With my body falling into a great depression of its own, I prepared for the worst. Fight or flight, I surely wasn't going to surrender to human traffickers.

But before I could physically react, his wrist flashed again and a swirl of orange shapes consumed his hand.

The glowing geometric pattern was not the mistaken flicker of flames, but an entirely new elemental expression. It clothed his wrist like a mitt, like an energetic glove.

This power was not of my world. I watched in stunned silence as it's effect became apparent.

Along the far end of the treeline, facing away from me, the real camp fizzled into being. Like a lit fuse in reversed-time, a curtain rolled back. It granted me true clarity for the first time tonight. But the gift was temporary. Whatever magic trick made this happen did the same for the mass of people caged within.

Like a scene out of a low-budget slavery documentary, half-naked…humans…stood out. But only because there was no other way to hold themselves in the cramped and barred container.

Humans…? With blindfolds on?

But it wasn’t the attire, or lack there-of. It wasn’t the jeans; it was the — genes?

Some had reddish bronze skin and others had purple hair, with fantasy ears to match.

What the hell?

My threat awareness was oxygen deprived. My brain and its wondering software took up all the fuel.

Am I dreaming?

Did the zap to my forehead juice my natural DMT?

I defended myself against the roughly revealed odor attacking my nose to rewind what I witnessed.

“What is this? Are you all occultists?” My voice started strong, but teetered into weakness. “A ritual, with the performances and the dress and all that? I don’t…” I was gonna say judge. But this didn’t look legal. Like so illegal a judge definitely needed to see it.

All three frowned. “This is business.”

My stomach dropped. There was no pleasure in his prosody. No performance either. Only a fatal case of profit-seeking. As the darkest supply and demand anyone could partake in, normal and healthy people never considered it. I wasn’t normal or healthy, but I really didn’t want to consider it. My heart couldn’t take it. If I was free pickings… a delivery to their doorstep…

I glanced to unknowns of the so-called everwoods, suddenly far more preferable. My eyes adjusted for the escape to come.

A few of the imprisoned slaves turned their heads towards me. Minus the blindfolded eyes, I got a full face of their features. Human… mostly human… basically human…

I gulped.

“B-best of loo—luck,” I said, pausing to rewire my nerves. “But my business is elsewhere tonight. Enjoy your—” I smiled. “Night out.”

I turned for the emergency exit, hoping with every fiber not to walk into that very scenario Hollywood dramatized to high hell.

“We saved your life,” Newsboy said. “Show some respect.”

Shit. The dreaded flag.

I prepared to run, but my muscles wouldn’t follow commands. An inner chill took over, frosting my bones to their marrow. I was still too close to the fire to be this cold and, more importantly, I couldn’t move. My mind knew, but my body disagreed. Like my nerves are disconnected or discombobulated.

My biomachinery, hacked…

I couldn’t turn around to see if the provenance of my paralysis was by design. Perhaps by these people thieves.

I heard the uneven gait of footsteps navigating lanterns. A black veil overcame my eyes, a damn blindfold.

“Sorry traveler, but this land doesn’t take kindly to loners.”

My body began to thaw, with my shivering chest rapidly reheating as returning blood flow charged my fear meter.

I tried and failed to rationalize the ridiculous sequence of events.

This isn’t the Epstein Island Community, these are mentally ill rednecks in the woods. Law enforcement could make quick work of this.

Or maybe my mind is unabashedly deceptive, and still playing tricks?

Anything’s possible on a wild trip.

The pair of rough hands pulled me towards the cages. This is not the direction I wanted.

I had no weapons, no communications, no options.

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The lanterns?

I kicked a rusty gas lamp, hoping for chaos, for explosions of green fire like that scene in GoT.

In return, I got nothing but pins and needles in a defrosting body. I was meat leaving the freezer.

“Take his linens, they look valuable.”

I lost my custom-print urban shirt and my emo boots to a guy with proximity BO. I was down to four senses, so the perception of my world required a redistribution of innate stats.

“It ain’t a death sentence." One of them patted my bare skin like I was a pig about to be fed. "As a man, you’ll put on some muscle. Your new owners will make sure of that.”

I fought against their pull, but two men were too much. Strength was never my forte. Never needed to be. I stayed my resistance, opting to save stamina for my eventual escape.

As if he read my thoughts, a captor put a relieving hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t try it. If you run, if you disobey… well, they relish the thought of making you mind their will.”

“I’m never afraid.”

I said it with brisk self-assurance, but it’s true enough. I’m only ever delusional, a delightfully dangerous trade-off.

My captors snorted. “That’s good. Maybe it’s a life worth living then,” I heard Newsboy say.

“As for me?” He scoffed before resuming. “I’m scared. But that ain’t important, not to the bigger picture. I guess you might say I’m a true believer. And true believers are familiar with fear.”

