Death, so call’d, is a thing which makes men weep,

And yet a third of life is pass’d in sleep.

—George Gordon Byron,

Don Juan,

Canto XIV

1

After her tussle with Rancaster on the lake, Mara remained in slow-wave sleep with a God’s-eye-view of Katherine’s private boudoir for a time, looking over Nico (the other Nico from Celia’s dream dive) undressing Mara’s body on the bed. This other Nico pulled the blood-stained shirt over Mara’s shoulders, revealing her bra and bare stomach and panties.

When all three Hearn sisters passed through Katherine’s body-length mirror, they gaped and stared, wide-eyed, at the scene before them.

Mara watched over the proceedings in agony, promising herself to confront Nico about undressing Mara while she slept, let alone in front of strangers she didn’t know. The oldest one called Katherine seemed to be in a weakened condition, cradling her head in her arms over the vanity table as the other Hearn sisters bickered, till Katherine laid down the law and chilled the whole room into silence with her glare.

The longer she watched the proceedings of these three Hearn sisters with Nico, the more Mara recognized the youngest one as Celia, the girl who nursed her back to consciousness at the sukiya-zukuri mansion with Colibe and Kendra. Guilt connected to guilt in Mara’s mind when she remembered everything she had done to Celia and her friends (especially to Colbie), but when her mind flashed on those horrific seconds of holding Nico’s dead body on Rancaster’s stage amidst a sickening applause from a demented audience, seen from the same God’s-eye-view, Mara zoomed in on Nico’s face in the boudoir.

That’s when Mara realized that these thoughts were Nico’s, when she said to Katherine, "We all need rest, Ms. Hearn. Let's hole up in this room for a while, and I'll keep a lookout for the time being."

At her formality, Mara deflated somewhat at her words, so she descended into the room right next to Nico and reached out to touch her hand, but her hand passed through it.

"I guess you're right. Till I get my strength back, I'm not much use, anyway. But Nico," Katherine said, turning around and facing the girl, "please, just call me by my first name. Same thing with my sisters, too. None of us are strangers here."

"Okay," she said, keeping her gaze to the floor.

Katherine and Mara eyed Nico. She seemed so distant all of the sudden, as if she was trying to keep something inside from collapsing in on itself, a desperate strength on the edge of breaking into a waterfall of tears.

So Katherine got up from her chair and hugged Nico close to her, saying, "It's okay. You don't have to keep it bottled up. Just let it all out, okay? Just let it out."

At her words, something inside Mara’s sister released like an overflowing dam, and her wide-eyed expression of being caught in a moment of weakness now melted into fits of crying over the dead and the hell Mara had experienced to the edge of her plight. Her sister let all that baggage out in a cascade of regret, as she fell to pieces in Katherine's embrace and cried into her shirt. And the gesture reminded Mara of doing the same thing many times before when she cried into Nico’s shirt on their bed during their parents’ escalating fights.

So Mara looked on as Celia and Madison followed suit, wrapping their arms around Nico and Katherine in commiseration.

So Mara followed suit in her own way, thinking of that son-of-a-bitch Rancaster, and walked towards Katherine’s only mirror and peered into it, looking for him. Instead, she found someone else, another girl she’d never seen before loitering in the hallway, looking just around the corner at Kendra carrying Nico Cairns in a fireman’s carry.

“What is this?” Mara looked back at the crying Nico in the room, commiserating with Celia and Madison and Katherine, and turned back to the other Nico in the hallway. “What’s going on here? Why are there two Nicos?”

Before she figured out this coincidence, she saw Nico’s bandaged leg and felt a burning sensation searing into her thigh just above her knee. The agonized grimace of Nico’s face flashed through her mind, and when she realized what had happened, she flared up in a rage that sank her bodily through a seal of red roses circumscribing her through the floor and onto the petals of an enormous red rose pillowing her and closing around her astral form—

2

And taking her across the temporal spacetime of dreams through the ceiling right behind the ‘bambina’ girl’s position around the corner, who had been waiting for Kendra and Nico.

The moment Mara alighted on the ground and dissipated the enormous rose, the atmosphere changed, and psychic waves began flooding the hallway in torrents, sweeping the ‘bambina’ girl off her feet and slamming her against the opposite wall, cracking the wall panels and pinning her there. Mara then stretched out her hand and manifested a kodachi there, gripped it in both hands and lunged into a stab, ready to ram it through this ‘bambina’ bitch who had hurt her sister—

When a gun went off down the hall, and the kodachi tumbled from Mara’s hands and fell to the floor, sticking to the floorboards through the carpet.

And the next thing Mara knew, she found Kendra up in her face, grabbing her wrists and pinning her against the wall and saying, “Stop this! You have to stop this right now!”

“I WOOOOON’T,” Mara screamed, a scream made of psychic waves that rattled the panels in the walls and the doors in their door jambs, picking Kendra off the ground and throwing her down the hall and colliding into Nico several feet away. But once she realized her mistake, she dissipated the psychic waves and ran down the hall towards Kendra and Nico. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“I know that,” Kendra said, getting back up to her feet, “but (God) you need to control yourself!”

“I am,” Mara said.

“No, you’re not,” Kendra said. “You almost killed that girl!”

“She tried to kill me, first!”

“Mara, listen to yourself!” Kendra said, grabbing Mara’s shoulders. “Do you really think killing’s worth it? Do you?”

Mara paused at her question and looked into Kendra’s eyes, looking for a confirmation where there was none, and looked away.

Kendra then hugged Mara close to her and said, “I almost did the same thing to you, but thank God I didn’t. I don’t want you to make that mistake, and neither does your sister.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling tears well up in her eyes.

“It’s okay,” Kendra said, letting go of Mara. “I don’t blame you for feeling that way.”

Her words calmed Mara down a bit, and after wiping her eyes, Mara walked over to her sister and held out her hand to her. Kendra did the same, and both girls hoisted Nico back to her feet, who limped on one leg for a moment, then gingerly planted it on the ground.

“Don’t put pressure on it,” Kendra said, and both Kendra and Mara took one of Nico’s arms over their shoulders, letting her ease up on her leg.

Then, when the trio of girls looked ahead of them towards the end of the hall, they saw Auna standing there and staring at them, holding her gun by her hip.

The girl then raised her gun at them, but just before she fired her weapon, the ceiling lights of the hallway flickered and blinked out, casting everything in darkness for an instant. When the lights came back on, Rancaster was holding Auna’s hand—still holding her gun—up to the ceiling by her wrist and had his other arm around her waist, keeping her still.

“Father, why?” Auna said.

