Taryn ran to hug Vares as soon as Wendar left.

“This is not the proper way to greet your sovereign,” he immediately chided her. “Release me.”

She buried her face in his chest and hugged him tighter as the tears came, holding on as long as he allowed her. Because he was home. And now she could go back to wearing pretty dresses and adorning herself in all his gifts and know that she meant something to him, even if he never told her, even if he pretended otherwise. She could come to these dinners and remind herself that she was a friend of the King.

She started to sob. He gave her a halted pat on the back before finally just resting his hand on her shoulder. Taryn didn’t know how long he stayed with her like that but he didn’t push her away and she was so grateful for that. It allowed her to let out all of the fear and uncertainty and insecurity that had built up in her since he’d abandoned her three months ago. And she didn’t have to look over her shoulders anymore, or read every flame that lurked in the dark anymore, because he was home and she was safe again.

He didn’t say anything when she finally pulled away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve soiled your shirt.”

He gathered two creme colored napkins from the table and held one out to her. “I’ve been warned that young women are highly emotional creatures by nature and prone to… leak on occasion.” He wiped his shirt while she blew her nose; the undignified noise put a scowl on his face and she laughed out loud.

She’d really missed him. When Taryn entered the room he had been the perfect picture of a Lothor god-king; his face a mask of bored indifference, his posture rigid, his eyes piercing and punishing. Now he was more relaxed, playful, and perhaps a little concerned. Now he was the man who liked to pretend he had a heart of stone. The man who didn’t mind that she used her abilities for every little thing (as long as no one else saw her.) Who was slightly annoyed by her refusal to address him as one should their King. And was incredibly annoyed – nearly to the point of outrage – that she refused to obey his every command.

He complained about her and threatened her with further restrictions. But he never made good on his threats. They weren’t empty threats. Taryn wasn’t fool enough to ever think that they were. But she was careful never to overstep her freedoms and he was extremely tolerant of her. Vares was the man who had been more a father to her than Dr. Seir pretended to be in her years at the palace and her dinners with him were the best part of her days.

“It looks like someone couldn’t wait to eat.”

Hunter’s tail swished happily in the air as he buried his face in an arrangement of glazed meats. Taryn lifted him off the table, along with a half-fist serving of what looked like orange glazed chicken. Taryn registered a catalogue of everything that dressed the table; a reservoir of a thick vegetable soup and jugs of wine, fruit juice, milk and water; a basket full of warm bread, a tub of creamy butter, hunks of cheese diced into small cubes and meats garnished with herbs, a platter of sliced fruit. She rearranged all of that to open up some room for Hunter to have a place beside her, set a dish for him and loaded it with meat and gravy.

“Tell me what prompted that emotional outburst.” Vares held her seat out for her on his left before he seated himself.

Taryn smiled as she poured juice in her glass and started piling food onto her plate. It had taken her five years to teach him to ask questions instead of making demands. She thought she might enjoy the reeducation.

“These are new,” she said, lifting the chess board set up in front of the fireplace. One of the armies was solid gold and sculpted in a romanticized celebration of nobility. The tall, bearded king looked very dignified. The tireless arms of the slender archers maintained fully drawn bows. Ornately armored knights rode muscle-riddled steeds. The opposing army looked like it had been cut from emeralds, which she thought was wasteful since he already had an emerald set. Until she actually held one of the pieces in her hand. This was something lighter in color, and weightier. Its knights rode on the backs of serpentine dragons. The towers boasted ten layers of highly decorated multi-incline roofs. The pawns were shaved warriors dressed in loose robes and armed with long staffs. “Treasures from your travels?”

“…Your Majesty.”

“I’m not royalty, Vares,” she laughed. “You can call me Taryn.”

“Or I could call you a prisoner,” he said with a growl.

“Empty threats are no substitute for proper declarations of affection. I already know you cut your trip short because you missed me. It’s okay to admit it.”

“Lothor Kings do not lie.”

“I know,” Taryn said. “Instead you deflect to avoid answering uncomfortable questions.”

“I may have thought about you a time or two,” he admitted. “Now I’m beginning to think my time would have been better – You’ve just spent hours in a bakery and all you want to eat is dessert?”

“It’s not all I want to eat.” Taryn had willed a pile of custard tarts onto her plate. “I just prefer to eat it first.”

“You will eat your soup first.”

“Fine.” Taryn moved the plate aside and ladled soup into a bowl. She tasted garlic and a hint of dill when she sampled it and shredded a few rolls to soak.

“I’ve been gone three months and you’ve already forgotten how to behave in the presence of royalty?” Vares asked.

‘You and I are alone in here, Vares,’ Taryn Echoed; it was impolite to speak with a full mouth. ‘There is no royalty.’

“You do not eat before the King.”

Taryn swallowed. “The King should have been eating when I arrived. It’s been hours since I’ve had anything to eat and I am starved.”

“If you would ration your food properly for the day, instead of inhaling it like some ill-bred savage, you wouldn’t have that problem,” Vares sneered before starting on his own meal.

Taryn willed his bowl into the air and made it swirl over his head, careful not to spill a drop.

“What are you doing?”

“They say that mutants have no power in the presence of a Gifted King, so I’m just making sure that you haven’t suddenly become a god in your absence. No; there’s nothing special about you,” she observed. She replaced his dish and grinned. “You’re still just as common as any other middling.”

“I think it’s time we add an evening extraction to your routine,” he said casually.

Taryn gaped at him. An evening extraction was something she considered to be a punishment akin to inhibition. “That is not funny.”

“You haven’t stopped moving or projecting since you swaggered in here,” he said. “The only reason we stop at an afternoon extraction is so that you would be capable enough for our evening sessions – ”

“Is that what you tell yourself?”

“ – but my mental defense is impeccable and you’ve done all you can for me.”

“I did not say it was impeccable. Above average, at best, but – ”

“It’s obvious that you’ve retained an excessive amount of secarin in my absence so the next time I’m away I’ll be sure to add a third daily extraction.”

