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Dyna had been given the incredibly imprecise instruction of bonding with her selected artifact. It was only after arriving in Idaho Falls that Dyna realized that Doctor Cross hadn’t told her how to actually do that. Neither had the technician, Harold—pretty much all he had done was complain about Doctor Cross. Under normal circumstances, she would simply have called them up and asked.

There were two problems with that at the moment. The first was that neither had given her contact information. That wasn’t that big of a problem. Surely a receptionist at Carroll would know how to get into contact with one of them. The other problem was that Dyna didn’t have a phone.

Nobody had returned or replaced her cell phone to her following the incident down in Psychodynamics.

That wasn’t that big of a problem either. Her hotel room had a phone in it and, although rare, it was still possible to find public pay phones.

Really, both problems were just excuses. The real problem was that Dyna didn’t want to ask for help. Not yet, not so soon. As exciting as making some kind of progress felt, an undercurrent of helplessness tingled at the back of her mind. Like she wasn’t doing anything for herself. Others were doing everything for her.

Dyna had never been taught that asking for help was wrong or a personal failing. At the same time, if she just went limp and let everyone else push her into the places they wanted her to be, could she say that she was accomplishing anything?

She wanted to do at least this much on her own. And if it failed? Well, she could afford to spend another few days out in the city. It wasn’t like classes and lectures were doing much for her. Besides, they wouldn’t have simply forgotten to tell her about her only objective. This was probably something she had to do on her own.

Sighing, Dyna leaned back in her cushioned booth seat only to lean forward once again after deciding to take a bite from her large huckleberry-filled danish. It had been warm when she first got it, but cooling hadn’t hurt it at all. Since moving to Idaho for the institute, huckleberries had become something of a vice. They were like blueberries if blueberries were actually good. And here at Bacchus, a small café in the middle of Idaho Falls that really should have been a winery based on the name, they made huckleberries into some fine pastries.

Packing up her life and moving from the bustling Los Angeles up to the middle of nowhere in Idaho had been… an experience. Some parts were familiar. Idaho Falls was about a half hour away from the Carroll Institute. There was absolutely nothing between the city and the school. Just flat desert. She was used to deserts, more or less. Though the desert wasn’t all that notable inside L.A. and she didn’t venture out all that often.

Aside from that, however. There wasn’t much in the city either. Flat farms surrounded a flat city. The tallest building was probably a three story hotel and about the only entertainment was a movie theater. The entire population of Idaho Falls roughly matched just the student body of the University of Southern California. Except here, the people were spread out over a fairly wide area.

Not that Dyna came for entertainment. She was just here to think in peace. Bacchus had a much better selection of pastries and their hot chocolate always had just the right amount of whipped cream. The coffee shop in the Carroll dorms wasn’t terrible, but it was almost constantly surrounded by psychics. As was everywhere else in Carroll.

Dyna’s first trip out here had been in the hopes that a café in the middle of the city would have less interruptions. And so far, she had been right. So it provided the perfect place to bond with her new artifact as well.

The other few customers, spaced out with empty tables between, didn’t bother her. They didn’t harass her, peer into her thoughts, or otherwise care about what she was doing. Not that most people at Carroll bothered her. It was more like they thought she just wasn’t worth the effort to talk to.

She certainly didn’t need people sitting around reading her mind while she was narcissistically admiring herself in the hand mirror. There wasn’t much else to do with the artifact. So far, she hadn’t figured out how to operate the camera. The only piece that she could move was the latch that opened the mirror. And the hinge, but that probably didn’t count. Dyna had tried twisting and pulling at a few other parts, but, not wanting to break the device, hadn’t tried with any real force.

Sitting in the café, Dyna tried to avoid looking like a creep as she pointed the lens around the room. Artifacts were supposedly psionically sensitive objects that would help her to focus and hone her own psychic abilities. So far, she wasn’t getting anything. As far as she could tell, it was just a simple pocket mirror.

Pointing the lens at three other customers and the man behind the counter did nothing. She tried turning it on herself, but if that did anything, she couldn’t tell. It was a spy camera, so it made sense that there was some way to activate the lens. If she could figure that out, it might solve her problems.

Maybe if she knew more about the history of the device. That it had belonged to a spy seemed obvious from its design. Cross hadn’t said much else beyond that.

Setting the mirror down on the low table in front of her, Dyna leaned back and tried to imagine just what might its owner have been like? A James Bond type? A man walking clandestine through a city, taking photographs of important people or buildings that were relevant for some adventurous mission. Perhaps there would be pursuers, the villains catching on to the spy and trying to get rid of him.

Of course, a Bond movie would quickly dispense with the spy gimmick, if it bothered with it in the first place, and turn into an action movie. The actual owner of this mirror probably hadn’t been through something quite so adventurous. Dangerous, yes, but more in the sense that enemies would just shoot him rather than leaving him to die in an elaborate laser or shark-based trap.

Dyna took a long drink from her hot chocolate, trying to think of more realistic spy movies that she had seen. Unfortunately, her mind was coming up blank. They weren’t exactly her favorite kinds of movies to watch.

Reaching forward, she took hold of the mirror once again. The moment she flipped open the cover, something changed.

Both silvery glass panes were blank. Black holes that reflected nothing at all.

Dyna’s breath hitched, staring into them. Her finger tapped one, nail impacting glass. They still felt like mirrors, but they weren’t reflecting anything.

This is… good, right? Dyna dared to feel a little excited. She wasn’t sure what she had done, but psychic abilities, as the name implied, all happened in the mind. If imagining a spy movie resonated with the mirror somehow, then she was all for finding a new phone and streaming as many as possible.

A third tap against the glass changed the mirror once again. The panes lit up. Except they didn’t reflect her. It was the room she was in. The café. She could see the counter and the employee with the purple apron and the wooden tables and chairs between her and the counter. At first, she thought she had accidentally pulled up the camera, only to glance up and realize that the scene in front of her was off.

It wasn’t the right angle.

Which became all the more apparent when she realized that the chair closest to the camera’s point of view had her sitting at it. She couldn’t see her own face, but there definitely wasn’t someone like that in front of her. Besides, how many other idiots went and dyed their hair a shiny silvery white?

Nobody, that was who.

Feeling tense, feeling like she had back in Psychodynamics, Dyna slowly turned around, watching the screen in front of her as the angle didn’t change, but the her in the mirror did turn.

She expected to find a camera. Dyna wouldn’t be able to explain how the mirror accessed some random camera, but she couldn’t explain a lot of things in this world and that would at least be a rational explanation.

Instead, she found two people seated at another table just behind her own. Not altogether uncommon. It wasn’t like the place was empty. A handful of casually dressed students were off at another table, possibly studying or maybe playing a tabletop game. A couple had come and gone not long ago. A mother looked like she was treating her children to some donuts.

But the two behind her stood out. They stood out to the point where she had a hard time believing that the entire café wasn’t staring in their direction.

Both men wore suits. Black suits with black shirts and black ties. Both had hats as well. Like cowboy hats, but solid black instead of the brown or white she pictured from movies. One, bulkier than the other, had a solid black goatee that completely encircled his mouth. The other merely had a graying mustache above his lip.

Neither were looking at her. A glance down at the mirror showed that its perspective wasn’t aimed her way anymore either. She got a close up view of the slightly wrinkled face of the man with the mustache. He had dark brown eyes. It was almost impossible to distinguish his pupils from the color.

Trying to act like she had just been stretching, Dyna stood. There wasn’t anything keeping her at the café. The half-eaten danish and now-cold hot chocolate had already been paid for. Mirror clutched in a white-knuckled grip, Dyna made her way to the exit as quickly as she could without looking like she was running.

As soon as she was out the door, she glanced down at the mirror once again. The view in the glass trailed after her, though the man with the mustache partially blocked the screen while facing away from her. Still, the view was definitely looking her way.

At least until she got away from the café’s front windows. The mirror went dark again.

The moment it did, Dyna took off in a run. She didn’t know what was going on but had a feeling that it had something to do with psychics. Either her own psionic potential acting up or other people doing something. Regardless of the reason, she did not like unknown people staring at her. Especially not when they were dressed so strangely.

And extra especially when their perspective showed up in a psychic spy camera.

“It’s only paranoia if they aren’t after you,” she mumbled to herself as she rounded a corner.

Dyna slowed, reaching a hand into her pocket. Her fingers clasped around nothing.

A jolt of panic ran through her, fearing that they had stolen her phone, only to remember that she didn’t have a phone at the moment.

Calling Walter wasn’t an option even though it was the first thing that came to mind. Without her phone, she didn’t know his number. Nobody in this day and age actually memorized phone numbers. The Carroll reception desk was still a possibility, but looking up the number while running around might not be the easiest thing and phone booths didn’t sound all that safe at the moment. Still, it was either that or she needed to get back to the bus stop that would take her back to the institute. Unless the bus was there, sitting about on a bench in the open while strange people were watching her sounded like just as bad an idea as sitting around in a phone booth.

Some store nearby had to have a phone she could use.

Before she could even look around, the mirror in her hands lit up once again.

It showed off her own back from a short distance away. The view turned, looking to the man with the dark goatee who was looking down an alley around the corner. The view jerked in what might have been a nod in her direction.

Dyna didn’t wait any longer. It was one thing to stare at her in a shop, but to follow her?

She took off in a full sprint.

Dyna didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t know where to go and she didn’t know her way around Idaho Falls at all. Finding the police sounded like the best option. Failing that, a public space with lots of people around might buy her some time. Though both those were only mights.

Her mind raced through possibilities even as she raced through the streets.

The two men were dressed so strangely and she hadn’t seen any coffee or muffins on their table. Bacchus didn’t just let people sit about without buying anything. Maybe they had just walked in and the barista hadn’t gone to throw them out, but Dyna had been around the Carroll Institute long enough to know that hiding in plain sight didn’t take much mental effort. Almost any type of Influencer could hide themselves, whether through illusions, appearing inconsequential, or direct mind control.

Which also meant that crowded areas and even the police might not be safe. A crowd of people might just ignore her being kidnapped in front of them simply because one of the two men could exude an aura of ‘nothing going on here folks’ through their psychic power.

Turning a corner made the mirror go black once again. Dyna assumed that meant that they lost direct line of sight with her. Depending on how athletic they were, it wouldn’t be for long. She had been part of the photography club in high school, not anything physically demanding.

Which meant that they were almost certainly more athletic than she was by default.

Dyna practically dove into the first door she passed. A bell chimed as she entered.

A beauty salon? The decor looked about fifty years out of date, though maybe that was just Idaho. One of the chairs with its flowery pattern might have even been from the sixties. The mirrors had thick silver frames with that antique leaf-like styling that looked impressive until you got a closer look and realized that they were cheap and mass produced.

Worse than their style was the fact that it was utterly deserted. Dyna couldn’t even see an attendant. Part of her wondered if she was caught in some psychic illusion like when she had walked with Walter through the dormitory lounge. That thought vanished as a portly man pushed aside a curtain of beads and emerged from a back room.

“Sorry, we’re actually about to close for—”

“There are two strange men following me down the road,” Dyna said, trying to speak clearly despite her hammering heart. It was important to communicate clearly in situations like this. Probably. It wasn’t like she had experienced being chased around before. “I dropped my phone. Can I hide here for a few minutes and maybe use your phone?” As she spoke, she moved further into the room, trying to make herself look as small as possible.

If there was one good thing about the interior of the salon, it was its clutter. There were free-standing shelves, rolling trays, bottles of care products, hanging lamps from the low ceiling, large hair dryers that went over people’s entire heads, and a dozen chairs—both of the black leather variety with the foot rest for people getting their hair cut as well as the seemingly random styles from various decades for people waiting at the front of the shop.

No solid walls or counters to hide behind, unfortunately. But just stepping off to the side and crouching in one of the chairs was probably enough to keep anyone from noticing her through a casual glance in the windows.

