WIPwed: The Hornblower Incident part 2 (Patreon)

A couple weeks ago I gave you guys a sneak peek at my Psychonauts fanfic before it went up. I've been working on it more readily and I'm quite far ahead of what I've posted already to ao3, so I thought I'd give you guys an update! I've also been thinking really hard about my Dragon Ball Z drawing that I owe you.  Inspiration has just not visited me for that one. I'm thinking I'm going to change my strategy and go back to what I'm best at -- self indulgence. Any Bulveta fands out there? Well, anyway, here's parts 6-14 of The Hornblower Incident. Be back next week with more artwork and probably a bonus painting to make up for not running a poll in January. $5 and up patrons, be thinking of what you want to add to February's poll!

The Hornblower Incident

Parts 1 - 5 

Chapter 6

Raz had been in a dormant mindscape before. When he first met Helmut Fullbear, he was a nameless brain in a ball who’d been without thought for so long he didn’t even remember who he was. It took Nick Johnsmilth’s body (Gristol Malik’s body. Raz still felt a little ill at the thought of that) to finally wake Helmut up. This situation was a bit different, but the optics were the same. Blackness so deep it both felt claustrophobic and infinite as if Raz were in a straight jacket at the center of the universe.

His footsteps echoed as he traversed the space. Out of the corner of his eye he could see glimpses of forms. Furniture. Buildings. Structures around him manifested when the owner was home now left dark. He cleared his throat. “Hello!”

His voice carried into the vastness, but no one replied. At this point in Helmut’s mind, his consciousness had manifested as a mote of light.

“Hello!” Raz tried again. “i know you’re not home right now, but maybe you can try and talk to me? I’m here to help you!”

Raz popped up on his levitation ball to gain height, but the extra two feet and change didn’t increase visibility. He fired psi-blasts in four directions. His signature orange glow glimmered off irregular edges as it shot past. Whatever the crepe vendor’s mindscape looked like before, it was in shambles now. Raz rolled forward through the dark, hunting for something to wake his host with; a mental construct, an untapped memory, heck even a doorbell. If only he knew more about the man than just he was panicking and made crepes.

“Mr. Guy! My name is Raz!” He called. “You don’t have to be afraid! I’m something called a Psychonaut. I’m here to help you pull yourself back together!”

He rolled past a looming stone structure sunk halfway in the ground. Raz’s levball highlighted off-kilter walls and empty door frames. Raz started to notice a pattern in the bend and break of all the structures, as if one of his concussive mental blasts had bent everything back. Raz leaned left and followed the directionality toward its center where the weakest flicker of mental energy thrummed like a heartbeat.

Raz popped his levball and tiptoed closer. A halo of purple light pulsed from a darkened shape. Raz cleared his throat. “Hello? Mr. Vendor?”

The shape didn’t respond, but seemed somehow more humanlike. Raz inched closer.

“Sir?”

He stopped. The figure carved into the rock was no a man, but a little girl. She was posed with her fists balled into her cheeks and her brow pinched in fear. Raz touched the statue’s shoulder and found it solid. She was not the vendor, but she had to be important to him. She was the center of his entire mental world.

“Is this your daughter?” Raz asked the void. Again, no response. Words were obviously not working. He patted the statue of the girl on the head. She reminded him of Mirtala. It squared his resolve.

<i>”Raz! Are you in there?”</i> Oleander said in his head. <i>”Grab this!”</i>

A panel opened in midair as if opening a door. Raz squinted into it. He recognized the swirl of the inside of a psi-portal. The coach’s arm reached through holding length of shining golden rope in one hand.

<i> “Take this!”</i>

Raz grabbed the string. tingled through his hand like holding a live wire. “What is this thing?”

<i>“Never mind! Tie it down to something.”</i>

The coach’s arm vanished and the rope was yanked back toward the open portal with a jolt. Raz yelped and dug his heels, the rope kicking and bouncing in his hand as if a bucking bronco were on the other end. Raz yanked hard to gain some slack and looked for a post or a wall that could withstand the force of the pull. Everything was broken except the statue of the girl. Raz reinforced his grip with a pair of mental fists and dragged the gold rope toward the stone. He circled it twice and knotted the string as best he could. Crackles of mental energy raced up and down the cord. Raz backed off, panting. <i>”Okay, Coach. I’ve got it.”</i>

<i>”Good job. Now hang on!”</i>

As soon as he said it, the world around Raz trembled. The golden cord jerked against the post, causing the wood to twist and snap. The thread came free and whipped back into the portal. Raz yelped and reached for its flapping tail. His hand came short, but his mentally projected hands caught hold. Raz planted his feet, balled his fists, and pulled back as hard as his mind could.

Thus began a tug of war between Raz and the portal in the broken stone. A foot of string vanished into the swirl, and Raz tugged it back out with interest. His mind ached with the effort, but he was determined not to let the rope go. He backed away from the portal one step at a time, dragging more and more rope with him. There still was nowhere sturdy to anchor the rope to. Raz would have to back all the way to the city ruin where he’d first entered the man’s head to find anything halfway solid. He reached with a second astral hand and began yanking out slack. The golden cord crackled under the strain, but continued emerging one foot at a time.

A keening wail rose from the portal, gaining volume with each length of rope until a lump emerged. The soft round ball plugged the entrance to the portal muffling the sound and causing the thread to go slack. Raz frowned, not sure what he was looking at, but the golden cord was tied in a loop around it so he gripped the thread in both mental hands and gave one mighty yank. The plug pulled free and sailed wailing through the air. The golden thread vanished and the portal in the rock closed with a purple flash of power. Raz was thrown off his feet, crashing through broken walls and splintered beams. He rolled into a ball and popped a shield around himself as the bits of mindscape burst into debris. He slammed backward against a stone wall. His shield fell but the stone held. Raz covered his head as bits of wood and plaster rained down. The sky above him warmed a sunrise-magenta. The ground beneath him sprung with whisps of fine gras, and the mental projection of the crepe vendor landed like a ragdoll on the floor of his own mind.

Chapter 7

Raz’s head ached. He raised his goggles and approached the ego of the wheezing man, dressed in a grease-stained smock and apron with terror and confusion plastered on his death-pale face.

“Hi,” Raz said.

The crepe vendor looked at him as if in a dream.

“So… good news. You’re psychic,” Raz said clinically. “You probably didn’t know that before so give it a minute to sink in. Bad news, your whole town has been flattened by a mind bomb, but don’t worry. I’m a Psychonaut, and I’m here to help sort that out.”

“Fashengle shenme?” The man asked.

“Yeah… that’s what I thought,” Raz said.

Light spread throughout the mindscape, illuminating the shadows Raz had seen in his trek through the dark. All around, statues and murals appeared on the structures. The wall Raz had dented with his shield ball had a swirling portrait of an old woman. The broken one several feet away was of a dog with spotted fur. Raz couldn’t help but smile. “Wow! You’re an artist, too!”

The crepe vender’s labored breathing eased. He rose onto his elbows. “Wo nu’er zai nali?”

“Yeah, I can’t help you with that.” Raz offered his hand. “But I’ll find someone who can, I promise.”

The crepe vendor reached for the offered hand, but a sucking pull tugged at Raz’s projection away at high speed. Before Raz could register the smell of ammonia, he was vacuumed out of the crepe vendor’s mind and snapped back into his own. He blinked through the disorientation and blinding sunlight. Thankfully his body was still wearing his goggles.

“Y’ok, kid?” Oleander asked. “I told you to get out.”

“Uh, yeah… ” Raz lifted his lenses to see the Coach standing beside him with a capsule of salts in one hand. The crepe vendor was prone on the pavement. Everything else was calm. “Something happened.”

“Is he tied down tight?” Oleander pressed.

“No. I mean – ”

“Then we can’t waste time.” Oleander turned to the man. “Take cover. He may snap-in violently. Could cause another explosion.”

“Wait!” Raz said.

Oleander pressed the smelling salts to the sleeping man’s nose and covered his head. The crepe vendor didn’t jolt awake. Nothing exploded. The man twitched and peeled his eyes open. Oleander relaxed in shock. “That was oddly uneventful.”

“Wo nu’er zai nali?” The crepe vendor said again. He beheld the bodies in the street and started shaking. ““Wo nu’er zai nali? Wo nu’er zai nali!?”

“Calm down, it’s okay,” Raz said. “Recognize me?”

The man did. Tears filled his eyes. “Wo de nu’er…”

“Okay, explain,” Oleander said. “Do you know this guy?”

“We just met,” Raz said. “The rope came untied so I had to hang on. I ended up towing him home I guess? He came out the portal and everything went crazy.”

