Step zero of the plan turned out to be what step zero always was, which was: ‘Don’t die.’

Which was harder said than done, because while Moon was doing her best to shoot down whatever threats were coming at us whenever she had a free moment off harassing the ever-encroaching XPCA, Tem was pretty much just…

Well, the damage surrounding the house could be charitably described as ‘indiscriminate’. And ‘indiscriminate’ was how she was still shooting currently, in our direction as well as in every other, even into the sky. It seemed the garage was still mostly standing only because it was within Tem’s range and didn’t need to be shot through in her efforts to destroy everything else.

I’d thought at first that it was just raw destructive power which was keeping the XPCA at bay. Doubtless any coordinated assault was slowed with the prospect of random, spontaneous death. But I realized that wasn’t all, the two of them were constantly slipping in and out of view in a very disorienting way, and more than once, AEGIS diverted our approach around flecks of hard-light frozen in the air.

As we got closer, the constructs became more and more frequent and I wondered how I hadn’t spotted them before, except maybe that half were translucent purple and basically impossible to see. Those were formed into perfect glassy hexagons and arranged precisely to block avenues of attack. The white motes were just everywhere, chaotic and random snow which hung forever in the air. I had seen it, I realized, and dismissed it as smoke or fire in the house, just a cloudy, glowing haze, so ubiquitous and formless it was.

When we couldn’t go any further without walking into it, the haze seemed to part for us slowly, like curtains being pulled away, and I knew from the sluggish motion that it was Tem’s powers at work…or Moon’s, tugging the constructs as quickly as her powers could go. But as we got closer and the layers grew thicker, our passage shrunk and shrunk and our progress slowed, until AEGIS was crawling on her front on the ground, dragging me on her back, as I marvelled at feeling the dirt painlessly scraping by my face.

Some of the constructs had bullets or other remnants of attack still stuck in them, and if it weren’t already obvious by the carnage and damage, I knew these two had been here for a long time and had endured much. Just being able to withstand the XPCA — the power of which was evident in how quickly they’d shredded us — that was something. But it wasn’t all just the raw capabilities of Tem’s power on display here, or Moon’s clever use of them. It was both, and exclusively both.

The white beams shot off constantly, with a vim and ferocity and randomness that were a constant threat to any who would approach, from any angle. Even those in the sky, even those truly undetectable, even AEGIS and myself, crawling in the dirt inches at a time, the beams washed over us, heat wilting my hair as my shield parted it. Everywhere, constantly, raked by the lethal suppressing fire.

And those she did not inadvertently destroy, Moon precisely did. She shot beams with perhaps a tenth of the rate of her partner, but every one that Moon fired, at least two or three targets were hit. The beams were instantaneous and perfectly accurate if she could account for the few moments of charging time, and as I’d witnessed on our approach, and as the holes blown through squads behind impervious cover proved, she could definitely account for that.

We were only a dozen feet away now, the shimmering manifestation of Tem’s hate visible in the air above her like some kind of mirage, the motes of light so thick and choking that it was taking minutes for them to part for our passage of a few inches. But we were so close, once we were in the garage itself, it looked like we’d be in the clear.

“Tem!” I shouted at her, my voice disappearing into the seething, screaming air she burned away. “Tem!”

Moon mouthed something back at us, but whatever it was, I couldn’t hear over the constant boiling of air. And then I couldn’t see through the beam Tem suddenly unleashed on us.

“Why would she shoot us?” I yelled at AEGIS, her ear only inches away from my spot clinging to her back.

“I don’t know,” she shouted back, her voice like a whisper in the roaring, despite the fact I could feel how hard she was shouting with my hands on her. “She’s always been close to going ballistic though.”

“But I’ve always been able to calm her down before. She must see me now, why isn’t she now?”

AEGIS just shook her head and concentrated on dragging us forward by inches. Assuming Tem’s head was anything like mine, maybe it had to do with the still-persistent befuddlement. The harder I tried to think, the more my thoughts seemed to disassociate away from what I wanted to focus on, the same damn thing that was fucking with Saga and me earlier. Except it was way, way stronger up here. I honestly didn’t know how the two of them could keep up firing with their minds twisting along associative trains like mine kept attempting to.

Well, not Moon anyway. I was pretty sure Tem was just utterly mindless at this point, and it wrenched my heart to think of her, primal and hurt.

We crawled past a body, an XPCA in the remains of an exosuit. His entire front half was torn away, the suit cut open to expose the serrated flesh within. He looked like he’d died to thousands of tiny knives slicing open every inch of his skin at once, and I realized that walking into the hard-light cloud basically was that. You’d make it one, maybe two steps in, and then you’d have motes of it sticking through your organs, ensuring you bled out, while the greater mass of them shredded you from the outside, a wall of pain you only realized you crossed by having most of you scrubbed off by it. Even if you backed out, the motes weren’t knives that clung to the wound, they hung impossibly in the air, they cut coming out as well.

