Another day, another eight hundred thousand lifetimes dumped into Thomas’s brain.

And he had managed to absorb them all before nightfall.

He was angry all the time. He hated sunlight. He detested people. He was pretty sure he was developing stomach ulcers from the stress of processing too many lifetimes too rapidly. And he still had not unmasked Stranger Danger.

You’ll never find the culprit, his inner critic taunted him. This is the Torth Empire outsmarting you.

Thomas told his inner critic to shut up. He was full of the collated opinions of a whole lot of stupid, fearful, self-absorbed mind readers; he wasn’t going to let them dominate his personality.

He floated uphill, towards the Academy. He had neglected Azhdarchidae for a week. The sky croc could take care of himself, but Thomas really wanted to share in some innocent and pleasant memories right now.

Plus, his exercise equipment was inside his tower. Physical therapy was never fun, but if he let the habit slip away entirely, the results were predictable. He was a growing fourteen-year-old. He ought to go through daily exercise routines so that he would be able to resume his sparring sessions with Daindlor once he had enough free time.

Maybe, someday, he would run and jump without the aid of mechanized leg braces? That was something to look forward to.

He needed dinner. He needed a bath. And then?

Ugh. He supposed he would return to the putrid barracks and choke down another hundred thousand minds, searching for the sinister interloper.

What fun.

His wristwatch pinged with a notification. Thomas glanced at it. Kessa had invited him to dinner later in the week.

Too bad. He deleted the invitation, just like he had deleted five previous invites. Kessa would just try to get motherly, asking how he was doing and expecting him to answer any question she asked. Thomas could guess what she would try to dig out of him. Humanness.

Well, he was saturated with Torthness.

That didn’t make him damaged or messed up in the head, despite what his friends might think. His life was a bit rough at the moment, but what else was new? He was doing all right. He was surviving.

But people had better leave him alone.

Thomas paused under a shady tree and deleted half a dozen concerned messages from Varktezo. Sure, he missed leisurely chats with his chief lab assistant—but Varktezo’s new favorite hobby was telepathy gas. The adolescent ummin was obsessed with the practice of reading minds. Thomas had no desire to hear about that. Or deal with it.

Oh, and a message from Ariock, too? Hm. Did the depressed hero want some extra therapy? No thanks. Thomas deleted the invitation to “talk.” If Ariock simply wanted a friendly visit, too bad. He could try again next month.

Having cleared his inbox, Thomas floated across the garden park that everyone called Reflections Plaza. Students strolled over bridges, crossing interconnected ponds that were rife with alien waterfowl.

(Yikes.)

 (Steer clear.)

Thomas did the pedestrians a favor and swerved wide around them. He just did not belong in a place where innocent adolescents were going to school. Everyone knew it. He belonged with zombies and animals.

He was so sick of people.

Thomas closed his eyes and conjured a vivid simulation of his ideal retirement. Wide open skies. Distant snow-capped mountains. A wilderness with plenty of animals and no people whatsoever.

He craved solitude. Peace. Quiescence.

He wanted it so badly.

As Thomas approached the huge archway that delineated the Academy grounds, an instinct made him pause.

Maybe it was a shadow in the wrong place.

Maybe it was a scent that didn’t belong.

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Thomas contained a million lifetimes worth of life experience; quite a lot more than the thousands he used to contain. Whatever caused his sudden paranoia, he trusted his instincts. He overclocked his perceptual intake.

The flagstones ahead of him erupted.

Thomas, registering every microsecond, calculated that the explosion would rip through him unless he moved away at superhuman speed. He flicked his hoverchair controls and connected to the air with thermal thrust. He used heat to propel himself violently backwards.

But the shockwave overtook his reaction. His hoverchair flipped over.

Thomas should have rolled into a somersault and landed on his feet, the way Daindlor was training him to do. But it all happened too fast. He’d had to pour his focus into thermokinetic propulsion, which left him with nothing for superhuman speed.

He landed on the flagstones headfirst, hard enough to rattle his jaw and stun him.

His hoverchair banged onto the ground nearby. The impact shattered its delicate hover disk. It bounced and rolled to a stop, useless. It was just junk now.

Distant screams.

Thomas pushed himself to sit up. He was strong enough to do that.

His forehead felt bruised, and he figured he would have a lump there. But the impact could have been much worse. His hoverchair might have smashed into his neck or head.