“Remember your debut, bambina. It’s best not to get carried away,” he said, then looked up at the trio of girls before him, eyeing Kendra in particular. “As for you, darling, for a meddlesome brat who went back on her word, you’ve proven yourself an honorable child. As a token of my gratitude, I call for a cease fire, and I’ll allow you to return to your place and your life, unmolested.”

“How do I know you’re not bluffing?” Kendra said.

“You only have my word,” he said, “and the integrity of your character to discern the truth in my word. That is all. Whether you believe it or not makes no difference to me.”

“Fuck you!” Mara said. “Why would we—”

“We have no choice,” Kendra said.

“You can’t be serious,” Mara said.

“She’s right, Mara,” Nico said. “My injury won’t make it any easier on us if we keep going like this.”

“But—”

“This is a tactical retreat,” Kendra said, “not a surrender.”

“Since you found your way in,” Rancaster added, “I trust you can find your way out again.” And a gray haze emanated below Rancaster’s feet and obscured him and the ‘bambina’ girl, causing the ceiling lights to blink overhead and blinking them out of sight like a magician’s stage act.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kendra said, and she let go of Nico’s arm. “Can you keep a look out for me?”

Mara nodded and said, “What are you planning?”

“What do you think?” Kendra said. “To get out of here.”

“But how?”

“Leave it to me,” she said, and manifested a semiautomatic in her hand and came to the first door near the corner where Auna had been watching them, handled the door knob and found it locked from the inside. “We’ll need to find a bedroom to get out of here,” she said, then raised her gun and fired some rounds through the knob and kicked it open . . .

Only to reveal a large storage room full of mirrors stacked over each other against the walls.

“Kendra,” Nico said, “do we even know where the bedrooms are?”

Kendra sighed and said, “We’ll just have to try every door.”

“This’ll be slower than hell,” Mara said.

“I know! Just bear with it, okay?” And Kendra made for the next door and repeated the operation—trying the knobs, shooting them out, kicking doors open. For the next half hour, Kendra repeated her modus operandi along three separate hallways, while Mara carried Nico and kept watch, the footfalls of all three girls cracking over mirror shards. Finally, after a sizable amount of tedium had elapsed, Kendra shot out the last door knob at the end of the third hallway and kicked the door open . . .

Only to reveal one of Katherine's more secret bedrooms, wherein Kendra and Nico and Mara sucked in breath and gaped in shock.

Before them was a bed, draped in thin red linens and scattered with heart-shaped pillows, surrounded by recessed shelves stocked with dildos, vibrators, and rubber toys of all kinds on one side of the room, and several adult magazines and literary smut stocked into another set of recessed shelves on the other side of the room, and a large LCD flat-screen television inland into the front wall above another set of shelves stocked with adult DVDs and a DVD player in the middle.

Kendra was the first to enter, followed by Mara and Nico, who kept their eyes down on the floor away from the naughty objects on display, but Kendra was different.

Kendra said, “Kathy, you are a naughty girl.”

“Who?” Nico said.

“Katherine Hearn, the owner of this mansion,” Kendra said.

“You’re kidding me,” Mara said. “I never thought she’d be a closet pervert.”

“Me neither.” Kendra doubled back and shut the door, enclosing herself and her companions in the space, and stalked towards the bed and said, “If Celia hadn’t told me about it, I would never have guessed, and even then I still wouldn’t believe it.”

“So how do we get out of here?” Mara said.

“You’ll see.” Kendra then crouched and grasped the bed frame in both hands and pushed it aside, revealing one of Celia’s teleportation seals inscribed with red roses on the floor. “Ah, I knew it was there,” she said, then stalked towards a DVD collection of hentai, looked through the titles, and took one off the shelf.

“What are you doing?” Nico and Mara said.

“Oh, just planning to blackmail Celia with it,” she said, “since I know where she gets all her masturbation material now. Come on,” and she beckoned Mara and Nico to Celia’s seal, keeping one foot over the seal and one foot outside of it, till Mara and Nico were inside.

But Mara asked Kendra to take a hold of Nico for her, which she did, then stayed outside the seal.

“Hey, what gives?” Nico said. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

“No,” Mara said.

“But why?” Kendra said. “You’ll be safer staying with us than staying here. Wait a minute,” she added, and a wry smile turned up her face. “Are you planning on staying here and masturbating?”

But Mara remained unmoved, as she looked Kendra in her eyes and said, “I’m serious about staying here, and it has everything to do with Celia and her sisters.”

“Wait, they’re here?” Kendra said. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us before?”

“Because they’re in trouble and they need my help,” she said, “especially Katherine.”

“Seriously?” Kendra said. “What happened to her?”

“Didn’t you notice all the broken mirrors in the hallways?” Mara said. “All of her mirrors in the halls are broken, and we run into this Rancaster and this ‘bambina’ girl stalking around this place, both inside and outside. And the last time I saw Katherine, her sisters had to carry her to a hidden room.”

“What?” Kendra was speechless.

“That’s why I’m staying,” Mara said. “I need to help them out.”

“Do you even know where they are?” Nico said.

Mara nodded. “I”m not changing my mind. I’m staying here.”

Silence reigned for a spell amongst the girls, and Kendra said, “Don’t do anything rash, okay? I’m serious: no more of those idiot heroics. Your sister’s worried enough as it is.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.”

But Nico added, “Be careful out there, okay?”

“I will.”

Kendra lifted her leg over the threshold and activated the seal that glowed beneath their feet—

3

And took them into the same sukiya-zukuri mansion that bore witness to Mara’s fury and Colbie’s death and Kendra’s and Celia’s tears over the dead, as well as the miracle that took place between them and Nico Cairns that night.

It felt strange for both girls to tread such ground after one day, like a film replaying in their minds as their footfalls cracked over wooden splinters and tatami mats scattered over wooden planks. Kendra herself averted her eyes from the hole in the wall looking out into the ruined garden, where Kendra had almost ended Mara’s life.

“It’s okay,” Nico said. “Let it go. Just let it go.”

“I’m trying,” Kendra said, and led her limping companion towards the storage room and let her sit on the chair in the corner, so she could recuperate. Kendra headed for the countertop drawers and pulled them out and placed the hentai DVD inside, then grabbed disinfectant ointment and fresh bandage strips and towels and bottles of water. “Sit on the edge and lean your leg out.”

Nico did as she was asked. “Like this?”

“Perfect,” and Kendra crouched and unwrapped the makeshift bandages around Nico’s thigh, opened two bottles of water and poured them over her leg, making Nico wince as she cleaned out the bloodstains and patted it dry with the towel, revealing three bullet entry and exit wounds. Kendra then opened the bottle of ointment and dabbed some on both hands and said, “This is gonna sting a little, so bear with it, okay?”

Nico nodded.