Although her sudden appearance and proclamation had clearly startled the man, who no longer had a smile on his face, he sent rolls of skin into a wave under his chin as he quickly nodded his head. “Y-yes, of course.”

“Thank you.”

“Come.” He beckoned with his hand. “Hide in the back.”

Dyna didn’t waste any time. She rushed through the curtain of beads to find a relatively narrow gap between a clearly false wall and the actual rear wall of the building. There was a restroom at the far end and another door next to it, a mini fridge with a microwave on top, a counter with a sink, and a pair of chairs around a table. A cramped little break room.

“Phone is on the wall,” he said, pointing near the microwave. “There is another out front. I’ll stay out there and tell anyone who comes in to go away.”

“Thank you,” Dyna said again.

Though she still felt that getting in contact with Walter would be more important. The police weren’t equipped to handle psychics. At least not yet. The Carroll Institute had only existed for a few years, there simply weren’t many graduates just yet. And of those who had left the institute… well, who wanted to live in Idaho Falls?

Orientation at the institute included a fairly direct warning that, if there were any suspected psychic incidents, to call the institute first. They were the authority on psychics in the area.

However, as the salon owner headed back into the main room, Dyna could only stare at the phone.

It was a rotary phone. The handset sat atop, connected by a curly cord. The entire thing might have been white a century ago, but was a nasty yellow today.

Dyna wasn’t an idiot. She knew how to use a rotary phone. It was just that she had expected to be handed a cell phone. Something she could have used to look up the Carroll Institute’s number.

Who actually memorizes numbers in this day and age? Dyna bemoaned for the dozenth time in the last hour.

Dyna would. The moment she got back safe and sound to her dormitory, she vowed to commit Walter’s number to memory. His and the Carroll Institute emergency line. Doctor Cross’ too, just in case Walter was busy.

Not knowing those numbers now, however, really left just one number she could call.

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

“Two men are chasing me through the streets. I don’t know exactly where I am. It’s a beauty salon not far from Café Bacchus. In Idaho Falls,” she added.

“Understood. We’ll find you. Police will be on the way. Are you safe right now?”

“I’m not in immediate danger, but it depends on how hard they’ll look for me. I… I have reason to believe that they are psychics.”

“E… Excuse me? Could you please repeat that?”

Dyna grimaced, squeezing her eyes shut. Of course the man on the line would be a skeptic. Lots of people were. Dyna used to be a bit skeptic herself. Maybe she still was, though mostly of herself after six months of nothing.

“Just can you contact the Carroll Institute? Tell them that Dyna Graves, Initiate ID: 50112, has encountered hostile psychics off campus.”

“Ma’am, if—”

“How can you be skeptic in Idaho Falls of all places!” Dyna hissed into the phone. She tried to run her other hand through her hair only to smack herself in the forehead with the mirror—still thankfully dark. “Look, you can’t hang up on me, it’s like illegal or something. And I’m in a big panic at the moment. I lost my phone. Trust me when I say I would definitely be calling them and not you if I still—”

A loud click interrupted her rant.

“Did you just hang—”

A steady tone interrupted her. For the briefest of instants, she thought it was a dial tone. But that only happened in movies. The tone quickly changed into a garbled series of beeps and tones, accompanied by something like a cross between whispering and those old modem connection noises.

Between fearing that this was the psychics somehow cutting the call and hope that it was something useful like the tablet, Dyna couldn’t decide whether or not to hang up.

With the whispering and electronic tones still echoing in the background noise, a clear and feminine voice took over.

“This is Beatrice. Hostile intrusion of emergency call network complete. Dyna Graves, can you hear this voice?”

“Beatrice? The… the one from the elevator?”

“Communication confirmed. Please describe your pursuers.”

Dyna shook her head, somehow both surprised and not. If anyone could detect that she was in trouble, it would be the institute of mind readers. “Two men,” she said. “Both dressed in solid black suits with black hats. One had a goatee. One had a mustache. Black and gray colored respectively.”

“Understood. Solutions are underway. Please hold.”

The first bit of relief she had felt in a long time came with Beatrice’s stilted words.

It didn’t last long, however.

From the back, she heard the distinct bell chime of the front door.

“Sorry, we’re actually about to close for the day.”

Dyna heard the man in the other room. But there was no response to his statement. “Beatrice,” she hissed. “I think they’re here.”

“Sir? You can’t just—”

A soft voice interrupted the shop owner. “You’re feeling… very sleepy.”

At the same time, her only hope started talking once again.

“Understood,” Beatrice said, somehow speaking before she actually spoke. A strange echo on the line. “The door in the back of the salon leads to an alley. Take it. Turn to the right. Cross the street. Enter the opposite alley. The first door on your right will have an electronic lock, combination: zero, four, five, one.”

Dyna didn’t wait to hear any more. Zero, four, five, one. The door, just next to the bathroom door, had to be the one Beatrice had been talking about.

Leaving the phone swinging, Dyna jumped into a full sprint, clutching the mirror to her chest. It still hadn’t lit up which presumably meant that they didn’t have eyes on her.

That changed as soon as she reached the street. With the mirror clutched to her chest, she couldn’t see what it showed, only that it was displaying something.

Dyna didn’t stop to look both ways. The streets of Idaho Falls were never that busy. At least not around the café.

She could see the door in the alley. The large blocky handle with several buttons in two rows was obvious even from the middle of the road outside the alley. Beatrice had been right. Dyna didn’t know how she knew, but she skidded to a stop in front of the door.

Heart pounding and sweat running down her brow, Dyna hit the first button in the top row before she fully stopped.

Zero. Four. Five. One.

A tense moment stretched on, probably a second but it felt like it lasted ten minutes. The light on the handle flicked green as she heard the locking mechanism click. Dyna slammed her shoulder into the door as she pushed it open. Another shoulder slammed it shut just before the man could reach it.

Just as his fists started hammering against the metal door, a phone nearby started ringing.

Dyna didn’t know what kind of shop she was in. The main lights were out and there were no windows in the back. A dim always-on light illuminated the area just enough to see a cordless phone hanging on the wall opposite from the door. Not exactly a modern phone, but it wasn’t a rotary phone either.

She dashed over, ripping the receiver from the cradle.

“This is Beatrice. Status?”

“Safe,” Dyna said, breathing a long sigh. Her sigh hitched as another fist pounded against the door. “For the moment. I don’t know if they have a way inside.”

“Subject status confirmed. Dyna Graves, your intended destination is the Supreme 8 Motel building on 3rd Avenue.”

“I have no idea where that is.” In addition to memorizing some phone numbers, Dyna vowed to memorize a few maps. Idaho Falls wasn’t a big place, she could memorize it completely.

“Understood. This building provides roof access through a stairway to your left. Upon exiting to the roof, head eastward—”

“Which way is East?”

“Upon exiting to the roof, turn directly to your left and walk along the building rooftops. The fifth building will have a ladder down to the street level. Directly across from the ladder, you will find a pizzeria. I will deliver updated instructions there. Do not be seen on the roof.”

“Okay.” Dyna took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The moment of safety helped to control her pounding heart. “I can do that. I can—”

“Hold.” The background static and whispering noise in Beatrice’s call raised in volume enough that Dyna had to pull the phone away from her ear. It only lasted a moment before returning to normal as Beatrice began speaking again. “An alternate egress route has presented itself. At the third building, jumping down the front side will place you directly adjacent to a silver vehicle that you may use to navigate to the motel.”

“Jump?”

“A single story fall. This egress opportunity will only be available for a short time. You must hurry. If you do not feel confident, proceed to the pizzeria as originally planned.”

Taking one last breath, Dyna hung the phone back on the receiver and rushed to find the staircase. The staircase wasn’t lit. She did feel a switch on the wall, but decided to leave it off at the last second, choosing to climb the stairs in the dark and just hope that none of the steps were missing. No sense leaving an obvious trail for the men after her.

The chill air bit at her cheeks as she rushed across the gravel-covered roof. The sun would soon set. Would that be better or worse for her? Dyna wasn’t sure. Her biggest advantage was simply knowing when someone was looking at her. A lack of light would keep her out of sight.

But she couldn’t wait around. Dyna didn’t know if the men had a way through that electronic lock, if they would just sit around and watch for her leaving, or if they would try to break through what was surely a glass front window to whatever store she had been inside. Two-thirds of those options would see them up on the rooftops after her sooner rather than later.

At the third roof, Dyna angled herself toward the front edge while keeping an eye on her dark mirror.

The third building didn’t have a straight drop down to ground level. That was the first thing she noticed. Some kind of rain cover hung over the door below the roof level. It wasn’t a long drop to it. Maybe her full body height. Hard and rigid, would it hold her weight? Probably. She didn’t think she weighed that much. From the overhang, it wasn’t much further to the ground.

It didn’t take long to spot the silver car either. There were a few of them, but only one with lights on and the engine running despite there being no people in the driver seat or the passenger seat. Whose was it? Was the door unlocked?

The mirror in her hands lit up. She threw a look back over her shoulder to find one of the black clothed men standing at the roof entrance a few buildings back.

The ladder wasn’t far. The second building had been much longer than the third or forth were. She was closer to it than he was.

But then he would just follow her into the pizza shop.

No time to sit around and deliberate. He was already moving.

Dyna jumped over the side, landing on the overhang without much trouble.

The second drop looked a whole lot higher than she had thought it was going to be, even from the lowered spot.

No choice.

Dyna landed hard on her feet, stumbling forward from her momentum and slamming her shoulder into a black minivan parked alongside the road. Biting her cheek at the ache, she pushed off and ran around to the silver car. Dyna couldn’t help the laugh she let out at finding the door unlocked.

She slipped inside the driver’s seat, threw the gear into drive, and hit the gas without even slipping her seatbelt on.

The mirror was dark for the moment. She didn’t know how long that would be the case, but she was hoping that it meant that nobody had seen her get into the car. If nobody had seen her get into the car, driving normally was the best option. Make it look like she was just another car on the road.

The tension in her stomach still made her scream when a loud buzzing ring came from the car’s speakers. Dyna took her eyes off the road long enough to find a phone in the cup holder.

Grabbing the phone, Dyna swiped to answer and immediately shouted, “Beatrice, I’m in the car! Where do I—”

Dyna, fully prepared for a calm voice offering her instructions on how to fix the situation, screamed a second time as a litany of profanity, pleading, demanding, and other detritus started shouting over the car’s speakers. The car’s owner? Dyna couldn’t hang up fast enough.

“This is Beatrice. Take—”

“I stole a car.”

“Take a left at the next intersection. Are you still being pursued?”

“I don’t know? The mirror is dark.”

“Clarify mirror.”

“The artifact. The one Doctor Cross gave me.”

“Understood. Note made and submitted for scientific review for Doctor Cross. Continue straight through the next three intersections.”

Dyna tried to take another few breaths to calm down. “What about the car? Someone called the phone just before you did. They definitely knew I stole it. Maybe they saw me from whatever shop they had been in. They might have seen my face.”

“Irrelevant.”

“What? But—”

“Subject Dyna Graves is the object of an ongoing Level Five incident. I have been granted elevated permissions to see you to safety. All other matters can be dealt with later. Turn right at the next intersection then take an immediate left.”

Dyna’s hands kept a tight grip of the steering wheel. The man on the phone had probably just run into the store for a quick moment, leaving their keys inside to keep the engine warm. That was why Beatrice had said that the opportunity would only be available for a short time.

Maybe Idaho was different from what she was used to, but Dyna could hardly believe that someone would just leave their car unlocked. Or leave a car unlocked with the keys in the ignition.

Once she was safe, she could hand the car over to the police and Carroll could help explain what happened, keeping her out of trouble. The phone kept buzzing with what were surely angry text messages and phone calls that went ignored. She would probably have police on her sooner rather than later. Especially if the car or phone had any kind of tracking. The car wasn’t particularly new, but it did have a wireless connection to the speakers.

She could only hope that they would all forgive her in the end.

While that made her feel marginally better, she couldn’t help but cringe every time she hit a bump too hard. This was someone else’s car.