And then, if this guy was any judge, you just dropped where you stood and died. It looked a pretty horrible way to die, and I got to see every inch of his exposed skull and half-shorn organs as we slowly, slowly crept past.

I looked back and saw Saga waiting behind us, maybe aware of how fruitless walking into the cloud would be, hunched over and waiting with her head cradled pained in her arms. And then I noticed that…it wasn’t her clothes that were stained with blood anymore, it was her skin. Her clothes hung in tatters off her legs, shredded and useless, and she was naked.

I swallowed hard and looked back up at our progress. So maybe she hadn’t figured out not to walk into the cloud without trying it first. I was a bit glad I hadn’t seen her attempt that. I didn’t really enjoy watching her die, even if sometimes I felt she did, and seeing her ripped apart by photic sandpaper was even less appealing.

AEGIS surged forward another few inches, and then a few more, and finally began standing up to pull us over the wrecked wall of the garage. We were in, finally.

And I had exactly one moment of relief before I was forced to blink a lot as my addled brain tried to understand what it was seeing.

Moon was shouting something at me over the constant crackle of air and laser but whatever it was, my mind could not take in what I was…taking in. I knew on some level, this was some trick of Tem’s powers, some bending of light and vision which…might have explained a lot of I were more cognizant at the time. Instead it just made my head hurt more.

It was like the whole world outside this room was fisheyed. We could see everything, everywhere, in all directions. I could look up and see down. I could look down and see…inches away from the concrete floor, a pocket which was looking sideways and to our left. And if I looked sideways and to our left, I could peek over the lip of a house near us, at the pile of bodies who thought they were behind cover, though they were out of view of the garage, and who had died in a neat line with a laser blasted straight through the four of them.

It was mind-twisting in the goddamn neural field which was already mind-twisting, and it made me a little sick to look at too hard. I leaned heavier on AEGIS, but the shifting of my head even those few inches made my perspective shift, and everything I saw went whirling far past what a few inches of shifting should have done.

So I closed my eyes. That seemed like a good idea. In the dark behind them, once my head stopped spinning, I could see Tem and Moon…not at all where they appeared to be, of course, hunched over on the ground in the living room near Moon’s body.

AEGIS and I hobbled over there, where I sat opposite and in front of Tem, invisible, even as her illusory form in the garage screamed in rage and darkness and anger flowed off of her.

“Hi Tem,” I shouted at her over the lasers and gave her my most reassuring smile despite the…the everything. “We’re back. I’m sorry we left you.”

The world seemed to shift even more around us and the blackness of Tem’s manifestation grew. Bits of the sky blotched out with black tears, like in here, under Tem’s influence, the world itself might just rip apart.

I reached out and gingerly took her hand, and she inhaled sharply and pulled away. I saw the churning only an instant before it hit me, and pulled AEGIS close to me before the pillar of light erupted on top of us.

Sweat was dripping off my brow by the time the beam relented, and AEGIS took two steps away from me and her shoulder ports opened to vent a cloud of steam with a hiss.

I couldn’t get my thoughts straight, and maybe Tem couldn’t either, but all I wanted was to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to let her know that this was all my fault, that I hadn’t intended to abandon her, but she was injured, she was wheelchair-bound. She was never meant to have to face the XPCA or anyone without me.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I felt feathers brushing my mind and looked over at Saga, whose eyes were screwed shut and whose brow was knitted in pained focus, her arms held out towards Tem and myself like she was a priest throwing a blessing at us. Through her, I felt the edges of Tem’s mind.

And I felt everything within it. It wasn’t a mind like any other I’d ever felt. It was just…tumbling. Churning. Madness.

She was so angry. She was so hurt, and the world just chose to kept hurting her. All she wanted was to be nothing, be ignored, be put aside and forgotten, but instead, this. The whole world on her doorstep, the carnage of ten thousand bodies ground up and thrown at her face. Her desires were so simple and the world was so incompatible with them. People screaming and dying and trying to hurt her, so loudly that it was quieter just to erase them all, just to throw bleach at the world and wipe it white and empty.

And a hole where I was supposed to be at its center, I realized. Everything she did, every bit of pain she tried to block out was just…twisted with this undertone of why? Because it was pointless. She was pointless. Her pain and the deaths of everyone here and blocking out the world and the noise and the hurt, it was all pointless. She didn’t know what she was doing or why, she was just an animal lashing out because it hurt. She relied on something, someone, to tell her what to do and to believe in, and to know it was all for something.

And that was me. And I’d just left her here alone, when the worst thing ever in her life happened to her.

“Tem, I am here!” I shouted in her face. “I came back for you! I’d never abandon you.”