Kendra massaged the ointment over her thigh, making Nico clench her teeth and squint her eyes and grip onto the edges of her chair with both hands and say, “I thought you said it was only a ‘little?’”

“Compared to the next step, it is,” Kendra said, finishing the ointment and heading towards the sink to wash her hands. She then opened another set of drawers, looking for one in particular (“Ah, there they are.”), and took out a pickling jar of chrysanthemums, a blank omamori charm, and a roll of scotch tape, then opened the lid and picked out six chrysanthemum buds and replaced the lid and replaced the jar in the drawer.

“What are those?” Nico said.

“Chrysanthemums,” Kendra said. “This is my mom’s remedy for treating moderate wounds, like gashes and some bullet wounds. Come on—stick your leg out more.”

And Nico did.

“There, perfect,” Kendra said, and she taped one chrysanthemum bud over each entry and exit wound, making Nico wince again, then wrapped her thigh with a fresh bandage and tied it in a shallow knot, making her wince again. She then grabbed another towel and twisted it. “I need you to put this in your mouth when I start the spell, okay? Prepare yourself, because this is really gonna hurt.”

Nico took it and gulped. “Really? Is it that bad?”

“Yeah, but it works,” Kendra said. “Colbie’s mom taught me how to do this, so don’t be scared, okay?”

Nico nodded.

“Are you ready?”

Nico gulped but nodded, putting the towel bit in her mouth.

Kendra placed the charm over Nico’s thigh and pressed it against her palm, then said, “Now take a deep breath for me.” And when Nico did, she said, “Therapevo!” (Heal!)

And Nico bit down on her towel bit, as the spell enacted the healing process in ten seconds that would normally take ten days, which amounted to ten excruciating seconds for Nico.

While Kendra counted under her breath, saying, “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . ten.”

She let go, revealing the word, ‘therapevo,’ smoldering into the charm above her leg, and grabbed more scotch tape and taped the charm to the bandages.

“There,” Kendra said. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Nico spit out the towel bit and glared at her and said, “I should kill you right now.”

“Don’t worry about the pain,” Kendra said. “It’ll wear off eventually. You won’t be able to get up till it heals completely, so just stay seated till then.” Kendra paused when she spotted the bloodstain on the side of Nico’s dress and said, “What’s that?”

“No, it’s fine!” Nico said.

Kendra looked at her. “Are you sure?”

“It’s fine, really! It’s fine!”

“We’ll just have to find out, shall we?”

4

While Kendra was tending to Nico’s wounds, the lights overhead flickered on and off, and a darkness more than night flooded a corner of Katherine’s hallway, turning it into a void that drummed to a beating heart. And in that beating void, there appeared the hazy figure of Rancaster in wisps of fog emanating from his feet. He had returned to the very spot where he had stopped Auna Wenger from shooting Kendra and the Cairns sisters, yet he had second thoughts on showing leniency on the trio of party crashers in the hallway earlier.

He thought of Auna Wenger in Katherine’s library and said, “I hope you’re ready to play your part, bambina,” and he stomped his foot onto the floor and dispelled the haze from the hallway, save for the trail of footsteps leading around the corner.

He then followed the trail of residual fog, crunching over broken mirror shards, and spied the ruined door with its knob shot out, thinking of Kendra’s barbaric redecorating ideas, and shook his head at Edward Tellerman’s lack of adequate parental guidance and said, “Eddie, you should’ve been more strict with her. That girl has no sense of propriety, thanks to you.”

Nevertheless, he followed the astral footsteps of the trio of party crashers and spied more of Kendra’s destructive handiwork of kicked-in doors and shot-out door knobs along three more hallways, when he stopped at the sight of those footsteps heading into the last door at the end of the hallway just before the turn around the next corner.

He peered in and stammered back, gaping at the sight of all the phallic objects on the shelves, and gulped down his qualms about entering a lady’s private boudoir. The sight brought long-dead memories of his tour of the bordellos of Italy and Spain and France in the company of Giacomo Casanova and Don Giovanni and Joseph Balsamo and even Marquis de Sade.

So he mustered up his courage and passed the threshold and then remembered Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” which colored Katherine Hearn’s character when he considered Celia Hearn’s delinquency in his mind, and said, “Lady Katherine, you naughty minx! Your dirty secrets have rubbed off on your youngest sister,” and he quoted Swift’s poem, saying,

“O never may such vile machine

Be once in Celia’s chamber seen!

O may [Kathy] better learn to keep

Those ‘secrets of the hoary deep!’”

He ignored the phalluses and the television and DVDs and DVD player and paused at a set of books with titles such as Story of O and Lolita and Ada, among others, none of which he recognized. So he manifested the translation of Marquis de Sade’s Juliette that he had ‘checked out’ of the Arcana Bookstore after Madison Hearn’s outburst and before Auna Wenger’s arrival and flipped its front cover, where the blood seal he had traced on the back fluoresced in the lamplight.

Here, Rancaster traced a sleeper curse over the blood seal and wrote Katherine Hearn’s full name on the cover. He then closed the book and placed it in between the other volumes on the shelf and smiled at his handiwork.

“That should take care of you, braid-girl,” he said and smiled at the thought of Katherine Hearn being cursed to sleep by a book she might have otherwise enjoyed as a guilty pleasure. “Sweet dreams, darling.”

Though he wouldn’t admit it to anyone, much less to Auna, Rancaster still had his naughty proclivities from his sojourn in Italy and Spain and France with those long-dead playboys. As such, he thought of introducing Auna to this room, wondering if someone of her appetites would approve, but he quelled such thoughts when he spied the bed that Kendra had moved and noticed the afterglow of Celia’s seal inscribed with red roses.

He crouched and placed two fingers on the seal and closed his eyes, in which he saw Kendra and Nico making their getaway. And before he knew it, he felt the psychic presence of Mara Cairns behind him. He turned and barely caught her afterglow, reaching out for her as the image dissipated from his mind’s eye.

“So you decided to stay, darling?” Rancaster said to the lingering afterglow. “Quite admirable of you. I guess every play needs its heroine.”

He paused at Celia’s seal a moment longer, till he remembered leaving Auna Wenger to occupy her time alone in Katherine’s library by the double grand staircase. So he turned and exited Katherine’s extra private boudoir. Just as he passed the threshold into the hallway, he took himself away in a gray fog, leaving wisps of it lingering in the air—

5

Only to arrive and get an eyeful of Auna Wenger masturbating on the solan sofa. He had manifested next to a cafe table, so he sat on a nearby chair and watched her continue to pinch and rub herself beneath her panties.

