… Books, game theory, mathematics… If she focused her efforts on psionics, she could easily surpass Doctor Cross’ knowledge within a single afternoon. The only limitation was, essentially, food. Although the doctors still debated whether or not she aged during stopped time, there was no debate that Emerald expended Calories.

Yet, despite all that, it had nearly vanished in an instant. If those two guests had simply decided to shoot her in the head instead of tying her up, all her efforts would have gone to waste. One unknown artificer out there had nearly ruined everything.

And they could probably do it again.

Walter was right.

Emerald didn’t know what the capabilities or limitations their unknown opponent had. She didn’t know their motivations or orders. All she knew was that a single situation had been turned on its head.

Now, that same opponent had reached into the heart of Psychodynamics and attacked Ruby and Dyna.

Emerald’s fist clenched. She knelt down, picked up the case, and promptly stormed off the rooftop. A maintenance ladder led down to her parked car. She tossed the case into the back seat before slamming the door shut to make sure that it would stay shut during the trip back over to the Carroll Institute.

Someone had messed with Ruby. And while she didn’t know Dyna that well, the other woman helped keep those two men from stopping all Emerald’s futures.

Emerald would not let them come to harm.

She threw the car into gear.

 

 

 

Dyna wasn’t sure what she expected from her mirror. An answer, she supposed. One way or another, she thought she would get some kind of answer. Instead, she simply got her own reflection. A perfectly normal girl stared back in the perfectly normal compact mirror. It didn’t even turn dark this time.

Did that mean anything? The absence of a change to the mirror didn’t prove that it couldn’t change, only that this specific situation wasn’t enough to trigger it.

Walking up to the left cell, the one with the man with dark hair and a beard, Dyna knocked her knuckles against the glass. He had been the one whose perspective had appeared on the mirror when they were after her. If either of them would do something, it would be him.

He didn’t look all that happy to see her. Lolling his head to the side, he stared for one long moment without his facial expression changing in the slightest. The mirror didn’t change at all. Without even an attempt to speak, he lolled his head back, turning his attention back to the television in the wall.

“What are we here for?” Ruby asked, toe tapping on the floor.

“I’m… I guess I’m trying to recreate the situation of that day to help me figure out how this mirror is supposed to work.”

“These guys probably need help taking a piss. They aren’t going to be chasing you around anytime soon.”

“Yeah, I—”

“If you want someone to chase you with deadly intent, I’m right here.”

A chill ran up Dyna’s spine. Turning away from the cell, she found Ruby looking up at her with that knife back in her hand, making little metallic clicking noises as she flipped it back and forth. The guard shifted behind her, looking uncertain.

“No… No thank you.”

“Maybe later?”

“Uh… I’d rather… not,” Dyna said, speaking slowly. She did glance at her mirror. Just in case. It still didn’t change. “If it is all the same to you.”

With a disappointed harrumph, Ruby folded the knife and slipped it back into her pocket. “Well, you know whatever you’re doing won’t work, right?”

Dyna blinked. “I’m sorry? Why won’t it work?”

Ruby stepped forward and hit the glass with far more force than Dyna managed. It was enough to make the man in the cell jump. A fairly painful jump if the prompt wince on his face was any indication. He must have missed Ruby the first time he looked over. This time, as soon as he spotted the little girl, his eyes went wide and he pressed himself back into his bed.

“What did you do to him?”

Ruby shrugged. “Dragged him down here. Guess he didn’t like it.” She leaned up against the glass and shouted, “Maybe he shouldn’t have struggled so much! Not important anyway. I’m talking about this.” She smacked the glass again. “It is psionically shielded.”

“I know that.” The glass was used everywhere in Psychodynamics and, now that she knew to look for the slight extra thickness and faint pink tint, plenty of places up on the main campus as well.

“That means mind things don’t get through it. You’re on this side of the glass. He’s on the other. Staring at your mirror isn’t going to work.”

Dyna blinked again. She looked from the man in the bed to her mirror, then back to the glass between them. Closing her eyes, she let out a short breath. “Right. Can I get in there?” she asked, looking up to their escort.

“One moment,” he said, turning to the side as he pressed a finger to the earpiece looped over the top of his ear.

“What are you doing?” Ruby said.

“Just testing something. I had a thought that maybe the reason I haven’t been able to use the mirror since that day was because the interaction was something unique to these men. That maybe they were the ones doing everything and not me.”

“Well that’s simply untrue.”

“How would you know?”

“Because Emerald told me. Your mirror let you see when they were about to attack, but Emerald didn’t see anything unusual about your mirror. So it has to be you.”

Dyna stood stunned, staring at Ruby. That… was true. She had forgotten until just now, but Emerald had said something about not seeing anything unusual in the mirror. The exact details of the situation weren’t clear in Dyna’s mind, but it had been a hectic day with lots going on and lots of stress. Nobody would remember every little detail with perfect accuracy.

So it was her. Some part of it, at least. There simply was no other option. If it was the man who had chased her, Emerald—and anyone else who saw the mirror—would have seen the same thing she did.

A wave of relief flooded through her at that thought. Dyna had thought that she herself was some kind of red herring that everyone had focused on. Now it made more sense why Doctor Cross, despite his obvious frustrations, had remained focused on her rather than looking to the captives down here. Emerald had given a debriefing and had probably included that crucial detail, which he hadn’t overlooked.

Dyna puffed up, swelling with renewed excitement. Her plan hadn’t gone as she had… well, planned. It still worked out somehow anyway. Doubts about her ability or lack thereof washed away with a certainty she hadn’t felt in weeks.

The glass wall separating the cell from the hall started lifting into the ceiling, interrupting Dyna’s moment of feeling better about herself. It wasn’t exactly needed now, and she almost said so to the guard, but thought better of it after a moment. Although her doubts about her abilities had lessened, that didn’t mean that she had no questions on her mind.

Especially for one of the men who had chased her around town. Walter hadn’t told her a thing and yet, here she was, now able to question them herself.

Ruby followed her as she stepped into the cell. Dyna tried to ignore the wide grin on her face.

“You—” she started, only for her breath to hitch as she noticed the mirror’s lenses turning black.

Dyna quickly waved the mirror in front of Ruby’s eyes. “Do you see anything?”

Ruby stared for just a moment before putting on a deep scowl. Lifting a hand, she wiped her thumb just beneath her lip. “You could have mentioned that I had jam on my face.”

That, Dyna figured, meant everything was normal for her. “I didn’t notice,” she said absently, no longer paying attention to Ruby.

The mirror changed. Why now? Was it this guy after all? She looked over the top of the mirror to find that he wasn’t looking at her at all. Ruby occupied his attention. With Ruby unable to see anything odd about the mirror, Dyna had to be involved. Was it just that this man was a particular type of transmitter that interacted easily with the mirror?

“What are your psychic classifications and abilities?”

Ruby pulled her knife back out, taking an aggressive step forward when he didn’t respond. “The lady asked you a question!”

“I told them,” the man said in a much higher tone than Dyna would have expected from someone of his stature. “I told them I don’t know what I’m here for or how I got here.”

“That’s not what she asked,” Ruby snapped.

Dyna raised an eyebrow. The mirror was still black. It wasn’t displaying his perspective. The previous times, it had gone black for a time before switching over. Shouldn’t it have switched by now? And about what he said… “Was he mind controlled?”

Ruby shrugged. Neither the guard nor Beatrice had a response for her.

As Dyna voiced her suspicion, however, a change came over the man. His alarm and obvious panic over Ruby’s presence subsided. The mirror lit up, showing off Dyna, but from his perspective rather than her own reflected view.

Three sharp and angry tones beeped over the speakers. “Facility Alert,” Beatrice’s voice started.

Dyna didn’t get to hear the rest.

She wasn’t in the cell anymore.

She wasn’t sure where she was.

Her head snapped left and right. Nothing but a dark void surrounded her. She could still see herself on the mirror she held. Except, the her in the mirror wasn’t her now. She saw herself standing, glassy eyed, with her back to the television of the cell.

The Carroll Institute trained everyone to be able to detect when someone was influencing their thoughts and, hopefully, reject such influences. Everyone went through it upon enrolling, before even getting into any other psychic training. It was a necessary course for the safety of all the students. Dyna never had any problems with it either. One of the few things she considered a success at the institute. Which was probably because it didn’t actually take psionic ability to detect, just training. Any normal human could learn how to resist mental effects.

But here and now? Dyna felt nothing.

The situation was obviously abnormal. Whether illusion or direct control, she should be able to feel something.

The first step to stopping psionic influence was to know that there was psionic influence. That was obvious enough. Then, she needed to figure out which parts of her brain were being influenced. Audio-visual centers? Something deeper? Dyna couldn’t tell because she couldn’t feel this effect.

“The human brain is a black box of mystery and imagination. The scientists around you, those at the forefront of the field, are only just beginning to understand how the human brain processes sensory input, let alone how it uses that information to create the idea of the reality you perceive. And you think they can teach you to detect, let alone stop, something that reaches deep and touches the furthest reaches of your mind?”

Dyna’s head snapped left and right, searching, but failed to find anything other than the void. The voice came from everywhere at once, leaving her uncertain of where to look.

“Who are you? Show yourself!” she shouted.

“Who indeed?”

This time, the voice came from straight in front of Dyna. The total darkness melted back, receding from around a figure.

A woman, one with the void wrapped around her as if she were wearing the darkness as a dress, stepped forward. The darkness gave her the appearance of gloves that went up to her shoulders while leaving her shoulders and head bare, exposed to some nonexistent light. Her hair flowed. Not like a breeze carried it, but more like she was underwater. Even a subtle movement of her head sent a wave of movement all the way to the tips.

And her face…

Dyna blinked.

She stared. There were… lips… a nose… eyes… All the things one would expect of a face, except Dyna couldn’t make out any real details. She couldn’t see the woman’s eye color, how wide her lips were, whether her nose was pointed or round. When she tried to take in the face as a whole, it appeared as little more than a blur of features.

“Call me Id.”

Dyna winced. The words fell on her ears in a soft, pleasant tone. The kind of tone that Dyna might have used when greeting an old friend. She couldn’t even say that there was anything off about the voice. No subtle sinister nature.

“Let me out of here.”

“Truly impossible, I’m afraid. We’re in your mind. There is no escape for you.”

“Then—”

“Leave? Not going to happen. I saw an opportunity to communicate.”

As the woman spoke, Dyna realized something that she probably should have noticed right away. The woman’s mouth didn’t move. It didn’t open, it didn’t form words with modulated waves in the air.

And if the woman was right, there was no air. This entire place, this dark void, was some small corner of Dyna’s mind. Everything she was seeing was little more than electrochemical impulses dancing about within her skull.

“I saw an opportunity to warn you.”

“Warn me?” Dyna barked out a clipped, nervous laugh. “Then give me your warning and get out.”

The woman, Id, hummed and cocked her head to the side. Her face, blurred as it was, remained entirely impassive and unreadable, but Dyna could easily imagine an amused smile playing across her face. Or… no… wait. The woman was smiling.

Had she been smiling before the thought crossed Dyna’s mind? Or had Dyna projected her own ideas onto the image of the woman.

Just how much control did she have? This was her own mind, she should—

“You have no control.”

