Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
• Recollections of an Alternate Past •

Book Two

The Twofold Invasion - OR - 
Penetration and Destruction - OR - 
How To Make Love With Twins

A Novel by
Teel McClanahan III

Modern Evil Press

Phoenix

ISBN: 978-1-934516-44-7

eBook Edition

Copyright © 2005 by Teel McClanahan III

Some Rights Reserved.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Published by Modern Evil Press, Phoenix, AZ

ISBN: 978-1-934516-44-7 (E-Book)

 

• for love, lost •

 

“I’d somehow managed to go this long without once thinking about what it would be like to kiss you.” A fireball crackled with searing heat as it flew within inches of Trevor’s head, his robe’s hood down, his hair blowing back with the warming wind of the passing danger.

“What?” Nirgal was so distracted by Trevor’s strange comment that he nearly failed to burst a lightning ball that would have converted their best player to the other side.

“Nothing. Sorry.” Trevor had an idea forming as he ran over to help Jode get a scarantula off the back of his robes without either of them being hit by incoming projectiles. He shouted back to Nirgal who was redirecting a series of fast-moving visionballs away from their right-side cluster of fireball throwers, their Burners, “I was just thinking about a girl from my old school.”

“Is that such a good idea?” One of the visionballs got past him, and a Burner was down. Nirgal had been hit with enough visionballs to know what his teammate was seeing, and that what he was not seeing was more important – until the visionball dispelled, Nirgal was the only person keeping Saeto from being hit by every single thing the other side decided to throw their way. “We are in the middle of a championship dodgeball game. What would Kay and Elle think if you lost the big game because you were thinking about someone else?” Nirgal suddenly jumped away from the cluster of Burners, ducking and rolling along the ground to miss a very close freezeball that would have slowed him down significantly. “Maybe you could daydream later? AFTER we win?”

“No, no, but it gave me an idea. I’m going to need some help.” Everyone who heard Trevor say he’d had an idea looked his way, at least for a moment. His own teammates had learned to just trust him and hope for the best. Eight times out of ten his ideas won the game for them, and the other times… well, they hadn’t ever gone so wrong as to cause a total match loss. The other team tried to prepare for the worst, word spreading fast among them to get ready to try to distract Trevor or lose big – only one team had ever been able to break his concentration, and they had disqualified themselves in the process. And the crowd, the crowd roared louder and louder in excitement, then hushed to a startling silence in anticipation of something unexpected. “Everyone aim at different players… just … figure it out, okay? We want every one to hit.”

They all got projectiles ready to loose, and then Trevor seemed to disappear. And then their projectiles all seemed to disappear. And then Trevor reappeared, holding nothing in his back-cocked arm, and shouted, “Now!” Everyone threw nothing. Nothing flew across the courts at the other team. Some of them tried to block nothing, a few of them tried to move or leap out of the way of nothing, the guards tried blasting nothing out of the air. “Get ready for another set of shots!” Trevor already had a fireball blazing just off his hand as he said this, and it seemed to be enough to get his teammates to stop just watching to see what was happening on the other side and get them back into play.

What happened was, excepting one player whose leaping had got him just out of the way of the invisible mudball Nirgal had thrown at him and one player who had never been kissed, all the players on the other team got hit by invisible balls and then just stood there with their eyes closed and smiles drawing across their faces.

The other team’s coach was at the edge of the court, screaming at the referees, “He’s playing with their minds! He can’t do that! They ruled against Mentalism in the playoffs and you know it! What kind of a referee are you? That monster is in there flagrantly breaking the rules and you’re just going to let him do it? How far up your ass has your head got to be not to see what he’s doing out there to my boys?” He went on and on, saliva spraying on the referee’s face as he screamed and turned red and tried to get the referee to make a call in his team’s favor. The constant barrage of hits raining down on his players did nothing to distract them from whatever was going on in their heads, some of them literally being knocked to the ground by lightning balls or multiple hard hits, and there were fewer and fewer of them smiling happily as they lost the game.

“What did you do, Trev?” Harrison, the team’s captain, threw marble ball after marble ball at the remaining players as he implored Trevor for an answer. “You know you’re not allowed to use Mentalism in the playoffs. Are we going to be disqualified?”

“I don’t think so.” Trevor always felt like a weakling when he tried to heave balls of solid marble twelve inches in diameter across the court, so stuck to fast fireballs as he also continued playing. “I read the ruling pretty carefully, and it only says I can’t communicate or otherwise directly interact with the minds of the players on either team. So I modified everyone’s balls to do it for me.”

“What did you put in their heads, exactly? They seem pretty happy to be losing, maybe you could do the rest of us after the match.” Harrison grinned, hoping it was something troublingly erotic.

“Oh, nothing special. I just triggered a looping memory of their most emotionally significant kiss. Pretty easy, if you know how to create mental loops.”

“Is that because of the emotional content?” Their conversation was fairly relaxed, since no one on the other team was trying to hit them with anything. “I’m studying to get into Mentalism 1 next year, and I think I read something about emotional memories being the easiest to get people to replay.”

“That’s a pretty good way to put it. I think we’re about done here.”

“But we’ve still got to wait for the end of the game. Could you do me?”

“After the game, Harry.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to do the cascading balls trick again, while we wait?”

“Yeah.” Harrison began grinning a conniving grin.

“Tell the others; I’ll get ready.”

Harrison gathered all the players who weren’t trapped in reverie together at the center of the court in three concentric circles around where Trevor was sitting cross-legged and floating just above the floor. Everyone, even the players that had been converted from the other side, got into the energy of it as the three rings started moving in alternating directions around Trevor; the smallest and largest circles moving clockwise and the other circle moving counter-clockwise, all of them facing in. A sphere of distortion, like a three-dimensional rippling of waves in the fabric of reality radiating outward, was already large enough to encompass Trevor and was growing and growing to take in the other players. As soon as the entire inner circle was inside the distortion, the players within appeared to turn into a blur of motion around and around and around Trevor, who sat perfectly still in the center, windblown. The sphere of rippling distortion expanded and expanded until eventually all the players and a big chunk of the floor below them and air above them were contained within it, and then it maintained its size and rippled slower and slower until its surface was like the perfect clear surface of a crystal ball.

Within this strange sphere, the three rings of players were spinning in a blur around Trevor, who could just be seen through their partially transparent vagueness. Then Trevor opened his eyes and seemed to turn into a blur himself as a constant stream of light began pouring out of the air in front of him and cascaded up into the air above them all until very quickly there was a half-sphere of white light curving out like water from a fountain, flowing from Trevor to the inner circle of players. And then a second burst flowered out of that one, a yellow fountaining of light and energy reaching the second circle of players, but less visible so that the light from the white, inner sphere was still visible to the crowd. Finally a third fountain of multicolored light flowed forth from Trevor to the outer circle of players, a constantly shifting rainbow of continuous color forming a half-sphere of light with the multilayered backlighting of the inner half-spheres within it. This gorgeous display of light continued for a few moments, and then the crystal-like sphere around all of them suddenly exploded outward to encompass the entire stadium and everyone inside it as the last few seconds ticked down on the clock for the third game of the match that would decide the national dodgeball championship. As soon as the clock was inside the sphere it seemed to stop altogether, and as soon as the nearly silent audience was inside the sphere, they gasped and cheered to see what was really going on.

The players were still slowly circling Trevor in alternating directions, but now everyone could see that the solid half-spheres of light they had seen above the blurs of players had actually been various dodgeballs being passed back and forth between the players in a complex pattern that could not have been achieved by anyone without a fairly high level of skill. Different colors of visionballs were moving across the highest arcs between the players of the third circle. Fireballs were burning their way back and forth in careful arcs between the players in the second circle, and lightning balls sped still blindingly fast between the inner circle of players, the best of the lightning-ball casters from both teams showing off their skill and dexterity. The crowd ooh-ed and ah-ed and cheered and clapped as the players’ circles slowly expanded. The outer circle took two steps back, carefully maintaining the constant motion of dozens of visionballs, the second circle took one step back without losing a single fireball, and then all three circles began taking simultaneous steps outward until the outermost players were heaving visionballs across the entire width of the court to reach the players on the other side.

Trevor was now standing, and as soon as they reached the edge he shouted out, “Ready?”

The entire team shouted back in unison, “Ready,” and the balls began flying faster.

Trevor raised his arms into the air and shouted “Set” as he whipped his arms back to his sides. The nearly forgotten crystal-like sphere of distortion came rushing back in on him in an instant, time speeding back up to normal with three seconds left on the clock. Everyone caught the balls in the air and held them floating in front of themselves as they turned to face the audience. When they had all turned with held balls, they shouted back to him, “Set.”

The clock ticked down to one second and Trevor shouted “Go!” – Each player heaved his ball towards the crowd in long, slow arcs through the air, a rain of fire, lightning, and color streaming towards the thousands of onlookers who all leaned back in their seats, even the ones who had seen this same show at earlier games, as the danger approached. The clock hit zero before a single ball reached the audience, and as the buzzer rang out through the air every single projectile still in motion disappeared at once and the audience let out a communal breath of relief and joy. The cheering and clapping and whistling and roaring of the crowd rose to an unbelievable level and players and families and fans rushed onto the court to congratulate the obviously winning team, raising the players onto shoulders and backs above the crowd and carrying them around in celebration. They all knew the final display was a bit of showboating, but since it didn’t elevate any one player above the others and emphasized teamwork and skill above grandstanding, even including players converted from opposing teams, the referees had been more than glad to allow Trevor to show off a little when there was time left on the clock. Though he was loath to admit it, Trevor found he liked playing dodgeball after all.

At the same time that Trevor was trying, as politely as he could, to get the three strangers who were carrying him around like a trophy to set him down, two young women were weaving their way through the crowd trying to reach him. The two women and Trevor met their goals at almost exactly the same time, so that he seemed to fall out of the sky to stand directly before them just as they were coming to a stop.

Kay smiled her proudest smile at Trevor, said “Good game, Trev,” then leaned up and forward and kissed him gently on the lips.

Elle smiled her identical smile at Trevor, leaned forward and up and kissed him gently on the lips before saying, “What did you do to those guys at the end? It all went so fast, and then they stopped playing!”

“Thank you,” he nodded to Elle. “Thank you,” he nodded to Kay, took them one to a side, arm in arm, and began working their way out of the still-raucous crowd. “Nothing that would seem too fancy to you two. I slowed down my personal time so I could turn everyone’s balls invisible and then give each ball a single mental command to transmit to whoever they hit without running down the clock.”

“Invisible so the other team couldn’t block them,” Elle began.

Kay finished, “but what was the mental command?” Both girls smiled their mischievous smiles at him as they continued their slow way through the crowd, and he knew they wanted the same thing Harrison had.

“Are you sure?” They nodded synchronously. “Okay, I’ll give it to you in a minute.” Their smiles drooped a bit. “It’ll take you two a few minutes to recover, I’m sure. I’ll give it to you when we part ways at the locker room.” They nodded in grudging acceptance. “Are you two gonna stick around for the co-ed game?”

“Of course we are!”

“We want to be sure you treat those girls right.”

“No funny business.” She reached out to poke his side, tickling him.

“But don’t throw the game, either.”

“Of course not, Kay. You know I would never mistreat anyone, whether they happened to be the national champions of all high-school level women’s teams or not. Though I can’t actually promise ‘no funny business.’ You remember how the quarter-finals went, Elle.”

All three of them laughed at the thought of the way the court had looked at the end of the quarter-finals, with banana cream pies splattered across every player on both sides, the floor, the walls, and most of the audience. It had been a close game, decided without a clear Condorcet winner at first, but in Trevor’s team’s favor after all, despite no points or conversions being scored for either side after his area-effect spell had begun to work. Before the three of them had really caught their breath from the memory of Trevor’s “funny business,” they reached the locker room entrance, and Trevor unhooked his arms from those of the young women on either side of him.

“Well, I guess I’ve got to change my robes before the co-ed game, and Mr. Klaw will probably want to talk strategy with everybody, even though we’re already the champions. Your seats up front should still be reserved, but be sure you’re in them before the game starts, or they’ll give them to someone else. Now, I’m going to give you the mental command, and I don’t know how long it’ll last, exactly, but I have a feeling you’ll want it to last longer, so… Well, here goes, I’ll see you later.” He held out his hand and generated a red ball of light, imbuing it with the same mental command he had used earlier. He held it up to his face and kissed it and then, as though blowing the kiss to them, blew the energy ball out of his hand in their direction. It split into two glowing balls as it lazily crossed the distance between them, and before the balls landed gently on each girl’s smooth cheek, transferring the mental commands to them, he turned around and went into the locker room, leaving them standing there just outside the door reliving their most emotionally significant kisses over and over again.

It is perhaps an unfortunate thing that he did not stay to look at the expressions on their faces or to look into their minds to experience what they were remembering in such vivid detail, for it might have changed the entire course of future events for dozens, perhaps billions of people. For most people, their most emotionally significant kiss would be a pleasant memory, where the emotion had been happiness, joy, love, or some other warm and fuzzy feeling that one would want to experience again and again and again in a loop of true experiential realism. In the case of Kay and Elle, the primary emotion of their most emotionally significant kiss was identically different from what most people would have expected, and as the remaining players filed into the locker room they passed quickly by twin faces of frozen terror.

“What did you do to Kay and Elle, Trev?”

“Nothing they didn’t ask for.” Trevor smiled, thinking what he’d done had been quite pleasant for them, and didn’t see his teammates’ puzzled reactions because he was pulling his undershirt off over his head to freshen up between games. “Do you want the same?”

“N-no. No.” Everyone who had seen the girls was shaking his head, fervently imploring Trevor not to put him through whatever had put that expression on their faces. Some turned their backs on Trevor, facing their lockers, and others just busied themselves with changing their robes or looking though their playbooks, but no one wanted to make eye contact with him. They knew he didn’t need eye contact to get into their heads, but there was something psychological about looking someone in the eyes that seemed like an open door to mental manipulation.

“What about you, Harry?”

“What?” Harrison was caught off guard by Trevor singling him out; he thought they had been on good terms at the end of the game. “No, err… No.”

“Whatever.” Trevor didn’t understand the sudden cold shoulder everyone was giving him. They usually liked to goof around after a game. He began to wonder if he’d done something or said something that had upset them, but Trevor had been pretty sure he’d made winning the game a team effort, and he certainly hadn’t intended to or felt he had received any more praise than anyone else on the team after the game. He pulled off his short pants and then pulled them right back on as soon as the CleanGuard enchantment had done its work of returning him to the state of cleanliness he had been in at the start of the game.

Trevor remained silent, trying to work out why everyone else was so quiet, as he changed into his new robes for the final game. Instead of the school colors, these robes were the traditional dark brown of proper magicians’ monk-like robes, with the symbol of the national championship winners proudly emblazoned across their backs. It was supposed to be a secret, but these one-time-use overrobes were also supposed to enhance reflexes and act as power multipliers for any magic they used as they played – fireballs would burn hotter, lightning balls would shock more intensely and convert players faster, and all magically propelled balls would fly faster and hit harder. It didn’t give them a real advantage, since the young women’s team would be wearing equivalent robes, but it made the last game a real blast. Literally. Mr. Klaw finally came into the locker room to give the team some guidance for the final official dodgeball game of the school year.

✯ ✯ ✯

“None of the prophecies have been fulfilled yet; how can you still be thinking he’s the one?” Feagan was clearly beginning to doubt that the tall, lanky man with coke-bottle-like glasses standing before him. “He’s powerful, yes, and the stars are coming into alignment, but nothing else seems to fit.”

“Forget the prophecies! They were lies when my predecessors wrote them, and they’re still lies! That doesn’t mean he’s not the one they were warning us about.” The dark stranger spoke with a burning intensity that literally showed in his eyes, tiny flames licking up across his irises towards his pupils as he roared back at Feagan. “He’s a danger to all of us, and if we don’t do something to stop him soon … you know what could happen.”

“I’m not sure I believe that part either. Why would he do something that would destroy Earth as we know it? He’s not exactly suicidal or quote-unquote evil.” Feagan made finger quote-marks in the air as he emphasized the word “evil” verbally. The lanky man rolled his eyes in response, but Feagan continued, “So he can read and control minds with an unprecedented level of skill, so what? So he’s got a copy of Sunshine’s entire life history to draw on, and who knows who else has let him into their minds by now to add to that, there’s nothing he could learn from someone that could make him any more of a threat than the person he learned it from already represented to us.”

Sqrat, who had been standing so meekly to the side that he seemed hardly to have been noticed by the other two, spoke up. “I’ve watched every single dodgeball game he’s ever played, written down every play and studied what he’s done – he uses magic no one has ever used before in almost every game, developing strategies and complex spells spur-of-the-moment to suit his moods. When he does use traditional magic, he rarely uses it the way everyone else has been using it for eons. I heard Echelar & Spink has been planting a man in the audience at our games and have already begun to update their texts with as many of his plays as they can before the new school year.”

The tall man’s glare focused through his giant glasses and seemed intensified like the sun’s light would have been intensified through the lenses to rapidly create a fire, and would have been burning a hole right between Sqrat’s eyes if it were more than just a glare. “What does that childish game have to do with anything, Sqrat?” As the lanky leader said “anything,” Sqrat’s bushy, connected eyebrows actually did catch fire, and he quickly reached up to slap at his own face to try to put out the tiny blaze.

“Aaahh! Aaa-aahh.. ahh… Ow.” Sqrat calmed down when his face was no longer on fire and tried to answer, “if he… if he’s that powerful just playing a .. a... childish game, imagine what he could do in a … a… a ..b-b-b-b… b-b- b-b b-b …”

“A battle?”

Sqrat let out a huge breath in relaxation. “Yes. A real battle. I’m on your side, sir.” Sqrat reached over and put his hand on the scar where his bone had broken through his arm and remembered the day he had first introduced Trevor to their world.

“Good thing, Sqrat.” He turned back to Feagan and continued to try to quell his mutiny, “what do you say to that, Trask?”

“I’ve seen him play, too, and if he’s using the full extent of his abilities in the game, they’re impressive, but he wouldn’t beat you on your worst day in a proper duel.” The tall one seemed nonplussed about having his ego rubbed by Mr. Trask, but didn’t interrupt again. “Just because he’s powerful and can do things no one has ever seen before doesn’t make him the one talked about in the prophecy. If he wins the championship tonight, it almost means the opposite, since the one in the prophecy isn’t ever supposed to achieve notoriety before the end has already begun.”

“You’re not listening. I told you the prophecy isn’t the point anymore. Stopping the boy is.”

“You’ve been telling us from the beginning that the prophecy was all that mattered. All the work we’ve done has revolved around the prophecy, and now you say it’s all a lie, it doesn’t matter, that the prophecy is not the point? If the prophecy isn’t real, why am I talking to you at all?”

“Because you know I’m right.” The tall man’s voice was becoming more even.

“You got me to believe in the prophecy for nothing, then?”

“Do you still believe I’m right about the boy?” His face was becoming more relaxed.

“He’s not the one in the prophecy.”

“Do you believe me about the boy?” The formerly imposing figure now seemed forgiving, imploring rather than demanding.

“…I…” Feagan Trask was no longer looking at an angry face, a menacing beast defending himself, and if the tall man was so calm and assured about it … Feagan wasn’t sure what to think. “We should keep watching him.”

“We should stop him.” The lanky figure was determined, but not oppressive.

“Stop him from doing what? If the prophecy can’t be trusted, what exactly do you think he’s going to be doing?”

“Just because we don’t know the path he takes to get there doesn’t mean he’s not going to destroy life on Earth as we know it.”

“It doesn’t mean he is, either.”

“He is. You’ve seen the look in his eye. You’ve touched the surface of his mind. You know he’s not like us.”

“You’re such a xenophobe. You’re worse than the native shamans were.”

“And if he’s the advance scout of a colonization effort of thousands or millions more like him, like we were when we arrived on these shores? Do you want to be the one that welcomed him and his people to take over our planet?”

“Is that what you think is going to happen?”

“You know we can’t know the future with that much detail. All we can do is speculate and calculate and observe him until we see the moment to stop him.”

“But if he’s not the risk you claim, what sort of ethical charge do we get for stopping him?”

“You’re worried about ethical charge? You. That’s a joke, right?” The thin face’s composure finally broke into thundering laughter.

“Stop laughing at me.” He simply laughed louder. “You don’t know what I’ve gone through to get back to a balanced charge after what we’ve done already. Sunshine does random charge sweeps of her entire staff, and I’m not about to be singled out or lose my position there because of your … experiments.”

The tall man couldn’t seem to stop laughing, apparently thinking about the sheer scale of community service and positive social work Feagan must have done to make up for their dark activities of the last decade. He laughed so hard he nearly fell to the floor, shaking and bending over and clutching his skinny belly in pain from convulsions. He laughed and laughed and laughed and the other two men didn’t try to speak or leave, they just watched and waited. Sqrat chuckled a little, but more for the tall man’s benefit than his believing Feagan’s actions had been funny. Sqrat had done quite a bit of work to balance his own ethical charge; he just didn’t consider bringing it up to be a wise idea. Finally, the lanky man began to catch his breath, and spoke again.

“How many little old ladies do you have to help across the street to make up for murdering a room full of children, exactly?”

“You know that wasn’t my fault! I never meant for them to die! What about your sacrifices? How many hungry mouths do you have to feed, how many lives do you have to lift out of poverty, how much human suffering do you have to erase from the world to make up for just one of your human sacrifices?” He barely paused to see if the tall man would try to defend himself, “Oh yeah, that’s right! You can’t! Ever! Bring back a human sacrifice! You can’t ever balance it. At least I have the opportunity to try.”

“You know you’re asking for trouble, right?” The lanky man’s voice was calm and even, and his face once again had no readable expression. “You’re not the only one who can do the Devil’s Arithmetic. A tweak here, a tiny change in your instructions there, and next time the balance of the charge will land on your shoulders.”

“There won’t be a next time. You think I’d work with you again on something like … that?”

“You’ll do precisely what I say you will. My runestones have a record of every effect they’ve ever played a part in, and can be source-routed back to everyone who had a hand in their use. If the right stone were somehow misplaced and ended up in the hands of The Board, you know it wouldn’t take them long to detect one massacre or another lingering on it.”

“You’d never allow that. You’d be sourced, the same as me. They’d know what you’ve been doing, and I could tell them I only acted under duress.”

“Are you sure they could source it back to me? Do I need to remind you of my true name?”

Feagan’s lack of a reaction beyond silence told the bespectacled man that he had reasserted his power sufficiently, and the mutinous thoughts of his colleague were at an end. He returned to his appropriately tall seat at the head of the table, waited for the other two men to take their more humble seats, and began again.

“The real reason we’re meeting today should be obvious. You haven’t found the girl yet. You haven’t found out who took her or who wanted to take her. All you’ve proven is who didn’t take her, who didn’t want to take her, and that doesn’t actually help us. She’s less than a month from natural birth, assuming a standard gestation, and we need to find her before The Board does and before she gives birth. Whoever took her will probably just discard her when they have what they want from her, and her dead body doesn’t do us any good at all. So. What news do you have for me?”

✯ ✯ ✯

The final buzzer for the final game went off, and the crowd sat in stunned silence, staring at the scoreboard, staring at the teams, trying to decide whether to cheer or boo or just go home. Down on the court, the players were tired and sore and the players from both teams, when they had caught their breath after the final buzzer, walked to the center of the court and shook each other’s hands almost silently. The sounds of their boots on the floor of the court and the shuffling of the crowd in the stands echoed in the empty air; no one even coughed to fill the silence.

The game had been a perfect tie.

There would be no way of knowing which team would have won if Trevor had not been playing, or had not been allowed to use his Mentalism, but the way it played out gave the appearance that the young men’s national champions were exactly matched with the young women’s national champions. Every player on both teams had exactly the same number of hits against them as they hadmade against another player. Every player that had been converted from one side to the other was converted back again. Every block was matched with a block on the other side. Every single thing that was tracked about every single player and action in each of the three games was precisely matched between the two teams. There was no way that either team, based on the match they had just completed, could be said to be the winner over the other team.

Trevor remembered what Mr. Klaw had told them before the game; it had been brief. He had said that the young women’s team was significantly better than they were, more talented, more skilled, and based on scoring for the entire season, if they played according to the same rules that had been used for the playoffs, Mr. Klaw assured them all they would lose two or three to one in every scoring category. Women are simply more naturally magically inclined, and had better intuition and teamwork, he’d said. And then he’d addressed Trevor directly, saying that the women’s team, the judging officials, and the league president had all agreed to allow Trevor to use his mental powers during the match, and that Mr. Klaw wanted him to go “all out.”

And that had been it. He’d had what had felt like a really long time by himself to think about what he could do or should do during the game. He could have not used his mental powers at all, and his team would probably have been severely beaten, even if he did pull off a big play at the end of the game, because of wins in a majority of statistics. He could have used his mental powers to lead his team to an overwhelming victory, even just by standing in the background and giving his teammates instructions about when to dodge and block and dip and when to throw or not to throw and who to throw at, giving them an excellent advantage in timing and precision and a relatively easy win. It was something he’d always avoided, so that the team’s winning was about their own skills generally, rather than his playing the entire game for the entire team as though it were merely a mental exercise. It was something he still didn’t want to do.

