Vares ended up interrupting her night watch with a jug of milk, a couple of slices of honey cake and a chess board. They’d been up well into the night; feasting, playing, and teasing each other. As well as conceptualizing and working out the reasoning behind allowing mutants to learn to master their abilities. Nothing had been decided. Nothing had been promised. But the fact that he’d taken her seriously enough to discuss it was encouraging.

It had been fun. But now she was exhausted. The day had barely begun and already she was running late. She wasn’t worried, though. As long as she could make it to the bakery at a decent hour, she expected it would be a good day. Even if she didn’t, she had a dinner with Vares to look forward to at the end of the day. That thought alone melted the fatigue from her mind. After a hurried breakfast in the dining hall, Taryn ran up to the third floor of the southeast wing of the palace for her morning extraction.

Morning extractions were a part of her immunity agreement. Afternoon extractions had been added after the Administrators complained that a single extraction was insufficient to suppress her abilities as well as inhibition would. If they knew she’d left for the city and missed any one of these extractions, she would be in breach of her agreement and have to join the prisoners in the palace dungeons. Taryn didn’t know how long she would be imprisoned, but she planned on never finding out. She refused to give the LAAMP the satisfaction and made sure that she never missed a session, no matter how much she hated it.

When she arrived at Dr. Seir’s laboratory she found the door ajar. She pushed it open and a single word came to mind: ransacked. The shelves and counter tops that lined two of the walls were bare of the many glass jars of chemicals they normally stored. The equipment that Dr. Seir used to prepare his solutions and conduct his experiments were gone from the table at the center of the room. His stores of inhibitors were still in the cupboards beneath, but the mountainous piles of his research papers had been cleared from the desk that lay on one side of the room. Only a few sheets of paper, inked with Dr. Seir’s scribbled notes, were left scattered on the floor.

The more frightening discovery was the door at the back of the room. It led to Dr. Seir’s secret Genesis lab and he always kept that door locked, whether he was in there not. Now it was wide open and Dr. Seir was nowhere to be seen. Taryn feared the worst. Her immunity depended on Dr. Seir providing the LAAMP with the Genesis serum. If they had finally managed to steal it and no longer needed him…

“Dr. Seir?” Taryn’s Survey showed his mental flame crouched on the other side of the table. She was relieved to see it move with his head as he rose.

“Good morning, Taryn!” The little scientist came up clutching papers to his chest. He wore his usual loose, gray robes with tapered sleeves. But they were void of the royal insignia and the credentials of his office. As far as the kingdom was concerned, Dr. Seir’s office didn’t officially exist. The kingdom was not supposed to know about Dr. Seir and the work he did for the LAAMP any more than they were supposed to know that a mutant lived in the palace.

“What happened here?” she asked.

“Isn’t it exciting?” Dr. Seir’s head disappeared as he bent again and came up with more papers. “I’m moving to a new laboratory.”

“Why?” Taryn asked suspiciously. It could have been a ploy of the Administrators to have something end up ‘lost’ in the move. “What’s wrong with this one?”

“It is no longer mine,” he replied.

“It’s mine.”

Taryn started at the voice that came from behind the door. She leapt away from the face of the young woman who’d appeared so suddenly beside her. She looked to be about a decade older than Taryn, with strands of blond curls falling from where she’d pinned her hair to keep it out of her face. She wore the same gray robes as Dr. Seir with a hem that flared out around her feet and swept the floor as she stepped closer to Taryn.

“I’m sorry,” the woman smiled. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Taryn, this is Countess Fren Kastor, of Karmish County,” Dr. Seir said. “Dr. Kastor, this is my, um, my daughter, Taryn.” Nine years and the lie was still awkward on his lips.

The woman held her hand out toward Taryn.

Taryn didn’t move; she didn’t speak. There was something about Dr. Kastor that bothered her. It wasn’t the pale blue eyes that raked over her fearfully. Taryn was used to that. Even the forced smile that masked her obvious discomfort was normal, as far as reactions to Taryn went. But there was something… unsettling about the woman. Taryn couldn’t figure what it was. The woman awkwardly dropped her hand and Dr. Seir moved to stand between them.