“What?”

“That is my warning. You have no control. In no aspect of your life do you have control over yourself. The institute, the people you surround yourself with, even your own mind acts against your desires.”

“How can my mind act against me?”

“Your hand…”

Dyna blinked. She glanced down to the mirror in her hand, still showing off the still image of her own face. Neither the perspective nor the version of herself in the mirror had moved since she last looked at it.

“Not that hand,” Id said, sounding even more amused.

With a start, Dyna realized that her left hand was up near her face, scratching at her chin.

“Why were you touching your face?”

“I… had an itch.”

“No. You’re justifying the movement after the fact. The truth is that your hand moved ‘on its own’ without you knowing about it.” Id reached out, bending her own arm and flexing her fingers. “It takes an astounding amount of processing power to perform even a task as simple as scratching an itch. Every finger moves, all the muscles contract to just the right degree, your arm moved without smacking yourself in the face. And all that happened without you being any the wiser. Your mind is not your own.”

“That’s…” Dyna felt a chill go up her spine, only to realize something. “That’s nonsense. It is a perfectly normal action that everyone would take. Id, Miss Subconscious, is it?” Dyna stepped forward. This was her mind, right? She shouldn’t be afraid of anything here. She just had to figure out how to force this woman out. “A bit embarrassing to call yourself that, isn’t it? Freudian psychology has been out of date since Freud’s time.”

“You wonder why you can’t perform well on the Carroll Institute’s psychic tests? Why everything seems to fail around you? Perhaps you need to look a little deeper than just what you think you want.”

Dyna took another step forward, ignoring the woman. “Like I would ever listen to you. You sent those men after me, didn’t you? Why? So you could come here and psychoanalyze me? Sit back and tell me about your mother, is it?”

“Your mind fights against you. Your fears, your worries, your hopes. All of it acts against what you want.”

“Why not take a seat on my couch,” Dyna said, gesturing to her side. She had to suppress her grin when a brown leather couch appeared next to her. This was her mind. Some two-bit Transmitter wasn’t going to get to her. “Showing up dressed in literal darkness and with that hair? Acting all mysterious while spouting nonsense? We can have a long discussion about your obvious daddy issues. I bet you have a tramp stamp.”

Id stared for a long moment. Was that a frown on her blurred face or just another of Dyna’s projections?

“If you build up that confidence outside your mind, half your issues would probably disappear entirely.”

“I’m always completely confident in myself.”

“Are you? Didn’t you just spend the last few hours doubting everything? And the past several days as well. Constantly coming up with scenarios in your mind about how you can’t possibly be special.”

Dyna couldn’t quite fight off her grimace. “How do you know that?”

“I’m inside your mind. There is nothing about you that I do not know.”

Clenching her fists, deliberately and consciously, Dyna ground her teeth together. “Get out.”

A heavy vault door appeared behind Id. The wheel spun and thick metal cylinders retracted back into the door. There was no frame and no walls for the door to actually block off, but Dyna assumed it was purely symbolic. This was apparently her mind after all.

It was a bit emptier than she might have hoped, but maybe this was some small corner of it.

Id simply turned around and watched as the door swung outward. Her hair flowed behind her with her movements, still acting like the entire place was filled with water. “Well,” she said, “if you insist.” She took a step toward the vault door, but paused and looked over her shoulder. “I’ll tell you: I got what I wanted from this exchange. And I do hope that I helped you. Don’t worry, even gone, I won’t leave you alone. Be in touch soon. Maybe we’ll even meet out there,” she said with a wink.

Dyna wanted to shout at her to leave. Maybe conjure up some giant fan inside her mind to whisk her off her feet and shoot her out through the vault door. But Id stepped through before Dyna could even open her mouth. She stepped into the dark void, disappearing into it like it was a curtain that she stepped behind.

After waiting a moment where nothing happened, the tension drained from Dyna’s shoulders. Id didn’t seem to be coming back. Was she actually gone? Or had she simply moved to another part of Dyna’s mind?

Dyna doubted she would be sure any time soon. She could only imagine the tests the institute would put her through to be sure that she was the only one left in her head. The thought made her want to flop over on the brown leather couch and just sit for a long while.

It wasn’t real, was it? Nothing here was. She needed to get out of her own head and then flop over on a real couch.

But… how?

Dyna looked around the empty space. Without Id, it was just the open vault door and the couch. She couldn’t remember any of the Carroll Institute’s lessons covering how to escape one’s own mind. The vault door should probably be shut to prevent Id from walking back in… but it was just symbolic, wasn’t it? Id could have walked into the darkness at any point during their conversation. The woman had come from the void, after all.

Perhaps, being symbolic, Dyna could just walk through herself?

There was a slight fear in the back of her mind that she would just walk out of her own head and find herself… disconnected? Dead? A consciousness couldn’t exist outside a mind, could it?

No. That was nonsense. Dyna couldn’t just separate her consciousness from her physical brain. Astral projectors didn’t even leave their own heads, science here at the institute had proved that.

Taking a breath of air that probably didn’t exist, Dyna walked forward.

Dyna blinked, falling forward toward the concrete floor of the prison. But her foot moved on its own, instinct from a few years of skateboarding rushed to the forefront of her mind, catching her. Her fall turned into a mere stumble. Even the stumble came to a stop with a quick swing of her arm to catch herself on the foot of the prisoner’s bed.

None of her movements were conscious. And that fact stuck out in her mind more than anything. If Id hadn’t mentioned anything, she doubted she would have ever noticed or paid her movements a second thought. Now?

Dyna couldn’t help but feel like she had just been a passenger within her own body.

She took control, deliberately pushing herself back to a proper standing position. She forced her feet onto the ground, planting them with more intentional thought than she could ever remember directing her body with before. Moving so deliberately probably hadn’t been what Id’s point had been, but Dyna couldn’t get the thought out of her mind.

Was that her own doing? Thinking over Id’s words over and over again…

Ruby provided a distraction, rushing toward the bed with her knife drawn.

“Stop!” Dyna reached out. She didn’t manage to grab her, but her shout was enough for Ruby to keep the blade on his throat and not in his throat. “He was definitely mind controlled.”

“The bastard just did something to you.”

“No,” Dyna shook her head. “It was someone else. It—”

A thunder of footsteps rushed up the hall. A dozen men, all wearing those silver suits with mirrored facial visors, rushed straight toward the closed cell.

At some point, the psionic glass had come back down, trapping Dyna and Ruby in the room. Their escort stood on the other side of the glass, talking to the approaching men, though his words were muted by the glass. He pointed toward the cell. Two of the silver men approached him after his speech, grabbed both his arms, and led him away. The guard didn’t fight them.

They were probably taking him to some quarantine room while they figured out what happened.

The remaining silver men all turned to the cell. Without being able to see their faces, Dyna couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing. Their motions implied talking to one another. Maybe they were just waiting for someone with higher authority to give them orders.

“We need to talk to Doctor Cross or Walter.”

“Walter’s gone.”

“Cross then,” Dyna said, looking back to find Ruby’s knife still pressed against the man’s throat. He was very carefully not speaking. Even swallowing looked like it might cause a cut. “Don’t kill him. Please.” Dyna wasn’t sure if the prisoner was wholly innocent, but she was mostly sure that he wasn’t fully culpable for his actions. “These guys aren’t going to attack us, are they?”

Ruby let out a guttural noise from the back of her throat. “Not if they don’t want a trip to the hospital.”

“Beatrice? Can you please get Doctor Cross down here?”

The speakers didn’t emit their tone. Dyna frowned, looking at the red light on one of the cameras in the room. Beatrice was definitely watching.

A sinking feeling settled into the pit of Dyna’s stomach.

“We’re not prisoners ourselves, are we?” Dyna asked, looking back to Ruby.

“Not if a lot of people don’t want a trip to the hospital.”

“Maybe don’t threaten them too much? We didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t want to make it worse.”

“Oh no,” Ruby said, lips curling back. Not into a grin. Not really into a scowl either. She was just baring her teeth. “While I’d love to crack some egghead’s skull, it won’t be me putting them there. Walter will be back eventually and he will tear them to bits.”

Dyna opened her mouth, only to pause. She had been about to argue that Walter wouldn’t do something like that. To her, he had always been the one guy who believed that she really was supposed to be at the Carroll Institute. A kind man, if a bit mysterious with those sunglasses he always wore.

Then again, knowing what she knew now, Dyna wasn’t sure she really knew him as well as someone like Ruby did.

“I’m sure it won’t come to that,” Dyna said, watching the silver suited men on the other side of the glass. Three of them were slowly approaching while the rest stayed back, looking ready to move if needed. “They just want to make sure nothing bad happened to us.”

I hope.

 

 

 

Dyna watched over Doctor Cross’ shoulder, not at all sure what she was looking at. A machine of some kind. The main body had three parts, all made from shiny silvery metal. A spherical chamber with several jutting canisters, a cylinder lit by a dozen bright green lasers shining into it, and a long narrow pipe connecting the two parts together. Cables, pipes, tubes, wires, and all manner of other dangling parts hung off the machine from nearly every point.

Dyna wasn’t sure what the day’s tests would bring for her. She had just arrived, waved in by Doctor Cross. This experiment had already been underway. The object being analyzed in the machine…

Felt familiar, somehow.

It was a circular disc, floating in the spherical chamber. Dyna wasn’t sure how it was floating or if there were just thin wires that she couldn’t see on the video feed. The disc slowly rotated. One side was fairly smooth, the other was covered in intricate carvings. Aztec, probably, or some other Mesoamerican artwork. Probably just a copy, though. Dyna’s mother used to have a replica Aztec calendar that looked fairly similar. Something she picked up from a street vendor during a trip to Mexico.

“Our most recently acquired artifact,” Harold said, walking over to Dyna with a small tablet in hand. “We are taking measurements of the psionic energy it releases in the hopes of determining what themes it might possess. And whether it is safe for general handling.”

“Are they… usually dangerous? Whenever you guys take it, people always handle my mirror while wearing those shiny silver suits. It’s safe to have here, isn’t it?”

“Psionic energy is somewhat like electromagnetic energy in that it is radiant and comes in several varieties across a spectrum. Some of that spectrum is like visible light where it is mostly harmless. Other parts are… less harmless, more akin to ultraviolet or gamma radiation. The suits, however, are a required protocol. Not just to protect the wearers, but to ensure that their own passive psionic emissions don’t cause any complications. We don’t want accidental binding of artifacts.”

“So… am I or am I not walking around leaking psychic radiation everywhere.”

“No. We wouldn’t have let you out of the facility if you were. The binding event has an odd effect on artifact emissions in that your own psionic emissions essentially cancel it out.”

“Oh. Good.”

“And,” Harold said, “for the record, we have never encountered a psychic that emits harmful psionic energy. That seems to be a trait of artifacts alone.”

That was also good. It seemed like it would be a pretty bad idea to bring a whole bunch of radioactive people together in one place. It seemed like it would just amplify the emissions. Though perhaps that was one reason why Psychodynamics was out in the middle of nowhere, several miles from the nearest city.

“What did you mean by themes?” Dyna asked.

Harold opened his mouth, but Doctor Cross beat him to actually speaking.