Her mind seethed with hatred as the hole in the center of her world pulsed, and again, my world turned white as she unloaded it on me. I held AEGIS tight in my arms.

“I am here!” I shouted, more in her mind than out of it now. “Tem, I am here, and you are safe now. We’re together again, as we always should have been.“

The laser on me intensified. It widened and, if possible, whitened. I realized, if it grew any further, it would engulf Tem’s own body, and that she hardly cared. I crawled forward, keeping AEGIS close, every movement putting my skin in contact with more of the superheated air, my hands sizzling painlessly on the scorched ground, my nose burning and sweat dripping now as I moved to cover her body in my shield as well.

She flinched at my touch and screamed a little bit, flailing her small fists to hit me without much effect. Even through the white of the laser, I saw darkness now, shadows of it blocking out the whole world.

“Tem,” I whispered, swallowing hard and dripping sweat on her in my hands. “Tem, please calm down. Please come back. You don’t have to be hurt and angry anymore.”

“She can’t hear you. She won’t, rather,” Moon said. “It’s easier for her to pretend you’re dead than for her to face the world anymore.”

“But I’m not dead,” I said, not sure where to turn to look at Moon. All I could see was white and heat, and my sense was as burned-out as my eyes. “I’m here, I’m back.”

“But you weren’t here when she gave up. When she did all of this,” she made some kind of gesture. “When she thought, it would be easier if she were dead, if everyone were dead, than to have to think, or feel, or be.”

“But I’m here,” I shouted, shaking her body. One small arm launched out and socked me in the jaw with surprising force. I didn’t know what the fuck else to say. My mind just ground into nothingness, and the one fucking point I had seemed to go nowhere in her head. “I’m here! I’m here! I am fucking here, goddamn it.”

She writhed in my arms and turned up the heat another notch. The whole house had to be on fire now, and it sure felt like we were. I could swear I felt the trickle of sweat running off my nose sizzle when it hit my legs.

“Tem listen to me,” I shouted at her in my mind. “It’s me, Athan. You don’t have to be hurt and alone. I am here for you. I will hold you and protect you and–” she lashed out again and her knee collided with the bloody bandages on my absent leg. AEGIS winced bodily, and the bandages bloomed with blood again, seeping through the sweat-drenched wrappings, but I didn’t feel a thing. “–and stop hitting me. Jesus Christ, Tem, just calm down.”

Telling someone who was having a panic attack-slash-existential crisis to just calm down, as it turned out, not so useful. The air I was choking on was now blisteringly hot, and my head was feeling light.

“You have to stop her somehow, you’re going to die at this rate,” AEGIS said.

“You have to make her see it’s you,” Moon said. “You have to dig deep, you have to make her face it in a way she can’t reject.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?” I shouted back.

“I don’t know. I’m trapped in a neural disruptor and strapped to the mind of an insane womanchild while single-handedly battling off the XPCA. Are you asking me to do more?”

“No,” I realized. “Uh, you’re doing fine, Moon.”

“Thank you. But please act with expedience, my body is unshielded and nearby. It will not survive if you do not turn that laser off.”

I shook the girl in my arms. Even blind, I could tell how light she was, how small and frail and delicate. Her life had just been one shitshow after another, and this was the shit cherry on top. I tried to see things from her view, which was both easier and harder for being halfway in her mind, and I discovered that despite her words, Moon was doing what she could to facilitate my access by carving through Tem’s thoughts with me.

I had to make her see it was me. At the thought, Tem’s mind boiled with obsession. A hundred million memories bubbled to the surface, stolen glances, guilty looks, dark pleasures. Like a surveillance camera, Tem was always there, always innocuous, but always watching. And as it turned out, most of what she watched was me.

I saw myself at every possible time from every possible angle, though most were from the floor, somewhere awkward and out of the way. I saw myself eating, chatting, fighting, dressing, sleeping, shaving, cooking, arguing, waiting, thinking. I saw myself in every outfit I owned, a hundred times. I saw myself as a fighter, as a leader, as a rebel, as a martyr, as a thinker. I saw every kind thing I ever did for Tem, every time I’d sheltered her or made an effort to make sure she was recognized, even if it hurt her, even if she didn’t want to be acknowledged, she loved me for doing it.

It was…all at once…overwhelming and flattering and terrifying. It was like a deep dive into the mind of a dog, seeing what it thought of its owner. Love in all things. Perfection in all flaws. It made me sick.

But maybe that was the key. I took another burning lungful and held her ear close to my lips. “Tem, wake up, it’s me. I love you,” I whispered. “Please come back to me.”

A hand lashed out again amidst her flailing and I barely moved my head in time to have it glance off my cheek. Her mind seethed as her existential loathing crawled between the cracks of everything she saw and did and was. It was as though her mind heard me and laughed bitterly. Love? It asked. What is love?

