Welcome to Chapter 15.

Something a little special for you this week. Not only is it an exciting chapter, but because of the way it flows, I couldn't find a place to logically split it into two parts as per my self-imposed size limit. So this week, you are getting a double feature... Enjoy.

A quick thanks to my amazing editing team. Your grasp of the English language allows these stories to be what they are. Thank you to the rest of you for your comments, feedback, and high ratings for each chapter as well.

Now, on with the story.

********

I looked around the generically decorated room. The walls were painted white on the top half, and that sickly shade of green that can only be found in hospitals and very old schoolhouses colored the bottom. I was sitting in one of those chairs that could only ever be found in a hospital. A soft, plastic cushion and a curved, ergonomic wooden armrest. But looking around, there was no bed. Just a tv bolted to one wall, currently off, and vague, nondescript stock art screwed in cheap wooden frames to two of the three walls in my eye line.

This was not the sort of hospital you came to heal after, say, a car crash. It was the sort you came to deal with major brain damage, like the sort that could happen after, say, a car crash. The sort there was little hope of ever recovering from. I ran my hand over my leg, feeling the pot marks and striations under the skin from the countless surgeries to repair it after the crash. I silently willed the useless appendage to move, to twitch, to drum out the beat to a Bryan Adams song with my still painful foot. Something, anything, to regain something of the life I had lost on the night of the crash.

My memory was fuzzy. I remembered some things so vividly that it felt like they had happened mere minutes ago. Waking up with Jimmy and the Doctors in the hospital, being told that Moe was gone, having the full extent of my massive injuries laid out to me in excruciating detail, and then being told that the memory centers in my brain had been shredded by the bone fragments from my skull. That I would never reliably be able to remember anything for the rest of my life. The inability to ever live independently again had seemed more like a vague concept when they had said it, but all these months later, I was still struggling to come to terms with its reality.

Then weeks of surgeries. Vain attempts to repair my shattered legs and broken back. My back had been first and had offered the cruelest glimmer of hope by being a total success. That hope was destroyed when the operations on my legs proved to be abject failures. Not only was neither leg capable of supporting my weight, one of them would never be able to be moved under its own power again. More than that, and in a sadistic twist of fate, the success of my back surgery meant that the pain that the damaged nerves had blocked out was now announcing itself with a vengeance. I was on enough pain medication to sedate a fully grown rhino, and that barely took the edge off.

But it was the brain damage that had ended any prospect of a normal life. Again, the early optimism brought about by my ability to remember things from before the crash, things like the events of that night in the pub and who Jimmy was, suddenly came crashing down as it became clear that my short-term memory was just incapable of working properly. Events happening to me at any one time had less than a twenty percent chance of being remembered a few hours later. Some things stuck, most things didn't. There were memories in my head of someone not only halfway through a conversation but actually mid-sentence, and me having no idea what they had been talking about.

Then there were the mood swings. Aggressive, violent, seething bouts of uncontrollable anger would just appear out of nowhere. There was a gorgeous blonde nurse in the hospital. I didn't remember her name, but she was always nice to me. One day, for reasons that completely eluded me, then and now, I hit her. I had hit her hard. There was just something about that look of pity and sympathy in her eyes that I wanted gone, so I used my balled-up fist to get rid of it. I didn't mean to, it certainly wasn't intentional. I had never considered myself a violent man before the accident, but now I was constantly aware of the eggshells people walked on around me. Both them, and I, knew that a single wrong look, or a single careless tone, even if it was friendly and humorous, could result in a horrifically violent outburst. I had become very aware of my own loss of control, and that, above all other things, had thrown me into the darkest pits of depressing despair. I never saw the cute blonde nurse again that I know of, and found myself in restraints for a lot of my hazy memories after that.

I didn't even know if I ever had the chance to apologize.

It wasn't long after that, that I found myself here. There was a vague, loose sense of the passage of time, but with no recollection of anything at all for days, sometimes weeks on end, I could never be entirely sure how long had passed since the last thing I could remember. I had grown into the habit of compulsively asking the date and time whenever I could, on the off chance that I would remember it later or at least be able to gauge how long it had been since my last memory.