“No,” Taryn said.

“It appears you’ve forgotten a lot more than I thought. When your King gives you an order, there is only one response. ‘It shall be done just as you say.’ Rehearse it,” he commanded her.

“No, what you don’t understand is that you’re not leaving me behind again,” Taryn explained. She didn’t care what it cost her. There was no way she would remain at the palace to deal with the LAAMP without him.

For a long time it seemed he didn’t know what to say. Taryn feared he would bypass her and simply make the command official by amending her immunity agreement. A third daily extraction would make her less than useless until her body acclimated to the drain. She would have to find a way to talk him out of it. She didn’t want to spend his first week back angry with him.

“Is that why you were upset?” he asked softly. “Because I left you behind?”

His persistence was endearing. It showed a concern that encouraged her fragile hopes. Yet her fears remained. She’d only just gotten him back and they weren’t fully themselves yet. He hadn’t met his daily quota for threats of imprisonment and she hadn’t even begun to test the limits of his patience. Now was not the time to test the strength of their friendship.

“If you needed a new chess set, I could have carved one for you,” she said instead. “There was no need to travel to the temples of the unholy monks all the way in the eastern provinces and beg for a jade set. Unless you had some other mission in mind.”

When he finally realized he wasn’t going to get an explanation from her, he dropped the matter. Taryn could tell that he wasn’t pleased. There was just the slightest clenching of his jaw; his posture shifted so that he was angled away from her and her perception of the flame in his mind diminished. Taryn considered reconsidering.

He cleared his throat between sips of wine. “It’s come to my attention that you’ve been pestering my curators for access to the game room. I thought you might like to begin a collection of your own.”

Taryn choked on her juice. “The set is mine?”

He shrugged. “I know the martial arts cultivated in the eastern provinces have always fascinated you.”

“And you didn’t think a trip to study alongside them would have been more apropos?”

“I’ll take it back then.”

“Absolutely not.” Taryn studied her gift with new eyes. Every piece was crafted with such intricate detail; from the queen’s extravagant head piece to the blocky underbelly of the towers’ many roofs. Every dragon scale, tooth, and claw was distinct from its neighbors. So much time and care went into the production and it warmed her heart that he’d had it done for her. “Look out, Hunter. You may have some competition for your position as my companion.”

The feline continued to lap up his gravy. She gave him a quick scratch and set a bowl of water for him. “What excuse did you have for stopping by the Bellautorex mines?” That was the only place to get a set of solid gold chess pieces. Bellautorex gold was the finest in the world.

“Ah, that,” he said. “I was shopping for a bride.”

This time, Taryn went into a veritable coughing fit. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

He gave her a raised eyebrow and she remembered: Lothor Kings had no sense of humor.

“I thought you didn’t adhere to those mystic tenets,” Taryn asked. Apart from the Lothors, the Bellautorex bloodline was the purest of middling lineages. Over seven hundred years since Vana the Queen Mother elevated them to nobility and not a single mutation had ever been recorded among them. A union between a Lothor son and Bellautorex daughter had been whispered among the Lorric faiths for half a millennium.

“The people believe it. And a King is a servant to his people.”

Taryn had so many questions she knew she’d never get the answers to. He’d actually been betrothed to a Bellautorex daughter in his youth. But she’d run off with his Sword and was never heard from again. That had been over twenty years ago. Was there even an age-appropriate daughter for him to try again? Who did he meet with and what had been decided? Had the chess set been a gift to seal the deal or a consolation prize?

“A man in search of a bride might find it difficult to explain a mistress,” she said.

He nodded his assent. “The Dowager wouldn’t let me within spitting distance of her kin if that were the case. Luckily it isn’t an issue.”

“It’s a bigger issue than you think.” Taryn gathered all the fruit slices from the spread, including the ones Vares had parceled onto his own bowl and arranged them to spell out the coded message she’d read that afternoon. “Does that look familiar?”

“It looks like my dinner,” he said

Taryn ignored his scowl. “There’s a journalist in the city who’s already found someone to decipher this. He’s weeks away from unmasking this woman and publishing it for the faithful masses.”

“How nice for him.” Vares swept his bowl through the air to collect the last two lines of floating text.

In all the time Taryn spent investigating Mr. Gondriguez’s investigation, she’d always focused on the aspects that had potential to harm the King. She’d never considered the woman. Now she did. “If the Purists find out you’ve been secretly meeting with one of their most faithful donors, they might begin to see this woman as a threat.” She knew how Purists dealt with things they didn’t like. With the birth of their centuries-awaited savior at stake, they might not make much of a distinction between mutant enemies and middling ones.

“We’ll just stop using code.”

It was times like this that Taryn found it hard to discern if he was pretending to be aloof or if he genuinely didn’t care.

“If you tell me who she is, I can protect her.” Taryn’s offer was not entirely unselfish. The last thing the kingdom needed was a queen with as rich a Purist heritage as the Bellautorexes. Keeping the woman unmasked, or at the very least alive, helped to prevent that. And Taryn would have a much better chance at either of these if she knew who to look out for.

“Since you’ve presented the coded message instead of the decoded text, I’ll assume this journalist didn’t share the cipher with you. And you haven’t cracked it on your own?”

“It wasn’t relevant to my investigation,” she said. And Vares had asked her not to try to find the woman. Besides, if Taryn knew, she couldn’t guarantee that the cipher wouldn’t be part of her parameters the next time she ran a Survey over the city to look for potential threats.

“I’ll make you a deal then; if you can get the cipher from me, I’ll tell you.”

Taryn hesitated at his offer. He’d played this game with his people for months; kept the secret from her for years, ofttimes snuffing the light of his flame out after their dinners and reappearing in the palace the next morning. She couldn’t believe he was suddenly going to tell her instead of reminding her that it was not her place to know. “What do you get out of this?”

“Exactly what I pay you for,” he answered. “My mental defense will be tested and approved to be of the highest caliber.”

