An oiled sound.

Thomas was instantly wide awake. He had not been sleeping well, thanks to all the dreck he’d absorbed from too many penitent Torth.

But the vault door should not be rolling ajar.

He used an unpredictable schedule of sleeping vaults, all fortified, shielded, and secret. Few people could even guess where he slept on a nightly basis. Besides, he posted minions—well, zombies—in the outer vault, as well as in a secret compartment of this bunker. He should be utterly safe.

Thomas forced himself not to move, except for one eye, which he cracked open. He looked at the mirrored wall next to his bed.

Shadowy figures crept towards him in the dimness.

Five of them. Too big to be shani. These looked like his own zombie sentries.

They had bypassed pressure plates and motion detectors, which meant they were being orchestrated by someone smart. Somebody had guessed how Thomas might rig traps.

Not undergrounders. Definitely Torth.

Their sneaky footsteps reminded Thomas of his worst years in foster care. Unexpected noises in his bedroom used to signify a malicious foster sibling or two. Thomas had been the victim of lots of cruel pranks.

He was glad to no longer be that child.

Although he remained outwardly motionless, he braced himself for a fight. A brazen attack from Stranger Danger was not entirely unexpected. Thomas had absorbed most of the penitent souls in the city, which left the unknown culprit with limited resources. Stranger Danger was strategically cornered.

Indeed, they were taking risks, having attacked shani warriors and other innocent people. They were growing reckless.

ATTACK! Thomas mentally commanded the reserve zombies in the secret compartment behind his bed.

Thomas’s extra zombies busted out. They leaped high, or somersaulted sideways, moving in unpredictable ways so as not to become immediate victims.

The enemy squad met their attacks with martial precision.

The zombies fought hand-to-hand, moving with such fluid grace, they almost seemed to be dancing. Hands met fists. Kicks met torsos. Zombies whirled and ducked and struck.

“You need more protection,” Garrett had told Thomas after the second assassination attempt on his life. “Especially when you sleep.”

Thomas had bristled at the implication that he needed babysitters. He no longer needed to rely on caretakers for daily needs, and he valued that independence. The last thing he wanted was people shadowing him everywhere he went.

“I don’t mean nussian bodyguards,” Garrett had growled. “You need living shields. Zombies, I mean.”

Thomas had refused. Weren’t personal slaves or minions a sign of major insecurity? He wasn’t the Death Architect. He was a good guy.

Or so he told himself.

“Your life matters more than your popularity,” Garrett had insisted. “This is non-negotiable. You will zombify a squad of personal bodyguards. I command it.”

It seemed Garrett had actually been right.

Thomas took full control of the five proxy bodies that belonged to him. He lay in bed, but he was also in motion, blocking the enemies controlled by Stranger Danger.

The enemy bodies fought with mechanical expertise. They simply weren’t as good as Thomas in direct control. Thomas knew every military campaign the Torth Empire had ever fought. He knew every martial arts technique in known history. He imbued his extra bodies with all of that, plus his overclocked perceptions.

His proxy bodies were faster than the enemy zombies. Smarter.

His bodies snapped fingers. Poked out eyes. Kicked and stomped and won.

Thomas sat up straighter in his bed, worried that he might accidentally miss some extra threat. Stranger Danger had nearly murdered Garrett and gotten away with it. They had managed to remain hidden in a city under investigation by a super-genius. They had learned where Thomas slept, which implied that they had eyes and ears all over the city. Whoever they were, they were judicious. It could be deadly to underestimate them even by a smidge.

Should he summon Ariock?

Thomas hesitated with his finger over the emergency alert button on his control sleeve. The problem was, Ariock was vulnerable to mind control. That was scary. Besides, Ariock might require minutes to locate Thomas, which was too slow.

It wasn’t worth the risk of bringing the big guy near a battle with an enemy brainwasher involved.

Thomas figured he was suited to handle this danger on his own.

He used the mirrored walls as visual aids. Bones cracked. Bodies fell in broken heaps.

Thomas had not wanted to feed and care for a plethora of extra flesh, but now he was grateful for Garrett’s insistence that he make his own bodyguards. The five zombies that had guarded Thomas’s bed could not have been accessed by anyone except him. Stranger Danger had not had a chance to repurpose them. At least, not yet…

A cloaked figure darted into Thomas’s bedchamber.

It could have been another zombie. Except it raised a hand, and the air wavered with heat. A fireball coalesced.

Thomas swore. Naturally, this cloaked man had not been processed or vetted like other penitents. He was a fully capable Yeresunsa; probably a Rosy or a Servant of All. The rags and slave collar were a sham.