He watched her in silence, feeling himself getting hard, till she gasped and took in massive gobs of air as if coming up from a deep dive and sprawled herself over the salon sofa. Her head rested on a pillow over an arm rest, with her left arm over the edge of the sofa and her fingers over a book lying parted with its pages down on the parquet flooring next to the sofa. Her other hand was still in her panties, and she pulled out and wiped the residue over her shirt and clipped on the fastener of her skirt.

“Was it fun?” Rancaster said.

And Auna sat up in a panic, flustered at the sight of him.

She said, “How long were you there?”

“Long enough to see the whole show,” he said, getting up from the chair and approaching her . . .

6

Meanwhile, Mara manifested atop the bed in Katherine’s boudoir, inscribed in a seal of red roses and one enormous rose pillowing her astral form. When she opened her eyes, Mara found the three Hearn sisters and Nico still debating what they should do next. And when she found that they still couldn’t see her conscious self sitting up from her bed, Mara decided to play a trick on Nico and the Hearn sisters.

Mara got off the bed and leaned in towards Nico’s ear and whispered, “They’re right, you know. Have faith.”

Nico turned again and looked at her sister sleeping on the bed, thinking, Is that you, Mara?

So Mara responded by passing her finger through Nico’s lips and blowing through her finger, filling her sister with warmth like that of their first kiss, sending color to her cheeks. She then walked through Nico's astral body, filling her sister with her strength and willpower, and Nico’s breathing became labored, her lips parted, and her heart drummed in her chest.

"What is it?" Celia said.

But Nico stayed silent, thinking, What are you up to?

And in response, Mara kissed Nico’s forehead, forming an image in Nico's mind of both sisters playing hide and seek when they were children, and driving her parents crazy for hours on end. Mara was up to her old tricks, coaxing Nico to play along with her sister-in-crime.

Each of the Hearn sisters followed Nico's gaze.

Madison said, "Wait, is it Mara? Is she with us?"

Nico turned with a smile on her face, saying, "Yeah, she's definitely here. It just took her some time to wake up, but she won't be obvious about it."

"What do you mean?" Katherine said.

"Mara and I used to play hide a seek a lot when we were little, and we drove our parents crazy every time. We'll do something similar here," she said, "but we need your permission to mess with this place a little. It's your dream realm, after all."

Katherine looked in Nico's eyes and saw mischief there, and had qualms that Celia’s influence must've rubbed off on her. "Try not to mess with it too much, okay? I don't want a certain someone getting any ideas."

Celia protested. "Hey, I'm not like that!"

"Sure, you're not." Katherine ignored further protests from Celia and said, "What have you got?”

When Celia calmed down, Nico looked at her fellow conspirators, and said, "Okay, here's the plan. First, we let Mara distract them, and trust me—they won't find her in this room. They'll be too busy with Mara messing with them. Once they're distracted, we'll separate them. Celia and Maddy will deal with that 'bambina' girl, and I'll handle Rancaster.”

7

“That was the original plan, anyway,” Mara said, “but it didn’t turn out that way. What happened after that was a complete mess, because we overlooked one important detail.”

“Alice?” Colbie said.

Mara nodded and said, “And not just her, either. We weren’t aware of the sleeper curse on Katherine, till it was too late. In fact, we weren’t even aware of each other’s movements during most of tonight, until now,” and she shook her head at her own incompetence, as well. “And I even forgot about my own movements before I woke up in front of the Hearn sisters and Nico—the other Nico. God, I’m so stupid!”

“Beating yourself up won’t change anything, you know,” Kendra said, then looked at her companions, one after the other: Nico, Mara, and Colbie. “Look, I know we made mistakes. Hell, I almost got myself killed if it hadn’t been for you, Mara, but . . . we have to focus on what we can do right now. You all get me?”

And one by one, all three of Kendra’s companions nodded in understanding, and Mara gleaned the sense that Kendra was in her element, taking charge.

“Good,” Kendra said. “So what are our options now?”

“Get Katherine to wake up,” Mara said.

“That’s one,” Kendra said. “What else?”

“Deal with Rancaster,” Nico said.

“That’s two,” Kendra said. “What else?”

“Deal with Alice,” Colbie said.

“That’s three,” Kendra said. “Anything else?”

None of Kendra’s friends added in anything else, so Kendra added a fourth and said, “You’re missing a fourth objective.”

“And what’s that?” Colbie said.

“Deal with unknown variables,” Kendra said. “Since we all came here virtually blind, we had no idea what to expect, and so we had no idea how to react in case of an emergency. Hence, we’re all in the middle of this mess right now. We need a strategy on how to deal with these variables. You all get me so far?”

Again, all three of her companions nodded, and Mara got the sense that Kendra had some inklings of an idea bubbling in her head, though Mara left her thoughts about them unsaid. For now, at the moment.

“Good,” Kendra said. “I choose dealing with unknown variables as the most important objective, since it’s these unknowns that fucked up everything up to now. Do you all agree?”

And again, all three of her companions nodded.

“Okay, so that dwindles it down to three,” Kendra said. “Out of those three options left, what do you all think is the next most important objective? Colbie, what do you think?”

“Wake up Katherine,” Colbie said.

“Nico,” Kendra said, “what about you?”

“Deal with Rancaster,” Nico said.

“Mara,” Kendra said, “what about you?”

“Wake up Katherine, first,” Mara said.

“I agree with Colbie and Mara,” Kendra said, then turned to Nico: “We’ll deal with Rancaster after we wake up Katherine. We need to focus on getting more help, and since we’re infiltrating Katherine’s mansion, she’ll be a big help to us in the long run. Does that make sense?”

Nico nodded without a word of protest, but Mara zeroed in on her sister’s expression, anyway, wondering what she was thinking to make her differ in her opinion.

“Is there something on your mind?” Mara said.

“Yeah,” Nico said.

“Did you notice anything?” Colbie said.

“Yeah,” Nico said, and faced her three companions as though she were on the cusp of connecting the dots.

“What is it?” Kendra said, and again Mara wondered where her thoughts were going, wondering if Kendra’s prior inklings had any connection with Nico’s burgeoning thoughts. “Does it have anything to do with our encounter with Amelia Hearn?”

“Part of it, yeah,” Nico said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Nico said, “I didn’t really notice until Mara pointed out that there were two Nicos, one with Celia and her sisters, and me when I met Kendra. I just didn’t realize . . .” She lost her train of thought, so she looked at her surroundings and said, “Kendra, before we entered this place, you told me what we can do here, but what can’t we do here?”

“Well, for one, we can’t bring people back here from the dead,” Kendra said, “and we can’t do anything beyond what we would normally do in our dreams.”

“And that means?” Nico said.

“That means no sex,” she said, “and no killing. Those are Connie’s rules. Barring those two things, we have free reign to do whatever we like, and during Connie experiments, we follow her objectives under her supervision.”