Trying to focus on the road as she followed Beatrice’s continued instructions, she kept glancing down at the mirror, which had returned to its normal job of reflecting the world. That was… a good sign, right? Maybe it meant that she was far enough away from those two men that it couldn’t pick up their vision.

Supreme Eight Motel and Inn was a dingy little hovel that looked like it had seen better days. Those days were probably circa nineteen-sixty-three. It was a single story line of rooms with the doors all open to the street.

“Room four. Knock three times. When answered, give the pass phrase White four-one-one. Beatrice Emergency Task Resolution Environment standing down.”

“Wait!”

Phones didn’t click when they hung up, but Dyna still imagined the noise. She stared at the face of the phone for just a minute, noting three hundred messages had been sent to the number in the ten minutes it took to drive out to the motel. Shaking her head, Dyna dropped the phone back into the cup holder.

Mirror clutched in one hand, Dyna knocked against the door.

It didn’t take long before a young girl opened up the door. For a long moment, she just stared up. And Dyna stared down. Had Beatrice gotten her information wrong? The girl couldn’t possibly be older than ten years old. Everything else had been right, but this?

“Who the fu—”

Someone shouted from further in the motel room. “Ruby!” she said, voice carrying that motherly admonishment that Dyna was ashamed to say she recognized far, far too well.

The little girl rolled bright red eyes that matched a gemstone in her choker. “Who the bleep are you?”

What was it Beatrice had said? “White four-one-one?”

The little girl’s eyes narrowed.

In the span of a single blink of Dyna’s eyes, she found herself going from staring in disbelief at the little girl to staring in shock at a gun aimed directly toward her.

Dyna took a step back in shock, mirror in front of her like it was some kind of especially tiny shield. She started to take another step back, but her movement went interrupted by someone else standing just behind her.

Something cold and metallic pressed against her neck.

“Why don’t we have a little chat inside?” the calm, motherly voice sounded like someone asking for a cup of tea.

Dyna had a feeling the reality was anything but. A glance down at the mirror in her hand showed off a gun barrel pressed directly against the back of her head.

“Okay?”

What else could she say?

 

 

Phillip Cross clasped his hands together. Propping his elbows up on the edge of the desk, he stared over his knuckles at the glowing monitor in front of him.

Test Subject Thirty-One Delta and Artificer Candidate number One-One-Seven, walked about in the room with the artifacts in a scene he had replayed a dozen times so far. She moved around the circular table, stopping at each item. Two of them, she didn’t seem to react to at all. The other two caused obvious discomfort. As she approached one, a grimace appeared on her face, her stance shifted with unease, observation systems in the room detected an increase in her heart rate by twenty-seven percent, and light perspiration coated her skin.

The test subject proceeded around the room, then selected one of the items that made her obviously ill. Immediately, all signs of discomfort ceased. The subject turned to the open door and walked out with one of the two fake artifacts.

Phillip’s eyes drifted to one of the graphs. The randi levels in the room remained the same before she entered the room, while she was in the room, and after she left the room.

And yet, eyes shifting to the next graph, the randi level increased in the debriefing room as the subject entered. From a steady background noise of three point four to a respectable nineteen randis. Psionic energies didn’t manifest out of nothing. The subject hadn’t appeared to do anything, but with one of the false artifacts in her hand and the others remaining in the previous room, she could be the only source.

Rolling back on his exercise ball, Phillip placed his fingers to the keyboard and continued with his report.

Subject proceeded into Idaho Falls as per the recommendation I provided. Elevated psionic energy continued to cling to 31Δ on its way out of the facility. Unsanctioned testing unfortunately precludes keeping it within the facility for continued observation. Remote monitoring equipment will have to suffice until I can convince the administrators of the value of this particular subject.

Turning to his fifth monitor, Phillip frowned at the readings coming in from Idaho Falls. Thirty-One Delta had checked in, spent approximately fifteen minutes inside her room, then left. Randi levels, initially at approximately one, raised to sixteen when she entered. Her departure caused them to drop back down to just below two, leaving a small trace of her presence behind.

He didn’t know where she had gone or for what reason she had left. Irritating.

“Beatrice. Any updates on Thirty-One Delta?”

“Subject position unknown.”

Adjusting his glasses in annoyance, Phillip composed a new email to the administrators. His fingers dashed across the keyboard, filling out yet another petition to install additional psionic monitoring equipment throughout the nearby cities. It was, quite frankly, unacceptable. They had scanning equipment at airports and on all roads in and out of Idaho Falls, but next to nothing in the city itself.

At least that was something Walter would agree with him about. Phillip rarely saw eye-to-eye with the agent, but would certainly use the man when he could. Walter had the ear of the administrators. The lead trainer and scout for potential artificers had an eye for security, possibly as a result of his artificers being drawn toward trouble. There wasn’t a single exception among his six.

After CCing Walter on the email, Phillip stood, sending his seat rolling back against the wall of his office. He locked his terminal, shut out the lights, and ensured that the door locked before he left.

There was nothing more to do at the moment. Human as he was, his body required rest at some point or another. Best to catch a quick nap now. His subject would trip a sensor sooner or later. Hopefully the ones back in the hotel room. If she tripped a different sensor, it would likely mean that Walter had recruited a spy who was trying to leave the city with an artifact. From her records, Phillip couldn’t see any way that Thirty-One Delta was a spy, but everyone had a price.

It wouldn’t take much in her case. Just someone showing up and offering her what she wanted. A chance to be special. It was, after all, what he had done just a few hours ago.

Taking that in mind, perhaps it was a good thing she had selected one of the fake artifacts. If she did disappear on him, Carroll wouldn’t lose much aside from one of many test subjects.

Phillip didn’t quite make it to the elevator that would take him out of Psychodynamics and to the topside dormitories. A young man stood in the hallway between the office complex and the dormitory elevator. There were a number of researchers, technicians, maintenance crew, medical personnel, and other crew with authorization to be down in Psychodynamics. Each division had their own uniforms, making it fairly obvious who was part of which team.

A gray, sleeveless vest, worn open at the front and trimmed with blue, was not among the uniforms. Neither were blue and black striped gloves that went up to the elbows but lacked fingers. Absolutely nobody wore shorts with striped socks and sandals.

Grimacing, Phillip turned around. It wouldn’t be the first time he napped in his office. Beds were more comfortable and gave him better sleep, but his office did have a couch.

Before he could make it more than three steps, a flash of blue shimmered at his side.

Fogged yet blue eyes stared at him from centimeters away from his face.

Phillip’s heart lurched in his chest. It took all his composure to keep from crying out in alarm.

“Sapphire,” Phillip said, taking a slow and careful step backwards. “I thought you were tracking down that suspected Aleut artifact in Alaska.”

The man didn’t step back so much as he glided back. Head and shoulders hanging as if he were held up by a rope attached to his waist, his head lolled from one side to the other.

“That’s not my name.” “I have no name.” “Todd, why won’t people call me Todd?”

Three sets of voices echoed around Phillip. He grimaced at each. They all sounded like they were coming from different directions and different people. A child, an elderly woman, and man with a heavy British accent. Not the posh Queen’s English accent, but that of the almost unintelligible Cockney accent. None of the voices came from the boy in front of Phillip.

Artifacts tended to do something to their artificers. Generally minor things. Personality shifts that might make them less concerned with personal wellbeing if their artifact could easily fix their bodies. Or perhaps they might become more violent if given an artifact known to belong to a murderer. Small yet notable differences. Codename: Sapphire, on the other hand, had been disturbed before bonding with the Marionette’s Control Bar. A man unable to identify himself amid the millions of minds his psionic potential copied over the top of his own thought patterns.

Bonding a man with the most severe case of dissociative identity disorder ever documented to an artifact well documented for its dissociative themes had likely not been a wise decision in retrospect, but that had been before Phillip’s time. Back when Carroll had been throwing pseudoscience at the wall to see what would stick.

One of Walter’s six successful artificers.

In Phillip’s opinion, his definition of success differed from that of the administrators and colleagues. The other five were at least stable. This one?

Phillip considered turning and walking away. If there was one good thing about Sapphire, it was the artificer’s well documented aversion to violence. Creepy though he was, there was nothing to fear.

But… this was different than other times Phillip had interacted with Sapphire.

There was no Walter rushing up to stand in between them.

The hall, Phillip noted, was empty aside from Sapphire.

One opportunity, if used wisely, could open a great many doors.

A nap could wait.

“Todd, then?” Phillip said. No one had ever accused him of having a good smile, but he tried adopting one anyway. “Perhaps you might be willing to join me for a few quick tests?”

“Tests,” a voice said from Phillip’s left. “It always wants tests.” “But never tests itself.”

“I run tests on myself constantly, Sapphire. Or have others do them—I don’t want to bias the results,” Phillip said with a laugh that sounded forced even to his own ears.

“Tests, yes. I’d like that.”

Only one voice that time? Phillip kept his eyes on the floating body in front of him, but nothing more came out of it. “Lovely. Shall we head to the synapse mapping chamber? I was reviewing your charts last night in preparation for a project of my own and noticed that you hadn’t had an update in over three years.”

Fixing his smile in place, Phillip started walking. Sapphire drifted along beside him, still slumped like a string was pulling his body. His sandals grazed the floor.

“I know your project.” “I felt your project.” “It drew me back.”

That almost made Phillip stop, but he managed to keep walking. “You came back from looking for an artifact because you felt something?”

“No artifact.” “We found nothing.”

Speaking of himself in the plural now? Or had he been partnered with someone else? Artifact acquisition wasn’t Phillips department; he often only knew the basics if that.

“So you sensed something here?”

“Yesterday.” “We immediately returned against directives.”

“Yesterday? The psionic cascade?” That was the only thing that Phillip could think of that happened yesterday. Subject Thirty-One Delta’s burst had been prolific enough to reach the surface even from the depths beneath Carroll’s main campus, but to reach Alaska?

Or was it a unique facet of Sapphire’s ability?

A spark brightened in Phillip’s eye. Curious and curiouser.

“Who screamed?”

“Screamed?” Phillip glanced up and down the hall. The still empty hall. “No one screamed.”

“Not now.” “Who noticed me?” “I felt your project.” “I was your project, momentarily.”

“Oh. You mean…” Phillip trailed off, mind focused entirely on the subject in front of him. It took him a long moment to remember the actual name of the other subject. Long enough to push inside the Neural Connection Mapping room. “Danny? That sounds about right.”

“That isn’t my name.” “Wasn’t my name.”

“Oh? It was something like that.” The whispers swirled around Phillip. Irritated whispers. He ignored them. “Mind taking a seat in the machine? I’ll prepare the iodine injection.”

Sapphire didn’t so much as take a seat as his body flopped over the machine’s bench and went entirely limp.

The neural imaging machine looked similar to standard MRI or CT machines. A long table that would slide into and out from a large donut-shaped ring. All the intricate internals were shielded from view with plain white plastic. A coloration and material that clashed with the aesthetics throughout the rest of Psychodynamics.

Phillip wasn’t quite sure why they spent so much money on what could easily be replaced with plain concrete walls, but suspected the answer involved eccentric investors.

“Did you say that my subject felt you?” Phillip asked as he pressed a thick needle into Sapphire’s arm. There really should be a few other attendants present, both to ensure proper procedure took place and to assist with any complications that arose, but that would require contacting people.

Contacting people meant that Walter would hear about this sooner. Walter hearing about it meant that he would likely intervene, pulling his precious pets away from Phillip before proper science could be done.

“I felt me.” “Everyone feels me.” “Nobody notices me.”

Phillip didn’t say anything to that. He wasn’t sure what to say to that. Talking rarely resulted in useful information. Even when what they said made sense—which was a rarity when Sapphire was involved—everything other people said held biases in some way or other. Phillip much preferred hard data. Unfortunately, with so much about the human mind, consciousness, and psionic energies still unknown to science, hard data wasn’t as readily available as he felt it should be.