Oleander’s eyes widened. “You’re not supposed to be able to do that.”

“I’m not?” Raz asked.

“That’s like level-five mental lasso stuff. That’s like “I’m best friends with the guy I’m hog-tying” mental lasso stuff,” Oleander said. “If I could do that, you’d still be on the plane.”

Raz tried not to gloat but still buffed his nails through his gloves. “It was kind of an accident, really. I guess I’m just a natural.”

“Don’t get cocky, kid.”

“Morry!” Milla called. She sailed down from the rooftops with her impeccable hair frayed at the temples. “Where did you go?”

Oleander went bright red. “We.. ah… we had a wild mind situation.”

“Wild…” She noticed the crepe vendor and immediately switched into motherly-mode. “Hello there, Darling.”

“Ni zai fei!” The man crawled backward on his elbows. “Nimen shi shei wushi?”

“Oh dear,” Milla said. She cleared her throat and attempted a slow, careful Chinese with a heavy Brazillian accent. “Bie haipa.”

The man looked unsure but calmed down a little.

“Bangzhu jijiang daolai,” Milla said.

Sasha descended from a nearby rooftop to join them. “Otto’s landed.” He lit another cigarette. “They’re keying on our location. Eta two minutes.”

Milla straightened, her eyes weary. “Good.”

“Any sign of Hornblower?” Oleander asked.

“As suspected, he was far away from Buxing when the bomb went off,” Milla said.

“We did locate the epicenter, however,” Sasha said. “Another single prisoner.”

Oleander grimaced. “He still alive?”

Sasha sucked his teeth and shook his head.

As promised, Agent Mentallis arrived on a Psychonauts-branded hoversled along with a half dozen other agents. Otto landed the sledge and barked to his companions. “Split up. Get the victims lined up for triage. Treat wounds. You know the drill.”

The agents flew in all directions. Otto descended to his fellow Psychonauts. “So, what’s the report?”

“We have a latent psychic here,” Oleander gestured to the crepe vendor who was growing more and more confused by the second. “We’re hoping maybe he saw something.”

“Let me see.” Otto knelt down in front of the man and lifted the eye-shaped pendant he wore around his neck to the crepe vendor’s eye level. The man stared at it in horror, only to be hit with a psychic beam and go catatonic. Otto shut the pendant’s affect off and rose. “His name is Zhang Wei. He’s lived here his whole life. No sign of Hornblower in there, but he definitely witnessed the bomb go off.”

“I think he has a daughter!” Raz offered.

Otto’s initial annoyed glance turned thoughtful. “He told you about her?”

“In a way,” Raz said.

“We’ll brief you about it later,” Oleander cut in. “For now, we’ve got a lot of mopping up to do around here. The whole town has been dementastrated.”

“What’s the state of Fanrong?” Sasha asked.

“We’re making progress,” Otto replied. “There’s a long way to go.”

“You can’t spare any more agents for this town?” Milla asked.

“Not if we want to rescue civilians.”

Raz bowed his head. Silence stretched between the agents until Sasha cleared his throat.

“Our party was headed southeast,” he said. “After this event, I suspect Hornblower is as well.”

“What? Why?” Oleander asked.

“As a psychic suppressed by psilirium poisoning, he’d need to be at least as far from the epicenter of this as we were on the Pelican,” Sasha explained. “If not, his command over his own mind would be too weak for him to knit himself back together without help from another psychic to assist him.”

“Yeah, but Buxing is north of Fanrong, not southeast!” Oleander said.

“I’m sure that’s on purpose,” Otto agreed. “He doesn’t gain much from destroying either of these cities apart from the general plan of non-psychic genocide. That goal would be much easier to accomplish when he’s back to full strength.”

“He’s using his fellow prisoners as a diversionary tactic,” Milla agreed. “He knew the Psychonauts would respond when we heard he had escaped the prison facility, and we are the only ones capable of catching him and preventing his plan.”

“So he scattered his human bombs throughout the region to lure us away from his true location,” Sasha resumed. “He’s choosing places of high population knowing we would have to devote our numbers to rescue and recovery, and the nature of the attack requires our most powerful agents be on-site. This will allow him time to get away to safety and recover from his poisoning.”

“So you’re assuming he’s headed the opposite direction of his minions?” Otto tutted. “That’s a gamble.”

“It’s one we are making,” Sasha determined. “But Otto, if we continue to pursue him, he will continue to deter us. You know what that could mean.”

“It’s crossed my mind, yes.”

“What?” Raz asked. “What does it mean?”

“More of these attacks,” Milla replied.

“So what? We call off the search?” Oleander asks. “Just let the guy win?”

“We won’t let him win, but we will need to call off the visible search,” Otto replied. “Mental world only, and tips from local authorities. I’ll discuss it with Truman.”

“We will  be scanning the region from the air as we head south, but we must leave now,” Sasha said. “Every minute we waste is a card in his hand.”

“I am staying here,” Milla said.

Raz’s stomach flipped. “To help?”

She nodded. “The strongest agents are all working in Fanrong. If we wait for them to join us, some of these minds might get away. If I begin now, I may be able to save all of them.”

“All?” Oleander scoffed. “There’s thousands of people here.”

“It will be difficult,” Milla agreed, “But if it is possible, it must be attempted.”

“You’ll need a partner,” Sasha said.

“No, you and Morceau continue as planned.” Milla canted her head toward Sasha, sending some telepathic message Raz was unprepared to catch. She folded her hands behind her back. “I’m afraid my mind will be occupied with the work here, so I won’t be able to scan the mental landscape.”

“Leave it to us.” Sasha nodded to the others. “Morry. Raz. Let’s go.”

“I don’t have to go,” Raz flit glances between him and Milla. “I could stay here and help - ”

“No, you come with us,” Sasha stated. “No arguing.”

“Right.” Morry saluted the agents remaining behind and clapped his hands at Raz. “March, soldier!”

“Okay, all right, I’m coming.” Raz sulked, but lingered just in earshot of Otto’s and Milla’s conversation.

“I don’t see why Truman let you two bring your Junior Agent and wouldn’t let me bring mine,” Otto scoffed.

“He was not supposed to see such things. Not yet at least,” Milla sounded heartbroken. She hadn’t been herself since the bomb was detonated, and now felt even moreso. For someone always depicted in comic books as up-beat, optimistic, and put-together, it felt like yet another crime Horatio had inflicted upon them. Milla sighed. “Razputin is a child. His fellow junior agents are still young. They are capable of so much more. I believe Razputin is capable but as the adults… as the ones responsible for him on behalf of his own parents… it is our job to make sure he doesn’t have to.”

“Forgive me if I don’t share your idealism,” Otto replied. “In any case, I should get our new friend Zheng Wei here, medical attention. He’s had his own shock.”

“Very well,” Milla said. Raz felt her attention turn on him. <i>“I am sorry, Darling.”</i>

Chapter 8

Without Milla on the Pelican, responsibilities took a shift. Raz took over reading the scanners and maps, and he understood why the coach was having a hard time concentrating. The information was as dry as the bank account statements and ten times more complex to shift though. It didn’t help that he was worried about Milla. Recovering Zheng Wei’s mind was hard enough with Oleander’s help… to do thousands of those by herself was going to burn her out like a match. At the same time, he understood why she opted to stay. Zhen Wei was so scared and upset, and his mindscape was left so hollow without him, Raz could only imagine what it was like to experience first person. Its possible that trauma was what awoke his psychic powers for the first time. Raz hoped he was okay. He hoped Milla could find his daughter.

Oleander was in the pilot’s seat. This would normally be a point of pride, but the coach was getting worn down by this mission in his own right. He pouted and grumbled to himself, unhappy with Otto for calling off a direct charge against Horatio, unhappy with Sasha for being in charge of their little away team, unhappy with Truman for not nuking this terrorist from space, and unhappy with himself for not thinking of a way to end this quickly. Raz caught little flashes of blueprints and plans in his fluctuating thoughtscape. He wasn’t even trying to hide his complicated death rays and satellite-mounted warheads. Raz recognized it as the coach’s primary love language and let him stew.

While Raz scanned and Oleander planned, Sasha assumed Milla’s role as mental surveyor. In contrast to Milla’s ethereal, music-and-color-fueled meditation space, Sasha’s meditation zone was silent as a grave. Instead of floating he was prone. His headphones were noise-canceling. He removed his glasses and left them folded on the floor over his shoulder. He even made a little coffin out of the pillows and draped the head of it in a thick blanket to cut off the light. The air around him vibrated slightly. It stitched its way under Raz’s skin and gave him the creeps. He wanted nothing more than to put on music or start a conversation but had the very distinct, unspoken impression that breaking this ironclad silence would break something fragile and important.

