Chapter 72: The Mind Thief (Patreon)

Mordran watched the woman and thought it over. Now I see why Eron is so obsessed with her.

He moved one hand. Two shadows rose up out of the floor, dark shapes with no face and no detail, just the rough form of something man-sized pulling itself upright. They took the woman by the arms and forced her down onto her knees, one holding each side.

“My leg. My fucking leg, you bastard,” she shouted.

Mordran came closer and crouched in front of her. He took one of her hands and turned it over in his own, slow, pressing his fingers along the back of it, the knuckles, the line of each tendon. He began his report on the woman who had just killed his soldiers.

“Skin, natural texture. No visible surface alteration. Possible structural hardening. Possible elevated resistance to physical impact. Further testing required to confirm resistance to cuts, punctures, and other forms of damage.”

He pressed harder, watching her face for what it told him, then less hard, then harder again, until he felt the bones give where they shouldn’t.

Broken bones.

“Enhanced, hardened proteins. Skeletal structure with no trace of mutation,” he said, and let her go at last.

She held the pain without a sound.

“Scar on the left forearm.” He turned her arm and ran a finger along it. “Not consistent with a cut. Uniform. The pattern suggests a specific purpose.” He held on the mark a few seconds longer, tracing it once more before he let it go. “More data to be gathered through laboratory analysis or interrogation of the subject.”

The woman strained to get up. She pushed hard enough that the shadows holding her had to brace against it, the dark shapes shifting to keep their grip, but she still couldn’t break loose.

Mordran watched her fight it.

“This whole space is mine,” he said. “My rules, top to bottom. In here, that strength you showed against the soldiers does you no good.” He let that settle. “Tell me your secrets, and I’ll share a few of mine about this place.”

He waited. She gave him nothing.

“A shame.” He took her hands again, watching the pain move behind her face. “I listened to you and Eron on the way down here. Eron should never have offered you kindness. He should never have asked you to cooperate.” He pressed, testing. “Results don’t come from courtesy. They come from control. From study. That is the only thing that has ever worked.” He looked at her. “So you will be studied. Same as everything else in this place.”

“Name?”

No answer. One of her hands still trembled from the force he’d used.

“No matter,” Mordran said. “It’s easy enough to find. Mine is Mordran. I tell you with complete sincerity, it is a pleasure to meet you.” A thin smile. “It isn’t often I find something worth studying.”

His eye turned gold. The light from it reached toward her, and where it touched, thin gold lines spread across her skull and down into her, and she moaned with the pain of it. Mordran held there, unhurried, watching the lines move, reading what they brought back to him a piece at a time.

“How curious.” He let the gold thin out and looked over what he’d taken from her. “Your name is Operator. An unusual one.”

His eye stopped glowing. The Operator slumped, drained, sweat running down her face.

“Now you’re going to tell me you can read minds? Or did Eron give you my name?”

“Neither.” Mordran smiled. “They sent me down here in a hurry, so I only know the basics. And I don’t read minds, it’s more complicated than that. I see what you’ve seen.”

His gaze moved to her right forearm. There were letters worked into the skin all the way around it. He studied them a few seconds.

“Drawings in ink? A stupid habit.” He turned away.

“What is this place?” the Operator asked.

Mordran didn’t answer right away. He lifted his gaze to the edge of the space, where the gray cut against the world outside.

The creatures hung where the freeze had caught them, stopped mid-stride, mouths open and silent, one tipped forward into a leap that never landed. The blood from above held in the air, partway down. Mordran had seen it countless times. None of it moved him anymore.

“I always appreciate a bit of curiosity,” he said, without turning to her yet. He drew his hand slowly through the air, and the gray bent around his fingers as it moved. “A space in the shadows. A gap that shouldn’t exist, and one of the things my eye lets me find.” He looked at her at last. “I open it, I hold it, I shape it to whatever I need. My private library, if it needs a name.”

He lowered the hand. “In here we have all the time we want. Out there, not even a blink will have passed.”

Mordran stepped back and looked her over, from her face down to the broken legs. “Subject under mutation process. Total absence of structural deformation. No irregular bone growth. No skull alteration. No facial displacement.”

He thought of the soldiers she’d left on the floor above, the faces stretched, the bone pushing out through the skin. “Every other subject exposed to the mutation shows visible degradation. Without exception.” He looked back at her. “This one shows none.”