What?

I heard the other two loudly groan.

“The Seekers aren’t the center of every devilish tale,” he continued, his passion leaking through. “But they might be the tale to end all the others. Think of your situation like a cause. A mission.”

The mission was foul.

These traffickers were agents of a dark market. One dark enough for a night like this.

Still blind, and now bound, I succumbed to a schrodinger moment. I half-expected to wake up with bandages over my face, and to then have an actual heart attack over a medical bill.

But for now, I accepted this awful moment as authentic. That’s how my heart listened, moment by moment. So every moment counted. The traffickers blocked my vision, sure. But my mind would always be free. Free to serve me, and not the external world.

Let me be honest, I’ve been keeping a secret from you.

You know I’m not healthy. My Tetragametic Chimerism has given me a body — a world — in constant turmoil. But it’s also given me a gift, a talent no normal person would claim. I’m like a professional athlete, but in a sport no one plays. My game is mastery over my mind, and through it, mastery over my body. The oscillating goal line is my heart, a beat I must protect against my own blood.

A rival I can never truly defeat.

But by mastering every other part of my body, I can gain an upper hand against this internal adversary. And it all starts with the top of the pyramid, the command-and-control center for all my parts and pieces.

Since I was a pre-teen, I’ve programmed my brain with an endless bag of tricks from one end of Eastern spiritualism to the other end of Western science. Thousands of hours of experimentation, attempts to find the right tool, the right way, the right thought. I tried all, and within the all, I found the ones that worked. I would protect my heart from fear, and in doing so, keep my life to myself.

I remembered the car crash, and the hot metal that tunneled into my mind.

The bars creaked as I was sardined into a blistering mass of flesh.

“Think happy thoughts.” Newsboy gave me my final instructions. “Half-rat hobos die out there all the time. But as a slave, you have a chance. You’re welcome.”

“I’ll outlive you all,” I retorted.

“Sure ya will,” he hollered back as I heard a creaky gate clink shut.

The false pedestal they put themselves on was pissing me off more than becoming some crime syndicate’s living product.

However, my anger left as soon as it arrived. In the cage, pressed against other bodies, panic took over. I know I talked a lot about my inner mojo, but experiencing horrid crap has a way around that. My unseen surroundings came with very unclean people.

I coughed autonomically, unable to hold my nose or prevent the wafting malaise from floating over my tongue. The ick was palpable, but only when I had air to breathe.

The collective rhythm of the sea of chests put me in the center of a pressurized cooker. I thought I would choke on sweat or bleed out of every orifice. I had no oxygen, and yet my body wanted to balloon. To pop or rise away.

Entering a meditative state, I extended my intakes and outtakes. Thinking of my favorite people, favorite places, and favorite experiences came easy. For some reason, they were all discord friends and action RPGs. Will came in at some point, but I managed to push him aside to stay high. It kinda worked, but the awkward sensuality of being skin-to-skin with all these unusual people was unnerving enough to keep me out of monk mode.

And the thought of a life in chains — slavery — was unacceptable for me.

I needed an emergency measure — an escape.

Surrounded on all sides by despair, darkness, and enough iron to weaponise a medieval army, I knew of only one path out. It was my get-of-jail-free card, an oddity none would expect. Not even you.

I may not get a better chance than this.

Before panic got my heart, or my brain tabulated this caustic claustrophobia into a fear-death-experience, I had to act.

I studied my position by returning to memory. Dark bars were the pillars of this shipping-container-sized holding cell. I remembered, I remembered it all — the heads of my fellow chattel. The purple-haired humans were all tall and suspiciously attractive. Their ears left a word in my mouth I didn’t want to say or think out loud. The other bronze-skinned people had little bony nubs on the top of their foreheads, like mounds of flesh were hidden under the skin.

Christ, what is all this…

I wanted a second look with real eyes — to make sure it was all imagination, but the blindfold would not be beaten.

I pushed my questions down, back to the ground and away my from awareness.

Keeping reason at bay was absolutely necessary during this procedure. In return, I let my awareness expand — to roam freely.

Nevertheless, normal thoughts crept up, attacking me with their typical intellectual demands.

“Human” trafficking?

Slavery was illegal in most countries, surely. Even if I was in Canada or a ren-fair out of an Alex Jonesian nightmare.

And was that magic or performance?

Where did the trick end? How did I get here?

Shaking my head, I refocused into the space beyond myself to silence my mind.

Right now the truth didn’t matter, no matter how strongly my rational thoughts demanded it. I only needed to expand my visualization to include the woodland. To the eyes that followed me in the dark of the everwoods, to the sounds I couldn’t place with any known animal.

What’s lost can be fo—

A whistle pierced the air.

The oppressive forest fell silent.

“The buyers are arriving.”