“Deeper… and deeper. Let your body and your mind calm. The tension in your shoulders, in your arms, in your chest… just let it all go and step to the third… step… now. Relax.”

Sensory deprivation chambers always felt strange. They were small cylinders. More like metal coffins than actual chambers. Half-filled with water, the occupant was intended to relax and float on top, removing most sensations of gravity and the upward force of the ground or chairs or beds. With the water and air both the same temperature, a warm and near-body temperature, there wasn’t much tactile sensation against the skin either. A neutralizing agent mixed in the air ensured that there were no odd smells or tastes.

The only sense not deprived at the moment was the deep voice of her hypnosis technician.

“Deeper and… deeper. Picture your worries as mere light bulbs easy to… reach out to turn them off. One… by… one. Until you find yourself totally without anxiety in your darkened environment and step down to the second… step… now. Relax.”

Hypnotism always seemed like a silly thing. Dyna wasn’t sure what other people felt during the sessions. Melanie had taken her out to a local fair about three months ago. There had been a hypnosis show with a dozen people up on stage. The hypnotist there had not been affiliated with the Carroll Institute, but he still had the volunteers barking like chickens and singing like elephants.

They had to be audience plants. Even exposed to hypnotists and hypnotism sessions on the regular, she couldn’t ever imagine herself acting like that out in public. At the institute, hypnotism sessions tended toward the ‘sit down and relax, be a better person, accomplish what you want, session over’ variety. Far less funny, but at least Dyna didn’t feel revolted at the idea of participating.

Not that she felt they really worked. None had unlocked secret psionic potential.

Though she did have to admit that the sensory deprivation tank was a novel touch. It definitely made the experience feel a whole lot stranger. She couldn’t quite picture this staircase of deeper relaxation or the light bulbs of troublesome thoughts, but she couldn’t remember ever feeling quite so… at peace.

Honestly, it was mostly the voice. Harold was a balding, middle-aged man who wore a fairly traditional pair of glasses. Unassuming in his position as Doctor Cross’ assistant, he was the kind of Mister Cellophane that most people wouldn’t notice. With the one exception of his voice.

“Deeper… and… deeper,” he said, voice smooth and rich. “There is only one step left before we reach your sanctuary. Picture a time before yesterday’s incident. Imagine yourself at peace as you take the final… step… now.”

Dyna blinked.

Dyna blinked again.

The sensory deprivation tank, in fitting with its theme of depriving the occupant of their senses, lacked any light. It didn’t matter if she had her eyes open or closed. Frankly, it was a bit difficult to tell if she had her eyes open or closed. She actually had to think about it.

And no matter how she thought about it now, Dyna couldn’t help but stare at the door in front of her. A simple wooden door. One without windows or a carved pattern. The only feature of the door was a simple brass handle.

Behind her, Dyna saw the ten steps she had taken down to reach the door. She could remember stepping down them one at a time, but… she hadn’t imagined herself doing so with the hypnotist’s voice. Picturing literal pictures in her head had never been something she could accomplish. When someone said to picture an apple… she knew what an apple was. Red, round, a little stem coming off the top. She might even consider the sweet taste of the crispy and juicy fruit.

But she wouldn’t picture it.

Odd as it was, Dyna didn’t feel unnerved. She relaxed. This was how it was supposed to be. Reaching forward, she turned the handle and… stepped deeper into the room now.

A sanctuary?

That was what Harold had said would be here.

Dyna wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or bad thing that her mental sanctuary apparently looked like any given room of Psychodynamics. Not quite as fancy, but the predominant parts of the architecture were made from wood and brass. A long couch and a smaller chair, both fashioned in red leather, sat around a small pit of fire. Shelves of books lined one wall while another wall looked like it had been ripped from a coffee shop, complete with a counter and rows of flavoring bottles and bags of beans. Some mental projection from when she had worked in one?

At the far end, past the pit of fire, a grand window occupied the far wall.