In considering it, Trevor also considered the implications of many possible outcomes. If he was allowed to use his Mentalism and didn’t, his teammates would hate him and the crowd would just watch them get smashed. If he led the team to a stunning victory, the other team would hate him and all the work he’d done during the season to make the team the focus instead of himself would be lost in a little over an hour; it would be pretty clear to everyone playing and watching that Trevor’s Mentalism was the difference between winning and losing for the young men. Trevor wasn’t sure where the idea came to him from, but he decided to attempt to create an outcome that required an intense show of his mental prowess, his team’s physical skill and mental dexterity in every player, and that wouldn’t take away from the fact that the young women’s team was an amazing set of players. He decided to try to craft a match that would not leave any individual player’s ego hurt, that would give every player equal time, and that would hopefully create balance and unity.

Whether it created balance and unity would be a matter of contentious discussion for a long time to come. No completed match had ever been exactly tied before, in the entire history of dodgeball. Even in matches where not a single hit had been made by either team, one team had always had more active blocks than the other and had been named the winner for superior defense. Plenty of games had had the same number of hits and conversions and blocks for each side, the primary statistics for scoring, but in each of those games, players had been converted faster from one side to the other, or converted players had played worse for the other side than they did their native side, or some other small statistical differences had existed between the teams or across the three games of a match which had created a reasonably clear winner. None of those things had happened in this unprecedented game.

Taking himself to the limits and pressing hard against the limits of what was morally acceptable with regard to taking action in the minds of others, Trevor had tuned into the thoughts of every player on both teams and actively suggested – and in some cases almost directly taken control of – actions for the players on his own side to take. Defensive actions to stay out of the way of just the right number of balls or to actively block just the right number of attacks to match what the young women’s team’s actual performance turned out to be, from play to play. Guidance about how to use different offensive moves, so that just the right number of strikes of the right types would hit or miss the female players, just the right number would be potentially blockable or potentially dodgeable. Mental guidance combined with actual physical guidance for lightning balls to hit the right players at the right times and miss in exactly the correct proportions to match what had been done by the other side. All of these mental commands and more were broadcasting while Trevor very carefully danced through the appropriate motions with his own body to play his own role in the game, dodging, blocking, casting, throwing, and otherwise doing his part to not be a better or worse player than any other person in any of the ways that any of them played the games.

Through this complex series of events, the young men’s national champions had actually managed to play at the level of the young women’s national champions, and because Trevor had not sent a single message, command, or suggestion to any of the players on the young women’s side – converted or not – it had been somewhat fair. But as the players shuffled off the court and the crowd began filing calmly row by row out of the stands, the low murmuring that was hardly above the audible level of the noise of thousands of feet making their way to the doors was certainly a harsh contrast to the literal cacophony that had filled the entire building just two hours earlier. Trevor, exhausted, had simply stood still at the sound of the buzzer.

When the crowd finally cleared and the rest of the players had retreated to their locker rooms, Trevor was still standing there in his formal brown robes, head hung down, arms at his sides, shoulders slung low, breathing slow and deep and long as he tried to recover from a game that was supposed to have been lighthearted and fun. He waited and relaxed and breathed with his head down and his eyes closed until his mind cleared and his thoughts’ velocity tapered off and his pulse returned to normal and he began to reach a calm, neutral state. Finally, after what may have been a genuinely long time or may have only been several minutes, Trevor lifted his head slowly upright and opened his eyes at the culmination of a refreshing inhalation of air. Present before him were the identical faces of his girlfriends, with big doe eyes and equal looks of concern broadcasting a reassuring warmth across his own less-than-radiant expression.

“You were amazing,” her tone was soft and reassuring, like the gentle purring of a newborn kitten held close and gentle against the skin. She stepped forward and pressed her whole body up against him, reaching around inside his overrobe in a very pleasant hug of his left side.

“That was perfect,” the other one was just as reassuring, just as soothing, and perhaps a bit of worshipfulness came across in her throaty but brief statement as she also stepped towards him, reached around his other side inside his overrobe and pressed the whole length of her body against him from the sides of their feet meeting slightly, her bare calf and thighs pressing through his underrobe, underskirt, and short pants against his own leg, and like her sister had done on the other side, pressing her torso against his and turning and tilting and resting the side of her head against his chest and shoulder, nuzzling up against his neck.

Then as they held themselves and each other tight against him and his own arms closed around them and his head came down to gently meet theirs, the three of them whispered softly in unison, “I love you.”

✙ ✙ ✙

“He’s ours.”

“It’s not over yet.”

“But our plan is working.”

“And if it does, –”

“He’s ours.”

✙ ✙ ✙

Their embrace lasted at least as long as his relaxing and emptying had before it, and none of them said another word before he was the first to move.

“Why don’t you come over to our place tonight, Trev?”

None of them had moved farther than to wrap themselves closer around each other, nor had Kay and Elle opened their eyes. They simply stood in his hot embrace, smiling, as he openned his eyes to consider the two of them. Trevor had never felt this way about anyone before, himself. Sunshine had felt a similar but also almost entirely different and unique way about her husband, and Trevor could remember it and compare it to this, but he knew that no two loves could really be related properly to each other, so didn’t spend long on that point of his/her memories. Here he was, feeling love – what he knew was genuine, everlasting, unconditional love – for these two people. Two people who not only loved him in return, but loved each other and loved their shared loves for each other.

Even without once reading a single thought or memory from either of them, he knew their love was genuine. He could feel it. It was like an unconscious broadcast they both made to him all the time, whether he was near or far, on their minds or not, and without ever consciously or intentionally looking into their thoughts and feelings he knew unmistakably that their love was genuine. He had known before they had told him, and though he had resisted, doubted, second-guessed and fought with himself about it, he had known for some time that he reciprocated that love. And as though speaking three tiny words had broken down a wall and transformed the world, things were different on the other side of that brief phrase. Like the final words of a long incantation or the first syllables of a new story, something had been created and something destroyed in the instance of that utterance.

Trevor caught even himself by surprise when he responded, saying “I think I will,” and the three of them disappeared, and the court on which one of the strangest dodgeball matches in history had just been played was finally left alone to contemplate the meaning of what had just transpired.

Meanwhile Trevor, Kay, and Elle appeared in the girls’ shared bedroom, still standing in each other’s embrace. Slowly the girls drew themselves away from Trevor’s sides and while one moved around the room lighting candles with tiny flicks of her wrist the other did a bit of subtle tidying. Trevor just watched them, thinking carefully about the situation he was about to find himself in, and though he didn’t question his decision to enter into it, he thought about exactly how he should proceed. He suspected that there was a line he’d have to cross if he wanted this experience to reach the full expression of potential for pleasure and fulfillment for all three of them that he suspected was possible. Yet he didn’t know whether it was one he ought to cross.

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask,” one of the young women said.

“Ask what?” Trevor thought perhaps he had missed some clue or sign about what she was talking about; he knew women sometimes expected men to know what they were thinking without their ever saying it, but that was the line he had never crossed with them, out of courtesy and propriety.

“You know. Permission. So you could feel it was proper,” the other young woman said as she finished lighting the candles and moved back to stand before Trevor.

“Proper and courteous,” the first young woman said as she finished straightening the duvet and pillows on the second of two beds before turning to face Trevor from where she stood, “as though you hadn’t already done it with countless others before us.”

Trevor was torn, and fighting with himself mentally to determine what, precisely, they were talking about. Considering the situation and environment they were in, and the implied actions to come, they could be talking about sex or some sex act or permission for some other related thing. The way they had implicated that he’d “already done it with countless others” before them could be a statement about their perception of sexual prowess and experience in him, and if that was the case, he may be in for some trouble when they learned he had never really been with anyone sexually before. Trevor certainly couldn’t think of a proper and courteous way to ask two women permission to make love to them.

On the other hand, their statements had almost frighteningly echoed words and thoughts from his own mind, as though they had been reading his mind and responding to his thoughts. In which case, they knew exactly what he was worried about, and it wasn’t exactly the sex, but something much more broadly reaching in their relationship. And whether it was frightening or relieving had something to do with whether they had already actually been reading his thoughts – he had not detected even a gentle touch of his mind by another since the end of the dodgeball match, even with all the techniques, skill and experience of Sunshine added to his own natural talent for Mentalism. If they could read Trevor’s highly attuned and sensitive mind without his slightest notice, what else could they do that he didn’t know about?

“You can’t find out if you don’t ask.” Both of them smiled warmly, invitingly, at Trevor, waiting for him to ask a question he wasn’t sure he knew how to ask.

“May I…” he tried to begin, but wasn’t so sure he wanted the answer to the question he most wanted to ask.

“What?”

“May I…” On one hand, if he asked about reading their minds and they were expecting him to ask about sex, the conversation that would inevitably ensue might put them out of the mood, and his hormones wanted no part of that.

“What?” The one of them standing nearer to Trevor walked slowly backwards to one of the beds and sat down, waiting for his question.

“I mean…” On the other hand, if he asked about sex and they were expecting him to ask about reading their minds, they would already know everything he’d been thinking, and it wouldn’t be long before they got to that same long conversation after all, which in addition to a faux pax about his asking might almost necessarily put them out of the mood.

The one that was still standing sat down on her own bed, her body facing her sister, her head still facing Trevor. “What?”

“May I…” On another hand, if they had the conversation about reading minds and he found out they had definitely been reading his mind the whole time, and who knows for how long before that, and that he had been avoiding it unnecessarily – not to mention the fact that if their level of skill was so much higher than his that he could only ever know what they wanted him to know without his injuring them – he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to go down that road at all. And now he was confusing himself with his own thoughts of how to figure it all out.

“Yes… ?”

He decided to try thinking a question, the result of which would tell him much, and thought quite clearly “Are you two reading my mind?” A response in thought came back to him, like the harmonization of two voices as ripples on the surface of his own jumbling thoughts, “Yes.”

“Fuck.”

“Soon.” Both girls giggled after speaking in synchronous response.

“I don’t know about that. I mean…”

“We know what you mean,” the twin on the left said.

The twin on the right continued, “and if you weren’t so polite and careful, you’d know what we meant, too.”

“But I thought… I couldn’t tell you were… “ Trevor was fighting becoming flabbergasted, but triumphed over their coy smiles and upper hand long enough to ask them forcefully, “Why can’t I tell when you’re reading my mind?”

“We’re twins.”

“Haven’t you ever studied twins?”

“Not … well, not really.”

“We know.”

“We’ll explain.”

“You’ve probably heard that some twins believe they can tell when the other is in danger,”

“And that some, well outside of any knowledge of the science of Mentalism, believe they can read each other’s thoughts,”

“And finish each other’s sentences.”

“Like you two are doing now.”

“Right. Like we’re doing now. But we had an advantage over all those other twins, because we…”

“Were raised by parents who were experts in the science of Mentalism…”

“Wait, your parents are the same Jay and Emma who literally wrote the book on modern Mentalism!? I thought their names were a coincidence! Are they downstairs right now? I’d love to meet them.”

“We know you would, and yes, they’re the same Jay and Emma who documented the techniques of Maheu’le before his unfortunate death.”

“Exactly! I remember working with Maheu’le… It would be nice to remember that with someone who can really understand.”

“We’re getting off topic here,”

“You wanted to know about our Mentalism. Jay and Em are out of town for the next week or two anyway, you can meet them another time.”

“Okay, okay, right. So. Twins have a natural affinity to Mentalism, and you were raised in it by experts.”

“That’s almost right. Identical twins have a natural affinity to having easy contact with their twin’s mind, not necessarily with anyone else’s.”

“But more right than you know, because it was expert guidance that allowed us to move beyond just reading each other’s minds,”

“To reading other people’s minds,”

“And then to communicating with other minds.” This was the harmonic double-voice flowing across the surface of his mind again. Trevor shivered.

They switched back to normal speech, the twin on the right saying “all before we were old enough for pre-school.”

“Which posed a problem. Most people don’t learn Mentalism as a first language, and as you know,”

“Contacting the minds of the unready or untrained can be very dangerous.”

“Even deadly. And we were only a few years old – our judgment wasn’t exactly the most sound.”

“So our parents kept us out of school for a while, training us further, sharing memories and experiences, and working with us until we could practice Mentalism gently.”

“Very gently.”

“So gently that all but the most sensitive mind would not notice us at all, and the chance of a reactionary injury dropped almost to zero. Which was what our parents had been working towards,”

“So we could go to school with other children without endangering them.”

“Or our teachers.”

“I see.”

“So that with practice,”

“And experience,”

“We learned to be very gentle indeed.” Trevor felt a sensation like something warm and soft running backwards across the top of his head and down and down and down his back, like being petted by some large invisible hand, and the girls giggled again.

“And you’ve been reading my mind for how long, exactly?”

“Since we first saw you.”

“We liked you right away, and wanted to know if you liked us too,”

“Before we tried to approach you,”

“So we read your first impression of us and knew you liked us too.”

“And you never stopped…” Trevor was beginning to grasp what they were telling him.

“Well, we knew how you felt about not reading our minds,”

“It’s cute how you don’t want to risk somehow upsetting us or betraying us or controlling us or whatever it is you think reading our minds might do,”

“But it’s just silly, really. You know enough about Mentalism to know that there’s a huge difference between monitoring surface thoughts or even accessing standard memories and actually issuing commands, directing thoughts, and anything that can cause real damage or influence us directly or indirectly.”

“We also know that you’ve never really been in a relationship with anyone,”

“Let alone two people at once,”

“And that you’re just working from cultural and absorbed memories to try to behave reasonably with us.”

“We think it’s very admirable, how polite and genteel you’ve been. We do appreciate it,”

“But from now on, we expect you to know what we’re thinking.”

“You have a big advantage over most men, you know. Their women expect them to read their minds even without Mentalism.” Both girls giggled again.

Trevor was taken somewhat aback, but tried to roll with it and not seem caught off guard. His hormones were still trying to get him to get past this psychological nonsense and get into bed with these willing young women, but his sense of ethics and propriety kept trying to force him to work out more of the details of what they wanted from him and how he should respond. He still felt it was an invasion to go into their minds like that. He still regretted all the time he’d spent unknowingly invading real people’s lives and thoughts before he’d learned what he had been doing, though, on a subtle level, Trevor was beginning to see that this reaction to his own past wrongdoing had perhaps moved him too far to see the truth about what might be right or reasonable.

“Why don’t you just take a peek to start? It’s okay.”

“We want you to.”

Trevor closed his eyes. He didn’t want to be looking at them when he started this, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be doing this at all. Trevor also knew that for this to go well, he’d have to take this first step. He relaxed his mind and opened his thoughts as Sunshine had been trained to do by Maheu’le. And there their thoughts were, very near to him, very clear. There was something altogether strange to him about their thoughts, something unexpected, something beautiful.

Instead of two distinct sets of thoughts coming from their two minds, instead of a disconnected jumble of thoughts and worries and memories all streaming out almost without direction and usually unfocused, instead of a single mental semi-conscious voiceover coming from each of them in their own voices, there was a single harmonious dual voice coming from what seemed to be neither one of them and both of them with perfect overlap and no echo or apparent mental back-and-forth of thoughts to reach agreement. They seemed both to think the same thoughts at the same time, and their thoughts were uncannily ordered and complete, which was a thing of such unexpected beauty to Trevor that he didn’t realize how unnatural such a thing must be. It was as though there was a single mind controlling their two bodies, and like their two distinct minds were in perfect harmony at the same time. Trevor was so in awe of the context that their mind or minds created that he was deaf to the content at first.

“Trev? Trev… Trev.” Finally his name, projected to him in their private thoughts, got his attention. He responded in thought, “Love.”

“See, there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’re here with you,” and with his eyes still closed, Trevor felt a small hand on each of his arms as their thoughts continued addressing him. He hadn’t noticed them thinking about getting up and coming over to him, but was completely enraptured by the strange beauty of their thoughts. “Come sit down, relax,” and the hands were pulling him forward, walking slowly towards their beds. He didn’t have to open his eyes to cross that short distance, or to allow himself to be turned around and pushed backwards onto the bed by two gentle hands on his chest, and he certainly didn’t have to open his eyes to realize that the beds had moved or changed since he’d closed his eyes. “We pushed them together,” their thoughts came to him in response, “so we’d have more room to be together.”

Trevor liked the idea of that, and having their two soft, warm bodies laying down alongside him, both left and right, and having their hands begin to explore slowly the surface of his body certainly pushed worries about reading their minds from his focus. He was still worried on some level about their literal mental prowess somehow posing a danger to him, but the strain of intuition that had put two and two together, that they had been keeping their expert Mentalism and their connection to the leading experts on the subject a secret which might be the tip of a very dark iceberg of secrets, was silenced by the blood flowing less through his brain and more into his growing arousal.

“That’s the idea, Trev. Relax.” Their thoughts were becoming like a familiar blanket to him rather than the foreign work of art they had first appeared, surrounding his own thoughts, he began to feel his mind harmonizing with their synchronicity. “Good. Now, would you like to see what you’ve been missing?”

“Missing? What have I been missing?” Trevor thought, increasingly excited and half asleep at once.

“This,” and then instead of the steady stream of thoughts interspersed with conscious communication from their minds, Trevor was experiencing their memories from their own point of view. It began with the first time they saw him, and already it was disorienting to him. Instead of serially reliving one of their memories and then the other and then reconciling them as he had done with other people’s memories of single events to experience them multiply, he was simultaneously seeing through four eyes, hearing though four ears, feeling with two bodies the same moment in memory. Layered on top of this was something complex and subtle in its elegance, as each of their minds while experiencing its own perceptions was experiencing the other’s slightly different perceptions on top of and through her own mind’s eye, and on top of that was part of a single consciousness that encompassed both of their thoughts as the singular whole he had first experienced when opening up to them. Making the whole thing more intense was the fact that on top of the perfect realization of three simultaneous layers of the twin’s perceptions, emotions, and thoughts, he was experiencing with his own body their four hands slowly and carefully beginning to undress him, reaching into his overrobe and unbuttoning his underrobe, then gently pulling his arms one at a time out of both robes’ sleeves at once while he lay on his back on their bed, on the robes, knowing what it was like when they’d first seen him across a crowded school hallway.

In the memory, as soon as Trevor made eye contact with one, then the other of them, then back and forth and back and forth between them as though trying to give equal time to each of them as he bared his soul to them in a single glance, they had each and both felt a surge of what he now, and they at the time, had immediately recognized as love at first sight, and with almost no time between that surge and their gentle reaching out to his mind, he experienced the oddness that was experiencing his own mind through the Mentalism of another for the first time as they searched to find out if his reaction to them could possibly equate to their reaction to him. It had.

That memory was just the beginning. Trevor soon found himself swimming in a sea of every time they had seen him or thought of him or been near him, singly or doubly, and every thought and feeling they had had at the time, layer upon layer. Hour after hour, day after day, month after month, flooding and rushing through and into his mind with nearly the speed he had absorbed Sunshine’s entire history, their lives since he had entered the scene came to him in a new way. The flow of information Trevor was experiencing that was their past soon became enough to drown out what was happening to his physical body in the present, so that by the time their flow of memories caught up with what was going on and he experienced their undressing him from their perspective, it was the first time he realized they had got him down to his undershirt and short pants, the rest of his uniform tossed casually to the floor beside their joined beds. He opened his eyes.

Two soft, round faces he only imagined he could tell one from the other were above his, smiling. One of them crossed to meet him, growing to fill Trevor’s perception before connecting with him lips on lips in a deep and passionate kiss he could feel four different ways as through his own body’s sensitized nerves, those of the young woman kissing him, through the eyes of the other twin leaning over the two of them watching the kiss and experiencing it as well, and through the duality of consciousness that was the twins’ two minds’ harmony. There was no parallel in his experience to that kiss, even in the experiences he had absorbed from their memories of kissing him in the past, as there were still only three layers in each of those unreconciled memories while all four were present and active within his experience in this moment. Trevor felt as though he should be overwhelmed, but was somehow not only able to cope with all this, but before that first kiss broke off in panting breath and a stirring in three sets of loins, he had already become somewhat accustomed to it all.

Except then the other twin took the first’s place at his lips and the experience was very similar in its complexity but also subtly different enough that it was wholly new while still recognizable – he knew briefly that the one whose tongue was tangling tantalizingly with his was Elle’s by the differences in the way they kissed – a kiss that built on the former as though by the same person while starting from a new basis because it was by a different person. Then, instead of just experiencing Kay watching the two of them kissing, Trevor, while kissing Elle and while through her mind experiencing what it was like to be Elle kissing him, experienced the sensation of Kay beginning to slowly and sensually undress herself, running her own hands over the curves of her body as she went for the cumulative gratification of all three of them, idling her soft fingertips here or there as feedback from her shared mental experience with Elle and the relatively rough mental processes of Trevor informed her of increasing mutual arousal. This new addition of sensation transformed this second kiss into a remarkable and finally literally overwhelming sexual encounter that with no direct stimulation to the common erogenous zones of his body lifted him to an orgasm that rocked through his body and into his short pants while flowing also through both Kay and Elle, leading them irrevocably into a chain reaction of orgasms, one sister then the other clenching, trembling, squealing and delighting as their bodies gave in to the pleasure they all shared, a loop of building sensations that subsumed their shared, quadruply-layered consciousness until it was replaced thought by thought with a glowing, radiating warmth and light devoid of reason or complexity.

As the blissful oblivion receded from them, their still-shared minds all realized that they must have passed out, collapsing in a heap across each other in various states of undress and intermingling of limbs, and only slowly did they begin again to move, enjoying the mirror-in-a-mirror sensations of skin sliding across skin without really being able to discern whose sensations were whose through the wall of pleasure that still engulfed them. “Wow” uttered from an unknown mouth in a female voice, though the level to which they were all in each others minds did not help clarify who had thought it first or whose lips had actually parted to breathe that soft exclamation of surprise.

“Did you know it would be like this,” Trevor asked, but it was clear without him having to think it consciously that what he really wanted to know was “have you two done this before?”

“Only in our imaginations,”

“And dreams,”

“Dreaming of you.”

Trevor tried for a millisecond to be flattered and to disbelieve their claim that they had, in fact, dreamed of him, but before he could even properly form the thought, the twins were playing back their memories of their ‘wet’ dreams of being with him. It was surreal on top of surreal. Trevor tried to pay close attention to it all, to discern in some way what they literally dreamed lovemaking could be like, but all the while the two of them proceeded with undressing each other as caressingly and stimulatingly as they could manage without sending him into a state of shock as he lay below and between them on the bed, the edges and sleeves of disrobed clothes brushing against his body as they made their way from each young woman down to the floor around the beds, and he couldn’t quite pay full attention to the dreams.

What he did catch was almost enough to push him over the edge again, and it certainly put some ideas in his head about how the next few hours might proceed. He opened his eyes just in time to close them again as the two young women each kissed him briefly again in turn.

“Our dream come true,” they both said at once.

He knew without opening his own eyes that he was in bed with two women wearing only a single scrap of clothing each, as he had fully experienced every step that had got them there through their own sensations and by seeing it through their own eyes and by feeling each moment of increasing release as layer after layer of clothing that he had not noticed was constricting until it was removed slipped, slithered, unclasped and shimmied off their soft, curvaceous forms had revealed it to him as though he were taking off his own sweaters, shirts, skirts, pants, and brassieres, but when he opened his eyes to see their nakedness in its nearly-full glory before and above him it was a totally new experience for all of them. Trevor had never, with his own eyes, seen a woman’s naked form in person, let alone two such unblemished examples of the female form so eagerly presented to him and neither of the twins had ever had anyone of the opposite sex see them so exposed. More than that, instead of merely seeing his eyes traveling the slopes and curves of their bodies and hoping for the best, their mental connection allowed them to know exactly what Trevor’s reactions to each detail of each of their bodies were as he had them, such that any fears or self-esteem issues they may have had before revealing themselves to him dissolved in the raw passion elicited in him at the sight of their bare flesh, and they had no shame or doubts about their physical appearance for the remainder of their time together.

Four hands grabbed the hem of his undershirt and Trevor lay there relaxed, allowing his arms to be raised above his head as Kay and Elle stripped the garment across his chest and up over his head, returning him to the state of cleanliness he had been in from the waist up before putting the shirt on while exposing that clean pink skin to their view for the first time. For him, being seen bare-chested was not the same as it was for them, and in experiencing their experiencing it and from both sides, they all knew that the parallel moment of apprehension about nakedness was about to meet him as their hands, having tossed the shirt aside, trailed teasingly down his now-nude flesh to grasp the waistband of his short pants. Bolstered perhaps by the positive feelings of self-worth that his own scrutiny of their nakedness had generated and looped back to him, the trepidation Trevor felt was easily overcome, especially in combination with their three-fold desire to become totally physically intimate, as they had already mentally and emotionally become through Mentalism. Trevor lifted his hips slightly as their many soft fingers slipped slightly inside his final covering of fabric and began to slide his short pants down his legs.

Kay and Elle were eager and certain of their course of action, and while they had seen pictures and diagrams and absorbed memories of men’s genitalia, they had never seen a penis face to face. As they pulled Trevor’s short pants down, exposing inch after inch of his skin and pubic hair, a mixed feeling of wanting to go ahead and what felt almost like fear nearly stopped their motion before his semi-erect member finally began to be exposed to the light and air. Since he had already ejaculated from the intensity of their first truly shared kiss there should have been a messy mop of tangled hair and drying seminal fluids to meet them, but through the literal magic which enchanted his dodgeball uniform, that was all cleaned up as the short pants made their way off his body. As soon as his partial erection sprang free of its former prison, the slowness with which the twins had been removing his final scrap of clothing disappeared, and he was totally naked in their bed in the very next moment possible.

