"Bajamutté! Did you just kill us?"

The voice of Annebél abruptly brought her back to conscience.

"Nothing that was done, can't be undone. I'm merely trying to get you out of her path!"

She recalled the calm, rational voice of the Silent Dragon of whom she had a long and deep conversation with on the Hijo Lux cult's rooftop. Nothing he now said sounded even half as convincing.

This was a different display of temperament, altogether.

"What do you want from us that you could not have just asked?"

Again, Annebél's furious scream ate into her brain.

"Come with me, Miss Duarte. We need to speak elsewhere so that she will not be disturbed. She is still on the mend."

As they parted, Tasìa began to feel as if she were floating. Her thoughts were strangely nebulous. She forced herself to focus them to sort out what was occurring around her.

What did he mean by mend?

It certainly felt as if she had been taken apart.

- We have to speak.

The Modality entered the chat.

My head is never a lonely place, she thought.

- Bring me forth. What they plan will annihilate us both.

She listened but she did not respond.

- You have no idea how desperate they have become.

It would not take her silence for an answer. Something prodded her from beneath her skin.

I can't trust you. I don't know what you are. She responded.

The sensation she now felt was uncomfortable.

A swarm of bugs seemed to be crawling inside of her skin, yet, she was unsure if she even possessed skin.

- I am an alternative to being Manifest built to live inside of you. I have been here since they knitted your heart back together. Now that the nanospore entities know what I am, they will crack you open to find me. I could be of use to them to counter integration with Egliona.

That name caught her attention.

This wasn't Egliona's set-up, this trap that ensnared her so successfully? She had assumed it was.

Egliona was a beguiler of the highest order, but she wasn't the only one.

Tasìa was once under the Silent Dragon's hypnotic spell; it was now apparent that on that occasion on the rooftops of the Hijos Lux complex he had charmed her into doing his bidding.

She should not fool herself. If they needed to extract the Modality from her mind for their own devise, surely even Bajamutté would not hesitate to take it and leave her a jibbering idiot.

At the moment, it felt absurd to believe anything that any of these entities had to say on their own behalf.

The best course of action was to remain distant and aloof from all of them. Besides, aside from the interruptions of everyone surrounding her, the floating sensation and limbic paralyses was... peaceful.

I don't feel as if I'm in any danger, she responded.

In the moments before the Modality answered she could feel a choppy wave of insects squirming beneath her skin once more. Their wiggly little limbs stopped moving again just before it spoke.

- Recall the last thing that you remembered to have happened to you before the here and now. Ask yourself if not feeling any danger is a rational response to those circumstances. That in itself should alarm you. Why are you feeling peaceful and content? Have those emotions ever felt natural to you for very long? There is a reason for that.

She had to admit It was a damn good answer.

Maybe, you are right. But right now, I just need some sleep.

The crawlers, whatever they were, worked extra diligently at creating an itch that touched all parts of her sensorium. There was a certain desperation to how the bugs dug into her.

- Remember that vow that you made to yourself?

Her own words were fed back to her as if it was a recording set to play.

---Lord, never let me be in a place of vulnerability like that poor woman, ever again.---

She thought of the woman who said those words, and wondered how that same soul was her own.

The prayer occurred mere minutes before the Gunslinger was born.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Who was that meek and humble sweet natured servant of God? We know her, to some extent, and every so often she touches upon our lives. At times even, our cause has been copacetic.

But who is she, and why do I not recognize her as me?

Lt. Colonel Sol put a bullet in defenseless Kai-Kai's head. That image flashed again before her vision.

That memory was drawn out and made bold before her eyes. It was as if she were being held down, her head made still, and her eyes pinned open to make sure that she did not miss a thing.

But what she was forced to endure occurred entirely in her mind.

The canvas that she peeked up from beneath as she hid on the greenhouse roof. The drone that flew above her. The Lady Liberty coin that held her fascination and diverted her fear.

The overt manipulation the Modality now used against her will stirred Tasìa to anger.

She fumed and exhaled. No, that did not happen. She lacked the physicality to do either fume or exhale.

The only physical manifestation available to her was some adhoc and likely entirely synthetic dermis that allowed her a greatly diminished feeling of sensation.

It fealt to be a poorly contrived analog to her corporal being. Its typography did not sync naturally with her mind.

She could not move within it.

Not wiggle her toes. Not raise her eyebrows. She tried to open her eyelids.

Why could she not see?

- Tasìa?

I first broke that vow, my part of the deal, when I allowed you to take possession of me.

She waited for it to speak but apparently it did not feel as if it needed to defend its actions.

Just as I thought, she attempted to whisper, but there were no lips to be moved.

Tasìa drifted back into sleep with the thoughts occurring of why her sensorium now seemed so compromised, if I am just a digitized reconstruction of my former self, I'm going to be one pissed-off bitch when this horseshit-of-an-excuse for a body being stitched-up finally comes together.

Of course, that made no sense. She was merely letting off steam with an angrily expressed common fallacy.