Thomas reached for his blaster glove, but he already knew he couldn’t move fast enough. His mind was quick but his body simply lacked that capability.

The fireball flew at his head.

Thomas used two proxy bodies to intercept it. The zombies fell on Thomas’s bed, sizzling. A sickening stench of burnt clothing plus smoked bacon filled the air.

The two surviving enemy zombies lunged at Thomas.

He blocked them with proxy bodies, but the enemies dodged and leaped. Thomas wanted to twist their minds, to own them, but he dared not shift too much focus away from Stranger Danger right at this moment.

The stranger lunged for the weapon on Thomas’s nightstand—and simultaneously, the blaster glove twitched.

Stranger Danger was an expert at manipulating thermal currents. Of course he was.

Thomas rolled and lunged, trying to grab his blaster glove before the assassin could get it. He infused his body with superhuman speed, Alashani-style, the way his sparring mentor had trained him to do.

Victory.

Thomas couldn’t spare a second to savor his triumph. He shoved the glove onto his hand and shot in a panic, using his thumb and one gloved finger.

Stranger Danger jumped aside. The spray of inhibitor micro-darts missed him by an inch.

The stranger’s hood fell back, revealing sandy blonde hair and a weathered face. The Somehow Nexus. Thomas knew every elite Torth champion, and he recognized this famous Servant of All.

No wonder he had hidden so well. The Somehow Nexus (formerly known as Stranger Danger) looked unremarkable. His eyes gleamed yellow in the dim room; a false color, and a common one. He wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd of penitents.

Thomas hissed in agony as his arm turned to ice. The surface of his control sleeve cracked. Its battery died, and it became useless junk.

So much for the option to call Ariock.

Thomas briefly wondered if he should have programmed the thing to auto-send an alert if it got wrecked, but it was a moot point. He truly did not want to bring Ariock into a battle where he might get zombified.

Anyhow, heat vapor was rising off the Somehow Nexus. It would take too much energy for him to freeze Thomas entirely—Thomas could already feel tingling sensation returning to his arm—but there were plenty of ways to kill. The attacker was building another fireball.

Thomas threw proxy bodies at him.

The two remaining enemy zombies blocked those attacks, all swift-moving elbows and knees. When the Somehow Nexus hurled his fireball, Thomas had to sacrifice two more proxy bodies.

He only had one left for self-defense. That wasn’t enough.

Desperate, Thomas shot at the Somehow Nexus again and again. His weapon was on inhibit mode rather than kill mode, since he hadn’t had time to change it. It didn’t matter. A wide spray of micro-darts should end this threat.

The Somehow Nexus dropped into a rolling somersault and popped up next to Thomas’s bed.

Within telepathy range.

Die Conqueror (abomination that is My fault). The Somehow Nexus dove into Thomas’s consciousness and burrowed into his core, while Thomas struggled to fend off the enemy zombies that were trying to wrench the glove off his hand.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Although Thomas was an expert at mind control, his opponent had a slippery mind. A powerful mind. Thomas tried to drill past a labyrinth of mental firewalls, but he was distracted, grappling with two zombies that were nearly twice his size. He had to buck and roll and try to keep the zombies from dislocating his shoulder and causing a shock wave of pain that would condemn him.

Meanwhile, the Somehow Nexus dug through a galaxy’s worth of memories. He arrowed straight towards Thomas’s primal core.

Thomas gave up on his own distracted burrowing. Instead, he dug into one of the broken minds and gave it a wrench. That zombie became his. Thomas commanded it to fight the Somehow Nexus even while he struggled to switch the glove to blast mode.

He was going to lose.

He just wasn’t strong enough to resist the tearing hands.

He should have realized that he and this opponent were evenly matched. Thomas had mental quickness, but he had sacrificed too many proxy bodies. He felt a wrenching twist inside his mind…

It failed to work.

!

The Somehow Nexus reeled as his powers melted to nothingness. He was inhibited.

Some of the micro-darts had crushed into his skin.

Thomas considered his options within a matter of split seconds. Pain seizures were not reliable in life or death struggles. Most people would defy agony when their life was on the line. Thomas could try to incapacitate his attacker with heat. Or…

Thomas dove deep into the primal core of his attacker’s mind.

!!!

The sole enemy zombie punched Thomas in the forehead.

It was a weak punch, thrown off by Thomas’s duo of zombies, but it was enough to grant the Somehow Nexus a reprieve. The assassin shook a small knife out of his sleeve and into his grasp.

A knife.