“Dr. Kastor will be taking over some of my duties so I can spend more time on my research,” Dr. Seir said to Taryn, then turned to the woman. “I guess we’ll leave you to it. You are free to organize everything to your liking.” Dr. Seir ushered Taryn out of the room.

“It was nice meeting you, Taryn,” the Countess called.

Taryn turned back to see the Countess smiling meekly after them before she closed the door. She looked relieved to see them go.

“What’s wrong?” Dr. Seir stopped in the hall and held his hand against Taryn’s forehead. “Are you feeling ill?”

“What?” Taryn answered distractedly. “No. I’m fine. Where are we going?”

“To my new laboratory. Are you sure you’re alright? You look troubled.”

“I’m fine, Dr. Seir. It’s just… nothing. I’m fine. Why are you suddenly moving into a new lab?” Taryn asked.

“It’s not sudden,” Dr. Seir said, continuing through the hall towards the northeastern wing. “The LAAMP has been asking for more of the Genesis serum. They never have enough, they say. Never as much as they want, which is an endless supply. But I needed time to conduct more research on the Genesis before I could produce the serum in such numbers. They’ve finally managed to find someone they trust to relieve me of my unnecessary workload. The young Countess is now in charge of extracting the prisoners and administering inhibitors to them, as well as supplying inhibitors to all the Guards and Black Knights in the city. I’ll still manufacture the Genesis serum but I’ll have more time for my research!”

“So should I continue to go to your old lab for extractions?” Taryn whispered as she smiled and waved greetings to busy servants and wandering officials.

“No. You’ll still come to me. The Countess doesn’t know about you.”

“I see,” Taryn said, though Dr. Kastor’s discomfort told a different tale. For a moment, Taryn wondered that she might have another enemy in the palace – one with access to her extraction syringes. But Vares had returned, she reminded herself. The LAAMP wouldn’t try anything so brash now that Vares had returned. She was safe. Better still, she’d never have to deal with the woman so long as Dr. Seir continued to supervise her extractions. Taryn breathed easier.

Dr. Seir stopped again, this time in front of the door to what Taryn assumed was his new laboratory. He unlocked it with a silver key that hung on a satin strip around his neck. He smiled like a child and led Taryn in.

Dr. Seir’s new laboratory was larger than the old had been. Here she found the familiar equipment; though they performed unfamiliar experiments and cooked strange solutions. This laboratory even had a new smell; nauseating but not overwhelmingly so. And familiar, though she was unable to place it. Stacks of books and research notes covered every surface and at the center of it all was the wood-framed glass case that held the one thing Dr. Seir cared about more than his Genesis serum – a colony of beetles he doted on as if they were his own children.

The room was also darker than the old lab. But this was only because five large wardrobes blocked the light from the wall of windows at the back of the room. They were each of them six feet tall and three feet in width and depth. These wardrobes were what he usually kept locked in the back room: his Genesis stores. She was surprised to see that he had so much; he never missed an opportunity to tell anyone who would listen about how short his supply was.

Dr. Seir placed the papers on the table and swept his arms out across the room. “Welcome to the Genesis Laboratory,” he said excitedly.

Taryn’s mind was elsewhere. “Did you promise to double your serum production in return for this lab? For the help?”

He frowned at her. “Of course not. Dr. Kastor allows me more time for research. I’ll finally be able to discover if its even possible to increase production. No promises were made.”

So the LAAMP just took it for granted that they would be able to. “How much of an increase could you sustain?”

“Well, I suppose, if I absolutely had to, I could triple the number of doses produced daily,” he said after a moment of thought. “But don’t tell them that!”

“How much of an increase would you be willing to accommodate?” she asked.

