I felt like the number of times I woke up with my head pounding was far too significant a percentage. Yet that never stopped me from doing it, and as I slowly opened my eyes to the aching world, I thought…maybe it still beat the alternative of not waking up at all? There’s some optimism for you.

It didn’t help with my understanding though. Like why I was on the floor in the living room, or my head hurt enough that every time my heart beat, I could feel it in my head and my vision seemed to constrict. I spent long moments just lying there, willing my brain to get its shit together.

“Yeah, won’t work.”

It was Saga’s voice, but fuck if I was going to turn to look around at it. Somewhere from the direction of the couch, anyway.

“What?” I croaked. “What won’t?”

“Willing your brain to get better. If it were in your head, I’d have fixed it for you, trust me. If you think your headache is bad, imagine my having all of them in the whole house at once.”

Yeah, her voice sounded pretty croaky and thin. I just didn’t have the spare capacity for sympathy at the moment when doing anything hurt.

“I thought you could fix headaches?” I asked.

“If it’s just brain chemistry or something sure. You guys are all full of poison that’s leaching through your bodies. I’d have to filter your blood or something. It’s already clearing up, but shit if it can’t hurry up a little.”

Something walked in front of me and smiled at me, and I realized it was AEGIS. “Let’s leave Saga to concentrate on blocking you guys out for now, huh?” she whispered to me. “Everything’s fine now, so let’s just focus on recovering for the next bit.”

“Was it not fine before? Why’d I fall asleep, and why…poison. Why was I poisoned? Err, how?”

She gave me a sympathetic smile and sat down gently in front of me, making sure to keep her dress from riding up. “About fifteen feet behind you, there’s a wreck of a big robot that sorta…snuck in here and filled the house with a knockout gas. Saga and I were the only ones unaffected…

“Um,” Saga groaned.

“Or…I should say…unaffected enough to keep conscious, and we beat it before it dragged Moon off.”

I grunted at her. It was supposed to be some kind of expression of gratitude and appreciation, but didn’t quite make it out. She smiled anyway.

“And then about twenty feet behind you, there’s uh, three lovely gentlemen. I imagine in an hour or so they’re going to have headaches just like yours, once the gas wears off.”

“…who?”

“They were the folks who sent in the snatcher drone. Once it went down, they came to finish the job, and then I beat them senseless, ripped off their rebreathers, and sprayed gas in their faces.” She frowned a little. “Honestly, it’s like they didn’t have a plan for what would happen if their drone failed.”

“Not everyone plans out every contingency, AEGIS.” I swallowed and realized my mouth tasted weird. Like…fruit, maybe? Sort of a weird side-effect. I’d have been more curious about it if the other side-effects weren’t so pronounced. And pounding.

“Well, we see how well that worked for them,” she said with the world’s most superior smirk. “Proper preparation is the cornerstone of any victory.”

“Wow,” I said, wincing. “What was your plan?”

She opened her mouth and then closed it.

“We winged it,” Saga muttered.

“Anyway, you’re the last one up,” AEGIS blurted out. “Everyone else is out back, and felt a lot better after they had some salt and water.”

“They really don’t,” Saga added. “Believe me.”

AEGIS sighed. “Well, it won’t hurt. Kind of a nasty drug, but that’s what you’d expect from kidnappers, I guess.”

“Sure,” I said, rising as slowly as I could. “Ow. Should I meet you out there?”

“No, I’m staying with our kidnapees. They’re tied up and still out for now, but I don’t want to leave them alone for a moment if I don’t have to.”

I finished sitting up and looked over in that direction. Oh yeah. She mentioned that.

Tied up were three men in suits, sunglasses, earpieces…the whole outfit. It was like they were deliberately trying to look like shady business thugs. I wondered if one of them might have a briefcase chained to his wrist, or if they had cyanide capsules in their molars.

Saga chuckled, and then held her head. “No, nothing like that. One’s just a driver and the other two are basically tech support for the snatcher. No secret agents here.”

“Oh.” That was a little disappointing. But probably for the best. If I knew one thing about super spies, it was that knocking them out and tying them up was just step one to them destroying your base and toppling all of your plans. Not that we really had plans at the moment, but I guess that’s what the capture and interrogation was for.

I winced as I stood up and shambled my way out the back. My life wasn’t like other lives.

After a round of greetings, we were all mostly quiet as we recovered in shared solitude. All of us had been knocked out by the gas, Lia, Whitney, Tem, even Chiho, and it seemed like Saga’s assessment on our mood was spot-on.