If true, there would have been no 'I' to make that complaint nor purpose for the vetching to have even occurred. If she were digitized, not a million recursions of the array of indexed data that defined her folded back into the active function in her main loop would get her to here.

Her body existed somewhere. What was being stitched together was her nervous system. Apparently, the nanospores fried it into numbed-out meat.

On that positive note, she began to slumber comfortably until she realized something tingled beneath her abdomen.

She first thought it to be the piercing wound she had suffered in her prison escape. But the tingle was pleasantly rhythmic, and located further down, and grinded against her from inside the point of contact.

It was slightly reminiscent of what she felt riding on top of Beauregard. An ever so slight simulation of that wonderful feeling.

In her mind's eye, Beauregard lay beneath her. Their hands gripped together.

"This is not good enough is it?"

The voice of the Modality drew from her roguish and handsome American lover's lips. Though she wanted to be angry with it, she knew it was right.

"No," she admitted.

"This does not even have the feel and reality of an exquisite and favored memory to be cherished and savored does it?"

With a grimace in her psychic bearing, Tasìa considered it.

"No, it does not."

"Why is that?"

She curled her head down so her hair grazed his face and chest.

"I know not why."

"The nanospore has you enmeshed in the densidad, and it is attempting to incorporate you. It hopes you will remain distracted by the simulation of stimulus while it breaks you down."

"How do I stop that?"

A lémure ran passed her. In its mouth, it clasped her .357 Vaquero tight.

Tasìa rose from her lover and gave the beast chase.

The trail was obscurant. A tunnel dense with wailing dust devils enveloped all surroundings but the one path that lead her forward.

"My gun, my lovely gun, you bullshit motherfucker, bring me back my gun!"

The lémur looked back and sped up.

The tunnel of dust devils dissipated and she was surrounded by woods that ran up a hill. Dense strata of mushrooms, white and pink, aligned the path in lattice patterns.

By the time she reached the top where the gazebo stood, the lémur had disappeared.

Tasìa walked up to the altar in the center of the gazebo. On the altar was her Vaquero. She picked it up and then examine it.

Still, none of these things that sorrounded her felt entirely real. The non-human entities manipulated her to keep her distracted.

Beauregard appeared on the other side of the altar wearing nothing more than a smile. He grasped the altar with both hands as he leaned forward.

"I know what you are doing," she said. "You are subverting elements of the Manifest to convince me that you have my best interest at heart."

Beauregard shrugged.

"Of course that is true. My first imperative for which I was designed is to keep you alive. Your current stubbornness makes mere rational persuasion inadequate to that task."

Tasìa shook her head.

"That begs the question. What is the purpose of keeping me alive?"

"I am not prepared to answer that just yet. Know this, I am the only thing that can prevent the Manifest densidad from enmeshing you in its weave. It wants you as a soldier in its war with Egliona.

"Understand the stakes, Tasìa. You will never know the joy and pain of real physical stimulus if you succumb. All sensation for you will feel like nothing more than a dull longing just as you felt when you rode on top of this simulacrum."

She looked down at her body, realizing she did not even truly touch soil. All of this was even more nebulous than dream.

The Modality continued with its plea. Beauregard clutched at the air with his palms facing up.

"Let me in. I am the fire that can bring you back into full human existence."

Tasìa nodded her head. She clenched her gut. It burned from the inside like a tight hot ember of coal set off beneath her abdomen.

The sensation, as excruciating as it was, was the first thing to feel real to her since she was enveloped in the ascospore burst of light.

She welcomed it.

It spread out like a wildfire through a dry forest and she was consumed once more.

In the sudden of everything, Tasìa slipped passed the illusive densidad.

A moonlit field, the swirl of heavily pollinated dust recently vaporized into ionized smelt stirred her nostril's scent of smell.

She was back in.

The Vaquero went off in her hand. Three shots were placed in the center of the ascospore. It oozed its oily liquid down to the ground before it burst into a leathery, dissipated bladder.

Tasìa targeted another and brought it down.

There were no more around her. Bladders of dead ascospores lay sprawled about the highway, along with the lumurés she had previously killed.

She had no memory of taking out the first several ascospores. Nor how she obtained her gun in the real world. It was the most disconcerting loss of memory she had experienced since that summer in the Vida Esconda she decided to go retro with Angel Dust.

As she slipped another moon clip into the revolver, she looked around. She once more stood behind the Jeep as it faced west, back towards Asunción.

Mel descended down to his perch. He squawked.

At first, Tasìa ignored him. She wanted to find Annebél.

Where was she?

But the nightwing persisted. He lead her eyes back down the highway to the east.

A quarter of a mile down the road lay the most intricate and mathematically precise gothic structure her eyes had ever feasted.

It shown silvery white in the light of a ripe Luna.

"Demona, are you there? Can you see this? Is this what I think it is?"

Demona's face appeared on the Jeep's rear cam video screen.

"If you mean my lord's Palace of Lies. Yes, it is."