“Okay, so does that mean we could make a simulation of places while we’re in here?” Nico said. “As in, we can recreate the same space or building or landscape that we saw before, right?”

“Yeah,” Kendra said. “As long as the place we recreate inside here comes from our own observations, like a memory of a prior visit to someplace, or a photograph of it, or even just a painting of it.”

“Okay, that makes sense,” Nico said, and again Mara wondered what was going through her mind when her sister added, “And besides Connie, who usually takes charge while you’re in here?”

“I do,” Kendra said, “though Connie delegates who’s in charge based on the kinds of experiments she runs. What are you thinking? Does it have anything to do with Amelia Hearn?”

Nico stayed silent in her thoughts, but Mara had the gist of them in her mind as she considered the contents of her own dream sequence before and after she met the Hearn sisters, then said, “Nico, are you talking about doubles, as in doppelgangers?”

“You’re both almost there,” Nico said.

So Colbie took a crack at it and said, “Are you talking about mirror reflections?”

“Yes! You got it,” she said, turning to face her friends with a smile on her face.

“I see where you’re going with this,” Colbie said, “but a mirror reflection only explains how you replicate something. That doesn’t explain how you make a copy of it.”

“Colbie’s right, you know,” Kendra said. “Unless you recreate it through a medium, like a drawing or painting or a photograph, it won’t last.”

Nico shook her head, but Mara had enough links in Nico’s argument to form an idea of what she was getting at, so she said, “I don’t think she means making something permanent by recreating it, but just remembering it long enough to form an impression of it in your mind.“

“Exactly!” Nico said. “Now do you see what I’m saying?”

“But what does this have to do with Amelia Hearn?” Kendra said.

“And what does this have to do with doppelgängers?” Mara said.

“And what does this have to do with Rancaster?” Colbie said.

“Everything,” Nico said, and her thoughts shifted the massive ballroom into another manifestation—

8

Of a large garden lake lying before them, where they stood on the boarded walkway of the embankment.

“Kendra, Amelia Hearn took us here when we entered Katherine’s dream realm,” Nico continued. “And Mara, this is the place where you fought that doppelgänger of Rancaster on the same lake. Also, Kendra, Mara, you were both with me in the hallways. What did you notice when you were there?“

Kendra and Mara traded glances, and both said, “Mirrors.”

“I saw the mirror shards strewn all over the floor,” Mara added.

“And when I came to your rescue, Nico,” Kendra said, “I saw all of those mirrors breaking in the hallways, but I never meant to break all of them. I only wanted to break one to get to your location.”

With both of their observations rolling through Nico’s mind, creating a chain of logic that Mara was just beginning to piece together in her own mind (just beginning to manifest the sequence of events like footage of a movie projector on the screen), Nico pointed at the mirror sheen of the lake towards the blood moon reflected on its surface.

“Look at the moon there,” Nico said, “and then look at the sky.”

And when Kendra, Colbie, and Mara did, each girl caught onto Nico’s drift, and Kendra said, “There’s no moon in the sky.”

“That’s exactly my point,” Nico said, “but if that was truly the case, then wouldn’t this entire place be in total darkness? Look around you. There’s no moon overhead, nor are there any stars visible in the sky, but we can still see in this place as if there still is a moon in the sky.”

Indeed, the more Mara thought about it, the more she realized the veracity of Nico’s claim. When Mara cast her gaze across the garden lake to the other side of the embankment, complete with the boarded walkway against a screen of trees, she found herself wondering if this very lake was itself a mirror—a mirror in Katherine Hearn’s mind.

“And,” Kendra added, “I noticed the same thing when Amelia Hearn took us to this place. When we walked with her down across the bridge over the water, I saw the same blood moon in the reflection of her lake, but I saw nothing in the sky.”

“Wait,” Colbie said, looking from Kendra to Nico, then back to Kendra, “are you talking about the Blood Rose Witch?”

“Yeah,” Kendra said. “Same person.”

“Do you think Rancaster and Amelia Hearn used the same spell?”

“I don’t know about that for sure,” Kendra said, “but from what Nico’s implying, and what I’ve seen in my dream sequence, I think Rancaster might have the same skill set—maybe not the same expertise as her, but definitely the same skill set.”

“Which means,” Nico said, following through on her chain of logic, “that Rancaster must’ve infiltrated Katherine’s dream mansion in a similar way.” Nico then dissipated the construct of Katherine’s lake under a moonless night sky—

9

And brought back Colbie’s mental construct of the ballroom in Katherine Hearn’s mansion and said, “Now, Colbie, did you notice any mirrors when you came in?”

“I didn’t see any mirrors when I entered the lobby area at the beginning of my dream sequence,” she said. “Only when I got to the bathroom in the lobby area did I see any mirrors.”

“How many were there?” Nico said.

“Just one continuous mirror along the wall,” Colbie said. “You know, like the ones you see in public bathrooms, but . . .”

“But what?”

“The other masqueraders were scared of me for some reason,” Colbie said, “but I don’t know why. I was wearing this mask, too.” And she scanned the ballroom from left to right, feeling a brainwave flashing through her mind, and teleported all the way to the blue section at the other end of the ballroom to get it, then teleported back to the violet section where her friends were and showed it to them. “I wore this one.”

“The color of blood?” Nico said.

“I know it’s weird,” Colbie said, wondering if she should tell her friends about the woman who walked in on her in the bathroom, “but this mask and the layout of this whole ballroom kind of reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ in which Prince Prospero confronts the Red Death in the seventh and last room of the ballroom.”

“What about in this ballroom?” Nico said, looking around at her surroundings. “Did you notice any mirrors here?”

“No,” Colbie said. “There weren’t any mirrors when I was here.”

Nico paused on Colbie’s observation, then said, “Did you see or run into Rancaster, by any chance?”

“No,” Colbie said, “but my mom did.”

“But you never met him, did you?” Nico said.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Colbie, are you serious?” Kendra said. “You’ve never met him?”

“No.”

“Damn you, Colbie, you are one lucky bitch,” Kendra said. “That fucker almost took my head off.”

“And he abducted me and Nico,” Mara said, “and had us playing Russian roulette and killed my sister.“

“And,” Nico added, “he abducted our parents and had them killed, too, the bastard.” She then looked at Colbie, singling her out, and said, “Seriously, are you telling me that you never met Rancaster during this whole night?”

“At least,” Colbie said, “I never got a chance to see him.”

At her words, Nico stayed silent for several moments, then said, “What happens at the end of Poe’s story?”

“You mean,” Colbie said, “’The Masque of the Red Death’?”

Nico nodded.

Colbie took a deep breath and said, “The protagonist, Prince Prospero, dies when he confronts the Red Death.”