Still, I felt a little better being in the fresh air and under the sun, and drinking some water and eating some boring-ass salty crackers felt like it did something, maybe. But as AEGIS said, there probably wasn’t much recourse but for us to just wait it out as the toxins worked through our systems.

About twenty minutes later found me doing a lot better, though I’d given up on sitting in the sun and we were all crowded into Saga’s preferred spot. I could tell the others were doing better as well, which was confirmed when Saga joined us, a little smirk back on her face and swagger back in her barefooted step.

“They’re waking up,” she informed us. “Wanna go have some fun?”

“Your idea of fun is weird,” Lia said.

“What’s her idea of fun?” Chiho asked.

“I was thinking we ask them questions and every one they refused to answer, I’d make one of their buddies bite off a digit of their finger and swallow it.” Saga’s grin intensified as she cracked her knuckles in preparation.

Chiho’s eyes widened. “Her idea of fun is weird.”

“Couldn’t you just like…get the info from them?” I asked.

“Well yeah, but Athan, that’d be a violation of their mental sanctity,” Saga argued. “I would never want to make one of our guests feel unsafe here.”

“Uh, huh,” I said, standing up to see to them before any of their fingers mysteriously disappeared. When I got over there, they looked exactly as I expected. Besuited, besunglassed, and wincing at every movement and sound.

AEGIS was doing her best to make them uncomfortable. Each was tied hand and foot to the chair they sat on, limiting their field of vision to just the corner, where she flitted in and out of their sight, stalking them like a predator as she bent to look them in the eyes or pass close enough behind them to shatter any personal space they might dream of having.

“How do you want to play it?” Lia asked me from where she was sprawled lazily on the carpet behind them. “If we go uh, all-out on them, we’ll probably at least need to make sure they don’t remember it afterwards.”

“Again, not something I think I’m up to quite at the moment. We’d have to keep them a few hours because of the drugging,” Saga shrugged. “I’m uh, keeping myself a little separate right now as best as I can. But I’m game. I’m patient like that.”

“Oh I don’t think it’ll come to that,” I said, walking into their view and crouching to their level. Three sets of wide dark eyes snapped onto me. “After all, if these guys know we’re talking about having to kill them or the like, I’m sure they’ll be much more will to have a chat without going that far. Right guys?”

Two of them just stared at me impassively. The third hesitated and then nodded. Instantly the other two were yelling at him in Japanese while he screamed his best back.

“Great,” I said, smiling at the chattiest one. “Let’s get these other two out of here, maybe even sedate them again, and then our friend here can have a nice chat with us and tell us what he’s doing here, huh?”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Yes…nice chat,” he muttered. I gave him a reassuring smile and turned towards the now-livid pair, only to find Moon there, reaching her hand towards one and brushing him on the cheek. Tenderly, like a lover, before she just dropped where she stood.

“Uh,” I got out, before a purple effigy of the man burst from his chest, his eyes widening even further.

“Just one moment,” Moon said. “I should have done this before, I should.”

“Moon, what are you doing?”

“Oh holy shit,” Saga muttered.

“Okay that’s a really bad sign, Moon what are you doing?”

She didn’t answer me, just sat there, floating, impassive, as the body under her shuddered and trembled. Half-stuttered words parted his lips but none that I recognized. He seemed to be having a seizure as his whole body threw itself against itself.

I…I didn’t…what was I supposed to do? I felt as helpless as the man she was possessing as she…did whatever this was to him. It was clear some kind of mental war was going on, but I couldn’t pretend I understood the very least of it. The last time Moon had travelled on me, we’d fought, but my body had never shaken like a leaf through the whole thing.

I just had the idea of grabbing her corpse and retouching the victim with it to force her out when she spoke. “As I suspected, this man is yet another mere pawn of my father. He works for a specialized security firm.”

“Yeah…we could have gotten this from talking, Moon. There’s no need for…this.”

“It is Kaori. Moon is my callsign at work.”

“You’re really working the fuck out of that guy.”

“This is personal,” she said simply, and the man spasmed in his seat with an extra throe of violence. “I should have done this long ago. The longer I held back, the more I imperiled those around me, to say nothing of myself.”

“Moon…Kaori…we were fine. We didn’t even have all our cards on the table. We weren’t in any danger. There wasn’t any need to go full-bore like this.”

“Oh, but there was. This man possesses memories he does not consider relevant which would never have been found without a thorough search. Very interesting memories, they are.”

The memories seemed more terrifying and painful than anything to him, as his bucking reached a crescendo which caused the chair to skip up and down the carpet.

