Dyna wasn’t sure what she expected from her mirror. An answer, she supposed. One way or another, she thought she would get some kind of answer. Instead, she simply got her own reflection. A perfectly normal girl stared back in the perfectly normal compact mirror. It didn’t even turn dark this time.

Did that mean anything? The absence of a change to the mirror didn’t prove that it couldn’t change, only that this specific situation wasn’t enough to trigger it.

Walking up to the left cell, the one with the man with dark hair and a beard, Dyna knocked her knuckles against the glass. He had been the one whose perspective had appeared on the mirror when they were after her. If either of them would do something, it would be him.

He didn’t look all that happy to see her. Lolling his head to the side, he stared for one long moment without his facial expression changing in the slightest. The mirror didn’t change at all. Without even an attempt to speak, he lolled his head back, turning his attention back to the television in the wall.

“What are we here for?” Ruby asked, toe tapping on the floor.

“I’m… I guess I’m trying to recreate the situation of that day to help me figure out how this mirror is supposed to work.”

“These guys probably need help taking a piss. They aren’t going to be chasing you around anytime soon.”

“Yeah, I—”

“If you want someone to chase you with deadly intent, I’m right here.”

A chill ran up Dyna’s spine. Turning away from the cell, she found Ruby looking up at her with that knife back in her hand, making little metallic clicking noises as she flipped it back and forth. The guard shifted behind her, looking uncertain.

“No… No thank you.”

“Maybe later?”

“Uh… I’d rather… not,” Dyna said, speaking slowly. She did glance at her mirror. Just in case. It still didn’t change. “If it is all the same to you.”

With a disappointed harrumph, Ruby folded the knife and slipped it back into her pocket. “Well, you know whatever you’re doing won’t work, right?”

Dyna blinked. “I’m sorry? Why won’t it work?”

Ruby stepped forward and hit the glass with far more force than Dyna managed. It was enough to make the man in the cell jump. A fairly painful jump if the prompt wince on his face was any indication. He must have missed Ruby the first time he looked over. This time, as soon as he spotted the little girl, his eyes went wide and he pressed himself back into his bed.

“What did you do to him?”

Ruby shrugged. “Dragged him down here. Guess he didn’t like it.” She leaned up against the glass and shouted, “Maybe he shouldn’t have struggled so much! Not important anyway. I’m talking about this.” She smacked the glass again. “It is psionically shielded.”

“I know that.” The glass was used everywhere in Psychodynamics and, now that she knew to look for the slight extra thickness and faint pink tint, plenty of places up on the main campus as well.

“That means mind things don’t get through it. You’re on this side of the glass. He’s on the other. Staring at your mirror isn’t going to work.”

Dyna blinked again. She looked from the man in the bed to her mirror, then back to the glass between them. Closing her eyes, she let out a short breath. “Right. Can I get in there?” she asked, looking up to their escort.

“One moment,” he said, turning to the side as he pressed a finger to the earpiece looped over the top of his ear.

“What are you doing?” Ruby said.

“Just testing something. I had a thought that maybe the reason I haven’t been able to use the mirror since that day was because the interaction was something unique to these men. That maybe they were the ones doing everything and not me.”

“Well that’s simply untrue.”

“How would you know?”

“Because Emerald told me. Your mirror let you see when they were about to attack, but Emerald didn’t see anything unusual about your mirror. So it has to be you.”

Dyna stood stunned, staring at Ruby. That… was true. She had forgotten until just now, but Emerald had said something about not seeing anything unusual in the mirror. The exact details of the situation weren’t clear in Dyna’s mind, but it had been a hectic day with lots going on and lots of stress. Nobody would remember every little detail with perfect accuracy.

So it was her. Some part of it, at least. There simply was no other option. If it was the man who had chased her, Emerald—and anyone else who saw the mirror—would have seen the same thing she did.

A wave of relief flooded through her at that thought. Dyna had thought that she herself was some kind of red herring that everyone had focused on. Now it made more sense why Doctor Cross, despite his obvious frustrations, had remained focused on her rather than looking to the captives down here. Emerald had given a debriefing and had probably included that crucial detail, which he hadn’t overlooked.

Dyna puffed up, swelling with renewed excitement. Her plan hadn’t gone as she had… well, planned. It still worked out somehow anyway. Doubts about her ability or lack thereof washed away with a certainty she hadn’t felt in weeks.

The glass wall separating the cell from the hall started lifting into the ceiling, interrupting Dyna’s moment of feeling better about herself. It wasn’t exactly needed now, and she almost said so to the guard, but thought better of it after a moment. Although her doubts about her abilities had lessened, that didn’t mean that she had no questions on her mind.

Especially for one of the men who had chased her around town. Walter hadn’t told her a thing and yet, here she was, now able to question them herself.