Dyna had been thinking her sanctuary was rather… plain. Not special enough. Rather like her, actually. And yet, the window…

The sanctuary floated in space. Not space like she had ever seen it from Earth, with general darkness dotted by a few faint lights, but something far more fantastic. A nebula of swirling clouds in a rainbow of hues. Stars burned bright as they shined through the clouds. And far out in the distance, what Dyna would have called the horizon had there been a horizon, a single sun-like ball of light dominated the vista. Except instead of being a perfect ball, it was like someone had pinched the light on either side, stretching it far out to infinity on the sides while leaving a small bulge in the middle.

Dyna stared out for… she wasn’t sure how long. The real sun would have burned her eyes out. This? It calmed and relaxed her.

Though she had a task to do. Dyna couldn’t sit around staring forever. She needed to look around her sanctuary… now. She needed to check for any changes, any alterations of what was here. Any additions of new objects. Or any removals, where an object should have been but wasn’t anymore. And she needed to look… now.

Dyna couldn’t remember visiting this place ever before. She couldn’t simply play spot the difference. Perhaps something would feel out of place?

The bookshelf struck her as the most obvious area to look at. Large enough to occupy an entire wall and filled with books? It would have been easy to slip in an extra tome. Or change the title of a tome. Or remove one, though that might leave a small gap.

Given the number of books, she could have spent a short eternity searching through every single page. So she didn’t. Instead, she walked past the shelves slowly, casually looking from one shelf to another. Curious about what was inside the books, she picked up one. Dyna couldn’t read the words on the spine. Not on this one or any of the others. There were definitely letters there, but they swirled and twisted like she was looking at them through a haze.

Text lined the pages of the book. Much like the cover, she couldn’t read a single word of it. That fact didn’t bother her. In fact, she was fairly certain that she had heard somewhere about how it was impossible to read something while in a dream. A hypnosis-induced trance probably counted as a dream.

Flipping a few pages, she found more than just text. An image inset in the book. Unlike the text, she could see the image mostly fine. It was of a water park. Six young children were playing in a large pool. Various shadowy figures hung about in the distance. If this was a memory, she had to assume that the shadowy figures were just random people unimportant to the scene. The children, however, were off. Much like Id, Dyna could see their faces and their eyes and mouths and so on, but putting it all together just didn’t quite work right.

Thinking a little harder, Dyna tried to remember the event. The one stark memory that stood out to her at a water park as a child would have been one of her elementary school friend’s birthday party. It had been… El. Emmanuel, though he just went by El. The moment the name came to her, the image in the book cleared up. One of the children’s features changed. The skin tone darkened from a neutral tan, the now obviously brown hair curled, and she could now see his bright smile as he splashed one of the other children.

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Their faces remained blurred. Dyna figured that she could clear them up as well if she thought hard enough, but the memory wasn’t that important to her or to the current situation, so she moved on.

Dyna flipped through a few pages, finding more scenes from the birthday party, and just about closed the book and shelved it again. Before she could, her flipping stopped at another image.

Dyna’s stomach dropped.

The image looked like it was from the same birthday party. Perhaps out in the parking lot as they were heading home. But there was something about this image that struck her as odd…

An adult stood in the background, among the shadowy figures representing the crowd, but not shadowy itself. Like every other person in the hazy memory, Dyna couldn’t identify the features on the adult. Unlike the others, it wasn’t because their face was hazy.

It was like someone had taken a black permanent marker and scribbled out its eyes and nose and mouth and hair. Not like a censor bar, but each individual part of its face had been blacked out. Dyna, horror fanatic that she was, didn’t think she had seen anything more unnerving. Especially because, despite lacking a face, Dyna could tell that it was staring at them.

Dyna flipped a few more pages until she got to the next picture. Also in the parking lot, but near a car. Like the people, Dyna couldn’t tell the specifics. It was large enough to hold six children, however.

And yet, that figure with the blacked out face was still in the image. Closer than before. No longer part of the shadowy crowds.