In that moment a great many things were bubbling up, boiling through their multiply-layered shared consciousnesses. His manhood, while still not fully aroused, was bigger than they had expected. This thought flowing to him made any trepidation he might have had socially and culturally embedded into him melt away as nothing. At the same time, with perspective and logic and other people’s memories, their minds knew immediately that he was not – as some people and beings certainly were – too big for them to handle comfortably, which was a relief for them and another calming wave of pleasant anticipation cresting across Trevor’s mind as it was across theirs. Before their hands were able to reach it physically, their minds and desires reaching out towards his cock had brought him to an almost painfully full erection.

Trevor had, on many, many occasions, had the experience of “handling” himself for sexual gratification, and felt he had a “good grasp” on what he did and didn’t like in the ways that hands could stimulate him. In the seconds leading up to the first time another person, in this case two other people at once, would touch him in that way, Trevor seemed automatically to run through all his best and worst memories of stimulating himself, literally educating Kay and Elle in nearly every success and failure in his solo sexual career. Of course, when those two hands grasped his dick, Elle’s all the way down to the base of it where her fingers mingled with his coarsest hairs, Kay’s stacked just above that one but the two of them still unable to encompass the entire length with both their hands, the softness and smallness of their hands and the ginger, gentle way they took hold of him was entirely different from anything he had ever felt on his own, and simply did not equate directly to any of the information he had shared with them. Elle and Kay had never held a cock in their hands before, but his own memories of holding and otherwise working with his erection were so numerous and detailed that they felt even before they touched it that they knew his flesh as well as they could have without their own second and third hand information, but then as they each wrapped their hand around his girth, the tips of their fingers only slightly touching their thumbs as they wrapped all the way around, the feeling was almost entirely foreign and unexpected to them. And to Trevor, who was experiencing holding his own cock in two entirely new ways as they were experiencing it for the first time; it was almost as though he were holding another man’s penis, he had never seen or felt a man’s hard shaft from the two new perspectives he now did.

Their desire to please him, his desire to fulfill their desire, the confusion of the definition of self, and all the various sexual fantasies that Trevor and Kay and Elle had ever had, joining together in a mercurial bath of heady sexuality all around and throughout their conscious minds led Trevor to do something he had simply not expected. As though through his own eyes and with his own hands, Trevor was Kay and was Elle, holding a young man’s heat and excitement hard against his own soft hand, and wanting nothing more, Trevor moved in and leaned closer and wrapped his soft lips around the exposed head and inches of the irresistible cock before him. The scent that filled his lungs was a musk he recognized but which had an altogether different effect on him than he was used to as he breathed it deeply in and out through his tiny nose. The taste on his tongue was new to him, salty but not quite like sweat, a flavour that seemed to match the feeling of the flesh in his mouth in its complexity; being hard and soft, sweet and salty, loose and tight, strong and subtle, rough and smooth, all at once. He could not get enough of it, trying to pull more cock up into his mouth as he sucked on what he could get past his unfamiliarly soft, full lips – it was as though he had just discovered that the true purpose of his life was to have this man inside him, filling him in every way possible, and wanted to make up for lost time. He slowly bobbed his head up and down, taking in a little more meat with every motion, inching his hand down over his sister’s hand as he moved it out of the way of his mouth’s ministrations.

It was the sensation of his testicles tightening into him, his body preparing to release its seed that drew Trevor first out of his reverie state through which he was experiencing and controlling Kay’s body as though it were his own and his own were someone else, and becoming suddenly aware of the other things he and Kay were experiencing certainly did nothing to pull him completely out of Kay’s experience fellating him, though it did bring more focus onto the experience of being fellated by Kay, and as his spunk burst forth and his body released another dose of endorphins and hormones into his bloodstream, he felt and tasted with Kay’s mouth exactly what it was like to have a man’s cum explode into that hungry hole he had turned her head into from inside her, what semen felt like sliding down her throat even as he felt it rising up his urethra, entering and leaving his sensation at the same time, and the satisfaction not only of being pleased but more so of pleasing the object of love’s affection. The whole experience of giving herself completely over to Trevor had been like flipping a switch in Kay, turning her on to a whole new brand of pleasure that was somewhat disconnected from the warmth and intensity she certainly felt growing within her body and the electricity that seemed to be running continuously between her nipples as they brushed up and down against Trevor’s legs or the bed or her sister’s arm and her own pelvic area and back again, more like fulfillment through selflessness rather than her own selfish physical desires – Kay felt as though she were on the verge of a soul-orgasm. Elle, whose body had had very little to do with what was going on a that moment, had experienced the entire thing as though she were top and bottom, in control and controlled, cause of and recipient of sensations that were new to all three of them, giving and receiving and being transported to new levels of sensation and consciousness and then at the most intense instant, she was right there with her own hand, her own nerves sensing the rhythmic pumping flow of his ejaculate’s path under her palm and her sister’s mouth and throat’s matching motions against the back of her hand and arm. All these various sensations were more than enough to bring Elle to another orgasm of her own, her free hand being drawn by it finally down to her own moist underwear as she felt that uncontrollable tightening and relaxing and spasming in her abdomen, back, legs, arms, and what felt like every other musculature in her body, down to the tiny constrictions and releases of her blood vessels running for miles and miles up and down her body and connecting that burning reality of pleasure to every inch of her being, inside and out.

Finally the flow of fluids and pleasure between them began to wane after an instant that seemed much longer to each of them in their convoluted communal experience than could have been possible for a single mind in a single body going through the precise same actions but from such a limited perspective. Trevor took a moment just to inhale and exhale deeply and deliberately as Kay continued to orally tend his flagging erection, seeming to want to locate every last drop of cum that could be found or licked or sucked or tricked out of him and into her, almost humming with that unchecked newfound desire that neither one of them would be able to identify the true origin of, him or her or Elle or some other combination – just that it was insatiable. As Trevor’s hardness and Kay’s attention thereof was winding down, Elle’s manual stimulation of her own body was not-so-gradually winding up; she had already torn the frustrating, constricting barrier of her sopping-wet panties from her hips and had two of one hand’s fingers plunged into herself while the other hand gently but rapidly rubbed the tiny nub of her clitoris. Trevor, still just trying to breathe, was feeling everything Elle was feeling as she tried to ride the wave of pleasure generated by Kay’s mouth on his cock through to another orgasm, that still-shocking softness of her own hand on her own skin, the less-central intensity of her sexual experience building throughout her whole body as she really began to grind into her clit in earnest, and an entirely new sensation that he had had an idea of from Sunshine’s memories but had never really experienced as immediately and as personally as he did through Elle and the extra layer of the twins’ dual consciousness experiencing it again – penetration. Kay was still lapping at his balls and his now-limp cock, so he knew from that sensation there was nothing of his own body to penetrate, but there was still the overlapping sensation of Elle’s fingers pumping in and out of her own pussy with a deliberate rhythm separate from that of her other hand on her clitoris which seemed to be his own hand reaching down between his own legs and reaching somehow into his own body in an altogether pleasant way he had never in his most intense fantasies expected to experience. Trevor continued to simply work on remembering to breathe with his own lungs at a reasonable rate for a few moments as he took in that furious feeling of Elle’s fingers fingering herself and the frighteningly fulfilling feeling of being filled, and hardly noticed what it was like for Kay to be exploring her way slowly up his body, kissing here and there and everywhere as she gradually crawled along the length of his torso until he was looking down at his own face through her eyes and felt himself through her moving in to kiss him.

“I’ve never kissed anyone but you,” the words were barely breathed out, just as their lips were making the softest contact, her lower lip like a soft feather’s touch as it alighted back and forth across his lips at the edge of perception, propelled by the words that would have been truthful coming from Kay, but which had escaped her throat under Trevor’s mental control. From those same lips, she responded to him, “and neither have I,” and then she kissed him in earnest.

As they kissed, rough and hard and with a new level of awakened passion within the two of them, they both felt one of Elle’s hands move up her body to rub, caress, squeeze, pinch, and twist lovingly her own breasts and nipples, and while Kay was momentarily distracted by the shockingly pleasant sensations of her sister’s highly sensitized body, Trevor flipped her over onto her back as he rolled over on top of her without their lips’ engaging contact ever severing, and the difference between the feeling of her weight atop him and his weight above her was the first thing he noticed when they finally broke contact and she began to try to draw breath again. He quickly lifted himself lighter above her and began tracing the course that she had mapped out on his body with her lips in reverse down her own pale, soft skin, kissing and licking and breathing lightly across every delicate and sensitive spot that met him on his casual course down her neck and shoulders, across her bosom which was nearly overwhelmed with the contrast between the sensation of his soft lips and her sister’s rough treatment of her own body, down between and underneath her breasts where she had not expected to find so electrifying a reaction as she did, across her flat tummy to her belly button, then circling down and around the outward curves of her hips. Then, just as she thought he would reach the corresponding point of his journey to her own oral attentions of his body, his lips continued down her legs, paying special attention to the skin just outside the borders of her still-worn panties but never making contact with the most sensitive areas it barely covered, and then made his way down the insides of her spread thighs to nibble gently on the inside curve of her knee before continuing down her calf to her ankle and foot.

Now, Trevor did not in any way fetishize a woman’s feet – he was too inexperienced at this point in his life to have developed such a strange fascination – but he had years of experience with the reflexology that Ms. Charming had studied as a hobby and to satisfy her husband, and as he reached Kay’s feet that background seemed to take over his actions automatically. Both his hands worked and massaged her feet and ankles gently, locating and working with trouble points until her feet were at a state of neutral balance within only a few minutes. Then his fingers applied pressure and energies to very specific locations on Kay’s feet to stimulate the free flow of energy through her body to activate desired responses within her. After energizing her muscles and speeding her circulatory system and forcing her respiratory system to cleanse itself through deep breaths and a little rough coughing before taking in deep, new, clean air, his hands followed a much-practiced routine of renewal and sexual fervor that Sunshine was especially fond of, and just after paralyzing every voluntary action of her body from the neck down, he stimulated the most powerful orgasm within her that her body would ever know, but which she was unable to respond to physically. Elle, who had been riding just below the edge of orgasm the entire time, keeping herself stimulated, but not too stimulated, by her own practiced rhythms of manual stimulation would have been lifted far above the pleasure threshold by what Kay was going through, except that suddenly, for the first time she could remember it happening, Elle was not sharing Kay’s mind. Trevor had locked Kay off from all outside mental influence so that she would be trapped completely in ongoing ultimate pleasure – she could not move or sense anything outside her own mind, her own body’s unstopping orgasm, and she could not move her body, either. From his own memories of Sunshine’s experiences, Trevor knew that it was like being in a sensory deprivation chamber in some respects, except where instead of feeling nothing at all, one felt only pleasure greater than was possible in the constant deluge of other sensations that being connected to the world presented. He knew it was unbelievably assailing, and when he brought her out of it he was sure she would agree.

Kay’s sudden disconnection from her mind was enough to cause Elle to freeze completely in place, as though paralyzed in the same stroke that had paralyzed her sister, but Trevor was not slow to move from Kay’s feet to begin concentrating on Elle. He started at her feet, since he was already at that end of the bed, not bothering with reflexology, but just kissing and caressing his way up her unmoving legs to meet her hand, frozen knuckles-deep in the folds and depths of her vagina, and the puddle of juices that had formed on the bed where her legs came together above it. He dove in, using the wide flat surface of his whole tongue to lap at every hot and glistening surface between her legs, bringing Elle at least back to low, shallow breathing again as he took in her potent juices with stroke after stroke of his mouth’s thick muscle. As he continued taking in and tasting the liquids leaking from her love-hole, Trevor began to slowly move Elle’s hand out of her, cleaning it with his tongue as inch by inch of her pruned fingers escaped the confines of her tightly clenching cunt. When the very tips of her fingers were finally free and cleaned by Trevor’s tongue-bath, Elle was just recovered enough that she pulled it almost powerlessly along the delicate petals of flesh of her labia to her clitoris and began a slow, deep grind against it with her weakened, lost hand, half-unconscious still.

Trevor began eating Elle eagerly, using the half-numb, half-aware trickle of sensations that Elle was gradually beginning to experience in more and more detail and intensity to guide his passion for pleasing her, and as his lips and tongue and jaw worked together on her most private and receptive nerves, his hands moved up and down and around whatever they could reach, slipping across the outside of her bare hips, squeezing down on the globes of her round ass cheeks, trailing the backs of his nails upward along the undersides of her raised thighs, and on and on along and around the less-focused on areas of her body as his mouth made intense work of exploring and enjoying every detail of her entirely edible pussy, inside and out. Her breathing came deeper and faster as he worked her into a frenzy and back into consciousness, and in the absence of her sister’s mind, Elle reached out to Trevor’s mind as though to bond with it in the way she no longer could with Kay’s.

Trevor didn’t see any harm in it, so he allowed Elle’s mind to latch on to his through that somehow-still-present extra layer of shared consciousness that she had always had in common with her twin, and suddenly he found his own mind subject to a new level of control he had not anticipated. It was suddenly as though he could no longer make any decisions on his own, except that he was definitely still a part of every decision made and now also a part of every decision Elle made as well, so the shift, while taking away his own self-direction, did not seem entirely to strip him of his decision-making abilities. The triplicate-nature of Kay and Elle’s shared consciousness seemed so much more natural to Trevor once he was actually experiencing it from the inside instead of as an outside observer. The extra layer of thought that was neither his nor hers but that seemed to be some combination of the two turned out to be the true guiding force of both of their actions and feelings, taking the place of individual responsibility and choice in a form of total surrender that Trevor welcomed wholeheartedly under the circumstances.

The cunnilingus continued completely under the control of the third consciousness, neither Trevor nor Elle really guiding the stimulation, both of them experiencing giving and receiving perfect pleasure as though they were both in both bodies and yet actively controlling neither body as he licked and sucked and gripped and filled and she writhed and shook and squeezed and ground and they both slid closer and closer to another orgasmic burst. From the outside, Trevor had thought the three minds of the twins, their two individual minds and the dual, shared mind between them, had been totally in sync and almost the same entity. From the inside of the same mental arrangement he could tell that each of the three minds appeared to be quite distinct from the others.

Even as he relented his body completely to the third mind, his mind was free to think and feel and explore on its own, as though the third mind was automatically drawing on his unconscious and emotional desires without the need for his directed input. He began exploring Elle’s mind on his own for the first time as his body tirelessly stimulated and satisfied her body, taking his first consciously-directed look at her memories. Except he couldn’t seem to find anything.

It wasn’t exactly like his first experiences trying to find information in people’s minds, before he had absorbed Sunshine’s centuries of study and practice at delving effectively into the mind to retrieve what you want without causing damage or coming up empty-handed, where if he hadn’t known what to think to wonder about he wouldn’t have been able to know what they’d known – instead, he was using techniques that should have given him a plethora of information about her, the first kiss, the first happy memory, the way she thinks about her father or the way she remembers her last school before transferring, and he came up with nothing. It was as though she didn’t have any of these memories stored in her own mind at all. Trevor tried more general techniques, to get anything, any memories, even the ones Elle and Kay had already played back for him of their experiences with and about him, but found nothing at all. Her mind was there, and was active and felt just like anyone else’s mind, but didn’t seem to have any memories within it. A blank slate.

An orgasm ripped through them. Between their dual semi-conscious control of their bodies they must have done something right, it was like someone had hooked positive electrodes up to her nipples and negative contacts to his testicles and the electricity had made a straight path from his groin up his body, through his mouth, into her pelvic region, and up to her rock-hard nipples, a chain of sensation probably impossible without their interlocked minds and bodies or some equivalent co-mingling of real senses and the experiences of another’s body as intimately as they were at that moment. As the burning flame of pleasure began to subsist, Trevor tried to see if he could detect any features in Elle’s mind at all. The third tier of consciousness guiding their bodies spread his attention from her swollen pussy lips and hyper-sensitive clitoris to all the sensitive skin so protected from normal contact by the panties she wasn’t wearing.

Trevor couldn’t make heads or tails of Elle’s mind. His lips began trailing a path of kisses through the forest of her soft pubic hair. Every normal feature he reached out to get information about or to feel the contours of came up empty or blank or featureless. His tongue explored the shallow depths of her navel while his fingers traced soft trails up and down her sides, slick with sweat. There was something wrong; there was nothing there at all where Elle’s individuality should have been, and where every feature should have been defined and every facet that should have shined, there was simply nothing. Trevor’s hands slid up and around the circumference of her breasts, one in each hand, and softly massaged around and around them as his kisses worked their way slowly across her abdomen towards those strange hills of glory rising above it. He turned his attention backwards and around and felt like he was doing somersaults and yoga and turning his eyes around to peer into the back of his head all at once as he tried mentally to ‘see’ the third-layer mind that was directing his tongue to explore the delicate curves defined by the meeting of her breasts with her chest below; it was like trying to grasp a gnat or fly with two fingers.

Dry lips gently gumming down on stiff nipples and pulling back, a subtle vibration of friction in elasticity and a rippling wave just beyond fathoming as they rebounded the tiny distance back down. Finally, Trevor is able to get a glimpse of the mind he had totally surrendered himself to, and it is harder for him to comprehend than the emptiness of Elle’s, but in sharp relief to that sad façade. His lips tracing the curve of her collarbone and gently brushing against the skin defined by her tensed tendons underneath, then taking her whole chin into his mouth and slowly drawing back while closing his jaw, coming to a soft lingering kiss on that pointed detail at the edge of her statuesque face. It was like the feeling he’d had in the co-ed dodgeball game of peering into dozens of minds at once and having full access to dozens more, but instead of all the minds working towards the goal of winning a dodgeball game, these minds seemed to be working to stop him from looking at them. Suddenly he felt the head of his penis pressing hard and hot against the eager, lusciously lubricated lips of Elle’s vasoactive vagina. Trevor didn’t know what his mind was perceiving, exactly, but it wasn’t the mind of one or even two young women in love with him, and he certainly wasn’t ready to give up his virginity to the machinations of some devious collective he didn’t begin to understand – he disappeared instantly, before the pressure that third-tier mind was exerting through his hips could move him half an inch.

“Trev?!?” Sunshine exclaimed at his sudden, totally nude appearance before her, on her living room floor.

“Auughhh….” Trevor was no longer physically in the presence of either twin, but that mind that had so completely interlocked with his own in the absence of Kay’s mind was still connecting him with Elle and still had a strong grip on his ability to make decisions. His body twitched and flailed in short arcs as the two forces fought within him to take control, his limbs apparently in seizure and his mouth unable to speak.

Sunshine practically leapt out of her seat, tossing her Echelar & Spink aside as she rushed to Trevor’s side, trying to grab him, to get him to lay flat, to try to determine what was going on. She began to reach out with her mind to see if she could detect the source of the abnormality.

“DON’T!” The screamed syllable was definitely his voice, under his control, and matched the pleading in his eyes, but he was apparently unable to articulate further. Ms. Charming instantly let go of his body and moved slightly back in body and mind, still in arm’s reach and ready thought, but unsure of how to proceed.

She spoke to him, hoping her voice would calm him, help him with whatever he was going through. “I can see you’re having some trouble, Trev. I’m glad you felt comfortable coming to me. I’ll help in any way I can.” Trevor’s body became more and more tense, the fight moving towards paralysis as balance began to be reached between Trevor’s totally unprepared mind and the interloping mental presence latched on to it and his body. Sunshine continued speaking in smooth, mellifluous tones, “I heard you won both games today, Trev. Well, not so much won the second as created the perfect game with the second, but that may be more impressive than a simple win, in the end. Congratulations. I never had much taste for the sport myself… always reminded me of …. Nevermind. Congratulations, anyway. A real triumph.”

Even as his head was turned back and forth and away from her, Trevor managed to keep his eyes locked onto Sunshine’s eyes, tracking them through sheer force of will. When his body seemed finally to be totally seized up, he let out a long, slow breath, first through his upper teeth pressed against his lower lip slightly, then just an open breathing, and it ended with a punctuating sound like he’d touched just the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth or the back of his upper teeth just as he’d run out of breath and moved his eyes from hers to point straight down along the length of his frozen body. If he hadn’t so clearly indicated that she shouldn’t peer into his mind, she would have known sooner and more exactly what he’d wanted, but she got it soon enough, and moved around to look at his feet.

Carefully moving them to see all sides of his feet, Sunshine did not see anything there, no clue or mark or blemish, and wasn’t sure how to proceed. Then Ms. Charming remembered that Trevor had absorbed all of her memories at once, and in coming to her he had probably done so based on something he knew from those memories, so she thought about what sorts of magical remedies for intense mental attack or paralyzation she might know that related to the feet. If it had not been for her eyes returning again and again to the distraction of his still-very-erect penis, Ms. Charming might not have come to the proper thought for a very long time. She immediately took each of his feet in her hands in turn and applied the pressures and motions that would remove him from a paralyzed state of ultimate pleasure that she and her late husband had been so fond of helping each other achieve. He didn’t even twitch. He didn’t even blink. That wasn’t it.

She tried running through the entire exercise from the beginning, thinking that perhaps he needed some intermediate step to be freed. She began with the general foot massage, his feet so tense that it may have done more harm than good, but she went carefully though the entire routine. She cleared out his lungs and filled him with fresh air, increased his circulation, and on and on until she reached the point that would normally have paralyzed him and simultaneously put him into a continuous orgasmic state, and she hesitated. To perform the final step properly, she would have to reach out to his mind and block it off from all outside contact, and he had stopped her from even taking a light glimpse at his mind just twenty minutes before. She spoke aloud to his frozen body, not even sure he could hear her, “You came to me for help. You wouldn’t even be in our world if it weren’t for me. I have to try this, and if whatever got you gets me, at least I tried. I’m sorry you can’t tell me if this is right, but I hope it works.” She reached out with her hands as she reached out with her mind, and in a single, quick, simultaneous gesture of both that she had done hundreds of times before, sent Trevor into total isolation and bliss.

His body instantly relaxed, collapsing flat to the soft, plush rug, his erection rapidly becoming flaccid even as it twitched out a dry ejaculation. Sunshine ran through a series of mental exercises Maheu’le had taught her to keep in good shape for everyday Mentalism and check for any signs or traces of mental instability or harm, and found nothing wrong. She had been in and out of Trevor’s mind too quickly to have known what might have been going on there, and hoped she had been quick enough to avoid whatever he had been trying to protect her from. With his eyes closed and his body limp, Trevor appeared to be sleeping, and Sunshine wanted to pull a blanket across him and let him rest. At the same time, she knew he was in a state of total bliss and separation from sensation that would make a blanket meaningless to him and leaving him in this state would be unrestful for his mind, the part of him she suspected was most in need of a proper dose of relaxation. In the end she realized that minutes wasted here could mean serious trouble wherever he had just come from and that she had no business leaving him this way for longer than he needed to be, in case someone else was in more danger. Ms. Charming put her hands on his feet again and went through the steps that didn’t wake him before, but left the mental isolation in place, just in case.

Trevor gasped suddenly, sitting bolt upright and opening his eyes wide. “So that’s what that feels like!” He breathed a few slowing breaths of relaxation before he seemed to notice his surroundings. And his nakedness. “Sorry about that.” He disappeared briefly and reappeared with the clothes he had left in his school locker, trench coat and all, properly appeared into place on his body. “And thank you. It didn’t take you long to figure that out; I’m just glad it worked.”

“Uhh… Sure. What … what exactly… ?”

“I’m not sure yet, and I’m not sure I want to find out. I don’t even have words to describe it… I just …” Trevor paused, put his hand across his face, over his eyes, squeezing his temples with his eyes closed and his head turned down, “and I’m not sure it’s safe for you to remember it from my mind. Or for us to even take this block off and allow Mentalism at all.”

“Is it anyone I’d know? Who did this to you? That, at least, would be a start.”

“Kay and Elle, but … not them, really. At least, I don’t think it could have been them. Except I’m not sure that that makes sense, since I’m not sure they’re really … them. I’m sorry if none of this makes sense.”

“No, no, it’s alright. Whatever’s going on, we can figure it out. It’s probably just one of the groups who have been out to get you from the beginning, right? Someone who think you’re on the wrong side of some celestial battle.”

“I want to try something. If I … If I lose it again, just do the same thing, and bring me right out of it. But give me … five minutes, okay? I want to take another look at this thing.”

Before Ms. Charming could agree, she felt the block freeing from his mind and something else taking its place. She reflexively recoiled, both physically and mentally, but caught a glimpse of what felt to her like Kay’s mind in that brief second of contact. Trevor’s eyes closed.

As soon as he’d taken down the wall in his mind that prevented Mentalism entirely, that third-tier mind was already there, trying again to interlock with his own, to take him over. This time he was ready for it, and not willing in the least to relent to it. With all his experience, his power, and Sunshine’s long training with the best of the best, Trevor was able to not only prevent this strange mind from taking over his own, but also prevented it from fleeing or disappearing or obfuscating. It took him a few tries and a little ingenuity, but he managed to put a block up around it similar to the one he had been under, isolating it within itself and disconnecting it from Elle, her body falling limp without control, far from where Trevor now sat. When he finally felt he had this entity under control, he opened his eyes to see Sunshine beginning to massage his feet. “I almost took too long, did I?”

“I actually gave you ten minutes. You didn’t seem to be having any trouble, but I didn’t want to risk it taking so long.”