“Lie down and don’t move.”

The body on the bench didn’t move. Phillip had to reposition Sapphire’s head and neck, but left the rest of his body entirely alone.

Satisfied that Sapphire was doing as directed, he moved back into another chamber, one separated by psionically shielded glass to prevent any interference in the machine. A twist of a few knobs and a press of the large green button started the machine.

It hummed, leaving Phillip little to do aside from humming along with it as he watched the images, charts, and graphs fill themselves in on the terminal monitor in front of him.

Anomalies quickly manifested. Namely in the utter lack of activity within the body. Electrical activity in Sapphire’s brain barely existed. Not quite to the point of a corpse, but he had seen brain-dead patients with more lights on inside their heads. A quick touch to the terminal pulled up Sapphire’s old scans. Three years, not long before he acquired the Marionette’s Control Bar.

The old scans were chaotic. Almost the complete opposite. Every single synapse had constant activity. Not only that, but every few seconds, the entire pattern changed. With the mapping machine building the map in layers, it was like every few layers came from someone else’s brain.

Subject: Sapphire. Consciousness exists within artifact 0305? 0305, the Marionette’s Control Bar, is little more than a few sticks of wood and a few dangling strings. It is doubtful that anything would appear on a mapping image, but it should be tested anyway. When that fails to produce any results, how best to devise a device to detect consciousness?

Phillip’s finger tapped beside the keyboard as he considered the problem. He was not a hardware specialist. Psychodynamics had its own manufacturing division for just this sort of reason, but it was up to people like him to figure out the theory behind the devices. Manufacturing couldn’t do a thing with an imprecise order to simply build a consciousness detecting device.

The door to the mapping room slid aside before the imaging could finish.

Sapphire’s body dragged itself out of the machine, producing a few smeared layers that nonetheless lacked any activity. After a few blank layers, the machine produced an error and shut itself down.

Just as well. Walter walked into the room. Eyes hidden behind his mirrored shades, Phillip couldn’t see the other man’s full expression. He didn’t look particularly upset, which was good news. His lips still curled into a deep frown as he looked through the glass and spotted just who it was manning the controls.

Phillip waited, mentally preparing himself for the argument that was sure to ensue. Walter delayed, saying a few words to Sapphire that Phillip didn’t bother to flip on the room’s microphone to listen to. It ended with the artificer drifting out of the room while Walter approached the control room.

“Cross.”

Phillip wasn’t sure what he was supposed to take from the flat, low tone. “Walter. How have you been today?”

The sunglasses made it hard to tell, but Phillip was fairly certain he was getting an incredibly dull look.

“Yeah, I hate small talk too,” he said. “Which is why I decided to take action instead of talk. Did you know Sapphire hasn’t had a proper mapping since before he and the artifact bonded?”

That actually made Walter falter. He cocked his head to the side, raising an eyebrow. “He has. I’ve seen them.”

“Oh?” Phillip turned back to his terminal, tapped a few times, then turned the monitor to display the list of Sapphire’s scans. “They stop three years ago. Unless some idiot misnamed them. Some of our coworkers… it wouldn’t surprise me, frankly.”

“They’ve been deliberately expunged.”

“Oh?” Phillip tapped at his terminal again, returning the monitor to displaying the interrupted readings from Sapphire’s scan today. “Didn’t think the artifact research team needs to know that one of our artificers is so brain dead that I’m not sure he can be classified as a living being anymore?”

“It isn’t my call. The administrators—”

Phillip slammed his hands onto the control panel. “Administrators is the weakest excuse. They’re all a bunch of foolish idiots more concerned with accounting than proper science. You’re telling me they decided that the research team didn’t need to know something that I find incredibly vital?”

Walter crossed his arms, scowling down. “I more or less agree with you.”

“We’re like twelve blind people shoved into a small room, told to perform groundbreaking feats of research. All without smacking each other with our walking canes. Everyone has their own little projects. Nobody knows what anyone else is doing. No wonder your partner bowed out.”

Walter took an aggressive step forward. “Doctor,” he said, warning lacing his tone.

Phillip took a few careful steps backwards, trying to look more like he was pacing than running away. Mentioning Walter’s old parter was always a bad decision. For some reason, Phillip couldn’t stop himself. Walter probably wouldn’t attack him—he never had in the past—but he could find other ways to make life miserable.

“I couldn’t find Dyna in her dormitory. One of the technicians mentioned seeing Dyna down here. What were you doing?”

“Dyna?” Before Walter could respond, Phillip connected the dots. “Oh. I knew it was something like Danny… Who told you that?”

“Does it matter?”

“I would like for them to be fired immediately. Yes.”

“Cross.”

Phillip let out a long sigh, waving a dismissive hand. “A joke,” he lied. No sense hiding it any longer. He would just go through Beatrice to figure out what happened. “I put her through a single-blind artifact selection.”

Walter stepped forward again, raising his voice. “You what? You gave her an artifact?”

“No, actually. She selected a fake.”

No need to say anything more. Especially nothing about the anomalous randi levels. Delta was his. A potential artificer with all the data going to him, not being expunged before the artifact research team could see it.

His response had the expected effect on Walter. Obvious, blatant surprise crossed his face, visible even with his sunglasses in the way. “A fake?” he asked in that tone of voice that said he didn’t believe it.

“Some cheap mirror I ordered online for ten dollars. Aged it up a bit, hot glued a camera lens to the inside, and told her it was some legendary spy equipment. She’s currently ‘bonding’ with it out in the city. I sent her out there specifically to keep you from interfering—” And because the operation was technically unsanctioned by the administrators. No sense getting them involved any more than necessary. “—so I would prefer if you did not. I’m sure she’ll be back tomor—”

A two-tone alert sounded over the room’s speaker system. “Agent Walter. Your attention is required with a Level—”

“Beatrice.” Walter interrupted, sounding far angrier than Phillip had ever heard him before. Especially with someone else. Especially with Beatrice. “I am having a discussion with Doctor Cross. If this is the same kind of interruption as yesterday, I do not want to hear a word more from you. Task resolution is in your name. I’m sure you can find another way to resolve the situation.”

That had Phillip raising his eyebrows. Some kind of altercation occurred between them yesterday?

“Beatrice requests escalation of system privileges to deal with an ongoing Level Five situation.”

Walter mouthed ‘Level Five’ to himself before shaking his head. “Granted. Whatever you need. Handle it yourself.”

“Understood. Beatrice System engaging emergency Autonomous Task Resolution Environment.” A few rather angry-sounding beeps followed the edict, but Beatrice didn’t speak again.

Phillip, eyebrows slowly returning to normal, looked up at his own reflection in Walter’s lenses. “Are you sure you don’t need to handle that.”

“Beatrice will contact me again or whoever she needs to if she can’t do it herself. At the moment, I think I need to handle you. Let’s have a long chat about overstepping our bounds, Doctor.”

Phillip sighed. With any luck, Beatrice would interrupt again. Unfortunately, he didn’t believe in luck. “My office or yours?”

“Mine.”

 

 

Doctor Cross led Dyna back down into Psychodynamics. A different section of the underground research facility than she had visited last time, though the end destination was somewhat similar. Instead of a red leather chair in a room that looked like something out of the nineteen-twenties, there was a single large table. One with polished wood and smooth, sleek brass detail work.

Of course, Dyna wasn’t there for the table. The objects on the table interested her far more.

She watched through a mirrored glass as a pair of silver-suited individuals placed a simple glass vase on the table alongside a trio of other items. They held it with tongs, as if touching it through their gloves—which were even thicker than the ones Cross wore—would cause them to burst into flames.

“Artifacts,” Doctor Cross said as they set up the room. “Items, often mundane in appearance, that have gained anomalous properties through exposure to psionic energies. To most, they cause discomfort, paranoia, emotions that seem unnatural, or other feelings that can’t really be explained properly. To some, they may offer a sliver of their anomalous properties. Perhaps a gambler’s lucky chip offers them increased odds of being dealt a good hand. Or the fisherman’s tackle that always seems to catch the better fish.”

Crossing his arms, Cross looked to Dyna. “Mere slivers of their power. Those who can use the full extent of their abilities are called artificers. Not exactly an accurate usage of the word as the definition of artificer is a ‘skilled craftsman’ and not a user, but the administrators don’t see a need to change it despite my protests.”

“I… see?”

“I doubt that,” Cross said, looking back to the window. “Linguistic irritants aside, you display high probability of being an artificer. You passed the Bendall Test yet fail to display any traditional psychic abilities and your reaction to the resonant test almost confirm it. Now?”

He waited a moment, watching as the silver-suited men left the room. As soon as the far door hissed closed behind them, he motioned to the door in their room. The door, currently open, led to a small chamber through which there was another door that led into the room with the objects. More of an airlock, really.

In fact, it probably was an airlock.

“You will go in and select a single object. Whichever one feels the best to you. There is no wrong answer. As soon as you have it in hand, the door the men just left through will open. I will meet you in the following chamber.”

Dyna nodded her head. She already felt a mild tingling in her stomach. Excitement. Maybe a little apprehension. Those people who had been setting up the room had been wearing fully concealing suits and thick gloves. “Is it… safe?”

“That is a word with a muddled definition,” Cross said, fiddling with his rectangular glasses. “Every individual has their own concept of what safe is.”

“Dodging my question doesn’t instill confidence,” Dyna shot back.

“I am sure nothing irreversible will occur. We have teams on standby. Believe me when I say that we don’t want to lose such a valuable test subject so early in our experiments.”

Dyna narrowed her eyes, starting to wonder just what she had agreed to. “You mean at all.”

Cross blinked behind his glasses, slowly nodded his head, and then started to nod firmly. “Yes, of course. It would be a shame to lose you at all.”

The stiff way he spoke didn’t make Dyna any happier.

“If you would prefer to wait for Walter, I’m sure he’ll be with you some time this week. Next week at the latest.”

“No,” Dyna said, a little shocked at how quickly she responded. “No, I can do this. I just…”

“Nerves are not unexpected. I recommend taking a deep breath and letting it out nice and slow.”

Doing so, Dyna did feel a little better. Not great, but slightly less nervous. “Alright. So I just pick the one I like best?”

“Some artificers can tell exactly which artifact most aligns with them within seconds of entering the room. Others stand about and consider each, maybe even waving their hands over them to help decide. All you must not do is touch more than one. The first one you touch will be the one you must select. Failure to comply will result in the room being flooded with a sedative at which point you will be isolated and forcibly decoupled from the objects. I am told that it is not a pleasant experience.”

Dyna shuddered, picturing that glass chamber suspended over a pit. Waking up in that place didn’t sound fun. Adding ‘forcible decoupling’ sounded worse. “Glad you decided to mention that.”

“Whenever you are ready, step into the chamber,” Cross said, motioning toward the airlock.

Taking another breath, Dyna followed his instructions. The glass door hissed shut behind her. After a few audible beeps and the camera in the corner swiveling to watch her, the next door opened.

Instantly, Dyna felt a calming wave rush over her. All her anxiety and apprehension vanished, replaced with a certainty that everything would be fine. She couldn’t say where that feeling came from. Somewhere inside her.

At the Carroll Institute, it was impossible to go more than a few days without experiencing some psychic phenomenon. All initiates were given mandatory psychic resistance training to avoid complications with their peers. Because of that, Dyna knew well what it felt like to have her emotions manipulated. She could even stop it, to a degree, and fight back against the intrusive thoughts and feelings.

This felt nothing like that.

It was clearly unnatural. But Dyna wasn’t sure what to do. That uncertainty crept in, growing and growing until she realized that the permeating calm sensation wasn’t nearly strong enough to worry over. If she could upset herself just by thinking about it, Dyna could manage it.

Taking another breath, she stepped forward and into the room. Each of the four objects were set around the circular table at cardinal directions. None reached out to her instantly as Cross had suggested might happen, so she went with his other suggestion.

Stepping forward to the glass vase, Dyna held out her hand.

