The eye are the window to the soul. So what do you see when you look into the eyes of someone without a soul? Gazing into Way’s eyes, I couldn’t answer that question. I only saw her.

It was little worrisome when she closed her eyes, wrestling with some internal struggle that was shielded even from my meta-awareness.

It was more than a little worrisome when she brought her left hand up, wreathed in golden fire, to the level of our faces.

I watched as the fire grew hotter and brighter and wondered if I’d read things very wrong. I could have dived away, or wrestled her back into the manacles. Being a goblin at the moment, I was stronger than I’d been as a human. Instead I looked to the tiny flicker of faith I’d found and waited.

The fire in Way’s hand grew brighter still before shooting outwards in a flash. I didn’t have time to move or even flinch as the tightly focused bolt passed over my right shoulder, across the room, through the bars and through the Lake Lurker who had returned to watch us again.

The Lurker gave a pained gurgle as Way swept the bolt upwards. I didn’t see what happened as a result of that, but I didn’t have to. He wouldn’t be getting a belly full of me any time this side of never.

“Thank you.” I said as I stepped back to let her rise to feet.

She remained quiet, watching me as though I was somehow more dangerous than the Lurker.

“I know the Bramble Paths through Faerie. I think I can find the way out here.” I explained. Jenny wasn’t familiar with the paths within the Shadow Courts domain but she had a guess where the main thoroughfares were and how to navigate towards them.

“Ok.” Way said simply as she stood to join me.

Way’s bolt had burned one of the bars in two. She could have cut us out of the cell easily without the manacles shackling her power. Instead she hung back and let me work on the doors lock the way I’d worked on the manacles.

The door lock was less complicated than her manacles had been but it had a few tricky knots that would serve as alarms if anyone entered or left the cell. My arrival hadn’t triggered them for some reason though.

“How did I get here?” I asked. Jenny’s memories suggested that she’d be heading to the Silent Bazaar when part of the bramble path she was taking a shortcut through cracked and left her tumbling into darkness.

“They captured us. The Unwelcome set snares for us after they ran away. As soon as you tried to world walk they reeled you in.” Way replied.

I thought back to the two binding circles that I’d seen in the Dreamlit world while trying to flee from the nameless giant. The Unwelcome, or the Shadow Court as I knew them, wasn’t holding back if they were casting their net that wide.

“So why didn’t they leave more guards?” I asked.

“Escape is impossible. That one…”, she gestured at the remains of the Lake Lurker, “was no guard, just a spectator that wanted a bite.”

“Escape is impossible and yet we’re escaping.” I snipped the last locking thread to allow us to leave the cell without setting off the alarms.

“You are impossible.”

I honestly couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. It didn’t seem likely or in character for her, but who knew.

I stepped into the hallway. We’d been imprisoned in a special cell in the hedge maze of the Shadow Court’s central prison bulb. The hall outside the cell ran, in twists and turns, around a number of other cells. Odd branches in the path led either no where or two traps of various levels of lethality.

As I looked over the path we were on for a way out I recalled something my meta-awareness had shown me before. There were other prisoners here. I tried to think what I could do for them. Release them certainly, but could I protect or even hide a bunch of other people? Could I get them home?

“It’s gone.” Way whispered.

She was standing near the corpse of the Lake Lurker with her hands extended. It wasn’t the corpse that was bothering her though.

“What’s missing?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

I thought she was refusing to answer me, but looking at her I could see that wasn’t it. I’d seen her holding her hands like that before.

“Your scythe? You don’t have it anymore?”

She was silent.

“What happened to it?”

“You did.” she said, still looking at the Lurker’s corpse.

I almost asked what I had done, but it was clear. Her scythe had been tied to the emptiness in her. With my meta-awareness able to sense her, I was able to understand more about what she had been before too.

“Your name. I broke your connection it by giving you a name?”

“Yes.” she whispered, not looking at me.

“I’m…Are you going to be ok without it?”

Way let her hands settle to her side as she turned to me. Her eyes were glassy with tears that weren’t able to fall yet but her lips were set in a small, brave smile.

“I don’t know.”

If anyone who’d seen the destroying angel of emptiness that she’d been could have seen the girl that was standing with me at the moment, they couldn’t possibly have recognized her.

I folded my arms and leaned back with a smile.

“You don’t know? Well I do. You’re still Way Too Powerful.”

Way’s smile turned genuine at that.

“And you’re not alone.” I added.

My timing, as ever, was dreadful. No sooner had the words left my mouth when a pair of horrors rounded the corner of the briar path that connected the cells.

Shadow Courtiers.

They moved so fast I barely saw them. Like in the parking lot, all I caught was a quick blur of teeth and metal bright talons in a grey blur. That time Way’s beast had saved me. This time Way herself was with me and she was faster than her beast. Much faster.

A blur of grey forms met Way’s black clad, golden hair blur. The fight lasted maybe a whole second. Way settled against the wall, steadying herself with her right hand and covering an injury on her right arm with her left hand.

The Shadow Courtiers didn’t fare quite that well. Bits of grey goo were splattered over the entirety of the hallways leading away from us. Some of the goo wwas burning with golden flames, the rest would make a fascinating study for a blood splatter expert probably.

“Way!” I called out a warning that was roughly three seconds too late for a two second encounter.

“I’m ok.”, she assured me.

“Let me see your arm.”

A path of purple and green briars wasn’t an ideal first aid camp in the best of conditions and the Shadow Court weren’t exactly “neat freaks” when it came to their prisons. Mold, refuse and old stains that I didn’t want to think about littered the ground. Jenny had worked in worse though.

“Lovely. Poisoned.” I explained, tasting a drop of Way’s blood. It was kind of gross to do, but Jenny had seen wounds like this before and had a remarkably discerning palate. “It’s a slow one though and it’s fed by the lights here. If we can get you out all we’ll need is some water to clean the wound and you’ll be fine.”

Shadow Court poisons were weird. They were as much a menace to other Faeries as they were to humans. Jenny was familiar with them as a result, more than she wanted to be.

I thought again of the prisoners. Spending time to get them out would mean letting the poison advance in Way’s system, leaving them here though was intolerable. Meta-awareness was all too happy to show me what sort of agonies they’d suffer in the Shadow Court’s hands.

I tried to balance that against the task force of heroes that I knew were on the way. It was a gamble that I’d be able to save Way and myself, moreso without her at full fighting speed. With prisoners in tow we’d be slower, harder to hide and more vulnerable. If I left them here, the real heroes would be showing up to save them. Right?

Meta-awareness didn’t offer any precognition for that. There were too many paths. The heroes might save them, but time flowed oddly in Faerie. What might be an hour in the physical world could be a year in Faerie. A year for them to suffer while the task force gathered and fought their way in. That was assuming the heroes won too. There were plenty of paths where that didn’t happen.

On the other hand were the paths where the delay meant we didn’t make it out. Or where Way succumbed to the poison before we could escape. Or where she fell in battle because it had sapped away just enough of her strength.

“Can you do something for me?” I asked her.

“What?”

“Burn this place. Light it all on fire.”

“We’ll burn with it.” she observed.

“That’s a risk, yep.”

“Then why?”

“The poison in you feeds on the ambient light of this place. Your power left the Shadow Courtiers burning gold so your flames will wash out this purple light. It might be enough to starve out the poison entirely and if not it’ll at least leave you in better shape for longer.”

“Is that the way poison works?”

“Only if its this one.”

I went over to the nearest cell and began working the lock. From the outside it was much easier to manipulate. I saw how this would appear to the Shadow Court as I severed the links that held the cell shut.

Their prison would be in flames, with none of the alarms on the cells ringing to say the prisoners had escaped. That would suggest a failed assault, and all of their captives dead. Way’s flames would burn hot enough and long enough that they wouldn’t be able to look for our burned bodies before we could manage to get safely away.

As plans went it sounded excellent. So it was doomed to fail. I still liked it though.

In all there were six other cells that held captives. I worked through them as quickly as I could while Way began setting the prison ablaze, starting with branching paths farthest away from us.

The first cell held a minotaur. She wasn’t manacled. Instead there was a circlet of faerie gold locked around her head. Jenny recognized it as a binding spell to hold the girl’s mind imprisoned. My meta-awareness recognized it as having an additional property. It was changing the girl. She hadn’t been a minotaur when she arrived.

She was one of the children the Shadow Court had kidnapped. They’d needed a guardian and Minnie had amused them. Minnie the Minotaur. That had been all it had taken to provoke their cruel fancy.

I gently lifted the circlet off her head and caught her as she collapsed into my arms. She was much larger than me, but Jenny was pretty strong.

“The labyrinth? Where am I?” she asked. After the night I’d had I could more than empathize with the confusion that was written on her face.

“You’re with people who will help you.”, I told her calmly. The prison was going to burn down around us in a few minutes but she needed at least a moment or two to adjust.

“The labyrinth you have been trapped in was a magical lie, but it has affected you. We’re not safe here, so I can’t answer your questions yet. I will when we’re out here though so please, come with me.”

“Who are you?” she asked, still bewildered.

It was the most dangerous question she could have asked. I’d read that names have power. My recent experience with Way had shown me I didn’t know the half of it.

“A new friend.” I said, knowing I could commit at least to that being true, “The fire will reach here soon though, we have to move.”

That got her attention and without further prompting she rose and followed me out of the cell. I fiddled with the circlet that she’d been forced to wear. Part of me wanted to have Way melt the hateful thing down to scrap. Another part, Jin oddly enough, told me to hang onto it. The image of crushing a Shadow Courtiers head to fit within it was bloodily appealing. I was really starting to hate them.

The briar path was lit by a mix of purple and golden light. At the far end of the path, Way was casting arcs of fire into the cluster of empty cells that made up the cul de sac where one of the branches ended.

“How are you feeling?” I called to Way.

“The light is helping.” she called back.

“Good, I’ll try to make this as quick as I can. Minnie could you help her? The purple torches need to be put out.”

“Oh, uh, sure.” Minnie said and headed down towards where Way was working.

Having figured out the lock for Minnie’s cell, the next one proved even faster to disarm.

The occupant of the second cell was asleep and naked aside from a thick covering of red fur. Patches was like Minnie, another child captured by the Shadow Court, except he’d been captured long ago. He was as much cat as he was boy from what my meta-awareness could discern. Even his original name was lost.

“Patches, you need to get up.” I said, nudging his shoulder.

He yawned and looked at me with curious amber eyes.

He’d been sent to the cell for the crime of being too nice. He’d wanted to play with a mouse that was given to him rather than tear it to pieces. The mouse was in the next cell over and I knew already that she was grateful for his kindness even if the Shadow Court wasn’t.

Patches looked me up and down, stretched and then lazily rose without speaking. I wasn’t sure if he could anymore or if he had simply learned not to. Either way he looked content to follow me so I continued on.

The third cell held the mouse. She was still human in form, but her spirit had begun to change. Not through magic alone either. The Shadow Court were gifted psychologists in their own way. They knew all sorts of techniques to break spirits, minds and hearts. That Nell, the girl in the cell, had any courage left at all was almost unbelievable.

When I opened the cell the girl was sitting with her back to the door. She turned to face me and I saw electricity crackle off her. Her eyes were what caught my attention though. The iris and the pupils were gone, replaced by a pattern of circuits with tiny pulses of blue light racing through them.

“Nell, we’re here to help!” I said quickly. If she wanted to she could have thrown the electricity she was leaking. As a lightning bolt it would have been on the weak side. As a heart attack inducer though it would have worked just fine.

“Who are you?” she asked, as confused as Minnie had been.

“A new friend.” Patches answered. I’d been wrong, he hadn’t been sleeping and he had much better ears than I’d guessed at first.

“I’m getting you all out of here.” I told her and helped her up as her electrical aura died away.

I couldn’t place why she would have electricity coursing through her veins until meta-awareness slapped me with the idea. Words. The Shadow Court and faeries in general were drawn to words. So Nell was their mouse, as in rodent pet, but she was also being formed into a mouse, as in computer controlling peripheral. Despite the medieval trappings, the Shadow Court did understand the modern world.

I was thinking how much more dangerous they were than I’d ever imagined when I opened the next cell and found a Shadow Courtier waiting inside for me.

“Why isn’t this charming.” she said.

The shadow courtier was wearing a glamour. To my eyes she appeared as a tall woman of mathematically perfect proportions. Her skin was a rich shade of tan that suggested lustrous warmth but even from across the small cell I could feel it radiating an icy chill.

I knew her form, and the simple black dress she wore, were all magical artifice. I didn’t need meta-awareness to tell me that what really stood before me was the another of the grey horrors that Way had destroyed minutes ago.

“Charming’s a prince. I’m not him.” I replied, playing on the words as quickly as I could. I didn’t have a plan, but stalling for time made for a good reflex as it turned out.

“Indeed not. So what might you be then?” the Shadow Courtier said. She tried to walk over to me and came up short. The glamour had covered the manacles, but I could see she was chained to the wall like Way and I had been. I breathed a sigh of relief. Not an ambush. Another prisoner.

“Can’t you tell?” I asked. It was a challenge. Even chained, the Shadow Courtier could be insanely dangerous, unless I could bind her in words.

“Not a goblin, I see. Something more.”. She was enjoying the game and confident she would win it. In her vision, she was walking out here inside of two minutes, or ten if she decided to play with me a bit first. After all, how hard could it be to outwit an escaped slave, which I clearly appeared to be?

I smiled back at her. Even with Jenny’s strength and talents I was no match for a Shadow Courtier physically. I didn’t need to be dangerous physically though. Not in this game. For this I just needed words and my meta-awareness gave me a deadly edge there.

“Are you sure? What if I’m something less?” I baited her.

“If you were something lesser, we wouldn’t be speaking would we?” That was the key I needed. She couldn’t bear being wrong. Once she made a claim, she couldn’t rescind it.

“No we wouldn’t Your Majesty.”

I hadn’t expected meta-awareness to give me that bit of info but I could tell there was some truth to it beyond the Shadow Courtiers own delusions.

“Ah, you recognize me.”

“I recognize the Queen Who Was, the Queen Who Has Fallen, but not her authority, unless you would rule the realm bounded by the walls of this cell.” I said, dodging a trap she’d laid for me. Recognizing her authority, in this context, would have given her authority over me.

“And if I would?”

A chill went through me. She was far more desperate than I’d guessed. To even hint at that suggested a willingness to abandon all of the dreams of royalty that propped up her ego in a play to escape this place. For a creature like her, that was a lot to be give up, pretty much everything she had in fact.

“Then we would contest for your realm.” I told her, letting the flow of meta-awareness guide my words.

“And by what right would you lay your claim to my realm and person?”

The Shadow Court only acknowledged one “right” for rulership; the right of power. That path was lined with innumerable perils though.

“You would have me claim both your realm and yourself?” I asked.

“Do you think you could you claim the one without the other?”

“Yes.” I said, staring directly into her eyes. My word left open either possibility. She could have cast the game wholly onto control of her cell and perhaps even won her freedom from it, trapping me there in her place. That wasn’t in her though. In or out of the cell, there was no escape for her.

The Queen Who Has Fallen was allowed to exist for only one reason; to prove the power held by the Queen Who Reigned. I had insulted the rest of the Shadow Court beyond forbearance. They had to hunt me from here onwards. That was exactly how it would be for the Fallen Queen if she left her cell. The only difference is that the Fallen Queen knew exactly what depths of malice the rest of the Shadow Court would sink to in devising punishments for her.

People mistake immortality for a blessing. For the Fallen Queen, it would be a nightmare beyond human comprehension were she to become prey to her former vassals.

“And what quality would you name that could wrest the title of Queen from my lips?” she asked.

“Mercy.” I answered.

She laughed a cruel, biting gale devoid of mirth or joy.

“Mercy? There is none in me and none that I may claim.”

“Breath and tell me what approaches.”, I said.

The Fallen Queen looked at me puzzled for an instant. I’d caught her off guard and we both knew it.

“Flame? Fire approaches? Here?”

“Yes.”

“Never have these thorns burned before!”

“At my command they do now.”, I assured her. Privately I was surprised too. Meta-awareness confirmed her claim. These thorn bushes were warded against every sort of flame and fire spirit. Every sort except Way it seemed.

“The briars will burn, your realm will burn and so will the Queen Who Was.” I said.

“You offer the mercy of ashes then?” the Fallen Queen smiled, pleased at the cruelty she saw in my words.

“No, I offer you power.”

“What power could one such as you give me?”

“The power to choose. You can cling to your title, your prestige and accept the peace the flames will offer. Or you can lay down the burden of your royalty and come with me.” Meta-awareness drove the words. I’d been looking for whatever I could offer her that would convince her to come with us while at the same time chaining her into doing us no harm. Meta-awareness delivered, it found the lure she couldn’t resist taking, but in offering it I made a huge mistake.

“Very well. Only one may rule. I shall do as you bid. My Queen.” she said, savoring each syllable as she spoke them. I felt her words close on me like a vice.

She had accepted my offer, she had sworn herself to me and in doing so, she had passed her title to me. I’d been so sure I was winning. Damn tricky faerie. Damn stupid me.

The Fallen Queen would leave this cell after all it turned out. The problem was I had become the bearer of that title. The moment I stepped outside the cell’s boundaries, I would be carrying the mantle of the Fallen Queen onto forbidden ground. I would have all of the hatred of the Shadow Court with none of the perks of royal power and the former Queen would be free of any obligation to her former Court. She was my problem instead of theirs.