Dyna flipped the pages again.

The figure stood next to the car door. It wasn’t their driver, as Dyna could see another adult—this one with a mere hazy face—sitting at the wheel. It just leered over the children as the first of the six piled into the side door.

Dyna flipped forward..

And promptly dropped the book.

There was nothing in the image but the scribbled face of the figure. A close-up, like it was staring at her through the book of memories.

Stomach churning, Dyna bent and flipped forward.

The tight feeling in her chest didn’t disappear even though the figure did. The next scene was one from the inside of the car with all the children. She could clearly see El. The others were around as well. Except… Counting, Dyna only made it to five. One of the six children wasn’t there.

Closing her eyes, Dyna tried to think back. Had… someone been kidnapped in her childhood? One of her friends? That seemed like a fairly important memory and one that she wasn’t likely to forget, but she came up blank. Not only that, but El, the only clear child, was obviously laughing. He had a hand on another’s shoulder like they were pal-ing around. If someone had just been kidnapped…

Dyna quickly skimmed through the rest of the book, but couldn’t find any sign of the missing child nor any sign that anyone else noticed.

Psionics?

Memory alteration could certainly have everyone acting like nothing was wrong. And that blacked out face. That had clearly been unnatural.

Was that from Id? Had the woman scribbled over memories while in her head?

Dyna… didn’t think so. This was something old. Something that had happened at the time, not just yesterday.

Putting the book back, Dyna reached for the next, wanting to know if some memory held a clue as to the identity of either that figure or the sixth child. But before she could grab the next book, she noticed something on the shelf above. Dyna couldn’t read the spine. She couldn’t read the spines of any of the books, but this one was like someone had taken a paintbrush and dragged it over what regular text might have been there.

Dyna grabbed the book, noted the same paint smeared across the front, and opened it up.

Every page had been defaced. Someone had taken a paint roller and covered each page. The swirling text and the images were impossible to see, let alone attempt to make out.

Turning pages like the album was a flipbook, Dyna didn’t find a single page that hadn’t been blacked out.

But, nearing the end, a small slip of paper fell from between the pages.

Bending, Dyna picked it up.

“They don’t want you to remember,” she said, reading the readable scribble of handwriting aloud. “They want the control.”

Grabbing a pen from… well, it didn’t really matter where from. Pen suddenly in hand, Dyna wrote the same message on the backside of the paper.

The handwriting didn’t match. She hadn’t thought it did, but this confirmed it.

Dyna hadn’t left this message for herself. Someone else had done it. Id? That person with the blacked out face? Who was they? The Carroll Institute? They were the first they that came to mind given that they were about the only they Dyna knew of that had the technology and personnel capable of manipulating memories. But…

But the Carroll Institute wasn’t her enemy. Were they? It had to be someone else. Those men who followed her, Id… The figure with the blacked out face. Who was that?

It couldn’t be the institute.

It…

Dyna blinked and, finding herself in a pool of water, promptly splashed around in an attempt to keep from drowning. Her hands slapped into the hard metal of the deprivation chamber’s walls, making her realize that the water was less than a foot deep. The lid of the chamber cracked open, forcing her to blink from the light that now poured in.

A few technicians rushed to help her, leaving Dyna feeling more embarrassed than anything else.

“I’m fine,” she said with a groan as she sat up in the tank. “I just…”

“Did you find anything amiss within the confines of your mind?”

Dyna, squinting as one of the technicians handed her a towel, looked to where Doctor Cross stood safely behind a pane of shielded glass. She didn’t give him an answer right away, choosing to pat at her face with the towel while she thought.

There was definitely something amiss within her mind. A kidnapped childhood friend. Some memory that she couldn’t even imagine what it might have been. And that note.

Doctor Cross was looking for some evidence that Id had implanted subliminal messages or trigger words and situations that would cause problems.

Who could she trust? The Carroll Institute? Walter? Cross? Id—certainly not.