Mordran held still. “Integration with no apparent rejection. Unusual. Highly unusual.”

Back during the battle, he’d watched her talking to one side, answering something that wasn’t there. “During combat, the subject held conversation with an absent party. No visible presence. No second voice recorded.” He looked at her again. “Possible mental disorder. Possible alteration from the process. Requires further analysis.”

“I see you talking to yourself,” she said. “I’m gonna assume you’ve got a mental disorder.”

“No more interruptions.” Mordran lifted two fingers and turned them once in the air. A strip of leather formed out of nothing across her mouth, pulling tight around the back of her head, and whatever she said next died behind it.

“As I said, Operator, I can’t read your mind. But I can see what you’ve seen.” He circled behind her. “And according to Eron, you’re a traveler. So let’s start where that began.”

His eye turned gold again. The light sank into her, gold spreading through her veins, and her scream came out as nothing behind the leather.

He saw all of it.

A scarlet sphere, and the woman falling out of it onto the ground of the evolution zone. People coming for her, wanting her dead, and the Operator running. A small machine waking at her command. A fight against something massive, a Rathen Apex, the two of them tearing at each other across the dirt.

Mordran stopped, considering what he’d just seen.

“So. Tera.” He said the name slow. “I can’t hear her. But I saw the HUD. You can only speak to her out loud.” A thin smile. “Convenient. A parasite? Artificial intelligence?”

He went back in.

She stepped into a reward zone. Her Engineer skills, the role itself, the system shifting around her. And then the hammer. A First Alloy, settling into her hands.

Mordran pulled back fast.

“A First Alloy.” The calm was gone from his voice. “You have a First Alloy.”

While the shadows held her arms, he started searching her for it, his hands going over her sides, her back, her belt, anywhere she might have hidden a hammer. The curiosity was gone. Before, he had known she was valuable. Now there was something else in his eye, something that shortened his breath and wouldn’t let his hands hold still.

“It’s not here.” He stepped back and forced himself to calm down. “No matter. We’ll find where it is.”

He went into her mind again.

Reth. The Veil children. The moment she killed Harren. None of it mattered to him. Her fight with Aram, and then, at the end, the moment she offered the First Alloy for Reth’s life.

He pulled back.

The Operator was drenched in sweat, her eyes half closed, no strength left in her, the link draining her down to nothing.

“Stupid woman. Stupid.” His voice climbed. “Do you understand what you gave away? What you handed that administrator, that Guardian? For friendship? For honor, you gave up a First Alloy to save one person?” He leaned into her face. “If you wanted to be a savior, you could have saved millions.”

He stood and struck her across the face. “Stupid woman.”

She lifted her eyes back to his. There was nothing behind them now, the weight of her own memories pressing her down, but she held his gaze anyway.

Mordran drew a long breath and steadied himself.

“No matter. The real prize is in your mutation.” He smoothed the front of his robe. “Still, it would have been pleasant to hold a First Alloy. Let’s continue.”

He went into her again, and this time he watched what came after she gave it up. The Saga lifting off the metal. The letters burning onto her arm, one by one. The words forming on her skin. The Guardian, tricked, left holding the metal and nothing else.

Mordran broke off and grabbed her arm, the same arm he’d called a cheap tattoo, and he started to laugh, and the laugh had joy in it.

“A Saga.” He could barely get the words out. “I have a Saga right in front of me. Hahahaha.”

A quick flash of red pulsed from Mordran’s eye, and the gray began to fill.

The shelves rose as they always had for him, climbing level above level above level until they lost themselves in the dark overhead, every row packed with books, the work of centuries, each spine known to his hand. His desk took shape in the middle of it, the same as he always left it, buried under notes and open volumes, the diagrams and samples and records he had gathered across years of study, pages weighted down and curling at the edges.

It opened around him on every side, his library, raised whole out of the shadow, all of it answering the moment he called it up.

Mordran held the shape of the Saga’s letters in his head, words he couldn’t read but couldn’t let go of. The shelves answered. Books pulled themselves loose and flew to him, pages turning on their own, one trading places with the next each time it wasn’t what he wanted, and each took him a second, maybe two, to empty.

Every book says the same thing. The only thing I find. He pulled another loose, emptied it, let it drop. Another. Different languages, verses, glyphs he hadn’t seen in centuries, and every one of them landed on the same truth. A First Alloy is earned. It is chosen.