Fine then, I thought, let’s play the game that way. I smiled sharply at the former Queen and sliced off her manacles with a practiced flick of my fingers. I then turned and walked out of the cell without showing any concern.

She thought she’d trapped and damned me. In the Shadow Court’s eyes I was already far beyond damned though so I’d lost nothing in practice and in return I’d gained a vassal.

I had a brief vision of commanding a horde of monsters, each more terrible than the last.

“Gotta catch ‘em all.” I murmured as I strode over to the next cell.

Along the briar path, I could see that Way was getting close to where she and Minnie could rejoin us. On the other side of her, the briars were engulfed in golden flame.  Minnie was working to one side of Way, ripping out the last of the purple torches that had lined the walls of the path.

“Who’s this?”, Nell asked, pointing at the former Queen as she emerged from her cell for the first time in what might have been centuries.

“My Queen.” Patches said with a slight bow. I thought he was referring to the Shadow Courtier, but he was facing me.

“I am the Queen’s servant.”, the former Queen stated, her words weaving a shield around her. Even if the Shadow Court reclaimed her, they would do no more than play with her. They’d probably even be delighted with her.

That was a problem for another time though so I put it out of my mind and focused on opening the next cell before the fire caught us.

I was halfway through unlocking the cell door when a ghost walked right through it.

“I’m sorry.”, she said, “I didn’t know when it would be safe to come out. Is it ok if I come with you?”

I was speechless for a moment. I hadn’t been expecting a ghost, but with the night I was having, sure, why not?

I checked with my meta-awareness. She wasn’t native to here, and she hadn’t died here. What the Shadow Court wanted with her was also unclear.

“Umm, why were you in there?” I asked.

“I thought that was the last place anyone would look for me while I figured out what to do.”

That made as much sense as any other answer I could imagine her coming up with.

“Silly question but are you evil, malicious or intent on hurting us in any way?”, I asked.

“I don’t think so.”

Meta-awareness didn’t say she was lying so I shrugged my shoulders and went with it.

“Probably best to tag along with us then. Nice to meet you!”

“Thank you! Oh, and you’ll want to get the girl from the last cell too. They just brought her in yesterday.”

“Were you spying on us?” Patches asked with a purr in his voice. Turning to the ghost I noticed her shocked expression and discovered something new. I hadn’t known ghosts could blush.

I turned to work on the lock for the last cell and had it open just as Way and Minnie joined the growing ensemble. The lock was the same as all the others, the Shadow Court not being big on creativity outside of torture techniques it seemed, so I was able to disarm it in seconds. Once it was safely disposed of  I opened the cell to find a smoking hot girl waiting inside.

I don’t mean she was beautiful, I mean there was literally smoke rising from her glowing red skin. The other odd bit about her was that she looked like she was a little older than me, which meant the Shadow Court hadn’t kidnapped her as one of their usual prey.

“Let me out of here or I will burn this place to ground you bastards.” she screamed at me.

“We’ve already set it on fire, and we’re here to get you out.” I told her and moved in to undo her manacles.

She was human still. The fire that raged within her was none of the Shadow Court’s doing.

“Don’t touch me!” she demanded, fire, again literally, burning in her eyes.

“I need to get those manacles off you.”

“Give me the key.” she growled.

“I don’t have one.” I said and wiggled my finger tips in front of me to show what I was going to do.

“What the hell are you?”

“A new friend.” Patches called out from behind me in the doorway helpfully.

“Also a Queen of Faerie.” he added a moment later. The former Queen burst out laughing.

I barely had time to dodge the gout of fire that the girl breathed out at me.

“Ok this is ridiculous. Stop trying to hurt me. I’m here to help.” I said.

“A Faerie Queen? You think I don’t know who you are? Goddamn Shadow Court. I will burn all of you.”

I started to protest that I wasn’t part of the Shadow Court but then checked myself. Denying the title I’d “won” from the former Queen could have unfortunate ramification in terms of my ability to command her. The last thing I needed was to unleash yet another monster on the world.

On the other hand, being fried by someone I was trying to help wasn’t appealing either.

I checked with meta-awareness to see if she could survive the coming flames that we’d set. It would be kind of cowardly to leave her behind but it could save a lot of people from a trip to the burn ward if the girl’s temper was as bad as it was looking to be.

Of course things couldn’t be that simple. The girl was certainly fireproof. So were the Briars though. Way’s flame wouldn’t have any more trouble roasting the girl than it did igniting the briars. Leaving her behind was a death sentence.

“Right. How about a deal then? Faeries love making deals don’t they. Here’s what I’ve got for you. I need a fire elemental to burn up a bunch of my enemies in the Court. Come with me and help protect the people here and in return I’ll lead you back to the physical world. No strings, no tricks.”

“There’s always a trick.” she said warily.

“True. The trick in this case is we’ve just set fire to their prison, every Courtier wants me worse than dead and getting out of here is in no way guaranteed.”

“That’s a terrible deal.” she complained, but I could see her rage had subsided to a more manageable level.

“What’s scarier in faerie; being offered a terrible deal or one that seems perfectly fair and balanced?” I asked.

She paused to consider that for a moment.

“Fine. Get me out of these things. But don’t touch me. Seriously, I will burn you.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time tonight.” I muttered.

“What?” she asked.

“Just whining. Here, can you stand ok?” I asked, having the manacles unlocked before she even noticed I’d begun working on them.

“Umm, yeah.” she said. She didn’t offer her name, but meta-awareness told me it was “Jessica”. The extent of how powerful of a talent I possessed wasn’t lost on me. Knowing the name of people or things in Faerie was a close cousin to having total dominion over them. On the hand, I’d just gotten spanked at a game of words vs. the Queen of Failure, so somehow it wasn’t too hard to keep my ego in check.

“Good. We definitely need to get moving then.”

“Yes.” Way agreed, moving to stand beside me.

“Ok. We need one more burn. Our passage is on the far side of that wall. We don’t want the briars just on fire though, we need them ashed before the rest of the flames reach us. Can you handle that?” I asked.

Even with the golden light of her flames holding back the poison, I could tell Way’s wound was sapping her strength.

“Yes.”

“Burn this place down? Just try to stop me!”, Jessica added.

“Everyone else, stand back and let them work then.” I ordered. I wasn’t a natural leader, but with a group this size I could see that trying to put things to a vote was not going to work.

The outer shell of the prison was a noticeably harder challenge than the interior briar walls. Neither Way nor Jessica could afford to unleash their full power in the cramped quarters that remained but I could tell they would manage with at least two or three seconds to spare before the flames overwhelmed us.

That was until fire lizards showed up.

Dragons are interesting creatures from what I’ve read. They come in as many varieties as there are people to imagine them. The abominations that came leaping through the flaming briars bore as little resemblance to anything a human had dreamed up as the Shadow Court bore to the humans they’d once been.

“Minnie!” I called, but she was already reacting.

The two creatures reared back on legs that divided into a dozen spike-tipped pincers as Minnie charged them. She’d crossed her arms in front of her, so they took the brunt of the burning poison the fire lizard spat out. Before the corrosive spittle could do any damage she flung it off and crashed into the beasts, bearing them both to the ground.

Under other circumstances I would have wagered on Minnie taking both of the monsters out before they had the chance to do any serious damage to her. The fire we’d set wasn’t our friend though and with the fire lizards added heat it’s progress along the briar path had accelerated.

Where Minnie and the fire lizards fell was covered in flame and smoke an instant later.

Lacking any common sense whatsoever, I plunged into the conflagration with only the barest hint of a plan in mind. I blamed Jenny for that since I’m pretty certain Jin had far more self preservation instinct than that.

“Your cell!” I screamed to Minnie through the smoke, scrambling to the first door I’d opened.

I wasn’t sure that my intention was clear enough until a moment later when I felt a whoosh of air as a large mass sailed past me. I couldn’t see what it was through the smoke but from the sound of it crashing into the far wall of the cell it was clearly hefty. A second later another whoosh of air and crash within the cell suggested that Minnie had understood exactly what I meant to do.

With both fire lizards secured inside, I slammed the cell door shut and blindly fiddled with the lock. Fortunately they were designed to secure things easily so resetting it didn’t take too long even blinded as I was. Just long enough for me to catch a lungful of smoke and grow too dizzy to walk.

As epitaphs went, “she wasn’t smart enough to stay out of largest, obvious fires” wasn’t exactly the one I was hoping for.

“She’s here!” I heard a ghostly voice call out as my knees buckled.

I blinked and for a second saw double. On one side of my vision there was the burning prison in the Shadow Court’s pocket of fairyland. On the other I saw something out of an eldritch horror’s nightmares.

The Dreamlit world!

Pen had said it bordered everything that was real within the context of my world. The Shadow Court was certainly real and so their realm had a shadow in the Dreamlit world. A grotesque and terrifying shadow, as befitted the nightmares that they were, but somehow still a comforting thing to discover. It was a nightmare, but it was my kind of nightmare.

My vision snapped back into singular focus as we exited the smoke. Minnie had pulled me into the small bit of the Briar path that remained free of fire. She looked noticeably worse for her encounter with the fire lizard, red welts already forming on her hands and face from where they’d struck her. For some reason though she was smiling at me.

“We’re not going to make it through the Briar wall in time.” I coughed out.

“Perhaps if two were to become three?” Patches suggested.

I looked at him, trying to guess what he meant. He was looking past me though. At Nell. Who was looking at me for permission? I kicked myself mentally. I hadn’t asked the mousey girl to help so she thought she wasn’t welcome to. More proof that I definitely wasn’t a natural leader.

“Absolutely. Nell, can you help them?”, I asked and moved aside to open a path to where Way and Jessica were working on carving through the briar wall.

I’d expected her to start throwing lightning bolts to complement the streams of fire that Way and Jessica were pouring forth. Instead she approached them both and very tentatively touched each of them on their backs. Way and Jessica’s fire streams didn’t grow hotter or larger in response to the touch. If anything they became smaller and more focused.

Where they had been carving through the wall with the equivalent of two flame throwers, with Nell’s assistance they punched straight through it with laser beams.

It took less than a minute for them to complete the task and we all piled out into the adjoining pathway a full twenty seconds before the fire engulfed the last of the prison’s briar path.

The Shadow Court’s domain had been grown to their liking. That mean the walls of the path around the prison were riddled with poisonous needles. The floor bent and twisted at all sorts of odd angles too. Perfect for hurting anyone who walked on it and didn’t possess inhuman grace. Which meant half the people in our group, myself included.

We’d been “lucky” inside the prison. It had been less “artistic” and more given over to form and security, which Jenny knew was only due to the geometries required for the binding spells it held. The less secure prison bulbs, of which I realized there were dozens, were quite a bit more horrifying.

I took stock of our position and saw that the path we had escaped to wrapped around the perimeter of the prison and led to an artery into the Shadow Court’s “play rooms”.

We were fortunate in one sense. We were near the heart of their realm, inside the dead bough of a failed World Tree. That meant we weren’t all that far from a Hedge Gate, one of the natural portals that joined together the shifting domains of the Fey. That also meant we were near a center of the Court’s power so the chance of avoiding them was minimal.

“This way.” I said and began leading the others down the path running counter clockwise around the burning prison. In the distance I could hear ululations of mad joy. The Court had discovered that their prison was ablaze. I’d expect rage would follow but that wasn’t the way their alien minds worked. Something was being destroyed. They couldn’t help but be delighted. The same way sharks are delighted when blood is spilled in the water.

“What’s that?” Nell asked. She’d never heard the Court laughing before.

“We need to go. Be careful but move as fast as you can.” I said.

“Running isn’t going to save us.” the former Queen sing-songed. I threw a glare at her but kept moving. There wasn’t time to argue and we both knew it.

We made it to the first branch of the path that would take us beyond the prison bulb and into the greater gardens of the Shadow Court before the first Courtiers caught up to us.

One moment we were walking along, the next Way was several dozen yards down the path, bits of flaming Courtier raining down around her. The former Queen had also intercepted one of the Courtiers and was locked in a silent and nearly frozen struggle with it. They were evenly matched and it was clear the struggle would only end with the death of one or the other.

Before any of the rest of could think to move, Patches stepped up behind the alien Courtier, broke off a poisoned thorn the length of his hand from a nearby section of bramble and rammed it through the Courtier’s left eye. The monster twitched and spasmed for a second before the former Queen used its weakness to slam it into the wall of thorns, impaling it a hundred times over.

A shiver of delight rippled down the Queen’s entire body as the alien Courtier sagged against the wall and began to dissolve. Patches meanwhile regarded the scene with unfeigned disinterest. He turned to look at me as though wondering why we had stopped at all.

“Damn.” I struggled to collect myself, images of what would have happened if there had been three Courtiers rather than two dancing in my head. I was leading us deeper into their lair. We had nowhere else to go but even so it seemed like an insane course of action.

From somewhere deep in the heart of the Shadow Court’s realm, a single pure bell tone rang out. It wasn’t ear splittingly loud but I could feel it reach through the entirety of their domain. Something had crossed their Hedge Gate. Something uninvited that didn’t carry the taint of their horror. My heart leapt into my throat, hope surging within me.

The heroes had arrived!

Even in chains, Way looked as beautiful as ever.

“I’m not who you think I am.” I told her. It seemed like a fair guess that she’d mistaken me for someone else. The last time she’d seen me, I hadn’t been a squat, blue skinned goblin with crochet hook fingers.

“I know exactly who you are. Namer.” Way replied. She did not sound pleased to see me.

“You recognize me? Like this?” I asked, amazed. Jenny Nine Stitches body wasn’t an illusion. I really was her, at least according to my meta-sense. There shouldn’t have been any details or clues that would connect the two of us.

“I will always know who you are.”, she said.

“How?”

Way glared at me silently. She wasn’t in the mood for playing twenty questions it looked like. That seemed fair since I hadn’t answered hers.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened before.” I told her.

“Why did you speak to me. Why didn’t you keep running?”

“I didn’t want to fight you.”

“Why?”

“Why would I?”

“Do you know what I am?”

“No.” I admitted, my awareness caught something in her question though and I added “Do you?”

Again, she only glared at me in response.

She was angry, but it was the sort of anger that came from fear. Her fear of me was a tiny thing compared to whatever fear actually drove her. I was here though which made me an easy target.

Was it good that she was chained, I wondered? Would she be trying to blast me to pieces with her golden bolts or chop me up with her scythe if she was free?

“Why did you want me to run?” I asked, trying to confirm what my intuition had told me during our aerial race.

Silence, but this time she looked away. Meta-awareness told me I was right. She had been holding back. She’d been trying to spare me and she’d suffered for it. I couldn’t tell how exactly, but she lost something when she’d gained a name.

I blinked in belated surprise. I could sense her! I remembered the end of the chase, just before she’d exploded with power, I’d been able to sense her then too but after I burned up I’d lost her. Naming her, even as unintentionally as I had, had given her more than a name. She had a presence, a reality, that she lacked before.

“What happened to you?” I breathed, quietly stunned at the enormity of change that such a simple action had precipitated.

“You named me.” she replied, as though that explained everything.

“How? By saying you’re way too powerful? It can’t be that easy or someone would have named you ages ago.” I protested.

“People don’t speak to me.” she said. Her voice was flat, but the anger was still there and this time I got a glimpse of what was behind it.

Kids are afraid of the dark because they know Death lurks in it. Way was what Death was afraid of. In that one instant, I glimpsed what she had been. Where death marks the end of a life, the emptiness in Way held its revocation.

I thought of the Shadow Courtier that Way’s beast had torn apart. Way’s purpose wasn’t to destroy monsters or heroes. Destruction wasn’t enough. In her hands what was once real became nothing. Not real, not even a dream.

I felt my anger stir as my meta-awareness filled in a detail I’d missed. That was what the nameless giant had tried to do to me! The black flame wasn’t meant to burn me. The nameless giant wanted me more than dead. That should have scared the hell out of me. Jin probably would have been terrified, but Jenny Nine Stitches was cut from a meaner cloth.

And anyways he’d failed. I spat on the floor at the thought of him.

“What am I then?” I demanded. Way didn’t deserve my anger, except she had set her beast on me, and chased me, and burned me to death.

“I don’t know.” she admitted quietly. Her fear was there, echoing my own.

I flipped between Jenny and Jin. Two different people, two different lives. It wasn’t a question of which was real. They both were, and they were both me. There was more to me than could be summed up in a single truth. Just like Way.

I saw in the purple torchlight, not the destroying angel, but the girl that she also was. An idea was there, meta-awareness and intuition were trying to pound it into my head, but I had to hear it from her.

“So we’re two of a kind then?” I asked.

She looked back at me silently. She didn’t need to answer that question.

“Do you want to go back to what you were?” I continued.

“Yes! I’m broken like this!” she lied.

“Will you destroy me if you have the chance?” I asked.

A look of confusion passed over Way’s face and she looked away again.

“Probably.”, she nearly whispered the word. Was it a confession? A regret? It didn’t matter, either way, that was a lie too.

I paused for a moment and wondered how sure I could be of the idea I was putting together. I knew she was lying thanks to my meta-awareness, but that same meta-awareness hadn’t even registered her existence earlier. I could be deluding myself but if so I was doing a damn good job of it.

I smiled at her and tried to stand up. I wasn’t able to get fully to my feet due the chains that bound me to the floor. They were woven from strands of spider silk, so light I hadn’t noticed them at first. When they went taut though I felt the strength they held me with. The silk was stronger than steel and there were Winter enchantments on them which would leech away any strength used to break them. Jenny was familiar with them, though she’d never stitched one herself.

