Dyna didn’t know where she was being taken. The door was locked. The driver was obviously being controlled somehow. She had thought it seemed strange when, despite matching the description of someone involved in a potential shooting, he hadn’t frisked her and arrested her. In retrospect, that should have been a huge red flag. It was so clear now, but a few minutes ago, she had been far, far more concerned with the fact that Harold had gotten away and her memories of how were fuzzy at best.

Now, she wondered if he had really gotten away or if these people had gotten to him.

These people being the man in the backseat and whoever he worked for.

Dyna couldn’t take her eyes off him. Not that she thought eye contact would help if he turned his mental attentions toward her. He was clearly a psychic of some sort. Likely a mind controller. She might be able to fight him off thanks to the training the Carroll Institute had put her through, which could be why he hadn’t tried… that she knew of.

She did have to wonder why the local police didn’t get that same training.

But it was the machine on the side of his head that really kept her attention. It moved. She hadn’t noticed at first because the interior of the car didn’t have much light, but every time they passed a street lamp, she saw it. Little wheels, one larger than the other but neither larger than an old silver dollar, connected by a small metal rod. Like the wheels of an old train.

Never had she seen anything like it before. No one at the Carroll Institute, topside or down in Psychodynamics, had an implant quite like that. Or an implant at all, as far as Dyna knew. While there were companies working on brain-computer interfaces, few had actually made their entry into public availability. Those that had were little more than highly invasive remote controls. And they were small computer chips, not actual hunks of industrial machinery slapped onto the side of someone’s head.

Was it for his psionic ability? Did it amplify it somehow? Or was it for some other medical reason?

It seemed far too much of a coincidence to assume that a psychic needed an implant like that for reasons unrelated to psychic abilities. It had to be some kind of amplifier or enhancer. Deciding on that explanation, she had to wonder why the Carroll Institute didn’t employ such technology. Was it too invasive? It certainly didn’t look good, but Dyna was willing to bet that at least a few psychics would volunteer themselves for such experiments.

Even her. If they had offered an implant instead of an artifact… Dyna might have taken them up on the offer. Despite all the trouble the artifact had come along with, Dyna was perfectly willing to admit that it was exciting. Not being chased around town or anything like that—though some might call that exciting in a very different way—but just doing something, even if she was still getting a handle on exactly what she was doing.

Her next question, one she couldn’t stop herself from asking, was whether or not such an implant would work for her.

Being able to see people who had it out for her was all well and good, but she couldn’t help but wonder what her natural psychic ability might be. Everyone around her had one. Even the other artificers. Emerald, useless though she claimed it was, could see alternate futures. Ruby was a clairvoyant centered on herself, constantly and perfectly aware of every part of her body. Sapphire, Dyna knew less about, but Ruby called him the ultimate mind reader.

If it did work, would she accept such an implant?

“We are here.”

Dyna jolted at the whispered words. A knot of tension twisted in her stomach. Distracted, she almost forgot just where she was and what she had been doing.

Namely, being kidnapped.

Taking her eyes off the man, she quickly glanced about. They were in another alley? No. Long strips of buildings extended along a narrow street on either side of her like an alley, but they were covered in narrow garage-like doors. A self-storage facility. The police car parked beneath a flickering orange light that hung above one of the bright red doors.

Neither the mind controlled police officer or the man with the implants had seen fit to confiscate her phone. They both knew she had it given that she had pulled it out before realizing that someone had been sitting in the back. She didn’t bother hiding her text to Emerald stating her new location.

Ustd, came the response. Btc loc, Red inc.

For all that Emerald presented a prim and proper and even motherly attitude in person, her texts were surprisingly incomprehensible. Dyna assumed Emerald understood and that Ruby was on her way, but hadn’t the slightest idea what btc loc meant.

Gthr info.

And, apparently, that Dyna should gather information.

Dyna still couldn’t open her own car door. The police officer didn’t move from his seat, keeping his hands lightly gripping the steering wheel, while the man in the backseat pushed open his door and stepped outside. Wearing a light brown tweed suit and walking with a faint limp, he didn’t look all that threatening. Were it not for the machinery on the side of his face, he might have looked like a chauffeur coming to open Dyna’s door for her.

When he did open the door, Dyna’s first thought was that she could run. There wasn’t anything physically stopping her. Nobody handcuffed her or broke her legs. Gather information? Who did Emerald think she was talking to? That order certainly wasn’t holding her here either.