“Okay, that’s enough. Let him go.”

Saga sat on the couch and interlaced her fingers, her eyes shining as she stared at the violent spectacle unfolding before us. Shadows of something sinister flickered behind the hunger in her simple smile.

“If you insist,” Moon said, and the man’s twitching and jumping reached a climax. I felt myself going white as I saw his contorted face, both wishing I knew what was going on in there, and wishing I never knew.

Her spectre shifted, and with a crash, she threw the chair, man and all into the ground, herself being carried with it, the physics of it all be damned. He wriggled and writhed on the floor, and then in one movement, stood fully upright, the ropes and remains of the chair falling off of him. I was on him in a moment, surrounding him with blades to keep him from moving towards anyone else, but he just gave me a smile…the most…bizarrely haunting smile I’d ever seen, like his flesh was being pulled away by hooks.

And then he threw himself into the air, jumping straight up, higher than I could ever jump, and twisting himself so that he landed face-first on the carpet, his arms locked at his sides. There was an audible crack as his neck twisted in a way no neck should, and then the body crumpled in an impossible pile.

Whitney gasped. Saga applauded slowly. The others just watched. Chiho wasn’t here, fortunately. My heart broke a little that Lia seemed as unphased as AEGIS.

Moon’s spectre flickered out and then she opened her eyes. She stretched for a moment before reaching out towards the more cooperative of the two remaining guys.

My blades moved between them as I trapped her instead.

“Holy…w-what the…fuck?” I yelled at her.

“Oh, grow up,” she said, with a deliberate roll of her eyes at me.

“Grow…Moon, you just fucking killed him. By making him jump and snap his own spine. I didn’t even know you could control people’s brains like that!”

“I can’t. But you should have known this was coming already.”

“What, I should just assume you’re a psycho?”

“The moment my powers were made manifest to these people, they could not be permitted to report it. Now if you will excuse me, I have two more–“

“Goddamnit, Moon, that’s not how we do things. I don’t care how inconvenient someone else’s life is, you don’t just snuff people out because you can.”

She blinked at me. “He travelled across the world to snatch me from my home. You would argue in his defense?”

“Yes. He’s still a person. I might hate him, I might think he’s human garbage, but you don’t just kill people. Not if you can avoid it. We’ve got Saga…we’ve got…options.”

“We have been playing options until now. As a result of your restraint, today your sister, your girlfriend–“

“I’m not his girlfriend–“

“She’s not my girlfriend–“

“–you, and I were very nearly snatched from our home. By a man who has made a profession of it. He has been doing this for years, and do you think he loses sleep on the morality of his actions?”

“Yeah, but I’m not him, Moon. I’m me. I can’t control what anyone else does or regrets.”

“How ironic,” she said, gesturing at the crackling cage I’d put her in. “And it is Kaori.”

“Whatever your name is, killer, can’t you see how pointless that was? This guy could have been rehabilitated. Hell, Saga could have gone in and…fixed some of his plumbing. Today could have been the last awful day of this guy’s life.”

“Why would I want to touch that guy’s penis?” Saga smirked.

“His mental plumbing, Jesus.”

“Oh, of course,” she said, the smirk going absolutely nowhere. “Athan, I love you of course, and this little tantrum of yours is just the cutest little thing.”

“It’s not a tantrum. There’s a fucking corpse right fucking there!”

“Always looking backwards. Why dwell on the corpses of the past when there are so many corpses of the future just waiting to be made”

“Saga, damn it, I’m serious here.”

“And so am I,” she said, her smirk finally falling away. “I’m not in it to fix every trauma of every broken little person we stumble upon. I didn’t take any hippocratic oath, and I sure as fuck don’t have an altruistic bone in my body — though I wouldn’t say no if you wanted to lend me one?”

She batted her eyes at me and when I didn’t respond just blew air at her bangs and continued. “And even if I were, why would I be rewarding these fuckups with healthy, fixed lives? There are like, kids out there, who haven’t had a toxic thought in their lives, with their whole shit in front of ’em, who are gonna have a rough go because of nothing more than messed up chemistry in their brains.”

“So…go fix them?” I said.

“Oh, right. Yeah, I’ll just spend the rest of my life catching every snowflake falling around me and doing surgery to make sure every fuckin’ one of ’em is perfectly symmetrical.”

“What?”

“It’s a metaphor, stupid. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but you and all these other people are just going to melt away long before I do. You’re all only worth as much to me as how pretty y’all are while you’re falling.”