“Want to see it? I think it’ll be safe enough for now.”

“Sure.” She closed her eyes and he closed his and together they viewed the mental landscape of the trapped beast. Like a guard dog, it lashed out at them from inside its prison, unable to do anything but make noise and startle them a little with its ferocity. Pairs of minds paired with pairs of minds in a hierarchy of duality upon duality where each pair masqueraded as a single entity despite containing distinct internal units, the conquered mentality seemed to be comprised of not less than 16 individual directing forces working together when Trevor and Sunshine tried to analyze its makeup. And it was dissembling itself rapidly. They each tried to get any information they could about what it was they were looking at before it was lost to them, but every other part of it was either intent on taking the whole of its being apart or hiding what was being taken apart, different wills working together in a fractaline dance of degenerating but effective stealth. Then, just before it seemed about to disappear completely, four or five of the individual fractional minds, now almost entirely disconnected from each other, found themselves small enough to slip through the barriers and protections that had been designed to hold a much larger, more complex entity in place, each scooting off along a different tangent of thought barely in time to escape the imploding force of the remaining emptiness-that-was-the-twins collapsing inward. Trevor and Sunshine were not so lucky, and nearly passed out from the force of the mental blast in the wake of the destruction, having learned nearly nothing.

“Are you alright, Trev?” Sunshine was rubbing her own head in pain, hoping her student wasn’t worse off than she felt.

“I think so,” Trevor tried to stand, one hand gripping the edge of her coffee table as he moved to right himself, the other massaging the back of his head where his skull met his neck. Before he could even get fully standing, his legs shook and buckled underneath him, dropping him hard back to the floor. “A little weakened, I guess.”

“Don’t push yourself too hard. Whatever that was, it was powerful, and it was trying to hurt you.” She decided not to try to stand, and crawled the short distance back to her couch, pulling herself up onto it wearily, as though she had just returned from running a marathon or flying Mercury’s Challenge. She barely made it over the edge of balance onto the soft cushions, then practically poured herself out across the couch’s length. “You’re saying that thing was controlling Kay and Elle, though? I wonder how long it’s been there that no one noticed it.”

“I don’t think it was controlling Kay and Elle, I think it actually was the twins, and probably since the beginning, way before you or I ever met them. When I finally found myself behind its defenses and got a look at Elle’s mind… there wasn’t anything there at all. No memories, no emotions, not even basic motor control or sense processing. Everything that I’d thought was Elle was actually part of whatever that thing was. It had experienced for her, thought for her, felt for her, and controlled her body as its own. Probably for both of them. And it had taken over most of me, before I managed to get to you.”

“Where are the girls now?”

“I guess they’re probably still at home, in bed, where I left them … do you suppose there’s anything left of them? Mentally, I mean?”

“We’d better go find out. Take me there.” Instantly they disappeared from Ms. Charming’s living room and re-appeared in the twins’ bedroom; Trevor sitting on the edge of the bed next to Kay’s still-paralyzed body, Sunshine still nearly formlessly tired as she appeared already sunk into a big plush chair in the corner of the room, facing the beds. In the flickering, dim candlelight they could both see that Elle’s body had been moving quickly when Trevor had cut its mind off from it – what was left of her was crumpled hard against the wall and floor, her limbs skewed at painful angles and her head twisted too-far-around, apparently in a hard impact with the wall or doorknob on her way down. With their enhanced perceptions they knew immediately that she was dead, but whether it was the disconnection from her mind or the impact from the fall that took her life, they didn’t know yet. They must have been thinking the same thing just then, because they both said “I suppose we’ll find out when we wake Kay” together.

“Are we sure that’s such a good idea?” Trevor wasn’t moving towards her feet, just yet, but felt its inevitability nearly as palpably as they both felt the continuing and degrading effects of the mental burst.

Sunshine could barely turn her head. She felt physically exhausted, and as she spoke she began re-running her mental self-checks, “maybe there’s an alternative.” She coughed weakly, “we should probably get some outside help anyway. I’m not feeling very well.”

“Worse and worse. Me, too. Who, though? Evelyn?”

“We’re going to need more than one person’s help. Do you still have the strength to move her with you? I think I can get myself to the Wolyd Centre, if you can move her with you.”

“Third floor? I think I can do that. Why don’t you –” but she was already gone. Trevor took Kay’s hand in his and used the last of his strength to disappear with her to what he hoped would be the third floor of the Wolyd Centre, but he blacked out before they reappeared, glad for the rest after what had turned out to be quite a long, hard day.

✙ ✙ ✙

“He knows. He knows! What are we going to do?”

“You’re the one who said he was ours, if I recall. That the plan was working.”

“How was I to know he’d blaspheme the dark side of the temple, cut the balance completely? No one could have predicted that, it was pure chance!”

“It’s not over yet.”

“You said that earlier.”

“They were just our first try. Since when do we only do something once? Be patient. Our time is at hand.”

“We still have his daughters. They’re the real key. It’s not over yet.”

“Exactly.”

✙ ✙ ✙

Spectral figures in the form of nurses tended to the three unconscious bodies that had appeared a few short hours earlier, one passed out in front of reception and the other two falling from several feet above the surface of the floor in one of the third-floor hallways shortly afterward, the noise of their bodies hitting the floor drawing appropriate attention. The three of them were now laid out in three adjacent hospital beds, and except for the staff tending them, they were the only ones present in a room large enough to serve several dozens of patients, filled with row after row of empty beds. Invisible to the human eye were the doctors doing the bulk of the work, experts who had ended up in their current non-corporeal states usually through some variation of a serious accident most famously made by the wizard Wolyd in the midst of his negotiations with a flesh-consuming “demon” which, had Wolyd not mistakenly destroyed his own body, would have done the job for him shortly thereafter. It was the lesson of Wolyd, that one doesn’t require a body to be a force for positive change in the world, upon which the Wolyd Centre had been founded, and their combined experience represented more information about the dangerous after-effects of Mentalism and the various natures that non-bodied minds might have than any other location in the world.

Sunshine began to rouse first, her eyes slowly coming half-open and her breath beginning to come deeper into her lungs as her mind recovered consciousness. She tried to speak, but didn’t have the energy or the breath yet to squeeze even a single syllable from her dry lips. A thought came to her, “Don’t try to speak, Ms. Charming. Give the nurses time to treat you.”

“We made it here safely? This is the Wolyd Centre?” Sunshine was long familiar with mental conversation and was glad she would not have to strain herself by trying to speak physically.

“Yes, you’re in good hands. Well, not hands, precisely, but you’re being well cared for nonetheless. We’re very glad you came directly to us, timing is important in matters such as this. How, exactly, did you manage to destroy the hivemind that attacked you two? We’re all very curious about that.”

“It was Trev. As far as I could see, he just used a modified Mentalism containment effect to prevent it from latching back onto his mind, but … you’ve seen something like this before?”

“Not exactly. One of our research fellows, Tharsis, had theorized about the possible existence of hiveminds in nature, and how they might appear and behave among beings of a single consciousness. I thought he was right here somewhere…”

“Yes, yes, sorry, I was examining Trev’s mind very carefully. I’m Tharsis, yes. Pleased to be speaking with you, Sunshine, in the manner we can, that is. I believe we’ve met before – I was at Professor Callum’s place when you stopped by last March, I believe he teaches your Mentalism curriculum?” Tharsis illuminated his memories of the meeting and shined them in Sunshine’s mental direction to help her recall.

“Oh, yes, I remember you now, you were very quiet that evening.”

“I apologize,” Tharsis thought, “I was preoccupied with … well, this, actually. And it’s a good thing, too. Trevor’s mind is going through what I expect, based on my research, is a form of withdrawal from having been interlocked into the hivemind and then disconnected. From the looks of the damage to your mind from the eventual destruction of the hivemind as it compares to his mental state, I’d say that even his brief contact with it had reformed his mind’s topography enough that the blast didn’t do him nearly as much harm as the disconnection did. You’re sure he was disconnected from it when it attacked?”

“Almost certainly, though I can’t claim to be an expert on hiveminds by any means. I’d never seen or heard of one before tonight. Wait. Is it still the same night?”

“Yes, yes, you’ve only just arrived a few hours ago. The sun won’t be up for quite some time.”

One of the nurses raised a small amount of water to Sunshine’s lips, and she took a tiny, refreshing sip, thinking “Thank you.”

The nurse thought back, “you’re welcome. If there’s anything you need, just think it, and we’ll be here.”

“Again, thank you.”

The nurse was already gone, the small glass appearing to float away on its own into the distance. Tharsis was quick to pick up again where his thoughts had left off. “A funny thing though, the girl. From what we’ve been able to determine without removing the ongoing effects, we believe that she has actually been in the thrall of the hivemind since infancy, perhaps before.”

“That seems right, based on what I detected in the hivemind while I still had the chance. Why didn’t anyone notice before?”

“I’m glad you asked. That’s probably the most well-developed part of my research. You see, before anyone ever bothered to ask me why a hivemind had never been seen I had developed an independent theory that the communal nature of thoughts within a hivemind would make them take the form of normal thoughts at the conscious level, such that without a very in-depth and careful analysis by someone who knew what to look for and what was considered normal, even the hivemind might never become consciously aware that it was anything but normal.”

“By the time I got a look at it, this thing was definitely aware that it wasn’t the same as Trev or I. Its different individual parts worked independently of each other to achieve common goals, as though the whole thing had been choreographed. I tried looking at the separate pieces, and they each reacted the way a master of Mentalism would have done instinctually to defend themselves while the other pieces did their own things.”

“Fascinating.”

“Yes, fascinating, but why didn’t I notice it before? There were two of them, and I did a thorough mental interview before accepting them as transfer students. They each seemed to be a perfectly normal young woman at the time.”

“There were two of them?”

“Yes, twins. The body of the other is here,” Sunshine remembered the location of Elle’s crumpled body, and a couple of the doctors that had been observing the exchange moved themselves to that location, “but aside from the comfortable, long-established mental link they seemed to share constantly, I didn’t detect anything unusual. Ever.”

“Twins? With a strange mental link? Where’s Gorsky? Isn’t he an expert on twins’ minds?”

“He went to the other location as soon as she thought ‘twins’ – he’ll probably bring her back here if she’s in any condition to be moved.”

Elle’s mangled body appeared on the empty bed adjacent to Kay’s paralyzed body just as Sunshine tried to explain “She’s dead.” The body let out a ghastly rattling sigh as it settled into a new configuration onto the bed, and for a moment even the nurses didn’t move to adjust her corpse from its tangled configuration as they stared on at the horror and loss it represented. “I think that when Trevor put the barricades around the hivemind and broke contact she must have been mid-stride,” Sunshine tried to explain.

“I’ve never seen a neck turned that way before,” said one of the nurses who, despite the fact that she would have appeared to be a ghost to the casual observer, seemed quite squeamish.

“We don’t get exposed to many … physical ailments,” Tharsis tried to explain, “we mostly just work with damaged minds here.” The other nurses were very gently forcing Elle’s already stiffening corpse into a more natural-looking pose on the bed.

Gorsky addressed Sunshine directly, “Definitely twins. Can you recall the shape or any other details of their mental bridge for me?”

Sunshine did her best to play back all her memories of the twins, from their interview through the entire semester, and including her experience with Trevor’s appearance that evening for all the minds who cared to look in on them. There was a long silence in the room and in their minds, with only the sound of Elle’s flesh and bones straining against being twisted and popped back into place to fill the huge room as Ms. Charming’s memories were considered carefully by each of the doctors.

Finally, Tharsis berated himself, “I should have thought of that before! It’s much clearer to me now! Twins!” Then his mind fell silent, as though that were all the information needed to complete the puzzle for everyone else.

After what seemed like a long time, when it was clear Tharsis wasn’t going to explain himself further, Gorsky thought to the others, “I don’t know what he’s going on about, but from what I saw, the connection between those two was not like most twins’ bridge. I’ve seen a lot of twins’ minds in my life, twins who had studied Mentalism, twins who had a strong bridge despite never even being introduced to Mentalism, and more twins that had little or no bridge at all than the others together.” Gorsky paused as though for breath, “but these two… I wouldn’t even classify that connection as a bridge, personally. It was more like what I expected a hivemind to look like, from Tharsis’s many papers and lectures on the subject.”

“No, no, this was much more elegant than any of my theories! Didn’t you see it? It was beautiful! And so obvious! Why didn’t I see it sooner? Twins!”

“I don’t mean to sound too ignorant, Tharsis,” Sunshine addressed him in a calm, even tone of thought, “but I don’t understand what you’re talking about, really. Could you explain what you mean about their being twins?”

“Oh, right, sorry! You haven’t read any of my work, have you? Alright, I’ll try to explain.” Tharsis seemed flustered and excited at the same time, and the other doctors just stayed quiet and let him explain himself without ever letting on that they hadn’t understood him from the beginning. “You see, since a hivemind has never been observed and documented before, everything in my work was based on theory. I had posited several possible internal structures for a hivemind to possess, from apparent randomness with individual consciousnesses working together through a system like democracy to the queen-soldier-drone structure of insect colonies and even stranger things like crystalline matrices and homogenous interplays where there was no detectible border where one mind ended and the next began. Without an example of a hivemind to work from, testing out known existing social and natural structures against what is understood about the mind was the only way to determine which structures were theoretically viable and which were not. As we have all seen, the actual structure was not like even the wildest or simplest of my guesses; it was twins!”

“I’m afraid I still don’t understand. I can see that you’ve spent a lot of time on this, and that you seem very pleased that all your research was based on incorrect guesses, but I still don’t understand what Trev was fighting tonight.”

“Twins! Don’t you see?” Sunshine tried to shake her head and managed a slight rocking motion. She closed her eyes from the dizziness that even so little motion brought on, and almost immediately felt two of the doctor’s skilled energies massaging her mind, bringing it back to proper working order so that it could then take charge of her body. Tharsis seemed to get the idea, and continued, “imagine just two minds, like any normal pair of twins, or two people in love who link their minds together to enhance … their experiences together. With two of them, when a decision must be made that concerns both of them, the binary option of the decision is not whether to do the thing or not, but really whether they agree on what to do or disagree on what to do. If they disagree, they can try to work it out, but if they can’t work it out, the decision goes unmade and no action takes place.

“So, if you imagine two minds thusly connected at all times without the ability to become disconnected, you can see that if they ever wanted to get anything decided and done the two individual minds would rapidly become excellent at working together and at compromising. If it were one being that somehow ended up with two minds linked as such, its very survival on a day to day basis would require an amazing level of rapid compromise and truly intense empathy, one mind to the other. After not very long, these two minds would be so synchronized, so quick at resolving differences to generate action at all, that from the outside it would appear as though there were only one mind at work, one thought process. Not to mention the natural affinity for Mentalism that such constant mental contact would make possible.

“Now, imagine that this dual-minded being had offspring that naturally also had a dual mind, passed on through heredity. Imagine also that instead of a single child at a time, this being always had twins. These twins would each have two minds working in concert to control each of their bodies, but would also share a mental connection like the strong bridge that Gorsky is familiar with, but enhanced first by their natural affinity for Mentalism, and also by their experience with learning to compromise and work together rapidly with another mind to achieve their goals. It is easy to see that soon these two beings with two bodies and four minds would appear from the outside to be only two, or perhaps even one mind. What if these offspring also formed a mental connection with their parent from an early age? And later with others of their kind who they took as mates?

“Duality acting as a single entity paired with duality acting as a single entity creating a new duality that could operate as though a single entity with two bodies. Or four bodies, if a being and its mate and a pair of its offspring ended up working together. I imagine that when the progenitors reached their end of life, the long-standing mental interconnection they’d had with their mate and offspring would cause something like a Wolyd disconnection from their dying bodies because they would still be part of the decision-making process for other, living bodies. After a few generations of this activity there would be innumerable subtle levels of complexity within the duality-upon-duality, where at first each element appeared to be just that, elemental, but which upon further investigation it would be found to be a duality, and each element uncovered at each level might reveal another duality at work unknown to the higher levels.

“If you were one of these beings, the wisdom and prejudices of your grandparents’ grandparents would be subtly present for you from an early age, from as soon as your parents’ minds began interlocking with your own until your entire family line was destroyed. Now, you couldn’t see enough detail through the containment effect for me to know for sure what it was, but I’d be willing to say that while that gives you a reasonable understanding of the current structure of the hivemind in question, the actual origins are totally different from what I’ve suggested here. Still, these beings could go undetected and at a great advantage for a very long time, with their constantly building multi-generational experiences with Mentalism and the human condition. I would love to know what that experience is like.

“That’s crazy.”

“You think everything I say is crazy, Ralf, but I challenge you to come up with another explanation for the hivemind Ms. Charming experienced.”

“You know that’s not my area of study at all! If she had been attacked by an herbivorous intelligence, then perhaps I could offer expertise in how to treat her, but … whatever that thing may have been, your explanation is crazy. Wouldn’t Gorsky have seen something like these twins’ connection before? Wouldn’t twins be running the world, one way or another? There has to be some other explanation for this.”

Sunshine was an excellent arbiter and began thinking as soon as Ralf left off, so the argument could not escalate, “I can see how I, not being experienced with the study of twins’ minds, wouldn’t have recognized their mental connection as unusual when I met them. Perhaps when Trev comes to he’ll be able to share his memories more effectively, having been connected to the hivemind, as Tharsis speculates. Is there an expectation as to when he will be recovered enough to communicate?”

“We’ve never dealt with anything like this before.”

“In fact, due to the nature of the mental changes he seems to have undergone, we haven’t done much more than to apply the equivalent of splints, to prevent the damage from getting worse when he does become conscious.”

“There’s the possibility that, without a detailed map of his mind from some point before the connection, any restorative techniques we attempt to apply would only cause him to be more like the hivemind and less like himself.”

“So what are you going to do? Obviously someone is out to get him, and they aren’t exactly novices or anything you or I are familiar with. Before long they will return and if he’s in this state when they do, they won’t get much of a fight. Do you know who he is? What he represents?”

“We are very aware of the rumors surrounding the boy, Ms. Charming, and with all due respect –” his thought was cut off by Sunshine’s actual voice, croaking out into the room.

“With all due respect, doctors, some of those rumors are true.” She tried to move to sit up, and managed to raise herself onto her elbows, turning her head to the appropriate locations of each of the doctor’s minds in turn as she continued, in thought. “Even if they weren’t true, there are certain very powerful and apparently very secret individuals and organizations that believe the rumors are true, and any one of them would stop at nothing to access whatever it is they believe he represents. Some of them only to prevent the others from getting their hands on him.”

“Which is what you’re trying to do now, isn’t it, Ms. Charming?”

“Absolutely. Without selfish interests or designs on whatever power or destiny he may represent, I am doing everything I can to keep him from harm and from the hands of those who would use him for their own gain. He deserves to exist as he wishes to exist, without hiveminds taking him over or dark conspiracies locking him up and draining his life away. He’s only a boy.”

“Fine, fine, yes, and we want to help him, too, but how do you propose we do that? This isn’t a magical attack you can just dispel or even some mental injury from an understood form of attack that we’ve seen before or treated before. From the looks of it, that hivemind imploded just after some of its individual elements escaped, and the force of everything left of the mind impacting against the surface of yours is what caused the trauma you’re under.”

Tharsis finally thought up again, “but as I was saying earlier, the primary cause of his continuing condition appears to be the brief period of contact he had with the hivemind and the disconnection thereafter. It’s even possible that when those elements escaped his containment and seemed to disappear, one or more of them latched back on to his mind. We’ve got the entire building affected with an enchantment that prevents mental contact in or out of our walls, but if these elements were already attached to his mind when he showed up here … we might not even be able to detect them, now.”

“You mean to think that he could be re-attached to parts of the hivemind right now? You saw that when I disconnected him from it before, my success was presumably because the hivemind was grounded in Elle – if he’s the only one connected with it now, how could it be detected or removed?”

“No one knows.”

“And it could just be another incorrect guess. I’ve made them before.” Tharsis was doing his best to think reassuringly, but everyone knew that he was probably right. Everyone was quiet for a time, doing the bodiless equivalent of staring at their toes to avoid eye contact, some trying to busy themselves with redundant examinations of Trevor or Kay’s mental states. Sunshine let herself collapse back into the comforting embrace of the bedding and pillows, too exhausted after only a few moments to stay even half-elevated.

“You should get your rest. It’s the middle of the night. If Trev’s status changes in any way, we’ll let you know.”

“What about Kay?”

Tharsis had apparently been thinking about this, too, and thought “We’re not sure how exactly she’s staying alive in there, but taking her out of that state presents a very real danger to her survival. Though it cannot be known at this time the exact circumstances, I suspect that it was the disconnection from the hivemind that killed her sister, not the fall. From what we can tell of her mental topography through the containment, there aren’t even basic control structures for managing breathing and circulation present – it was all handled by the hivemind. Realistically, she should have stopped breathing as soon as he cut her off in the first place.”

“So if you wake her, there won’t be anything there at all?”

“That’s a possibility. She could die the very moment we attempt to wake her. It’s also possible that the remaining elements that had been controlling her are waiting, either inside Trev’s mind or hiding somewhere else in the building, and will reconnect with her as soon as the block is removed. Which may be good or may be very bad, if it happens at all. If they do reconnect, and if they have been hiding in Trev’s mind, he would be interlocked with her, possibly under the hivemind’s control and becoming ever-more-restructured by it. Or any number of other possibilities we may not be able to anticipate.”

“So you’re just going to leave her that way?”

“For now. At least until you feel better, perhaps until we can do more with Trev. He could have a lot of answers for us. But you should go back to sleep, get some rest. Our nurses would be glad to give you a gentle sleep inducing effect, if you like.”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you. I’m having to fight to stay awake as it is. Just … wake me if anything develops, alright?”

“We will.” She was already asleep before he finished thinking that brief phrase, and she slept straight through to morning. There were no developments that night. The staff had some experience dealing with paralyzed bodies, so caring for the two teenagers properly was handled ably as the night turned into morning and the morning turned into a weekend without even subtle changes in Trevor’s mental topography to indicate that foreign elements might be working there or diminishment or increase in the viability of Kay’s mental state.

Kay and Elle’s parents did not return home or call home and could not be reached by any known means to be informed of their daughters’ conditions. Elle’s body had been put into a state of perpetual stasis shortly after its discovery, and was being kept out of sight, unchanging. Sunshine had recovered enough to get around reasonably on her own by mid-day Saturday, and when she had spoken to Trevor’s parents they hadn’t cared whether he was at a school function or halfway to the moon – they hadn’t even noticed his failure to return home Friday night and didn’t even seem to want to know when he could be expected home again. Luckily, in the same way that the people who ought to have cared for him were apathetic, those who had attacked Trevor had not acted again either. Sunshine continued to expect the worst.

Monday morning Sunshine returned reluctantly to school. It was the last week of classes before final exams and there were always problems that needed her attention this close to the end of the school year – she trusted that the doctors at the Wolyd Centre would alert her to any new ideas they had and any changes in Trevor or Kay’s conditions. Then before she knew it the week had swept by her entirely and she found herself at the Wolyd Centre on another Friday night.

“If you aren’t going to do anything for him, I am. You yourselves have said that there has been no detectable change in any element of his mind from the first time you observed it to now, and I’m not about to leave him in this state indefinitely. In fact, I have a feeling that if we don’t get him back in good condition within the next week or two… things could go very badly.”

“What do you mean? Is this about some ancient prophecy he’s supposed to fulfill?”

“No. This is about a young woman he impregnated, and the fact that under normal circumstances she would be giving birth to his child in about a week’s time. A little over six months ago, that young woman disappeared, and no force had been able to locate her, including every entity and energy The Board could call on to try to find her. I have little doubt that when she births his child he will be able to detect it, but only if he is conscious and able to try. If the child came early, if whoever sent the hivemind has the girl and induced labor as soon as Trev was out of commission, it may be too late. A week ago I didn’t want to rush things, but the fact that there has been no follow-up, no new evidence of what caused all this, it makes me think that this is exactly what they wanted. The Board agrees.”

“You’ve spoken with the board about this?”

“Of course. Last Sunday I told them everything. As usual, they took their time reaching a decision. At a meeting after school today, they endorsed the taking of immediate action to try to awaken him by any means necessary. They don’t care about the girl at this point, especially since her mind is either destroyed or will return to her when we wake her, and I agree that the first thing we should do is wake her up. Unless you have a better idea?”

“We …”

“Nothing better, no ma’am.” When she’d reminded them all that she was a member of The Board, Ms. Charming had apparently disarmed any egos they had had about their own ideas and theories and standing in the community. They immediately cowed before her, following her unquestioningly as though she were the expert and they knew nothing. “Would you like to do it yourself?”

“Fine.” Sunshine moved to the foot of Kay’s bed and began a basic massage of her feet. She was glad to see that they had put a hospital gown over Kay’s otherwise naked form. The temperature of the room was very comfortable, but there was something wrong about seeing a young woman lay uncovered and unable to move that seemed somehow more unjust to her than the possibility that Sunshine’s next action would take the girl’s life. She pressed and rubbed and poked Kay’s feet in just the right pattern and smoothed and removed the mental containment that was in effect, re-exposing her to external mental influences just as she ended the young woman’s orgasmic state and paralysis at once. Kay’s body immediately began shaking and convulsing and her breath became ragged and uneven. “Oh dear,” Sunshine said, low but still audible over Kay’s spasming and gasping.