She held steady, several inches away from the glass to avoid accidentally bumping it, and just thought.

Nothing. No odd feelings. No strange sensations. No pull toward it.

Carefully stepping away—stumbling and falling onto the table would probably result in her being sedated—Dyna moved clockwise around the table.

The second item was a coin. A tarnished brass coin with a square hole in the middle. Lettering on the front had worn down and what text it had left had obviously originated from an East Asian country, though Dyna wasn’t sure which. She didn’t want to lean closer for a better look. Instead, she just held out her hand.

Dyna didn’t like the coin. The calm she felt upon entering the room disappeared when she put her hand over it. It was a feeling, but not a particularly good feeling. The calm returned when she pulled her hand away.

The next item, a sleek, modern pocket mirror with what almost looked like a camera lens on the cover, did the same thing as the coin. If anything, she felt even worse after holding her hand over it than she had with the coin.

Moving away once again calmed Dyna down.

The final artifact actually looked like what she might expect from the term. A… She wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it was a conical piece of brown stone covered in carvings that might have been Egyptian hieroglyphs, Native American or Mesoamerican writings, or even just the whittlings of a bored Boy Scout. She was not an expert in such things and couldn’t begin to recognize where the artifact might have come from.

Holding her hand over it, Dyna didn’t feel anything at all. Much like the vase, she just felt calm and neutral.

Two things that felt bad and two things that didn’t do anything. Doctor Cross had said to pick the one that felt the best, but… which felt the best? The vase and the stone obviously made her calmer, but was that what she should be looking for?

Looking up to the mirrored wall, Dyna frowned. She couldn’t see beyond the glass. Would Cross hear her if she talked?

Might as well try.

“None of them feel good. Some are just nothing, others make me feel uncomfortable. Is that what I’m looking for?”

Dyna waited a moment, but received no response. Scowling, her eyes flicked to one corner of the room where a spherical camera with five separate lenses hid behind a clear glass pane, watching her. They were surely listening. Was it part of the test to not speak to her?

Turning her back to the camera, Dyna started circling around the room once again. She didn’t want to pick up an object and have it be nothing at all. So then was the correct choice to pick from the objects that she had a stronger reaction to, even if that reaction was negative?

Then which one from there? The coin felt ‘better’ than the mirror, but only because the emotion was weaker.

Circling the table four more times, Dyna slowly came to a decision. One not exactly based around how she felt about the objects on the table in front of her, but a decision based on her memories of the compatibility test.

The end of the compatibility test, specifically. The moment where she finally displayed some kind of psionic abilities, even if that ability had destroyed the room as she had seen on Cross’ tablet.

She had felt bad. Uneasy, uncomfortable, paranoid, and all the things that Cross had said some people felt around these kind of objects.

Dyna’s hand reached out and hovered over the pocket mirror. If anything, it felt even worse than it had a few moments ago. The calm fled, replaced entirely with uncertainty and anxiety. What if the mirror was the wrong choice? Was there a wrong choice? Would she be invited back? Should she have waited for Walter? Was this unorthodox method that Cross wanted to use actually going to do anything at all for her?

Taking a breath and letting it out slowly, Dyna lowered her hand and picked up the pocket mirror.

It was small, circular, and folded shut to protect the glass on the inside. The exterior, some kind of silver metal, had a small lens that almost looked like a gemstone in the center of one side of the mirror, under the latch that would open the mirror back up. Maybe it was some kind of spy’s camera?

Belatedly, Dyna realized that she didn’t feel any of that anxiety or apprehension anymore. Not now that she had selected an item. The unnatural calming feeling did not return, but perhaps that had been nothing more than her own mind trying to relax as she told it to do so.

Before she could examine her feelings or the mirror any further, the door slid open. The two silver-suited men stood on the other side, one of which waved her through.

Walking through, she found herself in a simple room with another red leather chair, wood and brass paneling on the walls, and black and white marbled tile. As one of the silver men directed her toward the chair, Dyna couldn’t help but wonder how many of those rooms they had around the place.

This one didn’t have a front panel sitting on the other side of the chair. In its place, a clear pane of glass separated her from Doctor Cross and a small team of men with button-up shirts and striped ties. Researchers, probably.

“Well done,” Cross said, eyes locked onto the mirror in her hands.

“Did I pick correctly?”

“There was no correct or incorrect choice. I believe I mentioned that.”

Dyna honestly couldn’t remember if he had or not. Her hands trembled slightly and her nerves felt jittery. Like she had been nervous over something and now was feeling relief. In fact, that was exactly what had happened.

“If I might ask, what made you choose that object?”

Sinking into the red chair, she looked down at the mirror in her lap, flipping the latch to open it. There were two mirrors on the inside, one slightly curved to make her appear larger than normal. She flipped it over in her hands, noting a small dent in one side of the metal cover and again noting the lens. Faint markings etched the metal around the lens, like something had been there to help disguise it but had since been removed.

“It had the strongest feeling. The vase and the stone felt like nothing at all. The other thing made me feel bad, but not quite to the same degree as this.”

“You chose the ones that made you feel bad?”

Dyna shuddered. He had nothing but curiosity in his tone, but it still felt like he was accusing her. “Was that wrong?”

“Again, there were no incorrect answers.”

“Oh.” Looking down at the mirror, she closed then opened it a few times before looking up to the glass pane where Doctor Cross had his eyes firmly fixed on her. “What is it?”

“That, subject, is zero-three-one-seven. Also known as the Operative’s Looking Glass. It belonged to a Secret Intelligence Service operative whose name has been redacted from all records, but was supposedly quite the agent. It was manufactured in the United Kingdom as an espionage device, but little else is known about its origins.”

So it was a spy camera. “What does it do?”

“That, Dyna, is for you to figure out. Every artifact results in different effects dependent on the artificer. They do generally share a theme, the theme of this one is, of course, espionage.”

“So it spies on people? Assisted clairvoyance?” Dyna couldn’t help but get excited over that. Clairvoyants were some of the more common psychics at Carroll. Being able to see things from far away might not be as directly impactful as mind control or even mind reading, but it might be fun to go to Vegas for a weekend and win some poker hands.

Not that she would. Gambling violated the Carroll Institute’s code of conduct. If found out, she would be expelled instantly.

Unfortunately, Cross just shrugged his shoulders. “Normally, we would have you isolated here for a brief bonding period. That is impossible as of this moment. We don’t want you around other psychics with that item before it fully binds to you, so I have elected to purchase you a hotel room in the city. Spend the night there, return to Carroll tomorrow morning and report on anything you have noticed about the device.”

“I can’t just sit around in this room?” The chair might not be that comfortable as a chair, but give her a blanket and Dyna could sleep just about anywhere she could sit.

“Details are classified,” Cross said, face blank. “I’m afraid Psychodynamics has a great many secrets that you will likely never be privy to.”

“Alright. I guess. So check into a hotel and…”

“Just keep the artifact close at hand. No need to keep others from touching it, but do try to avoid losing it. Recovering artifacts is always a pain in the backside. Sometimes literally with how much paperwork there is to do.”

Closing the mirror and holding it close, Dyna said, “I won’t let it out of my sight.”

“Excellent. My assistant…” Cross trailed off while looking to one of the tie-wearing researchers in the room with him. He frowned a moment before shaking his head. “This young man will give you the details of your hotel. You may take the shuttle into the city, which should leave in twenty minutes,” he said after consulting his watch.

The indicated assistant frowned at his boss, said something that Dyna couldn’t hear through the speakers. Cross must have turned the microphone off completely, as they apparently had a brief argument. The argument resulted in the assistant sighing, rolling his eyes, and then looking toward her. He reached forward and pressed a button on the computer terminal next to him.

“My name is Harold,” he said, bushy mustache wiggling as he specifically stated the name that Cross had likely just forgotten. “Or Doctor Porter, if you wish. I’ll meet you in the hall. Jenkins, escort her out, please?”

One of the silver-suited men approached her and, without speaking, motioned toward a door behind the chair.

Keeping the mirror close to her chest, Dyna stood, eager to get moving.

Eager to find out just what the little mirror did.

 

 

 

Meditation was far from Dyna’s favorite activity at Carroll. It wasn’t electroshock testing, so it wasn’t the worst, but it was a close second. Other students seemed to like it. There were more meditation chambers at Carroll than there were students and most of them saw daily use. Many were simple rooms with unobtrusive walls and floors with a mat or pillow to sit on. Others varied. Some looked like a psychologist’s sitting room. One was located beneath a large aquarium, where someone could sit surrounded by fish and water. Another was covered in gears that turned slowly to the tune of a lightly thumping piston. Everyone had their own individual preferences.

Everyone except Dyna. The unique rooms were often too busy, filled with distracting things, like the clock room with its many clocks on the walls constantly ticking away. The general rooms were often boring. As dedicated as Dyna felt she was, there were few people in the institute who had received more reprimands than her for falling asleep in a meditation chamber.

It wasn’t that she intended to nap. She just didn’t get meditation.

The instructors often said that there was no wrong way to meditate. Some people cleared their minds, sitting still in a room. Others thought about their day or paced about. Or they opened their minds—whatever that meant—listening in on the cosmos or the collective unconsciousness of humanity, ascending beyond the noosphere.

Those last ones were often the more pretentious sorts, but at least they got something out of meditation.

If there was no wrong way to meditate, didn’t that just mean that there was no correct way?

Dyna had certainly never found something that worked. Of course, nothing else she had tried worked either, but at least things that weren’t meditation often involved doing something.

But today was different.

Today, she knew she had experienced some kind of psionic event. Not just experienced, but caused. She wasn’t here to ponder on the infinite and vast. She was here to remember.

To remember how she felt. To remember what happened. To try to feel like she had in that test chamber.

Dyna didn’t necessarily intend to do anything. She certainly didn’t want to pass out or cause trouble for the rest of the institute.

When Walter came for her, she wanted to be ready. Not to sit about twiddling her thumbs for hours while he just watched.

The mirror chamber seemed the best for her needs. It wasn’t the most popular meditation chamber. In fact, she idly noted the check-out logs for the room and found that only two other people had used it in the last six months. Neither recently.

Pulling open the door to the room, it wasn’t hard to see why. No matter which way she looked, she saw no end to the room. It stretched out infinitely in every direction, only broken by white lights and a black border around the lights. The black and white beams lined the corners of the physical chamber, making the place look like infinite cubes. Naturally, an infinite number of Dyna clones occupied each of the infinite cubes, all moving just as she did.

There were rumors that some poor psychic who could perceive alternate versions of the world had gone mad and killed himself in this room, leaving a psychic imprint haunting the place. But that was probably just a rumor. There were a lot of those kinds of stories dotted around Carroll.

Dyna thought it would be good for her because it somewhat resembled the chamber from the other night. That room had only had one panel open at a time and had otherwise looked like some mid-century smoking room, but more than once, those panels had opened up to an infinite stretch of rooms.

At the very center of the room there was a small black tiled platform set into the mirrored floor. A small square pillow provided just a little cushion as she sat down. Dyna kept her posture upright, legs crossed beneath her.

Closing her eyes seemed like it would defeat the purpose of coming into the mirrored room, but she did so anyway. She was just here for the idea of the room.

And then… This was the part she always faltered at. Thinking.

What had she actually felt during that test? Agitated. Uncomfortable. Disturbed. It hadn’t been a very pleasant test. Most of the images she had seen in the— What had Walter called it? Psychically sensitive paper? None of it had been calm or soothing images. And it supposedly came from her mind? It had been like her horror movies had come to life and, given that she always occupied a space in those visions, she had featured in those horror movies front and center.

“Have I watched too many?” Maybe she could cut back a bit. Skip Friday movie night with Melanie. Or maybe schedule a few sessions with a therapist. Carroll had plenty to spare.

She had figured out that they were illusions pretty much right away. They hadn’t frightened her. A disturbing image was disturbing regardless of context, so she had still been affected.