“Themes,” he said in his Eastern European accent, “are far more intricate than…” Cross trailed off, glancing behind him to look at Harold. “Than my research associate’s crude depiction of psionic emissions warrants.”

Harold shot Cross an absolutely nasty look. “It’s Harold. Harold. Or Porter.”

“Yes. Harold,” Cross said, turning back to a series of graphs. “And themes—”

“And she’s asking for a layman’s definition. Not a doctoral thesis.”

Letting out a small grunt, Cross started speaking again. “Themes are a marriage between intuition and science. The pure energy can only tell us so much. One must also take the object into consideration when determining the theme of an artifact. Your compact mirror, for example, should emit psionic energy that we can detect, but we can use its image as an espionage tool of observation to determine the themes of stealthy voyeurism.”

Harold shook his head with a frown. “Please don’t call it voyeurism. I’ve already submitted a revision of Dyna’s artifact report to use observation. Please approve it already.”

“Yes, yes,” Cross said, waving a hand. “But you see, I can also explain complex matters to a child.”

Dyna, a bit irritated, almost complained about being called a child. A look from Harold and another shake of his head told her that it would be entirely fruitless.

“As for this,” Cross continued, looking back at the video feed from inside the machine, “it is an Aztec calendar. Not a Mayan calendar, which entered into the collective zeitgeist over a decade ago as a portent of apocalypse, but I doubt the average individual would be able to distinguish the differences between the two. This artifact may be… dangerous.”

That ominous statement had an effect on the room. Everyone sort of stilled. Nobody had been talking, and yet it sounded like someone hit the mute button for the room, somehow going even quieter than mere silence. Cross just stared at the monitor. Harold had an intrigued look on his face.

Dyna shuddered, decided she was perfectly happy having a mirror and not a portent of apocalypse, and tried to not look too uncomfortable being in the same room as it.

“Well,” she said eventually, feeling a primal need to break the silence, “what plans did you have for me today?”

“You?”

“Yeah. Tests or…”

Something about Doctor Cross’ face caused a sinking sensation in Dyna’s heart.

Dyna didn’t think she was an idiot. She could observe, notice mannerisms, and recognize patterns. The patterns she saw now were familiar. She could feel the frustration coming from Doctor Cross and even his technicians. Not at this exact moment, but just in general when they interacted with her. It was the same frustration that Dyna had seen among the researchers outside Psychodynamics.

The frustration that had led to Dyna feeling overall neglected in comparison to the other psychics of the institute.

It was happening again. She had been invited to the Carroll Institute, told that she would do well as a psychic… only to wind up a talentless effective control subject. Now she had been brought down to Psychodynamics, told that she required a little help to be special… and she had yet to actually utilize the artifact outside her first day with it.

Tests came up negative or inconclusive. Even what Cross had just said about her artifact was evidence of that. He said that the mirror should emit psionic energy, not that it did.

Doubt crept through Dyna’s mind. She wasn’t quite sure when it had started, that niggling feeling that she was once again spiraling into irrelevancy and failure, but now that it had taken hold, she couldn’t shake it. Maybe it had always been there. Dyna would be the first to admit that her self-confidence wasn’t exactly the best. Maybe it had come from Walter and his comment about her artifact being a fake. She hadn’t paid much attention at the time and had practically forgotten about it—it had seemed so absurd given that she saw the mirror working in her own hands—but now, she had to wonder if he hadn’t been right.

The terminal in front of Doctor Cross beeped. Cross didn’t react or even move for a long minute. The lasers shining onto the machine behind the pane of psionically shielded glass faded as the whirring of machinery quieted. A cloud of white gas burst from a valve connected to the machine, which Dyna assumed was supposed to happen given that nobody else in the room panicked. Cross still didn’t react.

The doctor kept his eyes on the terminal in front of him. Or, more specifically, the graph. Dyna wasn’t sure what the graph had been measuring, only that it hadn’t measured much of it. While the test had been in progress, a line had slowly made its way from the left side of the screen to the right. Occasionally, it made tiny little jumps in height. Compared to the overall size of the graph, those little bumps were completely negligible.

Once again, that doubt swirled around in the back of Dyna’s mind.

“Doctor Cross?” Dyna said, keeping her voice soft. “Was there something you needed me to do today?”

Cross let out a long sigh. He reached up and fiddled with his rectangular glasses. Probably just a motion to buy him a moment to think given that they ended up in the same spot they had started with. “No,” he said slowly. “I have neglected testing this artifact. I meant to send you a message, but it must have slipped my mind.” Turning, he pointed toward one of the technicians. “You there, have the psionic spectrometer nulled and prepared again. And you, have them bring up oh-one-four-two from the Vault for calibration testing.”

“Yes, Doctor Cross.”

“You don’t think these readings are accurate?” Harold asked, looking down at his own tablet.

“Nothing Emerald or Ruby stated in their report would indicate that this should have such a high output.”

Harold hummed. He turned to the Aztec disc, staring at it for a long moment.

Cross, however, had other ideas. “Delta,” he started as he turned toward Dyna. He blinked twice, then frowned. “Dyna, apologies. You are free for the rest of the day.”

“Again?”

“Something wrong?”

“I just…” Dyna hunched her shoulders. “I’ve had a lot of free days in the past week. Shouldn’t I be… working? Testing? Trying things?”

Cross stared for a long moment before nodding his head slowly. “If you wish, you may work on your own. The rest of us have other duties. You are not our sole responsibility.”

Dyna turned with a flinch. There are other psychics here who need attention. The words rang clear in her mind. Even the test proctor had used a variation of the phrase to dismiss her. A researcher whose name she couldn’t even remember anymore had shooed her off with those words. That had been around the time she really realized that she wasn’t going to make it as a psychic.

Fingers running over the hard shell of the compact mirror in her pocket, Dyna sighed to herself. “Alright. Should I come back tomorrow?”

“I will have a message sent to your phone with details.”

Dyna forced a smile. “Don’t forget, this time.”

“I have already scheduled it into my calendar.”

“See you later then.”

Dyna kept her smile on her face right up until she heard the door hiss close behind her. Her smile vanished immediately. Pulling out the mirror, she looked over the plain reflection staring back at her.

It was different this time, wasn’t it? The mirror definitely, absolutely, positively did something in her hands. It had showed the perspective of those men chasing after her. It had saved her from… whatever they had intended. She still didn’t know. Nobody had actually told her anything regarding them or their intentions. The latest she had heard was that someone had broken a protocol and wound up sending an unsecured message that had resulted in her identity being leaked. Some careless technician sending a message to their grandmother or something like that. Walter apparently decided that she didn’t need to know.

To have gone through all that only to wind up in the same position she had been in before…

The mirror had done nothing since then.

Dyna stopped abruptly in the middle of the hall as a thought occurred to her.

What if it hadn’t been her or the mirror doing anything?

That would explain everything. Everything. If Dyna wasn’t the key to the compact mirror, that would explain all the failed tests around her. The mirror might not even be special at all, as Walter had mentioned immediately following the incident. Thus explaining why Cross was so frustrated with it and the results of all the tests.

And if it hadn’t been her doing anything, then it had been someone else.

“Beatrice,” Dyna called out to the empty hall. “Are you there?”

A pair of tones echoed down the hallway from a speaker set into the ceiling not far from Dyna. “This is Beatrice.”

“The two men who chased after me the other week… are they in this facility?”

“Access to the requested information is denied. Citation: Insufficient security clearance level.”

“Is Walter around at the moment?”

“Agent Walter is attending a meeting in Washington D.C. He will return Friday morning.”

Dyna adopted a scowl. “Does Doctor Cross have security clearance?”

“Yes.”

Spinning on her heel, Dyna rushed back the way she had come. Her reappearance in the psionic spectrometer control room caused a bit of a ruckus, but Dyna didn’t care. She couldn’t just sit around and watch movies again. There was a limit to how little she could do. And if she could do something on her own, then she definitely was going to do it.

Besides, Ruby tended to ruin every movie with constant chatter about how she would survive any given situation.

“Doctor Cross!”

The man jumped, stumbling as he bumped into the terminal. None of the computers in this room had chairs or benches to trip over, at least. “What!” he barked, spinning to the door.

“You said I should test things on my own just now, right?”

“What?”

“Well, I had an idea that I want to test. I asked Beatrice for help, but she says that I don’t have a high enough security clearance. But you do. Can you help me? Or maybe assign someone to help me if you’re too busy?”

Cross blinked twice, bleary-eyed. “Temper yourself,” he said. “Your tumultuous arrival is trying my patience. Explain clearly what it is you want.”

“I…” Dyna took a deep breath. She didn’t want to say exactly what she wanted. Partially out of fear for what it would mean if she, indeed, wasn’t the catalyst for any of that day’s events, but she still needed help testing out whether or not what she now suspected to be true.

It hadn’t been her or the mirror at all. It had been one of the two men. Like a reverse-clairvoyant, perhaps instead of gathering information from afar, he had somehow projected his perspective onto the mirror. Probably unintentionally, given that it hadn’t worked to their advantage at all. That would explain why she had seen their perspectives, why Walter suggested that the mirror was a fake, and maybe even why she had been able to see their perspectives when Emerald had been in trouble and Dyna had been nowhere nearby.

Still, she needed to get close to them to test that theory.

“I need to see the men who chased after me. Are they here in this facility?”

“Yes…” Cross said, eyes narrowing. “Why?”

“I… I just need to see them. Not to— I don’t want to be in the same room as them, I don’t think. I just want to test something nearby. And I would rather not waste your time explaining my ideas before seeing the outcome. I know you’re busy.”

Cross stared for a long moment before shrugging. “Very well.”

“Really?”

“Why ask if you thought I would deny your request?”

“I… didn’t think it would be that easy.”

“I know what it is like to have ideas stifled. Beatrice, give her whatever she wants.”

Two tones dinged over the speakers before Beatrice spoke. “Your authorization is required. Please check the nearest terminal, Doctor Cross.”

Cross turned around and typed out a few words on the keyboard before pausing and half-turning back to Dyna. “This will take a few minutes. Find Ruby or Emerald. You’ll only have authorization if one of them accompanies you.”

“Okay. Okay!” That was perfect. Emerald was probably still off in the city, but Dyna knew exactly where Ruby would be.

Back at the dormitories, preparing a trap of some kind to test Dyna. Maybe picking out a movie to watch today. Maybe planning some nightmare in the training rooms.

Over the last week, Dyna learned more about guns than she ever thought she would know. And that had only been three of the five days that they had gotten together. The other two days, following a movie, had been weight training exercises in the gym.

“Thank you,” Dyna called out as she left the control room. She didn’t bother walking all the way back to the dormitory. As soon as she got back into the hall, Dyna pulled out her new cell phone, scrolled down to Ruby’s name, and sent off a few quick text messages.

Dyna expected some arguing or complaints. She was, after all, breaking the routine of ambush, movie, then training that they had somehow kept up for the past few days. But she didn’t get a single word of complaint. The moment she mentioned going to see the captured men, Ruby responded with a simple, ‘omw’. Dyna quickly rushed over to the Psychodynamics main lobby to wait for the elevator’s arrival.

