The world slowed, the world blurred. Air itself thundered at my passage and for a fraction of a second everything but my rage at a mind-controller invading the first place of true safety I'd found since the advent of hell on Earth was silenced. I flew fist-first at the little girl's face faster than my own senses could keep up with, but that was fine; nobody else could keep up either.

Except my target disappeared in a puff of smoke. The next thing I knew, I was slamming into the underground garden's wall, pain flashing up my arm as it sunk into the stone, closely followed by my face. My nose broke. My fingers were only recognizable as fingers due to my suit's glove giving shape to the pulverized bits inside. Concrete dust and ground brick irritated my eyes and sent me coughing.

"You shouldn't use your face as a wrecking ball, it's bad for your skin," an annoying high-pitched voice shouted to be heard from somewhere behind me.

The brickwork that had proven almost as hard as steel cracked a bit more as I pulled my arm out of the hole with some difficulty. Red sparks dancing over the rubble hinted that I'd broken something more than just a wall but I was too angry to care. I tried to blink dust out of my eyes, then shook off most of the rubble off my hair as my nose straightened and turned around towards the provocatively smirking Midget. She stood there as if nothing had happened whatsoever.

"Why you littl-ARGH!!" A lance of energy shot at me with a crack like thunder, tore a hole through my suit then dug into the meat of my right hip. I missed a step and had to turn my imminent charge into hovering to avoid falling on my face.

"As much as I hate little Verity's plotting at times," the jolly old man with the now smoking gun told me conversationally, "we'd be dead without it." He shrugged. "Plus this is a sanctuary. Ya kids wanna fight, take it outside."

"You shot me!" I exclaimed, staring baffled at the hole in my hip. Smoke was coming out as my regeneration slowly pushed out mangled bits of metal and restored muscle and skin. I'd never been shot before; the sensation was... surprisingly jarring. For over a week in what was basically a war-zone, I'd been punched, stabbed, set on fire, electrocuted, bombed, thrown off buildings, poisoned and bitten, and none of it had had the same... surreal yet visceral impact. Something about getting actually shot, even if it hurt less than some of my other experiences, demanded I stop and acknowledge the fact.

"Verity told me I had to," the old man simply said as if that made perfect sense. " 'Tall blonde bombshell you've never met' she said. 'Shoot her if she seems angry' she said". He shrugged. "Ye were angry, attacked us as soon as we got in, so I shot." He looked from me to the Midget with equal suspicion. "Did the shot knock the rage out as it was supposed to, or must I shoot again?"

"...you listen to what a mind controller tells you to?" I demanded, my anger flaring briefly but taking a back seat to thinking again. Wrecking the only safe place all of us had would be bad.

"I suppose removing mental influence would also feel like mental influence," the Midget said, drawing my ire away from the old man and back towards her. "If it had grown slowly, if it had remained unnoticed. Attacked by walking inhuman horrors, forced into life and death situations, all it would take was a nudge here, a prod there to push one over the edge."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I asked, even as a voice was telling me that this was a mistake. That instead of listening I should be pounding the little girl's face in before she could ensnare my mind. "You think I wouldn't get defenses against mental bullshit after our last encounter?" Except another voice was pointing out how that hadn't turned out very well the first time, how listening while no actual mind control was happening cost me nothing and that even what a manipulator chose to say could be informative.

"When faced with blatant monstrosities walking in daylight it is easy to forget that enemies can also be subtle," 'Verity' said then paused, giving me time to ponder the words. Seeing there was no further violence coming up, both the old hunter and Mandy relaxed, tension visibly leaving them as the little girl moved towards the basket of fruit Aunt Sarah had left. Taking out one of the smaller apples, she bit into it with a crunch, juices running down her chin before suddenly vanishing. "In 'ad situa'ions it 'oesn't 'ake much to make the 'rong 'oices," she added while still chewing. It was kinda cute, in a messy sort of way. She swallowed, coughed then continued. "Bad guy puts a finger on the scale. A bit more anger, a hair more greed or fear, the scales tilt and bad choices suddenly seem good. Make the situation bad enough to begin with, build the scales crooked, no fingers are needed."

"What does this have to do with you getting into my head?" Because I could buy bad guys totally exploiting the situation for whatever nefarious goals they had; they were bad guys... and the invasion had obviously been someone's plan. What was tougher to swallow was that she wasn't a bad guy. Call me a pessimist but if someone has proven they can get into your head once, it's hard to tell when they aren't doing it.

"Nothing, because I didn't." She rolled her eyes at me like little kids do to older people everywhere and someone snickered. Said someone was very lucky I didn't want to start another fight. "I don't need to put my own finger on the scales to remove somebody else's, I just need to punch them in the face. But to the scales it's still a sudden, noticeable difference that might lead to wrong conclusions. More to the point, it didn't happen now." She took a seat that had appeared out of thin air the moment she needed to sit. "It happened during our first meeting but just like stopping any drug, there are withdrawal symptoms."

"...it's a plausible explanation," I grudgingly admitted. I wanted to hold on to my anger but suddenly the idea of attacking the little girl biting into her apple and making cute little sounds of contentment seemed rather silly. "How about some proof?"

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"It's magic," she said with a shrug. "When anyone can invent spells that break logic, math and natural law, you either have to take things on trust or be powerful enough to force the truth out of others. Besides, I'm the only expert around right now. No matter what I say you'll have no reason to believe me but my words."