Ruby followed her as she stepped into the cell. Dyna tried to ignore the wide grin on her face.

“You—” she started, only for her breath to hitch as she noticed the mirror’s lenses turning black.

Dyna quickly waved the mirror in front of Ruby’s eyes. “Do you see anything?”

Ruby stared for just a moment before putting on a deep scowl. Lifting a hand, she wiped her thumb just beneath her lip. “You could have mentioned that I had jam on my face.”

That, Dyna figured, meant everything was normal for her. “I didn’t notice,” she said absently, no longer paying attention to Ruby.

The mirror changed. Why now? Was it this guy after all? She looked over the top of the mirror to find that he wasn’t looking at her at all. Ruby occupied his attention. With Ruby unable to see anything odd about the mirror, Dyna had to be involved. Was it just that this man was a particular type of transmitter that interacted easily with the mirror?

“What are your psychic classifications and abilities?”

Ruby pulled her knife back out, taking an aggressive step forward when he didn’t respond. “The lady asked you a question!”

“I told them,” the man said in a much higher tone than Dyna would have expected from someone of his stature. “I told them I don’t know what I’m here for or how I got here.”

“That’s not what she asked,” Ruby snapped.

Dyna raised an eyebrow. The mirror was still black. It wasn’t displaying his perspective. The previous times, it had gone black for a time before switching over. Shouldn’t it have switched by now? And about what he said… “Was he mind controlled?”

Ruby shrugged. Neither the guard nor Beatrice had a response for her.

As Dyna voiced her suspicion, however, a change came over the man. His alarm and obvious panic over Ruby’s presence subsided. The mirror lit up, showing off Dyna, but from his perspective rather than her own reflected view.

Three sharp and angry tones beeped over the speakers. “Facility Alert,” Beatrice’s voice started.

Dyna didn’t get to hear the rest.

She wasn’t in the cell anymore.

She wasn’t sure where she was.

Her head snapped left and right. Nothing but a dark void surrounded her. She could still see herself on the mirror she held. Except, the her in the mirror wasn’t her now. She saw herself standing, glassy eyed, with her back to the television of the cell.

The Carroll Institute trained everyone to be able to detect when someone was influencing their thoughts and, hopefully, reject such influences. Everyone went through it upon enrolling, before even getting into any other psychic training. It was a necessary course for the safety of all the students. Dyna never had any problems with it either. One of the few things she considered a success at the institute. Which was probably because it didn’t actually take psionic ability to detect, just training. Any normal human could learn how to resist mental effects.

But here and now? Dyna felt nothing.

The situation was obviously abnormal. Whether illusion or direct control, she should be able to feel something.

The first step to stopping psionic influence was to know that there was psionic influence. That was obvious enough. Then, she needed to figure out which parts of her brain were being influenced. Audio-visual centers? Something deeper? Dyna couldn’t tell because she couldn’t feel this effect.

“The human brain is a black box of mystery and imagination. The scientists around you, those at the forefront of the field, are only just beginning to understand how the human brain processes sensory input, let alone how it uses that information to create the idea of the reality you perceive. And you think they can teach you to detect, let alone stop, something that reaches deep and touches the furthest reaches of your mind?”

Dyna’s head snapped left and right, searching, but failed to find anything other than the void. The voice came from everywhere at once, leaving her uncertain of where to look.

“Who are you? Show yourself!” she shouted.

“Who indeed?”

This time, the voice came from straight in front of Dyna. The total darkness melted back, receding from around a figure.

A woman, one with the void wrapped around her as if she were wearing the darkness as a dress, stepped forward. The darkness gave her the appearance of gloves that went up to her shoulders while leaving her shoulders and head bare, exposed to some nonexistent light. Her hair flowed. Not like a breeze carried it, but more like she was underwater. Even a subtle movement of her head sent a wave of movement all the way to the tips.

And her face…

Dyna blinked.

She stared. There were… lips… a nose… eyes… All the things one would expect of a face, except Dyna couldn’t make out any real details. She couldn’t see the woman’s eye color, how wide her lips were, whether her nose was pointed or round. When she tried to take in the face as a whole, it appeared as little more than a blur of features.

“Call me Id.”

Dyna winced. The words fell on her ears in a soft, pleasant tone. The kind of tone that Dyna might have used when greeting an old friend. She couldn’t even say that there was anything off about the voice. No subtle sinister nature.

“Let me out of here.”

“Truly impossible, I’m afraid. We’re in your mind. There is no escape for you.”

“Then—”

“Leave? Not going to happen. I saw an opportunity to communicate.”

As the woman spoke, Dyna realized something that she probably should have noticed right away. The woman’s mouth didn’t move. It didn’t open, it didn’t form words with modulated waves in the air.