It felt like it took forever for Ruby to actually arrive. That was probably just her nerves. Dyna honestly wasn’t sure what she wanted from this. If the mirror changed and showed off the perspective of the captured men, what would that mean for her? At least she would know. Then again, surely she couldn’t be the first to think of this. Doctor Cross had to have already considered and dismissed the possibility. Perhaps she wasn’t treading new ground at all.

Ruby appeared before the doubt could fully set in. The elevator dinged, the doors slid aside, and the little girl stepped out with a butterfly knife spinning around her hand.

Dyna… stared for a moment. Ruby was definitely a tough little girl. Far tougher than she felt most little girls should be. And yet, certain things over the last week stuck out in Dyna’s mind as excessive. This, for example. Dyna would never believe that Ruby just played with knives for fun. It had to be a show. A show for Dyna, to reinforce that tough little girl image that she had going.

Case in point, Ruby stepped up to the bench Dyna sat at, flipped the knife around a few more times, and ended what had to be a practiced routine by slipping the knife into her pocket.

“What are you moping for? We’ve got skulls to crack.”

Dyna opened her mouth, then hesitated. Rather than say anything about the knife, she shook her head and said, “We’re not cracking any skulls. I just need to see them. And maybe let them see me.”

Ruby’s eyes narrowed. “You dragged me all the way down here to gawk at some idiots like we’re going to a zoo?”

“Doctor Cross said you have to come with me. I guess he trusts you?”

“Yay.” Ruby rolled her eyes. “Come on. I bet you don’t know where the detention cells are.”

Jumping to her feet, Dyna rushed after Ruby. The girl didn’t wait up in the slightest. Luckily, having much longer legs meant that she didn’t have to rush too much. As soon as she caught up, Dyna actually had to slow her natural pace just enough to be uncomfortable.

“Have you ever been to a zoo before?” Dyna had to ask, partially to fill the silence, partially because Ruby didn’t seem the kind of person to enjoy looking at animals.

“Emerald took me once while we were in New York. Said we needed to act normal for a day to try to throw people off our track. I think she was lying—I didn’t see anyone watching us the entire time.”

“Did you actually look at the animals at all?”

“Of course I did. I hate acting normal, but I still do it when she tells me.”

“I meant… Never mind.”

“Got something to say to me?”

Dyna shook her head. “No. I just—”

“Are you coming with us next time we go out on assignment?”

“I don’t think so? Nobody has said anything to me. And you two sound like you get up to a lot of things that I don’t want any part of.”

“You’re already part of them. I thought you realized that.” Ruby looked up with her red eyes, scanning over Dyna’s face for a few moments before looking down a hall that Dyna hadn’t ever been through before. “This way.”

A few doors, all thicker than normal, stood in their way. Each opened with far more weight. Not in a physical sense, but in gravitas. It was probably just Dyna’s imagination, but she felt like the halls were narrower in this wing of the facility. The fanciful wood and brass paneling stopped abruptly after one of the doors, leaving bare concrete walls in their place.

Two doors didn’t open automatically. Both had guards safely behind psionically shielded glass that had to manually press a button to allow passage. The second of the checkpoints even got them an additional escort. A burly man who might have been Walter’s twin save for his lighter skin and shaved hair.

Although the bare walls and floor looked far more like what Dyna pictured when she thought of a prison, it lacked the rows and rows of barred cells. Instead, beyond a large door fashioned after a bank vault, Dyna found herself faced with small cubicles made from glass panes. The psionically shielded glass.

“Is all this legal?” Dyna couldn’t help but ask as they passed an cell occupied by a man she didn’t recognize. He was fully restrained within an old-style straight jacket and didn’t look too happy with the situation.

Another inmate on the other side of the hall lacked the restraints, but stood in the far corner of her cell, staring at the wall like the Blair Witch had gotten to her.

Ruby didn’t answer. Neither did their escort. Instead, Beatrice’s two tone warning of an impending announcement sounded over the speakers. “The Carroll Institute maintains authority over all psionic matters occurring on territory belonging to the United States of America. No other facility is equipped to handle psionic entities.”

It sounded like an answer to her question, but Dyna noted that nobody actually said that yes, this prison buried deep underground is legal.

At least the next person they passed was just casually reading a book. The way he reclined on his bed made it look more like he was on vacation in a hotel room and not unlawfully imprisoned.

These people did get phone calls, didn’t they?

Ruby didn’t blink an eye at them. Neither did their escort. Both simply marched on past. Dyna expected the guard to know about everything that went on in here, but did Ruby know too? Or was she just being her usual tough self. Dyna hadn’t asked, but it was possible that Ruby could access this place without Doctor Cross’ approval. In fact, hadn’t it been Ruby who brought the two men down here in the first place?

Dyna didn’t pass any other inmates before reaching the end of the rather short hall. Two glass cells at the far end had been converted to being less cell-like and more like a hospital. The beds were larger and more comfortable, able to raise the legs of the beds. The two men inside had been stripped of their solid black clothes. Instead, they wore large gowns that didn’t quite cover the fact that both men had casts on each of their legs.

Emerald had mentioned that she shot out their kneecaps. Hopefully, they got some kind of surgery and medical attention down here beyond simply slapping a cast on their wounds.

Like the previous occupant of a cell, they had a stack of books, though both were watching televisions that were mounted inside the walls behind a pane of psionic glass.

Dyna hadn’t noticed with the other cells, but now that she had stopped and took a longer look, she spotted one of the five-lensed cameras in each corner of each cell. Constant surveillance. It did look like they had a toilet, and maybe even a shower, in a small separate room. That probably had cameras as well.

Before either could look over, Dyna pulled out the compact mirror. A proper scientist might have had various procedures and plans in place to ensure that the results were as accurate as possible. Having only come up with this idea this hour, Dyna had nothing along those lines. She felt she was much better at improvisation anyway.

She took a deep breath and flicked open the mirror.

 

 

 

“Sapphire,” Ruby snarled. “What are you doing here?”

Dyna took a deep breath, beyond glad that Ruby was at her side. She patted at her chest, trying to get her heart to calm back down. Spooky movies, even ones she had seen before, always set her on edge. A good kind of edge, she often thought. They got her heart racing and her blood pumping. But the figure appearing out of nowhere while walking down otherwise vacant hallways of Psychodynamics caused more than just a small shock.

If it had been just a regular person, she probably wouldn’t have jumped, let alone screamed. But this?

A man stood in front of her. Except he wasn’t standing. Hovering in the air with his head lolling to the side like a man hanged, the only indication that he was alive came in the form of shallow, rasping breaths. Were it not for Ruby stepping forward with a blade out, Dyna might have run off screaming.

Since she hadn’t fled, she had the opportunity to take in the situation just a little more. And what a situation it was. First of all, the man’s attire stood out. He wore a sleeveless vest and shorts, blue and black striped gloves, and sandals with socks. Dyna honestly couldn’t decide if his clothes made him more or less frightening. Certainly, the longer she stared, the less frightening he became. But it was just so out there…

“You are the one who called to me.” “We sought you out.” “I found you.”

Wincing, Dyna’s head snapped from side to side, looking for the source of the voices before realizing that they were coming from the hovering person in front of her.

“Ignore him,” Ruby said, slowly sheathing her knife. “It’s just Sapphire,” she added with a small sneer.

“Sapphire… the one you mentioned during the movie.” At the time, Ruby hadn’t said who or what Sapphire was, only that parts of the movie reminded her of him. It wasn’t hard to see which parts now, but Dyna had thought she was just making fun of a brother at the time.

“Yeah. Told you he is a creep. Another artificer. Completely harmless, let’s go.”

Dyna actually perked up at hearing that, heart calming now that her subconscious was coming to the realization that she wasn’t under attack from a creepy ghost. “You are an artificer?” she asked, trying to meet Sapphire’s eyes. It wasn’t easy with the way his head hung off to one side.

Aside from Ruby and Emerald, she hadn’t met any others. There were supposedly a few running around, but, according to Ruby, artificers didn’t spend much time at the Carroll Institute. All artificers could detect artifacts, making them more valuable outside the facility hunting them down.

“Sapphire?” Dyna tried, realizing that she wasn’t getting an answer.

“That isn’t my name.” “Matthew, call me Matthew.” “That isn’t my name either.”

“O-Oh…”

Dyna wasn’t at all sure what to make of the individual in front of her. She wasn’t at all sure that he was an individual with how he spoke. He definitely had only one body, unless there were more around that she couldn’t see. But the way he spoke several sentences in different sounding voices combined with the way he stood…

Like a ghost that had walked off the gallows.

Telekinesis wasn’t supposed to be possible. At least not according to what Carroll taught of regular psychics. Psionic energy was an energy of the mind. Some people were Transmitters, capable of projecting their thoughts onto others. The rest were Receivers, those who pulled in information from outside sources, usually other minds. The mind controller was the prototypical example of a Transmitter while the mind reader was the same for Receivers.

Affecting the physical world outside the brain?

Apparently it was possible, but required artifacts.

Dyna wasn’t sure why she was only now coming to that conclusion upon spotting this floating man. Evidence had been piling up for a while now. Emerald could vanish and reappear elsewhere. She didn’t create illusions that obscured her actual movements. She just up and teleported. Ruby, while Dyna hadn’t seen it for herself, apparently had the ability to perfectly repair her own body from any state.

She supposed it was because they generally looked normal. Emerald and Ruby walked around and talked like normal people. Normalish, anyway. So Dyna didn’t think they were too strange. They didn’t float or… whisper from impossible locations.

And they didn’t usually just sit there, letting the conversation languish into awkwardness.

“You’re Ruby’s brother, huh?” Dyna said, forcing herself to smile. Meeting with another artificer was supposed to be exciting. A chance to find someone else like her. But… Sapphire? Somehow, she doubted they had much in common.

He didn’t even respond. The little girl at Dyna’s side snorted.

“They’re code names, idiot. You think I’m related to this scarecrow? We don’t even look alike.”

That was true. It was a bit hard to look beyond Sapphire’s outfit, which looked like something rejected from a video game with its asymmetrical styling, but he did have much narrower features and a sharp pointed nose. In fact, looking a little closer, Dyna had to wonder if he ate properly. His body was almost anorexically thin.

“Emerald isn’t my sister either.”

“Really?” Dyna glanced down. “But she said—”

“She can say whatever she wants and no one can stop her. But I can stop you.”

The way Ruby stared up with tight lips and narrowed eyes made Dyna step back. “Okay. Not sisters.”

“We’re all the same.” “We’re all in here.” “All out the—”

“Shut up!” Ruby snapped, turning her ire onto Sapphire. “No one wants to hear your nonsense.” She clamped one tight hand around Dyna’s and started pulling her away. “Just leave him alone. No one likes Sapphire.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say, Ruby.” Especially not in front of his face. She tried to pull away from the little girl, only for a sharp tug to drag her along. “Sorry,” Dyna said, calling back to Sapphire without really fighting the pull. He was creepy and she didn’t really want to stay, but no need to be rude. “Maybe we can talk again some other time.”

Sapphire remained hovering in the hall of Psychodynamics. He didn’t turn toward Dyna or motion toward her in any way. Someone else walking around would probably have a minor heart attack, thinking someone had killed themselves right in the middle of the facility.