“My employer does not wish to make this encounter more hostile than needed.”

Dyna blinked, confused for just a moment before understanding what he meant. She narrowed her eyes. “Asking me to kindly walk with you doesn’t work when you’ve got a gun to the back of my head.” There wasn’t a literal gun to her head—the officer still stared straight ahead with his hands on the wheel—but what else could he have meant? He clearly saw her thinking about dashing off into the night and decided to put a stop to it with a threat.

Something he didn’t even deny. Shrugging one shoulder, he turned away from the police car and started toward one of the shuttered doors. When he turned, he didn’t turn his head at all, Dyna noticed. When he looked back to see if she was coming, he turned at the waist, keeping his neck stiff and straight.

That combined with his limp made Dyna wonder if the implant actually was for mundane medical purposes.

But… it was a faint wonder at best.

As the red light flashed on the side of his head and the small wheels started chugging along, Dyna stood. Not because she was forced to—she felt no intrusion into her mind—but because she didn’t want to test whether or not the Carroll Institute’s training would be enough to stand up to amplified psychic powers.

Once Dyna started following him, he turned and continued walking without a word. A stiff and frail walk. Dyna could probably give him a light shove and he would topple over without any resistance. While she was unarmed, slamming her phone into the moving parts of the implant might disrupt him enough to let her get away.

Consulting with her mirror, Dyna decided against trying to fight him. His back was to her, so he didn’t appear on the lenses, but two distinct other perspectives did. One probably belonged to someone standing on the rooftops. The other looked like it was watching a bank of monitors attached to security cameras.

There were other people here, others with eyes on her. Probably others with hostile intent.

He stopped in front of storage locker 1537 and typed a code that Dyna missed into the mounted keypad.

The door slowly lifted up.

Dyna wasn’t quite sure what she had expected. Not a whole lot. The storage units couldn’t be much larger than their doors given how closely they were compacted together. Perhaps she had thought there would be little more than one person seated in a chair. Instead, she found a massive room. The neighboring walls had been knocked down. Potentially every wall in the entire block of storage units.

The walls hadn’t been knocked down for fun. Every square foot of the space was filled with equipment. Shelves and tables filled with bubbling vats, vials of colored liquid, and microscopes and computer monitors. Exposed metal rods with electricity arcing between them. More machinery, similar in aesthetic to the implant on her kidnapper’s head, chugged along in various parts of the room.

One of the larger centerpieces that quickly drew Dyna’s attention were three tall tubes, each larger than she was. A disembodied spinal column floated in the crystal clear blue water of one, suspended—or perhaps anchored—by several wires. Both of the other two contained brains. Because of course they contained brains. What else would mad psychics have floating in jars?

It really made a lot more sense that they had a full warehouse of equipment. This organization had to compete with the Carroll Institute, who had a whole entire underground laboratory that Dyna had yet to fully explore despite having gone on more than one aimless walk through Psychodynamics. It was a bit strange that it was so close to the Carroll Institute, but this couldn’t be their only base of operations. It probably wasn’t their main base of operations either.

They certainly had a different style. Everything in the Carroll Institute had a sleek, modern look to it, often adorned with wood or brass. Here? It looked like Dyna had stumbled into an industrial factory.

“Psionic spike registered, ma’am.”

“Quintessence generation confirmed.”

“Manifestation underway. It’s working? It’s actually working.”

There were people about as well. The warehouse wasn’t just an unattended collection of equipment. All wore the same long white coats with thick black buttons—though the buttons were off-center, running up one side of their clothes. Several, those working with liquids mostly, had thick black gloves on. Some wore thinner medical gloves. Others—especially those working with the computers or grungy machinery, wore nothing at all. Dyna couldn’t see any of their faces. Without exception, they all wore silvery masks. Not mirrored masks as they weren’t reflective, but they probably existed for the same reason that the Carroll Institute used those silver suits around psionic energy emitters and receivers.

“Of course it is working,” a woman said, speaking in a smooth voice. It sounded just familiar enough to niggle at the back of Dyna’s mind. “Begin actualization. Lock and isolate. This is exactly what we needed.”

The woman, standing just in front of one of the large brain tubes, was the only one in the room who wasn’t wearing a laboratory coat. It was more like a duster from an old western, except slightly sleeker with obvious modern design elements. It was tight until the waist then flared out. Some kind of half vest covered her shoulders, part of her arms, and her upper chest. Dyna wondered if it was armor, though it looked a bit too thin.