Vares didn’t actually pay her for her services. Back when the Black Knights were getting started, they needed to be able to keep their minds, and the secrets they housed, from the probing of unfriendly mutants. The LAAMP could not administer this training themselves so they made their needs known to Vares, who ordered Taryn to do it. In truth, he’d refused to feed her unless she agreed. Taryn had accepted because, at the time, it was the only way she was ever going to use her abilities, even if it were just her reading abilities. Vares used the same tactic to volunteer her for his own private lessons a few months after that. That was when their evening dinners began, about a year after her arrival at the palace.

“You’re so sure that I won’t find it?” Taryn scoffed. It was almost enough to make her think that it wasn’t there to begin with. What if Mr. Gondriguez had fabricated his tale? Taryn checked herself. He’d been terrified of lying to her and she’d read him the entire time. If there was any duplicity it could only have come from Vares himself. Maybe he planted the notes to set any investigator on a false trail.

“There is only one way to find out.”

Taryn responded to his smug grin by charging into his mind. She entered onto an open field facing the fortress of his mind. She surveyed the armed defenders who patrolled the battlements above, ready to pitch scalding oil onto intruders. Vares was trained to define the rules of his mind, to limit what intruders would be capable of. So she had no mutant abilities there, only those born from her imagination. It was her favorite part of these mental excursions; the almost magical ability she had to manipulate the world of a mind. With a thought, the ruffles of her midnight blue dining gown sewed themselves into leather trousers. The glittering bodice became a padded vest and her silver sequined shoes turned to steel combat boots.

Suddenly, a low growl rumbled from somewhere behind her. Taryn tuned in time to see protracted claws reaching for her from a paw as large as her head. Midnight fur ruffled as the figure sailed through the air and its golden eyes glinted in the sunless light, hungry. Taryn was so surprised by the attack that she forgot she didn’t have any breath to be knocked out of her when he dropped his weight on her chest and roared in her face. Taryn closed her eyes against the shower of spit and bits of warm flesh. She turned her head away from the smell of meat and gravy that assaulted her nostrils.

“It looks like someone’s in a bad mood,” she said when he was finished.

“Two things are allowed to occur when I am feeding,” Hunter said. ‘Petting and praising. This is neither!” He growled that final word and bit of chicken fell into her eye.

“You do realize you’re a figment of my imagination, don’t you?” Taryn liked to conjure a companion when she engaged in a deep read. It allowed her to express her ideas aloud and respond to herself without feeling like a crazy person. She infused a lot of the real Hunter’s personality into his conjured doppelganger and was often surprised by some of his – its – reactions. “I can send you away and conjure a new companion.”

Taryn imagined the jade dragon from her new chess set. A baby dragon with pale green scales emerged from the grass beside her, blinking slowly in the light and taking a few staggering steps.

Hunter pounced on it, snatched it up in his mouth and tore it to shreds. “I will not be replace by some glorified lizard.”

A small forward squad of the mental defenders emerged from the fortress with spears and bows to chase off the invaders. Hunter vaulted over her and launched himself at them. He was a bolt of black lightning, moving faster than a creature that size should have been able to as he dodged, pounced, turned and struck. The strength in a single swipe of his paw, a single snap of his jaws, was enough to pulverize the mental enemies to dust. “Laying there while someone else does all the work is my job,” he yelled over his shoulder. “Move!”

Taryn picked herself up and joined the fray. She attacked the guards with a pair of hand-bows loaded with sharpened blades of grass. While they hid behind battlements, her advance was slowed by archers hidden within. Meanwhile,Hunter scaled the wall. He landed at the top and drew their attention so Taryn could fly up and they lay waste to them together.

“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” Taryn said. She imagined he liked making dead things as much as he liked leaving them behind for her. “Do you still want to go?”

“I expect an extra bowl of gravy for this.”

As they entered the fortress together through a trap door at the top of the tower, there was a definite grin across his muzzle.

In reality, Taryn faced her opponent and found his face straining with the effort to keep her from his mind. “You’re out of practice,” she told him. “You’re trying to force it when you need to let your mind defend itself naturally. Hunter and I are already in.”

Vares raised a shaky hand to wipe sweat from his brow and took a lazy sip of his wine. “If you’re so cocksure, why don’t we make it more challenging for you.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Four Words,” he said with a smirk.

Taryn should have seen that coming. Back before she knew any better, she used to seek him out whenever the mood struck her. Whether he was in his office or strolling through the halls between meetings, Taryn didn’t much care. She’d even barged in during meetings to make her case for what he liked to call ‘unreasonable requests.’ She’d make long speeches and present a plethora of justifications as to why she absolutely needed a rooftop pool. Or why the incredibly inappropriate action of the week was actually quite logical. He got sick of it and presented her a challenge. She would have four words to convey her need or defense and he would provide the fifth – yes or no, pardon or punishment. Eventually it turned into a game between them; to hold a conversation with neither of them saying more than four words at a turn. The first to break had to submit to the other for an entire hour.

Taryn didn’t always win. But that might not be a disadvantage in this case.

“Are you sure you can handle it?” she asked. Really weak or untrained minds often reflected whatever environment her target found themselves in. When they spoke, their words actually reshaped their mental world, and so Taryn could more easily navigate through their mental realm by simply steering the conversation where she wanted it to go. It was a challenge for her to split her focus like this without giving up the game. But she didn’t have to worry about that with Vares.

When he’d left three month ago, he’d been pretty adept at dividing those worlds. Now he was gravely out of practice. Every word he spoke echoed through his mind. One of the paintings on the wall of his mental fortress even depicted their exact scene from his perspective; the dining table, the half eaten food that rested between them, Hunter the cat gnawing on a chicken bone and Taryn’s own eyes staring intently at her.

“He definitely isn’t leaving the city for longer than a few days without me again,” she told Hunter.

“Do you think you might be able to conjure a doppelganger?” he suggested.