He focused on the maps. They were almost to the Himalayan mountains where the Lowha Lasung monastery was marked with an ‘x’ like pirate treasure. Cities and towns appeared as Police radio activity. There wasn’t time to screen every call, but the number of emergencies going on in any one place was notable. Raz wished he had a key to break the code of what he was looking at. He made note of what he could and flipped through mugshots and security camera footage until the palpable silence was broken by a groan from the back of the plane.

Sasha rose from his shrine with the blanket draped over his head like a ghost. He tossed it aside and pressed his eyes into the heels of his hands with another groan.

“Trouble, Nein?” Oleander asked.

Sasha rose from the floor, looking exhausted. This didn’t stop him from TK’ing a cigarette out of his coat, pyro’ing it mid-air, and taking a drag as his glasses followed him up the isle. By the time he was slouched into one of the starboard-side seats his lenses were on his face and his cigarette was half gone. He flopped one arm across his face. “I wish I had my lab equipment.”

“You rely too much on machines,” Oleander said. “A REAL Psychonaut runs on intuition and instinct!”

“Dare I ask what your intuition is telling you about this situation?”

<i>“Violence mostly,”</i> Raz answered privately. He thought he saw Sasha smile a little bit.

“My gut tells me this guy isn’t headed for any terrorist group,” Oleander said. “He’s had years to sit and plan in prison right? You don’t spend all that time and energy to break out and go back to your old friends. He’s gone rogue.”

“That’s very interesting, but it doesn’t affect the immediate situation,” Sasha replied.

“Yeah but it could affect what directiong he’s headed,” Oleander said. “We’re headed to his old monastery. Dollars to doughnuts he’s waiting for us when we get there.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“Why? They taught him everything he knows, right?”

“Yes, but he’s also killed thousands of innocent people.” Sasha peeked out from under his arm. “Just because they are pacifists doesn’t mean they are forgiving. If Horatio returned to Lowha Lasung, he’d be confronted with an order of angry weaponskinesis experts juggling swords and pitchforks with their minds.”

Oleander scoffed. “Wouldn’t stop me.”

Sasha slouched deeper. “No, Morry, I bet it wouldn’t.”

“We should at least check it out.” Oleander pressed. “If he’s headed that way, he could be directly under us right now, then we could pounce on him and put a lid on this thing once and for all.”

“There is unfortunately a lot of mentalference at the moment,” Sasha replied. “Psychic energy from Buxing has clouded everything. I can sense glimmers of psychics on the ground, but I can’t see them clearly enough to identify who they are.”

“And out in the mountains?” Oleander prompted.

“Can’t see that far right now,” Sasha mumbled. “Perhaps if Milla were here...”

“Ah, yeah, right…” Oleander spun in his chair. “I can take a crack at it if you want?”

“Be my guest.”

The coach hopped back to the rear and started constructing a pillow fort with a flurry of yellow-tinted psychic hands. Sasha rose and took the coach’s place at the helm. Raz kicked his feet under his chair, antsy again in the fresh silence. He cleared his throat. “Agent Nein?”

Sasha replied with a nearly imperceptible turn of his head.

“I have a question.” Raz ventured. “You uh… know how I helped the coach save Mr. Zheng?”

Sasha’s neck bent a little further. “Yes.”

Raz bristled, but persisted. “How do you reconnect a psychic’s mind with his body? I was in Mr. Zheng’s mind and it was really dark and empty, but then the coach opened up some kind of portal and handed me a string that yanked Mr. Zheng back in? I did what he told me to, but he didn’t really explain what was happening.”

The request for knowledge shifted Sasha out of disappointed-dad mode and into camp-counselor mode which made the plane a much more comfortable thing to be in. “Do you remember what I was telling you about the Lowha Lasung and their definition of the soul.”

“That it’s the connection between a person’s mind and a person’s body.”

Sasha nodded. “That string the coach handed you was an artificial version of the mind-body tether. Or I should say… a surrogate version of that used as a bridge to assist the reformation of a mind’s natural tether after it is broken. While you were in Mr. Zheng Wei’s mind, Oleander was fighting his displaced ego on the real-world side.”

“Yeah, I saw all the exploding…”

“When a mind that has never wandered finds itself without a body, it panics. If the mind has a psychic affinity – as Zheng Wei does – that natural proclivity is the first thing it reaches for. It’s likely he didn’t even know he was causing those explosions. To him it was a very frightening experience.”

“And fighting him helps that?”

“Subduing them is necessary, but we don’t want to hurt them. It’s not their fault they can’t find their way home.” Sasha was relaxing more by the minute. “The only way to truly calm a Wild Mind is to return it to its body and restore a sense of normalcy. This requires an accomplished psychic, like one of our agents, to astrally project themselves from their own body and meet the displaced mind one-on-one. The agent then uses an advanced Mental Connection technique called a Mental Lasso to capture the displaced mind. That was the rope you saw, it was a construct of the coach’s mind similar to psi-blast or a mental shield that he attached to Zheng Wei’s astrally projected ego.”

“Awesome!” Raz cried. “Can you teach me?”

He slouched against the console. “Not right now.”

“Right…” Raz was disappointed but drove on. “What do you do with the wild minds when you’ve caught them?”

“You then reunite the mind with its original body, although it’s more complicated than simply dragging the two together. The tie between the mind and body has been severed, so that needs to be repaired. That’s why the coach needed your help. It’s extremely difficult for a single psychic to both maintain the lasso, contain the ego, and traverse the collective unconscious to the original body all in one go. The common procedure is for one agent to be in charge of the mind portion of the patient and one to be in charge of the body. The mind agent – Morry in this case – uses the lasso to draw the displaced ego not into the ego’s own body, but into his own mental landscape. Once the displaced ego is back in a mindscape, it will normally conjure it’s own mental construct automatically – you’ve experienced that at camp when you were drawn into the coach’s mind in basic braining. You were taken out of your body but you stayed sane because your mind was able to construct a new body in the mental world and maintain that sense of normalcy. Once a Wild Mind is back in a mindscape, they usually calm down.”

“Mr. Zheng was still pretty panicked when I saw him,” Raz said.

“Well, he was being stored in Morry’s head, so…”

“And so he needed me in Mr. Zheng’s head so that he could hand me the end of the lasso,” Raz finished. “With him holding one end with the mind and me holding the other end with the body, we make a fake soul-tether-whatever that can snap back into place with smelling salts like nothing was wrong.”

“Basically, yes.”

“Can you two stop gabbing!” Oleander peered through a gap in his pillow ford. “I’m trying to concentrate over here!”

“Sorry, Coach,” Raz called back.

Sasha checked their geographical location and flight speed and spoke again,  more silently.  <i>”I will teach you the mental lasso method when we have a chance, Razputin. Until then, remember; if you ever find yourself outside your body with no easy way back, you can always “lasso” yourself back using Mental Connection. You have the talent and the skill, you needn’t be worried about the mind bomb as long as you allow your own thoughts to lead you home.”</i>

An alert beeped on the console behind Raz’s chair. He swiveled to look at the maps. “We’re coming up on the Himalayan mountains.”

“Ascending.” Sasha reported. He switched the autopilot off and took the Pelican higher. Raz continued watching the monitors for reports.

The higher they got, the fuzzier and more broken the signal became until no input was getting through at all. Raz clicked the buttons, trying to pull up something, but all he saw was snow. “I can’t get anything. Not even from Otto.”

“It’s the mountains,” Sasha said. “It blocks incoming and outgoing transmissions.”

“Psychic ones, too?” Raz asked. “My head feels foggy.”

“Wait!” Oleander burst out of his fort in a jumble of pillows. He dashed to the console, folding himself over the center console. “Down there!”

“What?” Sasha stood. “What is it?”

“Psilirium residue!” He pointed straight down. “There, down there!”

“Psilirium!” Raz cried. “The prisoners!”

“It must be all of them to put off a strong enough residue field!” Sasha agreed.

“What do we do?” Raz asked.

“Land!” Oleander said.

“Climb,” Sasha said at the same time.

“What? You’re gonna run?” Oleander cried. “We can stop them right now!”

“We need more information,” Sasha replied.

“Come on, Nein! Don’t be a coward.”

Raz flushed with adrenaline. “Sasha’s not – ”

Sasha spoke over him. “Best case scenario - the three of us descend on Horatio in a private jet and capture forty-plus hostiles including a homicidal maniac with no way to call for backup. Worst case? Horatio detonates another bomb, the three of us are dementistrated out of our own heads, and every one of those men die.”

“They’re vicious convicts!”