“Just ignore him,” Ruby said, keeping her hand tight around Dyna’s hand. “He knows you don’t like him.”

“I don’t dislike—”

“You do. And he knows. He’s the ultimate mind reader. For a few seconds, he probably was you. Every single conscious mind anywhere nearby gets imprinted on his mind at random. He can’t stop it, he can’t control it, but he remembers everything. And nobody likes him.”

“That can’t be true. The last bit,” she quickly added. The rest… sounded pretty terrible. More deserving of pity than dislike, however. “I bet Walter likes him.”

Ruby stopped abruptly, facing away from Dyna. Slowly, some of the tension in her shoulders relaxed and she dropped Dyna’s hand. “Almost nobody likes him. I don’t like him. And neither do you, I could see it in your face.”

“I was just surprised. After watching that movie… How are you not terrified?” Dyna asked, changing the topic. “I saw The Ring when I was around your age and couldn’t sleep for a week. It was the last horror movie I watched for a good five years. Maybe it just hasn’t settled in yet.”

Ruby snorted. “You’re so lame. But don’t worry. I’ll help you get better.”

“Thanks?”

Dyna wasn’t sure how to react to being talked down-to by a ten-year-old. On one hand, she felt like laughing and patting her on the head, patronizing her. On the other… Ruby could throw her around like a rag doll.

Psychodynamics had more than just endless laboratories and horrific test chambers disguised as comfortable sitting rooms. It had a whole division of the facility dedicated toward the artificers, providing space for training in both physical and mental capacities, rest areas, eating areas, communal areas, and a surprising number of briefing rooms. The destination for today, as per her agreement with Ruby, was a shooting range.

Unlike most of the rest of Psychodynamics, it lacked the fanciful aesthetics to it. At least beyond a certain point. The actual human-traversable section of the range was a narrow strip of walkway with tile and wood. A series of booths separated the walkway from the rest of the range, all made from wood and brass. But beyond that, it was gray concrete.

On the opposite side of the walkway from the range, a simple door led into a room filled to the brim with weapons and ammunition. A veritable armory. Ruby ignored the room, however, pulling the pieces of Dyna’s gun out of her pants pockets and dropping them on the table of one of the booths.

“This is a VP9, do you know how to reassemble it?”

“Not a clue.”

“It’s easy. There are only four main pieces. Come here.”

Having already said that she would do what Ruby wanted, Dyna followed along. First, she watched as Ruby slapped a spring and metal tube into the gun casing with far more dexterity than Dyna had ever possessed as a child. Then Ruby promptly disassembled it again and slid it across the table toward Dyna.

“Barrel first. Then… yep. Slide it on. Flip the lever. See? Easy?”

It really was. As Ruby said, there were only four pieces and most of them couldn’t be assembled incorrectly. After watching her once, Dyna picked it up easily enough.

“Now, have you ever loaded cartridges into a magazine before?”

“Cartridge?” The first things that popped into Dyna’s head were old gaming consoles.

“Bullets,” Ruby said, holding up a brass bullet between her fingers.

“I’ve shot two guns ever. This one and a sniper rifle. Once each. I don’t know terminology or practices beyond what I’ve seen in movies.”

Ruby raised her eyebrows, letting out a long sigh. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“How did you learn all this stuff?”

Ruby flinched as if Dyna had just thrust a fist into her face. Except she probably wouldn’t have flinched if Dyna had actually done that.

“Ruby?”

The little girl was frozen, staring down at a mess of bullets around the table.

Dyna reached forward, waving a hand in front of those red eyes.

Ruby flinched again, eyes darting around. She locked onto Dyna, the gun, and the outstretched hand. “Sorry,” she said, dropping her gaze.

“No. It’s fine.” Dyna wasn’t quite sure what happened. Bad memories? Perhaps staying away from the topic of her past was for the best.

In fact, Dyna wasn’t sure she wanted to know about how Ruby became herself today. Little kids didn’t learn so much about guns and how to use them without going through something serious. It was enough to make Dyna reevaluate Ruby, looking over her features. Where was she from? Perhaps Central America or northern South America? Dyna didn’t think she came from Africa, but was fully prepared to admit that she was far from traveled.

Maybe Ruby had been a child soldier in some war-torn country? That was about the only thing that Dyna could think of that would lead to such familiarity with weaponry.

Dyna shuddered. She had lived a fairly sheltered life, growing up in California. Especially relative to something like that. Her family hadn’t been rich by any stretch of the word and her father had vanished just before her third birthday, apparently, but that was about the extent of her hardships. Though relatively poor, there had always been food on the table and clothes to wear, even if her clothes had mostly come from thrift stores.

“There are other artificers, aren’t there? Besides just Sapphire and Emerald, I mean,” Dyna asked as Ruby showed how to load bullets into the magazine. “Are they around?”

“Not if you’re lucky.”

“Really? Don’t get along with them either, do you?”

Ruby hit the magazine against the table hard enough to make Dyna jump. The bullets weren’t going to go off, were they?

“Every artificer is insane. You think Sapphire is bad? I’m the only normal one. You seem normal too, so I’ll help you.”

“Emerald doesn’t strike me as insane.”

Ruby dropped her jaw, staring up with obvious disbelief. “She’s the worst of them all! You don’t know. You haven’t seen her enough. She smiles.”

Dyna gave Ruby a look, but the little girl was rhythmically loading bullet after bullet into the magazine, completely ignoring everything else. She had apparently forgotten that she was supposed to be teaching how to load the gun as well.

“The other artificers,” Dyna said, “What are they like? Besides being insane, that is. What can they do?”

Ruby pressed her lips together in a heavy pout. “Aquamarine makes ghost versions of himself that can touch things. Talks to himself a lot too. Alex pretends to be nice, but likes to sing.”

“Alex? I thought everyone had the name of a gemstone?”

“Alexandrite.”

“Oh.” Dyna tried to ignore Ruby’s flat look. “And what’s wrong with singing?”

Ruby shuddered. “You’ll know if you ever have the misfortune of hearing it. As for Hematite… just keep away from her. You specifically won’t get along. And if she is around, never look into mirrors.”

Dyna’s hand drifted back to her pocket, rubbing the hard plastic of her artifact through the denim of her pants. “What’s wrong with mirrors?”

“Just trust me. You said you would listen to everything I said if I watched your dumb movie. I did, so listen to this: Keep away from Hematite.”

Tapping a finger on the table, Dyna bit her lip. She had no doubt that Ruby was beyond biased. The girl had a chip on her shoulder. She wasn’t sure what kind of chip it was, but its presence had been obvious from the first moment they met. And yet… Dyna didn’t think she would outright lie.

Maybe she should speak with Walter before winding up in a chance encounter with any of these other artificers.

Sapphire had been eerie enough.

“Gun,” Ruby said, holding it by the barrel as she held its grip out for Dyna to take. “You’re going to shoot and shoot and shoot until you’re used to it. Then you’re going to keep shooting until you get five groupings right in center mass in a row, shooting about as fast as you can.”

“Is that going to take long?”

“Not if you’re not an idiot.” Ruby put on a vicious grin. “I’m not expecting much.”

 

 

 

“Alright, Miss Graves. You may remove the apparatus.”

Dyna straightened her back, gripping the handles built into the armrest of the chair to help pull herself forward. She reached up, undid a small buckle set under her chin, and slowly lifted a complex series of interlocking metal plates off her head. Cables and wires ran up into the ceiling. Most were for data transfer, but a few were connected to winches and counterbalance weights, causing the helmet to practically levitate away from her with barely any force applied on her part.

“Thank you, Miss Graves. That will be all for today.”

“Really?” Perking up, Dyna looked over to the glass pane separating the test chamber from the control room. Two technicians accompanied Harold, Cross’ chief assistant, in running the equipment safely on the other side of the psionically insulated glass. “I thought I was supposed to head to the Infusion Lab?”

“After the anomaly with your previous test, Doctor Cross wishes to postpone further experiments until the results of today’s activities can be properly analyzed.”

“So I’m free?”

“Correct. Would you like an escort?”

“No thanks,” Dyna said as she popped out of the reclining chair. “I’ve learned my way around.” A step away from the door, she paused and looked back. “Is Emerald around?”

Harold didn’t answer right away, checking something on one of the computer terminals around him. After a moment, he leaned forward to a microphone, pressing the button to talk. “I believe Doctor Livermore has chased her back into the city.”

“Oh.”

“Ruby is topside, I can direct you—”

“That’s okay,” Dyna interrupted a little faster than she meant to. “I’d like to spend my day relaxing, if I’m really free.”

Harold smiled and waved a hand. “Good day, Miss Graves. Details of any upcoming tests will be sent to your phone.”

“Wonderful,” Dyna said, practically skipping out of the room.

Two weeks of being poked and prodded deep within Psychodynamics had been exciting at first. A whole new world stood before Dyna. One filled with strange equipment and actual results, scientists who paid her full attention and dedicated many hours of the day to her and her alone. It was basically everything she ever wanted from Carroll.

The hours were long and hard. Dyna moved from test to test, room to room, scientist to scientist. From the moment she woke up in the morning until the time she staggered back to her room and collapsed in bed, they put her through the wringer.

Dyna hadn’t complained once. Not out loud. Internally, she quickly realized that Melanie had been right. All work and no play made for one dull boy.

She barely knew what to do with her newfound free time. It had been two weeks since she really had any. Two weeks since she attended any of the topside lectures or sessions. Two weeks since she had been into the city—not that she cared or was allowed to head there anytime soon. The Carroll Institute didn’t want her leaving campus for the time being and Dyna had no desires to disobey that order.

Regardless of what she ended up doing, Dyna had to stop by the locker room before leaving Psychodynamics. At least, they called it the locker room. As Dyna stopped in front of the heavy hexagonal door made from solid metal, she once again thought that it would have been more at home in a bank vault than a research facility. Moving to the console on the wall, she pressed her hand flat against a small glass pane. A slight heat rolled from her fingertips down to her wrist as the device scanned her biometrics.

But that wasn’t enough to open the door. She had to lean down and peer down a dark hole until she could fully see a bright green light. The bright flash of light as the console took a photograph of her retina always made her wince.

Still, that wasn’t enough for this door. The console lit up, displaying a simple clock.

Dyna winced again, this time because of the odd sensation of a mental intruder. Foreign thoughts intersected with her own. She wasn’t quite sure how it worked or what Walter had done to her despite his attempts to explain, but a series of numbers drifted through her mind.

“Temp – one, zero, eight.”

“Access granted.”

Shaking the slight dizzy sensation from her mind, Dyna idly watched as locking panels twisted, thick metal rods retracted, and heavy gears turned. The hexagonal door split apart down the center, sliding to either side of the wall. A much thinner glass door slid apart just beyond the metal door. After that, a single silver pedestal emerged from the ground. One of many.

Dyna stepped forward and into the locker room as the faceted shielding on the pedestal opened like a blooming flower, pressing flat against the sides of the pedestal. She reached in and withdrew a small plastic object.

All that to keep her artifact safe while it was out of her presence. Frankly, Dyna wasn’t sure that anyone would ever try to steal it while it was down here in Psychodynamics. Outside of testing, she kept it close at hand at all times. Which meant it spent a great deal of time up in her dormitory room while she spent the nights sleeping. Her dormitory room did have a lock on both the hallway door and the balcony door, but neither were anywhere near as impressive as this.