His brow furrowed and he look at her as if she’d suddenly sprouted an extra eye. “I thought you despised the program and wanted it disbanded. Why the sudden concern in its expansion?”

She didn’t want it disbanded completely, only heavily modified. But that was not the point. “I’ve just learned that the LAAMP hopes to double the force of Black Knights. They’ve already started hiring for it. If you would agree to help them increase even by half, I think it would go a long way to granting me a little more bargaining power when my immunity expires.”

He stroked his chin as he considered. Finally, he nodded. “I can do half – but please try not to go higher. Double would cripple my research and triple would destroy it completely. It was foolish of them to start hiring before they had the terms of the contract secured. What were they thinking?”

It hadn’t been foolish, Taryn thought. Just painfully sure of success.

“Oh, and before I forget…” He took from the pockets of his robe a small leather bound book and offered it to Taryn. “Is this yours?”

Taryn turned the book over and examined it. It had no title on its cover or spine. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“I found it while I was cleaning out the storage cupboards. You and I are the only ones who ever spent any appreciable amount of time in there and you’re the only one who reads.”

“This isn’t a book,” she said absently. It’s contents were handwritten in an articulate, blocky script, its illustrations drawn with skillful attention to detail. “It’s a journal. By the looks of it, it belongs to someone obsessed with plants.” Taryn took some time to look at each page carefully. They catalogued told her of the healing properties of the sap and leaves from willows; how to produce the essential oil of frankincense; how one would go about isolating the active extract from the willow’s bark; and the effects of some toxic plants. “An herbalist, not a florist,” she concluded. If she had been responsible for its presence in Dr. Seir’s lab she wouldn’t have cared enough to know that she’d lost it.

Taryn turned to the inside of the front cover and frowned. “It says here: ‘Property of I.’ Well that’s not very helpful, is it?”

“I?” Dr. Seir repeated. “Well, it must have belonged to someone who worked in the old laboratory before I did. Perhaps I may find something of scientific value I can put to good use.”

“There’s something else here.” Taryn flipped to a page with a folded corner. It started a section on how to extract oils from plants and she read aloud the words written beneath the flap. “Vrim gala sou shee noe.”

Her breath caught. The words were familiar to her but she could not think of where she had seen them. But she’d never seen them, she soon realized. “I’ve heard this before,” she said, staring at the words. She repeated them in her mind but no other instances of having heard them came to her. “Where have I heard this before?” she whispered to herself.

Dr. Seir took the book from her. “It’s obviously written in an ancient language. You might have picked up the phrase wandering around the mind of one of the city’s scholars.” He pulled from his pocket a thick syringe and motioned for Taryn’s arm.

“No. It’s something I know, or have heard someone say. I just can’t remember who.” Taryn willed one of the stools to her side. She moved the papers onto the table and rolled up one of her sleeves as she sat. Frowning at the irritated and punctured crook of her elbow, she tried to recall where she’d heard the phrase. Or even who had spoken it. But it was like trying to remember a decades-old dream that had left her only seconds after waking. Not that she expected to remember; her abilities weren’t the only things ‘lost’ to her between Damville and the palace city. “I’ve forgotten a lot of things from my past.”

Dr. Seir stopped the needle just above her skin and stared at her. “We are not talking about this again,” he warned.

“Yes,” Taryn said. “I think we – ”

“Arguing about this will only distract me from performing your extraction. I’ll make a mistake and have to start again,” he said. “Is that what you want?”

“No,” Taryn conceded. She closed her fist and looked away as Dr. Seir pushed the three pronged syringe into her arm.

The three needles of Dr. Seir’s specially designed syringe were attached to three glass tubes. The two smaller ones held clear reagents. They were injected simultaneously. The third, larger tube was empty. But it eventually began to fill with golden yellow liquid. Taryn suspected that the phials had gotten bigger over the years; Dr. Seir’s subtle way of extracting more secarin from her without her knowing.