She placed a hand on the painting and pushed her own thoughts and perspective into it, until the image panned to reflect what she herself saw in the dining room. She took the painting from the wall and shook it until it dropped its paper-thin images. She scooped everything back in; the fruit, the table, the fire, the chess set. Until only a paper doll of Vares lay on the carpeted hall. She had to push Hunter’s sniffing muzzle away before she could blow air into the paper doll. It swelled into a life-sized replica of the man himself. Since it was just his top half, she had to add the legs. She didn’t want to risk having him move and getting his gait wrong, so she allowed the doppelganger to glide through the fortress.

“Does the man realize that he is completely compromised?” Hunter asked.

As long as Taryn remained with this doppelganger, Vares’s defenses against her would be rendered nearly powerless. The human consciousness simply would not attack itself or its guests – at least a healthy mind wouldn’t.

“At least now we don’t have to worry about any more denizens of defense. Only traps.” Taryn hung the painting on the back of the doppelganger to bind the image she’d manifested to what was happening in the real world. It would move as she willed but share Vares’s real expressions, do what he did, say what he said.

“Then what am I here for?”

Taryn scratched behind his ear as they followed the grinning doppelganger down the hall. If there were any surprises, he’d get the brunt of it and Taryn and Hunter would have plenty of time to respond. “We’re looking for a code; a cipher Vares uses to communicate with his… special friend.”

“So I’m here to keep you from running into anything you can’t unsee,” Hunter said. “I’ll take some more chicken with that gravy.”

Taryn shrugged. Technically, Hunter’s doppelganger was a figment of her imagination, a piece of her own mind. Anything he experienced was actually her experience. But this way, she could separate her conscious self from any unwanted experiences and only keep the filtered information.

At the end of the hall, the group faced a constellation of doors and carpeted walkways, navigated by an impossible stairway. A work of sheer genius on Vares’s part, it defied all logic and would have embarrassed any physicist. Taryn could climb one set and end up upside down; go down the same and end up across the room from where she started from. It was incredibly frustrating and time consuming to navigate and a disaster to manipulate.

“How shall we begin?” Taryn said to all three of them.

“We’ll split up,” Hunter said as Vares deliberated. “Pick a stair for you an the half-man. I’ll take the big one.”

‘The big one’ was almost always some form of trap. Sometimes the stairs turned into a slide half way up. Or a pool with all the strength of tempest. Or the steps moved continually so that you never actually made any progress. Taryn was sure it was the key to finding Vares’s subconscious self but she’d never been able to master it.

“Are you happy here?” the man and his doppelganger said.

The fortress filled with bright colors and the sound of laughter. At first Taryn was sure it was her own. Probably imported from his memory of one of their food fights, or that week they’d spent trying to scare each other, or their first snowball fight. But then the laughter changed, took on a higher pitch with a quicker pattern. This was the laughter of a younger child; a toddler full of glee, of music and magic. Taryn wondered who it had been, because she hadn’t been that young when she’d come to the palace. Then the light was swept away by darkness and the laughter swallowed by silence; and she remembered that Vares had once had a son.

Prince Vilram had been kidnapped and murdered by the Maron prince, Malix. Queen Moira had assassinated the Lothor queen. As far as Taryn knew, no mutant had ever tried to harm any of the LAAMP Administrators; yet they all hated her. And while they had been ready to hang her when she and Dr. Seir strolled into the palace with his serum seven years ago, Vares had negotiated for her complete immunity.

It overwhelmed her sometimes, to see his heart for her. She didn’t think she could ever tell him how much she appreciated the great leap of faith he’d taken with her, to give her this charmed life she enjoyed. Even if she could find the words, he’d only balk at her and tell her that such noble deeds were might and main of Lothor Kings. It’s what he always did when one showed him his humanity. And he’d remind her that it wasn’t completely selfless. He’d gotten the Genesis serum and a personal mental defense tester.

“What do you mean?” she asked him.

In his fortress, she’d reach the door at the top of this first set of stairs. The knob felt hot to the touch. She pressed her ear to the door and heard… nothing that sounded like a romantic rendezvous.

“You’ll be sixteen soon.”

So much was packed into those four words that Taryn pulled out of the fortress to look at the man directly. Her immunity agreement identified her as ‘the mutant child,’ and in five weeks, she would be a legal adult. Her immunity would expire and she would be free to leave the city.

“Its only a trip,” she assured him. She and George had been planning it ever since she’d discovered the loophole three years ago.

“And after?”

Well, Taryn thought, then she would have a choice to make; to return to the palace and negotiate a new immunity agreement for herself, or… not. “That’s – There’s too much…” Taryn struggled to find the right words.

“We’re only talking today,” he assured her.

So nothing they said would be set in stone. Still, it was not a conversation to be had on a lark. It was a conversation for Dr. Seir and the LAAMP, for lawyers and George; none of whom she’d had a chance to discuss it with. Obviously, the LAAMP would be glad to be free of the burden of her. Dr. Seir would do whatever he could to protect her freedom and though George never missed an opportunity to tell her what he thought, he never sat still long enough for her to tell him what she wanted. No one ever had.

Vares tapped his temple to remind her that there were two faces to this game. So Taryn delved back in so she could say all the things she couldn’t.

“Leave me here again,” Hunter growled, “and I’ll turn your wardrobe into a graveyard.”

Taryn apologized, unsure if he meant he’d ruin it with gifts or if he’d simply claw all her gowns and shoes to pieces. “He asked me about the choice. He wants to know what I’ll decide.”

“And?”

“I don’t know what I want!”

“Yes, you do. You just don’t think you’ll get it.” He turned away from her, pointed his nose at a maroon door above head with a golden knob in the center. “That door smells dangerous.” Meaning, there may be something worth finding inside.

Taryn searched the maze of stairs and couldn’t find one that led to the door.

“We’ll have to fly.” Hunter bared his fangs. “No wings this time. They ruin my glorious self.”

“I can’t make you fly without wings,” she reminded him. “I don’t have my power here.”

“Just add it to my abilities, to fly like you do. Without wings.”