Ruby… Ruby couldn’t have anything to do with this. She was too young to have been involved in that event at the water park and she didn’t exactly seem friendly with most Carroll Institute personnel. Dyna did have to wonder what Ruby would do if the Carrol Institute decided to rewrite someone’s memories.

“No. I… I don’t think so. There was…” Dyna slowly lowered the towel from her face. What could she say? She wasn’t sure. Her thoughts were a mess. She…

She needed to call her mother. Back home in L.A., her mother would have a half-dozen scrapbooks chronicling Dyna’s childhood. Perhaps one of those would have a picture or reference to that sixth child. Dyna could barely even remember her classmates, though she assumed that most of that was simply because of her age at the time and far more prominent high school memories feeling more important. Or at least more recent.

There should be a class photo with all the names of her schoolmates somewhere.

“I don’t think anything changed during Id’s visit,” Dyna eventually said. She had nothing more than a gut feeling that it hadn’t been Id who blacked out that book. That felt like something that had been done a long while ago as well. Perhaps not at the water park, but sometime between then and now.

“Well, don’t put too much stock in what you saw. I certainly don’t,” Cross said with a chuckle. “Hypnotism is the least scientific of all our admitted pseudoscience.”

That earned him a long glare from the shorter man at his side. Harold had a glare that could kill. Not that Cross paid him or his glare any attention.

“Your other tests came back clean enough. Whatever this Id wanted, it apparently did not involve influencing your mind. Perhaps she was looking for information? Though I wonder what you could possibly know.”

Dyna wondered that exact question. What had she known?

And who had taken it away from her?

Stepping out of the deprivation tank, Dyna finished drying herself off. She had been given a kind of wet suit-like outfit to wear. It was tight fitting and a little embarrassing. Or it had been on the way into the tank. Now? Her thoughts were occupied. She couldn’t help but stare around the room. Those silver suits that everyone always wore around her suddenly felt far more sinister.

She didn’t want to believe that the Carroll Institute had been responsible for manipulating her memories. Or if they had, they had best have a good reason for it. But no other group fit that they definition. If Id had left that note, Dyna did have to admit that it was having an influencing effect on her. Id had probably left it vague specifically for that reason. It was probably the truth that they had something to cover up, but the use of the pronoun rather than simply stating who they was might have Dyna barking up the wrong tree, thinking it was the institute when instead it was… Who had Emerald mentioned? The Russians, Chinese, Indians, and dozens of smaller organizations?

Thinking of it like that, it could be nearly anyone.

That said, she wasn’t quite ready to voice her suspicions just yet. If it was the Carroll Institute, they could easily modify her memories again and this time, would know not to send her into a hypnotherapy session.

It was also possible that the blacked out book and the water park figure were two parts of the same incident. It didn’t seem like that. One had been a larger attempt at covering something up while the latter had simply been a kidnapper with psychic abilities. One book had used paint across the entire thing while the kidnapper merely had marker scribbling out his features.

Handing the towel off to one of the technicians, Dyna looked over to the room where Doctor Cross had observed the session. “I’m clear to leave, right?” she said, forcing a smile. “No offense to the interior decorators here, but I would prefer to spend the night in my own dorm rather than the… cell here.”

“It was a precaution for your safety, I’m told,” Cross said. “I believe you have a private room down in the Artificer Quarters.”

“Yes, but that’s empty, sterile, and has no natural light. Maybe it would be better after I decorate it, but I’m not exactly planning on going back into town anytime soon.”

“Wise. I have no issue with you living out of your dormitory. If you do venture into the city, I would advise you to take Emerald and Ruby along for the journey.”

“Not planning on it.” And that wasn’t a lie in the slightest. Although a seed of doubt had sprouted with regards to the Carroll Institute, swapping her trust to someone like Id sounded like the very most foolish thing she could do.

No. She had some phone calls to make. Hopefully innocuous calls.

Dyna’s eyes shifted to the burning red light set into the glass dome of the camera in the corner of the room.

Beatrice, she assumed, would be listening.