It wasn't like I was in a drooling stupor between moments of lucidity, at least not according to the few things I could remember my doctors saying. I was always cognizant and aware. I was always coherent and cooperative, I always worked hard in my therapies, and always seemed genuinely motivated to work toward my recovery. I just had no memory of vast periods of time before that session. And with no memory, no therapies could take hold, and no progress could be made.

Apparently, it had been discovered that repeating the same lessons over and over and over again, sometimes for weeks on end, would force it into my long-term memory. It was a technique that promised some results, but the time it would take to see those achievements was prolonged proportionately with the amount of time it took to repeat each one before I remembered it.

Beneath it all, however, were the dreams. And just like dreams, holding onto them was like trying to pin down the tide or hold smoke in your hand. As soon as I felt like I had a grip on the memory, it would be gone.

There were flashes. Flashes of a girl with fiery red hair, of an extraordinary sense of happiness and belonging whenever she would visit my dreams. Another girl with strawberry blonde hair, the feeling of calm and comfort she brought with her. A big man with a tattoo peeking above his collar. Another with an Italian accent. Dreams of places I had never been and would never go. The sun-drenched city, the vaulted halls of some massive church-looking building, and that city. The city of my dreams, bathed in soft light and filled with towering skyscrapers, and that feeling of... home... whenever I walked its streets. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't hold onto any image or any memory from those dreams for more than a few hazy moments. But they were always there, like a story playing out just beneath the surface.

But then there were instincts; those were the things that scared me the most. The urge to stretch and flex my mind in much the same way I was flexing my fingers against the arm of the chair. The same as the urge to move my ruined leg. The instinct to somehow connect my mind to another... as if that were even possible. The urge to speak to someone I didn't know, an aged old man wearing a butler's costume and a constant look of amusement. The feeling of utter, indescribably hostility I would feel every time the Doctor came to talk to me. I knew he was trying to help, I knew I needed to listen to him and cooperate if I ever had any chance of getting better. But there was something inside me that screamed "Danger!" whenever I saw him. It wasn't a fear response. I wasn't afraid of him, just violently, savagely angry. It was the same feeling I had felt when I hit that nurse. I wasn't afraid of the Doctor, but I was absolutely terrified of the urge to rip out his still-beating heart every time I saw him.

Fuck. I am actually insane! Or at least fucking psychotic.

I frowned again, shook my head clear, and swallowed that almost overwhelming need to kill something. For the time being, I was content to just sit. This chair was comfortable, and without really knowing how, I seemed to understand that 'comfortable' was not a position I found myself in too often these days. Something was very wrong with me, and I needed to get a grip if I was ever going to be normal again. I pulled at my arms; the restraints wrapped over the tops of my forearms gave me just enough movement to be able to reach my nose and scratch it. Whatever meds they were keeping me on were keeping me as pain-free as it was possible for me to be and reasonably calm... or at least lucid enough to be able to control my own emotions.

I glanced up at the door directly in front of me. I knew it would open soon, and the Doctor would arrive. He would smile, ask me how I was feeling, and then start working backward through the therapies we had tried until I remembered something. We would spend the first half of our session finding the point at which we could start it. I knew he was frustrated with the same little dance we performed every day, but I knew his patience was far beyond anything I possessed myself, even before the accident. He would sit on the chair facing me, between me and the door, just far enough away to be able to escape if I broke from my restraints. I'm not sure how much damage I could do without functional legs, but the fact that nobody even seemed to come within arms reach of me if they could help it, suggested that the answer to that was "quite a lot!"

I glanced up at the clock on the wall and sighed. I had no idea if I should be feeling impatient or not, mainly because I had no memory of entering the room and, as such, no idea how long I had been waiting. I could have been here for ten minutes or ten hours, for all I knew.

I suppose I could get a head start and try working out for myself the last thing I could remember.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and cast my mind back.