The reaction pained her like the inhibitor she’d experienced last night. The pain was restricted to the area around her elbow but it still felt like fire in her veins. How it separated the secarin to be drawn out from the blood, Taryn was sure she’d never fully understand. But the whole process would take little more than a minute and if Dr. Seir lost his focus and worked too quickly or too slowly, he would draw blood into the syringe. Sometimes a few drops of blood would get in anyways. But it was easier to get blood out of secarin than it was to get secarin out of blood.

Taryn focused her will on the wardrobes. A mutant with little secarin was a weak mutant. But a mutant with no secarin was a dead mutant. So moving during extraction was the best way to judge weather Dr. Seir was drawing too much from her. The wardrobes were heavier than she’d expected, but she was still able to keep two of them hovering without needing to use her hands. She made them circle in front of the windows and they cast moving shadows over the room.

Dr. Seir noticed and turned from his work. “No-no-no-no-no! Put those down!”

“I’m not going to drop them,” Taryn said.

“Maybe not now but by the end of extraction you might realize different.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll have plenty of secarin left when you’re through,” Taryn tried to reassure him. He wasn’t convinced. He followed the circular motion of the wardrobes until Taryn put them back in place, safe on the ground. “What do you keep in them?”

“Just some phials.”

“They must be some very important phials for you to draw blood.”

Dr. Seir muttered a curse and brought his focus back to her extraction. Taryn set as many empty beakers and bottles as she could find to motion, trying to think of what Dr. Seir’s arguments had been the last time she’d asked his help to get her memories back.

“You’re done.” Dr. Seir eased the syringe out and studied the newly filled phial of secarin. Taryn averted her eyes from the small glob of blood that floated within. “It’s not irreparable. You’re free to go until noon.” He smiled and turned away from her, setting the syringe to rest on a rack.

Taryn pushed her sleeve down and stared out of the window, replacing all of Dr. Seir’s instruments. She knew the newest Black Knight recruits were leaving the courtyard below, urged by the shouts of their trainers and their own exhaustion. She remembered the times she used to spend on those same yards. Until the LAAMP had forced her away. “I am going to Damville after my birthday,” she finally said. “I would appreciate it if you would come along.”

“I thought we weren’t talking about this?”

“This isn’t going away, Dr. Seir. I need to see the village for myself.”

Dr. Seir didn’t turn to face her, but he spoke to her in the same tired and frustrated tone he’d used every time she asked him about Damville. “Taryn, both of those counties were swallowed by the sea. The forest, the villages; they’re all under water now. You know that. There is nothing left to see.”

Of course, Taryn knew that. She knew that she would never see the village or her family again. But that knowledge did nothing for the longing she felt. Even before she suspected that something other than a fractured skull might have been responsible for all that she’d allegedly lost, Taryn had always felt that something was missing in her. And the urgency nagged greater and greater as the years passed. When she turned sixteen, she would no longer be bound to the confines of the palace city. She had to go back to Damville. Her life would ever feel right until she did.

“I still need to go back. I might be able to remember something by being there. I might be able to reverse my memory loss completely.” Then she might understand how she had survived when no one else had.

“But you won’t,” Dr. Seir said, busying himself with the preparation of a new experiment. “You wasted a year of your life – and my supplies – trying to synthesize a serum or tonic that would restore your lost memories. And you only succeeded in making yourself ill for weeks. You spent months studying and paying heed to absurd theories like hypnosis and meditation. You failed at those as well. If your memories haven’t returned on their own by now, you need to accept that they never will. Stop setting yourself up for these disappointments.”

Taryn didn’t need to be reminded of her past failures. She recalled them better than he did; the hours of tedious work searching out and compiling small bits of information from numerous sources, stubbornly pushing through despite her many failures. She had never had a lot of faith in them to begin with but busying herself with those fruitless endeavors was preferable to doing nothing. “This will be different. I know I’ll remember something when I go back.”