Nico gulped. “How did he die?”

“When he confronted the Red Death in the black room,” Colbie said, “he died screaming upon seeing his face. Then the masqueraders rushed into the black room and tore up the shroud of the Red Death, but found nothing within.”

“Then what?” Nico breathed.

“They all died,” Colbie said.

All the while, Mara had been counting the sections of the ballroom on her fingers to herself, counting from the furthest section to the nearest (“Blue . . . purple . . . green . . . orange . . . white . . . violet . . .”) and said, “There’s only six rooms here, and none of them are black.” Mara turned to Colbie and said, “Where’s the black room?”

So Colbie pointed towards the giant grandfather clock with an empty dial-face at the end of their section of the ballroom, pointing out the double doors with its two handles beckoning for someone to grasp and pull them open. “It’s in there.”

“Did you get inside?” Nico said.

“Once,” Colbie said, “but when I tried to do it a second time, I couldn’t open it. It wouldn’t let me.”

“When you opened it the first time,” Nico said, “did you see anything?”

But Colbie shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Like I said: nothing,” Colbie said. “It was pitch-black in there. I couldn’t see a damn thing the whole time I was in there.”

“Did you see anything at all?” Nico said.

“Not in that room,” Colbie said, “but I did find Katherine’s private library. Kendra, do you still have my program with you?”

“Yeah,” she said, holding it up and opening it to the page where Katherine’s letter began. “You want it back?”

“Yeah.” When Kendra handed it back to her, Colbie perused the letter a second time and noticed four blank pages before it, where an indentation in each corner of all four pages (made from pressing a fingernail against the paper) indicated something in these pages. “Could it really be that simple?”

Mara, Nico, and Kendra crowded around Colbie, looking at the blank pages, and Nico said, “What is it?”

“Before I read this letter in Kathy’s library,” Colbie said, “I experienced a quake that knocked out the lights overhead in the library, which (by the way),” and she turned to Nico, in particular, “corresponds to what you said about the moon overhead being invisible in the night sky. And just like what you said about the moonlight still surrounding Kathy’s dream realm, even without the moon in the sky, the backup lights in Kathy’s library came on, but I just didn’t know what kind of lights they were.”

“What do you mean?” Nico and Mara said.

“Wait,” Kendra said, “do you mean black lights?”

“Yeah,” and Colbie manifested a black light in her hand and raised it over the four blank pages of the program, revealing two separate maps within Katherine’s mansion in fluorescent ink. The first map, titled

“First Floor,”

showed the ballroom with its entrance hall (or lobby area) at one end, and a hidden room enclosed with another set of double doors leading into it at the other end. The second map, titled

“Ground Floor,”

showed Katherine Hearn’s library one floor below the first map, with a hidden entrance behind one of the bookshelves leading into the private library that Colbie had entered during her initial dream dive sequence.

Colbie then flipped back to Katherine’s letter and shined the black light over it, which showed a second postscript after the first one. It read in fluorescent ink:

P.P.S.: Both maps show hidden rooms, one in the ballroom, and one in the library. I am in the seventh room in the ballroom, just beyond the double doors of the grandfather clock, but I sense another person, called the ‘bambina’ girl, somewhere in the library. I wish I could be more specific, but I think it has something to do with mirrors. Hope this helps, and I hope you find this message soon.

—K. H.

Colbie looked up from the second postscript and said to Nico, “You mentioned her name, this ‘bambina’ girl. What was it again?”

“Auna Wenger,” Nico said.

“Is that her real name?” Colbie said.

Nico paused at her question, then said, “I can’t be certain. Why do you ask?”

“Because everything we’ve been talking about in this room,” Colbie said, “like mirrors, reflections, doppelgängers, and even similarities between different events throughout our dreams, share one common element.”

“And what’s that?” Nico said.

“Acting,” Colbie said. “You know, like wearing different costumes and assuming different identities. That kind of stuff. Come on, Kendra. You know what I’m talking about. You’re wearing those clothes, remember?” And she pointed out Kendra’s tattered and bloodstained Mandarine dress.

“But this is cosplay,” Kendra said, “not acting.”

“Cosplay is a part of acting,” Colbie said. “When you and Nico met Amelia Hearn in her shop, she pegged you two as outsiders even when you were both wearing the clothes of that time period, because you were both out of character in that setting.”

“Okay, that makes sense,” Kendra said, “but how does that connect with Rancaster?”

“Or Auna Wenger?” Nico added.

“Or Alice?” Mara said.

“Because they’re all connected to the stage,” Colbie said. “Look, hear me out, okay? Nico, you were asking Kendra about this very room that Connie built for our use, and you were talking about these hallways with mirrors and the garden lake under a moonless night at Kathy’s dream realm. All of these things deal with the setting of the stage, am I right?”

“It makes sense when you put it that way,” Nico said.

“And Kendra,” Colbie continued, “you were talking about all these objectives of what we should do next, which corresponds to character goals in the storyline of a play. Am I right?”

“Yeah, it makes sense,” Kendra said, “but how does Rancaster play into all this?”

“Because Rancaster has appeared in all of your dreams tonight,” Colbie said. “I know it seems like a coincidence, but hear me out. If you were all actors playing a part in a movie or a play, then who is the one person you all have to meet during rehearsals? Come on, take a guess.”

“You mean,” Kendra said, “a director?”

“Yes,” Colbie said. “Now think about the dreams you had tonight, all of you. If all of tonight’s dreams have become the setting for a stage play, the setting for a collective storyline in which you’ve all been playing a part in until now, then who do you think has been directing everything that’s happened tonight? It should be obvious by now.”

And just like that, everyone’s eyes lit up in recognition.

Nico said, “Rancaster.”

“Exactly,” Colbie said, then looked at Nico and Mara: “And as for Auna Wenger and Alice, I think they’re the same person.”

“What?” Nico and Mara said.

“Wait a minute,” Kendra said. “Nico, Mara, and I have met Auna Wenger, this ‘bambina’ girl, but none of us have met this Alice person.”

“It’s the same thing with my mom,” Colbie said. “She met Auna in her dream, too, but not Alice. But out of everyone who had dreams tonight, I’m the only one who doesn’t fit this pattern. I’m the only one who’s met Alice, and I’m also the only one here who hasn’t met Rancaster. At least, not directly.”

“You mean, he might have seen you?” Mara said.

“Yeah,” she said, “but he hasn’t shown himself to me, or I just didn’t see him.” Colbie then backed away from the group, keeping her eyes on her friends, and said, “Either way, I know that we all play a part in Rancaster’s play, but to what end, I don’t know yet.” She then raised her hand and manifested two of her mother’s omamori charms in her hand, letting both charms hang in the air before her friends, and said, “Nico, before Auna decided to kill you, she introduced herself to you as Auna Wenger, right?”