Thomas was rattled; he had not expected a penitent, even a false one, to be armed. But he should have realized that the Somehow Nexus (Stranger Danger) (the nameless lurker) had a whole network of lightly brainwashed victims to draw from. Vetted penitents were allowed to peel yams or slice carrots. That must be where this paring knife came from.

The Somehow Nexus smiled.

Thomas was quicker. He seized the mind of the nearby enemy zombie and gave it a new target. His newly acquired zombie threw a solid punch at the Somehow Nexus’s arm.

It missed.

The Somehow Nexus had rolled and dodged. As he brandished the knife, he whistled sharply. An ummin and a govki came rushing through the open vault door.

More brainwashed minions!

This savvy champion had managed to sneak into Thomas’s high security vault of a bedchamber, surprise him, and nearly kill him multiple times. And he had apparently twisted minds on his way. He was a tactician with a lot of self-restraint, to have kept these extra minions in reserve until he was in a desperate no-win situation.

Impressive.

“System kill!” Thomas shouted.

His voice command activated the lethal security system which he’d had installed in the walls. He hadn’t expected to need it, let alone to need a voice command. He hadn’t expected that his control sleeve would break.

Blasts shot from hidden apertures. Thomas ducked. The facial and body recognition program he’d created was rudimentary. He didn’t entirely trust that it would rule him out.

Unfortunately, the Somehow Nexus picked up the danger from Thomas’s mind and ducked as well.

Blasts vaporized the heads and torsos of brainwashed minions. Headless bodies collapsed. Blood misted the air.

Thomas balled his gloved hand into a fist, making it harder to remove the weapon. With all of the zombies dead, this battle was now a savage contest of speed and brute strength and cunning. He prepared to burn his attacker to death.

Die Conqueror (My son). The Somehow Nexus brandished the knife while he ascended into the Megacosm. I never should have had a son. I am sorry.

A son?

Thomas had tried to dismiss the assassin’s feeling of guilt during their combat. He’d figured it might be a distraction technique. Outright lies were impossible in telepathy, but anyone could make an analogy. Maybe the Somehow Nexus meant that the Conqueror was the unwanted son of the Torth Empire?

Except his guilt felt personal.

Now that Thomas was suspicious, he saw physical similarities between himself and this attacker. The Somehow Nexus offered a thin, bitter smile that looked an awful lot like the way Thomas smiled.

As soon as Thomas saw the truth, he could not ignore it.

He was locked in deadly combat against his own biological father—not a human, but a Torth!—in a blood-spattered room full of headless corpses.

! ? ! ? ! ? ! ?

At this close a range, Thomas could not help but overhear the immense audience that orbited his father’s mind. Millions of distant Torth minds demanded to know how the calamitous Conqueror had come into existence. They, like Thomas, had believed that the Conqueror was birthed from a renegade Servant of All, formerly known as the Lone Killer, who had illegally bedded a human man.

Except she clearly had not.

She must have had a dalliance with a fellow Servant of All. This one.

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE??? millions of minds thundered.

 What illegal perversion occurred?

  How was he (the Conqueror) not born on a baby farm?

   How can both of his gamete donors have been Servants of All?

    !? !? !? !? !?

The Somehow Nexus paused before attempting to plunge his knife into the Conqueror’s neck. He still held that thin, bitter smile. He had never imagined that his dalliance would have far-reaching repercussions. He had never imagined that the whole galaxy would someday find out.

It was supposed to have remained secret forever.

Now he caved under the pressure of many millions of minds, in addition to his own guilt.

He finally admitted his crimes. Yes. He’d had sex with lots of female Servants of All. He had brainwashed them into forgetting afterwards.

He replayed old memories, showing his audience—and the Conqueror—that he had, indeed, been a rogue Torth who messed around in ways he should not have.

His favorite plaything had been the blonde clone sister to the Swift Killer; the Lone Killer.

She’d been willing. Heartbreakingly gorgeous, and eager to experiment while they both playacted as humans on Earth. They would meet in hotel rooms in different guises. Afterwards? He’d wiped her memories and left her with the vague impression that she’d had sex with random human men.

It was safer for both of them that way.

She lacked any power to brainwash, so she would be unable to lie or defend herself if her fellow Torth agents got suspicious.

The Somehow Nexus always made sure other people took the blame for his many illicit acts.

Thomas stared at his biological father. Instead of twisting the mind of Stranger Danger, instead of attacking, he paused. Everything he had known about his own identity was either questionable or wrong. He was mentally cartwheeling over the edge of an abyss.

Thomas Hill was not a human hybrid.

Thomas wasn’t human at all.

