The plan had been simple. Step 1, sneak as close to M.A.G.E as possible. Henry still had enough control over the city’s cameras to find their final objective. Whitworth’s pet, Lyssa. There wasn’t a lot of data on the student. But coupled with Oscar’s experience with the girl, they had enough for their last hurrah.

Step 2, Oscar would employ one of a telepath’s many forms of attack. A subconscious infiltration. It was allegedly difficult, and dangerous to do. Thoughts were not formed in neat speech bubbles, even in the conscious mind. It was hard to define a mind; there was no objective metric for it. The subconscious was a roiling place of feelings, emotions, instincts. Chaos.

The problem was distance. Henry looked out the window of the vacant flat they had snuck into—or rather walked straight into thanks to a little mental suggestion. It was quite a few blocks away from the front gates of M.A.G.E. Even from there, he could see lines of personnel in blue patrol the streets. APC’s were parked unabashedly in plain sight. Protrusions out of their roofs bathed the area in sensor sweeps. The defensive perimeter was absolute against physical threats. They probably had some low-cat telepaths there too. They could move no closer.

The others moved into the empty bedroom where Oscar waited, cross-legged, his eyes closed in a preparatory trance. Jason Quwave, their teleporter, stopped Henry before he went in as well.

“I know I said those things, to encourage you to keep going,” he said. “But this wasn’t what I had in mind.”

“You said it yourself,” Henry said. “The system needs to go down.”

“We’re using a kid.”

“There are no kids at M.A.G.E, only soldiers.”

“What’s Sarah to you? She’s about the same age.”

Henry made sure Sarah was in the room, and not camouflaged outside within earshot.

“We let her in because she needed something like this. So she doesn’t hurt herself.”

“She didn’t need to join our war,” Jason said adamantly. “She wanted to. She was safe in our sidelines and now you want to directly involve her.”

“We are at war.” And we have lost, he almost said as well.

“Henry…”

“Here’s the deal, Jason,” Henry said sharply. Then he softened. “None of this would have progressed to this stage without you. If you want out, for any reason, well, we no longer have the resources to stop you.”

The teleporter seemed to hesitate. He thought, deeply for what it was worth, then made a decision. The air shimmered. Henry walked into the room.

The other saw him and made the inference, saying nothing. They sat on the floor, holding hands in a circle with Oscar at the lead. It looked an awful lot like a pagan ritual. Or the climax of a cult. How would historians look at their attempt? Would they see insanity? What would the boss think? Perhaps he was disappointed, and that was why he abandoned them. The alternative was too painful to consider. Henry could only commit. In a way, that made him no different than the heroes. They too had to commit to their roles. And maybe that was the reason why this world was so resilient to change. All those millions of people, comfortable to exist in this state of tug-and-pull between hero and villain. They were all afraid of an unknown alternative, which for all intents and purposes could be worse.

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“Ready?” Oscar asked.

There were nods.

He began.

Mind existed everywhere, discrete because of borders that defined each ‘thing’ as something other. Telepaths were gifted who could see beyond those borders, and even affect the elements within. Such power could be amplified, even with those who were not gifted this way. One simply had to give over their mental power to the telepath, and trust him with its entirety. The trust was optional.

The girl was asleep, and her mental defenses were erratic to begin with. This should have been easy. Instead, Oscar had to face a veritable nightmare of a place. He knew Lyssa had a fragmented mind. In an earlier life he had worked to repair traumatized patients with dissociative identity disorder. It was satisfying work. If she had come to him then, she would have been a career defining patient.

“My god,” he whispered.

The dunes of this desert of color kept changing. In one instant, there was structure. In another, there was nothing but flatness. Sometimes a gigantic finned creature encircled them, shooed away by the efforts of the strange denizens he discovered there. Were they alternate personalities? No. They were their own, alive, but without physical forms. He supposed it only made sense. The body could have parasites, why couldn’t the mind? There has been research on organisms that exist solely as mind, shapeless in reality. Though such information was rarely given attention to in the scientific field. It hardly seemed like science at all.

“It’s working, it’s working!” The creature known as Grogor squealed.

What an awful thing. Under his power, the chaotic sands around them were slowing down their endless mutations. The stability was spreading. While he waited, he looked at the ‘sky’. What were those stars? Why did they temporarily stop this insanity? There was a lifetime of research to be done here. If only the circumstances were different.

A green glow poked above the horizon. Oscar squinted.

“Ah, sun rise,” Hagathar said.

The ‘sun’ was a spiky ball, refractive like glass. Oscar could see through this ‘sun’ itself if he withstood the piercing green light. Each spike was like a hallway of mirrors, reflecting the interior of a building. It looked like a Victorian era mansion, though he couldn’t be sure. The ‘sun’ was so far away.

“Wait! Wait!” Grogar screamed.

“Creature, turn us away from that place!” Hagathar said.

Oscar turned his head. With the desert moving around them, other places were coming over the horizon, or rather, descending towards them. This desert was anything but flat. One such place was coming closer now. It was like a glass planet, though it was not lit like the sun was. But there was enough light for him to see inside. The glass planet was like a snow globe filled with gravestones.

“No, no, no!” Grogar was pulling at his own eyelids.

“What are you doing, creature?” Hagathar asked. He grabbed onto Oscar’s shoulders shaking him. “Get us away!”

“Alright, alright,” Oscar said. He allowed some chaos through, separating the ‘snow globe’ from their area. It retreated, going on its own strange orbit. What were they so afraid of? Oscar looked.

“Don’t look at it!” Grogar said.

Oscar ignored the creature. He had noticed something move inside the glass ball.

“What is that?” He intoned quietly.

It was a shambling mass of gold mechanisms. They were arms. Each with their own fingers. The thing was hunched over, draped with a black cloak. It turned its head—it had a head!—and they locked eyes. It had her face.

“What?” Oscar breathed, narrowing his eyes.

No, not her face. It looked like a doll with the girl’s hair as a wig, wearing a caricature of her face made of bronze-gold.

“What have you done, you two-leg,” Hagathar said.

“I don’t understand,” Oscar said.

The sphere’s orbit changed. It was following them.

“We must leave. We must leave!” Hagathar shouted.

Grogar had reduced to incoherent screeches.

Oscar decided to listen to them, manipulating their island of stability to swim through the chaotic dunes. But the sphere was not lagging behind.

“What are we running away from?” Oscar asked.

“You really are foreign to this place,” Hagathar said. “That is our death. It cannot be reasoned with. Nothing made of what we are could survive it. It will take us apart and reuse our insides as stuffing for its strange purposes. We would be alive during that process until it is finished.”

“Made of us?” Oscar asked. “Stuff of the mind?”

But Hagathar was too stunned to speak further. At least that was what Oscar thought the expression meant. It was hard to read these creatures.