“Guilty or not, they are still people and they are still victims,” Sasha insisted. “There’s no reason to act irrationally when we can be patient and do this the correct way. Keep your mind on that residue, I’m taking us up.”

“This is horse shit and you know it,” Oleander snapped.

Sasha turned to Raz. “Hit the green button in front of you and give us an exterior camera view. I want to see what’s below us.”

“Yes, sir!” Raz spun and punched the panel as instructed. A camera view popped open, revealing a green-tinted landscape of craggy mountains and patches of vegetation below.

It was rough terrain, too uneven for an accessible road. The stones scissored in on each other like teeth. He didn’t see any convicts. He wasn’t even sure a group of men would leave a path in a place like this. They definitely couldn’t drive. Even off-road vehicles wouldn’t make it. If they were scattered on foot, they could be hiding in the trees. Raz focused hard on the camera view and projected his senses down into the branches. He could pick up the Psilirium residue already… it had the same warping brain-stem feeling as the Rhombus of Ruin and as a result, tasted kind of fishy as well. He tried to pinpoint its origin but his reach was getting weaker as the Pelican angled upward.

Oleander had a stronger radar on it. “There’s a patch south and east. One a bit further north. They must be scattered.”

“You can feel individual bodies?” Sasha asked. “Are you sure?”

“Are you doubting me?”

“Yes, frankly.”

“I’m going to write a report up on you when this is over, I hope you know that.”

“I think I see something,” Raz interrupted. He followed the coach’s directions with the camera and spotted a tiny building tucked into the rock. “See that?”

“What is it?” Sasha asked. “Can you zoom in closer?”

“This is as close as it gets.”

“That’s where the residue is coming from!” Oleander said. “There’s another one north and east! Can you find that?”

“I’ll look.” Raz steered the camera more. Sure enough, another hut was perched in the spot Oleander sensed it.

“Did they build themselves tiny houses?” Oleander asked. “How fast did they get here?”

“I don’t think those are convicts,” Sasha said. “There’s something suspicious…”

A red light flashed on the helm. Sasha flipped an array of switches with his mind and pulled up the Pelican’s schematics. An alarm was triggering in the engines where a purple meter was draining rapidly. Raz cringed at the sight. “Are we crashing again?”

“There’s a problem with the Psitanium Drive,” Sasha said. “This confirms it. We aren’t encountering convicts. This is a fence.”

“A fence?” Oleander asked.

“The monastery,” Sasha answered as if that made it clear. “Everyone strap in.”

Seatbelts clicked. The Pelican sputtered as Sasha yanked back and took it into a vertical climb. The further from the fence the plane got, the slower the Psitanium drained until the drive hit and held on 34% before going dark. The electric lights around them sputtered. A grating noise filled the cockpit as the engines stalled and the Pelican was left scaling upward on it’s own momentum.

Raz gripped the seat of his chair, his eyes wide in fear, but his heart pounding with the thrill as the plane dipped onto it’s back. A wave of blue mental energy flashed across the windscreen. Sasha’s telekinetic hand gripped the nose and yanked the whole plane downward, completing a backflip and aiming the back at the ground.

“You trying to kill us?” Oleander asked, but it didn’t earn a response.

Sasha flipped the bank of switches again and the electrics came back on. The readout on Raz’s console ran startup procedures. The psitanium drive came back online. Sasha hit a button to rev the engine and levitation kicked back in. The Pelican evened out, engines gearing up as they banked left and right.

Oleander pressed his temples and looked behind him. “We’re inside the fence.”

“I know,” Sasha replied. He banked the plane left and right, running on levitation and psitanium gas until they reached a high plateau where the monastery of Lowha Lasung perched like a vulture at the crest of the ridge.

Chapter 9

The monastery was a crumbling, windswept mound of buildings, wound through with stone steps and ledges like rivers of brick. The Pelican settled in the main courtyard, kicking dust and snow in a great whirlwind around its glowing drive. Raz studied what he could through the front window as the plane powered down. The buildings had signs of geokinetic construction. Unmarred planks of rock jutted vertically from the plateau’s surface, joining at corners and forming doors and windows with mathematical precision. Spires of stone stood high above the rest, bound with rope and strung with flags that flapped in the high wind. Figures moved in the shadowed doorways of the mind-hewn buildings, but none emerged. Lights went out in windows up and down the staircases as the monks inside vanished deeper into hiding.

The central building was a temple of some kind, marked by four tall standing stones and a mosaic entry built to resemble an open eye in a ring of sunbeams. A man with a walking staff appeared at the temple door. He stepped out on cloth-wrapped feet, his long white beard whipping like one of the flags from within the hood of his heavy cloak.

Sasha summoned his coat from the closet near the back and addressed his fellow passengers. “Suit up, agents. This is what we’re here for.”

Raz tossed his fur and canvas coat across the cockpit and caught it in mid-air. It was meant to survive a long Grulovian winter, but one step onto the Pelican’s gangplank told him that was a cakewalk compared to high-altitude Himalayan windchill. The coach had an army surplus wool jacket – cosplaying to the last – which he belted on with a bandolier that was practically designed to piss off an order of pacifist monks.

Sasha went ahead of them into the wind with both hands raised in peace.

The monk slammed his stick on the stone and shouted with a thick Mediterranean-sounding accent. “PSYCHONAUT!”

“We are!” Sasha called back.

“GET OFF MY MOUNTAIN!”

“We are just here to talk!”

“BAH!” He scoffed into the wind and his reedy voice entered their minds with a hiss as if he were standing right behind them and breathing on their necks. <i> “We gave you our answer decades ago. No one here wants to join your little group. No outsiders!”</i>

<i> “We are not here for recruits,”</i> Sasha said. <i> “We would have honored your wishes but for extreme circumstances </i>

<i> “Is Crueller here with you?”</i> The monk asked.

Oleander shot Raz a glance across the gangplank. <i> “They know Ford?”</i>

Raz sucked his teeth. <i> “At this point are you really surprised?</i>

<i> “Agent Crueller is retired,” </i> Sasha told the monk. <i> “I am agent Sasha Nein, with me are Agents Oleander and Aquato. We don’t want trouble, just an audience. If allowing admittance to your monastery is unacceptable, we can have it aboard our plane – ” </i>

<i> “I’ll be dead before you get me on one of your vessels,” </i> The monk said. <i> “Fine. Come into the great hall, but I’ll take you no further.” </i>

<i> “Agreed,” </i> Sasha said.

The monk turned back to his temple. Sasha beckoned the other two to follow. Raz gulped and trotted up behind him as Oleander’s yellow-tinted mental hands closed the gangplank and erected a Pelican-sized shield behind them.

It was a relief to be out of the wind, but If Raz was hoping the inside of the temple was going to be warmer than the outside, he was kidding himself. The ‘great hall’ was a cavern of mentally and physically hewn stone without a single wooden plank or beam to support it. The walls were ribbed and arched giving the impression they’d been swallowed by some giant animal. The indents in the walls were too deep to see past the surface and the protrusions carved with a language that wasn’t English or Mongolian. Strips of faded and tattered fabric hung from the ceiling like the inside of his family’s circus tents. There were no chairs or tables, but there was a plinth at the head of the room where their cloaked guide stopped and began untying the multitude of hidden cords and belts holding him into his outfit.

When the cloak fell away it revealed a bony, grizzled old man dressed in deerskin with a long twisted white beard, a bald head, and enough hair on his eyebrows to make a toupe.

He dropped his cloak on the naked stone and sat on it like a cushion. “I am the Untainted Achilles Pergola, abbot of this monastery and the only human face you will ever see. I’m not interested in anything you have to say, and I am displeased wasting my time on your nonsense. So what do you want?”

Sasha lowered his hood. “It concerns one of your former members.”

Pergola narrowed his eyes. “Horatio.”

“Indeed.”

“He is dead to us,” Pergola said.

“Be that as it may,” Sasha insisted. “I’m afraid he has not forgotten the lessons he’s learned while among you. You are aware of his dueling history.”

“We are,” Pergola said. “And you know that we do not condone this.”

“Yes.”

“So why have you come?”

“Horatio has taken your theories to a disturbing new level.” Sasha’s voice deepened. “He has adapted your vision of tempering the mind-body soulbond into a triggering mechanism. He has amplified the power of a psychic’s mental strength to a destructive degree. He has maimed and possibly killed tens of thousands of people in the last few days alone. He is a murderer and he is currently at large and the Psychonauts are here to stop it.”

Raz’s heart was pounding, but if the speech affected Pergola he gave no indication. The old man sat as still as the stone beneath him. “And?”

“And?” Oleander barked. “And what are you gonna do about it!?”

