Scene 1 - November 1st

Interior Guest Room, Late Morning

Quinn Kaufman

I didn’t sleep much - or if I did, it wasn’t very restful. I didn’t toss and turn, just lay and space out. My mind was lost in a sea of fog, a wall of grief blotting me out from feeling... anything.

Ironic that my thoughts are becoming so poetic now, after my father died.

Eventually, I stopped staring at the wall and rose. It was at that point that I realized I wasn’t sure where I was.

Most of the previous night was a blur - I could only remember bits and pieces. I thought I remembered Devon saying something about calling Holly? She couldn’t have taken me home, since she had never been to my house, but I did remember the revelation that she lived in a mansion. Maybe there was a spare room - that she had stashed me? I wondered what her parents thought of...

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

I came back to myself after what I hoped was only a few moments. It seemed unlikely, I decided, that I was in Holly’s mansion. The room was rather bare and spartan, and I doubted that people as rich as that were particularly minimalist. So where was I, then?

My ESP might not be have been able to see through walls like Hypnos’ sensory projection could, but I could still get quite a bit of information if I tried. I took a deep breath, bracing myself for the slight headache that had come along with this when I had done it in the past, and shifted the ESP to plug into my hearing rather than my proprioception.

Instantly, I could hear everything - everything that caused even the slightest vibration of anything in the small room I had woken in. It wasn’t as great a magnification to my senses as I had experienced in the junkyard, since my presence filled only the room I was in instead of a radius of several city blocks, but it was enough to tell me where I was.

Judging from the low, near-constant rumbling of voices and feet shuffling in all directions, I was in a crowded building. Judging from the faint hum of plasma, I was in one of the few buildings in New Venice that was powered by an internal plasma generator - mostly corporate or governmental buildings. And judging by the murmur of conversation I could hear a few rooms away, I was in a building in Holly and Abe. All that added up to tell me that I was in the MLED Compound - presumably in one of the spare rooms.