I felt my own head growing lighter and my vision…my burned-out, useless, close-eyed vision was flickering in and out. I felt an irresistible temptation to just fall over as my body began to fail. Lie down. Rest. Breathe. Die, probably.

I used the neural dampener to my advantage and brought Tem’s thoughts in to replace my own, and with my brain all jacked up, I didn’t have the leftover capacity to indulge weakness.

Love wasn’t what Tem and I shared, and she’d reacted violently towards my efforts to give it to her — as I realized stupidly, she always had. She’d never wanted or liked it when I complimented her, that wasn’t a thing she was in a good enough place to accept…ever. And her worldview was so fucked that every comment like that was an attack. Love was, in her mind, just pain. Effort wasted on her that she didn’t know how to accept, and couldn’t.

Because in her whole time on this Earth, who had ever given it to her? How would she have ever learned to accept another’s love? The violence at home? The beatings at school? The slavery under Blackett?

In that context, I almost understood why she worshipped me for tolerating and ignoring her. It was the best anyone had ever treated her, and better than she thought she deserved. It was disgusting, and not for the first time, I resolved that Tem really, really, really needed some professional therapy. Just as soon as one of those opened for Exhumans.

But I couldn’t break through to her by ignoring and tolerating her. I needed her to open her eyes now. I needed her to fight back the dark impulses she’d drowned herself in, to realize, I was fucking right here, ready to…to tolerate and ignore her…to her heart’s content. She didn’t need to burn the world down right now.

I flinched as she hit me in the nose and frowned at her. Why did she always have to make everything so fucking difficult? Why did she have to be such an enormous pain in my ass constantly?

My mind shifted gears again without me. I really did hate her. She was selfless and stupid and bull-headed and self-sacrificing in ways I could only ever dream of being. She didn’t even know what an ego was, and if she did, she’d probably apologize for it. And now here she was, keeping me from Lia and Moon, because she was too busy drowning in her own misery.

I wasn’t sure if that’s what I really thought. Or, not enough to ever act on. It was all true, certainly. But honestly, a fair part of that was just reliving her waves of anger and her highlight reel of my fucking life. I hoped. Shit I really didn’t need right now. I shook her again, harder, willing her to come to with every piece of my mind that was in hers.

And then I realized what I was doing wrong, how to tell Tem I loved her in her own language, to tell her I was me, and I was here, and I was in charge, and everything was going to be fine.

I hesitated.

“Fucking do it,” Moon said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, not moving.

“We’re going to die. You’re already at the cusp of heatstroke. Just do it. She’ll forgive you.”

“Athan, whatever you’re doing, you need to do it,” AEGIS added, her voice as soothing as she could manage through the robotic synthesizer that indicated widespread malfunction. “We don’t have much time left.”

“And the XPCA are coming. She stopped shooting them to shoot you,” Moon added.

“I fucking know, okay?” I sniped back. “Just give me a second.”

[Athan, I’m gonna help. Just close your eyes. Mentally.]

I shook my head. I kept my mental eyes wide open, kept my head inside Tem and made myself feel everything, as I drew back and punched her right in the face.

Her mind erupted with fire. Instantly, the desperation, the anger receded. Panic and confusion set in. Too familiar. Oh no. What did I do wrong now?

I hit her again. And again, feeling through her as her cheekbone cracked, the first pain I felt since the drugs. Her mind washed white from the pain, cleansing and terrifying. Fear gripped her, taking its rightful place over her heart. I’m getting hit. I must have messed up again.

Tears mingled with the sweat running off my face as I threw her down and put one more haymaker to snap her head sideways. As I did, the laser around us vanished, and her consciousness tumbled in her emptying mind. Oh, it’s Athan.

I held her and cried as she came to, feeling tendrils of anxiety and panic flaring up inside her as she realized where she was and who was holding her and what they were doing, before Saga let the connection drop. Her body went rigid in my arms, paralyzed at the thought of what she might have done to reduce me to this.

“It’s okay,” I whispered in her ear. “I’m here now. It’s all okay.”

She nodded and whimpered back, blood dripping down her nose across my cheek.

“If you s-s-say s-so, I believe you,” she said.

“I’m sorry I left you. This never should have happened to you.”

She said nothing, just shook her head mutely against my body, tensed like she couldn’t wait to escape. I let her go and gave her one final moment, just between us, unsure if she was visible or not through my still-blind eyes.

And then I couldn’t wait any longer. As much as I wanted to be here for Tem and offer her all of me I could, most of me wasn’t mine to give. It really lived for others.

“Tem,” I asked her, “Were you fighting this whole time? Do you remember how this started? Where are the others?”

I looked around and then stopped beating around the bush and asked the question I really wanted to hear.

“Tem, where’s Lia?”