Was that it? Did she need to be disturbed and uncomfortable to use whatever power she might have? That wasn’t unheard of. Lots of lectures at Carroll covered the demonstrated proof that stressful situations often enhanced an individual’s powers.

That wasn’t good. Dyna didn’t get scared at much of anything. Movies, roller coasters, games, stories, and so on… It was all fake, so she couldn’t ever feel frightened. Rather, she liked that kind of stuff. And her power didn’t activate under stress alone or she would have done something far earlier during any number of tests—both academic and medical.

Had that clicking pen played any real role?

Dyna tried to remember how it felt. That weight and stony surface. The odd way it clicked in her mind but not in reality. It was much easier to remember than vague emotions and memories. So much easier that she could practically feel its weight in her hand.

Swallowing, Dyna peeked an eye open.

She glanced down at her hand.

Her very empty hand.

With a snort, she blew a lock of platinum hair out of her face.

Dyna didn’t know what she expected.

Scratch that. She knew exactly what she expected.

An empty hand.

Crick forming in her back from sitting still for an hour, Dyna stretched to the left, then to the right. Her mirrored clones did the same, following her movements. None of them moved in different ways than she did, unlike many of the copies of herself from the night before.

This…

She didn’t want to say that it had been a waste of time, but she didn’t really feel like she had accomplished anything either.

No. That wasn’t true. Dyna had to remind herself, but she accomplished exactly what she wanted to accomplish. She wanted to remember how she felt. Not do something.

But she wasn’t satisfied.

Maybe trying a little more wouldn’t hurt?

Feeling several snaps run down her spine, Dyna straightened herself out again.

And…

This. This is the part that always falls apart.

From what she had learned, both through lectures and asking her contemporaries, most people simply used their abilities instinctively. Like moving an arm that they had always had. They could train their abilities in the same way that someone could train their arm by lifting weights, but they still knew they had that extra arm in the first place.

Dyna didn’t. She didn’t know how she was moving her regular arms. It was all electrical impulses in her brain sent through nerves to tell muscles to contract and expand, but it wasn’t like she thought about those impulses. She just did it.

Just doing it didn’t work for psychic abilities. At least not for her.

She looked around the mirrored room, wondering if she could trick herself into getting scared. Maybe by imagining some shadow moving? Or one of the mirrored copies of herself moving unnaturally?

Standing, Dyna turned in place, both looking and trying to imagine something spooky.

Only to turn to find a bald man in the room with her, grinning wildly with his eyes hidden behind the glare on his rectangular glasses.

Dyna let out a startled shout. One the apparition quickly echoed, stumbling backward as he did so, bumping into the door and falling as the door pushed open against his back.

That… broke the tension. Whatever fright Dyna momentarily felt vanished as she rushed across the room to help him up. He was clearly one of the staff if his long white laboratory coat was any indication. If she had knocked him over using some psychic power, she might have been given a pass. But startling someone, even if they startled her first, was probably not a good look.

Luckily, the man didn’t seem hurt. He accepted her hand to help him back to his feet. As she did so, she couldn’t help but notice some fairly thick black gloves hiding his hands. After brushing off his lab coat, he straightened himself and donned a wide smile once again.

“Terrifically sorry,” he said, bowing his head. “Didn’t intend to startle you.”

He was bald, but he had thin yet full sideburns of black hair starting at the arms of his glasses and extending down along his chin to a pointed beard. Realizing that she was staring, Dyna started. “No, no. Sorry for screaming. I just… wasn’t expecting anyone.”

“I did knock,” he said. He had a slight accent. Slavic? “I suppose the soundproofing deadened the noise. Thought you fell asleep, or were in some manner of trance-like state.”

Dyna didn’t bother saying that she wasn’t. It should have been obvious. Stranger was that she hadn’t noticed him enter. The door to the room was a mirror that didn’t quite seamlessly align with the rest of its wall. That and a simple metal plate to push against were all that indicated its presence. But with the door open, there should have been a gaping hole in all the mirrored cubes.

Deciding she had been overly focused on less obvious things to frighten her, Dyna shook her head. “Was there something I could help you with, uh…”

“Cross. Doctor Phillip Cross.”

“Oh…” The name meant nothing to her.

Apparently realizing that, the taller man chuckled. “We haven’t met before, but I was the one overseeing your eventful compatibility analysis down in Psychodynamics.”

“Oh. Oh!”

“Yes, oh!” He peered over her shoulder, dark eyes looking into the mirrored meditation room. “You were… trying to recreate the situation?”

“Yes, I— I mean, no. Maybe? Sorry. I know Walter said to wait until after all the test results came back.”

“Bah!” Cross waved a gloved hand. “Walter is too cautious. We are scientists! No scientist ever made eggs without breaking a few chickens.”

“Uh…”

“You understand my meaning,” he said. Not as a question, but as a statement. And it was true, she had heard the actual idiom plenty of times. “Point is, I enjoy a subject with some drive.”

He paused like he expected some kind of response. “Right,” Dyna said, not sure what else to say.

“Now, I did not come to wax philosophical over culinary feats.” He turned on the heel of a thick boot that looked like it was designed to keep chemicals far away from his feet. “Walter told you nothing, yes? Would you like to know what happened during your test?”

“Yes?”

Cross pulled a fairly large tablet out from an even larger pocket on his laboratory coat. Dyna wasn’t sure if she was supposed to see his password or not, but she was standing right next to him and he didn’t make any attempts to hide it. It wasn’t even biometric. Maybe it didn’t have anything really secure on it.

After tapping a few times to open the image gallery, he flipped the screen to face her.

A twisted, broken room filled with chains, hooks, blades, blood and viscera. She might have thought it to be one of those horror houses that popped up around Halloween were it not for the chair in the center. An overlarge chair made from red leather and dark stained wood.

Cross reached over the top of the tablet and swiped off to one side. The image changed, showing off the same room but from a different angle. This time, the angle displayed the entrance to the room. And the smeared wall, the same one that she had smeared by dipping her fingers in the wet oil painting.

Walter had said that the room changed to reflect what she saw during the test… but it was like all the scenes she had seen had merged together. Not all of them, unless they had already removed the headless bodies and trees from the forest vision she saw—one inspired by Sleepy Hollow, she presumed.

“We had to cut our way into the room,” Cross said as he swiped the tablet again. “The doors were inoperable. You…”

Someone had taken a picture of her on the floor in front of the chair, soaked in blood. With her eyes wide open in the stillness of the image, it almost looked like she was dead. Or rather, it did look like that. Dyna couldn’t suppress a shudder.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to dama—”

“Sorry!” Cross snapped, shoving his glasses up his nose. “The only ones sorry should be the accountants when they see the cost to repair the room and hall!”

Dyna winced. That didn’t exactly make her feel better about the situation.

“To the rest of us, this is data. We’ve seen subjects like you before, Miss… whatever your name was—”

“Graves. Dyna Graves.”

“Yes, that,” Cross said, dismissing her with a wave of his hand. “We’ve seen those who have had trouble with the regular curriculum here at Carroll’s topside. Their powers don’t fit into the neat mental categories that your peers occupy. And they often need a little help.” He pointed a lithe finger back toward the mirrored meditation chamber. “Sitting in there… you’re not going to get anywhere thinking to yourself.”

“Well sorry,” Dyna snapped, feeling attacked. Nothing worked. Nothing ever got her anywhere. “It’s not like you guys handed me an instruction manual.” Immediately, she winced. “Sorry. I’m just… frustrated.”

“Understandable.” Cross dropped the volume of his voice, turning his back on Dyna. “You canceled plans for your life thinking you were coming here to be a psychic. You had a college you wanted to go to? A career planned out? Perhaps a significant other that you left behind?”

“I was still trying to decide, actually. And no to that last one,” Dyna said with a self-deprecating chuckle. “Not a lot of people talked to me. I… was the kind of person who wore all black, and ran through more black lipstick and eyeliner than the rest of the student body put together. Didn’t have a lot of friends.”

Cross let out a noncommittal hum. If he styled himself in high school as he did today, Dyna doubted many people talked to him either. “And now you’re here. Enjoying yourself?”

Dyna didn’t answer. A day ago, she might have answered right away. A negative answer, but still an answer. Now? Well, it wasn’t like her overall impression of the Carroll Institute had changed much over a single night, but things were different now.

She flipped the tablet over after swiping back an image to show off the disturbed room.

“I feel like I would enjoy myself a whole lot more if I knew how I did this.”

“Indeed. And Walter wants to be in charge of your case. He is talented… if cautious and orthodox. He’ll appear before you sometime this week and will want to take you down to Psychodynamics to undergo some testing and training. He’ll take it slow and steady—after all, he doesn’t wish for this to occur again,” Cross said, pointing one of his narrow fingers at the tablet. “Eventually, I imagine, you’ll become what we call an artificer. A special type of psychic who uses certain psionically sensitive artifacts to enhance your difficult-to-use abilities. While I admit that he may have an unexpected breakthrough, I estimate you’ll come into said abilities within five years.”

“Five…”

“Give or take.”

“That… feels like a lot,” Dyna said, shoulders slumping.

Some of the people in the dormitory were younger than she was and had full control over their abilities. Most were around her age, seventeen to twenty-five at the oldest. Right after high school age. Only a handful were actually older than that. Melanie was twenty-four, and she was the oldest on the third floor.

Cross widened his smile. “Would you like to… accelerate the timescale? Skip over a few of the tedious portions of ability development?”

“I…” Dyna narrowed her eyes. She wanted to agree, but while she hadn’t developed any ability here, she had learned a bit about science. “Should a scientist really be skipping steps? Methodology is important.”

“Bah!” Cross waved a hand. “You’ve been here for six months, yes? Surely you don’t want to go through another six months of the same unproductive activities in the name of methodology. Outdated methodology.”

“Six more… Like, electroshock tests?”

“Like electro—It’s actually electroconvulsive thera—”

“Whatever you call it, it doesn’t work!” Apparently it worked well for some people. Even people undergoing regular therapy outside Carroll’s psychic training. And that was great for them.

It didn’t work for her.

“Exactly. We skip things we know don’t work.” Cross nodded his head as if that settled matters.

And it did. Kind of. Skipping things that didn’t work, getting straight to things that produced results? That was all Dyna wanted out of Carroll. She wanted it to not be a waste of time. She wanted to not continue to waste time.

Here was the opportunity to agree to just that.

“I’ll do it.”

“Excellent,” Cross said, clapping his hands before rubbing them together. The thick gloves he wore squeaked as he did so. “In truth, Walter should have had you in compatibility testing months ago. But he wanted to wait. Wanted to offer you a chance to be normal, in as much as anything at Carroll is normal.” The way he said the word made it sound as if he utterly detested the very idea.

Dyna… didn’t exactly disagree. She didn’t want to be normal. Who did? Every child dreamed of being someone special. The sad fact of reality was that very few people could actually be special. By definition, the average person was exactly that: Average. Normal.

“What, exactly, is the compatibility testing… uh… testing compatibility for? I didn’t get a clear answer when I asked Walter.”

“Wonderful question. That is our next stop.”

 

 

 

 

Dyna awoke to dim lights, a low hum droning on in the background, and a steady beeping that sounded like every electrocardiograph she had ever had. Which, she supposed, explained the dozen wires stuck to her chest, arms, and legs. It wasn’t the first time she had been hooked up to such a machine. Rather, she had lost count of how many medical tests she had been through. Carroll mandated regular health checkups of both the body and mind.

She had always been told that, should she awaken in such a situation, she should never remove anything attached to her body. That was mostly because an intravenous plug could cause damage if removed improperly, but also because who knew what things were hooked up to alarms. Triggering a code blue would just cause unneeded stress for the hospital staff and possibly take attentions away from other patients who were actually in trouble.

Dyna sat up and started looking around the bed for any buttons that might call a nurse, only to stop.

This wasn’t any normal hospital room.