“That seems to just be the effects of the orgasm waning. She’s not dying yet.”

Her breathing began to even out and her body’s convulsions stopped, but her eyes didn’t open and her heart didn’t stop. Trevor sat bolt upright in bed, gasping suddenly and deeply, his eyes wide open. He looked left and right and all around him, his eyes stopping on the spot in space that Gorsky’s mind happened to be as he spoke, “Ms. Charming, are you alright?”

“Yes, Trev, I’m fine. It’s you we’re worried about. How do you feel?”

Trevor was still facing Gorsky, not turning the opposite direction to face Sunshine as he responded, “I’m fine. I need you to run through the Barton Series for me though, would you, while I watch?”

“Whatever you say, Trev.” She felt his mind reach out to hers in a closed conduit that blocked her mental processes from the other minds present as she did the self-evaluations he’d recommended, and she managed to keep herself from reacting outwardly to the anomalies she discovered there. Just before he relaxed the conduit, Trev thought to her “just follow my lead” in a very confident tone of thought.

“Anything interesting, Ms. Charming? Everything in order, we presume?” Ralf sounded more confused than anything, especially as Trevor’s eyes followed Gorsky’s motion around the edge of the crowd of minds gathered around to see what waking Kay might have done. Kay still lay on the bed, but now it was clear to every mind attuned to such activity that she was restfully sleeping, dreaming of the only thing she had ever known, that week-long orgasmic state she had just been released from.

Trevor answered for Ms. Charming, saying “Everything is as expected, thank you Ralf. And thank you, ladies, for your gentle care all week. You were very respectful, not like corporeal nurses tend to be. Your attentions did not go unnoticed.” Several of the spectral figures of the nurses vanished while others seemed to turn a shade of pink as though blushing all over. The doctors’ minds were trying but not succeeding in expressing themselves clearly, but Trevor was on top of that, too. “You want to know how I could have been aware of any of that, considering my mental state, right? Take a close look at my mind right now.” He paused as they examined his mind.

“Impossible!” one of the doctors thought loudly. Several of them just did the thought-equivalent of gasping, and others were still just flabbergasted.

Trevor continued to respond in speech to a conversation that should have occurred in pure thought, and when Gorsky tried to make a break for it he found that Trevor had modified the mental containment effect on the Wolyd Centre so that instead of thoughts simply being unable to go in and out, free minds were blocked as well. Instead of protecting the outside world from the errant or insane mental processes that might be going on and treated inside, Trevor had made the hospital’s walls protect the outside world from an errant and insane mind which could have become much more dangerous than a few stray thoughts very quickly. “You didn’t think you’d get away that easily, did you?”

Every mind did the equivalent of turning to face Gorsky, backed up against the wall behind them. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Do you need me to show them what you’ve done to Ms. Charming, or are you going to admit to it and hope for some leniency?”

“I haven’t done anything wrong. He’s obviously under the control of the hivemind, like we thought would happen. It’s trying to distract us while it builds power or something. Look at his mind, it hasn’t changed a whit, it looks like he’s still unconscious!” They peered at his mind and saw that it was the truth; the apparent topology and activity of his mind appeared unchanged, just as it had appeared all week. Except then, as though a curtain were being pulled back to reveal a stage full of performers already in high activity, the façade blocking them from Trevor’s true mental processes fell away. Most of them didn’t know what they were looking at, but Trevor hadn’t really expected them to be able to and he was ready with an explanation.

“You were right to speculate that the escaped portions of the hivemind would seek out a body to attach themselves with, and that until Kay was released from containment they would not be able to use her body again. Unfortunately for Kay, the portions of her former mind that had made up what little elements of individuality she had possessed were not among those that escaped intact. Fortunately for her though, an odd number of mental entities escaped – I reunited a single, non-twinned mind with her body the moment you woke her. It has most of her memories and is familiar with her body enough to control it, but because its natural pair was lost, and because of a couple of dents I put in it this week, it won’t be able to reconnect with any hivemind, and Kay won’t be able to attend church anymore.”

“Church?”

“I’ll get to that. Actually, let me introduce the four surviving pairs from what was once Kay and Elle; I’ve had them trapped in my mindscape since just before I disappeared here with Kay’s body. I plan to leave them with you to study. Two of them used to be Kay and Elle’s ‘parents’, Jay and Em. Their other bodies are in stasis at their church, awaiting their possible return. I couldn’t get much from the other two, but from the things they were trying to hide, I’m fairly confident that their trying to take control of my mind has something to do with Hannah and my children.”

“Children, Trev?” Sunshine was trying to understand everything he was saying, she could see that he had the four mind-pairs on the rough equivalent of leashes, blocked from getting in range of his mind or anyone else’s but not strictly contained. It was this last point which stood out to her, though. “There was only one fetus in Hannah when she disappeared. I can see that you’ve been …erm… sexually active since then, at least with the twins, but neither one of them is pregnant. Is there someone else we should know about?”

“No, no, it’s Hannah. If these people are the ones who took her, they would have induced twinning of my child almost immediately. Isn’t that right, Gorsky?”

“I still don’t know what you’re trying to imply. My colleagues here have known me for decades; you won’t easily convince them I’ve been lying to them about who and what I am for so long.”

“Should be easy, actually. Is everyone paying attention?” Trevor’s eyes still hadn’t moved from where Gorsky was hovering, but he mentally addressed each doctor present to be sure they were paying attention. “Remember with me.” Trevor played back a few very brief memories from the past week, and a glimpse from his memory of being interlocked with the hivemind, just enough information that they understood how to see the differences between a mature hivemind and any other being’s mind. It was a subtle difference, just as Tharsis had suspected, and it made hiveminds appear totally mundane to the casual observer.

Tharsis was the first to exclaim, making the mental gestural equivalent to pointing a finger in Gorsky’s direction, “I should have known!” Soon every other mind in the room save Kay’s was seeing the same thing that had always been there and gone unnoticed; Gorsky himself was a hivemind, masquerading as an individual entity.

“Now, are you going to admit that you modified Sunshine’s mind and memories, or are we going to have to show everyone?”

“You’ll never get me on a leash, you freak. Unlike that crazy old woman, I’m well prepared to vanish completely. I may not be able to get out of this fucking loony-bin, but you won’t get a whisper of truth out of me!” Already they could sense that he had been tearing himself apart from the inside since just after he’d found himself blocked from escape, and before the fastest of them could reach him with a mental effect, the surface of his mind turned into a white-hot scream. Then, just before it was too late, Trevor’s mental effect reached the right distance and went off like a blast, erecting a virtual containment field between Gorsky’s imploding existence and the rest of the beings in the room, thereby saving them from going through the trauma that Sunshine had had to recover from just a week before. No remnants, no escapees, nothing even attempted to escape – Gorsky had truly erased himself completely from the face of existence rather than face the possibility of having the knowledge he held used against the powers he worked for. Trevor let the effect dissipate and let everyone begin discussing what had been revealed among themselves as he slowly moved to get out of the bed. He was still dressed, still wearing his coat, just as he had been when he’d arrived a week ago, and he appreciated the fact that he wouldn’t have to waste time and energy getting dressed. The conveniences of supernatural effects removed the most embarrassing aspects of a hospital stay, such as bedpans and sponge baths.

“Are you sure you’re okay, Trev?” Sunshine moved to his side and helped him out of the high bed. “A few minutes ago you were comatose. I’m not sure you should be up and around just yet.”

“We don’t have much time and there’s a lot that must be accomplished. We have to find their church, locate and free Hannah, and I’ve got to take my finals this week or I’m going to have to re-take half my classes. Thanks for taking action, by the way, Ms. Charming. I needed some rest, but if you hadn’t done it, I’d have woken Kay’s body before the weekend was over.”

“Finals? Trev, you can forget about that, this is much more important than high school.” As the Principal of Trevor’s high school, Sunshine certainly had the ability to make such broad declarations, but Trevor wouldn’t have it.

“High school is foundational to the rest of my education. I can’t have you intervening to allow me out of my responsibilities in school every time a major extracurricular catastrophe comes up or an evil organization tries to take over the world, and the recovery of my illegitimate children from a collection of hiveminds with plans totally inconceivable to individuals is certainly no reason to let me skip my finals altogether. Balancing priorities and meeting multiple sets of responsibilities is a normal part of life. My responsibilities just happen to be a little more far-reaching than most high school students.” Trevor paused for a moment to utter the phrase to match the hand gestures he was making to reduce the hospital’s protection to its normal level so that he would be able to leave. “Of course, if dodgeball season weren’t over, I would have gladly dropped that to make time for this new challenge. But my scholastic responsibilities are certainly more important than a little school spirit.”

Sunshine didn’t know what to say, but wasn’t prepared to disagree. Then she felt Trevor’s mental fingers on her memories, undoing what Gorsky had done and revealing the rest of the details about her experience the prior Friday night which had been covered up. She reflexively reached up and covered her mouth with one hand, and her eyes went wide. She had detected that something had been altered without her knowing, but hadn’t taken the steps to uncover it herself yet – now that she remembered that detail fully, she understood why Trevor was already out of bed. “I still don’t see why you can’t take your finals later, after you deal with this.”

“I don’t deserve to be treated any differently from the other students, Ms. Charming. They’re already having a hard time accepting me, imagine if I got extra time to study for finals. It’s not like you can explain to the entire student body what’s going on. Then they really couldn’t see me as a normal student.”

“Fine, fine, but if you feel Hannah start to go into labor, let me know immediately. Alright?”

“Alright. Now, I’ve got to go do some research. I have a paper due in English, a presentation for Ethics, and I’ve got to figure out how to locate the church before they find out I’m back in commission.” He didn’t wait for her to say goodbye, Trevor just disappeared as soon as he was done speaking. Sunshine stayed behind to discuss what was reasonable to share with those who had seen what had happened, and to talk about what to do with Kay when she awakened. She avoided their few meaningful questions the way any good politician can, and when they thought they were satisfied, she made her own way home. She knew that this was only the beginning of something that would leave more than a few people hurt in the end.

✯ ✯ ✯

“We have a lead, master.”

“Yes, Sqrat, I know. I even know who has the girl if their lead is correct, which The Board may not figure out in time, if at all. So we have a lead and we have an advantage, but we still don’t have the girl.” The tall bespectacled man had that same grim tone he always seemed to use when speaking with Sqrat and Feagan.

“According to my calculations, we still have a few days before it’s too late,” Feagan was trying to help. “We still have time to get the girl before she gives birth.”

“Unfortunately, our advantage is that we know our adversary is stronger than we are. The Board, the boy, they don’t know what they’re up against yet. We at least know enough to know we can’t win.”

“You keep saying that, sir. We still haven’t been told…”

“Who we have to steal the most prized object of their entire long history from right from under the noses of? What behemoth organization, every member of which has a hivemind so complex and powerful that the best thinkers at the Wolyd Centre couldn’t even tell there was one among them, whose inner workings are so secret that there isn’t even a whit of information about them on either of the internets, and who stole the girl out from under the watchful eye of The Board and have held her for over six months without being detected by anyone in the world, even as they infiltrated their operatives right into Trev’s life, are we fighting against and supposed to beat at their own game? You really want to know?”

“Of course, master. Share your wisdom.”

“Stop being such a brown-nosed little twit, Sqrat. Even if I told you their name, what more would you know about them that you don’t know now? Even if I told you the name of their most publicly known brand, you probably wouldn’t recognize it as a force trying to wrest control of the universe into its grip. Who this is does not matter nearly as much as the fact that they have been working to recreate the world in their image, slowly, patiently, by breeding their desired traits into generation after generation of people for thousands of years, and that their work is finally coming close to reaching critical mass – they have an army of beings that, according to your own admission each member of could be nearly powerful enough to overpower Trev on its own, and they believe that his offspring is the key that will unlock their glorious future. Consider them religious fanatics, if that helps, but imagine religious fanatics with Mentalism on par with Maheu’le and the potential to generate any spell, incantation or other effect which anyone they encounter could have, and to counter, dispel or block anything that anyone they’ve ever crossed minds with could have countered. And they know people will be coming to try to take what they believe they have rightfully stolen, and they surely have prepared formidable defenses. Now, tell me, how do we get access to the girl?”

Sqrat just stared on in silence and awe, but Feagan seemed to have already known what he was going to be asked and had his answer ready. “We follow Trev. If all you’ve said about him is true, even their greatest forces will be unable to stop him. He trusts Sqrat, and he’s familiar enough with me that with Sunshine’s recommendation we may both be able to be working with him when he attempts to go in. Then, when we get to the girl we bring you in to handle him and get her to our own masked location. Right?”

“That’s the best idea you’ve had this year. Too bad there’s no way you’d talk your way into Trev’s inevitable raiding party yourself. Sqrat, I’m counting on you to carry out Feagan’s plan. You’re already privy to The Board’s plans, so they won’t think twice about letting you in on more. Once again your parentage proves to be your only valuable feature, Sqrat.”

“Pleased to be of service, master.”

Feagan grumbled lowly, and busied himself with rearranging flasks and vials on his shelves as the other two discussed the finer details of a plan he would have no significant part in.

✯ ✯ ✯

“WHERE ARE YOU?!?” Trevor paused mid-sentence, wincing in pain at the strength of the thought that exploded into his mind from what felt like deep inside him, but was able to continue his oral presentation confidently while trying to figure out who was looking for him. He felt increasing distress bubbling up inside him from a place that didn’t make sense; he should have been upset with ‘stage fright’ over getting up in front of everyone in class to present his controversial analysis of how pure intent, rather than The Devil’s Arithmetic, is the primary determining factor in division of ethical charge among involved parties for anything with a charge greater than ten percent of the absolute value of each individual’s net charge at the time charge is applied. The presentation was going well, he was about to invite the class into a question and answer session to address individual examples and apparent contradictions he may not have covered explicitly, and he was feeling good about his performance in Ethics all year. Except he was feeling increasingly as though he didn’t know where he was or what was going on, and in addition to that was the somewhat familiar sensation of knowing that vast sections of his memories and the way he used to be were simply missing from his mind.

“HELP ME!!” Trevor had luckily reached the end of the main body of his presentation before the screaming voice came so loud, so urgent, so painful as it expanded from that same somewhere he hadn’t yet had time to locate inside himself from the first sign that these thoughts were not his own, growing larger and louder until he was sure everyone in the room could hear the cry for help pouring out of his eyes, his ears, his every pore. He closed his eyes and tried to keep a calm expression on his face as the ringing he knew was nothing more than the thought of ringing ears subsided and he could begin to think again. Trevor didn’t know how long this took, but when he opened his eyes he supposed it hadn’t been too long; no one was looking at him any differently or behaving as though anything were amiss.

He spoke again, “Mr. Tauer, class, because of the nature of my paper, instead of opening the floor to Q&A, I’ve prepared it for peer review, so you can test for yourself what I’ve shown here, and we can discuss it after my work has been verified.” Trevor reached behind the large standing tri-fold display he had set up to diagram the way the known statistical data matched his analysis better than strict adherence to The Devil’s Arithmetic as though he’d had a stack of copies of his research and data already there and hoped silently that no one had noticed the change in the air when he conjured exactly what he needed, or the change in his ethical charge as he’d lied to them about being prepared for this. He pulled the large, collated stacks of papers out, “if you think that’s appropriate, Mr. Tauer.”

“Sounds like a capital idea, Trev.” Trevor began handing the pages down the four ends of the double-horseshoe of desks and collected the extra copies from the middle to give to Mr. Tauer in case anyone else wanted a look at them, then took down his displays and discreetly asked to Mr. Tauer if he could be excused from the remainder of the class for a personal matter. “Of course, Trev. You did great today.”

As soon as he was out the door and out of sight of the window, Trev disappeared. He reappeared outside the Principal’s office, but as his hand reached out to knock on her door, he paused. “I don’t need Sunshine’s help for this…” Trevor’s lips formed the words and he breathed out, but his voice was not in it. “I can figure this out.” He disappeared before he had the chance to hear Sqrat’s voice or his own name being bandied about behind the door.

As soon as he reappeared, his mind was flooded with thoughts and feelings that mirrored what had interrupted his presentation, coming from what felt like all around him and in front of him at the same time. He had figured it out on the first try, and from the look on her face, Kay was relieved that he hadn’t taken any extra time talking to Sunshine about the matter.

“Where have you been? Where am I? I don’t understand!”

He took a step forward, took her hand in his, and tried to speak in as reassuring voice as he could muster considering the fact that he felt every fear and anxiety and strangeness that she was feeling as she was feeling it, “Relax, relax, you’re going to be alright. Haven’t the doctors explained what’s happened yet?”

“I just… I don’t… I’m not who you think I am, Trev. I’m not even who I thought I was. Who am I, Trev? What’s going on?”

“I’m here now, and you’re going to be okay,” he closed his other hand over hers and caressed it gently to try to help calm her, “just relax, and we can explain everything.”

“Where’s the rest of me? I don’t feel right, I can hardly feel anything. Why can’t I remember what happened to me?”

“There was an … incident. You’re … basically … all that survived. Most of your consciousness, your memories, and your other body were all destroyed. I’m sorry I couldn’t save more of you.” He could feel her reaction to that news, and wished he’d had better words prepared for her.

“Who did this to me? Why would they … What did I ever do to anybody?” She was crying softly now.

“It was… You had a secret. I think you were even keeping it a secret from yourself, but when we were … together, I almost found out about it, and …” Trevor didn’t want to continue, to tell Kay she’d done it to herself, that she hadn’t just been a normal young woman but part of a complex hivemind that was part of a vast conspiracy against him. But even without saying it or thinking it consciously, he felt her beginning to know the truth, this time as his own carefully guarded thoughts and feelings began to be mirrored in those flooding out of Kay and resounding off the walls of the Centre.

“I… It was me, wasn’t it? I was trying to keep the secret from you, and was willing to kill myself to prevent you from learning the truth. What could it have been? Did you find out?”

“No. But I wasn’t really trying to, I was just trying to figure out what was going on at first – you were taking control of me and almost killed me from inside my own mind at one point.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember any of this …”

“Don’t worry about that, who you were then is not who you are now. But in trying to protect myself from you, your other body was destroyed – I didn’t even find out until it was too late to do anything, until after most of your mind had … disassembled itself. And then I did what I could to save as much of you as possible, and what you know, what you remember, how you feel right now, that’s all that wasn’t irreversibly damaged or destroyed.” Kay was sobbing uncontrollably now, and Trevor was experiencing a strange growing pain in his lower back. He didn’t let either fact stop him from trying to be encouraging. “You’re still healthy and young, with a bright future ahead of you. It will be a hard transition while you try to figure out who you are and who you want to be… while you get used to only having one body, but I know you’re strong enough. The doctors here have all been through something that separated them from their bodies at one point or another, some of them more than once, and they know more about what you’re going through right now than anyone anywhere in the worlds. You can trust them. They’re here to help you.”

“I don’t…”

Sunshine and Sqrat appeared across Kay’s bed from Trevor, “Trev, I’ve got to show you something.” She pulled a large tome from Sqrat’s hands and thrust it across into Trevor’s hands. “Open to the black ribbon.”

Trevor did as he was commanded, fingering to the page marked by the thick silk ribbon Ms. Charming had specified. Both the left- and right-hand pages there appeared blank. Trevor looked up quizzically.

“Just concentrate, and give it a moment to get used to you. We think it should recognize that your mind was once part of one of their collectives, and you should be able to see what’s there when it does.” She paused, clearly excited and expectant, waiting to see some sort of change on Trevor’s face to indicate that it was working. “At least,” her face darkened somewhat, “that’s what we were hoping. There’s a possibility we need a password.”

Kay, who had been looking on in continued bewilderment and shock, suddenly spoke. “Tetralix Ilbis.” The look of confusion did not leave her face, but no one was looking at her to see it. They were looking at Trevor, whose face was bathed in a glowing light that appeared to be emanating from the surface of the pages of the book in his hands but not falling on anything else in the room but his skin, creating a surreal landscape of light and shadow across his features without casting shadows on the walls or illumination on anyone else present. Trevor’s eyes appeared to have dilated beyond maximum dilation, his irises disappeared along with the whites of his eyes, leaving two pits of black so black that seeing them was like the opposite of seeing, like peering into twin tunnels of blindness enclosed between his eyelids. The pages of the book did not appear to have changed, from what anyone else in the room could have seen; the change had only visibly taken place in Trevor, and had the emptiness that had once been his eyes not proceeded back and forth across the pages as though reading the unseen text, it would have appeared that Kay had invoked some sort of offensive magic against him. Instead, everyone waited with bated breath as he carefully examined what they could not perceive.

Trevor finally looked up from the page, meeting Sunshine’s expectant gaze with his still-dead eyes and glowing countenance, causing a cold shiver to run down her entire body as he spoke. “It’s …” he blinked, his eyes were back to normal, and the radiance that had been cast unnaturally across his skin was switched off like an electric light, “it’s worse than I expected.” Kay had passed out while Trevor had been reading, and he looked down at her unconscious form as he mumbled softly, “I should have let her die.”

“What do you mean? What did it say?”

“I can’t … this …” Trevor’s elbow leaning on the side of Kay’s bed, he lowered his face into his hand, covering his eyes and clutching at his temples, head down and eyes clenched. “…this is …too much.” He took a deep breath into his lungs, slowly drawing the air in, and with only the smallest trace of the trembling breath of sobbing overcoming his withdrawing form, vanished entirely. Sunshine and Sqrat looked at each other, at Kay’s unconscious form, to the positions of the incorporeal doctors who had been watching the entire display, and none of them said or projected a single sentence for a long time, unsure of what to say, how to react.

Softly, Sunshine split the silence, “Sqrat, share this book with The Board. Perhaps there is someone else who can unlock its secrets. I’ll see you in the morning,” and she disappeared as well.

She appeared standing in a dark hallway, before a closed bedroom door, and knocked gently upon its surface, whispering softly, “Trevor, may I come in?” She didn’t have to wait long for her answer, and the door’s handle turned and the door fell gradually open to reveal a very dark bedroom. Sunshine walked into the darkness assuredly but cautiously – she could see with her mind’s eye the interior of the windowless room easily enough without light to guide her eyes, but she didn’t know what state Trevor was in, so approached him with slow, careful steps.

Trevor was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the two beds, which were still pushed together in the middle of the room, their sheets and blankets an unmade disarray from the passions and traumas they had most recently been party to. He was hunched over and curled up, his head in his hands, sobbing as silently as sobbing can be, his hard wet breaths coming ragged and choked as his body shook and quaked with sorrow. As she looked on, knowing better than to try to comfort him physically, Ms. Charming felt that this understated display was somehow more affecting and deeply felt than it would have seemed had he be moaning and wailing and crying out as so many did when taken by feelings of loss and pain and grief and regret. She stood there, waiting for him, knowing that when he was ready to speak she would be ready to listen, but that these tears were more important than any words he could ever utter about what he was going through.

In the timelessness of tears, Trevor worked through to a point where his breaths began to come more evenly and his tears began to flow less steadily, and his heart clutched within his chest less tightly, and without looking up he sniffled a breath in and spoke in a broken, faltering voice, “I can’t save her. I’m not strong enough.” Sunshine moved around the corner of the bed and sat down, ending up within his reach and reasonably distant at the same time. She did not move to touch or comfort him, nor to say anything. “She hasn’t even begun to have a chance in this life, and I’ve already failed her as a father.” He looked up, his eyes locking intensely with hers, “I’m not strong enough to save her. No one is. They’ve been preparing for this for millennia. She’s already theirs. They’re going to use her, and they’re going to win.” His head sunk down again into his hands, and after a couple of fast, rough breaths, Trevor said, “they’ve already won.”

As his mood sunk and his shoulders collapsed even further and Trevor seemed almost ready to collapse into himself entirely, the candles all around the room lit at once with black flames that seemed to draw the darkness of the room to a deeper black. The edges of the room disappeared entirely so that from the bed where they both sat it seemed they were floating in an endless expanse of darkness in every direction, the only two people in a universe of emptiness. Finally she reached out to him, her hand coming softly to rest on his shoulder. “It isn’t over yet.”

“It may as well be. You have no idea what they’re capable of. I know you don’t. I really shouldn’t have tried to save Kay, not any part of her. What they’ll do to her now…” Trevor’s hands fell down into his lap and he looked up and locked his own dead, empty-feeling eyes with her more vibrant but still sad eyes. “They’re worse than death. She’s an individual now, through and through, and they cannot suffer individuality… they cannot … it’s going to be bad for her… so…bad… for her… and worse for the rest of us.”

“But it isn’t over yet. The future is not set. We have to try. To die trying is far better than to die never having tried. You know this.”

“I do, I know, and I know that if I try, I will fail. I’m not strong enough.”

“You don’t have to do this alone. Sqrat and Jurrin have already volunteered to help, and I’m sure more will come forward when they hear we have a plan.”

“I don’t have a plan, though. And whether they figure out how to read that book on their own or I end up telling them what was there, as soon as they know what they’re up against, all will stand aside. This isn’t a single wizard or a threefold of wizards that can be defeated by a simple doubling of matched powers or a proper duel.”

