I'd never really considered how frustrating my friends could be. Sure, I had moments of dealing with their quirks, we had disagreements, sometimes even violently so. But by and large, I was lucky that, for whatever reason, they listened to me, respected my opinion, even followed me to a degree.

And I was now learning just how much of that was them being followers and how much of it was personal loyalty and trust in me. And the answer was: Zero. Zero percent followers, these people. Absolutely obstinate. Impossible to deal with.

Because to them, I looked like someone utterly not myself. No matter how I tried to mime or cajole them out of whatever scenarios they were in, not a one of them seemed even slightly willing to give me a try. Maybe it was because their version of me was running his mouth, making excuses and apologies as he pantomimed around, bowing and tugging their hands. Maybe they were all just naturally distrustful of strangers. Or maybe, the worlds they were in were captivating and dangerous enough that they couldn't stand to be distracted by whoever this nimrod was.

Whatever their reasons, I got my ass kicked more than followed, and so Saga and I sat, fuming and exhausted, still just the two of us, watching the person who was Karu as she manned the wall, pivoting on the spot as she surveyed for something which didn't exist in our realities.

> Can you touch Karu's mind?

I wrote on the tablet, for Saga to see. I closed my eyes to see her response and found her nodding, and then a too-casual shrug, which...damn, I kinda wished I didn't know Saga as well as I did, but to me, there was no mistaking the gesture as questioning why anyone would ever want to.

> Just do it, please. See through her eyes, and let me see what you do.

Again, Saga gave an exaggerated shrug, and then a few deep breaths. Linking together minds was tricky business -- she and I were mostly the exception, given how close and open we were, and I doubted that the same with Karu would be painless or easy.

Especially this threesome. Perhaps I should have considered another few moments how impractical my request might be before making it, but Saga seemed up to the challenge, as my vision through her blurred and wavered as her own thoughts bled out into another's.

And then, more painless, more seamless than I thought possible, I saw what Karu was looking for. In her reality, Oasis was under siege, XPCA vehicles surrounding the city, tanks and VTOLs both, arranged in distant lines while soldiers like fleas nestled in the distant battlements.

She stood watch on the wall, seeing many more people around her than there actually were, each moving with urgency on their pretend tasks. If only she'd reach out towards them, her hand would pass right through. But it was no wonder she didn't give me the time of day when there were already so many people around who were inconsequential to her.

I wondered how long she'd been fighting in this reality, and with whom, and what it'd cost her. The city looked pretty intact, but so did the offensive line. Perhaps it was more of a standoff? It was hard to tell for certain, and my view through Saga was even hazier and more insubstantial than hers alone, like we were playing some new mental form of telephone.

As I watched, some kind of Oasian approached and spoke to Karu, asking her opinion on something, I thought. Karu turned and stood impressively, crossing her arms, not wearing her armor or visor but still cutting an intimidating form as she replied.

And I understood. As Saga had told me when we'd found Tem and...she advised me not to try to interfere. This was a situation that would keep and captivate Karu's mind forever. It was a reality built for her, to contain her, based on her own mind. Here was war, something Karu understood, and she was being consulted constantly for her expert opinion on it. She wasn't even in her armor, wasn't out there on the first wall like the rest of the humans...heck, in her reality, maybe humans were integrated throughout the defence instead of held at the front.

Or maybe, it was Karu's own insight which had integrated them. Impossible to say. But the point was, if there were two things Karu couldn't resist, it was sharing her experience and a good fight, and here she had both.

Just as Tem was in a peaceful setting, spending all her days with me. Just as I'd just been given a sympathetic damsel and a city to protect. Saga's reality was a city of real shitty people she could demolish without consequence, and Lia was basically just the 'net, with all her friends constantly online. In the end, each of us was a simple person in some ways. But mostly Tem.