Protocols were protocols. Silly as they were, Dyna had to comply.

As she did every time she touched the pocket mirror, Dyna flipped it open and quickly checked both panes. She didn’t think anyone was watching her with hostile intent down here, but that didn’t stop her from feeling immense relief at seeing nothing more than her own reflection.

Leaving the room to seal itself shut behind her, Dyna headed straight for the main elevator. A few researchers passed her in the halls. Aside from Cross, Harold, and Walter, she didn’t really know any of Psychodynamics’ personnel. Even still, she nodded back to them when they did the same. Down a few more halls and she finally reached the elevator. The doors to it slid aside automatically as she approached.

“Topside,” Dyna said, eying the little spherical camera and its five lenses.

Beatrice didn’t respond to her, but the elevator started moving.

Dyna tapped a foot on the ground, shifting slightly. It was a bit strange. Now that she had been through Psychodynamics, she had started noticing the cameras with their little red lights strewn throughout the rest of Carroll. They had been there the entire time—she was sure she was suffering from the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, but it was hard to believe that she hadn’t seen those red lights following her around in every hall and set atop the many walkway lights outside.

“Did I ever thank you?”

Knowing that she was being watched constantly by some kind of computer system wasn’t as uncomfortable as she had thought it would be. Probably because it had saved her.

“Beatrice?”

“I performed my tasks. ‘Thanks’ are unnecessary.”

“Still…”

Beatrice didn’t say anything else. Not until the light chime rang, indicating that the elevator had completed its ascent. Then, the speaker crackled to life.

“Be warned: Ruby is present within your room.”

“What? What is she doing there?”

“Unknown.”

The doors to the elevator slid open. Beatrice wouldn’t say anything more. Her existence was apparently almost as big a secret as the artifacts and Psychodynamics. The lobby of the Carroll administrative building wasn’t secure enough for an open dialog.

For a moment, Dyna considered heading back down to Psychodynamics just to get an answer out of the computer system, but she ended up rushing out of the elevator instead. “So much for a peaceful and relaxing afternoon,” she grumbled to herself.

As soon as she entered the chilly open air of Carroll’s campus, she checked her mirror. Doing so had become a habit over the past two weeks. Any time she moved to a new location or really any time she felt mildly uncomfortable, she would consult with the mirror to ensure that there weren’t snipers hiding in ghillie suits off in the desert. So far, she had been lucky enough that the mirror hadn’t shown off any more of those creepy men chasing after her, but the way Walter and Emerald talked, it would only be a matter of time.

It wasn’t like she could hide out inside Psychodynamics for the rest of her life. It was probably physically possible, but Dyna knew she would end up with a severe bout of cabin fever within weeks. Even these last two weeks had been trying on occasion. Once the fear of pursuers waned, Dyna found herself left with roughly the same exact thing she had been doing before getting her artifact.

Lots of tests.

This time felt slightly different, if only because she had a demonstrated ability now, but deliberately trying to use it still didn’t work out all that often.

Which reminded her that Doctor Cross wanted her to try at every available opportunity. Her run came to a stop just outside the dormitory building. This certainly seemed like an opportunity.

Dyna took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and tried to concentrate. The goal was obvious, clear, and concise. She needed to see through Ruby’s eyes. Whatever the little menace was up to, it wouldn’t be anything good. Knowing in advance could save Dyna from a throbbing headache later on.

Opening her eyes, Dyna didn’t feel any different. Colder, perhaps, now that she wasn’t actively moving around. But then, she had never felt any different than normal even while being chased around the streets of Idaho Falls. Trying to steady her hands, she flipped open the mirror.

Dyna stared down at the black lenses.

Her heart skipped a beat. Something was happening. That was better than the usual. It wasn’t useful. At least not yet.

Dyna waited, hoping the lenses would change to someone’s perspective. She started tapping her foot and drumming fingers on her thigh. It was taking too long. Just like every attempt at using the artifact since the incident, it wasn’t going to change.

Letting out a sad sigh, Dyna entered the dormitory building. She kept the mirror out and an eye on its lenses as she slowly made her way to the elevator, but she had a feeling that nothing would happen. The mirror showed off the perspective of people who had genuine hostility toward her or… Emerald? Dyna wasn’t quite sure about that last one and neither were the scientists, but the sad fact was that, annoying though Ruby was, she wasn’t actually hostile.

Doctor Cross’ assistant, Harold, suggested that self-hypnosis and mental discipline might allow her to subconsciously recognize anyone as hostile, thus triggering her artifact. Those tests hadn’t even been outlined, let alone scheduled yet.

The elevator chimed. The doors slid aside and Dyna stepped out into the corridor, eyes roaming over the plain white walls, speckled tiles, and even the panels of the ceiling between the fluorescent lights. If there was one thing Dyna had learned about Ruby in the past two weeks, it was that the little girl had more tricks up her sleeves than a magician.

Making it to the door to her room without spotting anything worrying, Dyna first pressed her ear to the cold wood of the door.

Nothing. The dorms weren’t sound proofed, though they did have some degree of dampening installed. Enough that Dyna hadn’t ever lost sleep because of neighbors or noise in the hall.

Slowly, she pressed the door open, using her foot to keep it from slamming shut.

The inside was dark. Darker than normal. Although overcast outside, there was plenty of light. Someone—Ruby—had blocked out the windows. Dyna started to reach for the light switch.

She snapped her hand back through the narrow gap in the door, avoiding the gleaming silver blade. At the same time, a heavy weight slammed into the other side of the door. Dyna’s arm would have been caught had she not planted her foot in the gap.

Spotting the opportunity, Dyna slammed her own shoulder into the door. It swung just a small bit before hitting something that let out a quiet grunt. Whatever she hit went down to the floor. She heard the clatter and noise.

Deciding to press whatever advantage she had gained, Dyna jumped into the room, ready to tackle Ruby straight to the ground.

Only to find herself looking down at one of the couch cushions on the floor and a butter knife at its side.

Dyna tried to step back. A little red-eyed menace popped out from behind the door before she could, tackling her. The small weight of the little girl wasn’t enough to send her to the floor, but she did lose her balance and stumble against the wall.

Cold metal pressed up against her neck before she could recover.

“Dead.”

Groaning, Dyna planted one hand on each of Ruby’s shoulders. With every scrap of force that she could muster, she shoved the girl away. It felt a bit weird to use so much strength against someone so small, but Emerald said to not be afraid of using too much force. There wasn’t too much force. Not with Ruby’s artifact.

Ruby didn’t even pretend to lose her balance. She hopped away to bleed off the momentum, spinning the knife in her hand as she moved. Her other hand stayed locked behind her back.

“What’s your major malfunction, Ruby?” Dyna snarled.

“Malfunction?”

Rather than explain a reference four times older than Ruby was, Dyna just slammed the door and flicked on the light switch before whirling on the girl. “What if I had been my roommate?”

“Your roommate wouldn’t have been so scared of opening the door. She would have stepped inside and stupidly blinked her eyes at the darkness, leaving me plenty of time to hide the knife and act like your cousin or whoever.” Ruby demonstrated as she spoke, slipping the knife under the bottom hem of her black T-shirt. A natural, practiced movement that left no trace of the short silver blade. Not even a bulge or lump in the fabric. “I’m far more worried about you. What if I had been one of those men?”

Dyna flinched. She… hoped that her artifact would have worked in that situation, giving her plenty of time to completely avoid the problem by getting help from elsewhere.

“Where’s your gun? Why didn’t you draw it?”

“I’m not going to shoot you in the middle of the dorms.”

“You should have. It would have been the smart thing to do. Shoot first. Ask questions later. Where’s your gun?”

“The walls here are thin. I’d end up killing someone else when I mi—”

Ruby stepped forward, one hand still behind her back and the other finding her knife once again. “Where is your gun?”

Dyna, through grit teeth, said, “In the drawer next to my bed.”

Ruby held out her hand, the one she had kept behind her back, clutching far more than should be possible for her tiny hands. A series of metal pieces and parts fell, clattering to the floor next to the couch cushion. The metal was, obviously, parts from the gun. Dyna’s gun. The same one that Emerald had given her in the alley.

“Why didn’t you have it on you?”

It was Dyna’s turn to step forward. “You were snooping around in my room?”

“You still don’t get your position,” Ruby said, completely unimpressed with Dyna’s posturing. “They’re already after you. You—”

“This place is safe,” Dyna said. “We have Carroll security, Walter, you. Beatrice watches from every camera and half the people here are mind readers trained to resist psychic influences. Nobody is going to make it into my room.”

“I did.”

Crossing her arms, Dyna put on a smug smile. “Beatrice warned me of you. If you had been an actual enemy, she would have taken more drastic measures.”

For the first time since entering her own dorm room, Ruby flashed an upset look. “That bit—”

“Ruby.”

“You’re not Emerald. I can swear if I want. And Beatrice can’t do anything without authorization besides act like a secretary. That means someone told her to watch for you specifically.” Despite her statement, Ruby did not go back and finish her interrupted sentence. Instead, she looked up and down, eying Dyna. “You need more training. Walter should have you skipping all Cross’ tests about your fake artifact and have you locked into the gym for three weeks straight.”

“It’s not fake,” Dyna said with a mild pout.

That was a bit of a sore subject. Maybe Cross hadn’t known that it wasn’t an artifact when he handed it over to her, but he had since confirmed its status. Probably. Unless he was lying again.

Dyna couldn’t be sure. And she wouldn’t ever be sure. That was the point of single-blind tests. The test subjects were intentionally kept in the dark to keep from biasing results. All Dyna knew was that the artifact worked for her.

“Come on,” Ruby said, kneeling. “I’ll show you how to reassemble the gun, then we’ll head down to the range and get you more comfortable in using it. It isn’t anything to be afraid of if you just respect it.”

“I’m not afraid… And today is a day off—”

“I know. Cross told me.”

“Then you should know that I have been constantly in testing for two weeks. I’m going to relax and… maybe I’ll watch a movie.”

“You’ll rot your brain.”

“I’ve been thinking nonstop. Sometimes you need to just turn off your brain to better let it grow later. Like sleeping except while you’re awake.”

“I don’t sleep.”

Dyna opened her mouth to call the girl a liar, but stopped herself as her eyes trailed down to the black ribbon holding the ruby gemstone to her neck.

She didn’t know exactly what Ruby’s namesake artifact did. Something with her body, according to Emerald. She could survive stabbings, burning, gunshots, probably even dismemberment and decapitation. Taking all that in mind, the idea that she didn’t sleep wasn’t quite as far fetched as it first sounded.

“And you sleep far too much as it is,” Ruby added. “Emerald sleeps for only a few minutes every night.”

Dyna let out a long sigh. “Do you want to watch a movie, Ruby? Turn off your brain for an hour?”

“That sounds like a nightmare.”

“I’ll pop popcorn. Relax for a few hours. And…” Dyna dropped her gaze from Ruby down to the pieces of the gun on the floor. There was merit to what she was saying. What she was trying to do. If Dyna was going to be chased around for the foreseeable future, learning some self-defense wasn’t a bad idea. “And if you watch a movie with me without trying to attack me at any point during, I’ll go with you to Carroll’s gun range and pay full attention to everything you say.”