Taryn tried to imagine him soaring at will, but all she saw were bloody gowns torn to shreds in her wardrobe. Then she wouldn’t be able to take them with her, if she had to choose what she didn’t want to do. “I’m sorry. It’s really hard for me to focus right now.”

“You are the worst pet in the history of pets.” He pushed off his powerful legs and launched himself to the side of one hovering door, leapt off to cling to a shifting staircase, swiping a paw at Taryn and Vares’s doppelganger as they floated past him to reach the landing before him.

“He already knows that you’re unhappy,” Hunter said when he landed. “Maybe he wants to fix it. You won’t know unless you tell him the truth. The worst he can do is say no, and then you’ll have five weeks to think of something else.”

There was wisdom in his words. Her words, she reminded herself. Those were her thoughts; she was just thinking them from a different filter.

“Keep telling yourself that,” Hunter said.

“I’ll never have friends,” Taryn confessed. Hunter gave her a hurt look. “You know what I mean.”

The two Vareses tilted their heads at her. “You have friends now.”

The knob of the door she faced turned into a pink and blue frosted cupcake. His fortress filled with the smell of baking bread and warm sugar. The room was dark beyond, and unresponsive to her calls for a torch. So she imagined her hand was a flame and pressed on in its light to find a large bed, with disturbed sheets. If she had lost her ability to manipulate the contents of his mind, then–

“There is definitely something here,” Hunter growled, and the whole room seemed to shake.

Taryn looked to the doppelganger and found him frowning at his feet. Then he reached down and pulled Hunter from his lap, the fabric of his vest snapping as the cat’s claws were ripped free.

“Real friends don’t lie,” Taryn said.

Vares’s expression didn’t change but his doppelganger’s softened. This was the same argument they’d been having for seven years. “Secrets keep you safe.”

“Secrets separate!” Seven years and he still didn’t understand that. They’d tried things his way but it hadn’t worked. They were still in the same place. Their dinners were still private. Her existence was still a closely guarded secret. The world burned with the belief that Lothor Kings and mutants could only ever be enemies. Mutants and middlings the world over went to war because of it. She had to lie to everyone she met because it it; deceive people who called her a friend. She was sick of it. The moment she turned sixteen, the moment she was free from her immunity agreement and its restrictions, she would leave her life of secrets behind, no matter what it cost. Living her life in truth could only cost her the things that had never been real to begin with.

“Taryn, it’s not forever.”

Seven years and he still didn’t hear her.

“Be honest,” Hunter reminded her.

“I am being honest!” Taryn threw back the covers and cringed against what she might find.

“Oh yeah,” Hunter drawled. “That scroll looks very dangerous.”

Taryn opened one eye. The scroll rested between the pillows. She reached for it – and her hand passed right through it. She reconstituted her hand so that it was as light and transparent as the scroll. She still couldn’t touch it. It actually sank further away from her, creating a well between the pillows. The more she tried to reach it, the deeper it sank until it was level with the floor. “I can’t touch it. Why can’t I touch it?”

“A wise person once said that real friends don’t lie.”

Taryn stared at him. There had to be something other that crawled into her manifestation of Hunter. There was no way she could be that arrogant and sure of herself.

She turned her attentions back to the scroll. She didn’t even know if it was what she came looking for.

Finally she looked at the man in front of her; the phantom one she couldn’t touch and the real one she never seemed to reach. And she realized something. Vares had bound the two exercises. He wasn’t going to allow his mind to give up its secrets to her until she gave him hers.

“I guess he isn’t so compromised, then.” Hunter lay down and went to work on his paws.

“I’ll never…” Taryn’s heart pounded. Her gut wrenched into a knot and she tried to think about how to bypass this test and get the scroll, or just give up and end both exercises and keep her secret. But wasn’t that the problem? She’d never said it out loud; never even gave it a full thought, always finding a way to distract herself when it came up. If she wanted to stop keeping secrets, she had to start here.

“I’ll never have love,” she finally said.

Hunter nuzzled her cheek and licked her tears as they fell. In the real world, her eyes watered but she was able to staunch the flow. Hunter the cat was standing in her lap now, purring steadily as he kneaded his front paws into her shoulder. Taryn let herself be comforted a minute before she poured more gravy into his dish. He ignored it.

For all of four seconds.

“Keven?”

“Kemen.” An image of his smile flashed in her mind from a hundred different times scattered across a hundred different days; amused, welcoming, admiring, mischievous. That was her favorite. She remembered the warmth in his eyes every time she caught him staring at her in the first few weeks that she’d worked at the bakery. The mild bass in his voice the first time he felt completely at ease with her; the musk that mingled with the smell of sugar on his breath as his lips hovered over hers just minutes before her other life shattered their budding romance.

“Its over between you?”

Taryn threw her focus back into Vares’s mind to escape the images in her own. One of them followed her.

It had been dark out. There was so much light in his eyes she thought they could have been stars. He’d worn his mischievous smile that night. She guessed he thought she was going to say something other than what she did. She had to watch the light go out in him. No reason, no explanation. Just the sound of two hearts falling and breaking because one gave up trying to fly.

Hunter pounced on the image. It broke into thousands of glittering pieces that turned to ash as they fell.

“I couldn’t keep lying.” The scroll rose from its grave at her words; a solid mass floating above the pillows.

“Take it,” Hunter said. “So we can go.”

“So you’re not returning,” Vares said. The expression on his face was unreadable and Taryn felt a weight press against her presence in his mind. It was almost as if he were forcing her out, even as bars formed on the windows. The door swung shut and the knob melted to a smoldering puddle at its base.

Impatient, Hunter leapt toward the scroll. He snatched it in his jaw and landed deftly on the other side of the bed. Then the ground opened up beneath him and he fell.

“No!” Taryn lunged for him but she had no power to rescue him. The dark spot of ground felt ominous; like something would reach out and grab her. She crouched at the edge and only saw black within. Any flames she managed to loose from her hand were doused as soon as they passed the threshold. “Hunter?”

Not even an echo.