“What are <i>we</i> going to do?” Pergola challenged. <i>“We?”</i>

“The situation is dire,” Sasha insisted.

“It is none of our concern,” Pergola said. “Horatio is not a member of this order. He is not a living person as far as this order is concerned. Our hands are clean and we will not dirty them.”

“As if!” Oleander scoffed.

“Morry,” Sasha warned.

“YOU taught him everything he knows. YOU made him capable of this!” Oleander persisted. “You gotta help fix it or what kinda impotent pacifists are you?”

“What kind of pacifists are we if we commit bloodshed now?” Pergola said. “What kind of pacifists are we if we commit bloodshed now or ever? Horatio is not a member of this order. His bloodshed is not our bloodshed.”

“But you’re letting it happen!” Oleander said.

“We are doing nothing,” Pergola replied. “That is the point. <i>We</i> are not. If we do as you want us to and raise our hands against a living soul, we are no longer peaceful.”

“But people are DYING!”

<i>”Morry,”</i> Sasha warned.

Pergola banged his walking stick on the stone. “It is apparent you do not respect our philosophy, and as a result I will no longer entertain your delusion. Get off my mountain. Stop the injustice you perceive and leave us alone.”

“Killing Horatio is not our goal,” Sasha insisted. “We need him alive to gain information to prevent future killing. We won’t ask you to harm him.”

Pergola tilted his head. “Explain yourself, then.”

“Our reports confirm that you and your brothers at this monastery are masters of the Weaponkinesis technique,” Sasha said. “Horatio has used this technique as a dueling style. We know it is complicated and deadly, but we do not have a specialist working for us.”

“Good,” Pergola said. “It is an intensive technique meant for use in meditation.”

“Nevertheless, it is being used in combat,” Sasha said. “And we know it carries with it a great deal of procedure and rules.”

“Yes, it is a mentally-intensive skill. A practitioner is as likely to kill himself as he is to kill his opponent, for that reason duels are heavily controlled. To break the rule of a duel is to break the mutual contract between duelists. All rules are abandoned. Lives become forfeit. But to duel an opponent as skilled as you… to meet an equal talent one on one is to enter a dance of death and power and mathematics. It’s beautiful. You become gods.”

<i>“This guy’s cracked,”</i> Oleander thought to Raz.

Raz swallowed hard.

“The qualities you’ve just mentioned are why we are here,” Sasha said. “We need a duelist of equal skill to meet Horatio in battle.”

“For what purpose?”

“To hold him enraptured long enough to invade his mind,” Sasha replied. “He has a band of men traveling with him, each with the capacity to kill a city. They are being deployed throughout the continent and likely the broader world. As long as Horatio is at large, these human bombs are a threat to all humanity. We need to uncover the code that will detonate them before Horatio uses it to wreak widespread and  irreversible damage.”

“You want one of our order to accompany you… as a diversion?” Pergola asked. “You ask us to violate our most closely held oaths of isolation and nonviolence for this? To risk our lives for this?”

“It is for the good of the world,” Sasha replied.

“It is for no good at all!” Pergola cried. “If you ask us this, kill him yourselves.”

“Killing him leaves his bombs at large,” Sasha said. “We need their location and we need their detonator – ”

“Let them go,” Pergola said. “Chaos is nature.”

“We know this trigger is not a psychic switch,” Sasha said. “It has to be something taken by the senses – a sound, a color, a scent. These things are not unique to Horatio, these are things these men can encounter anywhere and without warning.”

“If you won’t break your oath, there has to be someone who will!” Oleander cried. “Don’t you Weaponskinetics talk to each other? Invitational duelists or something? Somebody’s gotta be able to do it.”

“There used to be entire schools that taught this skill,” Pergola said. “They all died off, one by one. Duels. Battles. Self–inflicted wounds. Our order has honed this practice to near perfection. Horatio, himself, has murdered all the top rated Weaponskinetics in the known world. All but us, because we refuse to engage. And we still refuse.”

“Then teach someone!” Raz offered.

Pergola narrowed his eyes on Raz as if finally noticing him. “You are a child.”

“Uh…” Raz glanced at Sasha’s back, but his mentor remained firm and focused. The Junior Agent mimicked his pose. “I’m a Psychonaut.”

“You are child,” Pergola confirmed. “Do the Psychonauts manipulate the young and innocent to fight their wars, now? How many deaths have you caused already, child soldier?”

“He is not a soldier,” Sasha said. “But he is right. If you will not raise your hand to Horatio, teach one of our agents to do it.”

“Never.”

“We don’t want to join your order,” Sasha said. “We only need the skill. Time is of the essence.”

“No.”

“This is stupid!” Oleander said. “You call yourselves pacifists, fine. We gave you an out, yet you still refuse. What does it matter to you what happens off this godforsaken mountain of yours? You already said you don’t care. It’s not like you invented this technique. You’re just being selfish!”

“Bark all you want,” Pergola said. “I am the abbot. My word is final.”

“Fine,” Sasha said. “We can find another way to subdue him. We can’t waste any more time than we already have.”

“But…” Raz started. A spark of inspiration kindled his mind and he grinned. “Yeah, we don’t need this guy. He probably couldn’t fight Horatio even if he wanted to.”

Pergola’s brow furrowed. “Don’t talk about what you don’t know.”

“No really, I bet you said ‘no’ because you’re scared,” Raz said. “You and all your friends are up here hiding on top of a mountain. If you tried to fight Horatio, you’d get skewered in two seconds.”

<i>”Raz,”</i> Sasha warned.

Raz powered forward. “In fact, I bet you don’t even know how to do Weaponskinesis, and all those oaths you took are just excuses not to clean up your mess.”

“insolent – ” Pergola stood bolt upright. He thrust one hand out, capturing his walking stick in a halo of his silver-white mental energy. The stick spun like a pinwheel, cutting a perimeter around him as two-dozen other puce-colored rods and spears burst from the furrows in the walls. The forest of sticks converged on him, forming a shield of twisting and spinning waves.

Raz’s jaw dropped. The technique really was as beautiful and inspiring as Pergola said it was. The great hall glowed with the light of Pergola’s mental energy. The weapons danced in perfectly calculated arcs – narrowly missing each other in their cycles as they gained speed.

Pergola tightened his hands to fists and the ballet of weaponry changed configuration. The rods zippered together into a grid that parted into two walls before fanning like wings. He lifted his arms and pounded downward with both fists toward the earth. The spears slammed into each other, forming a wooden shield at each wrist. Pergola slid his back food and shifted into a fighting stance. Oleander readied a mental shield. Sasha made himself a shield for Raz and raised his hand to ready a psiblast. Pergola smiled.

“You Psychonauts are all the same.” the monk said. “When your Ford Crueller came here, he wanted the secret to a perfect temper, but he refused to give up his life of war and violence and mental destruction. You may be willing to dirty your hands, but I am not. I  will not break my oath of nonviolence, but I will defend my home and my honor from invaders like you.”

“Drop your weapons!” Sasha shot back.

Pergola’s eyes sparked. “Leave this mountain at once!”

<i>“Master!”</i> A voice spoke in all of their heads.

Pergola’s spears rose from his wrists.. <i> “What?” </i>

<i> “A pilgrim.”</i>

Pergola cursed in Greek. “Who else did you bring to accost us?”

“No one!” Raz cried.

Oleander turned to Sasha. “You don’t think…”

Pergola sent his weapons back to their hidden bunkers and stormed through the cluster of Psychonauts back to the frigid courtyard. The Pelican stood unmolested, protected by Oleander’s mental shield. Beneath the curve of it’s neck, a road-weary man climbed the last of the stone-hewn steps to the plateau. He was barely five feet tall, thin and shaky. He had on a puffy coat and hood with a massive mountain-climber’s backpack strapped to his chest with buckles and elastic.

Pergola carried his anger with him  from the Great Hall. “Traveler! I am abbot of this monastery! State your business!”

“This…” The traveler panted. “This is Lohwa Lasung?”

“It is,” Pergola growled. “What do you want?”

He unclipped the straps across his chest and dropped the heavy pack with a clunk. Raz advanced down the stairs, but Sasha gestured for him to stay back. Oleander narrowed his eyes. “This guy feels funky.”

The traveler reached into a pocket and pulled out a large envelope. He untied the string on the flap and reached in for a second, smaller envelope. The first one was whisked away on the high wind.

“State your business!” Pergola shouted. “We are not accepting pilgrims!”

“Sasha?” Raz warned. The tiny traveler unzipped his coat and pulled down his muffler. Through the wind and high snow, Raz caught a glimpse of a shirt collar. Stripes. Like the prison uniform in Sibera. Raz lunged from the steps. “Stop!”