I could remember meeting the Doctor, a tallish man - although that was hard to gauge when you are constantly in a sitting or lying position - with a thick head of graying hair. His face looked like it had the texture of old, worn leather, and the mass of wrinkles around his eyes seemed like they had been added for effect rather than earned through aging. I remembered a session a while later, maybe a week, where he reinforced all the things that were wrong with my brain and how they were being exacerbated by the problems with my memory.

I remembered being in a diner with the man with the neck tattoo, leaving to go home, pulling my collar up against the cold of the brisk winter sun, and being interrupted by quickly approaching footsteps from behind.

"Excuse me, mate, you left your phone at your table." a voice had said.

I frowned.

No, I didn't. It's next to my hand in my pocket. And considering that my phone is now linked to my computer and knowing what that machine is capable of, I'm not careless enough to let it out of my sight.

I turned to face the voice. "Sorry, it's not mine. I have mine right...."

My words were cut off in my throat as the owner of the voice held something that looked like a deodorant can to my face and pressed the top down. A spray, or gas, or something attacked my senses immediately, I didn't even get a chance to cough, let alone react to the attack, as the world around me grew dark and the ground raced up to meet me.

I shook my head hard.

No! That was a dream, the dreams are not real. Fuck, Pete, you are never going to get out of here if you can't tell reality from delusion.

I closed my eyes and tried again.

There was the time the Doctor had explained the logic behind repeating everything until I remembered it, then there were hours - the endless hours - of meditation and memory exercises. With him trying to time how long it was between me seeing something and forgetting it. Apparently, stretching this out was a good start, and we had been making progress, but that had been a few weeks ago, and I was struggling to remember anything since then.

I focused harder.

"C'mon, Pete. Try! Try to remember, or you are going to be stuck in this place for the rest of your natural life. And you know what these places are like. They will extend that natural life for as long as they can get away with to make sure they get paid!"

I took another deep breath and relaxed. Trying to force a memory was exactly the right way to prevent one from surfacing. That was something I could remember. The trick was just to let your mind wander, let the memory surface on its own. If it was an old one, then it could be gently pushed aside until a newer one took its place.

I relaxed into my chair as something seemed to tick in the back of my mind.

For a moment, that city appeared behind my eyes. The girl with fiery red hair, her face a mask of fear and anger, was silently screaming something at me. I could see her lips moving and her hands gesturing wildly, but there was no sound. I frowned as the image flickered. I was suddenly in a different part of the city, on something that looked like a wall. The metropolis was to my back, and out in the fields beyond was a howling, dangerous-looking storm that seemed to threaten everything in sight. Swirling, billowing brown and black clouds blotted out the horizon and towered above us. I could feel the wind blowing out from it as it got closer. Beside me was the Butler, someone I knew I should trust implicitly. He wore the same concerned expression and was also talking, but again, I couldn't make out anything he was saying. He kept pointing at the storm, then behind us to the towering monolith at the center of my city.

My frown deepened.

"I can't hear you!" I tried to say, but nothing came out. Only the muted movement of my lips. "You're not real!" My eyes glanced back up to the storm again.

The illusion was shattered, and my mind was yanked back into the generically decorated therapy room by the opening of the door. I shuffled in my seat to try to compose myself.

"Good morning, Pete," the doctor smiled warmly. "How are you doing today?"

"I'm doing... umm... I have no idea," I tried to match his smile while I subtly swallowed the ball of venomous bile in my throat and relaxed the furious grip of my hands on the armrests. Jesus, I wanted to rip out this man's throat just from looking at him. I needed to get a fucking grip! And I don't mean on his throat. "Why don't you tell me how I'm doing, Doc."

His smile faltered, and he sat down with a sigh. "I see we are having one of those days, aren't we?" He said as he opened the file in his hand and laid it out on the table between us. I didn't bother trying to read it. Not only was it upside down, but it was also written in doctor's scrawl and was, therefore, utterly illegible to the rest of the human population. I cocked my head to the side and looked at him inquiringly. "You don't remember my name, do you?" he asked.