Nico nodded. “Yeah, she did.”

On Nico’s affirmation, the right charm imprinted itself with the name of ‘Auna Wenger’ before their eyes.

“Alice did the same thing when I met her,” Colbie said. “Before my fight with her, she introduced herself as Alice Liddell.”

And on Colbie’s affirmation, the left charm imprinted itself with the name of ‘Alice Liddell’ before their eyes.

Colbie then grabbed both charms and crouched down to the floor, placing them on the ground before her friends, and said, “Oh Winds, show Auna Wenger and Alice Liddell to my friends, that they may understand. West Wind, East Wind, North Wind, South Wind, be my witnesses,” and she took a deep breath and blew onto the seals of both charms. Out of both arose images of Auna and Alice in a whirl of wind fluttering the space before them, like two doppelgängers, side by side, wearing the same white Sunday dress, sporting the same bobbed haircut, the same face, etc.

“Are you serious?” Kendra said.

Nico said, “They’re—”

“Twins,” Mara said, and without even noticing, she found herself grabbing a hold of Nico’s hand, and both sisters traded glances before turning back to the spectacle in front of them.

The gesture caught Colbie’s eye, and she looked at Mara and said, “Do any of you know anything about them?”

At first, Kendra and Nico and Mara remained silent.

Mara hesitated telling her friends the last link in the chain of horrors they were about to enter, but swallowed her qualms and said, “Auna Wenger was a sacrifice.”

“A sacrifice?” Colbie said. “Do you mean, like, a sacrifice for a summoning?”

“Yeah. Nico and I—” She glanced at the current Nico beside her and said, “Sorry. The other Nico, not you. Anyway, we were at Cooley’s mansion while Cooley was away on a mission.”

“What kind of mission?” Colbie said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Cooley wouldn’t say. Anyway, while Cooley was away, we asked Blaze what had happened. She said she and Kathy fought two other girls who looked like Auna after Cooley located them in Kathy’s mansion, and when they finally found Celia’s location, they found Auna with her at the base of the staircase. Blaze wouldn’t tell us what happened, but she said they found Auna dead on the landing just before they retrieved Celia, and . . .”

Mara’s words drifted off at this point.

“And what?” Colbie said.

“Blaze said,” Mara continued, “they all saw Auna come back to life on the landing and attacked Celia, before Rancaster prevented her from doing anything else. That’s when they all came in and got Celia out of there, but not before Blaze noticed something strange about Auna.”

“Strange how?” Colbie said.

Mara paused for a bit before saying, “Blaze said it was like seeing the dark side of Auna coming to life as if she had a hidden personality. She also said that when they found Celia’s location, they heard two gunshots going off at the same time, and that’s when they saw Auna dead on the landing with Celia crying over her.”

“Two gunshots?” Colbie said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“What time did you hear them?” Colbie said.

“Close to midnight,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m asking,” Colbie said, looking into Mara’s eyes, “because I heard two gunshots close to midnight, as well, when I came through this ballroom to enter that grandfather clock over there,” and she pointed towards the lone grandfather clock at the end of the ballroom ahead of them, the one with no hands on the dial face. “And I’m not the only one, either. My mom mentioned hearing something similar at the same time, close to midnight, in her own dream dive. Once is a fluke, two at the same time is a coincidence, but three at the same time? I’d call that a synchronicity.”

“A synchro-what?” Mara said.

“Don’t mind her,” Kendra said in a deadpan expression. “Colbie’s into this glitch-in-the-matrix kind of stuff.”

“I’m serious here!” Colbie said, then back to Mara: “What else did she say?”

“We asked Blaze what was on her mind,” Mara said, gazing into her memory of their conversation with a blank stare, “and she said something about a blood sacrifice. That’s why I mentioned it when I did. We asked her why she thought about that, but she wouldn’t say anything else about it, so we changed the subject, which eventually led to Strip Poker. Don’t ask, please.”

Colbie just looked at her and smiled, then rolled the rest of her own thoughts through her head and said, “Was there anything else she said?”

“She said,” Mara continued, “she looked for the two doppelgängers of Auna where she and Maddy left them, but she found them missing. The only thing left of them were the bloodstains, and when we asked her what she thought must’ve happened, she said that they must’ve disappeared soon after they heard the two gunshots going off.”

“My mom saw them disappear in her own dream,” Colbie said, “but it happened on a bridge overlooking a harbor, and they both left bloodstains on the bridge, too. Do you think they’re connected?”

“I’m starting to think so,” Mara said.

“Then do you know their names?” Colbie said.

“No.” Mara’s answer left Colbie silent, and Mara had some inklings of what she was thinking, though she was uncertain where the chain of logic led to, so she said, “Is that all we know?”

“That’s it so far,” Colbie said. “Any other ideas?”

Again, Kendra and Nico and Mara stayed silent.

Colbie dissipated her spell, dispelling the dual images of Auna Wenger and Alice Liddell, then looked to Kendra and said, “It’s your turn. We’ll follow your lead from here on out.”

So Kendra took Colbie aside and proposed a plan that utilized the functions of Connie’s place to their advantage in Katherine’s ballroom, and Colbie approved. With that, Kendra and Colbie let Nico and Mara into their confidence, and once Nico and Mara approved, all four girls went to work preparing the simulated ballroom around them.

Kendra manifested a row of howitzers in the violet section of the ballroom, each one aimed at the double doors of the grandfather clock that hid Katherine inside. She then duct-taped two blocks of C-4 explosives connected to a remote-controlled detonator against the handles and hinges of the double doors, should the howitzers fail to make a dent, and put Nico in charge of it from an elevated position, pointing towards the chandelier hanging above their heads. For her part, Nico volunteered to act as reconnaissance and advised that they all keep in radio contact, giving them wireless earpieces, so she could relay information from her position. In addition, Nico suggested placing a mirror against the double doors to see what was inside to make sure Katherine was inside, first, before they blasted the doors, which Kendra approved. On Colbie’s observation that reinforcements might have arrived since her last visit to the ballroom, Mara manifested a set of roadblocks surrounding their position to slow down enemy movements, and Kendra manifested a row of Gatling guns against these makeshift bulwarks as further security and volunteered to man these as chief gunner and main guard, then added dozens of boxes full of grenades and flash bangs and smoke bombs and volunteered as chief grenadier. Mara and Nico volunteered as offensive guards in charge of engaging dangerous mobile threats, like Alice and Rancaster.

Colbie grabbed Nico’s hand and teleported her to the top of the chandelier and said, “Don’t fall, okay?”

“I’ll try not to,” Nico said, then placed the earpiece to her ear, held the remote detonator in one hand. “I’m ready.”