I heard someone coming outside the cell and sat back down before a creature with grey, bulbous skin and milky eyes slithered forward to peer in through the bars of the cell. It was hunched over but still at least twice as tall as I was. He was a Lake Lurker, Jenny knew, not part of the Shadow Court but one of their allies.

“What’s this? A bit of flotsam get caught in the tangle trap? What are you doing here Blue?” the Lake Lurker asked. Its voice was wet and sloppy, as though each syllable had to force its way past a mouthful of thick goo.

“Walking the Bramble Path to the market. What of it?” Jenny answered. The Bramble Paths were the roads that led from one Faerie realm to another. Jenny’d fallen afoul of the Shadow Court’s trap while she was traveling in-between the faerie worlds.

“Picked the wrong night.” the Lake Lurker made a noise that passed for a laugh among its kind.

“You’ll let me go if you know what’s good for you, fishsticks!” Lake Lurker’s, for as disgusting as they looked to me, were a delicacy among some of the more degenerate fairies. Jenny was spoiling for a fight, and Jin had no idea how to handle a Lake Lurker so Jenny got to call the shots.

“You’re a rich one you are. Guess you’ll make fair bait too.” the Lurker said intending to be enigmatic. Meta-awareness had already shown me the score though.

Way was here as bait for the nameless giant. The Shadow Court hadn’t been intending to capture me, that was just a lucky (or unlucky from my point of view) fluke. Still, since I had enough similarities to Way and the giant to be captured by the trap meant for them, the Shadow Court would be happy to use me an additional lure.

“Come in here and say that to my face.” Jenny taunted him.

“I don’t need to say nothing to bait. Just got to watch you squirm when they string you up.” the Lurker’s smile revealed a set of irregular serrated teeth.

I sniffed and turned up my nose at him. Being Jenny was kind of cool. I knew I would feel that way right up until his teeth tore into my flesh and I started screaming.

I shook my head at that burst of meta-awareness. That part of the script needed to change.

“Squirming like a worm on a hook and they’re going to have you on so many hooks Blue.”

I looked back at him but stayed silent. I wasn’t going to be able to lure him into entering the trap with us so there wasn’t any need to goad him into staying around.

I glanced over at Way and found she was studying me. I couldn’t tell what she saw in me though. Did she see Jenny? Or Jin? Or someone else?

I smiled at her. She frowned back, confused.

“So many hooks.” the Lurker taunted again. I continued to ignore him. Sure he was dangerous. If this had been Jenny’s story, she would have wound up stuffing his belly if she wasn’t careful. That wasn’t the way it was going to play out though. I didn’t need meta-awareness to know that. I just needed to look inside for a tiny bit of faith and across the room for Way.

Seeing that I wasn’t rising to the bait, so to speak, the Lurker grew bored and turned away. He shambled down the hallway to check on the other prisoners the Shadow Court had collected. When he was far enough away I turned back to Way.

“I’m getting out of here.” I told her as I unraveled the manacles. It was Jenny’s special talent. She wasn’t a spellcaster but she could fix or break almost any kind of woven spell with her crochet fingers. The Shadow Court’s trap wasn’t meant for a goblin like Jenny, so undoing the silk manacles took only three twists and a snip.

Way shied back as I walked towards her, so I stopped first where the silk chains were lashed to the floor and began undoing them from there.

“What are you doing?” she asked warily.

“I don’t want to leave you here either.” I said.

“You bound with me a name. What else are you going to do to me?”

“Nothing. I just don’t want you to be trapped here.”

“I’ll hurt you.” she warned. There was truth to that. She would. Of her own volition or not, with malicious intention or not, if I set her free she would hurt me. What she didn’t see was that not setting her free would hurt me too. I’d had to live with abandoning someone to the nonexistent mercies of the Shadow Court. I hadn’t been able to do that with Samantha when I thought didn’t have the power to rescue her and I couldn’t do that with Way when I knew that I did.

“Will you?” I asked as the last of the threads came loose from the floor.

Way raised her still manacled hands and gestured to the cord I held that had anchored them to the floor.

“You’ll hold me leashed for your safety.”

I took her left hand in my right and set to work on her manacles. It was trickier removing them from her and took much longer than three twists and a snip. Way sat quiet and motionless as I worked on them, not even breathing until the first manacle dropped away.

“I will hurt you!” she warned me again.

“Is that what you want?” I asked as I took her other hand and began working on the other manacle.

She was silent again, watching me work. I was almost done when she put her free hand over mine to stop me from undoing the last manacle..

“No.” she said, shaking her head.

I smiled back and took my hands away, severing the manacle’s last thread as I did.

“No bindings. No compulsions.” I said.

I saw golden fire begin to gather in her hands and her eyes harden.

If she burned me up again, I thought, I’d just wake up in my body.

My body that was trapped in a collapsing building.

My body that I couldn’t sense at all anymore.

A flash of panic swept through me. I couldn’t sense my body anymore! Was I dead? Had I fled to Jenny because there wasn’t any Jin left to be? My meta-sense couldn’t tell me. I couldn’t sense anything about the physical world at all.

Strangely that was comforting. Maybe because I couldn’t normally sense the physical world while I was dreaming, the thought of being cut off from it wasn’t as terrifying as it could be. I knew this wasn’t a dream, or the Dreamlit world, so it seemed even more reasonable that my dual perception wouldn’t quite be able to span the distance.

Whatever was happening with my physical body though, I was pretty sure that if I burned up here it wouldn’t be good.

I looked into Way’s eyes for any sign of warmth and felt the heat radiating from the flames in her hands begin to rise.

There’s a distinctive sound to a collapsing building. Hearing it in stereo from the inside of the building is not an experience I recommend.

I managed to take all of three steps away from the nearest wall that was falling in towards me before I saw that being in two places at once was not helping me. Merging my dream and physical selves together was instantaneous.  That saved me from a pitching forward into one of the rents in the floor and impaling myself on jagged edges of the tear.

I was fully in the physical world, so when the wall that I fell against warped and exploded I was hit by purely physical shards of wood that tore into my uncovered arms. I didn’t remember losing my coat but I couldn’t remember having it after I woke up downstairs either. A little fabric and winter lining wasn’t going to save me the next floor up crushing me but it would still have been nice to have.

Throwing myself off the wall, I scrambled to think of someplace, any place, where I could find safety in the next two seconds before everything collapsed. Meta-awareness was faster than thought, giving me the answer so quickly that my feet were pushing me towards the conference room before I understood why I was headed in that direction.

Agent Haffrun had used the room for an interview with someone who could have been a supervillian. It had to be reinforced. Maybe some technomagic warding as well. Even if the entire building collapsed, that room might stay in one piece.

Two seconds might have been enough in the Dreamlit world. I could have flown there which would have cut the travel time down, but that would have meant leaving my physical self behind and nearly motionless. I might be able to survive dying in the Dreamlit world, but I wasn’t eager to see what would happen if I died in the physical world instead.

I was no more than five feet from the door to the conference room when buildings superstructure gave up it’s battle with the inexorable force that was bearing down on it. I felt the floor spasm and shatter into pieces away beneath me. I tried to fight for my balance but there was nothing to balance on.

The fall lasted less than a second but the pain from the landing was another story. Agony in my arms and left leg was all I had after the cacophony of the buildings destruction subsided. I tried to move away from the pain but I couldn’t. Weight was pressing down on me from all sides. Weight and darkness. I couldn’t tell if I was blind or only cut off from all light.

I listened, afraid that the giant might crush the building even further, but I couldn’t hear anything except for the sound of running water. Not even cries for help.

“Pen!” I dream spoke. I had no idea what he’d be able to do, but all I could think of was how badly I needed someone to rescue me. I didn’t want to die, crushed and bleeding, alone like this.

“You survived? Good. Then I will have my answer after all.” the harsh voice of the giant replied.

If my legs had been free I would have kicked myself. Instead I dream shouted again.

“PEN!”

“He is ours now.” the giant said. From above me the sound of an enormous mass being shifted away drowned out any other real sound I could have heard.

The rubble above me was cleared enough to let in the lights from the city through a few cracks in the debris. I saw in the dim light that the four walls of the room on the first floor that I landed in were still standing. I was laying awkwardly on a pile of debris with bits of wall and masonry from the second floor covering my arms and legs. The door frame from the conference room was propped up around my head by some debris on either side which gave me a small space above my head and upper torso that wasn’t buried.

The giant was shifting through the rubble that remained on the second floor but it was only a matter of time before he brushed off the junk above me. At that point he would either see me looking like a fish in a barrel, or the rubble would fall in on me and finish the job for him.

I struggled to move again and gave up before I’d twisted more than a millimeter or so. My leg was broken and both arms were punctured. The giant didn’t need to do anything. I was as good as dead as it was.

That’s when I heard moaning from the other side of the wall I was laying against. Someone else was alive! I swung from joy at not being alone to terrified concern. Whoever was on the other side of the wall didn’t sound like they were in any better shape than I was. If the giant was present in the physical world, no one was going to be able to get in and rescue either one of us.

Even if a team of super heroes could show up and drive the giant off, the fight would take long enough that the people trapped inside could die of shock before it finished.

I couldn’t do anything about that. I was useless. In the physical world.

The dreamlit world flooded over me as I projected myself outwards, rising from the rubble on the second floor.

I cast a look back at my body. I could feel it was fading. Separated like this, I felt my body giving in to the pull of sleep. That wasn’t a good response to shock, so I fought to stay awake, pitting the weariness I felt against the pain in my limbs.

The giant loomed over the police station in the Dreamlit world, standing at least a hundred feet tall. He, or it, was made of the same night-sky-colored fire as Way’s scythe blade had been. Where a pair of eyes should have been there where swirling lights, like galaxies dying. Lines through the flames gave the sense that they made a heavy suit of armor adorned with spikes where jets of fire shot out of the giant’s form.

He’d crushed the upper floor of the police station and left most of the first floor intact. I couldn’t tell how much of that was intentional and how much was due to the extra warding on the holding cells of the first floor of the police station in the real world. In either case it left me some hope that there were other survivors in the ruin of the building.

“What do you want?” I yelled at the giant in dream speak. I tried to match the coldness that I’d heard in Pen’s voice but I didn’t come close.

“You damaged a tool of mine. I want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.” the giant replied.

With a jerk he extended his right hand and ropes of black fire shot out towards me. I’d been too slow to escape the building. That was in the physical world. The dreamlit world played by different rules.

I was in the air before the fire had crossed half the distance between us. The flames disintegrated the spot I’d been standing on when they struck. In the physical world, I saw red-orange flames spring up on the destroyed second floor. Shock was no longer the most likely cause of death I’d have to look forward to.

“So you’re saying your tool is broken? I hear a lot of old guys have that problem.” I was scared enough to be angry and rude, and the joke just came to me at the right moment. I’d blame my meta-awareness for it but that bit of insanity was pretty much all me.

“No.” he said, clearly not willing to be taken in by banter. The rest of his response came in the form of more of that death fire or whatever it was.

I shot straight upwards to get away from it. This time the fire didn’t shoot straight through the point I’d been standing. It curved to follow me upwards instead. I pushed myself for greater speed to escape the pursuing flames and left an explosion of sparks behind.

Wings of flame unfurled from the giant back and he rose into the air to follow me with the force of a Saturn rocket leaving the launch pad.

The survivors in the building would stay safe from him for as long as I could keep him busy so I turned and fled like I had from Way, looking for any cloud cover I could use to hide my escape (because that worked so very well the first time).

What I found was a wall of force.

I hadn’t been able to see before hitting it but afterwards it was brilliantly visible, lit by the glow from a circle on the ground inscribed with mystic symbols. The circle was huge with walls that reached upwards as far my eyes could see. Another circle lay beyond it, invisible to everything except my meta-awareness. He’d created a trap to take no chances with, it circled not only the police station but everything within a half mile of it as well.

Running away horizontally wasn’t an option so I took the only direction that was. Straight up.

The stars above me burned dazzling bright in the Dreamlit world. They weren’t the same stars from the physical world, but they inspired the same sense of awe. In both planes of existence whole other worlds lay beyond the dark of the sky, here though I felt like I could reach them if I really tried.

That’s when the sheet of black flames blazed to life above me. They cut off the light of stars and forced me to check my flight speed.

“No escape.” the giant’s voice called out behind me.

My meta-awareness told me that the flames weren’t there, but I knew I couldn’t trust it in this case. It couldn’t see the giant either, at least not distinctly. There was a general sense of “wrongness” though, similar to what I’d felt from Way’s beast.

I spun away from the giant’s path of ascent, looking for a building I could hide behind. If I couldn’t get him completely away from the police station, I could at least keep him distracted to buy time for the survivors to be dug out.

The area around the police station wasn’t as deserted as the old manufacturing center in the South End though so nothing jumped out at me as a safe spot for cover. I could probably lose the giant by flying among the tenement buildings around the police station but there was nothing to say he wouldn’t knock those down too looking for me.

I considered trying to bluff him, but given how quickly he’d seen through Pen’s attempt at that I couldn’t picture anything I could come up with that would yield any better results.

I had to looped upwards and twist painfully to get out of the way of his next blast. I managed to avoid getting burned, or disintegrated but I knew it was just a matter of time. I had to dodge every attack he threw at me. He only need to hit once.

I thought of avoiding Way’s attacks, and then of Way herself. Was she the “tool”, the giant was speaking of? Had my naming her “broken” her somehow?

Both of those seemed likely. There was clearly some relationship between Way and the Giant. That both of them used the same sort of fire and assaulted me without provocation was too unlikely to be a coincidence.

Pen had been trying to keep information from me, but if there was a standing “burn you to ash” welcome wagon for new dream travelers I’m pretty certain he would have mentioned it.

The commonalities between the giant and Way hit a snag in my mind as I dodged more black fire by a smaller margin than ever.

The giant was using anti-fire or whatever black fire should be called. Way had used that on her scythe but when she was blasting at me her beams had been brilliant gold. I doubted that was a personal affectation, but I had no idea yet what it could mean.

“What I need is some super lasers of my own.” I mumbled to myself. If it was possible to wish things like that into existence in the Dreamlit world though I clearly didn’t know how yet.

The next blast of fire came in so fast and was twisting so wildly that I had to risk cutting past the top floor of an apartment building to escape it. The flames exploded on the side of the apartment, dissolving the wall away as they consumed everything, including themselves.

In the physical world, my awareness told me the wall shattered inwards covering an infant’s room with broken glass and sheetrock. The family was out at the movies. The infant was with her grandmother. I had gotten very lucky.

I soared higher, giving the giant a clearer shot at me, but avoiding the chance that a missed shot would damage any of the buildings inside the mystic circle.

“Tell me why you’re doing this!” I demanded. I was still afraid, but anger was holding that at bay.

“No.”

“You have no idea who I am.” I said, my voice doing a better impression of Pen’s absolute zero tone. It was true too. He hadn’t said my name. In fact he’d claimed he hadn’t known how I’d named Way.

“You have no idea what I’m capable of.” I stopped flying and stared him down. That was true too, though it was more accurate to say neither of us knew what I was capable of. Even Pen had seemed surprised by some of it.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“You’re wrong. Give me back Pen and leave here. We didn’t ask for any of this.” I cast my meta-awareness outwards. I had power, almost certainly more than I knew of yet. All I needed was to find something useful in it. Someway to smite this jerk.

My awareness touched on the police station. My physical self had fallen asleep for a few minutes while I was dodging the flame blasts in the Dreamlit world. I roused myself as best as I could and opened my eyes. Flames had covered the top of the police station and were starting to work their way down the walls of the room I was in. I didn’t have much time one way or the other. Nor did the rest of the survivors.

Outside the circle rescue teams were mobilizing. My awareness lit on one of the fire crews. They would arrive well after my room was engulfed in flame.

I cursed. If the giant wasn’t here I could help save people. With my awareness I’d be able to direct the rescuers right where to go to get everyone who was still alive out.

There wasn’t any way I’d be able to get past him though and no way, I guessed, that he’d relent on his assault.

“You don’t matter.” he said.

“If that were true, then why would you go to all this trouble?” I asked, gesturing to the circle of power that surrounded us.

His answer was a column of black flame that struck down on me from above.

I couldn’t dodge it, not by flying.

I tried to shift my dream self over to the physical world and escape the flames by avoiding their reality entirely. That didn’t work quite as planned.

The pain of the flames was intense but brief. One instant I was floating in sky of the dreamlit world and the next I felt blinding, soul-severing agony. I shoved myself away from the sensation as hard as I could and felt my world turn inside out. On the plus side, the pain vanished as quickly as it had struck.

I blinked and found myself in a cell made of dripping red thorns and dark brambles. There was light in the cell from a gnarled torch that burned with cold purple glow. The cell was spacious, probably as large as one of my classroom, though most of it was lost in shadows.

I looked down at my arms and body, surprised that I still had them after the flame hit me.

My skin was blue and my hands ended in fingers shaped like crochet hooks. My name was Jenny Nine Stitches and I was a Spinner for the Free Fairies of the Lost Oaks.

I shook my head. I was Jin Smith still, but I remembered. I’d dreamed about being Jenny Nine Stitches several times after I’d gotten a book of Fairytales from my Mom.

Somehow she was real. Like Molly.

She was real, she was me and we were captured.

By the Shadow Court.

My meta-awareness hadn’t gone away. I was still Jin after all.

They’d been waiting. I was the least of their worries, but I was at the center of an event that was destroying the foundation of who they were. They couldn’t let go of me regardless of how much they might want to.

The second circle had been theirs. They’d laid a trap around the trap.

