Chapter 3
Three
“There is nothing in this world or any other that could make me stop loving you, no matter how much you test my patience.”
—Mary Dunlavy
A patient room at St. Giles’s Hospital, a private cryptid institution under New York City
I PULLED THE CHAIR UP NEXT to Mark’s bed, reaching for his hand as I sat.
As always, he lay motionless and unresponsive, eyes closed and face turned toward the ceiling.
He looked enough like me to be my brother, and for all we knew, he was; cuckoo parents don’t exactly give their children lists of siblings when they drop us off.
I didn’t think so, though. There had been a familiar hum to Ingrid’s mind that told me she was my biological mother. I didn’t get that from Mark.
Right now, I didn’t get anything at all until I laced my fingers with his, holding him as tightly as I dared. Once our palms were touching and the skin contact amplified my powers, I tumbled into his mind like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole—the fictional character, not my grandmother.
I once described the inside of Mark’s mind as being like a damaged computer hard drive, all scrambled data and static-filled images.
This time, as I tumbled, I didn’t see anything like that.
Instead, I passed flashes of memory and personality.
None of it seemed conscious—the awareness that would have screamed “Mark” to me just wasn’t present.
Still, this was more than I’d ever been able to find before.
I focused on my descent. Diving into someone else’s mind like this was sort of like being in a lucid dream, one of those ones that feel completely real as they’re going on.
That meant that even though I knew I was sitting in Mark’s hospital room, I felt like I was falling.
I imagined my body heavier, dropping like a stone, and the dream image of myself obliged, plummeting into the depths of Mark’s mind.
It was a disorienting, vertigo-inducing sensation, and I had to clench my jaw to stop myself from taking the extra weight away. I fell past memory, past the flickering web of Mark’s personality trying to reconstruct itself, and landed in a familiar white void.
For a moment, I just stopped, standing up straight and looking triumphantly around.
I’d been trying to reach this void for years.
It was the bottom of the self. I’d been trapped in my own void by my mother, once, and rescued Artie from his when a cuckoo boobytrap left him stranded there.
Because that was the thing about really deep mental work: it was a concept and an unreal space, but that didn’t make it any less dangerous to the unprepared.
There were traps in the deeps, and they could catch and keep a person who didn’t know how to avoid them.
Mark’s void had been blocked by the distortion in his mind, keeping me from getting deep enough to look for him. And now the distortion was cleared, and I could get to the base of his psyche.
This deep into his thoughts, it no longer felt like lucid dreaming.
It felt like reality. I took a step deeper into the white endlessness and felt my weight shift onto my leading foot, felt the solidity of my body moving through the cool air at the bottom of his self.
I kept walking, trying to adjust to the strange sensation of moving through someone who probably wouldn’t have invited me in if he’d been awake to have a say.
When I’d been in my own mind, I’d been at home, and when I’d been in Artie’s mind, I’d been someone he trusted enough to welcome.
Here, I was barely better than a stranger, and I was the one who’d broken him. I had to tread carefully.
I held that thought firmly as I moved deeper, the scenery—or lack thereof—around me not changing in the least. I was an intruder here. I might not be actively unwelcome, but I needed to assume he’d throw me out if he could.
And I would welcome it. Throwing me out would show an awareness of his own mind that Mark hadn’t demonstrated before this point. It might hurt, but I’d accept the pain if it meant he was waking up.
I walked and walked, until I saw something breaking the line of the empty infinity around me.
It was a chair, the fancy gaming kind that Artie had in his basement for years, designed for people who wanted to spend hours staring at a screen and battling their controllers.
I angled myself toward it, and it got larger at an accelerated rate, every step I took carrying me an impossible distance forward.
As it grew, I saw the table and television in front of it, the bright polygons of some complicated video game flashing across the screen.
There was no sound. That made more sense when I got close enough to see the figure in the chair: Mark, maybe fourteen years old, wearing a pair of headphones that swallowed his ears and made his head look small.
He was watching the screen with a frighteningly focused intensity, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth and eyes narrowed to bring the figures into sharper focus.