Afterwards, Mara and Colbie set off to work on their own additions to the battlefield. Mara went towards the other side of the ballroom and manifested concrete roadblocks against the double entrance doors, barricading it from reinforcements getting in. Meanwhile, Colbie manifested several omamori charms in her hands and teleported to all four corners of the simulated ballroom to place three charms on the floor of each corner, one with the Greek word, ‘katapató,’ to ‘override’ Connie’s safety checks preventing dreamers from manifesting serious injuries in their sleep in order to merge the simulation with the ballroom, another one with the Greek word, ‘epikálymma,’ to ‘overlay’ the simulated ballroom over Katherine’s ballroom, and a third with the Greek word, ‘metafrázo,’ to ‘translate’ all of their preparations into the ballroom. In addition, she manifested more roadblocks running parallel along every section of the ballroom, dividing the ballroom into aisles to further restrict enemy movements.

Kendra looked at Colbie’s handiwork and whistled, saying from her position by the cannons, “You should be a general, Colbie.”

Colbie turned and faced her senpai with a smug smile on her face and said, “Divide and conquer, right?”

“Please, don’t bring politics into this,” Kendra said, then into her earpiece: “Is everyone ready?”

With Nico perched overhead, and Mara and Colbie armed with kodachi and dagger on either side of Kendra, all three girls said into their earpieces, “Ready!”

With that, Kendra nodded towards Colbie.

Colbie closed her eyes, imagining Connie’s safety checks as omamori charms breaking in her mind, one by one, and yelled, “Katapató!” (Override!)

And the simulation shook and rumbled its foundations, booming in succession like the fireworks on the Fourth of July, like volleys of cannons exploding through the astral plane. The herringbone parquet flooring shifted and cracked beneath their feet, the chandeliers overhead shifted and swayed on their chains, clinking the dangling crystals beneath Nico’s feet, and the lights blinked on and off in quick succession.

10

Connie Davis awoke to the blinking of her lamplight beside her on the nightstand, breathing hard like she had been startled from a daze. She turned over in bed and reached under the lampshade and turned on the light, squinting her eyes, then sat up in bed and felt her forehead. The stress of informing Leslie Amame and Celia’s sisters about yesterday’s events and visiting Mara Cairns in the hospital only to find Roy Dolan there, in particular, had given her a headache later that day, and she had taken ibuprofen to relieve it. She felt no more pain, but her skin felt clammy and cold, her bangs sticking to her forehead, so she put her hand over her chest and felt it beating hard and fast. She began breathing in and breathing out, repeating her breathing exercises, and managed to calm down enough to ease her heart rate.

Connie paused in the darkness, wondering what had awoken her out of her dream. At first glance, the dream itself was nothing special, but she had recorded her dreams long enough to know the significance of keys, of her dream self taking it off of her night stand and opening a chest that contained . . . What, exactly?

She couldn’t remember. She had woken up just before she saw inside the box.

She stretched her arms out, arching her back, got out of bed, and lumbered into the bathroom and turned on the light, and her tire reflection greeted her with a weary glance. She took a double take and paused as her vision doubled and tripled and quadrupled, squinting her eyes and pressing her fingers over her eyelids, till her vision returned.

She looked at herself in the mirror again, and clarity returned to her, but the light-headed feeling lingered, and with it something else. What it was, though, she could only guess.

“God, what the hell’s wrong with me?” she said, unaware of Colbie’s actions in the rapid-eyed consciousness of lucid dreams till they became the wide-eyed terror of nightmares.

11

When the last of Connie’s safety checks broke with a thundering crack, Colbie then imagined the simulated ballroom synching up with Katherine’s and yelled, “Epikálymma!” (Overlay!)

And the simulation of Connie’s place doubled and tripled and quadrupled, blurring the lines with each new replication of the space, then synching back up into sharp lines like a camera lens coming into focus.

Yet the scene that greeted them, seen through the refraction of a superimposed simulation over a shifting reality, seemed like the ghost of the past remastered into a three-dimensional virtual film. In fact, the party of masqueraders, many of them normal-looking party-goers in costumes and masks, seemed more like ghosts and phantasms than actual people. Yet one thing was clear: they all grasped at knives and daggers and cane-swords and rapiers and sabers—all blades still sheathed at their sides and in their grasps.

“Fuck, we’re screwed!” Kendra said.

“I have a plan, so don’t worry,” Colbie said. “The moment we get there, I can take them here, and they’ll all be out of our hair till we deal with them later.” Then she touched Kendra’s shoulder and looked in her eyes, getting her attention, and said, “But if I do this, you’ll be one down, so you and Mara and Nico will have to be on your own, till I get back. How long can you hold out?”

“I don’t know,” Kendra said. “Maybe two minutes, tops.”

“Geez,” Colbie said, “give me a break.”

“We don’t have breaks,” she said. “A lot of shit can happen in two minutes, and that’s me being generous.”

Colbie sighed and said, “Then give me five minutes.”

“Four minutes,” Kendra said, pointing a finger in Colbie’s chest, “or nothing, got it?”

“But—”

“I’m not the only one depending on you, Colbie,” Kendra said. “Mara and Nico are, too. Don’t forget that.” And then she grimaced and looked down on the floor and said, “I wish to God Celia were here right now. She’d be able to buy us more time.”

“I’ll try my best, okay?” Colbie said.

Kendra nodded her head in a noncommittal way.

Both girls turned towards all the masqueraders standing at attention and listening to a familiar figure in a white Sunday dress, one that Colbie recognized. She was addressing this audience, but her voice carried no note, as though the refracted state of two superimposed worlds snuffed out all sound into a ghostly hum around them.

“Is that Alice?” Kendra said.

“Yeah,” Colbie said, “and she is one tough bitch. Don’t underestimate her, okay?”

“Duly noted,” Kendra said, but remained silent as though working something over in her mind. “Colbie, if you’re gonna take these masqueraders out of here, do you think you can take Alice out of here, too?”

“That’s a tall order for me,” Colbie said. “I’ll try, but I’m not Celia. Even with the help of Connie’s place, I can’t teleport people stronger than me against their will.”

“Just try your best, okay? That’s all I’m asking,” Kendra said, then said into her earpiece, “Nico, kill the lights,” and Nico cut all the chandelier lights overhead, casting the whole ballroom in gloom and sending the masqueraders into a mass panic. Then Kendra said to Colbie, “You ready for this?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Colbie said, and went to work. She imagined the refracted spaces merging together in her mind, the simulation and reality lining up, till the unearthly hum merged with the din of a panicked mob. She took one deep breath and yelled, “Metafrázo!” (Translate!)

And the battle was afoot.

つづく