The man opened the envelope flap, licked it as if to seal it, and exploded.

Chapter 10

All Raz could register was hurt. Forget about the headache he felt from the first mind bomb, forget the punch of being ejected from a mind, his whole everything was just hurting like he’d been ripped into pieces. His senses struggled to find input. His mind raced. He opened his eyes but saw nothing – not even darkness. His ears were muffled. He gasped, but he had no lungs to draw air in. His heart should have been pounding, but there was no heart. There was no sense of his body at all. Panic surged at exponential values, doubling with each feeling he was missing – his blood pumping, his stomach churning, his nerves firing. This wasn’t even like that time he was just a brain. When that happened he could still at least twitch. He had something he could TK around that he could identify as “him.”

<i> “Okay, Raz. Keep it together,” </i> he coached himself. <i> “This is a mind bomb. What did Sasha say? Follow my thoughts. Follow my thoughts.” </i>

He summoned up his psychic training and ran a rolodex of his powers. First thing to do was find out where he was. Clairvoyance. He fought his blinding headache and sent a pulse out from his center. Information flooded back. He spotted the purple glow of psitanium from the jet, whiffs of orange psilirium from the border fence, he saw his own hands bluish transparent hands floating in front of his face. What a relief! Just the hint of who and where he was dropped his mental building blocks back into place and allowed him to stave off the panic.

He still couldn’t ‘see’ anything. Nothing purely physical registered unless is was touched with psychoacitve materials. What he could see were minds. Hundreds of minds sailing away from the epicenter of the attack. Most were dressed in robes or homemade tunics. A couple were moving but most were frozen in shock. Focusing on them tapped into their terror. Raz recognized the ethereal wail from the aftershock. It wasn’t a sound, it was the struggle of human consciousness clawing the mental waters for something to cling to.

A flash of gold mental energy lit in the air above him. Raz spotted Oleander’s mental projection among the ghosts. He was holding the Mental Lasso Raz saw in Buxing, complete with a knotted loop that he twirled over his head and flung downward toward the purple pistanium glow where the pelican was. Oleander’s body appeared the moment the lasso made contact, glowing with the yellow light that was Oleander’s signature. In a woosh, the coach’s mind was sucked back in and Raz watched him get up, only for him to leap back out, lasso ready, and hook the mind of the nearest monk.

Blue light flashed in the distance. Sasha’s mind was even farther, sent sideways through temple and into space beyond. Raz triangulated and realized his own mind was floating downward. He was inside the mountain! The thought gave him another mental spasm. He focused on his task.

<i> “Follow my thoughts. Follow my thoughts.” </i>

He hunted the mental landscape for a mote of free thought he recognized. Millions of thoughts crowded the space, but his own shimmered with a faint orange and green ripple. He engaged his Mental Connection skill and zipped himself toward it. Inside he heart his own voice repeating the mantra.

<i> “Follow my thoughts.”</i>

He searched for the next in the line and anchored onto it, then looked for the next. The train of <i> “Follow my thoughts.” </i> changed into <i> “Where am I?”</i> <i> “What happened?”</i> and <i> “Help!”</i> Raz mapped his own panic back to his prone form draped across the steps.

<i> “Finally,” </i> Raz thought in relief. He was pretty sure he was going to start crying the minute he got back in touch with his heart and his eyes. The whole experience was way too unnerving. He tossed himself from the final thought bubble toward his limp flesh and sailed right through it. He pivoted in mid air, hooked the first thought bubble (which fittingly said <i> “He could be a bomb!”</i>) and flung himself a second time. Again, he passed through himself. Fresh panic buzzed through him. He wasn’t just dementistrated, his connection to his mind was actually severed. He couldn’t get back to his body, as far as he knew he was actually, really, dead.

<i> “Keep it together, Raz,” </i> he rallied. His thoughts were shaky. He spun again, hunting for the yellow or blue of his guardians and thought as loudly as he could. <i> “Coach Oleander! Agent Nien!”</i> He scanned the ghostly shapes around him. Some were awake and afraid, trying to swim back. Others were drifting. Raz could see them dissolving away at the edges like the smear of a chalk drawing. It didn’t help him calm down.

A glimmer kindled somewhere below him – a pop of bright red Raz didn’t recognize – and a figure appeared. The shape darted along the floor, running with weight and wafting with pale orange residue like the psilirium fence in the distance. It was a broad-shouldered man with an unkempt long beard and a loose jumpsuit tied in a knot around his waist.

<i> “Hornblower!” </i> Raz forgot his fear and reached for his thought bubble again. He hooked on to <i> “Where am I?”</i> and sent himself flying straight through the temple and toward the psilirium shadow.

Horatio sprinted into a room and stopped in front of a wall. The psilirium residue smoking from his brain and his clothes bounced off a shelving unit, betraying the spines of books and papers tucked into the alcoves. He spotted one among the rows and yanked it free. Another red portal opened and he and jumped in, book still in his hand.

<i> “Hey!”</i> Raz thought aloud. <i> “Come back!”</i>

Without Horatio inside, the library vanished back into formless space. Raz grit his figurative teeth and reached out with Mental Connection to reel himself back, but the toss into the void took him too far from his own thoughts. He flailed, but felt no gravity. No pull of up or down. No anything. Even the ghosts of the monks were too far away to grab ahold.

<i> “Agent Nein! Coach!”</i> Raz thought. <i> “Help!”</i> He saw no pops of blue or yellow. The purple glow of the Pelican was growing distant. He wanted to cry more than ever. <i> “Sasha!” </i>

Out of the dark, a loop of blue drew tight around his waist. Raz barely registered the crackle of mental energy before he was sucked backward through the dark and straight into Sasha’s head.

Chapter 11

Raz burst through the walls of Sasha’s mind at rocket speed and skidded to a stop on the smooth black and white surface of the agent’s well-curated cubic mindscape. Raz drew in a big gulp of air, grateful for the sensation of lungs and pulse, even if they were imaginary. All the panic and fear he’d built up while projected rushed back to him at double time. It was all he could do to keep from imaginarily throwing up all over Sasha’s nice floor.

“Razputin, what were you doing out there?”

Raz looked up to see the curator waiting casually in his typical suit jacket and sweater, with one hand in his pocket and the other gripping the end of his Mental Lasso. Raz looked down to find the other end still tight around his ribs. He tucked a finger under the lead and felt the warmth and crackle through his gloves.

Sasha raised his spare hand to stop him. “Leave that on. You’re not home yet.”

“Sasha! I saw him!” Raz panted, his whole core shaking. “I saw Horatio!”

“You what?” He frowned. “Where?”

“Just now! In a library or something!” Raz said. “I went closer to look… he teleported in, found something, and teleported out again.”

“Teleported?” Sasha pondered. “Impossible. He’d still be suffering psilirium poisoning, how could he accomplish a full body transferral at all, let alone one from a distance far enough to escape the footprint of the bomb?”

“I think he had help,” Raz said. “His head was all psilirium-y and it didn’t think he opened the portal to get out.”

“An accomplice on the outside with teleportation abilities.” He tapped his chin. “So hunting for him locally won’t help. We need to look into his contacts…”

Raz watched him think a moment before tugging on the lasso. “Um…”

Sasha started. “Sorry. Hold on.”

The surface of the cube below them shuddered. The panel they stood on rose up as panels and blocks shifted below. The cube rotated, realigning like a giant puzzle before snapping back into place. A tiny circle popped open and Sasha’s resident yellow and orange psi-popper appeared.

“You did all that for Oatmeal?” Raz asked.

“Oatmeal?”

“Yeah, that’s his name.”

Sasha pressed his lips into a skeptical slant and gave Oatmeal a nod. The popper blew a bubble large enough to fit them both and sucked the pair out into the collective unconscious.

The shared mindscape of the human race was always impressive to visit. It held every mind in the world represented by doors, and the ones Raz had visited were connected  back to his through bridges and tethers. In the short time since Whispering Rock, his mental network had grown from himself and his teachers to a twisting ring of friends, coworkers, and even his family members. He was always pleased to hop in the brain tumblr and see his growth spread out in visual form, but nothing prepared him for stepping out of Sasha’s mind and into the atomic structure of moving paths and walkways that was his mental neighborhood.

Raz gaped in spite of himself. “Whoa!”

“A bit different from my perspective?”

“Is this every mind you’ve touched?” Raz asked.

“Technically, yes. Every mind we enter generates a connection, although the strongest ones – the ones we strengthen through interaction with the mind both on the mental realm and on an interpersonal level – we tend to keep those close.” He led Raz forward onto a platform and rode down to a level directly below where his familiar tent-shaped entry stood in a line with a dozen other agents’, including Oleander’s net-draped army-green bunker and Ford’s cracked frame.

