Chapter Twenty-Five
Shear
The nightmare hit Yun so hard that a pain echoed through my own head. It was as though her own psyche resisted my attempt to help, to calm her.
It was strange, and I’d felt it a few times since I’d started trying to help her sleep more. I’d tune into her mind, so I could rest but would wake if she became agitated.
The problem was that each time I attempted to guide her away from a nightmare, toward something more restful, it took more effort than it should have.
I’d done this with extremely powerful minds in the past and never struggled—my skills were unmatched—yet Yun felt like an unruly stallion I had to drag by the reins.
No matter how hard I tried to understand, it made no sense.
Tonight proved even more challenging, like each day my ability to affect her weakened.
Why?
Was it because of our closeness? Our bond? That should make it easier to affect her, not harder.
I reached into her mind, using all my focus to grip her thoughts, to move them from whatever horror rested there, but something else lurked in her gray matter. It felt twisted, dark, and it shoved me backward so hard that I found myself clutching my skull, leaning forward and panting on the bed.
What the hell just happened?
I set a hand on her shoulder and woke her with a shake. Whatever the nightmare was, it wouldn’t be good for her.
She came awake with a start, but she didn’t shock me with her powers. She jerked upright, breathing hard, but the moment her gaze landed on me she relaxed. “Was I screaming?”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s good.” She rubbed her eyes, taking it all in stride a little too easily.
“What are your nightmares like?”
She frowned. “I thought you would know that, since you’ve been in my head.”
“I did, at first. Now, though? I can’t seem to slip into them, it’s like they’re protected somehow.”
She dragged her tongue over her lip, a nervous habit I’d noticed from her. “I don’t know why.” Even as she said that, some part of her seemed to suspect something.
“You know something. You should tell me.”
She crossed her legs, a sure sign that she knew she wouldn’t get back to sleep. “You know I don’t like mentalists.”
“The corrupted who hurt you was one, right?”
Her eyes widened, but quickly she laughed as though she should have known I’d work it out. “That obvious, huh?”
“There were some signs.”
“The dreams feel so real, like I’m still trapped there, like he’s talking to me.”
“How did it happen?”
She took her bottom lip between her teeth, as though she struggled with whether to share. I got that, since it seemed as though she rarely—if ever—told anyone the full story.
I stayed out of her mind, not wanting to risk her retreating any further. If she felt me there, if she suspected I worked to pull the details out myself, any trust we had developed would melt away.
“I grew up in San Diego,” she said, her voice soft in the dim room. “So like most of the city, I ended up trapped inside when The Pitt opened last time.”
That much I had expected, given the facts we’d gathered. I said nothing, giving her the space to keep speaking on her own.
“My parents and I tried to make it toward the portal, but we were separated. There were monsters, they told me to run a different way, and…” She paused, then took a deep, shuddering breath. “I heard my mother scream, but I never saw them again.”
“How did you get out? There were espers looking for civilians, but the number lost was high.”
“I didn’t get out.”
That stilled me. What did she mean?
She curled her lips into a sad smile. “I don’t mean that metaphorically, like I still feel as though I’m still there.
I mean that very literally. I tried to make it toward the portal, moving in a roundabout way, avoiding any monsters I saw, but in the end, I just couldn’t get close enough. The portal closed.”
Even with her explanation, I understood it no better. No story had ever come out about a person surviving in a dungeon. While a stable dungeon wouldn’t collapse when it closed, there was no way a person could survive ten years inside one.
She went on, as though she accepted I would have trouble believing her story.
“A closed dungeon like that, it’s different from what people expect.
It’s dark, for one. The portal supplies way more light than it seems like it would, so everything is darker after it closes.
Only the purple streaks in the sky give any light.
Also, people always assume that the monsters would get worse, but it’s the opposite.
When the portal shimmered and collapsed, like a waterfall, the dungeon got so quiet.
The monsters stopped screaming, they stopped rampaging. ”
“They’re no longer aggressive?” I asked, trying to think of what a monster would look like if it weren’t drooling and growling and lunging.
“They’ll protect themselves, but they don’t seek out conflict the way they do when the portal is open. It’s almost like the portal is an energy that doesn’t belong, that drives them mad.”
“Were you alone? Weren’t there other survivors? Are they all still in there?”
That had her curling her shoulders in. “There were lots of survivors at first, but they got sick quickly. Corruption levels are high in the dungeons, and it seems if anyone spends much time in there, it infects them. They didn’t turn into espers—they just fell ill.
Headaches, vomiting…eventually they just died.
Their bodies disintegrated like monster bodies do here, and within two weeks, I was alone. ”
“Did you know you were a guide?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. I had no idea why I didn’t get sick.
I just lived off the food and water I found, the stuff locked in the dungeon with me.
” She swallowed loudly, a gulp that said she had reached the part of the conversation she really had wanted to avoid.
“I think it was about three weeks in when I met him.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“No. He never told me his name. He was a mentalist, powerful, corrupted. He must have been there a long time, living inside The Pitt like it was his own little kingdom. The beasts obeyed him, doing as he said. He used them as guards to keep me from running off.”
“I didn’t think corrupted could be guided,” I said, not wanting to deny what had obviously happened but trying to understand it.
“Yeah, I didn’t think it could happen, either.
Hell, I didn’t even know I was a guide. You know how I guide, by pulling corruption?
Well, he didn’t give me that chance. He just poured the corruption into me, forcing it inside me as though that would somehow make him not corrupted, anymore.
” Her voice quieted more, and she talked as though she hated the conversation, but she pushed the words out anyway.
The courage was commendable. “It didn’t work, of course. ”
“What you did to the corrupted at the hotel—”
“It’s different. For one, I’m not a scared child anymore who doesn’t know how to use my powers.