"I... I don't, no. Sorry."

"No, that's okay, Pete," he said as that smile returned to his face. "We had been making such good progress. I thought we had reached some kind of breakthrough. But, I can see there has been a significant regression. It's okay, though. That is why we are here. We try again until it sticks, right?"

"I guess so."

I knew my answers were coming out as flippant and curt, but it was very hard for me to describe that overpowering sense of rage that was burning in my chest at the mere sight of the man. I had no idea where it was coming from, but I knew it was dangerous. Just like a lot of other people my age, I had grown up in a time of increasingly graphic and gruesome horror movies. The days of Hitchcock's famous shadowed shower scene with its muted violence were long gone, I grew up with graphic disembowelment being par for the course in any horror movie worth its salt, but there was something about the tales of vengeful spirits, mercilessly and relentlessly hunting down their targets, only to savagely butcher them, that resonated very strongly with me as I looked at the man sat opposite. The worrying part about it was I knew - absolutely knew - that if the Doc removed my restraints and got too close, they were urges I wouldn't hesitate to act on. I didn't want to, it wasn't a conscious choice, but I knew that the inexplicable anger inside me was too much for anyone to control.

I would hurt that man in ways that would make those vengeful ghosts sit up and take notes if I got half the chance.

"You are getting better at fighting the urges," He said, snapping my attention back to the moment.

"Sorry?"

"The damage to your brain has caused a loss of control when it comes to the violent impulses that plague our species," He said calmly. "Humans, by our very nature, are an incredibly aggressive social group. It has taken thousands upon thousands of years for our brains to hardwire themselves not to act on those urges. Those parts of your brain have been severely damaged. But that is why we are here. The same mental discipline that will lead you back to being able to use your memory centers will also help you fight those violent impulses. It may not seem like it to you, but you are making remarkable progress. For what it is worth, I don't take them personally."

I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. "That's good to know," I said, consciously trying to sound a lot calmer than I felt and being surprisingly successful in the attempt. "So, what's the plan?"

"Well..." he said slowly, looking down at his notes, "... in our last session, you were telling me about your... dreams." There was something about the way he said that last word as if it wasn't his first choice to describe them. More than that, based on how I was feeling at that moment, talking about my insanity didn't seem like the best way to get the fuck out of there. If anything, it seemed like the last thing I would choose to do. At any rate, I had no memory of that whatsoever. So, I decided to play dumb.

"Dreams?"

He nodded and set his folder back down, keeping it open on a different page than the first time. It hadn't gone unnoticed that he had refrained from reminding me of his name, but for the moment, I just sat back and listened to him. "Your's is a very complex case. Usually, the loss of memory is universal, but in your case, the creative parts of the brain, the parts responsible for your... dreams... seem to still be able to communicate with your memory centers. I had hoped to use this as a means of gaining access to them through art, or something like that. You could possibly remember an event because you had drawn it, or painted it, for example. It is fascinating how your memories of your dreams, no matter how faded and vague they are, have been more constant than your memories of reality."

"That's... good?"

"It's... something we need to be careful about. Pete, would you mind if I spoke frankly?"

"I'd actively encourage it."

"Dreams are a way of allowing our subconscious mind to process and analyze the world around us. But in your case, with your lack of memory of your experiences, they are only serving to reinforce themselves. They are running the risk of becoming full-blown delusions. Losing yourself to them can potentially lead to an acute psychotic break from reality. If that were to happen, your chances of recovery would be almost nil. In our last session, we talked about the logic of your delusions. How your mind came up with this elaborate scenario as a way of protecting itself, and you, from the sudden changes in your reality. In these delusions, you are a member of a superhuman race with powerful abilities that not only let you completely heal yourself, but they made all of your wildest dreams come true. You didn't really assault that nurse; she was enthralled by you and seduced you. You didn't just go back to your old life once you were healed, but you got the apartment you had always wanted. You gained the knowledge to ace your course. You got the girl... or girls. But you weren't just a member of this all-powerful race; you were the most powerful of them all. You were the one capable of fighting off the enemy when no others could, it was you against the world, and you were winning. These illusions of grandeur, this sense of being invincible, run the risk of adversely affecting your recovery. It is a dangerous... fantasy... to lose yourself in because, without the ability to reliably form new memories, it can be hard for you to judge the amazing progress you have made. And without that perspective, and with these delusions being the only constant in your mind, I am concerned that you may allow them to... take over."