But though I'd seen it a number of times now, I was still irritated by the intelligence behind all of this. It wasn't some mere passive trap we'd walked into, it was actively constructed, it was being woven shut around us at all times, by some malign intellect which was beyond understanding. It was smart, and it was choosing to use those smarts to snare us rather than whatever other good could come from its enormous power.

And that honestly pretty much just pissed me off.

Still, seeing it didn't help get anyone free. All I'd learned about the girls' cages was that they were resilient. And unlike me, none of them seemed to have much interest in Saga knocking on their minds...and why would they? In their worlds, Saga still existed, and there was no reason to suspect that any abnormal code-X activity would be anything other than her screwing around. None of them had the rapport with her that I did, to know how to read some very oblique hints.

I spent another few minutes in Karu's vision as she worked her way down a few lists. Carved stone tablets, I realized. I guess they were cheaper and easier than paper out here. It looked like some kind of manifest for food production, if I was making it out clearly.

It was busy work she could keep up for days. Far longer than it would take to turn us all into toads. It was so frustrating and I felt so powerless that she was literally right in front of me, and I couldn't even see her...not as herself anyway, just some proud-looking Oasis native, intent on staring at the horizon a bunch.

I fell back into myself, into my own reality, feeling the bruises on my arm from when I'd tried to move Karu by force. They gave me an idea, that maybe, if I could do as Saga did and prove it was me somehow…

I sucker punched her, and she jumped into a fighting stance before she even winced, arms moving up on their own in a gesture too familiar. She came at me immediately, and I slipped her first two punches, left and right, before snapping back with a shot to the gut that she stepped back while taking to soften it.

That made her take me more seriously, and her next advance was slower. It was hard, because the girl I was fighting...the not-Karu...she wasn't acting at all like I knew Karu would be. Her eyes were everywhere instead of laser focused, she was babbling, yelling incoherently at me instead of keeping her breathing controlled.

Karu lunged and I took half a step back and sideways by reflex, but it was a feint. Her leg came out and caught the foot I'd left behind in my retreat, sending me stumbling backwards under my own momentum. She wasted no time in stepping in, her other foot shooting straight towards my off-balance jaw.

I got away with it clipping my elbow, which still hurt like fuck, her boots cutting a new gash up my forearm. This wasn't going well, and I wasn't doing a great job of selling myself as myself very convincingly. I thought back to the numerous times we'd sparred, for anything distinctive in her style or mine which would speak to her.

But the damn fact was, no matter what I tried, she was having none of it. She seemed completely uninterested in whether I moved like Athan or not. She was a soldier in a battlefield, and her job was to destroy her enemy, not to waste time admiring his moves.

While that sounds like a simple lesson, it took me several more smacks around before I got it, and from there, I felt I had little choice but to just book it. Knowing that in her head, she'd just see me using some Exhuman powers or an exosuit or some shit, I kicked off my exoframe at near full strength and shot myself back and away, creating the distance I needed to disappear from her sight.

I checked as I ran, and saw her choosing not to pursue. Already, in her vision, soldiers had swarmed to take chase after the assailant, and she saw little reason to do anything but breathe deeply and resume focus on her job.

Which was depressing and bitter. I wound up only a block away before coming back, and when I did, she didn't recognize me. Exactly where we'd fucking started, with nothing to show but a few more cuts and bruises.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Maybe I was closer with Lia, maybe there was some way of convincing her? Or maybe Tem? Despite the danger in pulling her away from 'me', surely she could tell if it was the actual me doing it?

Right?

...right?

I sat down, staring at not-Karu's back and feeling frustration like I'd rarely before.

No, not right. That was a stupid, garbage plan and I knew it. Whatever I offered them, it was a glimmer of something, going up against their entire reality. Even when I'd seen Saga unmistakably splayed out under her tree, it hadn't worked on me until I also felt her influence in my head. I just didn't have anything like that to leverage against anyone else.