The bomb could have splattered him all over the pavement.

He forced himself to zero in on the threat. Smoke and debris. Nothing else.

Thomas scanned the park, searching for danger. He needed to identify the saboteurs who had nearly succeeded in murdering him.

People were running to safety. A few people stared and pointed, or looked astonished, but nobody looked gleeful or unsurprised.

Whoever had planted this trap must have presupposed which route Thomas would take to get home. An easy guess. There were only so many ingress and egress points to the Academy. As for Thomas’s schedule? It was public knowledge, these days.

He had made it easy for them.

The saboteurs had probably dug beneath the pathway at night, when no one was around. They’d been technologically savvy enough to include a remotely controlled detonator with their explosive. If it was the undergrounders, then they must have recruited someone who enjoyed technology. A student at the Academy? Or one of the lab technicians?

Or this could be the handiwork of Stranger Danger.

The unknown mind controller could have turned anyone into unwitting helpers.

A lookout had probably been watching the traffic from a distance, finger on the remote control, ready to trigger the bomb when Thomas showed up. If they were still watching…

There might be a second bomb.

Thomas crawled off the flagstones, pushing his brain into hyper alert mode again. He scanned the plaza with methodical care. In hindsight, he thought it had been a sound which triggered his instinct; a tiny electronic sound that did not belong in this setting. He listened.

Nothing.

Just wind, and the distant exclamations of people who had seen the explosion.

Thomas pulled himself onto a hill of cultivated wildflowers. He knew that he ought to stand up. He should begin the arduous journey of walking towards safety. He would have to walk, with his awkward, unbalanced lack of grace, on grass and flowerbeds.

He really should get going.

Instead, Thomas drew up his knees and laid his forehead against them.

He felt shaky and cold, and he didn’t trust his legs to hold him upright at this particular moment. He wanted just a few seconds.

Bystanders craned to get a look at him. Thomas nearly snarled at them to go away.

Lots of people in this plaza probably wished the bomb had done its job. More than half the city would celebrate his death. Alashani undergrounders. Torth prisoners. Penitents. The secret mind controller, Stranger Danger. Ordinary free aliens. Students.

The bomb could have been planted by anyone.

And perhaps Thomas deserved all the hate.

Clearly, mistakes had been made. Otherwise Jinishta wouldn’t be dead. Otherwise the Twins and other renegade Torth would show up, happy to join the good guys. Otherwise the Upward Governess would be working with Thomas instead of reduced to a mere memory in the Megacosm.

Thousands of freed slaves were currently suffering the indignity and horror of wearing slave collars again. The freedom fighters on Nuss were losing ground to the Torth Empire.

Ultimately, whose fault was that?

It was easy to blame mistakes on the big guy. Ariock was the military leader … but only because Thomas had put him in that role.

Ariock relied on Thomas’s strategies and battle tactics. He acted on Thomas’s recommendations.

So whose fault were all the mistakes? Thomas could not blame anyone but himself.

“Are you all right?”

The speaker was a kindly looking govki. She must recognize Thomas as the dreadful rekveh, yet she extended two of her four hands in order to help him up.

Thomas detected her goodwill as she entered his telepathy range. This was an aerospace engineer, not an assassin. She respected the Teacher.

Unless a mind controller had subtly brainwashed her into lulling Thomas into a false sense of security?

Stranger Danger could almost certainly perform subtle brainwashing. That was the fourth magnitude of telepathy, a magnitude below full zombification. Stranger Danger might have implanted a hypnotic suggestion in this engineer. She might do something unexpected, sudden, and deadly. And sure, Thomas could preemptively brainwash her to be harmless…

But that crossed a line.

He wasn’t going to reprogram the minds of innocent people. If he dominated his own people like that, removing their freedom of choice, then how was he any better than Stranger Danger or the Death Architect?

He wasn’t a Torth.

He was a monster, but not the inhumane type that the undergrounders believed he was. He was not going to reduce his own people to disposable pawns.

“Go away.” Thomas leaned his head against his knee braces.

He could imagine the Death Architect’s covert instructions to Stranger Danger. She would command the brainwasher to send waves of nested assassins. If one assassination attempt failed? There would be a succession of fallbacks. That would keep the Conqueror off-balance and increase the likelihood of him making a fatal perceptual error.

If he was the Death Architect, that was how he would win.

Thomas waved the helpful govki away. “Leave me alone.”