Not for me though. Meta-awareness was pulling in details for me as fast as it could.

They’d been trying to trap the nameless giant. To save themselves from it. Because they’d already caught something bearing the giant’s power.

My meta-awareness found one more important piece of information. I wasn’t alone in the cell.

“Why did you do this to me.” Way asked, her eyes focused solely on mine.

“So, was this the stupidest possible thing I could have done?” I asked Pen, each of my selves pointing at the other. I was only half joking. He was looking at me like I was a five year old who was holding a stick of dynamite in one hand and a flamethrower in the other.

“If I say ‘yes’ will that compel you to try to top it?”

“Depends on how hard topping it would be.”

“Not hard enough unfortunately.”, Pen said with a small smile.

“I kind of figured that was the case. Want to just spill the beans and tell me what I’m really seeing here?”

“Want?”, Pen laughed, “It’d take a dozen maps and a team of Sherpas to get from where we are to anywhere close to what I want.”

I was surprised by the bitterness that lay under his words. He was better at dream speaking than I was, more able to mute the feelings that accompanied the thoughts he projected, but even so I could feel that this was tearing him up.

“Why? Why does this matter to you? You’re only going to be here for the three days right? Anything after that is my problem isn’t it?”

“That’s not it.”

“Is it because you needed me to be normal? To be powerless? Am I not a good enough hiding place for you now?” I asked, frustrated at not being able to see what was wrong. Frustrated at the prospect of not being good enough after all.

“No. This isn’t about you.” Pen insisted. He was frustrated too, choking back his words in fear of letting anything else out that he couldn’t take back.

“How can it not be about me? This is me we’re talking about.” I said in stereo, both my dream self and physical self reacting with a flush of anger.

Moving my physical body around took effort when I was projecting myself into a dreamspace but strong emotions made it easier. I’d have to watch for that or it would look like I was having a shouting match with thin air whenever I argued with someone via dream speech.

Pen sighed and paused for a moment, picking out out his words carefully.

“Have you ever killed a planet full of people?”, he asked without preamble. I tried to read his expression. It was a ridiculous question, but he didn’t look like he was joking at all.

“No.” I answered, struggling to work out how that could be relevant.

“I have.”

It wasn’t so much a confession as a cold statement of fact.

“Why?” I asked softly, still struggling to understand.

“For the greater good. That’s all I can remember.” He was still and the glow of his aura had faded away almost completely.

“So you’re trying to protect me to make up for that?”, I guessed. He wasn’t a planet killing monster. My meta-awareness confirmed that. It also said he wasn’t lying. I couldn’t see how both of those could be true but somehow they were.

“I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you can make up for. I’m trying to protect you so you won’t have to do the same thing.”

“I could kill the planet?” That didn’t seem even vaguely possible.

“Not now. Not like this. Knowledge is power though, so if you knew what I did?” he let the question stand between us.

“Even if I could do that, why would I? My family’s here! My friends are here! Why would I want everyone on the planet to die?”

“You wouldn’t need to want it. Just knowing how to do it would make you a target like I am.”

“It can’t be that easy to kill a planet.” I objected.

“You’re right. It’s not that easy. It’s impossible in fact.” Pen replied.

“Then what’s the problem?”

“So is what you’re doing now.”

I frowned, feeling as confused as ever.

“This is just astral projection or something like that isn’t it?”

“No.”

“And you can’t tell me how it’s different.”

Pen smiled sadly and shook his head.

“How much damage will I do by experimenting to find out?”

“Maybe none. Maybe a lot.”

“Then how do I forget this? How do I leave it behind?” I asked. I didn’t want to say those words. It wasn’t that the lure of power was intoxicating or corrupting me. It was the respite from feeling helpless. From feeling like I was a tiny ant in a world of giants. That was the drug that was making a part of me scream to hang onto the one thing I’d found that could make me special.

I’d read so much about the meta-humans of the world and always picked up on how horrible their lives could be. How much of that was seeing the reality behind the glamour and how much of it was sour grapes? Faced with having powers of my own, I couldn’t say.

There were other temptations too. The good that I could do if I kept whatever powers I had. The regret I’d feel if I let them go and something went wrong that I could have prevented. Even just being able to fly. I’d miss that terribly if I gave up my powers.

Balanced against that was the whole of my world. I knew Pen wasn’t lying or exaggerating. He’d done what he claimed. There were humans who would sink to the lowest depths of depravity to acquire a power like that, so I could only imagine what non-humans like the Shadow Court would be willing to do.

I saw what Pen meant when he said getting eaten by sharks was one of the better outcomes if things went towards the worst case scenario. I wasn’t brave at all, but even I’d chose “eaten by sharks” over letting someone kill everyone, everywhere. The trick was, with a lot of the things who would want a power like that, I probably wouldn’t even get the choice. Mind control would be the gentlest way to rip a secret like that from me. The real monsters could do a lot worse.

Taking on that kind of responsibility was too much. I couldn’t trust myself with it much less expect anyone else to. Looking at it like that, it was easy to quiet the screaming need to be special and accept that I had to be the same normal, unimportant Jin I’d always been.

“I don’t know if you can. There might not be any going back.”, Pen said, “Maybe there never was?”

“What?”, I mumbled. Having accepted that I needed to give the powers up, the prospect of being stuck with them left me with a sick feeling in my stomach, “Do you mean this was destiny or something?”

“No, or not in the sense of ‘predestination’. Destiny is what you make for yourself. Anyone who tells you different is running some scheme of their own.”

“Ok, so does that mean that this is my fault?”

“In a way, yes. You rescued me.”

“No good deed goes unpunished?”

“More like ‘everything has consequences’. You have a natural talent for this. I’d guess from a strong imagination. You chose to rescue me. Put those two together and we wind up here.” Pen said.

The sourness in my stomach rose. I couldn’t escape this and I’d brought it on myself.

“I need to know then. There has to be a middle ground between ‘destroy the world’ and ‘blind to everything’.  I’m going to go nuts otherwise. I’m barely holding it together as is stands. If I need to walk around with the chance that I might blunder into killing everyone on Earth I’m going to lose it completely.”

Pen looked at me for a long moment, evaluating not me but himself. He exhaled a slow breath and his features softened. He’d let go of something inside himself that neither my meta-awareness or mundane intuition could guess. The glow of his aura brightened as he looked back up at me, a faint blue fire flickering tight around him.

“You’re right.”, he said, “You were my beacon. It’s time I was yours. Ask away.”

I relaxed a little and marshalled my thoughts.

“I guess the first question is how likely is it that I’ll figure out your ‘destroy the world’ secret? And if it’s that obvious how could it be such a big secret?”

Technically that was two questions but Pen didn’t seem to mind.

“Under normal circumstances? Not very. Knowing alone isn’t enough either. If you really needed to? I have no idea.”

That wasn’t quite the answer I’d hoped for, but it was better than a lot of the alternatives. I’d just have to make sure I’d never need to destroy the world.

“Ok, next question what is this place? It’s not a dream, it’s not the real world, it’s something in between them, but what does that mean?”

“It’s called the ‘Dreamlit World’, but that’s a misnomer. Dreams are the way most people have contact with it but it’s more accurate to say this is the border between everything that’s real in your world and everything that’s not.”

I turned that over in my head and let it sink in.

“Ok, so this isn’t completely real, but things that happen here can affect the real world. Kind of like an echo. That’s what happened when Way’s beast destroyed the police station here. Back in the physical world it was just damaged a little.”

“It happened at the library too. The first time you slipped into the dreamlit world, you broke off part of the fence remember?”

“Oh yeah! So, wait, what about Samantha? If I was in the dreamlit world then, how did I pick her up? Unless she was just dreaming too?”

“No, she was physically there.”

I furrowed my brow. That didn’t add up.

“I’m missing something.”

Pen flashed me a mischievous smile.

“You have no idea how tempting it is to make sure it stays that way.”, he blew out a deep breath and let his smile soften, “The barrier between the dreamlit world and the worlds it borders is no more real than the dreamlit world itself.”

That sounded like the something he’d found in a fortune cookie but it clicked with something I’d already been thinking about.

“Does that mean…”, I paused, frightened by the implications of a positive answer to the question I had in mind, “Does that mean, that if someone can manipulate the things here, they can manipulate the barrier to the real world world too?”

“Yes.”

“But that means…” I felt like I was struggling to close Pandora’s box and keep some hope alive for the world. “That means that the Shadow Court can break down the rules of what’s real whenever they want. There’s no way that the Task Force is going to be able to fight them!”

Pen looked at me askance.

“The Shadow Court? Oh, those guys who chased you at the library?”, he laughed, “There’s nothing to worry about there. They’re not dream shapers.”

It was my turn to look at him askance. If it wasn’t them messing around at the library then who could it have been?

“Then you manipulated the barrier?” I asked.

Pen laughed again.

“No.”

I tried to think who else was there? Samantha? Maybe little kids could reach the dreamlit world more easily? I rejected that idea immediately. If kids could routinely suspend the rules of reality, we’d never have evolved past single celled organisms much less have a functioning society.

Still Samantha might be a special case, the Shadow Court had been trying to grab her for some reason after all. Somehow that didn’t fit though. If she could do that she wouldn’t have needed my help at all. The more I thought about it the more it seemed like it had to be someone else.

“Way.”, I said, “She was there from the start. It even looked like she was hunting the Shadow Court and she’s definitely powerful enough. It was her right?”

Pen smacked his forehead with his palm and left his hand there to cover his face. The way his shoulders started shaking I thought he was breaking down in tears.

When he doubled over I was able to hear the choked “sobs” he was making were actually laughs he was trying to cover up.

“I’m sorry.” he finally said, wiping tears from his eyes as he suppressed a few lingering giggles, “It’s not really that funny.”

And yet he couldn’t stop smiling.

“We should talk about this ‘Way’ though. What do you mean you ‘named’ her?”, he said, changing the subject.

I considered dragging the conversation back to what we’d been talking about, but learning what the story was with Way seemed critically important too.

“I would like the answer to that question as well.” said a harsh and inhuman voice that came from every direction at once.

Pen swore and glanced around us. He wasn’t laughing in the slightest anymore. He was scared.

“Maybe you’ll get it after a proper introduction. What’s your name.” Pen replied in a voice cool as a glacier and as loud as a thunderclap.

“We have none. Pendant.”

My meta-awareness kicked in there. I’d given Pen that name. Only the two of us should have known it. Whatever this thing was it wasn’t playing by the rules already.

“Ah, good. You know my name. That means you know what I do to things like you.” Pen’s voice had returned to a normal volume but had lost none of its frosty edge. “Tell you what, I’ll give you a headstart. How’s a ten count sound? You can start running any time you want.”

The entire building shook as the inhuman voice bellowed out its laughter.

“Once you might have been able to make good on that bluff. Not any more though.”

Pen turned to look me directly in the eyes. He said only a single word and packed so much urgency into it that it hit me with physical force.

“RUN”

Dream self and physical self were moving less than a second later but it was already too late. With a tortured scream of tearing metal and shattering brick, I heard the walls of the police station being crushed inwards. A section of the lounges exterior wall exploded toward me as an enormous finger punched through the shell of the building. My meta-awareness couldn’t tell that anyone was out there though. It was as blind to whatever giant was squeezing the building to pieces as it was to Way or her beast.

I tried to figure out where I could flee to, but the windows on the second floor were blocked by the giant’s hand and the stairs throughout the building would be unusable before I could get to them.  Both my dream and physical selves felt the floor underneath me beginning to buckle and I instinctively knew what that meant.

The police station in the real world was being destroyed the same as the one in the Dreamlit world. I was about to be crushed under a collapsing building and the nearest exit was too far away for even my dream self to reach.

I’d been frightened in a lot of different ways leading up to my handshake with Agent Haffrun. Grasping her hand, I discovered something interesting about being scared though; past a certain point, the only reaction you can have to fear is to laugh.

A crazy little chuckle escaped my lips before I could stop it. Then an equally crazy smile crept all the way up to my eyes. Generalized panic followed.

All I could imagine for a moment was the unpleasantness that might ensue if she knew someone had discovered who she was. That thought banished my laughter.

“Sorry, I’d thought this was going to be weird.” I said, trying to cover up my reaction.

“I hope it wasn’t too bad. People in your position have had a rough enough time; we try our best not to make it worse.”, Agent Haffrun explained. She was also smiling but her’s was kindly instead of crazy.

She escorted me to one of the lounges on the second floor that was set up as a public conference room. It wasn’t being used by anyone else and there was an old TV tuned to ESPN for entertainment.

“I’ll let the desk officer know you’re waiting here. He’ll send your brother up once they’re back with your car.” Agent Haffrun said before continuing down the hall.

I was alone. For a moment I didn’t think of anything. The stress of the day had kind of shorted out my brain. I couldn’t process the notion that I’d just been speaking with someone from another world. Aliens had done horrible things to my Earth. They’d changed it in fundamental ways.

So why had that one seemed so nice?

My thoughts began to move, sluggishly, and some part of me started screaming that I should tell someone there was an alien in our midst. Another part thought of how impossible it would be to get anyone to believe me. The last part, maybe the biggest part even, just wanted the woman I’d met to be real. I wanted her to be “Agent Haffrun, the kindly interviewer” and not “Agent Haffrun the Alien Agent of Judgment”.

My head was still buzzing with my new sense but it in answer to which Agent Haffrun was real it was silent. It had shown me what she was, but it was up to me to chose what to make of that.

So I stood there and let my thoughts untangle at their own pace and in their own way.

There was too much on my mind to sort through it all at once. Agent Haffrun. Way. The Star Runner’s crew. The Shadow Court. Whatever it was that I could do, or that I had become. So many possibilities.

Searching inside, I looked for which one mattered the most to me and cast away everything else for the time being.

Agent Haffrun might be a foe of humanity, but she didn’t feel like one. I’d need to think about her some more but that could wait. Way was the next big issue, but she was too complex to deal with and probably thought I was dead so she could wait too. The Star Runner’s crew? They could take care of themselves, however clumsy Molly might think they were.

The Shadow Court? I was the least of their worries at this point.

Which left me with myself and whatever it was that was really happening to me.

I’d flown, only I hadn’t. I could sense things, but only in a weird way. I remembered Molly’s life, a girl who’d never been real, except that I’d met her friends…maybe.

It felt like the ground beneath me was shifting sand in an earthquake. Each direction I turned I found things slipping away. I couldn’t trust my senses. I couldn’t trust my memories. I couldn’t trust anything. I should have been upset by that, and I was, but in truth I wasn’t even sure the emotions I felt were real.

Things had tried to kill me. I’d died. Kind of. That scared me, but more in the way reading a horror story would than actually living through those events should have. I knew I wasn’t that courageous, so I had to ask if something else was wrong.

I breathed in. I breathed out. I slowed down and observed myself.

I didn’t feel broken. I didn’t feel great either, but with a chance to catch my breath I was able to reflect on where I was. A lot had changed in a little time. I was off balance, and that was natural. I didn’t know what it would take to regain a stable footing but I knew the first thing I needed was some answers. I needed to know what had changed in me before I could figure out how I was going to deal with all of the other curves that were being thrown my way.

If I had to go anywhere to find those answers, I could have just walked out. The police hadn’t charged me with anything after all and Agent Haffrun was done with me. If James came back and couldn’t find me though he’d probably have a meltdown. Also, Mom and Dad would kill me for wandering off when I was conceivably still in danger.

Instead, I sat down on one of the black cushioned couches and put my feet up on the nearby coffee table. If someone came in it would either look like I was watching TV or had fallen asleep.

“Pen. We really need to talk.” I dreamspoke.

It had felt like “thinking loudly” before, but I’d done it enough times that I could sense the subtle differences between when I was thinking something and when I was projecting it.

“Wow! That’s incredible!” Pen said. He appeared sitting on the edge of coffee table,  to the left of my propped-up legs.

“I’ve got a lot of questions for you.” I said.

“I kind of figured you would. Let me tell you the first one you should ask.”

“Ok.”

“I told you there are questions I can’t answer because if I did you’d be in more danger right?”, he asked, inviting me to pursue that line of reasoning.

“Yeah, so why is that? Why would I be in more danger? Anything you tell me should keep me from making stupid mistakes. Knowledge is power isn’t it?”

“Not in all cases. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re floating in the ocean, happy as a clam. Then someone tells you there are sharks swimming beneath you. Sharks that can smell the chemicals released in your sweat when you’re afraid. So long as you didn’t know about the sharks, you were fine. As soon as you find out, the fear starts to build up and pretty soon you’re best chums with Mr Toothy.”

“So if you tell me what I want to know, I’ll wind up so afraid that something will eat me?”

“That would be the one of the better cases if you knew everything I do.” Pen said. He got up and started to pace along the edge of the table.

“I mentioned how I’m a special little snowflake as far as this world is concerned right? Part of that is due to the things I know.”, he explained, “The more I share with you, the more you know about the world that I can see? Well if I’m an ice cream sundae to some of the things out there then you’d be the cherry on top.”

“Bleh.”

“Ok, maybe you’d be more like an extra scoop. I’m not all that I used to be. That’s the other reason I can’t answer your questions.”

“If I don’t know anything though I’m going to go nuts or make some huge mistake. I can’t just pretend nothing has changed. I’ve been trying and it’s not working.” I said. I sounded more frightened than I expected. Maybe the scares weren’t quite as distant as if I’d imagined.

Pen frowned. I couldn’t hear his thoughts, but my meta-awareness came close to telling me what they were. He was weighing the burden of being responsible for something horrible happening to me because I’d made a preventable mistake versus the long term cost I’d pay for knowing what he did.

