Doubt is a creeping disease. It infects the mind and from there spreads to the rest of the body. The spirit, by which resolution and foresight, by which hope and will are maintained, is the ultimate victim of doubt.

I waited in the dark. In my isolated room, the noises were few and far between: the occasional clang, more interestingly, the occasional scream. I was not the only one down here. But the door was stout and muffled most sound. The walls were concrete, and though I put my ear up against them, they translated no sound except the drip, drip, drip that seemed constant.

The dripping became my companion. I would put my ear to the wall in order to hear something that was not my own maddening thoughts clawing at me with doubt. The first few hours I spent in the dark, I thought to myself; this is fine. The night that I lay in my bed, time reset. I had pictured it being some sort of Groundhog Day, midnight or 6 a.m. reset that would kick me back to the beginning of the day, and that would be my salvation. Next go again, I would have to make sure that I was not captured at school. Next time, I would be able to make sure Mrs. Billings didn't get shot.

But time crept forward. Aside from laying my head against the wall and listening to the drip, I had no way to measure it. I very foolishly spent the first interminable amount of time waiting. It was waiting that allowed doubt to begin to grow. Doubt takes root in boredom—I know that now. I know that in the future. My thoughts and my future self's thoughts had been blending, and I found less and less I could tell them apart.

I managed to get my hands around in the front of me. Much more comfortably positioned, I made a more thorough exploration of my cell. The walls were smooth and featureless except for one. It was damp and featureless. Water seeped out of it, making a slight puddle on the floor before it ran along the base of the wall, reaching some central point of a slope. It then began its slow trudge towards the center of the room, where there was a drain set. By the time it got there, the seepage from the wall was a mere trickle, little enough that it only caused the drain to murmur and burble.

The door was beyond infuriating. There was no handle on my side. No blank plate covering the handle having been screwed down. No hinges. No gap underneath allowing the passage of light. In that long wait in the dark, I found that my vision continued to adjust to the darkness.

Dark vision is a gradual thing, creeping up on you. But typically, after several minutes of exposure to pure darkness, your eyes have adjusted as much as they're going to. I found that mine continued to adjust, hour after hour, growing just the tiniest bit more in tune with the darkness, so that by the time the doubt had hold of me, strangling my ability to think and plan, leaving me sure that my day was not going to reset, something was different.

I could now make out indistinct shapes in the gloom. They were like phantoms. As soon as I looked at them, they would dance away from my vision. But if I left my gaze fixed on no point at all, they would slowly build themselves, presenting their form from the dark. Then, keeping my eyes forward, unblinking, I found I could walk and test their reality. Though their movement was macabre and otherworldly, they would step forward towards me, not like a normal vision would, but like an after-image.

It was a bizarre ability, and I sat still and mapped my cell from every angle, discovering there was conduiting high on the ceiling out of my reach. The wall that was seeping had some pitting high overhead where it looked like the water had begun to erode the concrete. The metal pan they had left me was, in fact, empty.

I held it up and waited for the slow focus to occur as the pan came into view. After a moment, it worked. I caught sight of Zombie Kaye. This was the first reflective surface I'd been able to look in long enough to get any sort of glimpse of Not-me.

"What the fuck?" Not-me exclaimed. Not-me appeared to be looking around, taking in his surroundings.

"You have either got to be the luckiest or the unluckiest SOB I've ever met. Somehow, gods know how it worked, you have managed to end up exactly where you need to be."

"I have?" I said.

"With the exception that you're captured, yes.”

“How is this where I need to be?" I attempted to gesture around the room, but I shifted the pan of my vision and lost my acquired dark sight. Sighing, I repositioned it and waited for the image to reappear.

"There you are," Not-me said.

"What's this like from your end?" I asked.

"What?

“When aren't you talking to me. You know, just now, when I couldn't see you. I presume you stopped talking at that point."

"Well," Not-me said, "I seem to be in a grayed-out version of wherever you are. The same with wherever you catch a reflection of me. I can tell you can see me because you stop being grayed out and you become living color."

"Huh," I said, processing that statement for a moment. "So you can explore your side of this..." I fumbled for words, "place that we're in," I said.

