Dyna didn’t wait for the nonsense of secret handshake numbers. The second Walter answered his phone, she shouted into the receiver, “Do you have a way of tracking Ruby?”

“Tracking?”

“Some chip implanted in her phone or… skin or something. You’ve got to have something, right?” Dyna asked. She switched the phone to speaker mode so that she could go back to scrolling through her notes and emails to herself. “Ruby was supposed to be here. She wasn’t supposed to leave my side for any reason.

“I remember her being on this trip with me. We were at the hotel and… stuff. But she’s gone. I can’t… I can’t remember what happened to her or when she disappeared. That means something messed with my head again and I’m pretty sure that something is the Hatman.”

“Dyna—”

“I was at the hospital, trying to figure out how to get Matt out. The Hatman showed up, standing there watching us on the security cameras. I saw it on… a phone. Ruby’s phone? It had to have been, because it wasn’t my phone and nobody else would have that. So Ruby was there. The Hatman came and… I got away. He got Ruby. He must have grabbed her. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

“We do have a way of tracking Ruby, Dyna. Several in fact. I have the team pulling them up now. But I need you to remain calm.”

“Calm? Ruby’s been captured by some inhuman monster that messed with my memories and makes people disappear.” Dyna slammed her palm against her forehead and started rubbing. “And now she’s gone. Disappeared—”

“Dyna—”

“He’s right.”

Dyna looked up at the new voice to find one of the terminal screens now angled toward her. The person on the screen hid their face behind the same type of brushed silver mask that Dyna had on, but her wafting black hair betrayed her identity immediately.

“Id.”

“Hello again, Dyna. We really should meet under more pleasant circumstances one of these days.”

“Pass,” Dyna said.

Walter’s deep voice didn’t carry quite as well over the phone, but Dyna could still detect a tinge of annoyance when he spoke. “You are… not alone.”

“Tartarus showed up. If I had been trying to get Matt into the car on my own, the Hatman probably would have caught up. I can’t exactly say I’m ungrateful, but if they had showed up earlier…”

“Dyna, please,” Id said. “We’re not your enemies. At least not at this moment. And your wallowing in self-deprecation and despair is actively harming your own goals. You can’t think that it is impossible to rescue your friend. Because it isn’t. It is possible to find her again.”

That made Dyna sit up fully. She didn’t trust Tartarus in the slightest, but Walter had already admitted that the Carroll Institute knew nothing about the Hatman. Tartarus obviously did. If Id said that Ruby hadn’t just disappeared forever, that did give Dyna some small amount of hope.

“Two of our trackers failed,” Walter said, “but one other just came back online. Ruby is alive. Both well-trained and nearly impossible to kill, I have confidence in her ability to survive.”

“See?” Id said. “Now, in the interest of pursuing our goals—”

“What are your goals, exactly?”

Id’s hair flowed behind her, the only movement she made for several moments. “Tartarus exists to contain threats. Threats such as your Hatman. I shall not elaborate further.”

Something about the way she spoke struck Dyna as odd. In all her previous encounters with Id, the woman had spoken with obtuse yet flowing speech. This felt… stiff. Like she was being forced to speak.

Before Dyna could think any further on the subject, Id stepped aside, allowing someone else to step onto the screen. A younger man with wavy brown hair, a light-blue laboratory coat, and a polka-dot bow tie. He smiled and waved while Id introduced him.

“This is Doctor Dark—”

“With a q.”

“Yes,” Id said, sounding more exasperated at the non-sequitur than Dyna had heard before. “Doctor Dark is Tartarus’ expert in entities such as your Hatman.”

“Indeed I am,” Dark said. “And what a pleasure it is to meet you all. The illustrious Walter, of course, everyone knows—”

“How?”

“Though forgive me for saying that I am quite glad to not be meeting you face-to-face. And Dyna Graves, I have been most interested in meeting you for a… long… time.”

“Ugh.”

Great. Just what Dyna always wanted. Another nutjob wanting to talk to her. Id was more than enough. The worst part was that Id seemed to agree. Her face was entirely hidden behind the mask, but her stance shifted, leaning away from him.

“There is, unfortunately, one small request I have in return for our assistance in recovering your ally,” Id said after a moment of awkward silence.

“Of course,” Walter said, tone flat.

“You are currently holding captive, quite illegally, I might add, allies of ours. Grafton and Porter. I would ask for their release.”

Dyna opened her mouth then immediately clamped it shut. Harold Porter disappeared as far as Dyna knew. Or rather, she thought he ran off to work for Id. Unless Walter had been lying, or unless he had since been captured and Dyna hadn’t heard about it, Harold wasn’t at the Carroll Institute.

But actually saying so was something that she should probably absolutely not do. That was something Walter could handle.

And, after a long moment of silence, Walter said, “No deal.”