“I know it won’t be easy…”

“Not easy? Doubling matched powers isn’t easy. The Devil’s Arithmetic alone for taking down a threefold without creating two more can take a dozen men a dozen months’ work. Let me try to give you a glimpse of what is going to destroy us, though. Imagine an army of threefolds, working together in perfect harmony. Not the handful of threefolds that Melnach got together. Not the dozen threefolds that finally overthrew the Spanish Inquisition. An army of threefolds. Hundreds of balanced trios of wizards working together towards a single goal. In fact, imagine that every student attending your school right now grew up to be part of a threefold of wizards, and that all of them joined together to accomplish a single goal, and you have an idea of the power level I want to get across to you.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Trev, hundreds and hundreds of powerful wizards. A scale of magic never before glimpsed on this Earth before you burnt a hole right through our power maps. That does not make them undefeatable, it just makes them a bigger target.”

“Don’t boast. I’m not through. You have that scale of power fixed in your mind, right? Probably comparable to what I’ll be able to do when I’m more experienced and mature, and vastly superior to what I could possibly do now. Except that that’s how much power and experience the average member of their society has, according to that book. Just one. Do you remember Tharsis’ explanations of twinned minds and dualities and the way Kay and Elle broke down? Instead of threefolds, they’re pairs and pairs of pairs and so on, so the synchronicity within their internal power and experience structures is always in perfect balance and agreement. He wasn’t wrong about successive generations holding the actual knowledge and experience of former generations, either – which is how we get to each one of them being as powerful and experienced as an entire army of the most powerful wizards you can imagine.”

“You’ve already defeated two of them, yourself. They can’t be that powerful.”

“I didn’t defeat them, Sunshine. They killed themselves to keep me from studying them. You saw Kay and Elle dismantling itself before our eyes, and I’m sure you saw how Gorsky did the same thing. I didn’t defeat anything, except to keep a husk of Kay alive and a fragment of her mind intact. I ought to have let her die, for all the pain it’s going to lead to.”

“Don’t say that. Preserving life is always the right choice.”

“You know it isn’t. But that’s not the worst of it. Do you remember the size of the army I spoke of? A wizard for every student enrolled in your school right now? Each of them is likely more powerful than I am, and their number is approaching the number of students enrolled in every high school in the world added together. Tens upon tens of thousands of beings, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them, each with millennia of experience and power at their fingertips, all working in harmony to achieve a single cause. Which right now means keeping my daughter from me. Which means they win, and everyone else loses.”

“Hundreds… hundreds of thousands of them?” Sunshine’s eyes hadn’t broken from the grip of Trevor’s gaze, but her face had slouched as he had spoken and the reality of their opposition dawned on her. “How … how could that be right? We would know they were there, wherever they are… That much power…”

“That much power can be hidden only by its equal and opposite. Why do you think they live as twins? Each one perfectly balances the power of the other, in time, energy, and location so their traces perfectly cancel each other out. It’s like the final dodgeball game, where I got into the minds of all the players on both teams to get every action by every player on either side to be balanced by the equivalent action on the other side, but more complicated by several orders of magnitude, and malevolent rather than playful. We can’t detect them any more than astronomers can detect black holes.”

“Astronomers can detect black holes.”

“Well, that’s not the point. I just meant… we can’t see them because neither light nor energy nor power, nor good nor evil escapes their balance; it all comes out grey and blank, as though there was nothing there at all.”

“Astronomers can detect black holes by looking at the way the space around them is effected by their gravity. We may not be able to detect them directly, but perhaps we can see how the world around them is affected by their unseen power and their unnatural balancing acts. And if we can detect them then we can find them, and if we can find them then we have to at least try to stop them.”

“Try and fail.”

“To try is to succeed. To give up without trying is to fail.”

“We’re all going to die.”

“I thought you said that was going to happen anyway. If they keep the girl, they get the power they need to take over the world, right? And then it’s torture, pain, and death for everyone, right?”

“I…”

“So what do we have to lose?”

“We’ve already lost.”

“Then there’s no reason not to fight, is there? No reason except apathy or laziness, and you’re neither one, and I’m neither one, and I’m sure we can raise all the forces of the world together to help us.”

“It’s worse, still, than I’ve told you.”

“How could it be worse? We’re already waist-deep in nihilism here, planning to fight for our principles against an unbeatable army of super-beings bent on world domination, if only because we’re all going to lose our lives anyway. What worse could there be?”

The black flames of the candles had been drawing the light out of the room around them, burning the candles slowly back to their former wholeness from the energy drawn out of the room, and some were beginning to go out as they reached completeness. The edges of the room were re-appearing from the inky blackness that had enveloped them, and the subtle details of Trevor’s grim expression were flickering slowly deeper into Sunshine’s perception. “You already know, you just haven’t realized it yet.”

“What is it, Trev?”

“They’re already among us. All around us. In positions of power and positions of access and influence, like Kay and Elle planted in your high school and Gorsky at the Wolyd Centre, and who knows who else, where else they already are? According to the book, they usually aren’t apparent as twins, but instead swap activities one twin to the other to maintain balance from hour to hour, day to day, so it could be anyone, anywhere – we can’t just look for twins, and almost no one in the world could tell one of them was any different from the person next to them. Their forces are already assembled, already fighting or ready to fight, and it could be anyone. It could be Sqrat or Jurrin or Maheu’le or Mrs. Leeds or half your student body. All the best minds and strongest powers who haven’t been able to locate Hannah or my child could have been working against us this entire time without our knowing it. We can begin looking now, but that might just spell the end for us, or the self-destruction of a few more of their number to protect the rest until the time is right. They’ve already won.”

Sunshine was beginning to look more upset, more assured and incensed than sad or lost or ready to give up. “They haven’t won yet. The most important thing we can do right now is to not give up. We’re not fighting against God, here – they’re just men, right?”

“Very, very powerful men and women who have been preparing for this for longer than the bulk of human history.”

“If they’re men, they can be defeated.”

“I…” The last of the candles finally snuffed out, wicks and wax restored as though they had never been burned at all, and the room’s darkness was the mere natural dark of an unlit room once again.

“You’re going to do just fine. Just like everything else. Just like you’ve been doing on your finals. I heard about your Ethics presentation, and I’ve seen your Math final; you’re doing better than I ever did, and you’re going to exceed our expectations even in this.”

“Oh no! My Mentalism final!”

“Shhh… shhh… Don’t worry about it, Trev. I’ve already discussed it with your teacher, and between your performance so far this semester and the way you handled yourself with those hiveminds, you’ve already got an A for the year. Especially considering the fact that you’ve single-handedly developed a system for detecting the slight differences in the mental topography of the hiveminds; that work alone could have earned you a fellowship at one of the top universities. Don’t worry about your Mentalism final.”

“What about my other classes?”

“You’ve more than earned an A in my History class, you earned Mr. Klaw his first dodgeball Championship in years, and you’re the first student to understand Mrs. McCallum’s interpretation of The Modern Prometheus – ever. Stop worrying about school for now, and focus on trying to escape certain death at the hands of a worldwide conspiracy of ultra-powerful wizards bent on reforming the world in their own image, instead.”

“Yeah, yeah, alright… I just… I don’t want to shirk my responsibilities.”

“You’ve more than met your responsibilities, Trev. You’ve excelled in every area, and now you have a new area to apply yourself fully to. A responsibility so much more important than any of your classes ever were. You can’t give up on her now, just when she needs you most. Who else is going to be her advocate?”

“I know, I know, I just … it’s …” Trevor searched for the words. “Sometimes I feel like it would be better, or… easier… just to give up, to let them win, to let go of all of this and just …” his voice trailed off into silence and his eyes fell finally, looking down into his hands held loosely in his lap.

Ms. Charming leaned in and wrapped her arms around Trevor in a big hug, trying to comfort him with her arms and her voice, “I know, Trev. It’ll be alright. We’ll get through this. Have faith.” Her arms moved up and down his back, soothing and warming him.

“Why do I care so much about her? How can I love someone I’ve never met this way? She hasn’t even been born yet, and the thought of losing her…” He began crying again, this time within the encircling arms of Ms. Charming, and he reached out to return the gesture of her embrace as he cried into her shoulder, collapsing into her welcoming form. They clenched each other tightly as his tears continued and his body was wracked with convulsions. Trevor truly felt as though he had already lost his daughter, the slim hope of her survival torn from him by the realization of the forces that had her in their clutches. He knew that what Ms. Charming had said was right, that he couldn’t give up, that he had to fight the good fight, no matter how futile. He knew she wasn’t dead yet, he wasn’t dead yet, and that meant he couldn’t stop yet, couldn’t give up hope. He struggled to find his strength, his perseverance, the will to go on.

Suddenly Trevor felt an intense, unbelievable pain burning and tearing through him, as though his entire pelvic region were trying to crush itself inside out. His arms squeezed tighter and his fingers became as claws, digging hard into Sunshine’s sides and back as he came into the grip of this unexplainable pain. He screamed, long and loud and right beside Ms. Charming’s ear, and then after what felt to Trevor as an endless span of time, the pain lessened and relaxed and his voice fell and his breaths came in again instead of out and his arms and hands gradually relaxed their painful place around his high school Principal. Trevor collapsed backwards onto the disarray of sheets and pillows on the bed, finding himself once again using all his concentration just trying to breathe evenly and stay conscious.

“I …” sharp breath, “I think …” sharp breath, “I think …” one sharp, deep breath after another, “she’s in labor…” and he just lay there, his hands unconsciously above the place on his body above where he didn’t have a birth canal to be contracting, his eyes closed and still loosing tears down the sides of his face, breathing hard.

✙ ✙ ✙

“It’s begun. Soon, he won’t matter at all. We’ve won.”

“It isn’t over yet. He’s sure to know where she is, now. We must keep our defenses ready.”

“Of course. Exactly. We’re ready for him. He’ll never get to her in time. He probably won’t survive the attempt.”

“And when he dies, or when the child is in our hands, then we’ll have won. Not a moment before.”

“I’ll kill him myself if he ever gets this far. He’ll never reach the girl.”

“We’ll find out if you’re right soon enough. Be ready.”

✙ ✙ ✙

“Trev? Can you hear me?”

Trevor was doubled over, one hand gripping the edge of a vacant hospital bed, a deep, guttural exhalation slowly escaping the mask of pain that his face had become. After a few more seconds, Trevor began breathing in and out again, in short, shallow breaths, slightly forming “yes, yes, yes” with exhalation after exhalation, but unable to properly vocalize his response.

“Alright. We’re going to give you the dual epidural you asked for, but you need to be aware that it might not do anything to help. Since the pain isn’t coming from your own nerves, the drug won’t actually have anything to block, so you may just lose half your motor functions. More importantly, considering you’re inside the protective walls of the Wolyd Centre, which according to all known rules and understanding of Mentalism should be blocking every single mental signal, large or small, beneficial or malevolent, from entering or leaving the building, and you’re still experiencing Hannah’s labor pains, the mental anesthetic we can provide may only dampen your other abilities without blocking the pain at all. Do you understand what I’m thinking?”

Trevor responded to the mental query from the unseen source with his voice, ragged from screaming out in pain, “Yes, yes, I understand! I also understand that if it does work, I probably won’t be able to pinpoint her location, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to battle a hundred thousand beings as powerful as any the world has ever seen while in this much pain! I can barely stand. I doubt I could throw a proper fireball, let alone dodge an attack. You don’t know what this feels like! I was never supposed to feel this way! Men aren’t built for this!”

“Alright, alright, can you get up onto the bed? The next contraction shouldn’t be for another several minutes. We need you to lie on your right side for the physical injection.” The invisible doctor continued thinking to Trevor as he slowly lifted himself onto the hospital bed and rolled onto his side in a partial fetal position. “You won’t feel the needle, as we’ll give the mental anesthetic first, but we need you to hold still until I tell you it’s safe to move. If you roll over or jerk away, you could puncture your spine, and then this body will be of no use for fighting, ever again. Try to relax.” A barely visible nurse performed the actual physical injection while several specialists applied a variety of mental anesthetics to Trevor’s mind to try to block the pain without knocking him out. They were very careful, per Trevor’s explicit instructions, not to look directly at his mind while they operated on it. He was worried that the effects of the hivemind might carry over to them, and just as he had agreed to the risks of the procedure, they had agreed to take the personal risks of performing it on his altered mind. “You can lay back now, if you like. We’ve done everything we can.”

Trevor curled into a tighter fetal ball, clutching his numb legs into his chest and curling his head down towards them, tightening and loosening back and forth as though rocking into himself sideways on the bed.

“Based on what you’ve told us, we believe the contractions are far enough apart to give you up to several hours before the baby can be born. Hopefully that will give you enough time to reach her and extract Hannah and the baby to a secure location. Even if this helps block the pain, we don’t know whether your mind will be able to take actual childbirth sensations. You were right when you said you weren’t built for this; very few men are able to handle a full sensory link to a woman giving birth, and there’s a good chance that even with the pain portion blocked, the extremes of sensation will overwhelm you and knock you out. Some people with first-hand knowledge of both experiences have said that childbirth is significantly more painful than death.”

Trevor was still rocking, still crying, trying to deal with the emotional toll of the increasingly probable loss of his child at the same time he was going through the physical and mental anguish of the labor pains that would bring her into the world. Through his tears in a half-whine, Trevor tried to respond, “I have to save her…”

“But you don’t have to do it alone,” Sunshine was suddenly at his side, her soft hand on the back of his, “you’ll have help. Sqrat and Jurrin are preparing right now to fight alongside you, and,” she paused a moment, not wanting to finish, “as you requested, Nirgal is downstairs being implanted with the training he’ll need to survive. I still think it’s a bad idea to put him in harm’s way. He’s inexperienced, just a boy. We have dozens of wizards and warriors eager to stand by your side.”

“I’m…” Trevor still struggled to speak, the effects of the mental anesthetics settling in around his ability to think clearly, “I’m just a boy, too. The others will be …” Trevor coughed, then continued, “…in the second wave. I just need …” he sniffled and moaned and took another breath, “an enemy, a friend, a traitor, a believer and myself. I’m only short the two, well really, just the one, but… we’ll find her on our way.”

“You’re speaking in riddles, Trev. Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

“None of us is going to be okay if I don’t at least try. A couple of hours ago it was you telling me that, remember?”

“It was actually just over an hour ago. I remember.”

“Time is a funny thing when you’re in this much pain. It doesn’t matter. How long until the next contraction? I need to know if this is going to help or not.”

“Could be any time, now. Childbirth isn’t an exact science, and we have no way of knowing how they’re treating Hannah. All we can hope is that they don’t try for a caesarian to get to the baby before you can reach them.”

“Don’t you worry about that. You just be sure there’s a safe place prepared for them. I don’t want to risk life and limb fighting to reach them only to have them stolen away again as soon as we think they’re safe.”

“I have it under control. When the time is right, if you can find me, bring them straight to me, and if you can’t find me, bring them here. I’ll be sure the doctors will know what to do if I can’t––” As Ms. Charming continued speaking, Trevor lost track of what she was saying when another contraction turned his world to pain. The physical anesthetic had numbed his body and the mental anesthetic had numbed his mind, but whatever the source of the pain was, whatever mechanism it used to work through him, it was not diminished in any way by the dual epidural. Trevor cried out with all the strength of breath he had left in him, a sad, sorry excuse for the wailing his pain deserved, but all he could manage under the circumstances.

When the blistering white light faded from his vision and the roaring sound left his ears and his body began to unclench from the pain it could not have been feeling, Trevor spoke again in a slurred half-voice, “give me my mind back. Your tricks didn’t work. It’s time to go.” He rolled towards the edge of the bed and lowered his legs down to the floor and tried to stand, but his legs collapsed underneath him and he crashed, hard to the floor. He pulled himself along by his arms for a moment, unable to get his weight up onto his numbed legs, but then the doctors managed to remove the first of the mental anesthetics, and Trevor was able to levitate his torso up above the ground a couple of feet, and he moved towards the stairwell with his half-limp, numb legs trailing backwards behind him along the floor, his feet catching against the legs of tables and beds as he half-floated away. The second mental anesthetic was removed just before he reached the stairs, which probably saved his knees and legs from being broken on the way down the stairwell – Trevor was able to levitate his entire body above the ground, his feet mere inches above the stairs he was descending in a weaving pattern to reach his friend below. Trevor reached the first floor of the Wolyd Centre and levved down the hallway towards the training room were he knew he would find Nirgal, a doctor upstairs working furiously to try to disengage the final mental anesthetic without seeing even a glimpse of Trevor’s mind. Just before he reached out to open the door, Trevor felt the last gauzy threads of numbness lift from his mind, and he paused to do a quick mental check.

Which seemed to be the cue for all four edges of the door he was levving in front of to begin expelling light, as though a white phosphorous grenade or some unearthly portal had been activated on the other side and the light was so bright that it came out in intense streaks all around the opaque surface of the door. When the light diminished and finally disappeared, Trevor waited just another brief moment before turning the handle and levving into the room.

“Was that yours, Nirgal?”

“What? Oh, err… yeah. That was my first try.”

“Looks good enough. We’re going. Now.”

“He’s not ready, Trev. There’s so much more he needs to know before he faces … a proper wizard.” The unseen doctor seemed unable to admit what the boys would be going up against, even to himself.

“Well, it looks like he’s mastered the blinding light, which is what I asked you to teach him. He isn’t going up against a proper wizard. We’re going to try to get by something between ten and a hundred thousand wizards, each more powerful than several hundred experienced threefolds. There is no one in the world that could thoroughly prepare him for that, no amount of time.” Trevor turned from the incorporeal doctor to face Nirgal again, “are you sure you want to do this? I’m not going to pussyfoot around the dangers like some people may; we’ll probably all die before we get within a thousand miles of Hannah and my child, and then the world will be destroyed by the power of the fruit of my loins. Worse perhaps than death, your mind and body may be absorbed into one of their hiveminds and you may end up working for them, against me and everyone you’ve ever cared about, from today until the day they wear your body out and die – in which case, your mind will go on in another of their bodies and another and another forever and ever, knowing you were unable to prevent them from taking over the world. If you want to back out, now is your last chance. I can’t have you chickening out in the middle of a real battle.”

“Have I ever chickened out in a dodgeball game? No. Have I ever questioned one of your plans? No. And if I understood Ms. Charming’s memories earlier, everything you warned me might happen if I joined you is definitely going to happen to me if I don’t join you and you fail. Together, maybe the world has a better chance.”

“It sounds so melodramatic when you say it.”

“What, you can’t hear yourself? You’re like Mr. Drama King over there, with your ‘the world will be destroyed by the power of the fruit of my loins’ and ‘your mind will go on forever knowing you were unable to prevent them from taking over the world.’ It’s like watching a bad science fiction movie.”

“Fine, fine, but we’ve got to go.”

“Are you sure you’re okay to go, Trev? You legs look a little … funky.”

“An anesthetic has been injected between the outer membrane covering my spinal cord and the overlying bones of my spine, knocking out all feeling and some motor coordination from about here,” he indicated with his hands where his numbness began, “on down. I can’t walk. And every time Hannah has a contraction, I’m going to be unable to levitate, either. But we can’t let our enemy know that, so I’m going to attach a simple cue from my mind to yours. As soon as my mind begins to be overwhelmed with labor pains, you’ll do the Blinding Light effect automatically, and no one within visual range of the two of us will be able to see or hear or think anything until my pain is gone.”

“Ooooh! I understand, now. Sure, hook me up.” Nirgal could feel a light touch on his mind, and didn’t try to block it or examine it at all. He continued talking under the careful touch of Trevor’s Mentalism, “is that all you need me for, or do I get to get into the heat of the battle, too? I mean, if you think I’m not ready, that’s cool, but if there’s any way I can help… uhh… whoa… that feels weird…”

“Sorry about that, I was just implanting another trigger. In case I die, you should find yourself in a safe place.”

“Hey, don’t talk that way. You’re the man who tied a dodgeball game, who burned a hole through all the power maps, and got voted King of the End of the World. You’re not going to die without being crowned King, are you?”

“What? I thought Harrison was a sure thing. I’m not even a senior – isn’t The End of the World Ball usually just the graduating class?”

“They did another vote after the championship games, while you were out sick. There were two questions. One asking if you should be considered for it, and the other to rank everyone’s choices for King and Queen. You won, a clear Condorcet winner in both. I was supposed to get you to go without telling you, but… you have to have something to look forward to, right?”

“But the ball is tonight, isn’t it? What if we can’t get away from saving the world in time?”

“I guess we’d better save the world before midnight, then. That’s when they crown the King and Queen.”

They both started giggling, and then everything went blindingly white and deafeningly silent for an internally unknowable period of time while Trevor was in the grip of another contraction. When the light began to fade, Nirgal was just barely able to see Trevor’s form rising again into the air; if he hadn’t known that Trevor was unable to stay upright during the contraction, he might not have noticed anything amiss at all. “I guess that works. Are you okay, Trev?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Trevor was clearly disoriented and still in pain as he brushed off Nirgal’s inquiry. “I’ll be fine. Let’s go get Sqrat and Jurrin and get out of here.”

“Do we know where we’re going, exactly?”

“I don’t think that should stop us.”

“So, no?”

“Yeah, no.” Trevor disappeared, and Nirgal was automatically drawn to follow him, disappearing a half-second later and appearing again by his side without consciously doing a thing.

“Did you do that?”

“No, you did. Another hook, to keep us together. You don’t mind, do you?”

“How many connections did you make in there? We’re not a hivemind now, are we?”

Trevor laughed out loud, “Not even close. I didn’t do anything you couldn’t learn at school. Certainly nothing really invasive. Just… advanced.”

“Sure, sure. But you’ll have to show me how, later.”

“Fine.” Trevor turned his attention to the other two in the room, “Sqrat, Jurrin, are you about ready to go?”

“Are you? We heard you’ve been feeling sympathetic pains from the mother, are you sure you’re going to be alright?” Jurrin seemed nearly genuinely concerned.

“Look at me. Do I look alright? I can’t feel anything below about here,” Trevor indicated again the point where his body’s sensations disappeared beneath him, “so I’m going to be levving everywhere we go, and yes, every few minutes I’m going to be crippled with pain. It doesn’t matter whether I’m alright or not, there’s no alternative.”

“Your so-called ‘second wave’ could join us. They’re very eager to be on the front lines.”

“And I’m not exactly…” Sqrat looked like a scorned puppy, afraid of his own master, “I mean, I wouldn’t mind a little assistance, myself.” He flinched away from Trevor, as though expecting to be struck down for displaying cowardice.

“You, Sqrat, have a central role to play, today. Just try to stay alive until your moment comes. Don’t freeze up or pull your punches; there’s no need to worry about perfectly balancing your ethical charge today,” Trevor looked at Sqrat as if to say that he knew his words had special meaning that he was very careful not to say, “everyone will know whose side you were on, after today.”

“Y-y-y-yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

“And there’s no need to be formal. We’re all fighting together, today. Though some of us apparently feel the need for more armor than others. Jurrin, you’re not exactly built for a full suit of plate armor. Do you even know how to wield that sword? It’s half again as tall as you are.”

Jurrin swung, stepped, parried, thrust, spun, and otherwise displayed his agility and prowess with a sword from within a full suit of what must have been magically light armor. “I’ve spent more hours practicing in this armor, with this sword, than you two children have been alive on this Earth. I have defended my life and honor with this steel on enough occasions to be confident that I will not be taken down in a physical fight.”

“And what about a mental fight? How’s your Mentalism defense? Would you say you could destroy Maheu’le’s mind in a duel to the death? Or will you be turned against us by the first lowly guard we come across?”

“I’m not going to claim to be Maheu’le’s equal, but I’m no slouch when it comes to Mentalism defense. Try to turn me, right now. I’m certainly able to defend… HUrK!” Jurrin’s body began spasming and quaking and he dropped his sword before he fell over, his armor’s percussion against the ground creating an intensely jarring audible impact on the other three. His spasms slowed and his gurgling and sputtering turned to moaning, and Jurrin slowly began to stand again, rubbing his head as though sorry he hadn’t been wearing his helmet. “How…” Jurrin leaned on the wall for support, “How did you do that? Who taught you that?”

“That, my now-educated colleague, is something I remembered from my brief time as part of a very young hivemind. I imagine that their more closely guarded techniques and experiences will be much more effective at ignoring your defenses. But let’s pretend for a moment that I’ll be able to hold back their mental attacks while you fight them with your sword. Can you fight without being able to see or hear your enemy, or to think?” The room filled suddenly with the Blinding Light effect, and everything was white, until it wasn’t. When the room came back into focus, Jurrin’s sword was held in what would have been a threatening position, right against Trevor’s unprotected throat, had Trevor not fallen hard to the ground in the clutches of another contraction. Trevor had simply re-lifted himself safely out of the way before the effect had fully faded and made Jurrin look less competent than his apparent ability to move and think in the midst of Nirgal’s Blinding Light should have. “Good, good. At least you’re not as useless as Sqrat.” Sqrat still had his hands clutched over his eyes as though that would have blocked the effect and was gasping for air as though he had been unable to breath during its course. “Sqrat, you’re going to have to learn to deal with the Blinding Light. To keep my weakened state and painfully prone body from harm, Nirgal will automatically be generating that effect every time I experience Hannah’s labor pains. I feel like I’m repeating myself. Nirgal, am I repeating myself?”

“They’ve never heard you say it, but yes, you’ve said it before.”

“Fine, whatever, can we get on our way now?”

“Where are we going exactly, Trev?” Jurrin asked as he donned his helmet.

“That’s a good question. But I don’t have the answer.”

“You don’t…” Jurrin didn’t seem to understand. Nirgal had already asked, and stayed quiet. Sqrat looked at his feet, and wringed his hands.