“Actualization started,” one of the more traditional scientists said after pulling a heavy-looking lever. One of the nearby machines started spinning and churning as sparks of lightning danced between two donut-shaped towers.

“Wonderful. Alert me the moment we have a location. See how much we can influence it toward one of our preferred areas.” As soon as she finished speaking, the woman turned to face the door.

Dyna let out a hiss.

Her face, like those of everyone else in the room, was hidden behind a silver mask. But her hair… her long black hair, tied into a ponytail, moved behind her. It didn’t move like hair should move. Rather, it moved like she was underwater. The hair drifted slowly behind her, lagging behind only to swing just a bit too far as it fanned out behind her.

“Id.”

Dyna figured that Id was the one who wanted to speak with her despite her captor only referring to her as his employer. Seeing her in person—or seeing that hair—made her stomach tense. She had thought that was just some mysterious thing she had decided on during their little mind meeting to make her seem more enigmatic. But it was real?

“One moment, Dyna Graves. Sorry about the mess. We are in the middle of an experiment that simply cannot wait. Mister Grafton, do you have the artifact?”

Eyes widening, Dyna whirled to the side to find the man with the machine on his head pulling out a large object from the inside of his tweed jacket. It was wrapped in foil, so Dyna couldn’t see what it was, but it was definitely the same foil disc that Harold had taken.

If the Aztec artifact was right here, where were Emerald and Ruby? Hadn’t they been chasing after that?

“Spike registered.”

“Isolating and decoupling.”

“Wonderful,” Id said. “Mister Grafton, please keep that safe for the time being. You may go ahead and head out. I’ll contact you shortly.” Turning fully to face Dyna as the man with the prosthetics backed out of the storage unit, the masked face of Id tilted slightly to one side. “Dyna Graves. How are you tonight?”

Shifting where she stood, Dyna glared. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say or do in a situation like this. She didn’t know what Id wanted from her and didn’t want to just start talking, offering free information to the enemy. In fact, the longer she just stood around watching, trying to figure out what they were doing, the better it was for her. She would have more to report on once she got out of here.

Assuming she got out of this safely.

“I intended for us to meet somewhere a little more casual,” Id said, clasping her hands behind her back as she started to pace. “Perhaps over tea or… No, wait. You prefer hot chocolate, don’t you?”

That had Dyna’s eyebrow twitching. Yes, she did prefer hot chocolate. The only reason Id knew that was because she stole the information from Dyna’s mind.

Her eyes darted around, leaving the brushed silver mask covering Id’s face for just a moment. She didn’t see any weapons. No obvious handguns, at least. With everyone in the room wearing a long laboratory coat except for Id and the recently departed man with the prosthetics, they could probably hide weapons easily enough. But they were all the scientist types. The only people who carried weapons at the Carroll Institute were the security team and the artificers. And Dyna wasn’t even sure about the latter group. It could just be Emerald and Ruby. The time she met Sapphire, he didn’t have a holster or gun.

Then again, these people might not need guns. Between the invasion of Dyna’s mind and the ease of mind control the prosthetic man displayed, they might be able to overpower anyone who had hostile intentions toward them.

“Something wrong?”

Dyna snapped her attentions back to Id. “You kidnapped me.”

“If what we suspect about you is true—and all evidence so far confirms this—I would posit that it is far more likely you wanted to meet with us.”

“Excuse me? I might have gotten into that car, but that was entirely under false pretenses. If I had known that your cyborg was lurking in the back seat, I would have run off without hesitation.”

Id shook her head. Without even holes for eyes, it was impossible to discern her facial expressions. Body language spoke more than enough of her apparent disappointment. “I tried to tell you, Dyna, that it isn’t what you think you want that matters.”

“Oh. This conversation again,” Dyna said, tone flat. “Yes, Miss Subconscious, my subconscious desperately wanted to get kidnapped, so I went out and put myself into a situation where just that would happen.” While speaking, she rolled her eyes. She put as much effort into it as possible, just in case that mask Id had limited her vision.

“Position locked. Location B-3.”

Id turned with a light hum. “Less than ideal. Better than it could have been. Continue.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tell me, Dyna,” Id said. “Do you trust yourself?”

“Sure.”

Id clicked her tongue and shook her head. “You’re shrugging off my question because you don’t like me. That’s fine. I like to hear myself talk.