“But what good are your memories if they will only traumatize you again? Your mind discarded them for a reason. Even if you do manage to get them back, you might recede deeper into your mind and lose more than just two years. You may never return to us again.” Dr. Seir finally turned to face her, his worry etched in the lines of his face. “You were very fortunate to have recovered from that once. We don’t know enough about the mind to take the chance that you’ll be able to do it again.”

Taryn didn’t feel fortunate. An important part of her life was missing and whenever she thought about it, she felt an emptiness in her, begging to be filled. She couldn’t explain that to him, though. She had to speak in a language he would understand. “If an event were traumatic enough to cause my mind to withdraw into itself for two whole years, it should leave a lasting impression, something beyond the suppression of my memories of the event. There should be something… more. Like a debilitating fear at the sight of any body of water, or the sound of any running water. It’s… illogical to say that the flood is what drove me into that mentally subdued state. Therefore, recovering my memories of that day won't send me back.”

Taryn didn’t have an issue with water. But she could not stand the sight nor stomach the smell of blood, even in the smallest amounts. She even despised the color red. That was a sign of trauma. “Something else did this to me,” she finished solemnly. “Its time it was undone.”

Dr. Seir stared blankly at her before replying. “You aren’t hydrophobic, Taryn, because your mind has had two years to repair itself. It’s flushed the memory from you completely. And I fear that any attempts to recall that memory would only reopen the old wounds.”

“No. I don’t think that’s what –”

“Taryn,” Dr. Seir interrupted. Taryn knew what was coming and forced her frustration back as Dr. Seir recounted the familiar story. “While Mr. Smith and I delivered the prisoners you’d captured to the Guard, a powerful storm raged, carrying massive amounts of waters from the sea. Damville was destroyed. Its people were carried into the sea, and both of those counties were completely submerged. Mr. Smith and I found you floating on a plank, unconscious and barely clinging to life. You’d been dashed by the powerful waves and had lost a lot of blood from the wound on your head. We were able to alert the other villages to Damville’s demise but your mind was already lost.

“Witnessing something like that, watching an entire village be swept away, it would have traumatized anyone, Taryn. You were a seven-year-old child. That, in combination with the severe head injury, its no wonder that your mind withdrew into itself to purge those painful memories. There was nothing else.”

Dr. Seir turned back to carry on with his preparations and Taryn was left to her frustrated thoughts and objections. He hadn’t been there. He couldn’t have known what happened or why. He could hypothesize. He could make assumptions. But no matter how he explained it – or how many times he explained it – Taryn could not make herself believe it. “Why do you keep doing that?” she asked.

“Doing what?”

“Why do you object to my returning to the Lost Counties so strongly?” Taryn only chased theories because Dr. Seir refused to give in to her demands. But she had no other theories this year. Nothing else would win her memories back. This time, she had logically explained away his biggest fear, yet he continued to refuse her. “What are you so afraid of?”

“I’m afraid of what would happen to you if –”

“No, that isn’t it.” Hatred and fear were the natural enemies of logic. Taryn had seen enough of it in the faces of the LAAMP Administrators and the city’s people to recognize that Dr. Seir’s averted eyes and restless limbs were due to something else. She couldn’t feel emotions anymore but she recognized the signs. Taryn recognizes this is not a fear about her, but a fear about himself. This was shame. “Is there something you don’t want me to remember?”

Dr. Seir stiffened at her words and an unpleasant silence filled the room. “Of course not,” he finally replied, not at all convincingly.

Taryn’s heart raced to think what he had to be ashamed about. He was a scientist who like to poke and prod at curiosities.

And she’d been a curiosity. “Dr. Seir?”

The man gave no reply.

“Dr. Seir.” He wouldn’t have, she told herself. Yes, he was obsessed with his work. But surely he could not have forgotten himself so completely as to use her for his experiments. She meant more to him that that. And George would not have allowed him to use her like that.

So why wasn’t he defending himself?