Dyna immediately grimaced. Saying no was probably the right answer, not dealing with this organization that could easily betray them, but that meant that she would probably be trying to rescue Ruby on her own. A few months of learning how to shoot guns and fight a little, along with some additional psychic resistance training, did not feel like nearly enough preparation to figure out how to rescue Ruby from a literal monster.

“Come now, be reasonable.”

“Mister Porter possesses significant knowledge of proprietary procedures, protocols, and classified material.”

“Your mind technicians haven’t stripped him of that valuable information yet?” Id asked, cocking her head to one side. “Just Grafton then. One-for-one. Surely an artificer of Ruby’s prowess is worth releasing a mere mind controller?”

“That… is more reasonable.”

“Excellent. Then we have an accord. Tartarus will assist in recovering your operative from the entity. In exchange, Grafton will be allowed free. No tracking or recapturing him the moment he leaves his cell, naturally.”

“Arrangements will be made if and only if we recover Ruby or her artifact.”

Dyna opened her mouth, about to protest leaving her friend behind in exchange for a stupid trinket, only to snap it shut once again. Ruby was her artifact. She had said so herself. Rescuing one meant rescuing the other.

“Excellent. Doctor Dark, you are free to share knowledge of the entity. And only the entity. If you’ll excuse me,” Id said, “I have unrelated work to attend to.”

“I wish there were more time for pleasantries,” Doctor Dark said, stepping forward as Id moved off the screen, “but we have work to do. I understand the situation has developed into something of an emergency for you, so I shall do my best to assist.”

Still smiling, he clasped his hands together. And then he just stood there. Still. Unmoving. He didn’t even blink. In fact, the entire time Id and Walter had been talking, he… hadn’t moved. Had he? Dyna had been focusing on the conversation.

Ado, who had been silently watching the screen with her arms folded over her chest, rolled her head on her neck. Her eyes were still hidden by the strange goggles, but Dyna could easily imagine her rolling her eyes. “You’re doing it again.”

“Oh.” Dark blinked. “My deepest apologies. I was merely captivated. So, the Class Two Phase-Wandering entity, apparent colloquial identity: Hatman. It has actually been on my radar for a while now, but only recently did the manpower to track it down become available. Quite a bothersome entity to track as well. Phase-Wandering, in this case, refers to its tendency to not exist in what is generally accepted as reality. It certainly does exist out there at times, but not all the time,” he said with a small chuckle.

Dyna bit her lip. She drummed her fingers against her thigh. The scientists and lecturers at the Carroll Institute, and even regular schooling before that, often loved to talk about their subjects. They were passionate about their work and, in many cases, viewed themselves as leading experts in the field. Which was probably not untrue. Even if someone knew very little, psionics as a whole were just so new that just about anyone who researched the subject could be considered an expert.

This Doctor Dark had the exact same tone as the Carroll Institute’s scientists. As, apparently, Tartarus’ expert in entities, that should probably be expected. But a lecture was all well and good when sitting in a school or the school-like environment of the Carroll Institute.

Here and now?

With Ruby missing and the Hatman potentially still after Matt?

She didn’t have time to pull out her notebook and start jotting down highlights of the lecture.

“Doctor Dark, what do—”

“Dark. With a q.”

“What?”

“My name is spelled with a q,” he said with a smile and casual laugh. “Don’t worry, everyone gets it wrong the first time.”

Dyna shook her head. She really didn’t care if he spelled his name with a stupid emoji. “What does the Hatman do with the people he… touches? Kidnaps? How do we get Ruby back?”

Darq’s smile slipped slightly, but only for a moment. “For your first question, unfortunately, I don’t know. As I mentioned, manpower has been limited up until recently. My current hypothesis is that the entity relocates individuals outside the cognitive spectrum of reality. Your companion still exists, but not in any way perceivable by standard humans and, likely, most psychics. She could even be sitting right next to you, watching this conversation.”

Dyna, sitting on the truck floor between some machinery attached to the walls, snapped her head around, slowly reaching out with an arm to maybe touch what she couldn’t perceive. Matt was on the floor next to her. Awake, she noted, though he was just sitting there. Listening in without trying to draw too much attention to himself? Or maybe still somewhat ill from the anesthetics. Whatever the case, Dyna paid him little mind as she reached around.

If Ruby were here, Dyna figured that she would be close by. Somewhere well within arm’s reach. If Dyna couldn’t touch her, then she either wasn’t here or couldn’t be touched. Or maybe Dyna couldn’t remember touching her. That seemed like a thing that could happen with the Hatman’s ability to erase specific memories.

Ado also turned to look around the truck. The woman didn’t reach out and try to touch anything, but she did reach up to the side of her goggles and press a few buttons. Her right lens, the one divided into four differently colored boxes, flashed through several more colors.