“I’m so close!” Raz said in spite of himself.

Sasha didn’t comment, but Raz could feel him warm a bit. The elevator platform stopped at his mind’s threshold and locked in place beside the path.

“Wait here,” Sasha said. “I have to go in first.”

Raz cringed. He’d never had anyone in his head without him there. The last time Sasha peeked deeper than a checkup, it was invaded by meat products. Raz hoped he hadn’t left anything embarrassing laying out. “Okay.”

Sasha slipped through the lighted door. Raz expected to feel something, but his mind was still dull and disconnected. The blue line around his waist went taut, then tight. He wasn’t sure if that was a signal until Sasha’s voice entered his mind.

<i> “Alright, Raz. Go in.”</i>

“Just jump in?” Raz asked. “The coach used smelling salts when he did it.”

<i> “Would you prefer that?”</i>

“No, no I got it.”

<i> “All right. Be warned. It’ll have a bit of a kick.”</i>

Raz stepped through the doorway and back into his own head. The transition snapped through him in a disorienting flash. Sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, gravity, volume, cold, and pain rammed into place like someone slamming doors in his skull. His mindscape tunneled and expanded around him so fast he was thrown out of his head and back to the frozen plateau where he snapped to a sitting position with a shot of adrenaline and a massive headache.

“Ahh!”

“I warned you,” Sasha said.

“Ahh!” Raz reiterated. He pressed his pounding temples between his hands. “God! My head!”

“Are you two done yappin’?” Oleander folded his arms. “I’ve got sixty-five random monks in my head and I’d like to get them out.”

“Of course.” Sasha unzipped the front panel of his winter coat and tugged out a psi-portal painted to resemble the geometric patterns of his cube. “Pergola first?”

“Please? He’s starting to piss me off.”

Sasha waved a hand toward a mound of fur and snow on the plaza and carried it back to the temple to escape the wind and, thankfully, any chance to witness the mind-bomb’s first victim. Raz ducked out of the wind and pulled his coat tighter. His head was killing him, and his body felt sluggish and fatigued. He wondered if a bit of it went ahead and started dying without him.

Sasha laid the mound out flat, revealing Pergola staring blank-eyed and slack-jawed into the middle distance. He seems extra old and frail in his compromised state. His expression betrayed disbelief. Sasha snapped the psi-portal onto the monk’s forehead and projected himself into his head.

Raz waited in the quiet hall, hoping his headache would subside. He cleared his throat. It echoed a million miles. “Hey coach?”

“Not now, kid, I’m concentrating.”

“Do you really have all these monks in your head right now?”

“As many as I could grab,” he frowned. “I think I got ‘em all.”

“Isn’t that crowded?”

“Like you wouldn't believe.”

The body on the ground drew a sudden breath. Sasha’s projection bounced out. His portal returned to his hand and Pergola sad forward wheezing like a tired mule.

“That bastard!” Pergola heaved. “That shameless monster!”

“Do you see now why we needed your help?” Sasha asked.

“He warped our core tenant,” Pergola continued. “To reach the perfect temper is to separate. From your body. From the world. He stole that moment from me. He snapped it! He took my soul!”

“He did more than that,” Raz said. “He stole a book.”

“A book?” Pergola asked.

“From your library downstairs,” Raz replied. “I saw him do it while I was floating. He took it off the shelf.”

“No. He wouldn’t – !” Pergola struggled to stand, but his legs failed him.

Sasha raised a hand. “Easy now. You’ve had quite a shock.”

“My brothers!” Pergola’s face fell. “They’re below us.”

“We have them all safe,” Sasha said. “We will restore them to their bodies.”

“If I help you, is that right?” Pergola challenged. “You’re holding them hostage!”

“No, we’ll restore them regardless,” Sasha assured. “We aren’t the type of organization you assume. We use our abilities to help prevent harm wherever and whenever we are able. The threat Horatio promises is not something we can let continue. I hope you see why.”

“Sir.” Raz stepped forward. “We understand it’s against your beliefs to harm people. We don’t want to hurt people either, but we will do what we have to.”

“Will you fight with us?” Oleander asked.

“No,” Pergola said. “No, i cannot.”

“Will you teach us?” Raz asked instead.

Pergola drew a slow breath and deflated into his cloaks. “Yes. I will teach one person. One only.”

“Great!  Raz said. “When do we start?”

“I won’t teach a child.”

“Nor would we allow you to,” Sasha said. “You’ll teach me.”

“Hmm.” Pergola gave him a head to toe assessment but still looked doubtful. “Are you prepared?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s agreed.”

“Thank you,” Sasha nodded. “I know how protective you are of your knowledge and your temple. We will enter only as long as it takes us to repair the damage to your members, then my associates will fly back to our outpost and I will stay as long as is required for instruction.”

“No,” Pergola said. “Restore my monks but no one stays. I will leave with you.”

“Leave?” Raz asked. “But why?”

“Because you are not of our order,” Pergola said. “And now that i’ve agreed to this, neither am I.”

Chapter 12

Raz, Sasha, Oleander, and Pergola moved through the icy halls of the Lowha Lasung monastery. The geokinetics visible on the surface continued into the mountainside, giving the whole monastery an ‘ant-farmy’ feel. The party picked their way along the torchlit halls, finding limp bodies wherever they’d fallen and working together to restore their minds. Oleander was the Lassoist, so Raz could still help. The party would locate each monk, Pergola would share the man’s name and either Sasha or Raz would psiportal into his head and tie off the end of Oleander’s tether. The monks didn’t have a wealth of smelling salts in storage, so after the first two dozen or so patients, revival switched from ammonia to a swift slap to the face. Pergola volunteered for this one, although Raz suspected Oleander would have enjoyed it.

The venture ended in the library where twenty monks and librarians sat slumped in their chairs. Pergola went around the circle, making identifications as Oleander labeled each one with a sticky note to the forehead.

Sasha pulled Raz aside. “Where did you see Horatio appear?”

“Over here… I think.” Raz jogged to the shelves. “I watched him teleport in here, and he ran this direction and stopped around here.”

“Nein?” Oleander called. “Gimme a hand! We’re almost done.”

“Show Pergola where you saw him,” Sasha said. “Perhaps he’ll know what Horatio stole.”

“Yes, sir!” Raz saluted.

Sasha returned to assist Oleander and Raz hunted the shelves. The abbot joined him, still crabby but also tied and impatient. “Don’t touch anything.”

“Mr. Pergola, sir,” Raz said. “What do you keep on these shelves?”

“These are the sacred texts of our order,” Pergola said. “Writings passed down from scholar to scholar to help us reach our final goal.”

“What is your final goal, exactly?” Raz asked. “Agent Nein tried to explain it to me. Something about the soul?”

“You are too young to petition to our order, so you’re not to know our secrets.”

“Okay, sure,” Raz said. “Would reading these books tell me? Because while I was astrally projected into your mountain I spotted Horatio teleport in here and steal something off this shelf.”

“You what?” Pergola cried. “Why did no one tell me!”

“I just did,” Raz said. “Can you tell what was taken?”

Pergola’s liver spotted face went red. “Vile betrayer. That cretin. That Philistine.” He attacked the nearby bookshelf, honing straight for a tiny void halfway up. “All this. He would have killed all his brothers for this one artifact.”

“What was it?” Raz asked. “I couldn’t get a good look.”

“It was the personal journal of our founding member, Aaradya Ram. She is the only person in the history of the world to attain a perfect temper. We as her followers have sought to emulate her achievement for centuries afterward, but none have succeeded.”

“What happens when you get a perfect temper, anyway?” Raz asked. “Why would Hornblower risk so much and cause so much damage to get the journal?”

“To achieve a perfect temper is to fully exist in all three parts of the self simultaneously,” Pergola said. “Wholly in the body, wholly in the soul, wholly in the mind, and in being so you relieve the tension between the elements. No more are we governed by conflict within ourselves. We are able to exist in perfect harmony and perfect separation.”

“And perfect brain-exploding?”

“Not if it’s done correctly,” Pergola answered.

“What about the Weaponkinesis technique?” Raz asked. “How does that help”

“Bah,” Pergola spat. “Weaponkinesis. What an artless name.”

“What do you guys call it?”

“It is a tempering meditation.” Pergola swept his bony hand toward the sky. “All the tension within ourselves is present in the meditation. The space between the weapons, the patterns with which they move, the line the practitioner walks between life and death. To practice this skill is to take your life into your own hands. Many the unfortunate monk i’ve watched draw so close to a breakthrough only to stab themselves in the back with a fork.”