Not-me nodded. "To some degree, I can. I can get about ten to twenty feet from wherever you last saw me, with the exception that I can't open doors."

I sighed. "Rats," I said. "I was hoping you could see what was on the other side of this door here."

"Why don't you look for yourself, genius?"

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I glared at Not-me. "Look for myself. I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm a little cut off from my powers." I tried to raise my manacles, but again, the movement caused my slow build dark sight to vanish and I lost sight of Not-me. I waited for the pan to come back into view.

Not-me huffed out a sigh and shook his head. "You are only cut off from your vampiric powers."

I thought about that. "So what does that leave me?"

"What does that leave you? You really are thick sometimes. That leaves you your natural human powers of logic, intuition, cunning, and scientific understanding. That leaves you with your slowly developing psychic abilities—If you could ever unbox your emotions and use them for a change—that leaves you with the tools that you have at hand. Your memories, your experience, and the fact that they did a piss-poor job of frisking you."

I felt my pockets. Sure enough, I still had the pen. I pulled it out. "What good is this going to do?"

"You could change the world with a pen, kid," Not-me said.

"I'm in no mood for jokes."

"Serious. I'm serious," Not-me said. "Let me see if this works. Oh, by the way," he said, "this might hurt."

"What?" I had just enough time to ask before Not-me held a hand out towards me from the reflection.

He was right. It hurt. It felt like an ice pick had been stuck between my eyes. I dropped the pan and yelled, falling to the floor, trying to fumble around in the dark, feeling for what was stabbing me in the face.

I expected to find the pen stuck point first somehow between my eyes, for my hand to come away bloody. But the pen was still in my other hand, and there was no sharp implement jammed into my forehead. I rubbed at the spot and creased my brow, and then the memories hit me.

***

A man in a sweater vest stood at a whiteboard, scribbling on it with a dry erase marker. He stopped writing, seemingly conscious of my attention, and turned towards where I sat at the table.

"Timothy," he said, "I'm not going to continue to lecture you if you're not working." He gestured to the table in front of me, upon which were set a variety of implements and various locks in states of disassembly. "You have to be able to use these tools without thought," the man said. "So I want you to continue practicing the repetitions while you follow my lecture, understand?"

I nodded, busying my hands again with the dual-stage tumbler lock that I was learning to navigate.

"If you want to be able to open a lock in a high-pressure situation, you have to be able to do it while your mind is on something else." I let my fingers continue the methodical work while I tried to pay attention to what it was he was lecturing me about on the whiteboard.

The man had short cropped hair, gone completely gray and a face full of hard lines. He wore spectacles and a sweater vest over a button-down shirt and pressed khaki pants. He stopped writing and looked at me.

"You know," he said. I remembered now his name was Charles. "I thought technology was going to outpace this skill set. It took me decades to acquire these skills, and then technology passed me by. Tumbler locks were a thing of third world countries and the past. Now…” he gestured. I knew what he meant; after the collapse, everything had reverted to how it had been decades ago. Half a century-old technology resurfaced as the most valuable and innovative tools on the market. Nothing computerized worked anymore; everything was mechanical.

And everything mechanical had a method; that was why technology had passed it by. As he resumed the lecture, I flashed forward to another day, my hands busy working on the various car locks that now existed. There were fifty-seven common models in rotation with two-hundred and three variants possible. Every variant was an adaptation of the core fifty-seven. Learning to work with the fifty-seven was key to being able to adapt and overcome any of the variants.

My mind flashed forward to another memory. Charles had his back turned to me, writing. I thought I could cheat. I used telekinesis and felt around inside the lock with my tongue for the tumblers, finding the pressure points and quickly releasing it. With a click, I set the lock aside. But Charles stopped and turned.

"You cheated," he said. He didn't sound upset, almost amused.

I smirked at him. "Well, of course, I cheated. Why wouldn't I use the tools that I have?"

He shook his head. "And what if you don't have those tools?"

My smirk grew wider. "Well, it’s the tool that I always carry with me, isn't it?" I stuck my tongue out at him.

He shook his head. "You can't always count on magic powers to save your butt. Your fingers need to know what to do. Pick it up, relock it, and start over. No cheating." He turned back to the board.