And if the woman was right, there was no air. This entire place, this dark void, was some small corner of Dyna’s mind. Everything she was seeing was little more than electrochemical impulses dancing about within her skull.

“I saw an opportunity to warn you.”

“Warn me?” Dyna barked out a clipped, nervous laugh. “Then give me your warning and get out.”

The woman, Id, hummed and cocked her head to the side. Her face, blurred as it was, remained entirely impassive and unreadable, but Dyna could easily imagine an amused smile playing across her face. Or… no… wait. The woman was smiling.

Had she been smiling before the thought crossed Dyna’s mind? Or had Dyna projected her own ideas onto the image of the woman.

Just how much control did she have? This was her own mind, she should—

“You have no control.”

“What?”

“That is my warning. You have no control. In no aspect of your life do you have control over yourself. The institute, the people you surround yourself with, even your own mind acts against your desires.”

“How can my mind act against me?”

“Your hand…”

Dyna blinked. She glanced down to the mirror in her hand, still showing off the still image of her own face. Neither the perspective nor the version of herself in the mirror had moved since she last looked at it.

“Not that hand,” Id said, sounding even more amused.

With a start, Dyna realized that her left hand was up near her face, scratching at her chin.

“Why were you touching your face?”

“I… had an itch.”

“No. You’re justifying the movement after the fact. The truth is that your hand moved ‘on its own’ without you knowing about it.” Id reached out, bending her own arm and flexing her fingers. “It takes an astounding amount of processing power to perform even a task as simple as scratching an itch. Every finger moves, all the muscles contract to just the right degree, your arm moved without smacking yourself in the face. And all that happened without you being any the wiser. Your mind is not your own.”

“That’s…” Dyna felt a chill go up her spine, only to realize something. “That’s nonsense. It is a perfectly normal action that everyone would take. Id, Miss Subconscious, is it?” Dyna stepped forward. This was her mind, right? She shouldn’t be afraid of anything here. She just had to figure out how to force this woman out. “A bit embarrassing to call yourself that, isn’t it? Freudian psychology has been out of date since Freud’s time.”

“You wonder why you can’t perform well on the Carroll Institute’s psychic tests? Why everything seems to fail around you? Perhaps you need to look a little deeper than just what you think you want.”

Dyna took another step forward, ignoring the woman. “Like I would ever listen to you. You sent those men after me, didn’t you? Why? So you could come here and psychoanalyze me? Sit back and tell me about your mother, is it?”

“Your mind fights against you. Your fears, your worries, your hopes. All of it acts against what you want.”

“Why not take a seat on my couch,” Dyna said, gesturing to her side. She had to suppress her grin when a brown leather couch appeared next to her. This was her mind. Some two-bit Transmitter wasn’t going to get to her. “Showing up dressed in literal darkness and with that hair? Acting all mysterious while spouting nonsense? We can have a long discussion about your obvious daddy issues. I bet you have a tramp stamp.”

Id stared for a long moment. Was that a frown on her blurred face or just another of Dyna’s projections?

“If you build up that confidence outside your mind, half your issues would probably disappear entirely.”

“I’m always completely confident in myself.”

“Are you? Didn’t you just spend the last few hours doubting everything? And the past several days as well. Constantly coming up with scenarios in your mind about how you can’t possibly be special.”

Dyna couldn’t quite fight off her grimace. “How do you know that?”

“I’m inside your mind. There is nothing about you that I do not know.”

Clenching her fists, deliberately and consciously, Dyna ground her teeth together. “Get out.”

A heavy vault door appeared behind Id. The wheel spun and thick metal cylinders retracted back into the door. There was no frame and no walls for the door to actually block off, but Dyna assumed it was purely symbolic. This was apparently her mind after all.

It was a bit emptier than she might have hoped, but maybe this was some small corner of it.

Id simply turned around and watched as the door swung outward. Her hair flowed behind her with her movements, still acting like the entire place was filled with water. “Well,” she said, “if you insist.” She took a step toward the vault door, but paused and looked over her shoulder. “I’ll tell you: I got what I wanted from this exchange. And I do hope that I helped you. Don’t worry, even gone, I won’t leave you alone. Be in touch soon. Maybe we’ll even meet out there,” she said with a wink.

Dyna wanted to shout at her to leave. Maybe conjure up some giant fan inside her mind to whisk her off her feet and shoot her out through the vault door. But Id stepped through before Dyna could even open her mouth. She stepped into the dark void, disappearing into it like it was a curtain that she stepped behind.

After waiting a moment where nothing happened, the tension drained from Dyna’s shoulders. Id didn’t seem to be coming back. Was she actually gone? Or had she simply moved to another part of Dyna’s mind?