“Likely not, however,” Darq said. “I imagine being phase-shifted in such a manner would be… jarring to the mind and body. I doubt she would be in any state to interact with much of anything. Assuming someone shifted in such a manner can even perceive us.”

“You could have started with that,” Ado said, returning the lenses to their original green and yellow colors.

Dyna, scowling as well, looked back to the screen. “So how do we perceive her? And get her back to normal?”

“First, you must physically find her. Your tracking device should assist with that, provided it remains operational. Then… we will need to contain the entity. Chief Engineer Ado is quite accomplished, capable of creating devices even I have trouble believing exist. Studying the entity should provide data necessary to manufacture a device capable of reversing what the entity did.”

“I doubt it will be quite so simple,” Ado said despite her nodding along with what Darq was saying, “but I have created far more complex devices.” She glanced over toward Dyna for just a moment, then nodded her head. “Yes. This should be relatively simple.”

“That’s…” Dyna let out a small sigh. A relief? Probably, though Dyna wasn’t so sure she was ready to breathe easy just yet. This was all assuming that the Hatman did this phase-shift thing to Ruby and then immediately ignored her. Ruby might not be easy to hurt, but a literal monster could probably come up with some creative ways of harming her. “So we track down Ruby first. Get her someplace safe, even if we can’t interact with her? We can do that with Walter’s tracking device. Then how do we track down the Hatman?”

“That might be a little more troublesome of a task,” Darq admitted.

Ado took over. “Our technology allows us to monitor a wide area for anomalies. It is, unfortunately, not very precise. I am working on it, but…”

“So we don’t have a way of finding him.”

That was literally half the plan. Find Ruby. Find the Hatman.

So far, Dyna had run into the Hatman three separate times over the past day. That was a high number, but it wasn’t anything about her that had been the cause of that. Slowly, she looked over to Matt.

He didn’t move his head, but his eyes met hers. They stared at each other for a moment before he closed his eyes.

The Hatman had been after him. Apparently for quite a while. Would it still be after him now that it had gotten a hold of Ruby? Dyna didn’t know. It seemed absurd that it would just decide to give up after potentially years. Maybe even from all the way back in middle school—though without having had a chance to talk to him yet, Dyna wasn’t sure if the Hatman had started chasing Matt back then or if he had simply remembered and found the Hatman after him later on.

It was a better bet than anything else they had, apparently. Unless Ado or Walter could come up with some other way of tracking the Hatman, using Matt as bait could be their only real option.

Could she convince him to help? Did he have a choice?

Now that he was awake and not trying to kill her, sitting him down for a conversation sounded like a good idea. This all had to be beyond overwhelming, assuming he was cognizant enough to understand the flow of conversation and what was going on. He might have even been drifting in and out of the conversation, not even getting the full thing.

Looking back to the screen, and the phone in her hands where Walter had been conspicuously silent throughout, Dyna said, “Let’s start with Ruby. Get her someplace safe. Away from the Hatman.” Looking back to Matt, she added, “We can work on the other issue as we go.”

Walter did speak up this time. A simple, “I concur. I can have Ruby’s tracking data redirected to Dyna’s device. Get her secure and safe and I will follow through with Id’s request.”

“I’m sure Id will be pleased to hear that. As a gesture of good will, I shall send over my full thesis on this particular entity. She did say I was free to share such information, after all. And it has been so long since others have read my work. I would love to know your thoughts afterwards.”

“Make no mistake,” Walter said, “this interaction does not make us friends or allies. This is a business decision.”

“No reason to not be pleasant about it.”

“Mhm. Dyna, your phone will ask you to install an application shortly. It will lead you to Ruby. Work with Tartarus, but try to avoid topics of interest to the Carroll Institute. Your priorities: Recover Ruby. Assist Tartarus in containing the entity. Keep yourself safe. Understood?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Good. The next time you find yourself in a private location, contact me again.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The line went dead the second Dyna responded. A moment later, her phone vibrated. Just as Walter had said, it was asking her to install something. Dyna accepted.

“So untrusting,” Darq said with a sad shake of his head. “I for one will relish the opportunity to work with you.”

“I just want Ruby back.”

“Of course. Of course. And, as Id so eloquently put it, we are here to assist in that endeavor. Shall we get started? Your phone now has the tracking information, correct? If you would be so kind as to hand that over to the chief engineer, we can redirect your transit immediately.”

Dyna didn’t hesitate. She didn’t exactly like handing over her phone, but Beatrice was probably monitoring it. Phones didn’t just randomly ask to install applications, after all. If worse came to worst, the institute would probably provide a new phone. In fact, they would probably do that anyway. Just being in the truck was probably compromising enough as it was.

If it got her to Ruby faster, Dyna was more than willing to let them keep it.