“I don’t have that answer, no.” From his levitating position, Trevor was towering over Sqrat’s diminutive form. “Sqrat does.”

Sqrat didn’t look up.

“No games now, Sqrat. No hiding clues out in the open, no feigning ignorance. You want us to get to her, too, so it would behoove you to at least tell us where the church is and save us some time and energy and pain in getting there.” Trevor paused briefly as though waiting for a response from the tiny man, and then continued, “you don’t even have to tell us, just go there, and we’ll follow you.” Trevor very quickly strung a couple of mental links between himself and Sqrat and himself and Jurrin, and levitated in place, waiting for Sqrat to disappear. Sqrat lifted his arms to his sides, as was his habit when disappearing, but then hesitated, looking up with fear and tears into Trevor’s expectant glare. “GO!” Trevor’s shout was loud enough and raw enough to rattle Jurrin’s armor and apparently loud enough to shock Sqrat into dropping his arms and disappearing. The other three of them followed behind him along the path Trevor’s links had made, and the four of them found themselves before the imposing, elegant stone walls of what appeared to be a time-worn cathedral.

The sun was high above them; they were farther west than they had begun. The day glinted warm and bright off Jurrin’s highly polished gold-inlaid armor and seemed to be swallowed up by the dark brown of the formal dueling underrobes that Trevor and Nirgal were wearing. They all stared for a moment up the sides of the massive structure before them, taking in the intricate details of the masonry, the stained-glass windows, the vast architecture created before engineering or science had even been invented.

“That’s some church.” Nirgal was probably not the only one intimidated by its size, but he was the only one who vocalized it. None of the others even knew how to respond. They simply began walking or levving up the wide stone steps towards the immense wooden doors that stood between them and their target, Nirgal never leaving Trevor’s side as they progressed. There was no way for them to know what was waiting for them on the other side of the doors before them, nor even whether they would be able to pass through them without difficulty, and they did not hurry in their approach. Not until Sqrat stopped entirely, staring straight up, jaw agape, and the other three turned around to see why he’d paused.

“Why have you stopped? What’s wrong?”

Sqrat didn’t speak, didn’t close his mouth, but moved one arm to point straight up. The others looked up only for an instant before they all shouted out “Run!” and moved quickly away from the frozen form of Sqrat. Nirgal and Trevor moved further up the stairs, reaching the door before they saw that Jurrin’s lateral motion had reversed to shove Sqrat’s still-motionless form out of the path of the gargoyle plummeting directly towards them both. Nirgal instinctively cast a blocking charge at the gargoyle, as though it were simply an oversized dodgeball, but the power he put into it was of the carefully practiced scale to exactly counter a stone dodgeball, and it merely knocked the two-faced head off the gargoyle before it crashed into the stone steps below with explosive force.

“Shit!” Nirgal cursed his failure and tried to see whether their companions had escaped the brunt of the crushing force and stone shrapnel. Trevor was generating ball after ball of what could only be visually described as a distortion, very apparently similar to most any of his dodgeball inventions, and juggling them up into the air above him in higher and higher arcs as their number increased.

“Nirgal!” Trevor shouted, now carefully juggling nine dodgeball-sized rippling distortions above him, “They’re fine! I’m going to throw these power amplifiers at the other gargoyles as they come down, and I need you to do that blocking charge against them so they intersect just before they get to the falling statues! Got it?” Trevor couldn’t wait for a response; the next hurtling mass of carefully carved stone was half a second from hitting Nirgal, and he tossed one of the amplifiers at it. The other gargoyles that had been cast down upon them came in rapid succession, a carpet-bombing of stone upon stone, and Trevor hurled his amplifiers as fast and accurately as he could, unable to take the time to see whether Nirgal was doing his part to stop the onslaught until it was over. He looked around through the cloud of dust that was slowly settling around them, and saw the glinting sparkles of Jurrin’s armor approaching him up the stairs, a shadowy form close behind. Nirgal was sitting down, breathing hard, with his back to the door and his eyes on the sky. “Are you okay, Nirgal?”

“What? Yeah.” Nirgal’s eyes didn’t move from the sky. “There were, uhh…”

“What?”

“There were sixteen of them, Trev. Not ten. You only gave me nine amplifiers.”

“But you stopped the other six, right?”

“Well, yeah, but…”

“But nothing. You just needed to get warmed up. We’ve got more than mass and gravity to worry about on the other side of the door you’re leaning against. And they know we’re here.” Trevor reached out to lay a flat palm against the wood of the door just as Jurrin and Sqrat reached the wide platform at the top of the stairs to stand beside him. “Are you two alright? Sqrat, you have to keep up and at least try to defend yourself.”

Sqrat was covered from head to foot in a light coating of the fine, light grey dust of the gargoyle that had shattered quite nearly on top of him, and carried a terrified and relieved look on his face as though he was simultaneously glad to have survived this first challenge and knew well that the next one would almost certainly represent a far greater danger to him than the last. He didn’t make a sound or a motion of acknowledgement; he just stood there, his eyes unfixed. Trevor didn’t wait for another volley of stone death from above to shake Sqrat out of it, he just turned back to the door, pulled his palm off its surface, and knocked hard upon it with his closed fist three resounding times. Both sides of the door opened inward, slowly, and Nirgal nearly lost his balance as his back support was pulled away from him. Nirgal stood and turned to face the interior of the church alongside the other three members of the party, none of them sure what they needed to be ready for on the other side.

As they waited the seemingly endless moments that it took for the doors to reveal the small, ornately decorated foyer of the church, Jurrin spoke, “It just … opened. They’re letting us in. Why are they just letting us in?”

“We should turn back.” Sqrat’s face hadn’t moved, his eyes remained unfixed. He seemed to be in a state of shock. But his thought came as clearly to them as though it were riding the wave of terror that should have been overwhelming them as the doors came finally to a stop, fully open.

“We go in. Sqrat would never betray his masters, and this is where he brought us. If the first attack didn’t confirm for you that we’re in the right place, I don’t know what will.”

“I thought there’d be armies waiting for us. We haven’t seen a single person yet. What have they got planned?”

“We won’t know until we try.” Trevor took the first step into the church, and the doors instantly began to close on them. Trevor’s response was to step inward, out of the way, and Nirgal never left his side. Jurrin stepped backwards, but not out of fear or to protect his personal safety; he moved behind Sqrat and pushed him into the foyer with due force. The doors seemed to close much more rapidly than they had opened, and when they closed, the sound of it had a certain finality to it that implied that they would not be leaving the way they’d just come in. Trevor was already headed towards the curtains hung across the row of stone arches that separated them from the main body of the cathedral’s interior when the others turned to react to the sound of the doors’ sealing behind them. He reached out and grasped the middle edge of the wide, red velvet curtains, and before he pulled them open, addressed the others, “Are you coming, guys? I can’t save the world by myself.”

They came up close behind him, the four of them too wide to pass through a single arch side by side, and just as Trevor pulled the curtain aside, the entire world turned white and silent.

When Trevor was able to unclench his face, his body, his mind, and pick himself up off the cold stone floor still reeling in the feeling of the lingering intensity of a pain he knew he had been the cause of, Trevor could see in the fading Blinding Light that Jurrin had reacted well, cutting the curtain entirely down from the arch before them so that those on the other side would be in the thrall of the effect even after Trevor had lost his grip. Trevor hadn’t actually lost his grip, his hand clenching only tighter on the curtain in that moment of pain, but he certainly hadn’t stayed levitating above the floor. Trevor dropped his handful of curtain as he regained his proper altitude, taking in the sea of men and women now visible beyond the arch, most of them still clutching at their eyes in the same futile way he couldn’t see Sqrat doing behind him. He was not surprised to see that none of them appeared identical to anyone else present; if these bodies were lost in the fray, their minds would become an army equally strong and doubly experienced with their mirrored bodies, surely safely distant from this congregation.

Jurrin was running forward as soon as he could see again, decapitating half a dozen with each swing of his sword and not stopping to wait for their bodies to reach the ground before he progressed through the swarming crowd. He fought the fight of the righteous; he didn’t want to save Trevor’s child any more than he wanted to preserve Trevor’s life, but he certainly didn’t want a power potentially as dangerous as Trevor to fall under the control of an organization bent on world domination any more than he could stand the idea of Trevor turning against The Board – he knew he had to do everything in his power to destroy the both of them, which in this moment meant killing those who kept him from killing the unborn child. Jurrin had convictions, he stood by them, and did not shirk from doing what he believed would forward the triumph of what was right. In this moment, that meant killing hundreds of men and women in a church, the aisles between the pews filling quickly with the blood and bodies of the dead.

Trevor and Nirgal remained at the back of the church, just inside the arch they had passed through, Trevor’s eyes closed, his mind locked in careful concentration as he fought to keep the thousands upon thousands of mental attacks against Jurrin and Nirgal and Sqrat from landing any kind of blow against his team. He was sweating profusely with the effort. Nirgal was furiously blocking direct magical attacks against Trevor and himself, trying as often as possible to use his dodgeball reflexes to redirect the attacks at those who very clearly wanted to do them real harm. Sqrat was still in a daze, still standing in the foyer behind them, his eyes still unfixed, and if he had taken another step or two forward, he would probably already have been injured or dead from lack of self-defense. Trevor was taking a risk, relying on a hope, not defending himself from mental attacks, but since none of the attacks seemed to be directed directly at his own mind, he was either right in his hope – and they knew it – or very lucky. It took a surprisingly short amount of time for Jurrin to kill the last of the hundreds who had been waiting for their arrival, and as the final bodies fell lifeless to the floor, the magical and mental attacks were also stopped and silenced.

Jurrin raised his bloody sword into the air and screamed out a warrior’s deep cry of success on the battlefield. His armor now gleamed a sickening, glistening red, dripping with the blood of the slain and trailing bits of entrails and hair and skin from the crevasses and joints where they had become caught in the opening and pinching created by his broad, sweeping, swinging dance of death. He turned back to face them, lifting the faceplate of his helmet, and they could see a strange pattern of gore painted across his eyes in the shape of the opening in his armor, blood dripping down his face like horrible tears, the whites of his eyes shining out through the intense red that had surrounded them. “That was easy,” he cried out, triumphant.

“That was too easy,” said Nirgal, almost out of breath from the continuous action of his defense.

“That was just the beginning. There must be more, waiting.” Trevor turned his head to shout out over his shoulder, “Sqrat! Get your lazy ass in here this instant!”

Sqrat hurried in, finally shaken from his former stupor, but still a cowering mess of a man.

“You’re supposed to be helping. Is this how you behave in your threefold?”

Jurrin was drawn out of his self-acclamation by this comment, and began carefully stepping down and across the mound of corpses he had created. “Is what he said true? You, Sqrat, are a member of a proper threefold? Is that even possible?”

Sqrat was looking pleadingly at Trevor and shaking his head furiously back and forth. Trevor spoke again, “Don’t worry about that for right now, Jurrin. You did well. But there’s something wrong. There should have been more of them, and they should have been more powerful. This either isn’t the right church, or there’s more to it than meets the eye. I suspect there’s an exactly equal number of them hidden somewhere, waiting to fight us, but even so…” Trevor was looking around the inside of the cathedral, but his mind was searching much further for answers, “…I know this isn’t the right place. Sqrat. Why did you bring us here?”

“He…” Sqrat’s voice was trembling with fear, his face clenched like he expected to be struck down at any moment, not by anyone present, but by the one he was speaking about, “He wasn’t sure which one they’d have her at. They’re all the same from the outside, and he couldn’t get to anyone on the inside. This was his best guess. It looked like the most powerful, to me.”

“How many are there? How many couldn’t he decide between?”

“Uhh… Ahh.. About thirty-five, I think…”

Nirgal collapsed again to the floor in a seated position, with his back to one of the columns that formed the arches between them and the foyer. “Thirty five?”

“N-n-not counting the hundreds he was s-s-sure were too small.”

Trevor sighed. “I knew there were a lot of them, but…” he moved his hand up to massage his forehead and temples, bending his head down and closing his eyes, “I thought Sqrat’s master knew which one she was at. Fuck.” No one said anything, even as the world faded to white, time passed, and then the world faded back into view around them. Trevor wasn’t sure whether he was in more pain from his impending failure or from the contractions that now punctuated that failure.

“So what do we do now? Go through all the churches one by one? If each one is as easy as this, we should be fine.”

“I’m pretty sure they weren’t actually expecting us here. Think about it. This is the wrong church. It could be on the wrong side of the globe from the right one. These people were probably regular congregants, waiting to celebrate their religion’s triumph in a few hours. A real defensive force …”

“Won’t be this easy,” Jurrin’s voice was losing its strength, and he leaned against his sword for support, “I see that, now. Do you think one of them,” he indicated the stacks of dead behind him, “knew where she’s being held?”

“We c-c-could g-g-go downs-s-stairs and ask them.” Sqrat seemed to be becoming freer with the information he had been pretending not to have as the trauma of the situation he had forced his way into took hold of his psyche.

“Sqrat’s right. The mirror of the church and the other halves of these twins are probably directly beneath us, and well aware of what’s happened here. Their knowledge isn’t lost to us yet. I doubt they’ll be very forthcoming with it, though.” Trevor reached out a hand to help Nirgal back to his feet, “Who’s up for finding out?” and he walked confidently across the back of the church to make his way up the side aisle which wasn’t full of still-leaking corpses. He still held Nirgal’s hand, not having to drag him along, but giving him enough confidence through that connection to go forward. Jurrin ushered Sqrat forward, and they were not far behind by the time they reached the transept and turned towards the center of the symbolic center of the church. There, behind a wide altar, was a sort of stairwell that descended under the church. Trevor did not hesitate to proceed down into the unknown.

Due to the close walls and tight corners of the stairwell, the sanity of perspective that would have been afforded by the church above them was quickly lost, and while they were all certainly disoriented and confused by the apparently impossible curves and angles the stairs seemed to take, when they noticed that they were climbing up instead of down they did not bother to turn back; it felt as though they already had, the turns and twists of their progress reversed from their descent. When Trevor emerged into a dark, really almost entirely lightless version of the church he had just left, he could see from the reactions of the crowd still in their pews, bent in silent prayer, that they had not expected him to take these stairs to find them; they began to run towards the back of the church, escaping as quickly as they could through the black velvet curtains that blocked the arches there. Jurrin was close behind Trevor and Nirgal, and ran into the crowd, commanding them to stop. They didn’t seem to hear him, or they simply didn’t care.

Very few of them attempted to attack, knowing they had already failed with all the power they possessed, and the few attempts that were made seemed only to distract for the others’ escapes. Trevor was already levitating, and simply moved across above the tangled mass of fleeing bodies beneath him with Nirgal’s hand still in his, floating along behind him. They came down near the curtains and Trevor sent Nirgal a mental command, “give me a mudball.” Nirgal didn’t question it, and in between blocking the relatively weak attacks coming their way, generated an overpowered mudball. Trevor tossed a small effect at it, then thought to Nirgal, “throw it at the curtains.” He knew Nirgal wouldn’t have heard him over the rabble and commotion of Jurrin and the slowly escaping crowd, but the thought worked fine, and Nirgal’s timing was fine, throwing at a moment when the curtains hung closed before him.

Trevor’s alteration had apparently caused the mudball to split; instead of one mudball flying at one curtain, enough mudballs to coat every single curtain hanging in every single arch along the entire width of the rear of the nave of the dark cathedral flew out of Nirgal’s hands with uncanny aim. They all struck targets, either curtains or people between other mudballs and curtains, and the mud quickly slithered and slicked its way up and down and around the surfaces of the curtains, drying rapidly to create a solid barrier that the remaining crowd could not easily escape. They began pounding on it and trying to dispel it, but it was enough to slow them down for a moment or two.

Trevor began querying their minds, looking for one that was still thinking about the reason they were there or the location of the church he was seeking or anything that would help him at all. Almost instinctively, as soon as Trevor touched their minds looking for the information they had, they began deconstructing themselves all around him. Even those he hadn’t touched directly seemed to know that he was about to, and he found that every one of them was one step, one moment, one pair of minds lesser, that much closer to its own destruction. Their bodies began to fall all around him, and Trevor was sure he could hear collapsing sounds on the other side of the solidified curtains as well. They weren’t about to let him have even the tiniest piece of information from them, and just like Gorsky and Kay and Elle before them, these hundreds of people were willing to give up their very lives to protect the rest of their kind.

This time the piles of bodies all around them was bloodless and it was Jurrin who said, “that was too easy.”

“That served no purpose.” Trevor sighed. It hadn’t taken but a few minutes, and the body count of their excursion had doubled, and they knew almost nothing more than they had known when they’d first appeared outside, upstairs. “We’re no closer to saving her.” He levved over to an empty pew and collapsed onto his side just before the most painful contraction he had experienced so far seemed to tear his lower body into tiny shreds of burning, searing, compressed and intense pain. The world faded to white and silence, free from thought, but not free from pain. It felt to Trevor like something must be going wrong; the pain was changing. He became more worried even as he felt less able to find the source of his fears. When the world faded back into existence from the white of the Blinding Light, Trevor was sobbing loudly, an emotional wreck.

“We have to find her,” Jurrin said, “there must be a way to narrow down the list. What else do you know, Sqrat? Why did you bring us here? This was too easy, and they weren’t really ready for us. I’d even be willing to bet those gargoyles were part of an automatic defense system.”

“You’d lose that bet,” an unfamiliar voice came to them from the opposite end of the nave, far beyond the altar at the transept. “I threw them at you myself, and I’m not exactly automatic.”

Trevor didn’t sit up or even stop crying, though he did keep a close mental watch on the minds of his companions to be sure they were not under attack. Nirgal began building a mudball before him, larger and larger, preparing for another wave of attack. Jurrin climbed up on the highest mound of bodies to try to see who had spoken, and Sqrat hid behind the last row of pews, hoping he hadn’t been seen.

“They weren’t counting on anyone competent showing up to take on such a small congregation, you see.” The voice was deep and resonant, but also seemed female in tone, and was definitely approaching them. “So they figured I’d be enough defense from the roof, all by myself. If I agreed with the popes’ position on this whole world domination business, I’d probably have given you a harder time out there.” The hulking figure was now clearly in view, two giant heads atop a wide, thick frame with a hunch on her back that kept her stooped to a low-looking nine or ten feet tall. Something about her seemed gentle, despite the deadly muscles ripplingly apparent across her entire form, the deep gravely timbre of her voice, and the fact that she had just basically admitted that she had been ordered to kill them. “Not that it would have done any good. You’re the real thing, aren’t you? I suppose there’s something special about this church they never bothered to tell me, some important reliquary you need to locate to defeat them that they haven’t realized is important yet? You guys are probably five steps ahead of them, aren’t you?” She had finally come down the full length of the wide aisle to where Nirgal and Jurrin were standing, and turned to see the curled form of Trevor, still laying down weeping in the last pew.

“You’re… you’re not going to hurt us, are you?” Nirgal’s mudball was twice as big as a beach ball now, he had been unconsciously enlarging it the entire time.

“Why would I do that?” The huge, two-headed woman chuckled deeply, “and what were you going to do with all that mud? Is it bath time already?”

Trevor stopped weeping long enough to mumble “a Gollum… Nirgal… you can do it…” before he went back to crying.

Nirgal almost dropped the mud at the suggestion, but was so used to following Trevor’s leadership without question that his mouth had automatically begun forming the runic poem that was supposed to give life to it. After the first time he incanted the ancient poem, the mud had begun to solidify and lengthen. As he spoke it a second time, he lowered it to the ground as it took on vaguely humanoid features such as arms and legs and a sort of a head. By the end of the third time through the poem, the mud had taken on a very lifelike and detailed composition, and was drying to a very flesh-like hue. He then spoke the final verse of the poem, the runes that give life to the mud, and suddenly there seemed to be a real living breathing naked human being standing between them where only mud had been before. He had a single runic symbol carved into his forehead and was completely hairless and without genitals, but seemed fully to be a normal man in every other way.

“What a beautiful poem,” said the huge woman.

“I can’t believe it worked,” said Nirgal.

“How is this going to help us find the girl with the baby?” asked Jurrin.

Sqrat stayed hidden behind the pew, trembling as silently as he could.

“What girl with a baby?” asked the Gollum.

“Quickly, Nirgal, carve the two ancient runic symbols for my name into his hand,” mumbled Trevor.

“I don’t have a knife!”

“He’s still made of mud, to you, until he has a name. Use your fingers.”

Nirgal grabbed the Gollum’s right hand and found that he could, indeed, carve into it as though it were soft mud. The Gollum did not seem to object, and as Nirgal completed the second rune, his skin hardened to the touch, and his features shifted and he soon looked like a hairless nonsexual duplicate of Trevor. Nirgal let go of the creature’s hand and it fell limp to its side.

“Oh, that baby.” The creature put its head down into its hand, massaging its forehead and temples the same way Trevor so often did. For a long moment it just stood there like that, creeping Nirgal and Jurrin out, and then it seemed to realize its nakedness, and it conjured a duplicate of Trevor’s outfit onto itself without taking its hand away from its bald head. The creepiness was not diminished.

“Yeah, that baby.” Trevor was sitting up, pulled upright onto numb legs by a single arm on the back edge of the pew. He looked through still-wet eyes at the Gollum of himself and the huge two-headed woman beyond it, nodding. “I suppose we were here for you, weren’t we? Why would they keep you around? Two heads isn’t the same thing as twins, and you… you’re not part of a hivemind.”

“Not compatible, they said. They tried to win me over with their propaganda and their dogma, but I never really believed in it. Of course, they wouldn’t have given me any peace if I’d tried to leave. Better to have me locked away here or destroyed than working against them, right? I guess they never really understood me, did they?”

“How did they find you?” Trevor stopped himself before she could answer, “Never mind that. You remind me of someone. Who do you remind me of?”

“You haven’t met him yet. Goes by the nickname ‘Trunk’. He’s the one who told me about you in the first place. Well, a version of you. But that’s not important right now. We’ve got to ––” the world filled again with white and silence, free from conscious thought, as Trevor succumbed to another painful contraction, this one worse in that ‘things are going wrong’ way, interrupting the woman’s directive. She seemed to have seen it coming though, because she didn’t seem to have missed a beat, picking up exactly where she’d left off as soon as the world came back into view, “––save your daughters. We can talk when they’re safe.”

“Daughters?” asked Jurrin. Somehow he hadn’t been informed of Trevor’s earlier speculation to that effect.

Trevor was trying to pull himself back upright again; he was having more and more trouble recovering from the labor pains. “Do you…” he had to pause for a deep, sucking breath, “Do you know where they are?”

“I never… They don’t exactly let me in on their plans. And they rarely say anything important out loud; they usually just think the most important parts to each other. So, err… I want to help you guys, but … no. I don’t know where they have her, exactly.” She sighed a huge, dual sigh that would have blown back the Gollum’s hair if it had had any, saying, “I can tell you anything you want about this church, though. I’ve been here for years.”

“It can’t hurt,” said Trevor, struggling to keep his eyes open, “why don’t you tell us why the church is built this way. The others don’t know, yet.”

“You mean, why it’s two churches, one light and one dark?” Trevor nodded to her, so she continued, “Balance, of course. They take great pride in their stupid balances, balancing good and evil, light and dark, one twin for another, everything balancing out to create what they think of as harmony.” Watching the woman speak was an interesting thing; sometimes one head would speak, and sometimes the other, they didn’t argue, and there seemed to be no pattern to which head would take which sentences. Somehow it seemed totally natural, though. “So one church is above ground, reaching up, worshiping God, and all its congregants carefully go through the opposite motions of their components below ground, who are cursing God, their church sinking down into the earth. If there are enough of them, perfectly balanced, no one knows they’re here, not God or the Devil, and certainly not sensitives like you and yours. It takes them years to have these churches built, some of the bigger ones took centuries, and to exacting standards that they cannot directly oversee. It’s quite a grueling process, from what I hear, since if any of them ever came around before the completion of the structure, they could be detected, so they have to communicate with a workforce not under their control, and from a distance. I really don’t know how they get anything done, but I suppose they value their secrecy enough to go through all that.”

“That explains why they don’t show up on power maps; they’re intentionally canceling themselves out.”

“Not that they do such a good job around here. I mean, with me here, they’ve got to be pretty far out of ‘balance’ – they’re always trying to get me to do things forwards and backwards on alternate days to make up for it. Not to mention the fact that they’re too small to get that critical mass of masking balance they strive for.”

“The other churches are bigger?”

“Oh, yeah, much bigger. Well, in attendance, I mean. A church this size can seat thousands, not just the hundreds that were here today. And of course, each one actually holds up to twice as many as possible, what with everyone and their double showing up. But this is one of the smaller churches, actually – I saw one of the big ones, once, and it makes this place,” she indicated the vast open spaces above them, descending into shadow at what seemed to be impossible heights, “look genuinely cramped.”

“If this is one of the smaller churches,” asked the Gollum of Trevor, “why did Sqrat’s master think it was the biggest?”

“Because it was the most out of balance,” Trevor responded to his own voice very matter-of-factly. “The thirty five churches he thought were good candidates are probably the smallest, the ones without a critical mass of balance.”

The sound of Jurrin’s armor settling onto the wooden pew was a strange one, punctuating his dejected collapse. “Which means the hundreds he thought were too small to bother with were probably the larger ones. This situation just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?”