We would have probably argued more, but a pained groan followed by metal hitting wood and more groans had Mandy leaping to a waking Jerry's side. Shooting the Midget a glare and the promise that this was not over, I followed my best friend to the brunet's still-pale form.

"How are you feeling, nerd boy?" I asked, surprised that he was even awake. Magical healing or no, he was still pale and sweating profusely. Unlike with me, that idiot Hackett's knife hadn't left a piece of itself in the wound but it had certainly done something more than "merely" gut and bleed Jerry almost dry.

"Like I was run over by a locomotive," he whispered, too tired to speak up. "Did we get the bastard?"

"He disappeared after I punched halfway though him," I told him while Mandy was putting a compress full of ice on his forehead. The redhead had somehow conjured the ice in the palm of her right hand while a touch on Jerry's clothes with her left had them warm enough they were steaming.

"Damn. I was hoping we'd take him out but he's good at weaseling out of-." He was interrupted by a cough, then another and a third, dry heaving with nothing coming out. A glance through his lungs confirmed they were clear and undamaged so whatever was causing this had to be more than physical. "Hate him... so much..."

"Just try to rest, J," Mandy pleaded. "Rest and Aunt Sarah's medicine will have you up and healed before you know it."

I was hoping she was right. I didn't want to lose one of the few people I knew I could trust.

xxxx xxxx

We left Jerry sleeping fitfully on that table, still wearing his exoskeleton. He'd passed out again after only a few minutes, the effort of talking exhausting him completely. Mandy had expected it despite the magic cookies completely regenerating the boy's wounds, blaming it on dark magic he'd need time to recover from. There was not much to say to that; magic was her field, not mine.

Retreating from the underground garden before Aunt Sarah could see the new hole opened in the wall, we found ourselves in a much smaller and darker, though still cavernous chamber. The size of a house instead of a stadium, the simple concrete box was much closer to what one would expect from sewers and tunnels than the garden had been. It was illuminated by a single floating orb the size of a thumbnail and no brighter than a large candle and most of its floor was taken up by old wooden chairs haphazardly arranged around a large, round table.

The old man with the rifle had taken up a seat around said table and was deep in conversation with two much younger men in strangely colored, military-style uniforms which, like their wearers, had seen better days. All three of them were looking at a large map of the city and its surrounding countryside spread over the table, a map above which a miniature storm cloud appeared and disappeared every few seconds.

"...Sarge found another cutoff here," the guy in red and yellow uniform was saying, pointing between the Mall and the old marketplace. "Thirty-foot wall going all the way through, blocking all routes to the city center from the West." As he spoke, a thick black line extended over that part of the map, making up one more side of a rough hexagon in the middle of the city. It even looked like a tiny wall, complete with crenelations. If not for being translucent and flickering like the storm cloud it would have looked like something a kid had made out of clay. "How the Hell did they build it so quickly?"

"They didn't get the title Dark Masons by collecting bottle caps," the Midget said from atop a chair with several pillows raising her high enough to see over the table. She flicked a hand and the cloud went away completely, revealing more illusory walls and towers marked on the map. "We're lucky the enemy could spare only two. Even odds they'll have finished the gate on this end before the tenday is out."

"How can you know that?" I interrupted, the two new guys glancing in my direction as I walked up to the table then doing a double take. "How do you know any of what you told us?" I didn't mean just those Dark Masons, whatever they were, nor just the bit with the mental influence. Pretty much everything out of the younger girl's mouth hinted at knowing more than any of us. So I asked the other question that had been bugging me for some time, about how everyone here seemed to know so much more. I even did my best to rein in my anger and mistrust. "If you can't prove you're speaking the truth at least reveal where you got the information!"

"I see more than others do because I know where to look," she told me, then elbowed the guy in the red and yellow uniform who was gaping at me. He blinked, realized what he'd been doing then looked immediately away after pulling his friend out of their mutual stupor too. Unfortunately for them, from less than ten feet away Force Awareness had enough accuracy to clearly see them wiping the drool on their sleeves. Under other circumstances I'd have just teased them till their faces burned but as things stood both the Midget and I ignored them. "And I know where to look because I'm not from around here."

"...well, that explains it," I grunted. "Does everyone in the magical world look like a seven year old?"

"Don't be obtuse. I just chose Wednesday Addams' looks from the original series." She smirked and the illusory cloud reappeared, thundering ominously. "It is surprisingly appropriate to the current situation."

More illusions appeared across the map by the hundreds, even thousands, most of them cartoonish representations of monsters a quarter inch high and the color of fresh-spilled blood. A central tower taller than the walls or any building in the city appeared over the location of the city hall on the map, electricity sparking on its needle-like top. Much sparser figures in blue, green and indigo formed a very loose circle of small groups across the city's suburbs. Three of the groups were even further afield, one in the five-star hotel to the West, one in the old truck stops and trailer park to the Southeast, the last in my and Mandy's school to the North.

"This is all we've found about the enemy and any survivors with powers that are still fighting the monsters," the stranger with a little girl's face told us when new illusions stopped appearing. "As you can see, you guys are vastly, hilariously outnumbered and the bad guys have more than halfway built the fortified beachhead they need so the actual invasion can begin." She smiled mirthlessly.

"Any questions?"