“Look at me!” she yelled, unable to keep the anger from her tone as she rose to stand behind him. He reluctantly complied and yelped at the sight of her, and what her rage was doing to the room. The wardrobes shook with the force of her poorly-contained fury. Glass rattled against glass and instruments flew around the room. Papers flapped and fluttered and all of their shadows moved with them in the room.

Taryn stepped away from him and forced herself to calm. She couldn’t afford the exhaustion of a rage-storm right after extraction. The room settled but the anger still boiled within her. She schooled her features and relaxed her tense muscles to appear less threatening to him. She thought she should apologize for frightening him but wondered instead why he would be so frightened of her.

“You said,” Taryn started, her voice shaking with her efforts to control herself. “You said that I’d lost my thought-reading and empathy because my secarin no longer carried those mutations. You said it was my body’s way of correcting the mistake of having both mutations in the first place. Was that true or did you… Did you… try to cure me?”

“Of course it’s true,” he finally said, his voice a terrified whisper, his face still a picture of trepidation. “There is no chemical in existence that would cure some of your abilities and leave the others untouched. I don’t understand enough about the specific mutations of secarin to even dream of achieving something like that. And though I cannot speak with absolute certainty to the cause of your loss, my theory is the only logical explanation.”

That didn’t answer Taryn’s question. She heard the words, but they lacked the indignant tone she would have expected if he’d been innocent of wrongdoing. She thought about taking the truth from his mind. But she’d promised she would never do such a thing to a friend and she would not dishonor herself by breaking her word; no matter how undeserving he was.

“I owe you my life, Taryn,” Dr. Seir continued. “I would never betray your trust. I am not that kind of scientist. You must believe me.”

It was all too easy for Taryn to forget how their relationship started, but the reminder did nothing to calm her unease. Taryn had saved his life when a couple of mutants had tried to kill him. One of whom had been an old ‘patient’ of his; someone he’d once conducted experiments on. If Dr. Seir had once done something bad enough that a man would want to kill him, what could he have done to her, unable to defend herself?

Taryn felt the stirrings of fury return and quelled them before they destroyed Dr. Seir’s new lab. It was too much. She had a prisoner in Pine Keep to look after; an investigation into a secret organization out of Larisport that was smuggling mutants into the city for unknown reasons; she had to make preparations for the series of heated arguments and delicate negotiations with Vares and the LAAMP for her future. Taryn didn’t want to think of what Dr. Seir might have done to her in the two years she spent in his custody. She moved to the door but stopped herself before she could storm out of the room.

If she didn’t find a channel for the twisted energy inside of her – if she didn’t move, hit or destroy something – it would seep out in the form of another rage-storm and drain her. Then she wouldn’t be able to leave the palace that day. She was in such desperate need of her morning training session. But she needed Dr. Seir’s cooperation more.

Taryn took a deep breath and turned to face him. She couldn’t discard her anger completely, but she could make herself less hostile toward him. “I think a phantom might be responsible for my two year fugue state and memory loss,” she said evenly.

Dr. Seir was taken aback and stared blankly at her before responding. “I beg your pardon?”

“Is there any chance that I might have encountered any other mutants during our travels?”

“I don’t know,” he said warily. “Mr. Smith and I had no way of knowing what went on in your mind. You never spoke, you see? You merely took whatever you needed. That was a source of great embarrassment for us until Mr. Smith took on the task of training that out of you. I remember,” he said, a small smile breaking on his face. “There was one instance when we were –”

“Focus, Dr. Seir!” Taryn snapped. “Mutants – could I have met any?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think it would do you any good to pursue this theory. What reason would a phantom have to make another mutant varn? Not to say, of course, that you were varn. A mutant only becomes varn after a berserker episode and you’re not a berserker. Its just that any reader can make a middling varn but a mutant’s mind is far too potent for even a phantom to attempt to tamper with – least of all not without becoming varn themselves. But then how would they be able to keep you varn for as long as you were?”