“Tell me what was incredible.” I asked, sensing that was one of the few paths through his growing certainty that I was better off not knowing.

“Oh, that I wound up with someone like you. Someone talented I mean.”

“Talented?”

“Yeah, I was out of it when you rescued me, but I should have been heading towards someone mundane. You took to dream speaking very naturally.”

“It seems pretty simple, and weren’t you the one who gave me that power?” I asked. Everything weird had started with Pen’s arrival so it seemed plausible that anything unusual I could do was related to him.

“Gave you a power? No way. I’m trying my hardest not to mess up your life!”

“Well if you didn’t give me this dream  speaking, and the hyper-awareness, and the flying, who did?”

“Wait, the what now? And when were you flying?”

“I don’t know? A half hour ago? Can’t you see what’s going on around me?”

“I was tucked away pretty deep. I didn’t want to attract any more attention to you.”

“So you missed all that stuff with Way and her beast and the sky pirates?”

“Who? And the what? And Sky Pirates!? What the hell has been going on?” Pen asked looking horrified.

“After we talked? I was here in the police station and a blonde girl and this giant shadow monster showed up. They chased me and trashed the place and the cars outside and then I had to fly to get away from her, but I couldn’t and then…” I drew a deep breath and shook my head. Recalling the flight from Way was intense. Part of me was still freaked out about the whole “burned to ash” way it had ended.

“And then a ship with Sky Pirates showed up.” I almost called them ‘my crew’.

“This world doesn’t have Sky Pirates does it?” Pen asked.

“No.”

“Huh.”

“They got shot down though. I did too. Way sort of exploded when I named her. Then I got burned up. Then I woke up here.” Dream speaking about what had happened was harder than simply saying the words would have been. I was much closer to the memories when I was dream speaking them. All the emotions that went with the memories were shared too, which meant I was feeling them again as well.

If I’d been in a different frame of mind, it might have been fun to watch Pen’s reaction to the things I was saying. Confusion turned to bewilderment which then became abject bafflement. By the end he was staring at me mouth open and struggling to find any response at all.

“So now do you see why I need to have some answers?” I said.

“No. I mean yes. I mean maybe. Damn. This is not the way things were supposed to go. Why is nothing ever simple?”

“I don’t know. What was supposed to happen?”

“I wasn’t supposed to get you involved in any of this. Three days. I was only going to need three days. I can remember that much clearly at least. Just three days of recovery and then I’d be out of here.”

“Out of my head?”

“Out of this world.”

“Out of this world like ‘Mars’ or like ‘Dino-Earth’?” I asked. Dino-Earth was one of the more ‘popular’ parallel Earths that we’d created a portal too. We hadn’t managed to bring a real dinosaur back yet but people were still trying.

“No.”

“That wasn’t a yes or no question.”

“That’s true, it wasn’t. Let’s move on though. You said a bunch of very worrisome things just now.”

“Like what?”

“Pretty much everything. I don’t even know where to begin.”

“How about this; I’ll tell you what I think I’ve figured out. If its something that I can work out on my own then you’re not protecting me from anything by trying to keep it a secret.”

“Fair enough.”

“Ok. Let’s start at the beginning then. You said you’re the pendant that I grabbed in my dreams.”

“Assuming that’s the way you saw me, then yes.”

“You were a pendant then and you’re a guy now because you were hurt and you’re recovering.”

“Right.”

“Since you showed up in my dreams and you’re living in my head…”

“I’m not…I’m not ‘in your head’ precisely.” he cut me off.

“Can you explain the difference then?” I asked.

“Yes, but it’ll be safer if you work it out, keep going.”

“Ok. You showed up in my dreams and you said you’re recovering in my dreamspace. Now you say that’s not in my head. So my dreamspace is separate from me. But linked in someway.”

“That’s correct.”

“I know some psychics can do stuff in dreams. It’s supposedly really chaotic though. The mind’s a complete jumble during a dream from what I’ve read.”

“You have psychics here?”

“Yeah. They even teach us a little bit about that in school. The Yellow Submarine Defense was my favorite.” I’d been tested for psychic ability back in kindergarten but, like everyone else in the class, I’d hadn’t displayed anything measurable.

“Interesting. This world is…different than I expected it to be.” he admitted without elaborating any further.

“There’s just one problem from what I know; dreams aren’t external to us. They’re just reprocessed memories and hallucinations brought on serotonin breaking down into a chemical state that’s similar to LSD.”

“Even in psychics?” Pen asked.

“Yeah. From what I’ve read one of the first thing a psychic learns to do instinctively is to disconnect their powers while they’re asleep. Otherwise they’d be broadcasting an acid trip to everyone around them every night.”

“So dreams are simply a part of people then right?”

“Right. Except, you’re here. So two possibilities occur to me. Possibility one: I could be hallucinating you. I could have cracked up and everything I think I’ve seen and done is all just a mad fantasy. Or, possibility two, maybe our dreams aren’t entirely memories and LSD.”

Pen looked worried. I was getting close to something he thought could hurt me. I thought of the sharks he’d talked about. They might smell my fear, but being ignorant didn’t mean I was safe either. If I knew they were there I could try to get into a boat, or at least punch one in the nose or something.

“I’ve ‘woken up’ twice so far tonight.” I said, coming at the idea from a different angle. “Both times were right after I’d been through something amazing. Both times there was proof that what I’d seen wasn’t entirely in my head, and both times I woke up right where I’d been at the start of things going weird.”

“Proof?” Pen asked. He was trying to delay me. Hoping I wouldn’t put together the pieces that I had.

“Yeah, I’ll get to that. So, what does that tell me? I’m dreaming these things? It can’t be that. Or at least not only that. Too many other people are seeing bits of what I’ve experienced. These don’t feel like dreams either.” I said.

“So I’m living the experiences for real then maybe? No, it can’t be that either. I burned to death. If that was real then I’d really be dead now. So what does that leave?”

Pen didn’t answer but he didn’t have to. My vision blurred for a second, bifurcated, and an idea started coming into focus.

I tried an experiment. I focused on my feet and wiggled them. I felt them knock back and forth. I blinked to clear my vision and looked at them. They weren’t moving. My meta-awareness nudged me on – I wasn’t seeing everything.

I blinked again and thought of Pen before I opened my eyes. My feet were moving back and forth, wiggling just the way I felt they should be.

I stood up. And I could feel myself still sitting down at the same time.

I jumped and gave a cheer of glee as understanding clicked into place.

“I’m not dreaming, but I’m not awake either. I’m somewhere between the two. This is what I’ve been doing without realizing it.” I said with a smile. It was stunningly clear once I knew to look for it.  The divide in my senses. The way the room I saw while I was standing wasn’t quite the same as the room I’d sat down in.

I tried to refocus my vision without blinking and found it was easy to do. I was sitting on the brown cushioned chair and I was standing on the other side of the table. I could see both worlds at once. The “physical me” and the “dream me” were both “me”.

I waved to myself. The “me” who was standing waved at the “me” on the couch. Physical “me” was too heavy to move a muscle but I could still sense my arms were there. I could still hear through my physical ears too.

I guessed I could force my physical body to move around while I was divided but it would probably be pretty slow. Kind of like a sleepwalker.

My dream self on the other hand? Forget just moving around, I could fly! In fact, I felt like I could do anything with my dream self. Existing in two places at once should been mind breaking but instead it felt perfectly natural. Actually it felt better than that. It felt super.

Superhuman.

A thrill of power ran down to the tips of my fingers and toes. I might be swimming with sharks but I wasn’t completely helpless anymore.

It was a heady rush, experiencing the world in such a new way. The worrywort in me helped bring me back to earth though. Nothing was without consequences. I looked at Pen and saw the trepidation written on his face. There was a lot we still needed to get through.

“Thank you for joining me Miss Smith.” Agent Haffrun said as I walked into the room. She had a tablet computer setup to one side of her on the conference table and a pair of manilla folders open on the other.

“Can I get you anything? Juice? Water? Donuts?” she offered, gesturing me to take one of the seats opposite hers at the conference table. She seemed slightly distracted, but otherwise unruffled. This was business as usual for her.

“No that’s ok.” I answered and immediately regretted it. She’d been testing me. If I was a changeling, the Law of Hospitality would have applied. They would guarantee her safety, for a time at least. I couldn’t tell how she knew I was a metahuman. If she thought I might be a changeling though then she didn’t know much about me specifically yet.

Since I didn’t want her to be worried enough to lock me up, I rubbed my stomach and changed my mind.

“Well, maybe if you’ve got another apple juice? Oh, and donuts wouldn’t be bad either I guess. I haven’t had dinner yet.”

She turned to the table behind her and reached under it into the small fridge. She pulled out a pair of juice bottles and then took the box of donuts off the table itself. After checking to make sure the donuts were ok, she placed them on the conference table between the two of us.

“So you’ve had quite a scare today?” she asked, bringing up something on her tablet. Meta-awareness told me it was the latest forensic information the team at the library had submitted.

“Yeah, this has been pretty intense.”

“Still feeling a bit nervous?”

“No, I’m good.” Which translated to “please don’t break out the thumbscrews and rack, just ask your questions and let’s get this over with as fast as possible.”

I snagged a donut and started nibbling on it, though my stomach rebelled at the concept. It felt like I’d crammed the questions that I didn’t want to think about down into my guts and they’d turned into hungry beasts trying to gnaw their way out. Questions like “So how do you feel about joining us” and “Do you think you have any other choice”. Once again I’d probably read too much for own good.

The Federal Bureau of Metahuman Affairs was charged with coordinating the work of the officially licensed metahuman operatives in the employ of the federal government of the United States of America. They’d made a lot of mistakes over the years and been involved in a bunch of corruption scandals. Most of that was ancient history, but it was still scary dealing with an organization with their history and power. They seemed to be clean these days but then they’d probably seemed to be clean years ago before the old scandals came to light.

I hadn’t been considering them when we agreed to come to police station because there wasn’t a local office for FBMA in town. That Agent Haffrun was here suggested either incredible luck (one way or the other) or that she’d been aware of the events that happened tonight before they occurred.

Normally, government organizations (or employees) aren’t known for having that much foresight but the FBMA had a special advantage in that regard. Precognition isn’t a common metahuman ability, but the FBMA has a few on their payroll. They don’t do field work though, so Agent Haffrun was probably working at their direction if she’d been tipped off that something was going to occur tonight.

Even without being a pre-cog herself, I still thought it was fairly impressive that Agent Haffrun had been able to pick me out as a potential meta-human. From what I’d read even the very best precogs couldn’t make exact predictions about the future and most had little control over what they saw. At best Agent Haffrun would have gotten cryptic and symbolic directions and had to piece things together from there.

I shouldn’t have been that surprised though I decided. Even with limits like that, pre-cogs made a huge difference in the world..

Three years ago the FBMA pre-cogs, along with a variety of other early warning systems, had prepared us for the most recent global invasion. It had been a total disaster for the invaders. Earth’s heroes and military forces had annihilated them in under an hour despite the enemy troops numbering in the millions.

What that meant for me was that Agent Haffrun was probably sent here with a fairly general agenda and was clever enough to put the pieces together without a lot to go on. I could only think of two things that would be on a general agenda like that. She would either want to recruit me, or she’d want an excuse to lock me up. Of the two I wasn’t sure which scared me more.

Being locked up in either a padded room or a prison cell would be terrible for obvious reasons. Joining the FBMA would mean becoming a public super hero though, which was terrible in more subtle ways.

As a superhero, I’d need to be trained in whatever powers I was developing. Trained at a special facility far away from civilian population centers. Trained far away from my family.

The “training” wasn’t for a set duration either. Depending on what a new meta-human’s powers were it could take anywhere from a couple months of study to several years of grueling effort to develop an acceptable level of control over them. Each case was treated differently, but the one constant was that metahumans in training were strictly supervised when interacting with anyone.

Images of sitting at Thanksgiving dinner flanked by guys in black suits with heavy firearms passed through my head.

Beyond that, if I became a licensed superhero, things would never be the same. I would become a public figure overnight. I could wear a mask, but unless my powers let me hide myself really well I’d probably be found out. There would be too many people I’d have to interact with who would know my real identity for the secret to stay hidden forever.

I’d probably have to fight too. Most licensed super heroes are assigned to a city, like Heartbeat and Professor Platinum are for Brassport. They collect a nice salary and have excellent benefits but they’re expected to stand as the first line of defense against all the craziness that the world throws at their hometown.

Giant lizard wanders out of the bay at 2:00am? Army of demonic snowmen attack on Christmas morning? Supervillain with a werewolf ray cruises into town and starts turning people into fluffy murderbeasts? Those all happened in the last ten years just in Brassport and the local super heroes were the first ones to get the call.

The training helps of course. Most of the time the heroes can deal with whatever’s come up, either on their own or by calling in backup. Not all the time though. Superheroes don’t come back from all the calls that go out. And they’re not always able to to save everyone.

I thought of my Dad and the last time I saw him.

“Let me start by thanking you.” Agent Haffrun interrupted my train of thought, for which I was secretly glad. It wasn’t going anywhere pleasant.

“Thanking me?”

“Calling in the report that you did took courage. It’s hard to get involved. Thanks to you though we’ve found clear evidence of a mystical incursion in time to act on it.”

“Oh, uh, it was my brother that called actually.” I admitted.

“I’ll extend the Bureau’s thanks to him as well then. He was the one who found you after the incident right?”

“Yeah.”

“From what he’s said, he didn’t see any signs of the Shadow Court when he found you?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, I think they were gone by the time he got there.”

“That fits their profile.”, Agent Haffrun agreed. Her tone was gentle where I’d been expecting it to be accusatory. For an interrogation, it didn’t feel like she was really pressing me for info. That was somehow comforting and worrisome at the same time.

“Did you say you found evidence they were there?” I asked, curiosity overcoming my apprehension at speaking with her.

“Oh yes. The forensics team is reporting that this is one of the “hottest” sites they’ve encountered. Usually we just find faint residues at locations where an abduction has occurred. In those cases, if we’re lucky, we can get one of our mystically gifted agents onsite before the residue evaporates and we lose the trail completely.”

“This time…”, she continued, “…it’s like we found a superhighway instead of a trail of breadcrumbs.”

“So you’ll be able to help any kids that they caught?” I was relieved to hear that, and also relieved that, strange as the experience had been, at least part of what I’d encountered behind the library was being confirmed as real by other people.

“We’re assembling a Task Force now. From what we’ve been able to determine the abduction attempt at the library wasn’t successful and with a trail this clear we might be able to find out where their real stronghold is. We’ll be paying them a little visit in whatever faeryland they’re calling home.”

Not all creatures use portals to move between the different parallel Earths exist. More magic rich worlds can breed creatures that can shift across dimensions naturally. At least that was the current theory behind what the Shadow Court were.

“In terms of the amount of good we may be able to accomplish based on this, I’d say you deserve a medal for calling it in.” Agent Haffrun commented, making a note on her tablet.

I flinched at the thought of a medal. Recognition was not going to do me any good. The Shadow Court might not risk approaching me again after what happened in the parking lot but there were a lot of things out there that were stronger and worse than them.

“You deserve one, but since you’re still a minor we will be keeping your involvement in this strictly off the record.” she added, answering my nervousness with calm patience.

“You can do that?” I asked, surprised they’d be willing to help hide me. It would be a lot easier to make me join up if I was out in the public eye already after all.

“Certainly. Do you know what our mandate at the Bureau is?” she asked.

“You ‘coordinate and administer the employment of metahuman personnel who are acting as official agents of the federal government in all sovereign territories and in foreign states where they are working as the result of joint ventures or world crisis.’” I rattled off.

“You’ve read our charter, a few times, I see.” she laughed, “That’s our official, legal mandate. We normally focus on a much simpler one. Basically we take care of the support and logistical issues to make superheroes more effective.”

“The licensed ones right?”

“Right. We have no official relationship with unlicensed meta-humans.” she confirmed. I barely needed my meta-awareness to hear what she was really saying there.

Meta-humans came in many different varieties. Whatever the source of their powers though, legally they fell into one of three types; Licensed, Unlicensed and Criminal.

Licensed meta-humans were the ones who chose to register with the federal government and had passed through the required training courses. They tended to either work for the FBMA or in private sector businesses where insurance or governmental regulations required them to be licensed.

Legally there was no requirement to be licensed if you possessed metahuman abilities. Various states had tried to pass laws over the last fifty years to circumvent that or require licensing in the face of the Supreme Court decision that ruled it unconstitutional. They’d either failed to achieve the required votes or been struck down by the state courts as well, but it was still something that came up for debate during election seasons.

Of the unlicensed metahumans, most lead normal lives. Either their powers were minor enough that they didn’t have much impact on their day-to-day existence or they used them in ways that weren’t covered by any regulations.

The were others though who chose to act in secret, for any of a variety of reasons.

These “Masks” were the most contentious point when it came to discussions on licensing meta-humans. There was no oversight for how a Mask used their powers. Technically they were vigilantes, at best. Most had a shaky connection with the law, though the ones who’d operated longer and kept their actions mostly within the law were at least respected if not fully trusted.

Agent Haffrun, for example, couldn’t work with one in her official capacity as a representative of the FBMA except in crisis situations where any and all help had to be accepted. Unofficially though? That was something I’d never thought of before.

“So what does taking care of support and logistics mean?” I asked. I knew what I’d read, but I could tell there was a lot that went on outside of the official channels.

