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I stared straight ahead, numb, feeling only the motion of the car on the road.
Get to Sandra.
But would she be able to do anything? Her voice on the line, the way she’d spoken, hadn’t sounded like someone who had the answers. Not the right ones, at least.
It was something to think about other than Tobias. Looking up, I was startled to find my aspects all frozen. Like statues, not moving, not breathing. As I realized it, they jerked into motion again, Ngozi drying her hands and telling J.C. about the two men from the hot dog cart.
I checked my phone, and saw that half an hour had passed while I’d sat there, zoned out, thinking about Sandra and Tobias.
The phone buzzed. It was Kalyani calling me.
“Hello,” I said, switching it to speaker.
“Everyone is accounted for, Mr. Steve,” Kalyani said. “Nobody has vanished. We’re all here. Even Leroy, who just got back.”
That meant no more nightmares. For now.
“What do you want us to do?” Kalyani asked.
I looked at Sandra’s phone. Did we just wait for her, or that Kyle fellow, to “be in touch”? Or did I do something more?
“Options?” I said, looking at my team.
“The older man,” Ivy said, “Kyle, he sounded like he was a business type. Not security. So…”
“So maybe there’s a record of him, and where he works,” I said, nodding. “But we’ll need a way to search him out. Ngozi. How’s your mental image of him?”
“Excellent,” she said.
“Great. Kalyani, you still there?”
“Yup.”
“Grab Turquoise.”
Turquoise was one of my older aspects. He came on, speaking with a weird mix of a Texas accent and a stoner drawl. “Hey, man. This has been crazy, huh?”
“Don’t use that word lightly around me, Turquoise,” I said. “Ngozi is going to describe someone to you. Can you draw him?”
“Sure. Like one of those guys. From those shows.”
“Exactly.”
“Cool.”
I nodded to Ngozi, who started describing Kyle. Round face, thinning hair, big forearms—like he worked out—but not really an athletic build. Big nose.
Kalyani turned the phone to video mode and showed what Turquoise was drawing. Ngozi coached him to make tweaks, with some input from Ivy, and he did a remarkable job. My brain could memorize complex details quickly. We just needed a way to get the information out.
“Cool,” Turquoise said when we were done. “Kind of looks like a potato who is pretending to be a man, and is worried someone will call his bluff.”
“You’re a weird dude, Turquoise,” I said.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Hey, Chin?” I asked. “You listening?”
“Here,” my computer expert said, leaning down and waving into the camera.
“Can you run that sketch through some kind of facial recognition software?” I asked.
“No, but I can tell you who he is anyway.”
“What? Really?”
“Sure,” Chin said. “I read an article on him recently—that’s Kyle Walters, a local entrepreneur. He’s made a few waves in local tech circles.”
I frowned, Googling the name. “Kyle Walters. President of Walters and Ostman Detention Enterprises.”
“… Detention Enterprises?” Ngozi asked. “Like, prisons?”
“For-profit prisons,” Chin said, reading. “He made news by purchasing a game company. It was a moderately big deal in some circles.”
I nodded slowly. Whatever Chin knew came from me. I must have read about Kyle during one of my many information binges, where I tried to absorb as many news stories and articles as possible, for future reference.
“Video games and prisons?” Ivy said. “That’s an odd pairing.”
“Yeah.” I scrolled up on the article. “President of the company. Why did he bother coming to meet me himself?”
“Meeting you is quite the experience,” Chin said. “He’s said to be a hands-on type. Guess he just wanted to see you for himself.”
I frowned, studying the article.
“What?” Ivy asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just … I think I used to know something about that structure he’s standing in front of.” I glanced at the caption below the picture. “‘Eiffel Tower’? Looks like some kind of art installation.”
“Yeah. A big one.” Ivy shook her head. “Strange.”
“That’s ‘art’?” J.C. said. “Looks like someone forgot to finish the thing.”
I sat there, waiting for Tobias to explain it to us, then felt again like I’d been punched. He was gone. I took a deep breath and did some further searching into our Kyle Walters fellow. I found some clips of him talking at tech conferences, giving speeches full of buzzwords.
But he owned prisons. What was he doing at these conferences? They weren’t even security conferences. Applied Virtual Reality Summit, I read. Huh.
“He’s based locally?” I asked. “Where?”
“Here,” Ivy said, showing me her phone, with an address listed. “He owns an entire building in a suburban office park.” It appearing on her phone meant I had that address tucked in the back of my brain somewhere, from when I’d memorized local business lists. So I hadn’t lost everything with Tobias.
“You seem to be coping remarkably well,” Jenny said, “now that the initial shock has worn off. Can you explain how your aspects are helping you to recover?”
Startled, I looked up. There she was, sitting across from me in the limo. J.C., with wonderful presence of mind, pulled his gun and leveled it right at her head.
“Is that necessary?” she asked.
“We just had an aspect go crazy and kill one of my best friends,” J.C. said. “I will blow the back of your head across that seat if I think it will save anyone else.”
“You’re not following the rules,” I said to her. “Appearing and vanishing? That’s dangerous. Nightmares don’t follow the rules.”
She pursed her lips, and for the first time seemed to get that idea. She nodded, and J.C. looked at me.
“You can put it away,” I said to him. “She’s obviously not a nightmare. Not yet.”
He obeyed, holstering it with deliberation as he leaned back in his seat, still watching her. We made fun of J.C., but I’ll admit he can be casually intimidating when he really wants to be. Ivy settled in next to him, legs crossed, staring daggers at Jenny. Ngozi had missed the entire exchange, because she was suddenly fixated on how dirty the inside of the cupholder was.
“It seems to me,” Jenny said, “that you all are very quick to point a gun—but very slow to ask the difficult questions.”
“Such as?” I asked.
>
“Such as why is this happening?” Jenny asked. “Why are you losing aspects? What is causing your hallucinations to behave in this way?”
“My brain is overworked. Too many aspects, too much going on with them. Either that or I’m emotionally incapable of handling change in my life.”
“False dichotomy,” Jenny said. “It could be a third option.”
“Such as?”
“You tell me. I’m just here to listen.”
“You realize,” I said to her, “that I already have a psychologist aspect.” I nodded toward Ivy. “She gives me lip, but she’s good at her job, so I don’t need another.”
“I’m not a psychologist,” Jenny said. “I’m a biographer.” She wrote some things in her notepad, as if to prove the point.
I looked out the window, watching streetlights pass on the side of the road. We’d pulled off the freeway, and were heading down a dim neighborhood street. The patches between the lights were dark—almost like nothing existed, except where those streetlights created the world.
I pushed the intercom button. “Barb, GPS an office building called Walters and Ostman Detention Enterprises. Should be on 206th. Take us there.”
“Roger, boss,” she said.
“Tell me, Mr. Leeds,” Jenny said. “Do you want to be cured?”
I didn’t answer.
“Say you’d lose us all,” Jenny said. “No more aspects. No more knowledge. No more being special. But if you could be normal, would you take that trade?”
When I didn’t answer immediately, Ivy shot me a betrayed look. But what could I say? To be well.
To be normal.
I did everything I could to remain sane, to shove my psychoses off onto the aspects. I was the most boring of the lot, by design. That way I could pretend. But did that mean … mean that I’d welcome losing the aspects?
Could I really live without them?
“I miss Tobias already,” J.C. said softly. “He’d have broken this silence. Said something to make me smile.”
“Tell me about him,” Jenny said. “I barely got to meet him.”
It felt like she was trying to worm her way in, dig information from my brain.