“Saga this is…this is so stupid, and so unrelated to what’s going on. Moon’s become a…freaking carnivorous snowflake, daring around and snuffing out other ones long before they hit the ground.”

“And you can’t see why that’d be amusing to watch?” Saga said, her dark eyes flashing. The others tied up strained against their ropes at her words.

“Look, let’s all just…I’m a pragmatist too, okay? Let’s wait for the drugs to wear off, and have Saga do some plumbing–“

“Penises?”

“No, damn it. Mentally. Just…do your thing, pull what you need from his mind, and blast him out so he doesn’t know anything about us or Moon’s powers or anything.”

Her smirk came back double, as obnoxious as it was superior. “See, that’s the thing though. Your little girl there is right. The dude did have details tucked away in his mind that are very interesting. But because they’re just incidental memories, not categorized in his own head as being related to us or our interests, it’s unlikely I would have ever found them.”

“Then we send her in, and then you…clean up after.”

“Okay, first off, I know you love your plumbing analogy here, but I am nobody’s janitor. If she leaves a steaming turd in some dude’s mind, I am not stepping in to mop that shit up. And second…come on, Athan. You saw him as she went through. Does that look like the kind of thing I just stroll through and pick up afterwards?”

I tried not to think about the man’s face as he struggled and jerked and thrashed. I wondered just how much of his suicide was Moon, and how much was what was left of the man.

“So you’re saying you can’t do it?” I crossed my arms.

“I’m saying your shitty reverse psychology sure ain’t enough to get me to. Not for some jerkoff like this. Come back when Moon mindfucks your sister or something, and I’ll have a reason to care.”

“Um, thanks?” Lia said.

Saga winked at her. I just held my head as I stared at the dead guy’s sideways-bent head, peeking out from under his crumpled body at the harshest of angles.

“It’s still bullshit. It’s still wrong. We’re supposed to be the good guys. We have to act like it.”

Saga laughed. “Wait, I’ve been good since when? And a guy since when?” She made a show of prying up and peeking down the gap at her waistline. “You need to learn that there’s no good or bad in the world, Athan. There’s just what needs to get done and the people willing to do it. To these guys, you’re a job to sustain their livelihood that went wrong, and a damn fucking villain at that. But to the next or last person they snatched, you’re a goddamn hero. Tell me who’s opinion is more right?”

“The one that doesn’t involve killing people who don’t need to be killed,” I crossed my arms even harder. “There’s always a better way. A smarter way, a more clever way.”

Moon was eyeing me differently suddenly from inside my sparking cage. A little more hesitatingly, a little faltering. Which by Moon standards was a lot more of both of those things.

“Well I guess as a good guy, you probably have no interest in the info your girl picked up then,” Saga said, yawning and stretching. “Guess I’ll just blast it out of her mind, since it’s so illicitly acquired.”

“Come on, Saga. The guy’s fucking dead already. Don’t be a shit about it. Let’s just…not be a shit about it again in the future.”

She gave me a small grin, and then bowed dramatically to Moon, who seemed taken aback for the first time at everyone focusing on her. She froze, and it took several attempts before her moving lips produced words.

“He…saw…my father. Ichiro Ikeda.”

“Okay,” I said. “So we know…as we already did…that your dad is behind trying to kidnap you.”

“Yes,” she frowned. Saga stood up and leaned off of me obnoxiously.

“Here it comes!” she squealed.

Moon gave her a glare before turning back to me. “When he was speaking to this man’s superior, my father received a phone call. This man did not recognize the name or voice as anything of significance, but I do. The context of the conversation was that the individual on the line was as involved in the arrangements of my capture as was my father. Perhaps even the one motivating him to begin chasing me again.”

“Nice dramatic buildup,” Saga said. “Now finish it of with a real punchline. Tell him who called.” She punched at the air a couple times with an absolutely horrible stance designed to irritate me as much as possible.

“You are being obnoxious,” Moon said, glaring at her through half-lidded eyes.

“I’m being lovable. You should learn the skill sometime.”

“Saga shut up and let her finish,” I said, pushing her off me by the face. “Moon, who called? Who else is involved in trying to capture you.”

She swallowed hard and looked around the group, going a little red at the continued attention and then closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. “Um. It was…the Senator. Senator Idris Irenside. Karu’s father.”

I sat down as my head spun, feeling like I’d just taken another hit of snatcher gas, as Saga beamed her most devilish at me. She crouched to put her face as obnoxiously into mine as she could, her eyes glittering with malice.

“Good guys. Bad guys. All a matter of perspective,” she said.