“Logistics is pretty simple. We handle the calls and act as dispatchers for the agents we work with. A lot of TV shows seem to think that we give out our agents numbers to everyone in the world and the agents have to deal with a big red phone waking them up every five minutes. We’ve found it’s a little better to have a staff of trained operators field those calls though.”

“Don’t a lot of problems come up at night though?”

“Yes, but we plan our shifts around that. We try to balance them so that our agents don’t get too worn down. That’s another part of Logistics.”

“So what about support?”

“That takes a lot of forms. I tend to do a lot of the paperwork for the agents I work with for example. That way all the needed records are kept and their time isn’t wasted. When Heartbeat was assigned here, I also handled getting her set up with living accommodations and helped her move in. It’s not the kind of thing that shows up on a job description but it made the transition smoother.”

Living accommodations, agents to pose as her parents when needed, entry to a new school, a credit card and petty cash to live off till her first paycheck arrived; my meta-awareness was showing me a lot more than Agent Haffrun was explicitly saying.

That got me thinking about how much passed unnoticed even in the life of a celebrity like Heartbeat. I’d never thought of her going to school in Brassport. I’d just assumed she had private tutors. It would probably be safer if she did, but I could kind of understand why they’d want to keep her in school for socialization purposes.

“Have you ever thought of joining the Bureau?” Agent Haffrun asked. Her tone conveyed only casual curiosity but the question hit me like a brick anyways.

No! I wanted to scream. I don’t wanted to give up my family for who knows how long. I don’t want to be poked and prodded and “tested” in some secret facility. “Dissected like a frog” was the usual joke people made but at the moment all I could imagine was someone cutting open my head to see how my brain worked.

“We employ a lot of non-powered people after all, about ten for each metahuman.” Agent Haffrun pointed out. She’d noticed the impact her earlier words had on me. She knew what my instinctive panic meant. Knew that it confirmed her belief that I was a metahuman. I might as well have blurted it out, and yet she wasn’t concerned about it either. Instead she continued on, not pressing the issue in any way.

“It’s not something you’d need to decide on for a while, but if you’re interested there are some high school level programs we run to familiarize people your age with what we do. It takes a lot of work to meet our recruitment requirements so we like people to be able to start thinking about it early on.” she explained.

“That sounds…interesting.” I replied forcing the muscles of my face to thaw.

“We try to keep it fun. Otherwise we wind up with a class of teenagers nodding off for the whole week and nobody gets anything out of it.”

“Just let us sleep in past 6:00am and we’d probably be fine.” I joked.

“Is that the time you get up for school?” she asked.

“Yeah, sometimes earlier if my step-Dad needs the car in the morning.”

“Ugh. That’s almost criminal.”

“When do you get up?”

“I work a late shift so there’s only one 6 o’clock in my day and it’s not that one.”

I laughed. On some level I was still suspicious that she was manipulating me, but on another it was so hard not to like her.

“Speaking of the late shift though, I shouldn’t keep you here too long. Especially if you need to get up for 6:00 tomorrow.”, Agent Haffrun shuffled the notes in her manilla folders,

“I’ve read the report the first responders put together. Could you review it and see if you can think of anything they missed or that might be helpful to add?” she asked as she slid one of the folders over to me.

The report was pretty dull. Clipped phrases that could still be parsed as basic English. All direct observations without the embellishments that would have captured how surreal the experience was. Reading the report I got the sense of this being a bland, everyday sort of event, notable only for the potentially serious danger to a minor. Despite that it seemed to cover all the facts that were provably true.

I still wasn’t sure how what I remembered fit in with the real world, so I didn’t feel like I needed to mention anything about that. Maybe after I talked to Pen, if I could talk to Pen, I’d have a better idea what was going on. I could always call and explain things then. Or send an anonymous note or something.

“It looks good. I think they got everything we said.” I told Agent Haffrun as I push the envelope back to her.

“That’s your copy actually. If you can keep it and read it again tomorrow, I’d appreciate that. Sometimes we remember little details once we’re back in a less stressful environment and for cases like this one the little details can make all the difference in the world.”

“Oh, okay.”

“My card’s in there too. Feel free to call me anytime if you remember something. The bureau doesn’t have an office in town so I’m renting an apartment while I’m here. The address is on the card or you can reach me here through the police if something comes up.”

She was giving me her address? That seemed weird until intuition and awareness filled in the blanks. She knew I was a metahuman. She was letting me leave so she probably didn’t think I was a villain in disguise. If I wasn’t going to come forward and register she wasn’t going to pressure me and risk me going rogue.

She’d watch me and she’d make it easy for me to seek her out for help when, not if, I needed it. In her view, working with a “Mask” was much better than alienating someone of unknown capabilities who was reluctant to become a public ally.

My awareness caught something else though. She was alone. That meant she was fairly senior and was trusted to handle things in her own way. I’d been lucky to run into her. There were certainly people in the FBMA who favored more of a “hard sell” approach and looked on metahumans as a resource “to be obtained by any means necessary”.

There’d been stories that had surfaced of the Bureau’s practices years ago that showed what a bad idea that could be and how more than a few villains had gotten their start that way. Some people don’t learn much from history though.

“It looks like we’ll have the Task Force set up to pursue the Shadow Court ready shortly. That should mean that you’ll be safe to leave here within the hour.” Agent Haffrun said as she stood. I got up too, seeing that the interview was over.

I felt stunned in a good way for a change. I’d been dreading the interview so much and it had turned out to be relatively painless aside from a scare I’d inflicted on myself. I’d come into the room expecting to have to defend myself with only the ragged tatters of wits that I had left. Instead it felt like I’d found someone who might be an ally if it turned out I needed one.

“It was a pleasure to meet you Miss Smith.” Agent Haffrun said and extended her hand.

“It was nice to meet you too.” I replied as I shook her hand. Her hand felt normal and warm in mine but something in the contact was different.

A vista opened in my mind’s eye. An alien world of gleaming spires and sprawling civilization. Agent Lynn Haffrun’s homeworld.

“Jin! Are you ok?” my brother’s very worried voice came to me.

I opened my eyes. I was laying on a cot in an unfamiliar room.

In the police station.

Couldn’t tell how I knew that though.

My thoughts were a jumble.

Someone else was there. Someones.

Desk clerk. Seen everything. I’m nothing new. Beat cop with first aid training behind him. Wonders if I’m on drugs. Not. Maybe should be. Wonders if I’m a supervillain. Not. Maybe crazy?

I looked at James and saw a mask. No, that was James. No mask.

“Give her a moment.” the medical cop said. “She’s probably little disoriented.”

He was at my side, checking my eyes.

“Doesn’t look like a concussion.” Minor meta-human power. Could have been a doctor, but his Dad was a cop, so he is too. “Any problem with your vision?”

“No. I’m ok. Just…how did I get here?” I asked. They’d brought me here when I passed out. We’d been at the check in desk and I’d collapsed and the glass doors had shattered. They thought I’d been hit by whatever had broken the doors. James had freaked out thinking I’d been shot, but there’d been no blood.

“We carried you. How are you feeling?” James asked still looking pretty worried.

“Like I passed out for no good reason.” I smiled, masking the cold fear that was growing in me.

I’d never left the police station. But I knew I had. I knew Way and her beast, Captain Rumbeard and the Star Runner were real. My memories of them were as crystal clear as the room around me.

The Sun Runner had been from a dream though. It couldn’t be real.

This was the second time I’d “woken up” from something that seemed perfectly real to something else that seemed perfectly real except this time it was worse. Waking up at the library had been weird, I’d been unsure of what was going on but I’d woken up still feeling like me. Still feeling normal.

This time I wasn’t normal. Not normal for me, not normal for anyone. The meta-awareness hadn’t gone away this time. Maybe my mind was shattering further each time?

“Can any of you hear me?” I thought to the three guys in the room with me, looking them each in the eyes briefly.

No answer.

“I’ll get her something to drink.” the medical cop said to James and the desk clerk before exiting. Getting away from the druggie supervillain before she exploded? No, just getting some apple juice to help with my blood sugar.

“Damn Jin, you scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry. What happened? I feel like someone hit me with a bat.” I complained, rubbing the back of my head for emphasis. It was a little sore but not as bad as I was making it out. I didn’t want anyone to press me for explanations yet so I went for the sympathy card.

“Some nut shot the bullet proof doors we were near. I guess it startled you enough that you tripped over backwards and clocked your head on the counter.” James explained.

“Don’t worry. Some clowns or another’s always looking to get a rise out of us. We replace that thing about twice a month.” the desk clerk said to reassure me. He didn’t want me to worry that whoever did it was targeting us, or me specifically. It was a lie though. They hadn’t replaced the doors in six months and the timing was too coincidental. He figured whoever did it was after me but didn’t want to risk entering a police station. I’d be safe as long as I was here, in his estimation at least.

They both remembered the events wrong too. I’d dropped first, just a split second before the doors shattered. I’d been unconscious before I hit the ground. I hadn’t felt the impact at all. Or seen James run to the door to see who it was. I hadn’t watched him whirl around when he saw that no one was there and notice me sprawled at the bottom of the desk. I couldn’t have seen that, but it was clear as day in my minds eye.

I felt along my arms and back.

“Hurt anywhere else?” James asked.

“No…no I think I’m ok. Just the bump on the head.” I hadn’t been looking for bruises. I’d been looking for burns. My memories were impossible and reality didn’t match my experience. I was losing it. Or I’d lost it already.

I should have felt happy that I was still around to lose my mind at all though I supposed. The golden bolts had incinerated me. I couldn’t sense Way anymore, but I knew what my last moment had to have looked like to her. Ashes floating to earth.

I poked those memories, expecting terror and desperation and whatever else had been there to come flooding back. The emotions were there but only as a distant echo. Like a fading dream.

The medical cop came back in with the apple juice and a plastic cup.

“Thanks.” I offered in exchange for the cupful of the juice. I sipped it slowly while I tried to put my mind back together.

“How’s she doing?” Officer Smalls asked as he appeared in the doorway.

“She’ll be fine. Just a bit of a scare and a bump on the head. Damn reception desk might as well be made of concrete.” the desk clerk replied.

“Yeah, I’ll be ok.” I agreed.

“Mind if I take your brother away for a minute?” Smalls asked. He needed to know how I was going to react their interrogation and he knew he could count on James to give him the straight scoop. Whatever answer James gave they’d still have to question me though.

“Yeah, no problem. I’m fine.” I told them both. When my words didn’t ease the worried look in Jame’s eyes I raised my apple juice cup and took another sip.

See, the gesture said, just need to refuel, I’m not going to fall to pieces.

“I need to get back to the desk. Gonna be people coming for the door. Can you stay here with her until they come back?” the desk clerk asked the medical cop, gesturing to the departing Officer Smalls and James.

“Sure. Beats doing paperwork!” the beat cop joked. I didn’t seem dangerous but he was still on edge. Too tough to show it though. The guys wouldn’t let him live it down if a puny little, normal, girl like me freaked him out.

I took another sip of juice and retreated into my thoughts.

Was I still normal? Was I still sane? The whole chase and flight and death, had that all been head trauma? That didn’t explain Pen. And it didn’t explain how I knew the things I did.

A complete psychotic break? Sure, maybe. Something the Shadow Court did to me? I felt a ping when that thought crossed my mind. It wasn’t true, but it’s what the cops would come up with as a working theory if I told them anything about what I’d seen.

I probed that. How did I know it wasn’t true? I mean, if the Shadow Court had messed with my mind, wouldn’t they have programmed me to disbelieve it too?

Yes they would, and no they hadn’t. How could I know? Because they never would have given me a memory that made them seem weak or frightened. Their power came from fear, specifically the fear children have of creatures like them. Seeing a Shadow Courtier destroyed like I had? That would have shattered any binding they’d put on me.

Of course my only source for that knowledge was my crazy meta-awareness, which could again be a product of the Shadow Court.  So I couldn’t trust it. I couldn’t trust anything. If I wasn’t crazy before, I was going to be soon.

I took another sip of the juice and fought to keep my inner turmoil off my face. I wanted to break down and cry, or scream, or just laugh hysterically but that wasn’t going to help.

“Hey, Simmons, get your gear. We just got another Class 1” an older officer said as he paused at the door to the room.

A Class 1 call meant a metahuman incident. I knew that one from being a book head. No meta-awareness needed.

“Another one? Damn tonight’s a busy one. What happened?” Simmons, the medical cop who’d been sitting with me asked.

“Somebody blew up half of the old factories out in South End. Then they crashed a boat into one of them!” Waid, the older officer explained. He’d seen worse, but not often and he’d hated every call like that he’d ever gotten.

Wait…a boat?

“Is anybody there?” I asked.

“Yeah, Heartbeat’s already on scene. She’s the one who called it in.” Waid explained. He wasn’t all that eager to leave so answering the question didn’t bother him.

“How do you crash boat into a building? Some ‘roid monkey toss a canoe through a window or something?” Simmons asked.

“Ain’t a canoe. Heartbeat said it was a Galleon. One of them big sail boat things.”

I grabbed the edge of the cot before I fell out of it.

“Woah, you ok?” Simmons asked.

“Yeah. Just a little woozy still. Shouldn’t have tried to get up there.” I said. I hadn’t been trying to get up, but neither of them had been paying attention so it seemed plausible to them.

“You going to be ok? I can get someone else.” Simmons offered. He couldn’t really. The damage to the South End meant everyone was going to have a busy night.

“Yeah. I’ll just rest here and wait for James and Officer Smalls to get back. No problem at all!” I wanted to jump to my feet and bounce around the room like a ping pong ball.

I wasn’t crazy! It was all real! I…I was in mortal peril still.

That calmed me down.

I was in mortal peril, but apparently being burned alive hadn’t been enough to actually kill me. That was good. I could work with that.

Maybe I was invulnerable? Not something I was eager to test and it wouldn’t fit what I’d experienced. It was something stranger than that. My meta-awareness wasn’t filling in the details either. Apparently I wasn’t omniscient in any useful ways. Just in odd ones.

What I needed was to talk to someone who knew what was going on. Pen. I needed to talk to Pen again.

“Hey! Pen! Come on, come out and talk to me.” I thought, really really loudly.

No answer.

Instead, James returned with Officer Smalls. I put on my best face. I wasn’t crazy and I wasn’t a delicate flower. They didn’t need to worry about me.

“They still need to question us Jin. Think you’re up for that?” James asked.

“No problem. What about the boat though? Don’t you need to check that out?” I asked Officer Smalls.

“Boat?” James looked at Smalls. For a second I wondered if I’d dreamed up the cops too. That’s how far off balance the night had left me.

“Yeah, we had another call. We’ve already got units on the scene.” Smalls informed James. Specifically James. Huh. That was odd.

“Ok.” James answered simply.

“If you’ll follow me then Miss Smith.” Officer Biggs said.  He’d been waiting in the hallways behind Smalls.

I got out of the cot easily, since I wasn’t actually hurt, and followed Biggs out of the room. He turned away from the hallway that lead to the interrogation rooms. James wasn’t following me either.

“James?” I said, asking “aren’t you coming too?” silently.

“If you can handle it, I thought I’d go with Smalls to get the car. They’re short staffed and you know Dad needs it tomorrow.” he answered.

I turned the idea over. On the one hand I’d feel a lot better if I had someone I could trust at my side. On the other, James was probably safer being away from me at the moment. Whatever was happening had shattered bulletproof glass and then blown up a bunch of buildings.

What had happened to the police cruisers in the parking lot, I wondered idly? I’d seen the door destroyed by Way’s beast, but it had only been broken when I woke up. Maybe the police cruisers were in better shape too? For that matter maybe the factories were too? ‘Half the South End’ had to have been an overstatement of the damage that was done.

If I couldn’t find out tonight, there’d be reports online tomorrow, so I filed those questions away as ones to worry about later.

“That sounds good.” I told James, aware that I’d paused a worryingly long time before responding.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. C’mon, I’m in a police station, its not like the Big Bad Wolf is going to get me here or anything.” I flashed on the memory of Way’s beast coming through the door. Well, it had missed me. Somehow.

“Yeah, I know but it might take a while. You know, if they’re not done with the car yet.” James half stammered. Lied. By omission.

I tried to focus my awareness on what I was missing but I got nothing. Plain old intuition had no idea either. Whatever he was hiding didn’t concern me I guess.

“I’ll be fine. Go. Remember though, you’re the one who has to tell Dad about all this.” I joked, letting him see I was serious.

Officer Biggs led me upstairs rather than to the interrogation rooms. He paused at the door to a small conference room.

“Agent Haffrun, this the witness we spoke of, Jin Smith. Jin, this is Agent Haffrun of the Bureau of Metahuman Affairs. She’s been assigned to your case.” Biggs informed me.

My case?, I thought, Didn’t he mean ‘The Shadow Court Case’?

My meta-awareness filled in the answer. No, he meant “The Case of Jin Smith”. It was my case because Agent Haffrun was here for me. She knew I was a new metahuman. Which meant that the only question was whether she thought I was a superhero or a supervillain.

I was flying!

I can’t explain how that first moment felt. Elation doesn’t begin to cover it. As much as everything else that night had felt wrong, this felt right. Like I was born for this. Soaring upwards, it didn’t seem like I gained a superpower but rather remembered an ability as natural as walking or breathing.

My meta-awareness didn’t disagree either. Gliding free of gravity’s chains was what the moment had demanded. Only I was doing more than gliding. I was shooting into the sky like a rocket and it was effortless.