“Worse still, the church they’ve been hiding Hannah at is probably the largest and most well-balanced, and if our interpretation of Sqrat’s information is correct, it shouldn’t show up on the power maps at all.” Trevor was levitating himself back up as close to standing as he could with his legs dangling limp beneath him. “It would perfectly cancel itself out, distortion and all.”

The sound of footsteps and armor and grunting and shouting grew from the direction of the altar, echoing around the distant stone surfaces to make the approaching warriors seem more numerous and murderous than they were. It was the second wave, every other of the men and women emerging from the twisted stairwell behind the altar a huge, fierce, armed warrior or a powerful robed wizard practically crackling with magical energy, all of them ready for a fight that had ended well before they had arrived. They fanned out, some approaching down the center aisle and the rest flanking down both sides of the pews, as though some foe might be hidden in the dark corners, waiting for the chance to strike. There were three dozen in all, sixteen ready to kill with their hands and their strength and their steel, and twenty quite eager to defend and destroy with their magic and their minds.

While Trevor waited for them to come to a halt and give him their full attention, he addressed Sqrat, “give me the map.”

“What map,” Sqrat feigned ignorance again, “do you m-m-mean?”

“Your master wouldn’t have let you leave without the map, Sqrat. He couldn’t risk you having to contact him before we reach the girl, and you’ve said yourself he didn’t know which location she was at.” Trevor levved closer to Sqrat, extending his arm expectantly, palm up towards the cowering man, “not to mention the fact that he couldn’t possibly have trusted you to remember where to go without a map, you little twit.” With the intensity of the labor pains, Trevor was having trouble keeping his emotions from surging, and it was coming out as anger directed at Sqrat. By this time, the largest of the second wave were standing all around, towering over Sqrat and supporting Trevor’s assertions without needing to understand them or utter a sound. Sqrat reached into his vest, pulled out a folded piece of parchment, and reluctantly placed it in Trevor’s outstretched hand.

Trevor unfolded the map and spent about half a second glancing at it before handing it over to the oldest and most powerful of the wizards in the second wave. “Marked on this map you’ll find this location, plus about three dozen others of about this one’s power, and hundreds of what appear to be smaller, less significant locations. From what, uhhh…” Trevor indicated the two-headed woman still towering over all of them, prompting her for a response.

“Call me Sophie.”

“From what Sophie’s told us, the smaller it appears on that map, the more people and power it has. Start with the easiest and work your way up. None of them will be expecting you, if you work fast enough and keep anyone from escaping. Jurrin cleared the upstairs in about fifteen minutes, and these killed themselves twice as fast to keep me from finding out what they knew.” Trevor’s hands were out in front of him, creating another ball of energy, this one glowing slightly instead of merely distorting the appearance of the space it intersected with, as he continued speaking. “The ones you’ll be fighting won’t be soldiers or warriors, they’ll be able to attack, and they may try to defend themselves, but they’re not battle hardened like you are. Their primary defense will probably be to try to get into your minds and absorb you into their number. If they can get a single thought into your head, you’re theirs – their mental powers are … superior to anything any one of you has ever encountered. I’m pretty confident that two of them were able to defeat Maheu’le alone,” a gasp from several of the Mentalists, and dissenting voices rising all around in shock, “and none of these locations will have fewer equally powerful minds present than you see dead here before you.”

A single voice from the back of the crowd came out, unsure, “Can’t you protect us, like you protected them?” No one turned to see who had spoken; they were more interested in Trevor’s answer.

“There is more than one front to fight on in this war. You will be going from location to location according to that map, taking out one side of their number, hundreds at a time, where they least expect to be struck. You will strike the beast at its borders, peeling away its outer layers like skinning an onion. You will bathe in their blood, as Jurrin has, here.” They couldn’t help but notice Jurrin’s slouched, still red-glistening and entrails-trailing form on the pew beside them, his head hung low as though in defeat instead of the triumph that he had so proudly worn not long before their arrival. “We,” he gestured to his small band of companions in turn, “will seek out their power center, their most heavily defended and well hidden outpost, where their most experienced soldiers and most powerful wizards will undoubtedly be standing by, ready to destroy us as soon as we are detected, and the six of us will slice directly to the heart of the beast and strike where it is most sensitive. You will probably not reach us before we reach our target or are obliterated, though it seems equally likely to me that you will all be killed or turned against us before we get within a hundred challengers of the girl. Things are getting worse with every passing moment; we don’t have long before it will be too late to stop them, but kill as many as you can, and maybe we can give the world a fighting chance.”

Trevor could feel pain and nausea building within him, and rushed to finish his thought before he was overcome with the pain of another contraction. He tried to keep his face even and determined until the world turned white and the sound of three dozen wizards and warriors eager to see action faded into the total silence of the Blinding Light. Knowing he needed to keep the appearance of strength in front of this group, Trevor fought to maintain his location through the pain that felt more and more like something was wrong with Hannah and less and less like normal labor pains. None of them seemed to question Trevor or Nirgal for the odd timing of the effect, nor gave any indication that they suspected there was anything wrong. Trevor began speaking again before they could say anything about it, “This sphere is imbued with the information you’ll need to defend yourselves against the beginning stages of the grip of a hivemind, and some of their basic mental attacks. It would be too dangerous to expose you to my own mind right now, as I’m sure you’ve heard that I was absorbed into a hivemind not long ago myself. Please, all of you, take what you can from what I’ve prepared here, it’s all the protection I can offer you. You’re best off working together, protecting each other rather than trying to protect yourselves; their thoughts will look like your own thoughts to you, but with this information you’ll be able to see their source as they approach those around you.”

The room grew quieter and the light of the sphere of distortion grew brighter with every additional mind that accessed it. The rippling across its surface seemed to quicken in pace as wizard after wizard, and even some of the warriors, took what they could from what Trevor had offered them. Then, in a flash, it disappeared, and everyone’s eyes were opened again. A low murmur rose as most of them turned to walk back out, suddenly aware of what they were really up against and less sure of themselves than even Jurrin seemed, still collapsed and waiting. One of the robed women was approaching, rather than retreating from, Trevor’s floating form.

“Hi,” she said, extending her hand out to him, “I saw the dodgeball championship games, and I wanted to say you were amazing out there.” Trevor reached out to her, and they handflashed. “My name is Millee. Pleased to meet you.”

“Thank you. I just … play the game and hope for the best.”

“After looking at your hivemind tutorial I’m beginning to see how you tied the last match, but what I really want to know is how you got all the boys to stop playing in the game before that. You must have told them to keep quiet, right, because… I uhh… I asked everyone on both sides, and no one would tell me. Some of them actually seemed to be genuinely frightened of whatever it was you did.” She seemed to be blushing slightly, trying not to sound like too big a fan in front of Trevor. He looked at her, looking up at him, smiling, and realized that if she were a few years younger or he were a few years older…

“I just… I made them remember something. Over and over again. They were so wrapped up in the memory, they didn’t care about the match anymore.”

“What was the memory?”

“It was …” Trevor paused, but was drowning in her big, brown eyes, and couldn’t help to take the liberty in the face of his almost-certain death, “… it probably felt something like this,” and he leaned down, levitated a little lower, until his lips met hers, and they kissed. Gently at first, but with growing urgency, intensity, and passion, as though they hadn’t just met for the first time mere seconds before. Arms wrapping around each other for a long moment, they felt as though they were melting into each other, as though all the troubles and pains and fears of the world had ceased to exist and everything was right as long as they were together. For Millee, this kiss would take the spot in her memories as the most emotionally significant kiss of her life, and hold it for a long time afterward.

When they finally separated, Millee was actually, literally glowing from the experience, an actual dream come true for her. Trevor seemed recharged, suddenly actually sure of himself instead of merely putting on a brave face. “I remember now!”

“What do you remember?”

The Gollum’s voice came softly, like the memory of an echo, “I’d somehow managed to go this long without once thinking about what it would be like to kiss you.” The Gollum nodded, understanding.

“Kiss who? Not the one he’s just kissed, right?”

“No, not me. Thank you, Trevor. I’ll let you get back to saving the world. Thank you.” Millee disappeared.

Trevor seemed lost in reverie, and the Gollum was like a mirror image, their eyes closed and their faces showing contentment as they remembered or imagined the same sweet moment. Nirgal leaned up towards one of Sophie’s ears and asked softly, “What’s going on?”

Sophie leaned down, still two heads above him, and gave her response as softly as she could with the big deep voice she had, “Trev’s thinking about kissing Hannah. It’s a form of sex magic that may allow him to locate her, despite all the forces trying to block him.”

“Why can’t they just block the sex magic? I thought sex magic was crude, elementary magic.”

“It’s easy to perform, but almost impossible to control.” Jurrin finally stood, joining the conversation again, “almost everyone in the world uses sex magic, whether they know it or not. It draws people together, it drives others apart, it can be subtle, such as amplifying memories, and it is the most powerful form of magic known to exist – it is the only way to create new life, new souls.”

“What about things like the Gollum? Even I can do that, and I’m just a teenager.”

“The Gollum does not have a soul of its own, or even a life of its own. You, as the creator, have imbued it with your life. Every moment it lives is a moment your life is shortened.” This seemed to come as a surprise to Nirgal, but Jurrin tried to answer his shock, “don’t worry – a mud Gollum rarely survives more than a week, and I doubt this one will survive the day. If you survive the day, you’ll still have a long life ahead of you. And while the Gollum’s body is living a part of your life, it requires something else, remember?”

“Trev’s name.”

“Right, it requires a mind, and identity. The creator of a Gollum can never be the one to provide both halves, both body and mind, so a second willing party must become involved. In this case, it was Trev. So the Gollum’s body lives your life and thinks and feels and remembers with Trev’s mind. It has no life of its own, no soul, and cannot last.” Jurrin seemed alright for a moment, not weighed down with the thought of failure or overcome with the thrill of victory, but really like himself as he spoke to Nirgal. “As to how you were able to create a Gollum, I cannot say. As far as has been known, no one has had the strength and will and arcane knowledge to bring a Gollum to life for thousands of years. Many have tried and all have failed, but you … this was your first try, wasn’t it?”

“Y-y-yes. I just… Trev said to… I didn’t know.”

“It’s alright, it’s not a problem, it’s just unexpected. I’m sure that if we get through this you’ll hear enough about it – all those wizards saw the Gollum, and they’re sure to talk about it if they survive.”

“I didn’t think… I just did it…”

“Fine, fine, don’t worry about it for now.” Jurrin looked over to the two very alike figures, still someplace else, in or out of their minds. “Back to sex magic. The only way to block, counter, or stop sex magic is with sex magic. Intentional sex magic can only be matched by unintentional, powerful only by subtle, but always in kind. Two wizards cannot use in kind sex magic against each other, because their intention to do so would cancel the negating effect. In this instance, for example, I assume Trev is intending to use the connection of kissing to reach Hannah and locate her. This is subtle and intentional, and if he’s well-focused doesn’t involve coitus at all, so the only way to block his attempt would be what?”

“Powerful and unintentional?”

“Can you think of an example? Remember that it has to be in kind.”

“Which means just kissing, right? Is there even a possible configuration of powerful, unintentional sex magic to be generated from a kiss alone?”

“You actually just watched a reasonably powerful example, when Trev kissed Millee. He didn’t intend to have any effect on her, nor she on him, but there was a very powerful result in Millee. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she is the only survivor of the second wave – she is protected in a way, by his kiss, and the fulfillment of love in anticipation that it represented for her.”

“How could the church do something like that to Hannah?”

“Exactly. She’s still in a coma, for one thing; I would know if that effect had been dispelled. So even if the reincarnation or ghost of the original Prince Charming somehow came to her side to wake her from her unnatural slumber, and even if she were the next in line to match his perfect love, that action would dispel her coma, and that dispelling would tell me and several others what her location was. Barring the nearly impossible interference of Prince Charming or his like deciding spontaneously and without intention to plant the perfect kiss on a comatose teenager in the midst of giving birth in a giant double church under the watchful eye of our enemy, there is nothing that can block this.”

“Is that why nothing helped with the labor pains Trev’s been feeling? They’re part of some sort of sex magic?”

“It could be.” Jurrin seemed enlightened and frustrated that he hadn’t thought of it himself, “it makes sense. The sex magic that impregnated her was more powerful than even basic conception and far less intentional, considering the circumstances. It’s possible that the nature of the impregnation was so powerfully affecting to the universe that his connection to its end is the universe’s way of trying to balance out the impossibility of its beginning.”

“You talk in circles, little man.” Sophie almost looked like she was beginning to develop a headache from trying to follow Jurrin’s speculations. She turned both her heads to face Nirgal again, “The bottom line is that we’re about to know where we’re headed, one way or the other, and that you’re the second most powerful wizard in the room. Got it?”

“Err… yeah, I get it.” Nirgal tried not to meet Jurrin’s eyes, but he could feel their scornful gaze on the side of his face.

Suddenly the Gollum disappeared. “Somebody bring Sophie,” Trevor said, just before he, too, disappeared. Sqrat and Jurrin disappeared almost immediately afterward, pulled on the line of Trevor’s mental links, and Nirgal grabbed Sophie’s giant hand before he followed close behind them. Sophie’s left head vomited against the stone wall of the twisted stairwell she appeared suddenly in, and her right head moaned and looked ready to vomit as well. “Shhh…” Trevor quietly intoned, his Gollum’s finger rising to its lips to pantomime the same command.

Trevor thought to the group, “be quiet, everyone. Hannah is right on the other side of that wall,” he pointed to the ‘ceiling’ directly opposite the spot they were standing on, “and the popes are above and below us, prepared not only for the arrival of my daughters, but probably for our very expected invasion,” he pointed forward and backward ‘up’ both sides of the twisting stairwell to indicate ‘above and below,’ and everyone seemed to figure out that they were in a stairwell like the one in the church they had just left. The odor of fresh vomit filled the air around them, and Sqrat began making sounds like he was fighting back choking and vomiting himself, just from the sight and the smell of it. Trevor shot the little man a harsh glare and the private thought, “We didn’t really need you among us after all, but the right time to call your master is very near now, Sqrat, can’t you hold your tongue a little longer?” Sqrat put his hand over his mouth and did his best to remain silent.

A young woman’s scream echoed up towards them just in time for their world to fade to an increasingly familiar white emptiness that wiped the scream from their senses. As soon as he knew he could be heard again on the fading side of the Blinding Light, the Gollum spoke in hushed tones the question Trevor was in too much pain to ask of Jurrin, “If she’s still in a coma, why is she screaming?”

“I don’t know. She’s probably not aware of it, but her body must know it’s in pain.” Jurrin knew he was only speculating, and well out of his depth, “I really don’t know, though.”

“Fine,” Trevor was levitating unevenly now; the proximity to the source of his pain or increasing difficulties on the other side of the wall above him were taking a greater toll on him than the prior labor pains had. “Nirgal, Jurrin, follow me this way. Sophie, you take Sqrat and the Gollum that way.” Trevor pulled the hood of his robe up over his head, and the Gollum did the same, their mirrored appearance becoming complete as the Gollum’s hairlessness was covered and the rune on its forehead became partially concealed. “Maybe we can disorient them by attacking both sides at once. It would be better if Nirgal took Sqrat’s place, but I need him to cover up my weakness. Sqrat, try to survive long enough to betray me, okay?” Sqrat nodded, then realized what he was doing and shook his head in protest, but Trevor was already headed down his side of the stairs and Sqrat was being dragged along by the collar of his shirt, which Sophie had grabbed before she proceeded the other way.

Trevor didn’t know whether he was headed towards the dark church or the light one, and didn’t think it really mattered, since his Gollum was headed the other way and his query was apparently between the two. He went forward as though he knew what he would find at the top of the stairs, as though he was prepared, and he hoped his confidence would bolster his companions. Just before they emerged into the view of the church above, Trevor thought decisively to all five of his party, “Kill them all. No questions. No mercy. Just save Hannah.” He burst out into the air, high above the altar to give himself a good perspective on what he would be facing, Jurrin rushing up the steps behind him, sword swinging, and Nirgal not far behind.

There was a half-second of surprise before the mental attacks against his companions began, but Trevor was ready for them, and glad he didn’t have to defend more minds himself. If the three dozen wizards and warriors who had made their way into the second wave had been here it would have been the equivalent of starting a fight by giving your enemy your best weapons; Trevor’s concentration could only be stretched so thin, he could only protect so many minds at once. Against the enemy he now faced, protecting two minds was very nearly too much for him.

This church was, as Sophie had suggested, truly monumental. The entire structure of the church they had just left would fit nicely into a corner of the room he was in and go unnoticed. The vast width and length of the floor plan could perhaps have accommodated tens of thousands of seated believers, and as he gazed down upon that huge space he realized that there were no pews or chairs, only an oddly empty floor. The insanely large space was nearly empty, and as Trevor returned to ground level he counted only fifteen men and women as the entire force against him. One was clearly the pope, and was kneeling over the hole in the floor where the alter had been, apparently praying over Hannah’s suspended body, which was floating in the middle of the tunnel that Trevor had been able to see, from his highest vantage point, looked straight through to the light, upper church on the other side of the stairs. Two more, a man and a woman, stood to the left and the right of the hole, their backs to the pope, sword and staff at the ready to defend him. Four androgynous beings stood beyond the four corners of the hole, a gold chain, each link several inches across, strung tight between them, right through gaping but apparently long-healed holes directly through their torsos, creating an unbroken ring around the hole and the three people beside it. Each of these four beings seemed prepared for a different sort of battle, bolts of light, energy, electricity, and a field of powerful magic moving between and among them as they circled slowly around the hole without ever letting their chain loosen or droop. These seven seemed not to have noticed that anything was amiss at all, as though Trevor and his companions were less important than flies buzzing the air around them.

It was the other eight that were keeping Jurrin and Nirgal busy, and that were providing more than enough mental activity to strain Trevor to his wits’ end. There seemed to be nothing in common between them besides their apparent desire to destroy the three intruders and disregard for the normal flow of time; they all moved with uncanny quick speed. Trevor moved down next to Nirgal and helped him defend himself while trying to decide what to do.

“I thought there’d be more of them!” Nirgal shouted, narrowly deflecting a flying serpent of what appeared and smelled like fecal matter with razor-sharp teeth and a flaming tail in the direction of the gold-chain-circle which was more than able to destroy it to protect the pope and the hole and the girl it contained.

“Is this too easy for you?” asked Jurrin, swinging away without making contact against his too-fast foes, barely defending himself against their projectiles and other attacks. “You’re such a powerful wizard, after all.” Jurrin’s sword finally anticipated one of the eight’s moves and sliced clean through its body in a beautiful diagonal arc from the tip of its outstretched arm, splitting in two the entire length of arm, carving through the shoulder, chest, and every organ and bone in between and emerging out the other side just below the crotch of the suddenly slowed being. They had just enough time to see that the toppling, divided form had been a very pale, very old man before the continued onslaught from the other seven defenders stole their attention away from the gore that represented a moment of success.

“Don’t be that way, Jurrin!” Nirgal was glad to realize that the one which had been killed was apparently the one that had been conjuring shit-monsters, and tried to be apologetic. “Sophie didn’t mean to diminish your abilities, but to bolster my confidence! We all have strengths,” Nirgal had a long enough break in his own defenses and in defending Trevor to invoke a few mudballs and heave them into the blur of bodies around him, “and we have to work together!” One of the mudballs had struck the head of one of the remaining seven, and the other two had struck the bodies of others. The sightless one was an easy target for Jurrin’s sword, and between Trevor and Nirgal’s more deadly attacks and Jurrin’s continued swordplay, the other two had been slowed enough to be destroyed.

“Fast or slow?” Trevor asked, as though they would know what he was asking. The mental attacks seemed mostly to have been coming from the one that had been hit in the head by Nirgal’s mudball and lost his head to Jurrin’s sword, and Trevor finally had enough concentration to do something more than just defend their minds.

“What?”

“Do you want me to slow them down or to speed you two up?”

“Slow them down!” shouted Nirgal.

“Speed them up!” shouted Jurrin.

“What?” shouted Nirgal, again.

“Hope they burn out?” mused Trevor, noting that the dead remains of the first four appeared wizened and old, each older than the one killed before it. “If you’re wrong, the best I can do is speed you up too, and then we’ll be back to the same relative speed difference. What do you think, Nirgal?”

Nirgal was growing tired, and it showed. “Whatever you think,” he collapsed to the ground, not from exhaustion, but to stay out of the way of one of the remaining four, hurtling overhead with what looked like daggers in its hands, “will work best.” He disappeared and reappeared standing up in an empty space a few feet away.

“This would work better with a sacrifice, for an extension …” Trevor searched the pockets of his robe for anything that would be useful and found nothing, then realized he was looking in the wrong pockets. He flashed out of visibility for half an instant, never losing his defense of Nirgal and Jurrin’s minds’ continuity, and was wearing his trench coat instead of the dueling underrobe. He searched his new pockets and immediately found what he was looking for, quickly pulling out an antique-looking pocket watch on a gold fob. The watch began spinning around and around at the end of the chain faster and faster as Trevor intoned the syllables that would initiate the spell, finally letting go of the end of the chain that now hung, spinning ever faster, in the air before him. The glinting of light across the watch’s rapidly rotating surfaces began to become a continuous glow as the heat from friction with the air and from the intensity of the magic took its toll on the metals and workings of the timepiece. Just as the apparently molten remains of the pocket watch were consumed in a flash of light that connected the four still-fighting figures around him, a scream tore through the air from within the hole in the floor and the entire expanse of the dark church filled top to bottom with the Blinding Light.

Trevor alone could still hear Hannah’s scream as the world turned to silence for the other twelve people within visual range of Nirgal’s less-than-conscious effect. He could feel more than just the pain of contraction, this one so much faster on the heels of the last one than the one before it had been that he knew Hannah was very close to being fully dilated, but the other feeling was as though the first of the two life forms he could definitely differentiate within her was already trying to work its way out, and too soon. It was almost as though some other force was drawing the tiny body out prematurely. To say that Trevor was becoming used to the pains would be like trying to sell vacation homes on the surface of the sun by saying that you could get used to the heat; there is no experience in this world that can be rightfully compared to what he was going through, and no one but a mother who was burned alive and then drowned during twin breech births while under heavy mental attack and facing the loss of the entire world if she didn’t find the strength to work through it all while retaining her sanity and coherence could say they began to understand his pain. As the most intense part of the experience began to fade, and the more problematic sensations of giving birth remained, the Blinding Light faded and Trevor tried to see if his companions were still alive.

Nirgal was laying in a fetal position on the ground, but clearly twitching and spasming, so still alive; Trevor did a quick check and verified that Nirgal was definitely not under mental control or attack by hiveminds. Jurrin was standing, sword at the ready, looking for someone to strike down. The four who had been trying to kill them before the world disappeared in a sea of white silence were now hardly more than skeletons collapsed on the stone floor with barely the energy to struggle, and not enough flesh left to tell whether they had been one gender or the other. Jurrin made quick work of them once he figured out that the faster pace of their time spent during the white out had been more than enough to fulfill his expectation that they would “burn out”, decapitating them all quickly.

Trevor sent a mental query to his doppelganger above/below him in the light church, “How’re y’all doing?” along with the image before him of the eight defenders defeated. There was a long pause, during which Trevor cautiously felt the mental space around him for more combatants or some clue as to why none of his own companions were being mentally invaded at all anymore.

Finally, with an echoing triumphant cry ringing out in Sophia’s huge voice coming through the tunnel between the mirrored churches, the Gollum thought back to Trevor, “We’ve got it under control up here,” including an image of eight broken bodies, a bloody Sophia, and Sqrat in a fetal position similar to Nirgal’s, but that Trevor suspected he had taken before, rather than after, the battle had taken place.

“They’re good on the other side, same headcounts left,” Trevor explained, then collapsed again, in pain, before Hannah started screaming hoarsely, and several seconds before Nirgal was able to generate the Blinding Light which seemed almost moot at this point. As though noticing his weakened state for the first time and not under the same command of warning as the others had been, the four chained beings reached out at once to try to absorb Trevor into their single hivemind. He didn’t resist them, and not just because he was in too much pain to think straight. After a longer moment than any prior instance of it, the white light and silence faded again.

Trevor was still laying on the floor, clutching his gut in pain, weeping again. The four chained beings were also, unexpectedly, laying on the floor, weeping and clutching at their own abdomens. There was no longer any light, energy, electricity or any other thing crackling between them. The chain was limp, fallen to the floor with them, and seemed somehow less restrictive than it once had. Where the chain touched the stones they began to fade away. Not like a corrosive, eating outward from the point of contact, but whole stones disappearing all at once, as though having come in contact with the chain made the entire stone to cease to be all at once. Once the first set of stones had vanished, the chained, weeping beings fell lower, the chains falling on new stones, a literal chain reaction beginning to take place. The Gollum mentally queried Trevor, “Did you do that?” as the chained beings on his side were also fallen, weeping, and taking the floor with them, but Trevor could not find the strength to respond before the pain became worse again and the world faded to white for everyone in view of Nirgal.

When the world came back, the first thing Trevor did when he regained full consciousness was to break the connection that was triggering Nirgal’s Blinding Light. The next thing he did was notice that the world had fallen to pieces all around him. In the timeless expanse of his pain, the chains had apparently found their way to each other and caused some sort of explosive reaction, because the two sets of chained men, and any semblance of order, had disappeared. The floor all around where they had been was gone and gravity was thrown totally out of order, huge chunks of rock floating in and out and around the now doubly-large expanse of the dual church, the floor