Also, the level of corruption is different.
In our world, there’s a limit to the amount a person can hold, but in the dungeon?
It’s everywhere, so no matter how much I pulled from him, how much he forced me to take, it always filled back up like he was a vacuum. ”
“Did he do anything else?” I hated the question, and given that she’d said she’d never had sex before, I had to think he hadn’t raped her. Still, I needed to understand fully, to know what exactly had happened.
She shook her head. “He didn’t have any desires like that. He just told me I was his, that we were bonded—guide and esper. That’s what he tells me in my dreams, that he’s mine, that I’m his, that he’s coming for me.”
“He’s still alive?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I assume he’s still in The Pitt. There isn’t much to hurt him in there, so unless the time becomes too much and he kills himself, I don’t see why he wouldn’t still be there.”
This all felt like information that was brand new, facts I had to fit into what I thought I understood about the world.
I had no idea what it meant in general, how it created a full story, but I knew better than to doubt her.
I’d learned enough to realize that Yun wouldn’t lie, not about this, so even if it made no sense, I trusted her.
“Is there any way he’s talking to me?”
I frowned, then shook my head. “The portal cuts any ability for a mentalist to pass through. If I am outside a dungeon, Carter inside, I can’t contact him at all.
They are different realms, even if they occupy the same space for a small amount of time, so they can’t be crossed.
” However, something else occurred to me, something I didn’t want to share.
I thought about the way her mind had all but thrown me out earlier.
Could the mentalist have left traces behind?
A mentalist could shore up a person’s mental barriers, but could one erect special ones like that?
He wouldn’t be able to contact her from a closed dungeon, but perhaps he’d left traces of his power that could still affect her?
I’d never heard of that, but I’d also done little research into what a corrupted mentalist could do. Given that mentalists were one of the rarest type of espers, there was little research on us. Even when one corrupted, they were usually killed so quickly that no true research could happen.
“How did you get out? It hasn’t opened again, so how did you escape?”
She stared down at her hands, the tension inside her growing.
“I was there for so long. It was hard to know how long, since there’s no day or night, but when I did get out, I’d been gone for six months.
Every day was worse than the one before, with him pushing me more, forcing me to guide more, toying with me more.
He wasn’t going to let anything happen to me that would kill me, and I couldn’t imagine living this way.
I refused. It was just too much, and I wasn’t strong enough. ”
Something inside me shivered, a fear I wasn’t accustomed to soaking into me. Part of me wanted to tell her to stop, to not tell me anymore, because I had no doubt it was headed to even darker things.
I remained silent, let her speak. I owed her that much.
“He had set himself up near the heart. Have you ever seen the heart of a stable dungeon?”
“No. Because they can’t be destroyed, we’ve never bothered with getting to them. In stable dungeons, we focus on saving civilians and clearing monsters.”
“They look the same as regular hearts, but they shimmer, like you can see the corruption swirling through them. He’d taken me there, made me stare at the heart, told me that it was the source of power, that it was the connection, that someday he’d figure out how to harness it.
Well, one day—night, I don’t even know—I couldn’t do it anymore.
I knew I couldn’t. Each time I had to guide him, it felt like another piece of me was pulled out, like he removed fingernails each time, like if I stayed there any longer there wouldn’t be anything of me left.
I didn’t think much of it through, just figured that dead was better than this.
So I snuck away while he slept. He woke up as I stared at the heart, and I think he knew what I planned.
He told me that he’d make me pay for it, that he’d never let me go, but that all just made it easier. I reached out and grabbed the heart.”
The fear I’d had about what might have occurred was justified. Everyone knew what happened if someone who wasn’t a strong esper, of at least the same rank, touched a heart.
It made me think about Ingram, about the esper who had tried to close the dungeon a few days before. He hadn’t survived it.
“You knew…?”
She nodded. “I knew what would happen, and I was fine with it. I was looking forward to it, actually. It would end everything that I went through, the pain, the fear, the uncertainty. I didn’t have hope that things would ever get better—why would I?
My parents were gone, and everyone else who survived the closing had died.
I was alone in a place I didn’t belong, and I knew that if I somehow made it to the next time the portal opened, I wouldn’t be me anymore.
I’d be a shell by then, and I refused to let that happen.
So when the pain echoed through me when I touched the heart, I welcomed it.
” She had a strange dreaminess, one that terrified me.
It felt like a glimpse of the hopelessness she had, and it made me realize that the feeling hadn’t ever truly left her. She still had it, and the knowledge made me want to keep her in my sights at all times.
“How I got back exactly, I don’t know. I can’t explain it.
There was this pain, and he was there, reaching for me, then everything faded around me.
The next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital with Kaidan there.
They told me that I was found in the San Diego ruins, that two monsters were near me, both dead, so they assumed I’d been attacked by them in a breakthrough portal.
They’d tested me while I was out, realized I was an S-Rank guide, then called the Guild—thus Kaidan. ”
That helped to explain her close friendship with Kaidan, given he’d been there from the start for her. I still didn’t care for him, didn’t like that connection, but at least I understood where it had come from.
It also made everything clearer. Her reaction to touch, her dislike of espers, her hatred of mentalists. Anyone would feel the same, at least if they could actually survive what she had.
I had a feeling few could.
The thing that pulled at me, though, the part that I couldn’t push aside. “How are you going to handle The Pitt again?”
She shrugged, though the nonchalant gesture did little to hide her fears. “I don’t know, but I can promise you one thing. No matter what happens, I will never end up trapped in there again.”
The certainty of her statement, the way she said it as though she was ready to give up on life if even the chance of that occurred, had me swallowing hard, because that was exactly what I feared.