“Nasty,” Raz said. “So you don’t fight each other with it the way Hornblower does?”

“Oh no, we do that, too.”

“Is that another level of meditation?”

“No, that we do because we’re bored,” he said. “As you imagine apart from meals and lessons, there’s not a lot to do up here. And an order of sixty-five various persons, there’s only a handful of ways to blow off some steam.”

Raz cringed. “Did you try playing cards?”

“Ahh!” One of the monks at the table shouted. His outburst stirred the others around him, moaning with sudden awareness and crippling headaches. Sasha and Oleander left them to their symptoms and joined Raz and Pergola in the stacks.

Oleander cracked his knuckles. “Ahh! Alone at last!”

“Razputin,” Sasha said. “Did you find out what Hornblower came for?”

“Yes, a journal,” Raz said. “Mr. Pergola was just telling me — ”

“Wait? Hornblower was HERE?” Oleander cried. “In the monastery?”

“Yes, he teleported in during the mind bomb’s aftermath.”

“So I was RIGHT about him waiting for us!” Oleander poked a finger into Sasha’s chest. “See? I told you so! I TOLD you so, Nein! What do you have to say about THAT?”

“I’d say there’s a distinct difference between his seeking refuge in Lowha Lasung and destroying it for a book, but I concede. He was here.”

“Hah!” Oleander grinned wide enough to split his whole face. “You heard that, right Raz? The gut prevails.”

Sasha wiped a hand down his face and willed himself back to a professional tone. “The journal he took. Would its contents justify the prison break and destruction of Fanrong?”

“To us, it is our most important tome.”

“And you just keep it on a shelf?” Oleander asked.

“It’s alphabetical,” Pergola replied.

“We must add recovery of this book to our list of tasks on this mission. Perhaps reading what it contains will shed light on his broader plan.”

“You will not touch the sacred pages of Aadhaya,” Pergola grunted.

Sasha dropped his head into his hand. ”Let’s just get going.”

“Let me speak to my people,” Pergola said. “They should know that I’m going and why I cannot return once I do. I’ll need to name a successor.”

“You have half an hour,” Sasha said.

“What? You insolent – ” Pergola gripped his walking stick with frustration. “I’ll make it quick!”

“Good.” Sasha said. “Raz – ”

“Don’t tell me to stay here, he’s not going to let me,” Raz said.

Sasha pressed his lips and started again. “Oleander and I need to take care of the victim on the plateau. I’d rather you not be a part of it.”

Blood drained from Raz’s face. “The… victim?”

“Yes.”

“The mind bomb victim? The head exploded victim?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you… going to bury him?”

“Unfortunately,no. His body could answer some of our questions,” Sasha said. “We will gather what we can of his belongings and bring him with us back to Fanrong.”

“Does he…” Raz swallowed hard. “Does he have to ride in the cabin?”

Sasha’s posture eased. “It’ll be discrete.”

“Yep, can’t put him in cargo! At the heights we’ll be going to get back in radio range, he’ll freeze like a popsicle.” Oleander laughed. He caught a look at Raz’s greenish face and clapped him on the back. “Don’t stress out kid! It’s not like he can blow up again, he doesn’t have a head!”

The coach chortled his way up the hallway. Raz lagged behind, hugging his elbows. When the little man arrived on the plateau, he was alone. He walked an invisible path through the rocks, past the pislirium fencing, and up a million steps to get to Lowha Lasung only to decapitate himself. Was that part of the hypnotism? Was he puppeted up the steps? No, he seemed cogent when he arrived. He was even talking. Horatio could have had blackmail on him or something, but then why not appeal to these monks for help? If all of this was to get his hands on a book, the monks knew where the book was. They could stage an ambush, or reinforce their anti-psychic barriers, or do something to contain Horatio when he got there. Instead he just opened an envelope, sealed the edge, and died. The thought gave Raz chills. His family were refugees of war. His Nona was responsible for countless innocent deaths, possibly just as many as Horatio, yet somehow these concepts still felt unreal. Like, the tragedy was too big for Raz to process other than as a story. Even seeing the bodies in Buxing, and being caught in the bomb on Lowha Lasung felt like something that could be undone and made better. A beheading though…

They emerged onto the plateau with hoods up and coats zipped. The Pelican was parked as they’d left it. Raz noticed Oleander’s protective shield was down, and realized it was probably canceled the minute the coach was ejected from his body. The wind and the jet’s smooth lines prevented snow from gathering in its crevices, but it still felt haunted. The prisoner’s backpack was propped near it, and the body just beyond. Raz tugged his hood to cover his eyes. Thankfully all he saw on accident was a patch of darkened snow.

Chapter 16

Raz sat at the pilot’s console while Sasha and Oleander stowed the prisoner’s body. The pillow-lined meditation zone was cleared out, and the man and his luggage were secured against the wall. The corpse was wrapped in tarps and zipped into a body bag that looked a lot like a gym duffel except for the feet poking up. Sasha covered the whole thing with a canvas blanket and secured it to the wall. Raz stared at the on-board readouts in front of him and didn’t look up until Sasha was standing at his side. “You all right, Razputin?”

“Yeah, yeah I’m fine.”

“Everything is secured. You don’t have to worry about it until we’re back with the others.”

“Kay.”

Sasha shifted his weight to his back foot. Raz still didn’t look up. He was embarrassed to be so emotional about some guy he’d never met. The guy was a hardened criminal, it just got to him somehow.

Sasha sounded matter-of-fact. “Unfortunately tragedy is not uncommon when we deal with villains like this. Fanrong, Buxing, here… I know you are precocious, but you can see why Truman and the rest of us limit your involvement in missions. The comic books and magazines don’t show every part of our job. This is a dangerous career you’ve chosen. People can get hurt. So can we. That’s why it’s important that we look out for each other both at headquarters and in the field.”

Raz bowed his head. “I know you’re sorry you brought me.”

Sasha paused. “Did I say that?”

“No, but you feel it. I can tell.”

He took the other captain’s seat and propped his elbows on his knees. Raz swiveled his chair, expecting a lecture or a dressing down, but found Sasha sympathetic. The Psychonaut folded his hands in front of him and took another breath. “I do not regret bringing you on this trip. I regret only that you’ve been put in harsher situations than I intended. I am sorry about that.”

“It’s okay.”

“You are still young, Razputin. There is a lot still left to learn. I only hope what you’ve seen and heard so far on this trip has been a stepping stone to deeper thinking. If you have any trepidation, any doubt that you can handle this going forward, I will send you home right away.”

“No, no, I want to help!” Raz pressed. “It just got <i>real</i> suddenly. It’s not like I don’t know that people die sometimes. Or that people’s heads explode. Dogen’s blown up like four people alread.”

Sasha’s eyebrow twitched. “Don’t take Mr. Boole as a role model.”

“I’m just saying I can handle it,” Raz said. “I’m SUPPOSED to handle it. I’m a Psychonaut after all.”

“Junior Psychonaut.”

“That just means I’m new, that doesn’t mean I’m not tough,” Raz said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Okay, I trust you,” Sasha said. “Remember, your teachers are here to talk to you. If you need a chat or help with a nightmare, or something’s stirring in your mind that you’d like us to look at, you can come to us. Always.”

“I will.” Raz sighed. “Thanks, Sasha.”

“Company’s coming,” Oleander announced. was making his way across the courtyard, carrying a heavy rucksack and wearing what looked like four shirts, three sets of pants, and the most worn out boots Raz had ever seen (which is saying something because his dad’s boots had full-on holes in them.)

The gangplank opened and Pergola hobbled aboard. In full light he looked even more frail and wasted than he had in the temple. Every bone and knob stood out from his skin like gnarled tree limbs. His long beard was white but also thinning badly in patches. His eyes, now visibly brownish, were sunken into heavy bags. He pulled down his hood and squinted into the onboard lights. “Cursed modern technology.”

“At least there’s heat.” Oleander snorted.

“Corporate, artificial comfort,” Pergola said. “What kind of crucible caters to your whims?”

“This is a plane.”

“The world is a crucible for the soul,” Pergola said. “We didn’t plant our monastery on the top of a mountain to heat it. Suffering builds character.”

“Sure, <i>dad.”</i> Oleander gestured toward the end of the plane with the corpse stowed in it. “Won’t you make yourself at home.”

“I will. And don’t expect me to treat it any different than my own. I am not a guest. I am here under unfortunate circumstances and I refuse to become secularized as a result.”

“Understood,” Sasha said simply.

The old man dropped his rucksack on top of the prisoner’s body. No one said anything.