Sighing, I reset the lock and began again.

Flash forward.

I was three pins in on a seven-pin lock. It was something I could normally open in seconds, but not in the middle of a live-fire simulation. Men were shouting and shooting pop-up targets. The staccato report of gunfire had adrenaline thundering in my ears, and I couldn’t lay hold of the square breathing technique that I was familiar with. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t control the shaking. I wanted to rip the tools out and kick the door open and yell obscenities at this development. Four tumblers in, only three to go, only three to go, only three to go, only three to go.

This thought spun and spun in my head until I dropped my tension rod, clattering uselessly to the floor. I snatched at it, and the pick that I was holding bent with the unexpected force.

Someone called a halt to the simulation and came thundering over to dress me down.

"What the fuck is wrong with you, Tim?" the man shouted. I stood and faced him.

"Nerves," I said.

"Your nerves just got you killed." He poked me in the chest hard enough that I had to take a step back. "We're going to reset and try again. Boys," he shouted. "Everyone back to starting. Tim fucked up. You've got to begin again. You're all dead. We're going to continue to repeat this until Tim gets it right, aren't we?"

My face burning, I removed the pick and attempted to bend it back into order and retrieved the tensioner that I dropped, walking back to the starting point. This was shaping up to be a long day. I got my breathing under control. The man shouted, "Simulation begins in three, two, one…"

Flash forward.

I was bleeding heavily from a shoulder wound. I took a stray round when we were ambushed en route to a pickup. We had to take cover, and in the end, I got separated from the group.

I stood in front of an old Toyota pickup. I leaned heavily on the door panel for a minute before fumbling out my tools. My right hand was throbbing, strangely sluggish in its responses, but I still had feeling in my fingers. I knew this lock. I set to work.

In moments, I had the door open, and I set to work bypassing the ignition. Hopefully, the junker would start. I needed to get this truck moving to get it back to the team. We lost our vehicle, and we needed something to exfil with. A truck with an open bed was an ideal candidate. My fingers found the wiring bundle, and I yanked them down, popping off the steering column panel and throwing it in the passenger footwell. Finding the correct wire set, I used my tensioner rod to apply pressure to the button inside of the ignition, and then touched the wires together. The truck turned over for an agonizing eleven turns and then coughed to life. God bless Toyotas, I thought, hopping in and throwing the car into drive.

Flash forward.

I'd snuck in under the cover of darkness and found where they were keeping the prisoners. It looked like they had ransacked an old police armory. Everybody was handcuffed with standard-issue police cuffs that looked like they were manufactured sometime between the '60s and the '80s. I knew this model. Holding my fingers to my lips as I woke the first man, I set to work on his cuffs, quickly finding the spring release mechanism and freeing him.

The flashes of memory continued in rapid-fire succession, one after the other, until I was lost, swimming in Not-me's memories for what seemed like years.

***

Eventually, I was left gasping and sweating in a heap on the floor. I lay breathing for a good fifteen minutes before I found the energy to fumble around for the pan and angle it up so that I could catch a glimpse of the reflection once my dark vision set.

When the image coalesced, I saw Not-me, his head in his hands. "Oh, shit," he said. "Well, that was a colossally bad idea." He rubbed his head. "I think I just took ten years off my lifespan." He peeked from between his fingers at me. "You alright, kid?"

I wheezed out an affirmative.

"Well, let's never do that again, huh?" he said.

I nodded in agreement, trying to catch my breath.

I felt like I had just run a marathon. Every muscle in my body ached. I felt a fatigue so deep-set I couldn’t recall ever having felt anything like it. "I think," I said, my voice dry and raspy, "that we can agree never doing that again is a good idea."

The handcuffs that I was bound with now looked classically familiar to my addled mind. I knew exactly how to defeat this particular model in six different ways, using a variety of tools. I attempted to push myself to a sitting position, but I needed another moment to rest.

"As soon as I'm able to get up," I said, "I'm going to unlock these cuffs. I just need a minute. You care to explain how this is where we need to be?"

“Sure kid,” Not-me rubbed his head, groaning, “but I need a minute too.”

I laid my head down on the floor, appreciating the coolness of the concrete for the first time. God bless concrete for being cold.

***