Never mind his supposed “human side.” He didn’t have an intrinsically kindhearted nature, like Vy and Kessa and Ariock and other friends believed. Not all. Instead, he was the spawn of monsters.

“The boy’s barely human,” Garrett had said to Ariock once, when Ariock was defending Thomas.

Garrett was right more often than Thomas wanted to credit.

He was not a half-angel from paradise. He quaked with shame. He was nothing but a terrible mistake—a Mistake—who never should have been born. And now everyone in the galaxy knew it, except for his willfully ignorant friends.

Die, Mistake! His biological father brought the knife down in a savage attack.

Thomas used every scrap of strength in his body to roll away just in time. The knife shredded the pillow beneath where his head had been.

The Somehow Nexus let go of the buried knife and went for a better weapon without hesitation. He seized Thomas’s arm. Before Thomas could react, the Somehow Nexus yanked the blaster glove off his hand.

! Thomas prepared to dive into the monster’s mind in order to defend himself.

He just… well. He just couldn’t decide what to do with his biological father. Zombify him? Execute him? Imprison him?

Talk to him?

I made such an awful Mistake, the Somehow Nexus moaned inside his head. This war. This boy. It’s all My fault.

The whole galaxy listened and agreed.

The Somehow Nexus forced his fingers into the glove, which was custom-sized for Thomas’s hand. The fit was tight and awkward. He hardly noticed.

He felt solely responsible for the rise of the Conqueror.

He even felt remorseful about the woman whom he had (loved) bedded. The Lone Killer haunted his dreams. She had never pointed an accusatory finger at the Somehow Nexus. She could not. When she’d gotten caught for the crime of having sex, the Somehow Nexus had not taken any of the blame. Silence had seemed pragmatic.

And later? When everyone in the Megacosm learned that she had given birth, like a primitive savage?

The Somehow Nexus had stayed silent. That had seemed prudent.

But his criminal behavior had turned out to have major consequences.

I created a monster (unwittingly) (by accident) (I didn’t mean to). The Somehow Nexus switched the stolen glove from inhibitor mode to deadly blast mode. Millions enslaved. He thought of the penitents. Billions may yet die. He thought of the beleaguered Torth Empire. IT IS ALL MY FAULT.

Thomas sensed the entire Torth population reeling as the news spread from mind to mind. Billions were drawn in by the dramatic confession. Trillions. They gaped and gawked, just as Thomas was doing.

The Somehow Nexus is a (criminal) rogue. The chorus began as a whisper, but it quickly picked up steam.

Strip away his name-title.

 Strip him of all rank.

  Strip away his possessions and wealth.

   We cannot trust him!

    (…And Earth is a hotbed of criminal activity. We ought to destroy that planet when We can.)

Many Torth were fed up with monsters and criminals who hid in plain sight. Distant orbiters pummeled each other with their opinions. They wanted to get rid of the insidious law-breaker who had sired the Conqueror.

The criminal formerly known as the Somehow Nexus has reaped DEATH! the Majority chorused.

Opinions coalesced into a Majority opinion.

 GUILTY!

  GUILTY!

   KILL HIM!

DIE!!!!!! they urged.

Thomas thought the Majority was stupid. But unlike him, his biological father resonated with the majestic chorus inside his mind.

I am a failure, he silently agreed.

A tortured Servant of All, one formerly known as the Lone Killer, haunted his memories. Guilty. The phantom agreed with the Majority. Guilty. She agreed with him.

The nameless lurker thought, I deserve death.

He rotated his gloved hand to aim at his own face.

Thomas shielded himself with thermal currents. But he wasn’t the one in danger.

A concussive sound shook the blood-soaked corpses. Unceremonious gouts of blood painted the room even more red. The nameless lurker had thumbed the trigger.

Blood-mist vaporized in Thomas’s heat shield. His biological father was headless.

The decapitated body toppled sideways off the bed.

Thomas continued to gasp, hyperventilating, disbelieving that his would-be assassin had pointed the blaster glove at his own face instead of at the abomination he had unwittingly sired. He could have (should have) made another attempt to assassinate the Conqueror. He might have actually succeeded.

But he had not.

Instead, he had caved under the relentless pressures of secret self-loathing and self-recrimination.

He had been burdened for many years. All of Thomas’s life.

So he had obeyed the Majority and executed himself.

So Thomas had survived.

That should be a good thing. Thomas the Conqueror ought to bask in blessed relief that the fight was over, and marvel at his good fortune.

Instead, he felt small, pathetic, and more abandoned and lost than he had ever felt in his life.