That’s another thing about being in someone’s mindscape: since everything I’m seeing is their thoughts, or sometimes memories, I can understand facial expressions when I’m on the inside.
They’re not images so much as the memory and intention of images, and Mark’s face was perfectly clear.
In here, I could see how much we looked alike, even if he was younger than I’d ever known him.
It made sense. Mark told Artie his ancestral memories had cracked when he was fifteen.
I’d ripped those same memories out of his mind after they’d been given plenty of time to throw down roots and wind their way through his psyche, resulting in incredible damage when they were removed.
This was a version of Mark that had existed before those memories, and might well be the oldest version of him that still existed.
I moved to stand next to the television, waiting for him to notice me.
For what felt like an eternity, he kept focusing on his game.
I could tell when he realized I was there: his eyes widened and his tongue pulled back into his mouth.
He pressed a button at the center of his controller, then tossed it to the side, pulling the headphones down around his neck.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, voice sharp and aggressive.
“I’ve been trying to find you,” I replied. “Mark, are you all right?”
“Asks the woman who took my brain apart,” he said, almost sullenly. He turned his attention back to the screen, picking up the controller again, although he left the headphones around his neck. “Of course I’m not all right.”
“I needed the space, and you gave me permission,” I said. “I didn’t have a choice. We’d all have died if I hadn’t done that.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I died anyway,” he countered. “If I wake up, am I still me? Am I going to lose everything that makes me who I am?”
I winced. “I don’t know,” I said. “Artie … Artie didn’t wake up at all.”
His eyes widened again, this time with surprise rather than shock. “What do you mean?”
“While I was running the equation, he—he touched me. Bare skin on bare skin. And it jumped into him, and it ate him alive. He didn’t wake up after that.
I had to build him a new person to be before he could wake up.
I didn’t do that with you. You’ve been sleeping and healing for a long time now. I think you’re getting better.”
“How long?” he asked suspiciously.
“I don’t think I should—”
“How. Long?”
“Eight years.”
He surged out of his chair, dropping the controller again.
Somewhere in the process of standing up, he went from fourteen to twenty, getting taller and broader across the chest and shoulders, face melting from boyish softness into something more severe.
“You mean you left me in a coma for eight years? My sister—”
“Is fine.”
He froze, sagging slightly, like I’d just knocked the wind out of him.
“I’ve been checking in with your family periodically. They don’t know who I am, and they don’t remember me between visits, but I know who they are, and I know they miss you very much. They have no idea what happened to you. They just want you to come home.”
“Cici.”
“Is twenty years old now. She graduated from high school in the middle of her class, but she didn’t get expelled, and when one of the boys on the football team grabbed her ass, she broke his jaw.
She’s a little spitfire, just like you said she was.
She’s majoring in forensic science. She misses her big brother. ”
“She can’t be twenty,” he objected. A giggle sounded from off to the right, high and bright and playful. He glanced toward it. “She’s not allowed.”
“I’m sorry.” That wasn’t enough. That could never have been enough. “You remember how Ingrid said she was going to turn me into a queen?”
“Yeah.”
“The last instar only triggers if you experience psychic trauma and have had your ancestral memories removed,” I said.
“I caused you psychic trauma in the process of removing those memories. I think you’ve been undergoing the third and fourth instars at the same time. That’s why it’s taken so long.”
He stared at me. “That’s not possible.”
Cici ran into the space between us, a skinny urchin of no more than twelve in leggings and an oversized T-shirt that hung well past her mid-thigh.
Her hair was gathered into two puffs on the sides of her head, banded with rainbow beads, and her skin was dark enough to make Mark look sickly as she grabbed his arm and yanked it down, pulling on him.
“Mark, come on,” she said. “You promised I could have a turn. You promised, you promised.”
“Cici, hey, chill for a second, okay?” He picked up the controller and handed it to her. “Go ahead and get your high score on, and I’ll check in with you in a little bit.”
She threw herself into his chair, already punching buttons with wild glee. Mark turned his attention back to me.