The bed was normal enough. It was a mechanized bed capable of bending at both the back and leg sections. A stack of computers next to her were hooked up to the cables attached to her body, measuring her cardiac rhythm, blood oxygen levels, and psychic emissions—the latter of which read a flat zero. But beyond that was nothing but glass.

Glass walls, glass floor, and a glass ceiling. One of the walls had a glass door, but no obvious means of opening the door.

Beyond the glass was nothing. Nothing at all. Wires suspended the chamber within some kind of spherical room, but she couldn’t see any other details. The light built into the frame of her glass home wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the entire space.

Suddenly caring a whole lot less about setting off any alarms, Dyna climbed out of bed. Several of the ECG nodes fell off, held on by a light adhesive only. She quickly tore the rest off, allowing her to move freely about in her medical gown—someone had changed her since she could last remember. An IV plug in her arm stayed where it was, but the saline bag was hooked to a pole with wheels, allowing her to move about with it.

Not that there was anywhere to move to. It took five paces to get from the bed in the middle of the room to the doorway. There was no button and no handle, just glass. She thought to hammer against it, but movement in the corner of her eye stayed her hand.

A camera. Spherical with a clear protective glass, behind which an array of five lenses and a single red light pivoted to face her.

“Please remain calm.” It was the same feminine voice from the elevator. The one that Walter had spoken to in order to bring her down into the basement.

“What happened? What’s going on? Where am I?”

“An unforeseen anomaly during an experiment rendered you unconscious. You were brought here to recover in safety. Your current location is… classified.”

The way the voice spoke was strange. It wasn’t smooth dialog, more like it was reading from a list of possible responses, adjusting each sentence with parts of other sentences. Especially its last sentence, where there was a long pause before it said ‘classified’. Some kind of automated assistant? Everyone’s phones had something similar these days.

“Agent Walter has been alerted to your wakefulness and is on his way. Please remain calm.”

Hearing that a familiar face would soon be here did provide some measure of calm. Nodding to the camera, Dyna backed up and sat on the side of the bed. It wasn’t like there was anything else she could do anyway. Not unless she wanted to take the IV stand and start swinging it at the glass.

Given the near abyss below her, she doubted that shattering the glass would accomplish much other than send her into the abyss and anger her captors.

Captors? Were they captors?

According to the voice, she was here to recover after an incident, not imprisoned.

Closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose, Dyna tried to remember exactly what had happened. She could clearly recall being left in the room with the stone spike pen thing and the walls opening up. Each one showed a distorted version of the room she had been in. Some were simply mirrored, others were… worse. One looked like a slaughterhouse with chains and slabs of meat hanging from the ceiling. And she had been fairly certain that the meat had not been from animals.

She had tried to ignore them, but it hadn’t been easy until she started turning the chair to face away from the images. Even then, she had still felt them. If she knew anything about Carroll, it was that odd feelings were, more often than not, some kind of psychic influence and not mere happenstance.

Movement interrupted her thoughts. Not the camera this time—though that was trained directly on her—but rather out in the distance. A drawbridge made of glass extended out from the distant wall, stretching across the chasm and to her cell. Thick cables supported it throughout the extension process, coming from somewhere high above. Probably the same place where the wires holding up the glass cage came from.

The walkway connected to the cage, motorized latches hooking into the glass frame around the door. In the distance, white light flooded into the large spherical chamber as a panel in the wall slid aside.

Walter, wearing his sunglasses even in the dark room, strode across the walkway with confidence. Behind him, two… robots? No, their movements were smooth and fluid. Their silver suits just made them look like robots. Each one of them pushed a cart filled with various equipment. Some medical, which Dyna recognized from the many tests she had taken since joining Carroll, and some with less obvious purposes.

The door slid aside just as they reached it, perfectly timed so that none of them needed to slow down. However, the two behind Walter stopped at the threshold, letting him enter alone.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine, I guess. Confused more than anything. I feel physically fine. Maybe a little hungry?”

“No grogginess or lethargy? Nausea?”

“Not particularly. A little when I first woke up, but seeing this weird place gave me a jolt of adrenaline and any nausea I felt hasn’t returned.”

“Good. We weren’t expecting much. You’ve been unconscious for six hours, give or take a quarter of an hour.”

“Six hours?”

“You were sedated as a precaution. We found you unconscious in the test chamber. What is the last thing you can remember?”

Dyna told him, recounting the whole test. “I figured out they were illusions almost immediately, so I tried not to let them bother me. There were some pretty disturbing images.”

“Specifically, what is the very last thing you can remember?”

Closing her eyes, Dyna thought back. “I dropped the pen. At that moment, everything came rushing back all at once. Then nothing.”

Walter frowned, but nodded his head. “I apologize. I said I would warn you before we attempted anything dangerous.” He paused a moment, frown deepening. “To be clear, we did not expect this to be dangerous. Nothing like this happened before. We were caught off guard. I’m sure that doesn’t reassure you after the fact, but—”

“It’s fine. I’m fine.” Seeing Walter bowing his head in genuine apology weirded Dyna out. He was normally so stiff and stoic, the picture of calm confidence. She very much preferred the normal him to this sorry version of himself. “All’s well that ends well, right?” When he didn’t answer right away, she couldn’t help but feel a bit of unease. She glanced over his shoulder at the men wearing those silver costumes. “I am fine, right?”

“As far as we can tell. The two men behind me are going to get that IV line out of your arm and run a few quick tests. Simple medical matters, nothing more. You’ll be able to return to your dormitory after, unless they find problems.”

“They aren’t expecting to find problems, are they?”

“Not really. You underwent a few tests while unconscious, all of which came back without issue.”

“Good,” Dyna said with a long sigh. “Good. Then let’s get them testing. No offense, but this room is a bit unnerving.”

“It is meant to contain powerful psionic entities,” he said as he waved a hand at the two silver people. The door slid open as he did so, allowing them access.

“Powerful? Me?” Dyna scoffed.

“You might be surprised.” He smiled a calm, knowing smile. One that made Dyna raise an eyebrow. “Another time, after you’ve had some rest and time to mentally reset, I’ll show you pictures. Right now especially, we don’t want to cause any undue duress before these men give you a clean bill of health.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Dyna said, watching as one of the men opened up a thick case containing a large device that looked like… Well, it looked like a metal colander with several curly red, blue, and green wires stuck into it at random points.

Seeing it made her sigh. Having long hair wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was a pain to wash, a pain to dry, and a pain to keep tidy. She had dyed it a silvery platinum upon first learning that she was going to attend a school for psychics, but hadn’t maintained that dye in the past while leading to dark roots. Worst of all, a school for psychics had a lot of equipment that went on the head.

Like this psionic waveform analysis device. Every time she had been asked to wear it, taking it off had tugged out some of her hair.

Most of her contemporaries were bald or kept their hair somewhat short. A sacrifice she hadn’t quite been willing to make, though it certainly became more and more appealing every time she went through this.

“Why are they in silver suits anyway?” Dyna asked Walter, trying to distract herself from the beeping noises coming from both the colander and a hand-held device that the other was waving over her.

“They protect against psionic energy. As I said a moment ago, you released quite the burst of uncontrolled energy. Nobody wants to take any chances.”

“Shouldn’t you be wearing a suit then?”

“I’ve had extensive training to the point where I am effectively a null. Besides that, I thought it might help if you saw a familiar face rather than your own mirrored reflection.”

While Dyna could definitely appreciate the sentiment, she wasn’t sure if she should mention that his sunglasses were heavily mirrored to the point where she could have done her makeup in the reflection without any issue.

Deciding to just sit still and silent in the hopes that the tests would be over with quicker, Dyna closed her eyes and simply waited. The IV line always felt unpleasant coming out. Not painful, just unnatural. But it wasn’t the first one she had ever had by far and certainly wouldn’t be the last either.

In less than an hour, the silver-suited men started packing up their equipment. Neither said a single word during their work, not to each other or to Walter, but one of them held out a small tablet for him to take before they pushed their carts back down the walkway. Walter spent a few minutes after they left silently reviewing the information. Eventually, he nodded.

“I’m going to schedule you for a full CT and MRI. Nothing here indicates a problem, but best to be safe.” He tucked the tablet under his arm and motioned. “Your clothes are in a room outside the damping chamber. They have been washed and pressed. If you were concerned, a female technician was the one who changed you.”

Dyna tugged at her hospital gown with a grimace, not sure if she wanted to know why she had been changed. Having passed out, she could really only think of embarrassing reasons why it would be necessary.

Walter wasn’t commenting further. She decided that, as long as he wasn’t treating her differently, she didn’t really need to know.

With the silver-suited men and their carts gone, Dyna followed Walter across the narrow walkway. True to his words, there was a small antechamber on the far end where her skirt and matching black shirt were neatly folded on a table. Even her undergarments had been laundered and placed out.

The room clearly wasn’t designed as a changing room. There were a few computers and lots of screens, many of which displayed scenes of the glass chamber both from within the room itself and of the chamber from within the spherical empty space. The glass chamber had probably not been designed for medical purposes either. It just felt too bare-bones to be a hospital.

Dyna’s eyes immediately found the camera in the room. Every room in this place had a camera, but this one’s bright red light wasn’t on. It was a nice gesture, though she didn’t believe for a moment that a little red light was truly indicative of whether or not she was being watched. At least the lenses behind the protective glass bubble weren’t directly focused on her.

Shaking her head, Dyna set to getting changed. Melanie wouldn’t have cared to even look for a camera, let alone whether it was off.

Taking hold of her skirt, her fingers felt something odd. Not the smooth fabric, but something rough and stiff. She could tell that it had been washed. Yet it had something stuck to it. Brown and red, a muddy looking splotch right where her thigh would be. It took a long time to realize just what it was.

Paint.

Paint that was—that should have been nothing more than an illusion.

Dyna shuddered. Was it in her mind right now? Or was it real? If the paint was real…

Closing her eyes, Dyna did some calming breathing exercises. A deep breath went in through the nose, stayed held in her lungs, then slowly came out through her mouth. After a brief pause, she repeated the action three more times. Everything was fine. All the medical tests were fine. No matter what had happened in that room, it was over with.

As she peeled off the paint as best she could, she decided to not participate in that test again. Not until she figured out exactly what its purpose was and what it had done. To other people, that might be common sense. But she had gone through so many tests at the Carroll Institute that asking what every single one was for was an exercise in futility. Doubly so when, even as a supposed psychic, she hardly understood the science behind it all.

Dressed and calm, Dyna headed out to find Walter waiting for her. He was staring down at the tablet again, but looked up as she exited the room.

“What exactly was in the room?” Dyna asked. When Walter looked over her shoulder at the room she had changed in, she shook her head then held up her fingers. “I mean the test room.”

“What is that?”

“Flecks of paint that were stuck to my clothes. Paint that I thought was an illusion.”

Walter pressed his lips together, nodding his head slowly. “It should have been an illusion. That is part of what went wrong.”

“What? Someone accidentally created a mural of the room?”

“You created a mural of the room. This isn’t an accusation. It is just the truth. The room was lined with psychically sensitive fabric. Under all previous tests, it merely reflects what is in the viewer’s mind. To myself and all observers, the room merely looked like a movie set with green screens on display. Until we reached you after you passed out.

“At that point, the room had changed. The current reigning theory is that your mind brought what you saw to reality, likely using the psi-fabric as a convenient canvas. As I said, we have documented the room and have pictures, though I would prefer to not show them to you until after you have had time to rest.”

“Because I might do it again?” Dyna said, trying to not sound too enthusiastic. Every type of psychic Carroll classified affected only the mind. Either their own or others. Affecting reality, if that was what Walter meant, wasn’t supposed to be possible. At least not according to dozens of lectures that she had gone through.

Then again, she wasn’t about to argue if it meant that she did have some real reason to be at the institute.

“All the tests you’ve undergone, both while asleep and just a few minutes ago, indicate that there is little chance of a second occurrence.”

Dyna slumped, a motion that did not go unnoticed by Walter.