From far below, I saw a burst of golden light from the top of the tiny anthill that was the building I’d been on. I wasn’t the only one who could fly. The blonde girl came after me leaving a trail of brilliant light in her wake.

I wasn’t sure how high I could go, so I leveled out my flight and began fleeing towards a cloud bank that was a few miles to the south. I’d been hoping to lose her in the reduced visibility but up close the cloud was a lot more diffuse than it had appeared from a distance. If she’d been far enough away from me the cloud might have worked as cover but she was faster than I was. She’d closed the distance to where I could see her clearly, outlined in a nimbus of gold, and she was gaining on me.

I dove deeper into the cloud, hoping to hit a patch that would obscure me enough to get away with a quick change of course. It didn’t help that I was leaving a trail of multi-chromatic sparks in my wake though. I’m sure from the ground the effect was beautiful. A stream of sparkles painting a kaleidoscopic swath across the sky.

A part of me marveled at how pretty the effect was. The rest would have been delighted with something uglier and much stealthier.

Fortunately my pursuer was even more visible than I was. The golden glow around her was like a miniature sun to my shooting star. I’d put something like a half mile of distance between us with my initial escape but she’d narrowed the lead down to the length of a football field.

I pushed for more speed and the shower of sparks coming off me intensified. I wasn’t leaving a trail of scattered flecks anymore. Instead a tail of fire, silver, blue, and pink stretched back like a comet. It was hard to tell, but it felt like I’d matched her speed.

She plowed through the tail I was leaving and I began to sense something. It wasn’t an out of body experience, but I felt like I was flying along beside her.

The sparks from my comet tail rolled over her and, as she absorbed their light, my meta-awareness finally found her. It felt like I was sensing where she was by looking at her shadow.

She wasn’t a shadow though. She was an emptiness. That was the best description I could find for her but the word didn’t begin to capture what I was perceiving.

Pen had spoken of being more alien than I could imagine, my meta-awareness was showing me what that really meant. There was something within her, something fundamental to what she was, that was not, could not, be part of anything real. It was corrosive to the very concept of reality. To the concept of being.

She was an impossibility. The antithesis of form, crafted into the shape of a girl? That bothered me. It didn’t fit. My meta-awareness was telling me that she wasn’t a “someone”, or even a “something”. So why did she appear to be a girl?

A girl and her beast. Why would either of them be here? How could “unbeing” have an incarnation? Wouldn’t that be the opposite of “unbeing”?

I couldn’t find any answers to those questions, and I wasn’t managing to outrun her either. The clouds had gotten thicker at last but with the comet tail behind me there was no way she was going to lose my trail. Not unless I stumbled on a miracle.

Instead of a miracle I got lightning. Because that’s the kind of luck having super powers leads to.

The clouds crackled with power and flashed jagged teeth of eye searing light as we plowed through them. My sparks looked like they were seeding the clouds because the intensity of the storm behind me was worse than what lay ahead. If this was another power though it was definitely not a safe one.

It was pure luck, as far as I could tell, that spared me from a thunderbolt hit. My pursuer wasn’t as lucky in avoiding the lightning, but her golden aura shattered the bolts into brilliant flares without faltering in the slightest. I could sense that she wasn’t slowed by them either.

Above us, hidden by the clouds, there was something large taking shape.

I began to wonder if I was capable of surviving in space and just how far the girl would be willing to pursue me when a  less suicidal idea occurred to me.

I waited for the next bolt to hit the girl’s shield and provide a distraction. Then I simply stopped flying. An instant later I was falling like a stone.

I expected it to be terrifying. Instead the wild joy of flight was replaced by a calm serenity as I snuggled into gravity’s embrace once more. It probably helped that I was high enough up that it took a little bit to clear the clouds. Intellectually I knew I was falling at roughly thirty two feet per second per second, but within the cloud it felt like I was a piece of gossamer slowly drifting in the wind. It would have been wonderfully peaceful if I wasn’t still fleeing for my life.

The sense of some third presence arriving on the scene remained, and was intensifying, but the sense I had of the girl faded rapidly as the comet tail I’d left behind thinned out. Without the light of the sparks playing over her, I was blind to where she was.

Losing the comet tail was the key to my plan though. That plus the dark of the night and the storm that was raging? However good the girl was, I was hoping those would be enough to make her lose track of me.

I cleared the clouds and saw that the ground was getting closer when it occurred to me that I’d started flying reflexively. Meaning I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to “turn it back on”. Looking at the city below me, that was going to be a problem. I was over a manufacturing area. Lots of smokestacks. Unless one of those buildings was a mattress factory, made out of mattresses, I wasn’t going to have a particularly soft landing.

As it turned out though, that wasn’t my biggest problem. The girl? Yeah, she wasn’t “that good” at tracking me. She was better. The clouds blew apart with a gigantic bolt of lightning revealing the golden glow that surrounded her as she flew straight at me like a hawk.

For however good she was at tracking me, she hadn’t caught me yet though, and I didn’t get the sense that she was toying with me either. This wasn’t a game of cat and mouse. She wasn’t prolonging the chase to enjoy my suffering or anything like that. It felt like she was holding back for some other reason.

That might have been wishful thinking, or a more mundane form of intuition, but I had the sense that if she had been going all out she would have caught me before I left the police station, and certainly before I learned how to fly.

Her beast for example. It had jumped up and wrecked the stairs leading to the roof. That was five floors up. Yet it’s first few leaps had only been high enough to dismantle the fire escape below me. I hadn’t considered that at the time but the idea bothered me as I fell.

Had it been trying to herd me somewhere? Either that wasn’t the case or it had failed spectacularly when I’d taken flight. So if it wasn’t herding me, why had it been chasing me? For that matter, why had it chased me at all?

The girl had said she had to kill me because of what she was. I’d managed to outpace her beast through a combination of luck and the sheer destruction it wrought slowing it down. She’d beaten me to the top of the building in the blink of an eye though. Why bother sending the beast to chase me at all if she could catch me that easily? For that matter, with how fast she was, how had she missed me with her scythe?

Those questions were interrupted by a brightening of the golden glow a moment before it lanced out at me.

If I’d been falling helplessly I couldn’t possibly have avoided it. Flying, as it turned out, proved to be quite a natural thing for me though. I needed to move and so I did, shooting downwards at a new angle and dodging the blast before it reached me.

The blast tracked along through the sky behind me and set fire to the buildings below where it didn’t simply blow them to flinders.

They were empty. Most were abandoned to begin with. And it was night. So people would be home. Not burning to death or blown to pieces along with the buildings. I hoped.

I saw the golden aura charging up again and ramped up my speed. That was a very short term solution though. She might be holding back. She might not want to kill me. Those were “maybes”.

In the “definitely” column, I definitely couldn’t dodge forever and I definitely wasn’t tougher than a building. Worse, if I kept flying we’d be over a residential area before too long and that would definitely be bad for anyone caught below.

I needed something to hide behind. Something big and tough enough to keep me safe. Mt. Everest would have provided as much shelter as I was looking for but since it hadn’t conveniently migrated to town, I wasn’t sure what other options I had. That’s when the sense of something large approaching was replaced with the sense of something large having arrived.

A huge sailing ship burst from the clouds above, air braking with it’s sails unfurled. Fire in a dozen shades of pale and brilliant green outlined the edges of the ship like neon stripping. From the decks the more common sort of orange red fire was visible and smoke was billowing from blasted areas in the ship’s hull.

It didn’t look like the sturdiest bucket of wood and iron and canvas to sail the Sea of Stars, but I knew she had it where it counted.

A shock passed through me. How did I know that? I knew because I was remembering the dream I’d had before waking. This was the ship I’d been on!

I changed course to put the ship between myself and the next golden blast, hoping I could make it in time. The ship’s descent was slowing as the crew frantically fought the fires and adjusted the sails. That left me with farther to go to reach the safety of it’s far side and I’d just managed to get there when the ship’s intricate shields of light and force flared around it.

They’d unintentionally intercepted the golden bolt the girl had thrown and I heard the crew reacting to the attack with surprise and alarm. They were speaking a flowing slippery language I’d never heard before, but that I could understand perfectly.

“<Where in the Seven Slipstreams are we? And why is someone still shooting my ship full of holes!?>” Captain Rumbeard demanded. I knew him from the year of service I’d put in under the black pirate flag of the Star Runner. He’d taken me in when I’d been set adrift on a steam coracle for being a witch, abandoned by Her Majesty’s Finest for the crime of their own superstition and ignorance. We’d sailed the skyways and plundered the finest ships. His crew had believed I was a witch too, but they hadn’t been afraid of that. They had taken me as a good luck charm.

I knew all of that the moment I heard his voice. I’d even experienced some it, inasmuch as a dream can be an experience. The rest though? The year of service as a pirate? My time before that in the Royal Sky Navy? Those were things I “knew” I’d done even though none of it was real. It was as though for a moment I was another person and her whole life was a real as mine.

I almost wasn’t even conscious of gliding down onto the deck and calling out to the crew.

“<That’d be my fault Captain!>” the words came out in the same language the crew was babbling as naturally as if it had been my native tongue.

“<Molly? Is that you girl?>”, Rumbeard bellowed, “<Thought you were blown to the devil’s deeps.>”

He regarded me with as much wonder and fascination as I felt for him. I knew he was asking himself the same thing I was: “Can this person be real?”

“<Not yet Captain. Devil’s not quick enough to catch me!>” I spoke the words, but it was my other life, Molly’s life, that was running the show.

As punctuation, or perhaps a counter-argument, more golden blasts slammed into the ship and its shield flared and dimmed dangerously. On the upper deck a crewman was thrown out of his seat when his station erupted in a blaze of magical fire.

“<Where’ve ya brought us lass? Ain’t never seen skies like these nor a shore like the one below.>” Rumbeard asked. I had no idea how to answer that question, and fortunately didn’t have to try before a distraction appeared.

“<Captain, we can’t many take more shots like those. Permission to return fire?>”, MacReady, the ship’s Chief Electromancer, asked.

“<Granted. Unlock all cannons and fire smartly! Run up the rotors and raise personal shields!”

As the crew scrambled to bring the ship to a full battle posture, attention turned away from me. Part of me, Molly I guess, wanted to climb to the highest crow’s nest and start calling out firing vectors as was my role during a fight. Her role during a fight.

I pushed “Molly’s” thoughts back. I wasn’t a sky pirate. I wasn’t even a superhero. The burning buildings below me showed what I had to look forward to if I started losing perspective.

Another golden blast slammed into the outer shields and they collapsed completely. As Molly, I knew they’d take about a minute to regenerate. Until then we only had the ship’s internal shields and our personal shields to rely on. Or rather the rest of the crew had personal shields to rely on. I was fresh out of magitech gadgets.

Molly knew where the spares were stored below decks so I followed her instincts and dove down one of the open hatches. The thunder of the Electrocannons discharging nearly flattened me as the first volley flew.

While their target was invisible to my meta-awareness, I could sense the crews reaction to the shots. No one seemed happy or comforted and all of the casters were scrambling to recharge the ThunderCaps for another volley.

The girl must have evaded the first wave I reasoned. The crew’s reaction to something that could shrug off cannon fire was not to continue firing blindly. They were many things but stupid was not one of them.

I grabbed a shield pin from the armory and hurtled back topside in time to witness the next round of electrocannon fire. Having missed with a blanket attack, the Star Runner’s crew had adopted a strategy of continuous firing, each cannon blast hemming the distant golden target in so that the next one missed by less and less.

It looked like that strategy was going to work if they could keep up the bombardment long enough, but watching the swiftly darting gold aura in the distance I saw we didn’t have anywhere near long enough.

The electrobolts that missed the girl were being captured in circular bands of force she was casting as she flew. I didn’t need my meta-awareness to guess what was going to happen next.

“Incoming Fire! Max Shields!” I shouted above the din a moment before the dozen circles of force the girl had constructed released their stored electrobolts back at us. I was blown off the deck by the shockwave that rocked the ship. The crew, having had their shields engaged, fared better until a wave of golden blasts shot through the ship’s hull and set the sails ablaze.

I watched, floating in mid-air, as the Star Runner pitched nose down and began spiraling towards the city below. As “Molly” I wanted to scream, but as Jin all I could think was that I couldn’t possibly fight this girl. On the other hand if I didn’t do something she was going to annihilate the Star Runner, her crew and maybe move on to the rest of Brassport from there until she got me.

I launched myself skyward. If she wanted me, then I could at least lead her away from anyone else. I’d been able to dodge her before, I thought, maybe if I could keep it up I could buy enough time for someone who knew what they were doing would to show up.

The Star Runner took a few more blasts before the girl noticed me fleeing and flew off after me. I could sense that the ship was in terrible shape. The crew was mostly ok though and were fighting to get control of it. They weren’t going to succeed. It was going to crash into, of all things, a mattress factory. Thanks to their efforts the crash would leave the ship largely intact. My awareness didn’t extend much beyond that except to tell me that the ship would be repairable and that the crew was likely to go to ground while they looked for the parts to get it flightworthy again.

I had more immediate concerns however. I’d put enough distance between us that the girl hadn’t resumed her barrage of golden bolts yet. That wasn’t likely to remain the case for long though.

“What do you want!?” I yelled back to her, in “dream speech” as Pen had called it.

“I don’t.” came the answer. Or non-answer.

“Who are you?” I tried.

“I’m not.” she replied. The words conveyed no meaning, they “sounded” (for lack of a better way to describe it) flat, but they felt like a dam holding back a vast longing.

“C’mon!”, I screamed in frustration, “You are Way Too Powerful! You don’t need to be all cryptic. I can’t hurt you! Just talk to me! Tell me why you’re doing this! There’s people who can…”

I was going to say “help you” but my voice and even my thoughts trailed off in surprise.

I could sense her. She was there. Filling my awareness.

Way. Her name was “Way”. I’d named her?

I saw her struggling in the air, no longer moving forward. She was holding her left hand to her head, like her skull was threatening to burst. My awareness of her was much spottier than it had been with the pirates, but I could tell this was no headache she was fighting against. Again, I found myself starting to move towards her and again it was a bad idea.

The crimson light that flared from within her confirmed that. A moment later a countless array of golden blasts filled the sky. I turned to flee, knowing that any one of those bolts could burn me to ash.

I was too late and too slow and too distracted. I’d barely turned around when the first bolt caught me. The personal shield I’d grabbed from the Star Runner held it off, but the next two bolts that caught me overloaded it instantly.

I tried to scream. This wasn’t supposed to be my life. I wasn’t anyone special. I wasn’t supposed to have to deal with anything like this. I wasn’t supposed to die this way.

And then, after I burned, after the blackness took me, I woke up.

Blonde hair tumbling over her black cloak, the girl I’d seen when I was running from the Shadow Court stood outside the glass doors to the police station. Beside her, a shadow lurked in beastial form with four legs and a body that was taller at its shoulder than the top of her head. If it was the creature from before it had grown, a lot.

The girl was gazing intently towards me but not making eye contact. She was clearly looking for something, but when I met her sweeping gaze she didn’t react. Sort of like she couldn’t see me at all.

“Hello?” I tried thinking to her, the way I’d ‘talked’ with Pen.

It had seemed like a silly idea but as I formed the word in my mind the girl’s eyes flew wide in shock and locked on mine. I hadn’t expected it to work and the intensity of her gaze startled me enough that I flinched back half a step. I couldn’t really have superpowers, could I?

“Thank you for earlier.” I added quickly, thinking how the giant beast at her side had probably saved me from being captured by the mistmen.

The girl’s froze for a moment and then her surprise melted away into an unreadable expression. She dropped her gaze from mine at last and looked down at a point on the ground between us.

“I’m here to destroy you. You should run.” the girl said, her voice soft and sad and weighed down by incredible fatigue.

For a moment, I didn’t process the words, didn’t convert them into meaning. I just marveled at the sense of them. The girl was at least a dozen feet away from me and on the other side of a pair of glass doors.

When I’d been talking to Pen, it hadn’t seemed like magic. At least not on my part. I’d thought things and he’d spoken back to me. It had felt like he was doing all the work there.

This girl was though far enough away that I knew I couldn’t be ‘hearing’ what she was saying. Her ‘voice’ was too soft to carry across the distance. I was hearing her projected thoughts the same way she was hearing mine. Between that and the return of my ‘meta-awareness’, it was getting harder to deny that I had some kind of superpower.

That meant my life was going to get a lot more complicated, and probably deadly, from everything I’d ever read. Most heroes didn’t seem to mind that but being able to project my thoughts didn’t seem like a superpower that would do much to keep me from getting killed.

If I was even halfway sane at that point, I would have taken the mere fact that she was speaking to me as a sign to bolt as fast as my feet would carry me. Instead I took a step towards her to…I don’t know…comfort her?

Speaking with our thoughts, the meaning of her words didn’t have as much impact as the sadness that was projected with them. I’d felt empty like that when my Dad had died. It hurt encountering it again, even in someone else.

The momentary insanity that was moving me towards her passed before I took another step. My return to clarity was helped in part by the growling from the beast beside her. Also, the words she’d spoken finally translated in my mind. She wanted to kill me?

“Why?” was all I could manage to put together.

“Sorry. It’s what I am.” she said, lifting her eyes back to meet mine. There wasn’t any anger in her expression. No malice or cruelty. Just emptiness.

Before I could ask her anything else, the glass doors shattered inwards and the giant beast leapt at me.

There wasn’t time to think so I reacted. Pure instinct. Primal fear. All I knew was something impossible to fight was rushing at me.

I ran.

I could lie and say that I thought about James and the clerk. That I fled to draw the beast away from them, but at that moment they simply didn’t exist for me.