Ruby’s back straightened a little more than it already was—she normally had the best posture a ten-year-old could have—as she looked to Dyna. “You’ll listen to me? You’re not just saying that?”

“You’re far more experienced than I am. Of course I would listen to you.”

A small grin spread across the little girl’s face before she could stop it. She did stop it eventually, narrowing her eyes. “You better not be lying to me just because I’m little.”

“I’m not. I’m not. Now, what’s a good movie for a kid to watch?” Dyna hummed to herself. “Have you ever seen The Ring?”

 

 

 

Dyna sat as still as she could. Only her eyes and her knee moved, both with a nervous tension. Her eyes darted back and forth between the little girl with red hair and the woman roughly her age with green hair. The older woman was on her phone, talking quietly in the far corner of the room. She kept her other hand locked onto a small silver pocket watch. Her thumb hovered just above the winding stem.

The little girl concerned Dyna just a little more than the older one. After all, it was the little girl who held a pistol. One she aimed directly between Dyna’s eyes. Something about the way the little girl stared with a cold look and shallow scowl made Dyna think that she wouldn’t hesitate to use it. And she wasn’t sure at all who would be on the receiving end.

It made sense that Dyna would be shot, but the girl’s cold look was actually aimed at the green-haired woman. The look was probably just nervous anticipation of what the outcome of the call would be.

Dyna hoped it wouldn’t be anything bad.

“White is Walter, right?” Dyna asked. More blurted, but the effect of getting words out was the same. Although nervous, there was a certain calm in knowing that they were calling him. They were just nervous about someone suddenly showing up. That was all. After the day she had been through, Dyna felt the same.

Except she didn’t have a gun in her hands.

Red-eyes blinked. “What?”

“The call,” Dyna said. “Green-hair over there said she was calling White. I heard White give his code in the elevator and I assume Beatrice gave me his code to give you two. Right? Do you know him?”

Dyna didn’t really know what she was saying. Anything, really. She was just trying to get the gun put away. Or at least aimed slightly away from her. She didn’t think she was in any immediate danger. The little girl’s finger wasn’t on the trigger.

Not only that, but she could hear the distinctively deep voice of Walter coming from Green’s phone. Nothing clear enough to hear what he was saying, but he wouldn’t let anything happen to her.

“Know him?” the little girl said, eyebrow twitching. “I work for the ba—”

“Ruby!”

“I work for the jerk.”

Dyna blinked again before narrowing her eyes. “Jerk?” she hissed. “Aren’t you a little young to be working? You’re like eight—”

“Finish that sentence and you die,” Ruby said, now firmly aiming her gun.

“Don’t point a firearm at something you aren’t prepared to kill,” Dyna said before she could stop herself. She clamped her mouth shut immediately afterwards. A child was probably not the best person to argue with while holding a gun. At the Carroll Institute, she had learned a few things about the human brain. One fun fact was that the reasoning centers of the brain weren’t fully developed until twenty to twenty-five years old.

That meant that Dyna didn’t have a fully developed brain. And if she didn’t have one, this little girl certainly didn’t have one.

“I am fully prepared to kill you if you so much as think the wrong thing.”

Great, Dyna thought, clenching her teeth, a psychopathic mind reader. Why did Beatrice send me here?

Surely she could have gone to the police while Carroll scraped together a proper rescue. Or maybe she could have simply driven back out to the institute in the stolen vehicle.

“No killing today,” the green-haired woman said as she stepped around the cramped motel room. “At least not this one.” After a moment of nobody moving, the harsh tone of admonishment returned. “Gun away, Ruby.”

Tongue clicking against the roof of her mouth, the little girl flicked a switch on the side of the gun before shoving it into a small pack she wore slung over one shoulder. “What’s the deal with her?” she practically snarled.

Despite the harsh tone, Dyna just about fainted back onto the bed now that the gun wasn’t pointed toward her. All the tension in her shoulders, back, and stomach released all at once. She didn’t quite fall over, but she definitely wobbled at the sudden lax feeling.

“The girl is a nascent artificer, though Walt—”

“I don’t know what that means,” Ruby cut in.

“It means she’s new.”

“Oh.” Ruby looked back to Dyna, now with less of a scowl and more of an evaluating expression.

Dyna wasn’t sure why she felt so offended at the small snort that came from the little girl’s nose.

“You clearly have no idea what you’re doing,” Ruby said, corner of her lip twisting up. “Or what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

“That’s what nascent means. At least in this context,” green-hair said. She then put on a kind, almost motherly smile despite not being much older than Dyna. “I’m Emerald. This is Ruby. We’re artificers too. Your seniors, if you want to think about it like that. Don’t worry, we can handle anyone following you if they show up.”

This person, despite initially holding a gun to Dyna’s neck, felt a whole lot more reasonable than the little Ruby. Someone that she could actually get along with. Whose idea was it to give a child a gun in the first place?

“Do you people get chased around by strange men often?”

“We’ve had such encounters once or twice,” Emerald said with that same saccharine smile.

Ruby let out an excessive scoff. The look in her eyes…

Maybe a gun was warranted. Or maybe someone should have simply not involved Ruby in the first place.

“Oh.”

Ruby put on a wide grin, only to let out a small squawk as Emerald dropped the edge of her hand onto Ruby’s head. A karate-chop without any real force behind it.

“Oh…”

“I understand that Walter hasn’t told you much. There is a wonderful gun range inside the Carroll Institute and a quaint little place here in town. I could show you around. Perhaps invest in some self-defense classes? Ruby would offer you some lessons right now, but she has a job to do.”

Ruby looked up, confusion evident in her furrowed brows. “I do?”

“The vehicle outside our motel needs to be lost,” Emerald said with her calm smile never wavering. “As usual, don’t be seen.”

Ruby’s confusion shifted to hostility as she turned and glared at Dyna. She opened her mouth only to get another chop on the head.

“Go. And while you’re gone, we’re relocating. Secondary fall back point.” Turning to Dyna as Ruby shoved past, Emerald offered an explanation. “If the vehicle has a tracker, they’ll know it was stopped here for a time and we don’t want to be found. I’m afraid we’ll be running around just a bit more.”

“Is the… secondary fall back point at the Carroll Institute?”

“Sorry,” Emerald said, smile staying in place but changing slightly to be just a little more apologetic. “Campus is on lockdown until they’ve got a better grasp on the situation and just what kind of danger there might be.”

“I don’t suppose I can talk to Walter.” Not that Dyna didn’t trust Beatrice after managing to get her out of that situation intact, but she knew absolutely nothing about these people other than that they seemed to work with Walter and the Carroll Institute. And also that they had guns. And also that those guns had been aimed at Dyna only a few minutes ago.

She didn’t not trust them. The mirror hadn’t lit up. Even while Ruby had a gun aimed in her direction. Given that it didn’t show off random people’s perspectives, she had to assume that there was more to it than just someone looking in her direction.

Hostile intent? That seemed a reasonable theory.

“You don’t have any authorization codes,” Emerald said, smile finally turning to a frown.

“I think I would recognize his voice.”

“Quite distinctive, isn’t it?” Emerald said with a dainty laugh. “Unfortunately, codes are there for a reason. You attended Carrol’s day-classes, correct? I’m sure you know the capabilities any random person might possess.”

“I…” Dyna glanced back toward the window as she heard an engine start. “There’s no way she’s old enough for a license.”

“A license only matters if you’re being pulled over. Ruby will not be seen.”

“Because she’s so short that she doesn’t poke above the bottom of the window?”

Emerald laughed again, much harder this time. “Careful. If Ruby hears you say things like that, you’ll wind up having to dodge as many knives as I do.”

“Uh…”

“Come on,” she said, bending to pick up a steel case from behind the bed. “We should move sooner rather than later. Do tell me if you see your shadows. Walter would absolutely love to have a chat with them, maybe figure out how they discovered you so quickly.”

“Do you know who they are? Or what they want with me?”

Emerald shrugged, motioning for Dyna to follow her out of the motel room. Steel case in one hand and her other hand in her pocket, she stepped out without looking at all concerned that someone might have followed Dyna. She didn’t even look around.

Dyna did. Her emergence from the motel room involved narrowed eyes, frequent glances to the mirror, scanning the mostly vacant street alongside the motel, and a quick dash to an older station wagon with those faux wood panels on the sides. The door stuck, requiring Dyna to throw her whole weight into pulling it open. By the time she sat down in the passenger seat, feeling the spring coils pressing into her lower back, she felt frazzled and more exposed than ever.

The woman with green hair simply watched, amused smile playing across her face. “You’re going to have a lot of work ahead of you, I think.”

“What?”

“The people following you could be from Russian Psi-Corps, Chinese Jingshen, the Maanasik Department of India, or any number of smaller entities. With the advent of human psionic potential, just about every world power has an interest in pursuing people like us.”

“And this happens to you often?” Dyna grumbled. “They could have mentioned this at orientation.”

“No, I mean people like us. Most of your old classmates won’t ever have to worry about something like this. Mind readers are a dime a dozen. No need to come out here for them.”

“Artificers?”

Emerald nodded her head as she glanced from left to right. Not because she was worried about being spotted, but simply because she had stopped at an intersection. “As for what they want, that depends on who is after you. Perhaps they want to recruit you, brainwash then recruit, strap you to a table and perform an encephalectomy, or simply kill you to keep you from becoming a threat.”

Shuddering, Dyna sank down into the seat despite that spring poking into her back. Her thumb rubbed against a small smudge on the mirrored surface of the spy mirror. Since it was acting normal at the moment, she got a good look at her miserable reflection. To think that face had been bright and smiling only a few short hours ago, excited with the prospect of finally having a psychic ability to call her own.

Now? Chased after by potential assassins?

All for the ability to see when someone was looking at her?

She snorted. “I somehow got the perfect ability to know when assassins are after me.”

“The mirror?”

“It showed the perspective of those men when they were watching me.” Dyna shook her head, scowling at it. “It looks normal right now. Guess it only does its thing when someone doesn’t like me.”

Emerald took her eyes off the road, raising an eyebrow. “You should be able to control it more than that. It doesn’t decide to do anything. You do.”

“Well, I only got it a few hours ago. I don’t know anything about it. I was supposed to…” Dyna trailed off, remembering why she was in the city at all. “I wasn’t supposed to be near other psychics while bonding to it.”

“You should be down in Psychodynamics, surrounded by technicians and researchers.”

“But Doctor Cross said—”

“Cross?” Emerald let out a chiming chuckle. “Oh that explains so much about the situation. He threw you into this? I don’t mean to laugh, but it is hilarious. Then he sent you outside the safety of the facility, right into the waiting hands of your shadows?”

Shuddering again, Dyna started glancing around, taking her eyes off the mirror. As Emerald said, she knew nothing. She didn’t know how the artifact worked or what activated it. It might have been her, it might have been someone watching her. Regardless, it wasn’t reliable.

The men chasing after her had been dressed distinctively. Spotting them wouldn’t even be a challenge. All she had to do was look about and occasionally glance at the mirror just in case it did do something.