Taryn shook herself. There was no real danger here. This trip was entirely mental, a representation of Vares’s thoughts and intentions. The real Hunter was perfectly safe lapping up a dish full of gravy. She was perfectly safe at his side and Vares didn’t really harbor any secret desires to keep her trapped in his palace. So she jumped.

She fell for a second – less than a second. Enough time to think that it might have been a better idea to retreat and reengage from a different angle, restart the assault or abandon the mission all together. The ache in her backside diagnosed the ground as cold stone and a quick survey of her new surroundings exposed five sides of a small enclosure, each boasting an entrance to dark passages beyond. Looking up, there was such a stretch of darkness between herself and the square of light she’d fallen from that she felt as if she had been shrunk down to the size of a grain of sand and swallowed by a giraffe. There was no way she’d be able to climb out and if she were right about what this place was, flying wouldn’t help her either.

“We’ve lost the half-man.”

Taryn held up her flaming hand as she swiveled and there was Hunter, resting as if he’d been waiting ages for her. “I’m glad you’re still with me.”

“We could have avoided this completely if only I could fly. Now we’re trapped in the Black Hell. I don’t suppose you have a way out, then?”

Taryn doubted it. Before Vares the First conquered the palace city and named himself King, the Thousand Arm Warriors had the underground labyrinth built as a means of sporting torture. It ran beneath the entire city and had dozens of entrances. Apparently the Warriors thought it more entertaining to give their victims chances to escape the various traps it had been rigged with and the carnivorous creatures it had been populated with. The only known opening landed somewhere in the palace, where they were normally thrown in. The Warriors themselves had been oblivious to the others. They’d allegedly murdered all the builders and designers to keep it that way, preferring to watch the suffering of their victims from the safety of the palace. None of the thousands of enemies they sent into it ever resurfaced; so the secrets remained. The Black Hell, they’d called it. The only hell in existence before Lorria and the mystics began rewriting history. The Lothors hadn’t kept the practice up so the traps and the bones of those creatures had long since crumbled. It was reasonable to assume that the tunnels were safe. But the location of the entrances had been the subject of mystery for over a thousand years.

“And this is where his mind goes when he thinks of your leaving.”

Taryn couldn’t tell if it was endearing or disturbing. Did he actually want her to stay or did he just not want to lose all the benefits her presence brought?

“Disturbing,” Hunter said. “Whatever the reason, this is definitely disturbing.”

“What happened to the scroll?” Taryn asked.

“My guess is as good as yours.” Hunter swept his gaze over the five passageways. “Tell him something else. I don’t feel particularly inclined to navigate a maze right now.”

Taryn chose her words carefully. If he was willing to go this far to keep her, perhaps he might be open to taking more reasonable risks to make her want to stay. She couldn’t promise him that she would not leave, even if nothing they said tonight would exist once they left the room.

“I want to.” But not if it meant continuing to live in secret at the palace or dying in obscurity in a cell. Not if it meant watching the rest of the city enjoy all the things she could never have. Taryn wanted to stay and be able to play these games with Vares and have unproductive giggle fits with Kem. She wanted to watch a play Rai and spend the intermission complaining about how much she hated her extractions. But she would leave if she had no other choice. If he didn’t give her any other choice.

“Something is happening.”

Taryn extinguished her flaming hand as the enclosure brightened all around them, exposing details around her. Taryn knew she was underground, yet she could see the individual stones and lines of mortar that made up the walls and passages stretched out around her as if she were standing in an uncovered clearing at the height of spring. Suddenly, Taryn knew which city sector each tunnel led into. The original builders may not have been mystically inclined when they’d crafted the Black Hell but Vares certainly was in his thoughts of it. Anything modeled in the Lorric faith followed the same pattern, whether it was the Lothor sigil, the names of each of the city sectors’ major roads, or children’s story books. The pattern was always: the Master, the Prince, the Scholar, the Saint, and the King.

It wasn’t difficult to identify the tunnel that was still blacked out as the one leading to Larisport, where The Scholar’s Lane was lined with the sectors most successful businesses. It was the one sector of the city where Vares and his forces refused to embark. Following the Lorric course clockwise, she identified The Prince’s Fall of Pine Keep, The Way of the Master that marked Camp Brock, The Path of Kings that cut through North Fold and finally The Saint’s Row in Hollyn. Now, where would he have hidden the cipher?

“Perhaps there’s a way,” Vares said.

Ideas flooded through her mind on what that could look like; most of which had already been broached and denied over the last seven years; one more tolerable than the others.

“Dinner in the city?” she asked, even as she tried to think back to where his first lunch in the city had been.

“It was North Fold,” Hunter said. “But where is the light coming from?”

Taryn watched him make a full circuit, then look down at his shadow. Her own searchrevealed no light source, only a round shadow that planted itself in the center of her vision and remained there, regardless of where she turned her gaze.

“It’s right behind me.” Hunter growled as he made another full circuit and swiped at his moving shadow.

“Me, too,” Taryn said. “It doesn’t look like we can look at it directly.”

“Any ideas?”

“Join the LAAMP.”

Taryn froze.

Hunter froze.

“He can’t be serious,” Hunter said, and Taryn repeated that.

“I think it’s time.”

Anger came second, after the surprise waned. The LAAMP were responsible for helping mutants integrate into society but they operated as if it were their mission to make mutant lives miserable, unbearable. Worthless. She wanted nothing to do with them.

But then she felt honored. It was unlawful for mutants to hold positions of power or influence. If they weren’t fugitives or criminals, they were lowly laborers or mistreated servants. For Vares to offer to make Taryn a LAAMP Administrator would show that it was more than just pandering talk when he spoke of the drastic changes he wished to make. It was almost everything she wanted. Almost. But Taryn wanted to do more. She wanted to be more.

Then the anger returned. The authority to change mutant laws had been one of her ‘ridiculous requests’ but now he was simply giving it to her – if she could stand prolonged exposure to the LAAMP Administrators. They were murderers! And Purist zealots. She couldn’t bear to share air with them for the brief time it took them to ensure she returned to the palace at the end of every day. Even if she could, it would be pointless. They would outvote her at every turn.