The books fell around him, one after another, until the floor was covered in them and he stopped reaching for more. “Earned.” He turned to her. “What did you do to earn a Saga? What did you accomplish that a Saga would choose you, and not us?” His voice tightened. “Not the winged ones.”

She found him through the exhaustion, anger in her eyes, and he laughed again.

“You’re going to be with me a very long time, Operator. I’ll keep you alive for years past your natural life. Decades, if the work calls for it. And we still haven’t seen anything that happened to you since you arrived on this planet.” His eye moved over her arm. “Let’s see why a Saga chose you. Why it wouldn’t let go.”

He went into her mind again, and this time he pushed all the way back, past everything, to the very first thing she remembered, a point before she ever entered the planet, before she even reached the space around it.

There was a wall there. Past it, only black.

Why?

The Operator’s eyes rolled white, and she started to convulse, but the two shadows holding her arms didn’t let go.

I need to see. His eye burned brighter, the gold turning luminous, throwing light across the shelves and the tables and the books scattered on the floor around them.

Only black. Something is blocking this. What is in there? What is in there? His hands tightened. The First Alloy could see past this, and I cannot. Why?

She couldn’t scream. The leather over her mouth choked the sound down, her whole body shaking against the grip, the gold burning through her veins.

“Show me.” Mordran’s voice dropped low. “Show me what you did to earn this. I want all of it.” He pushed harder, his eye flaring, the gold turning white at its center, and he drove himself against the black wall in her mind with everything he had.

The wall broke. Every piece of it came apart, and what was behind it opened up in front of him.

Mordran went rigid. The light died out of his eye on its own. He let go of her and stepped back, then again. His breath came fast and shallow, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, the cold ran all the way through him.

“...by the shadows,” he said, almost nothing left in his voice.

The Operator woke slowly, dizzy, Tera’s voice somewhere far off and not quite reaching her. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she got was the floor, cold against her cheek. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. Her thoughts came back slow and out of order.

Those shadow things that held me. Where did they go?

She rolled onto her back, her hands hurting too much to push off them, and lay there while her sight came back. When it did, she saw him.

Mordran. On his knees in front of her. “What the hell?” Her voice came out scared. She got up without using her hands, backing away on the bad leg, dragging it behind her.

Mordran stayed where he was, on his knees, his eye open. It wasn’t the gold she’d seen before. It was red now, bleeding down the sides. “Tera, what happened to this guy?”

Tera said nothing.

His head was tipped back, eyes fixed on nothing above him, drool sliding off his lip. The Operator moved closer, careful, the bad leg dragging, her hand still throbbing, and brought it up slow toward his face until it was under his nose. He was breathing.

“Tera, talk to me. You okay?”

Still nothing back.

She walked to the edge, to where the creatures were. She could see them on the other side, held in place, only moving in short, small drags. Napoleon was over there too, stuck to the floor in a run of slime, and when she got close something stopped her, a barrier she couldn’t get her hand through.

“Tera, talk to me. What the hell is going on? Tell me you’re okay. I can’t even reach Napoleon.”

Everything’s fine, Operator. I’m sorry. I was going through everything that happened.

“You got any read on what happened to this guy?”

No, Operator. But we need to talk. First...

“Yeah, we need to talk, I agree. But we need to get the hell out of here first.” She looked at him on his knees. “I could grab his neck, snap it, maybe that gets us out.”

Don’t do anything. He said it himself, this is a pocket dimension. He isn’t holding us down with his power. He pulled us into a space, which means if you kill him, and we don’t know the way out, we stay trapped in here.

“So what do I do.” The Operator looked at him. “Wait for him to wake up and put me back at his feet?”

She kept her eyes on him a moment. “Okay. Let me try something.”

Can’t use my hands. Let’s try this.

Nervous, she leaned in and gave his shoulder a small push with her elbow, testing. He didn’t move. She pushed again, harder.

“Hey.” Her voice shook more than she wanted. “Mordran.” Nothing. The eye stayed open, fixed on nothing, drool sliding off his lip. “Mordran.” Louder this time. She nudged him again, watching his face, ready for it to turn on her.

It didn’t.

She put her shoulder into him and shoved. He went over sideways and hit the floor stiff, no arm out to catch himself, no flinch. He lay on his side in the same shape he’d held on his knees, the eye still open and red, staring at nothing.

His chest was still moving. Shit. I think he’s a vegetable.