Dyna doubted she would be sure any time soon. She could only imagine the tests the institute would put her through to be sure that she was the only one left in her head. The thought made her want to flop over on the brown leather couch and just sit for a long while.

It wasn’t real, was it? Nothing here was. She needed to get out of her own head and then flop over on a real couch.

But… how?

Dyna looked around the empty space. Without Id, it was just the open vault door and the couch. She couldn’t remember any of the Carroll Institute’s lessons covering how to escape one’s own mind. The vault door should probably be shut to prevent Id from walking back in… but it was just symbolic, wasn’t it? Id could have walked into the darkness at any point during their conversation. The woman had come from the void, after all.

Perhaps, being symbolic, Dyna could just walk through herself?

There was a slight fear in the back of her mind that she would just walk out of her own head and find herself… disconnected? Dead? A consciousness couldn’t exist outside a mind, could it?

No. That was nonsense. Dyna couldn’t just separate her consciousness from her physical brain. Astral projectors didn’t even leave their own heads, science here at the institute had proved that.

Taking a breath of air that probably didn’t exist, Dyna walked forward.

Dyna blinked, falling forward toward the concrete floor of the prison. But her foot moved on its own, instinct from a few years of skateboarding rushed to the forefront of her mind, catching her. Her fall turned into a mere stumble. Even the stumble came to a stop with a quick swing of her arm to catch herself on the foot of the prisoner’s bed.

None of her movements were conscious. And that fact stuck out in her mind more than anything. If Id hadn’t mentioned anything, she doubted she would have ever noticed or paid her movements a second thought. Now?

Dyna couldn’t help but feel like she had just been a passenger within her own body.

She took control, deliberately pushing herself back to a proper standing position. She forced her feet onto the ground, planting them with more intentional thought than she could ever remember directing her body with before. Moving so deliberately probably hadn’t been what Id’s point had been, but Dyna couldn’t get the thought out of her mind.

Was that her own doing? Thinking over Id’s words over and over again…

Ruby provided a distraction, rushing toward the bed with her knife drawn.

“Stop!” Dyna reached out. She didn’t manage to grab her, but her shout was enough for Ruby to keep the blade on his throat and not in his throat. “He was definitely mind controlled.”

“The bastard just did something to you.”

“No,” Dyna shook her head. “It was someone else. It—”

A thunder of footsteps rushed up the hall. A dozen men, all wearing those silver suits with mirrored facial visors, rushed straight toward the closed cell.

At some point, the psionic glass had come back down, trapping Dyna and Ruby in the room. Their escort stood on the other side of the glass, talking to the approaching men, though his words were muted by the glass. He pointed toward the cell. Two of the silver men approached him after his speech, grabbed both his arms, and led him away. The guard didn’t fight them.

They were probably taking him to some quarantine room while they figured out what happened.

The remaining silver men all turned to the cell. Without being able to see their faces, Dyna couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing. Their motions implied talking to one another. Maybe they were just waiting for someone with higher authority to give them orders.

“We need to talk to Doctor Cross or Walter.”

“Walter’s gone.”

“Cross then,” Dyna said, looking back to find Ruby’s knife still pressed against the man’s throat. He was very carefully not speaking. Even swallowing looked like it might cause a cut. “Don’t kill him. Please.” Dyna wasn’t sure if the prisoner was wholly innocent, but she was mostly sure that he wasn’t fully culpable for his actions. “These guys aren’t going to attack us, are they?”

Ruby let out a guttural noise from the back of her throat. “Not if they don’t want a trip to the hospital.”

“Beatrice? Can you please get Doctor Cross down here?”

The speakers didn’t emit their tone. Dyna frowned, looking at the red light on one of the cameras in the room. Beatrice was definitely watching.

A sinking feeling settled into the pit of Dyna’s stomach.

“We’re not prisoners ourselves, are we?” Dyna asked, looking back to Ruby.

“Not if a lot of people don’t want a trip to the hospital.”

“Maybe don’t threaten them too much? We didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t want to make it worse.”

“Oh no,” Ruby said, lips curling back. Not into a grin. Not really into a scowl either. She was just baring her teeth. “While I’d love to crack some egghead’s skull, it won’t be me putting them there. Walter will be back eventually and he will tear them to bits.”

Dyna opened her mouth, only to pause. She had been about to argue that Walter wouldn’t do something like that. To her, he had always been the one guy who believed that she really was supposed to be at the Carroll Institute. A kind man, if a bit mysterious with those sunglasses he always wore.

Then again, knowing what she knew now, Dyna wasn’t sure she really knew him as well as someone like Ruby did.

“I’m sure it won’t come to that,” Dyna said, watching the silver suited men on the other side of the glass. Three of them were slowly approaching while the rest stayed back, looking ready to move if needed. “They just want to make sure nothing bad happened to us.”

I hope.