“I told you before that the human brain is a black box of mystery and imagination. That… was the case and still is for the majority of humanity. But some of us have cracked open that box. Do you know what we found?”

“I suspect you’re going to tell me.”

“Indeed. The literal answer, which is the one relevant to our current conversation, is that we found electrochemical charges dancing about. It is through understanding these electrochemical signals that we can begin to manipulate them. Psychics do so through a passive, intuitive manner. Transmitting and receiving through instinct alone. I doubt an illusionist could explain to you which neurons they are triggering to produce false images in your mind. That instinct causes pressure or traces, shall we say, that you should be trained to detect.”

“Spike registered.”

“Isolating. Irrelevant. Discarding.”

Id ignored the scientists behind her, keeping her focus on Dyna. “What if there wasn’t a mind intruding on your own, leaving those traces behind? Tell me Dyna, can you trust yourself? Do you trust what you are seeing in front of you?”

“Spike registered.”

“Actualizing.”

“Isolated. Decoupling.”

“Dyna, do you believe we are breathing the same air right now? Do you think we’re in the same room? Do you think we would actually set up a laboratory underneath our… competitor’s nose?”

Dyna’s eyes widened ever so slightly. Feeling the back of her mind for the signs the Carroll Institute taught her to recognize, only to come up blank. And yet, she did not miss Id’s meaning.

“You’re an illusion.”

“Spike registered.”

“Actualizing.”

“Isolated. Engaging.”

“A projection,” Id said. “Kidnapped you, did you say? Dyna, you are standing in a small room on your own. Nothing is holding you there. You can leave at any moment. We can’t stop you.” Turning to the technician at the engine-like machine, she snapped out a few quick orders. “Disable the device. Activate the Continuity Engine! And… Dyna,” she said, turning back. “Thank you. You’ve been far more help than you realize.”

“What—”

Dyna didn’t get a chance to say more than a single word. A bright flash of light blinded her, forcing her to shield her eyes with her arm. The light only lasted an instant, but it took several seconds of standing tense and blinking her eyes before she could partially see again.

The room was empty. Much as Id suggested, it was a small room. Slightly deeper than it was wide, and it was only as wide as the open garage door behind her. Apart from the solid brick walls that hadn’t been knocked out, there was a single device in the center of the room. It looked like a construction yard floodlight. The kind with two square lights propped up on a tripod.

They tricked her. They had never been present at all. Whatever the floodlights were, they must have been projecting that image. If what Id had said was true, they had projected it straight into Dyna’s mind and she hadn’t felt a thing. It had felt real, but…

Dyna moved, placing a hand on the nearest brick wall. Solid. Unmovable. Real.

It had all been fake. A display to… talk? This was the second time that Id had showed up, said thanks for something, then disappeared without actually doing anything other than having a small chat. Dyna… wasn’t sure what to think of that.

“Damn.”

Oddly enough, Dyna felt more confused than anything. Frustrated, yes. Definitely frustrated. She wasn’t sure what she would have wanted from a situation like that. Getting away safely was a good start, but it left her… unfulfilled. Like she was supposed to do something more. Gather information at the very least, as Emerald had said. And while she did have a few tidbits of information, it didn’t feel like enough. It wasn’t anything tangible.

That, perhaps, was the problem.

She could walk back to the Institute, tell them about Harold, about Id, about the disappearing laboratory and the way the illusion left no mental traces that she had been able to lock down. They would bombard her with another array of tests to be sure that she was still herself, but everything had slipped through her fingers. First Harold, then Id, then apparently even the artifact.

Dyna froze. The artifact. She didn’t know what it was supposed to do, what its themes were, as Cross and Harold had put it, but it was supposedly dangerous.

The man—Grafton, Id called him—hadn’t been part of the illusion. He had opened Dyna’s car door for her and punched in the code to open the garage.

That was why he had left early, why he hadn’t handed over the artifact to his boss. He was real. Or, at least, really here.

It had only been a minute or two. He couldn’t have gotten far.

Dyna rushed out of the storage unit. The police car was gone. Probably with him in it.

Dyna didn’t know how far off Emerald and Ruby were. She didn’t have time to wait for them.

Pulling out her phone, Dyna didn’t text them. She could do that in a minute. Time was of the essence. Instead, she dialed the Carroll Institute reception desk.

Ruby might not have much faith, but Dyna had seen proof with her own ears.

“This is Beatrice.”

“I need your help.”