“At least not without further investigation. This is new territory. The theories and ideas are a mere six hours old. Go back to your dorm, rest up, get the scans done to ensure there are no problems, and we’ll reconvene at a later date. Preferably after the scientists have had a chance to go over all the data.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Then let’s get topside.”

Dyna had a small pep in her step as she followed after him. She wasn’t just a glorified experimental control after all. That alone left a giddy feeling in her stomach. Even with passing out and waking up in a fairly scary place, she couldn’t help but feel utterly thrilled.

Six hours passing meant that it was early evening. Maybe around sunset? She was hungry, but not particularly tired. Which might have had something to do with her medically induced coma. Either way, between the coma and the excitement, she doubted she would be able to sleep tonight.

In fact, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep.

Instead, maybe she could requisition one of the meditation rooms for a few hours.

Everyone else at Carroll thought hard about their abilities. Before this, Dyna hadn’t known what to think about.

Now, she at least had a clue.

 

 

 

“So what makes this place different than the laboratories around campus?”

Carroll Institute was as much a school-like training center as it was a research institute. All the faculty were scientists first, teachers and lecturers second. Most every student was expected to spend some time in the laboratories, undergoing experiments at the behest of the scientists. Dyna had spent more than a few hours in sensory deprivation chambers, MRI machines, and even a deep sea pressurization vessel that was supposed to study the effects of esper abilities while under hyperbaric conditions.

As someone with no demonstrated psychic capability, Dyna had to wonder if they were using her as the experimental control.

“Psychodynamics concerns itself with more dangerous research than Carroll is prepared to deal with. Nothing you need to fear,” he quickly added. “At least not today. And you will be informed of any danger in the future before agreeing to participate in such experiments.”

“I can appreciate that,” Dyna said. “I’d like to be given ample warning before we start up electroshock tests again.”

“I doubt there will be anything so uncouth here. That would be something easily handled on the surface. Imagine the comparison more like the difference between your average university research and something highly specialized like CERN’s particle accelerators or the ITER nuclear fusion project.”

“Makes sense.”

Walter led her through a doorway. One labeled above the sliding door.

ARTIFACT COMPATIBILITY

The room inside matched that of the rest of this facility. White tile, wooden walls, brass inlays, and lighting set into the floor. A large chair covered in red leather, looking like something straight out of an antique store, occupied the center of the room. To its side, a small, circular table made from wood that matched the walls held up a simple wooden box.

Aside from a simple black rug underneath the chair, there wasn’t anything else in the room.

It certainly didn’t look like any kind of research laboratory she had been to before. With the relatively dim lighting, it looked more like a comfortable study. The kind of place where she might curl up in the chair to read a book.

Walter, crossing to the center of the room, gestured toward the chair. “Take a seat and I will explain this test.”

So it is a test. Shrugging, Dyna took the seat. It was more comfortable than she would have expected from an antique, but less comfortable than she would have preferred. At least as far as padding went. In terms of design, it was a nightmare. The chair was a bit overlarge while being low to the ground. She couldn’t use both armrests at once without feeling awkward. Dyna was quite tall for an eighteen-year old woman as well, which made the relatively low seat force her knees up into the air unless she stretched her legs out halfway across the room.

If he noticed her discomfort, Walter didn’t show it. Even with his glasses in the way, she could tell that he was watching her as she tried to figure out the best way to sit in the chair.

That only made it worse.

“When the experiment begins,” Walter said, thankfully taking pity on her by continuing, “you are free to use the entirety of this room. Walk about, exercise, sit on the floor, take a nap if you find that desirable.”

Dyna tried not to scoff. Getting sleep in this chair would be nearly impossible and she wasn’t tired enough by half to try sleeping on the floor just yet.

“The wall in front of you will slide apart, revealing another room. What you see inside may or may not be accurate to reality. Within the box on the table is a pen-like object. Don’t open it now,” he said when she started reaching for it. “It is not a pen—it doesn’t write—but one end does click rather like a pen.

“Your job is to click the device any time you feel anything. And I do mean anything. Whether that be something physical, such as a change in temperature or the air conditioning creating a breeze against your skin, or something mental, perhaps irritation at your experience at Carroll thus far, boredom at this experiment, or random thoughts that you cannot quite figure out where they came from. Do you understand?”

“I guess. I just click a pen. How many times or how long does this last?”

“Theoretically, this experiment could go on for days. Obviously, that is not practical. If you wish to take a break or stop altogether, simply say so,” Walter said, pointing to the corner of the room.

Another spherical camera, just like the one in the elevator, watched her with a burning red light.

“If you do not, I will call an end to the experiment after four hours. We can resume from there tomorrow.”

He started walking toward the door, but Dyna wasn’t quite done with her questions. “Wait!”

Pausing, he turned back, one eyebrow raised above his sunglasses.

“This is going to help me?”

“This is going to help us help you.”

Dyna couldn’t help but roll her eyes at that cliché, but didn’t bother arguing.

“As soon as I am out of the room, feel free to open the box. You may even click the device a few times to get a feel for it, if you wish. You will, after all, be experiencing the sensation of holding onto it.”

“I get it, I get it. Click it whenever I feel anything.”

With a small chuckle, Walter left the room. The door slid shut in his wake.

The door, which matched the wood and brass walls, didn’t have a handle on it. Nor any button on the wall. When they approached, it slid aside on its own, stayed open while he was in the room, and only shut just after he left. There was no obvious way for her to leave the room, though her eyes did flick to the camera in the corner.

Shrugging her shoulders, Dyna put the thought out of her mind. Being taken to a strange underground laboratory and locking her into a room might have worried other people, but Walter had been more than kind in the six months that she had known him. If he really wanted her hurt, there were certainly simpler ways to go about it.

The wooden box on the table looked like an average jewelry box, made from polished wood and gleaming brass. It didn’t have any lock, nor any hinges. The lid simply lifted off to reveal a red velvet-lined interior. Inside, a black stick sat nestled among the folded cloth. While it had the right size and rough shape, someone would only mistake it as a pen from a distance. It looked more like someone who had heard about the concept of pens had tried carving one from stone.

It felt like stone as well. Taking hold of it, the rough stone was heavier than she had expected. Normal pens barely weighed anything. This wasn’t so heavy that it couldn’t be lifted, but definitely had some unexpected heft to it.

In fitting with its whittled appearance, it wasn’t perfectly smooth. However, it didn’t have any seams or obvious mechanisms. One end was pointed as a pen might be. The other flat. There wasn’t anything to click.

Dyna shot a glare up at the camera, wondering if this was some kind of joke. She was about to open her mouth and put her wonderings into words, but as she did so, she pressed her thumb against the flat end of the stick.

She just about jumped out of her seat when it made a distinctly mechanical clicking noise. Not at all different from a pen.

Nothing moved with the stick. It didn’t change shape or look at all different. And yet, pressing her thumb to the end once again, it clicked. She even felt her thumb depress, just like if she were operating a regular pen. But she couldn’t see her finger move.

The feeling was odd. A disconnect between what she felt like she was doing and what she saw herself doing. It almost felt like she was wrapped up in Melanie’s illusions. Perhaps the case had contained a regular pen that she simply saw as a stick of stone? Except she could feel the stone. Aside from the clicking, it felt like it looked. An auditory illusion then? Hearing the clicks?

Except she could feel her thumb moving even though it didn’t look like it was moving.

An uneasy feeling filled her. It was such an innocuous object, yet it managed to unnerve her nonetheless.

And she just remembered that she was supposed to be clicking when she felt things, both emotional and physical. Dyna couldn’t say how many things she had felt since picking up the pen, but gave it a good dozen clicks for good measure.

As she did so, the wood panels on the wall in front of the chair slid aside, just as Walter said they would. Beyond it, a thin glass pane separated her from an identical room. The chair was there, as was the table and the little jewelry box.

Dyna was sitting on the other side of the glass as well.

A mirror, then?

She offered a wave, one returned by her reflection.

Except it was off. Dyna waved with her left hand, holding the pen in her right. Her reflection did the same. Which sounded fine in terms of words, but mirrors were supposed to show the opposite of reality.

Dyna clicked the pen a few times.

Which meant it was a camera? And the whole wall was one large screen displaying an image flipped from what a mirror would show?

Well, Walter had said that she was free to move about. She decided to figure out where the camera was, if only to assuage her own curiosity. It wasn’t from the camera in the corner, the perspective was wrong. It was something dead ahead of her, on the wall with the screen.

Standing, Dyna sucked in a small breath when the displayed room didn’t change at all. On the other side of the glass, the other displayed version of herself still sat on the chair, looking just how she had been before getting to her feet.

Clicking the pen a few times, Dyna walked to the wall, watching as the scene before her distorted. It wasn’t changing. The pattern on the screen stayed exactly as it had been while she was sitting. It was only her perspective that changed, blurring the scene together.

She reached out and grazed her fingers across the screen. Her fingertips left a trailing smear in what she now realized wasn’t a glass screen at all. Wet grease clung to her fingers, coming off the fresh oil painting. Rubbing it between her fingers and thumb, Dyna had to fight off the scowl. She didn’t particularly enjoy getting dirty and definitely didn’t want to wipe it on her clothes.

Idly wondering if Walter would be upset should she wipe her fingers on the back of the chair, Dyna turned back to the rest of the room with a shake of her head.

Her breath caught in her throat. Again.

The room wasn’t how she left it.

The wall with the door wasn’t quite all there anymore. The hallway beyond wasn’t visible, but the wooden panels of the wall looked…

Dyna glanced down at her wet fingers.

It looked like someone had swiped their fingers through an oil painting.

Her thumb clicked against the end of the stick several times as she walked up to where the door had been. Her hand reached out, running along the now bumpy and ridged surface where a smooth wall should have been.

There hadn’t been a button or handle, but now there wasn’t a door either. “Did I just trap myself in the room?” Dyna mumbled to herself, clicking the pen. Walter’s words of this place housing more dangerous experiments came to her mind, making her shudder. He said that he would warn her before any dangerous tests, and this hadn’t been one of those. But what if something had gone wrong?

Plenty of things went wrong around Dyna. Tests especially.

But the camera was still there. The red light burned into her eyes as she looked up at it. The five lenses behind the clear dome of glass followed her as she moved.

If something had gone wrong, they would know. There was a grated speaker next to the camera, just as there had been in the elevator. They could talk to her.

A calm washed over Dyna. Nothing was wrong. She even let out a small laugh.

This was Carroll. Maybe not the campus proper, but directly beneath it. Weird things happened all the time. This might be the strangest thing, but it was hardly surprising. In fact, with a roommate like Melanie, something like this wasn’t even that big of a shock. It might be more effort than her roommate would ever put into anything, but someone with similar illusory abilities would be able to do something exactly like this.

Far more relaxed, Dyna returned to the chair in the middle of the room. She sat herself down, deciding to make herself as comfortable as possible by kicking her legs up over one armrest and leaning her head against the other. She wiped her fingers on her black skirt. The paint probably wasn’t real anyway.

If it was, she would be sending Walter the bill for a new skirt. This was one of her favorites.

A few moments after retaking her seat, during which time she didn’t click the stick, the wall’s panels slid shut once again. A minute after that, a different wall opened up to another… scene. The wall was the one opposite from the door—which a quick glance over Dyna’s shoulder showed was still smeared over—and once again, it looked rather like a mirror of the room.

Dyna raised her hand and found that it was the proper hand for a mirror this time. Deciding that investigating even that much counted as curiosity, she clicked the stick as well.

Then she debated whether or not to get up and investigate this wall as well. Did merely debating with herself count as feeling something? Dyna wasn’t sure, but the confusion over whether or not to get up might count?

People really constantly felt things, now that she thought about it. Dyna started clicking the stick repeatedly, but slowed after a few dozen clicks. Constant clicking probably went against the real purpose of the experiment. Or at least the spirit of it.

A moment after she stopped clicking, the panels on the walls slid closed.

And another panel opened shortly after.

What a strange experiment.