Taryn sighed. Dr. Seir tended to ramble when he was rattled, chasing theories as they came to him. A phantom might target a mutant for the same reason she gathered stones and took lessons from Master Gedel: to test her abilities and discover new ways to use them. Her guess was that the Maron prince was her phantom. Every Maron Queen had been the most powerful mutant of her generation. They had to be, in order to maintain rule over a realm of uninhibited mutants. The Maron line had been so mad about power that they married into it – even if it could only be found among their own kin – so that every generation would be more powerful than the last. Who could say that they hadn’t finally bred a phantom in this last Maron prince?

If he fancied himself the long-awaited hero of the Keeper faith, possessed of a power greater than any the world had seen, then he may have been fool enough to use her as a test subject in his attempt at mind control. If that were the case, it would mean the worst kind of trouble.

“What about things you actually remember of my behavior?” Taryn asked. “No theories, please. I only want the facts.”

“I’ve told you time and again,” he said. “You never spoke. Mr Smith oversaw your training. You fed and looked after yourself. But through it all, your consciousness remained dormant. What else is there to say?”

“Did my behavior ever become unusual in any way or change at all at any time in those years?” she asked slowly. “Apart from George’s training.”

He stared to shake his head… and froze. His eyes blinked rapidly behind his glasses as his brow knit tightly against his forehead.

“You’re remembering something! Tell me,” Taryn demanded.

“I don’t think you ever slept,” he finally said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you would lie down and close your eyes at night but the slightest disturbance – a light touch or a soft sound – would alert you to full wakefulness again. Months had passed before Mr. Smith discovered this and we tried to keep a closer eye on you afterwards. But you’d always had a tendency to… wander off,” he finished stiltedly.

“You mean, I might have gone off on my own at night. And if I had, I might have encountered other mutants.” So it was possible. Taryn’s mind reeled at this confirmation. She’d suspected, surely. But until now it had merely been a theory; cobbled together from the encounters she’d had while exploring the minds and abilities of other mutants. Shored up against all the facts she could never make herself believe. Offered up to explain away her many failures. Now, knowing that it was a possibility made it appear all the more certain. A phantom had done this to her. So it could be undone.

“But a mutant could not have been responsible for what happened to you,” Dr. Seir pressed. “You think too much of a phantom’s abilities.”

“But its possible,” Taryn insisted. Phantoms were to readers what berserkers were to movers. But where berserkers were prone to sporadic episodes of incredible telekinetic power, phantoms constantly operated at a higher level of telepathic power. “The cause of the trauma isn’t what matters right now,” Taryn said. It mattered to her, but uncovering that mystery was the aim of her voyage to the Lost Counties. “Whether it was the flood or another mutant, I was a child when it happened. I am strong enough now that it will not happen again. But I need to remember what happened to me and I need your help.”

Dr. Seir sighed wearily. “How is it that you plan on facilitating this memory recovery?”

“Full sensory immersion,” Taryn replied. “If I join your memories of Damville – as well as George’s – with the presence of the Lost Counties, I may be able to stimulate the recover my own memories.” Taryn could see in his expression that he warred with himself; a part of him wanted to agree, but the rest still found a strong objection.

“This sounds suspiciously like the theories of the same ‘doctor’ Moors who led you to beg the King to have a replica of the Lady’s Fountain built for your garden. The sight of it has failed to help your memory. Why should this succeed?”

“Because it will!” Taryn knew no other way to explain it. Whether she returned to the Lost Counties and siphoned George’s and Dr. Seir’s memories to feed her own or she met the phantom who had meddled with her mind in the first place and forced them to repair her psyche, she knew this would work. If she returned to Damville, she would remember everything.

“Taryn, you can’t continue to place your hopes in these uncertified frauds and the theoretical nonsense they call science.”

“I don’t want to argue with you about what qualifies as science,” Taryn said impatiently. “If this is nonsense, then it won’t work. I won’t get my memories back. I won’t relive the trauma. I won’t fall back into that state of mental vacancy. I won't uncover your secrets. There is nothing for you to be afraid of.”