The anger grew. It was no real authority, no real honor. No real change. The LAAMP would continue to breath hatred against anyone who carried secarin in their veins and now Taryn would have a front row seat to all the cruelty and injustice they advocated. Worse, she would be party to it. And that, Taryn would not stand. “You must be out o–”

“Hey! Four words,” he warned her.

“One word: No!” He had to be mad if he truly expected her to let them torment the world’s mutants while she argued peacefully against it.

“We’re only talking today,” he reminded her.

This was not just talk. This was her life, her future. The lives and futures of hundreds of thousands of mutants the world over. And the millions of middlings whose lives they touched.

“Calm down,” Hunter warned her. “You’re starting to rage.”

There was no starting, she was fully there. The sheet that dressed the dining table billowed under the force of her power. Curtains shook on their rails and dishes clattered against each other before they shattered against the ceiling, the floor. Chess pieces became speeding missiles that dented the paneled walls. Candles met smoldering logs overhead and rained hot wax and ashes on their meals.

Vares looked at her over the rim of a glass that hadn’t floated from his grip. She looked at him and he was not afraid; he knew no one was ever harmed by her rage-storms.

So he waited.

Seven quick breaths. Seven palm stinging clenches of her fists. Seven very tense seconds. That’s how long it took her to calm the twisted energy that had stirred up in her and end her rage-storm before it drained all the power from her secarin.

“Sorry,” she mumbled as she set the room back to rights.

“Highly emotional by nature.”

That killed all the rage that remained. Here she was belying everything she’d ever confessed to be true and he sat there, understanding. And now it was her turn to understand; that he was doing the best that he knew to do considering his ample experience. He had opened this discussion to ask her opinion. To ask her help. “There is another way,” she said.

“I’m listening.”

“No. I need more…” She needed more words. This was too important to spend in a game. She’d studied a thousand years of mutant history. She’d lived as a mutant in a middling world for over a decade. She couldn’t explain everything that was wrong in four words.

He tapped his temple again. “An hour of obedience?”

Taryn groaned as she returned to the mental challenge. At least she could take the time to think of a way to say what she needed to say.

Still unable to manipulate the world of Vares’s mind, Taryn reached for the topaz necklace that decorated her collar bone in the natural world and it materialized in the mental one. She melted the silver setting into a cool puddle in her hands and let the stones fall to the ground around her feet.

She stretched the silver into a round, flat mirror and angled it before her mental eyes to reveal the reflection a golden scroll floating behind her head, shining like a tiny sun. Reaching behind only made it withdraw from her hands so she reached ahead, into the silver mirror. Her hand took on a milky hue in the silver world within a world but glowed gold when it closed around the scroll. The parchment rippled open, snaking up her arm to be absorbed into her skin, assimilating all of its painted information into Taryn’s mind.

Suddenly, she knew that Vares had discovered the tunnels in his youth. That he and his Arsenal had spent hundreds of hours exploring their depths. They’d charted all of their corners, marked all of the entrances and ensured that they could navigate the underground maze if they were blindfolded and delirious. Unfortunately, this was not the information Vares had charged her to find. Now Taryn had to undertake the tedious task of searching through the maze.

“At least now we wont get lost,” Hunter offered.

“Maybe next time,” Taryn said. “That was my final bid.”

“You’re giving up?”

“This is not the challenge that matters,” Taryn said. “Shopping for a bride” could have been one of his typical half-truths. He could have meant that he was looking for a wedding gift. Whose wedding, though, she couldn’t guess. But if Vares wanted Taryn to look after someone, he would have asked her to. The fact that he didn’t meant he had no reason to be worried about this woman who claimed his nights. So she was not going to worry. Besides, the zealots wouldn’t know who to turn their hatred toward until Mr. Gondriguez told them. And she’d just spent the last few months making sure that he wouldn’t tell anyone until he told her. So whether Vares finally came to his senses and asked for her help or Taryn had to intercept an angry mob, the woman would be fine. She had to focus her concern on her own kind.

“So you’re telling me that I just did all of that for nothing?”

“It’s never for nothing, Hunter. I enjoy these adventures with you.”

He scoffed at her. “This isn’t going on the collar.” Then he closed his eyes and disappeared.

Taryn returned to herself. And immediately discovered that she was ravenous. An Inquisitor like that usually took a few seconds but the back and forth had stretched it to half an hour. She hadn’t eaten much since the games started and her storm had burned away a sizable chunk of her power. She started on the tarts again, picking off spots of hardened candle wax.

Vares made a face. “No cipher?”

‘That’s not what matters.’ She had the two coded messages. She knew they were names of meeting places in the city and times. If she really wanted to, she could get a list from all the city planners and break the cipher on her own.

He folded his hands into his lap and Taryn couldn’t help wondering if this had been his goal all along. “What’s on your mind?”

Taryn willed the chess pieces into a swirling torrent in the air. Then she scattered them, sending the jade set speeding towards the windows only to stop short and tap gently on the glass; and the gold set speeding towards Vares’s face only to divert at the last breath and land in a circle on his bald head. They never collided with each other; they never spun out of her will. She maintained complete control. ‘Mutants need to learn.’

He removed the pieces of the makeshift crown from his head. “Why?”

‘Ignorance is…’ Taryn replaced it with the jade set while she searched for the right word. Detrimental? Destructive? ‘Unnecessary.’

He brushed the pieces from his head and gave her a warning look. “Humanity won’t accept that.”

“Mutants are human too!” A bit of raspberry paste flew from her mouth to his cheek. Taryn had used up her four words this turn so she couldn’t apologize. Instead she wiped it away with a napkin and hoped he understood.

“Middlings won’t accept that,” he grounded through his teeth.

Taryn had one word for that. ‘Taxes.’ As much as he liked to remind her, sometimes she thought that even he forgot he was a King.