But at the same time, nobody else was intimate enough with Saga to get that shit but me! So we had one fucking tool in our box, and it didn't work on anyone else. It was beginning to feel like the only good that would come of Saga setting my mind free would be that instead of a little paradise, I'd spend the rest of my eternity in Oasis knowing I was in hell. Knowing I failed, not just myself, but everyone. My own sister, trapped in here with me, and I was too fucking powerless to do a goddamn thing.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to do anything. I wanted to just whip out my powers and start hacking people apart, just to say fuck you to whoever had spent so much fucking time wrapping them all up pretty in their web.

But that was suicide, I knew. The thing responsible may not give a solitary shit if I wandered around raising trouble...or even apparently if I realized it was all fake and tried to break free. But I knew if I attacked the city itself, I could expect a quick death from the whole caste of Exhumans enslaved to defend it.

So that was plan B. If the whole everything didn't work out, I'd just go mental and get myself killed. Better than living here a mindfucked slave forever.

Which still left me frustrated and powerless to form a plan A. Which felt so unfair. I'd found the chinks in the armor, I'd seen how different the realities were, I'd tried to throw those details in the face of the illusion, to twist and break it.

Because I knew if there was one thing that shattered imaginary realities, it was having sudden truths thrown in their face. A truth that didn't agree with one's view of the world could either be accepted, or ignored.

And the goddamn fucking problem was that this whole fucking illusion seemed content to just ignore, ignore, ignore. I'd placed myself physically inside the imaginary people Karu saw around her, and in her mind, we'd just bumped into each other. I'd lay on the table that existed in some realities and not others and fallen through it, and nobody batted an eye.

Saga had taken extreme measures and had basically deepthroated me with her tongue right in front of Lia, and she'd just blushed and turned away. It was awkward as all hell, and still.

Still here we were. Here we all were.

Trapped.

Alone together.

Inside realities based on our own heads.

I thought back to my own reality, at how it'd been done up so I'd be content. But then, even when I wasn't, it didn't care. It'd let me have free run of the city, let me muck with the others however I wanted. As the hours had slipped by, I felt less like the thing was offering me a challenge, and more that it just legit didn't care what I did or didn't do. That's how confident it was in its illusion -- even knowing I was trapped inside, It was certain I could do exactly fucking zero about it.

And fuck, if I wasn't starting to believe it was right.

How the hell could one break out of a cage designed explicitly for them? How was I supposed to widen the cracks that it seemed people were content to ignore? Was there even a way?

I'd just assumed there would be but the grim reality was that...many times there just wasn't. A rat in a cage, or a bear in a trap, or a hiker pinned under rocks...we would always like to imagine if it were us, we'd have some clever way out, but more often than not, in those kinds of scenarios...they just remained trapped.

Until they died.

I closed my eyes but all that did was bring me back to Saga's world. She was sitting, slumped, with the same abject defeat as I saw on myself, even through the veil of being someone else. My view had gotten fuzzier in this short time already, as whatever toading effect continued to set in.

And all I could do was sit and think. And see myself, stuck in someone else's skin. A perfect cage, designed just for me.

See myself and the rest of Saga's world. She'd done a number on it to vent, while I was trying to solve problems. I didn't know how she set quite so much fire when the city was all stone, and then I had the horrifying realization that people were actually kind of flammable.

Fuck, I thought. Why couldn't I have wound up in that world instead of the one with Rio being all lovey-dovey at me? I'd have seen through the nonsense unreality of that in a second.

And then I blinked at her. Slowly. With each closing of my eyes, our worlds swapped in front of them.

And I had the idea we needed.

Saga jolted as I dove headfirst into her mind, stammering out words I couldn't make out, her arms flailing at the sudden transgression. Walls went up reflexively inside her, places even I shouldn't go, places nobody should go, places so dark or desperate that Saga would rather die than open them up.