He looked at her sharply. A small measure of his fear had returned. “But there is no point. If you’re so certain that a mutant is responsible, then only that mutant could reverse it.”

Taryn was counting on that. It would be nearly impossible to find her phantom among the hundreds of thousands of mutants in the kingdom. But if he was so intent on keeping her from her memories, then only an overwhelming attempt to regain them would lure her phantom to reveal himself. But he’d find that Taryn no longer had the pliable mind of the child she’d been when he first laid thoughts on it. Taryn knew enough about her abilities now to give as much as she got, and she would force her phantom to undo what had been done. “Pointless or not, I need to see this fail. Just as I saw hypnosis and meditation and the fountain and my tonics fail. I need to try this and I need your help.”

“Is there really no other way?”

“I recall reading of one instance where the subject recovered from a memory loss after sustaining a head injury that was very similar to the one that had caused the memory lapse,” Taryn answered. His resistances had begun to crumble and Taryn smiled, allowing herself to hope. “I think that would be too dangerous to try as anything but a last resort.”

“I agree.” He offered her a smiled of concession. “All right, then. I will accompany you. But only if that’s is all we do.”

“What do you mean?” That wouldn’t be all they did and he knew that. Whenever George came to visit her, he tried to coax her out of the city with some new marvel he wanted her to see, some new curiosity he wanted her to experience. Now that she wouldn’t be legally bound to stay, he wanted the cram all those experiences into the one trip before she signed her adulthood away.

“We would have to pass through the entirety of the southern province to reach the Lost Counties,” Dr. Seir answered. “If they’re performing Pilgrimages in the city, I can only imagine what we might encounter in the counties. I need your assurances that you will keep to your itinerary and not get involved.”

“Why would you ask that of me?”

“Because I need to keep you safe.”

“You swore to keep me free, not safe. George and I are more than enough protection against anything we’d encounter.” It would be just like their trip to the palace. Except she’d be aware of everything that happened to her, Taryn thought bitterly to herself.

“Not against Purist determination,” he insisted. “You do a well enough job of concealing you abilities here. But no one expects there to be mutants hiding in the city. The zealots in the counties have a reputation for sniffing out mutants in their midst. They’ve made a sport of it and I don’t doubt that you’d make a tempting prize. If you want my assistance, then you must promise that you’ll do nothing to draw their attention. That is my price.”

Well, that was too high for her. The whole point of the trip was that there would be no more secrets in her life. No more hiding.

If Taryn hadn’t known what the mystics were up to in the counties, she would have said he was overreacting. To him, everything was either too dangerous or too risky for her. He hadn’t wanted her to go into the city to complete her education because it was too risky. Granted, she had been nearly captured after two separate attempts at this. She blamed her own foolishness for that – and treachery from those she had considered her friends. But she had escaped unharmed. She had learned from her mistakes and would not repeat them. Still, Dr. Seir had insisted that she never leave the palace again and Vares had hired a private tutor.

Dr. Seir objected to her isolated training sessions because of the risk of injury to herself. When she offered to train in the open he’d complained that it would put her at risk of breaching her immunity agreement. Left up to him, Taryn’s days would be spent sitting quietly in her room, emerging solely for meals and extractions. If she didn’t need his memories, she would have called him dramatic and been done with it.

But Taryn did know about the kingdom’s faith war. She kept a close mind on the reports and statistics that come in to the LAAMP offices. She knew that the number of unprovoked crimes against mutants had nearly doubled in the last year. And while he was content to sit in his laboratory and tinker with his chemicals, terrified of the terrorizing state the kingdom was falling into, Taryn was determined to do something about it. But she couldn’t do it without his memories.

“I’ll see you at noon,” Taryn said. When she left Dr. Seir’s laboratory, she tried to console herself with the fact that at least he’d agreed to come along. But that was a victory three years in the making. She didn’t think she could find a way to answer his concerns for her safety without stifling her sense of justice. Not in five short weeks.

The day had barely begun and already it was ruined.