“I hope Walter is tearing him apart as we… Dyna?”

Dyna sucked in a sharp breath, stiffening. The mirror changed, going dark once again. Just like it did before it showed her the perspective of those strangely dressed men.

“What’s wrong?”

In lieu of words, Dyna held up the mirror, angling it toward Emerald.

“I don’t see anything. Aside from quite a beautiful woman, that is, but I try to limit the hours I spend admiring myself.”

“What? No, it’s…” Dyna looked back down. Both lenses of the mirror were a solid, unreflective black. “You don’t see this?”

“Just a mirror. Must only work for you.”

“It’s black and unreflective. Last time, it showed me the men after a few seconds like this.”

Emerald didn’t respond. Dyna didn’t look to see why, assuming that the other woman was on alert now and looking to see if she could see the men on her own. For her part, Dyna just gripped hold of the mirror, staring, waiting.

“It’s looking at us,” Dyna said the moment the mirror changed to a proper view, “from dead ahead. Elevated. Maybe on a building? But the view is magnified like they’re using binoculars or—”

“A scope,” Emerald hissed, wrenching the steering wheel to the left.

Dyna slammed into the door window as the station wagon veered into the lane of oncoming traffic. Despite all the effort it took to get the door open in the first place, her shoulder was enough to pop it open without even touching the handle. Her seatbelt helped to keep her in place, but even with that, she might have fallen right out had Emerald not spun the steering wheel in the opposite direction.

They careened straight down a side street, traveling twice the speed limit right until Emerald took another turn, sliding the station wagon into a narrow alley.

“Anyone watching us?”

Rattled and disoriented, it took Dyna a long moment to realize that Emerald was asking about the mirror. “It’s black. I think that means no.”

“Excellent.” Emerald kicked open her door, apparently not caring at all that it slammed into the brick side of the building they parked next to.

“We’re stopping? Getting out?” Dyna asked, unbuckling her own seat belt. Were she in charge, they would be flooring it clear out of the city. As she was not in charge, she doubted she had a say in matters. Now, she just didn’t want to be left behind.

“Of course!” Emerald said, leaving Dyna to shove open her poorly latched door. It dinged against another ladder, one that led to the roof of whatever building they had pulled up next to. Dyna just squeezed past, following as the other woman rushed back to the rear of the car where the trunk opened with hinges on the side rather than the roof. “Walter wants to speak with these gentlemen.”

Following her back, Dyna found her opening up a thick case that occupied almost the entirety of the rear storage space. Inside…

Guns. Knives. A crossbow? Grenades? Dyna’s eyes roamed over an arsenal the likes of which she had only seen in movies. A dozen handguns were arranged side-by-side at the rear of the case, handle out and ready to grab. Longer barreled firearms, aimed back and forth, were arrayed across the floor of the case, others were strapped to the roof. Knives with a variety of shapes, from straight and shiny silver blades to cruel-looking black blades curved like a crescent moon, were tucked between the guns, not far from the spherical and cylindrical grenades.

Emerald pulled out a small handgun. She slid back the top part of the gun, flicked a switch on the side, then pressed a small button underneath the barrel. A bright red dot appeared against the side of the station wagon’s rear door.

“Know how to use a gun?”

“Me?”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Emerald held out the gun. “Red light goes on who you want dead. Squeeze the trigger. Really as simple as that. This is a VP9, good gun.” She pulled a long tube from the case and started attaching it to the front of the barrel. “And the suppressor is so your ears don’t explode. It has fifteen shots which should be more than enough.”

“Enough for what?”

Emerald offered a brilliant smile. “Hopefully nothing,” she said, handing it over by holding onto the barrel. “I won’t be gone long.”

Dread sank into Dyna’s stomach at hearing that. “You’re leaving me?”

Emerald grabbed Dyna’s hand and placed it around the gun’s grip.

It was a lot heavier than it looked. A lot heavier than Emerald made it look with the way she moved it about.

As soon as it was out of her hands, Emerald pulled her pocket watch from her green cardigan and started winding the stem. “Not for long,” she said with a wink. “I’ll be back in a flash.”

Dyna blinked. In that split instant of a second, Emerald vanished. Not just ran off, but completely and totally disappeared. In a reflexive action, Dyna quickly ran through her thoughts just as they taught at Carroll, looking for any sign that her mind was being altered, maybe something similar to what Melanie did with her illusions. But she found nothing. Her thoughts were her own.

Emerald simply vanished, leaving her alone in the alley with a huge case of guns, an old and beat-up car, and a sense of extreme anxiety. Dyna gripped her mirror in one hand and the gun in the other. With the latter, she kept her fingers completely around the grip, none anywhere near the trigger.

She started pacing back and forth, jumping at every little noise that made its way down the alley. More than once, people walked past her little hiding spot. Most didn’t even notice her as they walked on to wherever their business took them. The few who did barely glanced in her direction. Only one seemed to notice the gun in her hand. He promptly started power walking away, rushing on.

Dyna paid every single one her near full attention, only relaxing once she noticed their regular attire for the chilly October air. For some reason, it felt like there were far, far too many people walking past. Did Idaho Falls even have that many people in it? It was probably just her panicked mind, but she couldn’t stop exaggerating every little thing into a big deal.

And where is Emerald? Back in a flash? How long was that supposed to be? She teleported away at least five minutes ago.

What if something happened?

A new source of dread invaded Dyna’s mind. The idea that her one source of safety in whatever mess she found herself in had gotten herself captured or killed and wouldn’t be coming back. The black-clothed men could be walking right down the road looking for her even now.

Her anxiety reached a crescendo when the mirror’s black lenses showed off a scene. Dyna swept the gun around, shining the red light around the brick walls of the alley before she realized that the subject of the mirror wasn’t herself.

Emerald’s face ground into a gravelly surface, pressed against it by whoever’s perspective Dyna was seeing. The perspective shifted, swinging to the side. It showed one of the black-clothed men standing right at the edge of a building. He held a pistol in his hands, aimed at Emerald. At his feet, propped up on a pair of legs, a long gun aimed up into the sky with no one standing next to it.

Captured.

She got captured.

Dyna swore, pacing back and forth even more as she stared at the scene in the mirror. She still didn’t have a phone to contact Beatrice or Walter or anyone else. Not that they would ever be able to help Emerald in time. Should she run? That was what her instinct told her to do. She was just a regular person, not some gun-wielding secret agent.

Would Emerald be able to escape on her own?

It didn’t look likely based on what the mirror showed.

That meant…

There was only one person who could help her.

Dyna swore again as she looked back into the station wagon’s trunk. There was a gun in that black case. One with a scope and a long barrel, just like the one the men had on the roof.

Biting her lip hard enough to draw blood, she grabbed the gun. It had a strap that she used to sling it over her shoulder. Rushing back to the passenger door, she grabbed hold of the ladder. This ladder had a small grate protected by a padlock to keep people from climbing. Pointing the red laser at the padlock and squeezing the trigger just like Emerald said got rid of that problem.

Dyna left the pistol on the ground; having no holster, she couldn’t climb with it in her hands.

The second she pulled herself onto the roof, she looked down at the mirror. The perspective wasn’t aimed in her direction. More worryingly, one of the men was trying to get zip ties around Emerald’s wrist. She struggled, but it wouldn’t work for long.

Dyna put the gun down, finding the latch to extend its legs as she looked in the rough direction that she thought the men would be based on the angles from the mirror.

If Idaho Falls had been any less flat, a building might have gotten in the way.

As it was, she saw them. Two moving shapes on a distant rooftop.

Sitting on her belly, Dyna tried to emulate everything she had seen in movies. She didn’t know if the gun was loaded and could only hope that it was. A small switch on the side was probably the safety. She didn’t know which way allowed it to fire, but assumed that the safety had been on while stored, so she flicked it.

Seeing through the scope was harder than the movies made it look. Unless she had her head positioned exactly perfectly, all she got were small crescents or pure blackness. Once she got her head into the proper spot, she had to actually find the men in the scope. Easier said than done, but eventually, she managed to get one of the men in the scope. Emerald was hidden from view beneath the lip of the building’s rooftop.

Dyna could only hope that her being hidden meant that she would be safe when Dyna inevitably missed.

There were knobs on the scope. Dyna didn’t know what they did and could only hope that they didn’t matter. She took a breath and tried to get the taller of the two men aligned with the crosshairs.

Her finger twitched with a nervous tension as the struggle increased. It twitched before she was ready.

Dyna’s ears started ringing as the gun slammed back into her shoulder.

The mirror, propped up just to the side of the roof where she could see it, showed the men entirely unharmed.

For a few seconds.

They clearly heard the noise and both ducked for cover. That was apparently enough for Emerald. She promptly vanished from under the perspective’s grip. A second after, one of the men was the one on the ground, both kneecaps missing courtesy of an Emerald with a smile that was just a hair too serene.

With her back on her feet and one man down, the other black-suited man stood no chance at all. She disappeared and reappeared only long enough to fire her pistol. He fell after only a few shots. Emerald kicked his gun from his hands a moment after. Dyna wasn’t sure if he was dead, but the one whose perspective she was seeing definitely wasn’t.

Dyna rolled onto her side with a small groan, fingers violently shaking. Even her legs and body trembled. A dozen buckets of sweat she must have shed in the last few minutes started to feel uncomfortably chill against the cold evening air.

But Emerald was fine. She was tying up both men using their own zip ties. As soon as they were secure and all weapons removed from their bodies, Emerald vanished from the mirror’s view.

A few seconds later, the mirror went dark.

A few seconds after that, the mirror started showing off just a normal reflection of Dyna’s sweat-covered face.

“Dyna?”

Dyna jumped at the soft voice. Her shaking fingers tried to grab the gun, only for its weight to overwhelm her unusually weak strength.

“It’s just me,” Emerald said.

Closing her eyes, Dyna let out a sigh that vibrated deep in her chest against her best efforts to remain calm. “Are… you okay?”

“Nothing to worry over,” Emerald said with a smile. “I’m… more confused than anything. I had them subdued completely with no effort at all, but then I was the one on the ground.” Her smile faltered as she shook her head, but she quickly recovered. “I contacted Ruby. She will be here shortly to take care of the men. You and I are going to move to a safe spot for the time being. Do you think you can climb down?”

“I…” Dyna shuddered, then shook her head. “Give me a few minutes.”

Emerald slowly knelt down and placed a gentle hand on Dyna’s shoulder. “You’re okay. Try to take deep breaths.”

Dyna did so, breathing deeply through her nose before letting it out slowly from her mouth. “Sorry. I shouldn’t… I wasn’t even in danger. You—”

“I’ve faced far, far worse. Trust me. That wasn’t even in the top hundred terrible situations I’ve been in this year. Though I should say thanks. It might have made it into the top hundred if you hadn’t stepped up.”

“I don’t even know what I’m doing. I was just copying movies.”

“Don’t worry. We can work on that.”

Dyna… didn’t quite know how to respond to that. She didn’t want to work on anything. In fact, all she wanted right now was a hot bath and a hot cup of chocolate.

“Feeling better? Enough to climb down?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, that’s better than before. Come on, on your feet,” Emerald said, holding out a hand to help.

Dyna took a long, deep breath, then took hold of Emerald’s hand.