“Hmm,” he said, reaching for the cracked reservoir of gravy. He didn’t pour the gravy anywhere. Only held it in his tense hands. She noticed the orange and brown stains that had peppered his kingly garb in her rage. And wondered if the mischief she saw in his eyes was actually a glint of vengeance.

“What are you thinking?” She hoped he wasn’t thinking what she thought he was thinking. Though he won most of their word games, she was undefeated in their food fights. But she didn’t know how invested she would be if she were too busy trying to eat his missiles instead of deflecting them.

He smiled at her. “I need more words.”

Taryn released a surprised breath. He hadn’t immediately said no. “Let’s end this, then!”

The game turned to their months apart. Taryn only had the race to report, postponed by an issue with permits. When she asked for moments of his trip that stood out, Vares lost on purpose. He knew that the only thing she would demand of him for the next hour was more details on his trip. She felt jilted when she learned that they’d spent most of the time camping; exploring the wind untamed wilderness of the kingdom, cooking around a camp fire and sleeping out under the stars. His whole reasoning for leaving her behind was that her familiarity would bring no end of embarrassment for him. But it didn’t seem like she would have had too many opportunities to embarrass him.

They talked about Denan. Even without mentioning the fact that the kingdom’s growing Purist faith had spread to the palace city, it turned into an argument. Speaking to other mutants violated her immunity agreement. Sharing a mental connection with them was dangerously close to nullifying it. Her mind held some of the monarchy’s most well kept secrets and she risked having that information stolen by other mutants. Luckily, the Administrators had no way of knowing and Vares had discretion to choose when he enforced the restrictions and he never had before.

He complained about feeling like a voyeur when she conferenced him into Shadowing a spectator at a concert in the city. Then he begged her to show him a play he’d been invited to but had been unable to attend. That consumed about an hour of their night. They were up so late that Sword and Shield came in to announce that they were bedding down for the night and leaving the King’s protection in Taryn’s capable hands.

As they spent the night catching up, Taryn felt her old confidence return. Confidence to check the LAAMP Administrators when they abused their authority. The audacityto believe she could change the kingdom for the better. Because she still had the King’s friendship. And she felt silly for ever believing that she had somehow lost it.

She didn’t tell him of the assassination attempt, or the 200 gold coins she’d recovered. His reaction could work counter to her goals. But she did have another – admittedly unreasonable – request to make of him as they left the dining room.

“I need help finding work for someone in Larisport; a middling.” Taryn had asked for favors for mutants before and been viciously rejected enough times to know better.

“What kind of work?” Vares held the door open for her and they walked side by side down the glass paneled hall.

“He’s a painter. But his works are… strange.”

“Strange how?”

“I’m not sure. He calls it cubism. He paints from his imagination, rather than life. He says it’s a pure art.”

Vares stopped mid-stride, put a hand on her shoulder and she turned to face him. “Larisport. You’re not allowed to set foot in Larisport.”

Taryn met his gaze head on. “I am not –”

His grip on her tightened and she saw something like panic flash across his face. But it couldn’t have been. Vares never panicked.

“What did I say?” he growled. “You came to me with a name and an address and what did I say?”

“This isn’t about him.”

“I told you to leave it alone. I told you to let it go. That’s what I said!”

“And I did!” As much as it confounded her, she’d done as he’d commanded.

“Then how the hells do you know anyone in Larisport?”

“You told me to leave the man alone. You said nothing about his victims.” Taryn spoke slowly and calmly so he would hear her words and not just some noise that defied his will. “I’m helping them.”

He blinked, his face frozen between rage and incredulity. She guessed he was trying to figure out if she had disobeyed him or not; if he should order her to stop. When his eyes finally met hers again, they were clearer, the frown lines of his face less pronounced. “Taryn, you have no reason to prowl into people’s minds – especially those outside of the palace or Pine Keep and specifically not those in Larisport!”

“I’m not supposed to, fine. But that’s not the issue. I need – ”

“Not supposed t– You could lose your immunity for this! You do understand that, don’t you?” He glared down at her as he ranted.

“Vares, I don’t need a lecture. I need your help. Will you help me?” She pleaded, for he hadn’t said anything in a while.

Closing his eyes and pinching his brow, the King sighed, deep and long. “Give me a few months.”

“No! We only have a couple of weeks. He needs to be working or have a promise of work in a couple of weeks. After that… It won’t matter.”

Vares studied her face. “Who is this man?”

Taryn shook her head. She had a strict rule against sharing what she learned from people’s minds without their permission. “Can you help me? Please? I… I don’t know what else to do.”

He began to say something, then pressed his lips and looked away. “I know someone who likes ‘strange’. He’s just had his manor remodeled and he wants to fill it with modern works. But he’s more interested in someone he can observe, someone to sponsor and flaunt to his colleagues. And it’s outside of the city,” he added when he turned back to her.

“Outside the city isn’t good.”

“It’s all you’ll get with two week’s notice and scarcely any information,” he snapped. His expression was full of exhaustion and frustration. “Do you want me to arrange it or not?”

Outside of Larisport was bad; outside of the city was practically hopeless. But considering the current state of things, she didn’t have much of a choice. “Yes. Please do.” She would have to find a way to make it work. “Thank you.”

“Remember: this can’t be linked back to me or the palace.”

“I know.” Everyone knew that there could be no friendship between mutants and Lothor Kings. If their association ever became known then the public would assume that she was using her mutant power to control him. It wasn’t true, but that hardly mattered against public opinion. And inhibition would not exonerate her. No. The LAAMP would demand her death and Vares would risk losing his Seat to defend her. At least she hoped he would risk his Seat in the defense of her life. She liked to think that she was more than convenient to him. She might have liked it more if she knew. But she was not confident enough to risk her life to find out. So, no, their association could not be known… by the masses.

If things didn’t go well, Taryn knew it would be better to have Vares do… whatever it was he did to people who discovered their secret.

Orph would be much better off being silenced by the King than avenged by the King of the Lane.