I got two steps away from the desk before the beast crashed into it, crushing the wood into kindling. The shadow mass of the beast lost its definition as a four legged entity and it rose up like a wobbly starfish. Random limbs punched through the remainder of the desk as the beast tried to free itself from the wreckage.

I made it another three steps before the beast recovered its balance and lunged again. The corner of the nearest hallway shielded me from that leap and I was off, racing down the hall as fast as I could move.

Even in its more amorphous form, the beast was too huge to fit down the narrow hall but that barely slowed it down. It followed me, destroying the walls on either side as it simply rammed its way through them.

The interrogation rooms whizzed by me to the left and right before I reached the end of the hallways. Heavy fire doors barred my exit but in my panic I slammed the one on the right open like it was made out of tinfoil.

Night air hit my face as I paused for a second to see where to run. I was on the top landing of a short flight of concrete stairs. A railing bordered the stairs and the landing beyond which lay the parking lot for police station.

I jumped over the railing without a thought. I had to get away and it was a only short drop to the parking lot. As I landed I felt my awareness flood with a number of unpleasant facts.

First, there were no corners or hallways here to slow down the thing that was chasing me. My meta-awareness couldn’t sense on the beast or the girl but I didn’t need that to know I was in danger still.

The Shadow Court on the other hand? I could sense them very easily. I knew they were waiting in the pools of darkness just outside the lights of the parking lot. They had found me and ringed the building waiting for me to leave.

They’d planned to follow me, to study the mortal that had destroyed their servants with iron. When I was unguarded and alone, they would come for me. They weren’t directly interested in me though. The damage I’d done, the loss of their minions, was an insult that would be paid for in agony, but it was inconsequential compared to what had happened to them afterwards. They wanted to learn about the beast.

I was unguarded as I started to run again. Alone for just an instant. So they swooped in, quicker than any human could move.

The things that came out of the darkness were a blur of dead arms, rotting razor teeth and chitinous eyes. They were fast and merciless, sinking claws into my arms and legs like a thousand fish hooks. Any other night that would have stopped me. The touch of one of the Shadow Court was more than a human could bear without screaming and I had at least a half dozen cutting into me.

Unfortunately for them, there were two other factors at work. First, I had momentum. The horror of their touch didn’t paralyze me, it just made me struggle harder to get away. That alone wouldn’t have amounted to much. The Shadow Court was used to victims that struggle. What saved me was that there was something much worse after me than them.

The fire doors didn’t slam open for the beast. It didn’t give them time to. Instead the doors exploded outward to announce the beast’s arrival.

Bricks and concrete, torn metal and shattered wood, the pieces of the door flew everywhere. As the dust swirled away the Shadow Court faeries saw the hungry beast staring at them from the top of the stairs. There was a quiet second while all of the parties took each other in.

Then came the inhuman screaming.

The beast had moved too fast for my eyes to follow and snatched up the luckless Shadow Courtier than was closest to it. The rest of the Shadow Court was just a little distracted by the beast ripping the Shadow Courtier into screaming pieces. That was enough of an opening that I was able to pull free from their hold. Tearing myself loose hurt worse than anything I could remember, but the freedom to run again was worth every ounce pain it took.

A fire escape at the far end of the parking lot caught my awareness and I was off for it like a shot. Behind me, I knew the Shadow Courtiers were fleeing as well. I couldn’t see the beast directly with my awareness but I could see its effect on the Shadow Court. It was totally outside their understanding, and for immortal predators that was an experience they’d never had before.

Nothing before this had hunted them. Nothing before this had scared them, horrified them. More so than the beast, that sensation of horror threatened to destroy them. They literally were not capable of feeling fear like this, and yet this thing, this beast was instilling it in them. As creatures of magic, their identities weren’t bound into flesh the way it was for a human. Fear had never been a part of them and now that it was it was corroding the very essence of who and what they were.

If there’d been any room in my mind for an emotion other than terror, I probably would have felt a wicked, righteous joy at their misfortune but I only had room for one thought; I had to reach that fire escape.

I’d made it a little over half way across the parking lot when the screams of the Shadow Courtier came to a sudden and terrible end. My meta-awareness rebelled at the notion. It was as though a hole had been punched in the script. The Shadow Courtier hadn’t been killed, or destroyed, or even consumed. He simply wasn’t.

Wasn’t alive. Wasn’t dead. Wasn’t anything. Had never even been anything. It was like he’d been erased from his beginnings to his end and whatever had been part of him was lost to the world. All his yesterdays, all his tomorrows, gone.

I didn’t have time to dwell on that. Survival was all that mattered, the only goal I had to run towards.

I made it past another few police cars before I heard the one nearest to the beast being torn in half. It had been in the beast’s way and it was simpler to go through it than go around it. It shredded two more car before it gave up on the mayhem and bounded over them to save time.

The destruction had bought me another few precious seconds. Just enough time to reach the fire escape. I jumped impossibly high and managed to snag the bottom rung of the ladder that formed the base of it. The metal had frozen in place, but desperation gave me the strength to pull myself up and over onto the first landing.

When I got to my feet, I didn’t pause for an instant before racing up the rickety narrow stairs to the next level. I left the first landing an instant before the beast crumpled it into a twisted gnarl of scrap metal. The beast’s next blow threatened to knock the entire fire escape off the building but somehow the bolts held on. Frustrated, the beast ripped the crumpled metal of the first landing completely off the wall and dropped back to the ground.

I ran up and up, not sure how far I needed to get to escape the monster below me. I’d reached the fourth landing before the beast leapt up again. I’d barely gotten far enough.

The great shadowy body of the beast crushed the stairs and landings below me. With it’s enormous claws it held on to the wreckage and reared back for another blow.

I screamed, knowing it wasn’t going to do any good but unable to stop myself. If I hadn’t been in motion the fear that was surging through me would have ripped away my strength and left me paralyzed and helpless. I couldn’t run any faster but I did keep going, reaching the stairs up to the fifth level just before the beast tore a huge section of them out from in front of me.

I choked on another scream. I couldn’t stop that thing. It was too close. I couldn’t even get away.

A tearing metal sound from below me was met with an unearthly growl as the beast’s sheer weight ripped the fire escape away from wall and tore the crushed lower floors loose sending the beast falling to the ground again.

My heart skipped a beat. I wasn’t dead yet. The roof might even be safe if I could cross the gap the beast had ripped in the stairs.

Before the beast could jump again, or start scaling the wall, I leapt into the gap it had made in the stairs. I would have fallen forty feet onto pavement if I’d missed but even that had seemed better than letting the beast do to me what it had done to the Shadow Courtier.

I don’t know if I could have made that jump normally but under the circumstances I was extremely motivated. I managed reach the first undamaged stair on the far side of the gap and grab the steps farther up with my hands before I tumbled backwards.

I felt a glimmer of hope at having gotten higher. If the beast could have reached me on the fourth floor landing it probably would have jumped there first. Maybe it had a maximum height it could reach? If I could get higher than it could follow I might be able to get away or at least stay safe until someone else could deal with it. Someone with an orbital kill satellite maybe, or a platoon of super heroes.

I pulled myself to my feet and dashed up the last few stairs to the roof level. I was two steps from the top when a gold blur flashed past me traveling up the side of the building. My awareness didn’t key on it being anything dangerous so I didn’t spare the blur any brain cycles. That was an almost fatal mistake.

I was caught in midstep, just about to reach the rooftop, when I saw the girl who commanded the beast standing above me. The scythe she held was wreathed in flames the color of an empty night sky and she was poised to strike. The blur had been her. She was that fast. No matter how I ran, I couldn’t escape.

So I fell. I wasn’t graceful or quick enough to avoid the scythe in any other way. Surrendering to gravity, I toppled backwards, plummeting head first towards the pavement below.

I was so far beyond panic at that point that the sensation of falling came as a warm relief. It wasn’t much of a choice but at least I’d been able to decide how things would end. At least I wouldn’t suffer the same fate as the Shadow Courtier. Somehow that made a difference.

I thought that my heart felt light at first; that the terror that had filled it was finally receding as one last bit of mercy in my life. A moment later I noticed it wasn’t just my heart that was light though. My whole body was buoyant, floating through the air like a feather. The terror the had consumed me drained away, replaced by an unexpected joy. I felt myself first rising gently, then soaring upwards.

I was flying!

Several conflicting thoughts tore through my head in the wake of the little floating man’s words.

The door nearest to me was closed and locked. It would take extra time to escape that way. James was in the way of escaping the other way. The floating man was tiny, which was good. He was also glowing, which was not. He had angel wings, so that wasgood. Evil things loved to appear in forms that got you to let down your guard though, so back to bad. I was probably going crazy, bad. Or this was a residual spell or trick of the Shadow Court, also bad. He looked tiny enough to smash, good. Which would be really gross, bad.

In the end what kept me calm was the sincerity in his voice. Granted it wouldn’t take a trickster god to fool me.  I’m fairly smart, but that just means I knew I was out of my depth and didn’t have enough real information to work with. So I went with intuition. It’s a terrible thing to rely on but sometimes it’s the best you’ve got to work with.

With slow, deep breaths I forced the flood of panic and surprise down into my stomach where it could have a little party with the cafeteria food from lunch. That discomfort aside, I felt the rest of my body relax slightly.

“Thanks!” the little man said, visibly relaxing as well.

I nodded at him and waited to hear what he had to say.

“First things first; you’re not going crazy, I’m real but you’re the only one here that can see or hear me. Oh and I’m not with those magiclings that you encountered before.”, he said.

I raised an eyebrow, wondering if “magiclings” meant the Shadow Court.

“Next, I’ve got confess, it’s probably my fault they were here. I can’t explain too much without putting you in danger, and I’m sorry for the danger I’ve put you in so far.”

“What do you mean danger?” I wanted to ask him but refrained from saying. James and the cops would go right for the straight jackets if I started talking to myself at this point.

“Well, see, a lot of things would like to get their hands on….wait a minute, how did you do that?” the little man asked, looking as shocked as I felt.

Of course I couldn’t answer him with a “Do what?” so I just glared at him and thought it really loud.

“That! Talking to me! You’re…oh man.”

“You can read my thoughts?” I spoke the words in my mind to see.

“No, I can’t. But you can apparently dreamspeak them just fine.” he answered.

James nudged me.

“Spacing out on me again?” he asked.

“What? No. Just a little freaked out.” I told him, keeping my eyes on the little glowing man. I heard James laugh.

“No worries.”, he bopped me on the shoulder as reassurance, “This kind of thing doesn’t take too long.” he said, referring to the police questioning I guessed. I looked over at him and frowned. How would he know? We could be there all night if the cops felt like keeping us.

“And you can still hear the waking world? That’s…interesting.” the little man said.

“You said we were in danger?” I thought-asked him, irrationally worried that I’d let him out of my sight for even a moment. On the other hand, I knew I’d have to at some point. People would get a little concerned if I kept staring at an empty point in space.

“Yes. Not at the moment though! That’s why I’m talking to you now.”

I looked back over at James to confirm he wasn’t seeing or hearing any of this.

“Think we should tell Mom?” James asked, apparently clueless about the other occupant of the car. I noticed we were moving. Seems I was bit clueless too since I hadn’t noticed when we took off.

“Mom?” I asked. I was distracted by the two conversations and I hadn’t been thinking about how our parents factored into this at all.

“She’s going to flip when she hears about it.”, he said, “I mean, we could just tell Dad and let him tell Mom.”

“What kind of danger is it?” I thought-asked the little man. If it was something that was going to come after my whole family they deserved to know too.

“Nightmares.” he answered.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Bad dreams I could handle. No need to tell Mom either!

“Think we can get home before they notice we’re late?” I asked aloud to James.

“I mean Nightmares that can enter the waking world.” the little glowing man clarified.

“What?” I blurted aloud. James looked at me like I’d grown another head, but then smiled.

“You know ‘what’.”, James laughed thinking I’d been reacting to his expression I guess, “Can you imagine what would happen if we didn’t tell them and they found out from the cops?”

I flushed a bit and shrugged in agreement feeling like an idiot for slipping like that.

“Sorry. I’ll leave as soon as I can, and if I can stay hidden till then nothing should be able to find you or me.” the floating man replied to me.

“What do you mean hidden? Why are you here? Why are you talking to me?” I thought-asked feeling frustrated and afraid.

“We don’t have long, and I can’t go into the all the details. Also you’d be a lot less safe if you knew them all. The short form of the story is this: I don’t come from this world. I’m more alien than anything you’ve ever seen or heard of in fact. That means there’s a lot of things in this world that would like to get their hands on me. I’m tough to find though because, as you can see, I’m very small. I’m also tough to find because at the moment I’m embedded inside of you.”

“Inside of me? How..”

He cut me off before I could continue.

“Not physically inside of you. I’m inside your dreamworld.”

“You’re in my mind?”

That would explain why no one else could see him I supposed. And why he could hear my thoughts.

“It’s a little different than that, but sure, we’ll go with that for now. The important thing is while I’m with you, I’m camouflaged. Anything that looks for me will see you instead. Kind of like disguising a needle as a piece of hay in the haystack.”

“Why me?”

“I think you rescued me.”

The dream from this morning came back to me. Flying through a staggeringly well rendered skyscape with a glowing pendant in my hand.

“You’re…you’re the pendant?”

“A pendant? Hmm, I guess so. I don’t remember. I was in pretty bad shape at that point.”

“What are you?” I demanded. The glowing man sighed.

“I can’t tell you…”, I glared at him but he continued before I could say anything, “…because I don’t remember it all myself. Again, short form, I’m a fragment of someone a lot more powerful than you can imagine.”

“I’ve read about all the metahumans in the last hundred years, I can imagine a lot.”

“I’m starting to see that.” the glowing man said, tipping his head to the side appraisingly. His gaze made me feel like a science project that was behaving in a puzzling way.

“How long will you be…hiding?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Not long though. Maybe three nights? Like I said, I’ll leave as soon as I’m strong enough to.”

“And we’ll be safe till then?”

“If I leave you before I’ve finished healing I’ll unmake – meaning I’ll fall apart on such a fundamental level that it will be as though I’d never been here. I don’t want to disappear like that. As far as I know, I’m the only part of me that’s left, so I hope you understand what it means when I say this: No matter what it takes, I won’t let you come to harm.”

“Hey, no snoozing, we’re here.” James said, nudging me as the car came to a stop in the parking lot behind the police station.

“I have to hide again.” the glowing man said.

“Wait, what’s your name?”

“Umm…I guess it’s ‘Pendant’.” he replied with a shrug.

“Pendant?”

“Yeah, I think I lost my old one, and ‘Pendant’ is what you called me, so that’s what I’m stuck with for now until someone gives me another one.” With that he was gone.

I blinked and then followed James out of the car. I felt light headed. Or in shock. It was hard to tell. It would have been nice to be able to doubt the conversation had been real but I had to be honest with myself. I didn’t have a history of mental illness. The Shadow Court leaving behind an agent like “Pen” was possible but wildly out of character from what I knew of them. Most of all though, weird things happened sometimes.

Pen might be a monster of some kind, but, as I thought about it, I realized he’d passed one crucial test. He hadn’t asked me for anything. He hadn’t even really asked me to believe anything. I wasn’t sworn to secrecy, and I didn’t have to do anything for him.

I believed him when he said he would protect me, or at least I wanted to. That could be dangerous, but some tiny little part of me was already telling me that it could be something more too.

“So are you going to tell them?” James asked as we walked into the police station, and for a second I thought he was asking if I was going to tell the police about Pen.

“I can talk to Dad if you don’t want to.” he added, making me realize I’d forgotten about the conversation we’d been having in the car.

“How about you take Dad and I’ll take Mom?”, I offered, “I think she’ll freak out less if she can grill me immediately.”

James laughed, “You’re braver than I am sis.”

“I don’t know, you’re pretty calm about talking to the cops, I’m jumping out of my skin.” I admitted.

“They’re not so bad. They just gotta follow procedures.” James shrugged.

“I’m not looking forward to ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’ I guess.”

“Pfff, trust me, they’re not going to be like that.”

“Like you’ve ever been brought in for questioning? What did Dad have you hauled down here the one time you got a ‘B’ so you’d be ‘scared straight’?”

James just rolled his eyes.

“No, really, have you met these guys before? It looked like you and Officer Smalls knew each other.” I asked, wondering where our Officer escort had gotten to.

“Nah. Just nice to see a black guy leading a case like this.” James lied.

I don’t know how I knew he was lying, or why he was lying, but the heightened awareness I’d had when the Shadow Court showed up was back and it was clear.

I felt a surge of panic hit my nerves. If I was entering that state again something horrible could be nearby. I couldn’t sense any immediate danger so I settled for looking around carefully as we got to the main desk. James caught the clerk’s attention.

“Officer Smalls asked us to check in. He needs to question us about the incident at the library.” my brother explained.

“He’s supposed to bring you in himself.” the clerk noted unhappily.

“He said he’s setting up the wards on the room, he wanted to get started as soon as possible.” James informed him.

“That’s fine. Just take these and fill them out while you’re waiting.” the clerk passed over some forms in the perfectly normal way a perfectly normal visit to the police station would go.

So why was I in hyper-aware mode? I looked at the clerk, but he was boring and normal. I looked at James, but he was my brother. Not boring, but not a threat either. I looked at the room we were being directed to. Live magic and technology playing together. Amazing stuff, but also run of the mill and boring somehow.

Then I looked at the door leading out and saw her. The girl from behind the library.

Not boring.