The walls tensed as I screamed at her to relax and let me in, to let us become one. It was sudden, it was beyond anything we'd done before -- beyond anything she'd done before, even. But I knew, this was the only way. This connection we had was fuzzy and faulty and it was impossible to be her, while looking through what felt like a dirty holo screen.

She took several deep breaths and with each one, lowered her guard, inch by inch. She let me slide into her, quivering at my touch in places long guarded and seldom felt. I did my best to be gentle, but I was a rank amateur, moving too fast and too slow at once, stumbling and fumbling with my mind over things she rather I not touch, and every time I did, she tensed up painfully, almost crushing me inside her.

It was...a lot like physical intimacy, if you couldn't tell, but at the same time, so very different. Instead of accidental bumps or prods, even a stray thought could kill the mood here. She had to accept me fully, open completely, with love and trust, in a situation where our communication was clumsy at best. And in turn, I had to come further and further inside her, until we were fully overlapped, until we were absolutely one, until we were confused who was who and whose were whose.

As I went further inside, I began to feel things I hadn't ever before. How shallow her breathing felt. How awkward it felt to swallow, without a stomach to empty into. How her hair hung just at the top of her vision, swaying with her every movement. How cold it was inside her, even in this weather, her hands were like leaden ice.

I saw it, felt it. And when I gasped at the sensations rushing in, was it, as she gasped with me.

"I'm…" I said, stopping, startled at how small and weak my voice was, even inside my head. "Is this…"

I moved her hands in front of her face, her spindly fingers barely thicker than the bones in them. Pointed fingertips touched each other, and I drank in the unfamiliar sensation of how it was Saga felt the world.

"I'm you," I said. And we nodded. But I was also still me, and still in myself, though I couldn't perceive any of it while inside her.

We didn't need to talk. Our minds were connected on such a level that talking was a barbarically trite way of communication. Instead, our thoughts swam and slipped over each other, like two schools of fish drawn tight and circling in a shimmering tornado, impossible to tell which were whose or from which mind they came.

Which made it very difficult to understand my thinking or reasoning or comprehension of anything, while it lasted. To me, it felt like a violation, that Saga could and would essentially give up the reins of her own thoughts and body to me, with a trust so complete that came only from a complete understanding of a person, to even ask that of her...seemed wrong to me.

But I'd also done lots of wrong recently in the interest of keeping everyone alive, and I couldn't stop now. As much as I hated it, I knew we'd be doing much worse very soon. I'd have to live with that, and hope that everyone could forgive me.

But even if they didn't, at least they'd be alive. I hoped.

I didn't need to explain myself to Saga. She knew everything that I did, and though we both felt empty for it, I began to slowly slide out of her and back into myself. I was suddenly aware of how sturdy I really was, how tight the exoframe clamped on my legs, how large my lungs felt.

And a million other things. But I didn't have time to marvel. I stayed halfway in Saga's mind and helped her as she reached out towards the minds of the others. If we couldn't get them to physically cooperate between realities, we could bring them together mentally. Saga reached for Lia while I touched Karu.

And neither of them had our understanding. Neither of them were completely open and trusting, neither were a warm, welcoming invitation. Saga and I were crying inside, but had to remain rigid, brutal, as we bore down on the minds of those we loved, forcing ourselves in despite their pain.

Lia, at least, had it a little easier. Once Saga was partway in, she could leverage the compel to force the girl to relax and make the rest of the process just a painless violation. Karu fought me tooth and nail until the bitter end.

But the simple fact was, they were two ordinary minds facing down the full, unleashed might of a code-X. They never stood a chance, no matter how they fought or resisted or how much it hurt them. They were doomed from the moment that Saga and I came up with this twisted, evil plan, the cruelty in it, hers, and the necessity of action, mine. They could do nothing but struggle as slowly, they felt themselves becoming not themselves, as something filled them up, unstoppable, unrelenting.

Wordlessly, in perfect synch, Saga and I switched our targets and let them go. The cracks would be broken. The realities would break. The girls would survive.