"Well, that sounds... shit."

"It would be less than ideal," The doctor smiled.

"So, how do we, like, not let that happen?"

"This is where our last few sessions have been making such good progress. You had accepted that by talking about them and seeing the psychological meaning behind each aspect of each delusion, they would lose their power over you. For example," he looked at his notes again. "I was fascinated by the imagery and metaphors of your dream city. The walls being literal constructions that protect your mind from harm was an amazingly insightful piece of information. That tells me that your sense of self-preservation is still entirely intact, which in turn means that you are able to see the danger and the implications of a psychotic break. Today, I wanted to talk about the people in your dreams."

I winced against another deafening tick in the back of my mind, and for a moment, I was back in the city of my dreams. The fiery-haired girl was still screaming, her hair being blown around wildly by the winds of the storms that raged on the other side of those enormous walls. I couldn't tell what she was saying, there was still no sound, but she was shaking her head violently, throwing her hands back and forth, and waving her fingertips at her neck.

"The man with the tattoo on his neck was one I was particularly interested in," The doctor said, yanking me back into the room.

I frowned at him. "I... umm... I'm not going to lie, Doc. It's all really hazy. I can barely remember this city you were talking about. I can sort of see it, but... there isn't any detail."

"Hmmm," he nodded, "You said his name was Uri?"

Did I? How the hell did I tell him that? I didn't even know that, so how could I have told him?

I frowned at him. The man with the tattoo was not one I could remember clearly, but I knew that of all the characters in my delusion, he was perhaps the least important. I couldn't even begin to understand why the doctor found him so interesting.

"Okay," The doctor smiled, "let's try something else. I would like to talk about your parents."

I had to stifle the groan that automatically rose from my chest. They were the last people on earth I wanted to talk about. Fuck! I could almost see the look of disdain on Debbie's face when she learned of my condition. I could almost hear Phil saying something about how they wouldn't have a cripple in the family and that I was probably making it all up for attention.

"Now your mother has told me about your childhood, how close you all were, and their regular visits here have been something you have looked forward to since your arrival."

Wait... WHAT? Back the ever-loving fuck up!

My mind started to race. My hostile - to say the least - relationship with Phil and Debbie, also occasionally referred to as my parents, was not a product of my delusional mind. That was a reality of my life long before the accident. Even if I had imagined the altercation with them at the hospital after I woke up, the rest of my life with them was as clear in my long-term memory as everything else was. Hell, all I had to do was to look down at the back of my left hand to see the circular scar on my skin where my prick of a father had put a cigarette out on it when I was seven years old. It was still there, as clear as day, and if that was there, then my memories of abuse and torment at their hands were exactly that.

Memories.

Not delusions!

The parents I knew would never in a million years visit their brain-damaged son in a hospital like this. Even if they cared, which they absolutely did not, it would be an embarrassment. It would be the sort of gossip that spread around the country club like wildfire, and that was one thing neither of them would tolerate. I spent my entire life being subjected to their wildly unrealistic ideas of what the perfect child was meant to be, and any disparity between that idea and my actions was punished... violently, repeatedly, and without the slightest shred of mercy.

The cigarette on the hand incident had come after I sneezed in the same room as them when they had friends over. I had learned to swallow my drinks silently before I had learned to count past 100 because letting them hear me drink usually led to some sort of beating. The notion of me being anything less than perfect was utterly rejected by those two animals, and when I inevitably failed to live up to their impossible expectations, they pretended to their social circle that I didn't exist. The thought that my condition, as bad as it was, was anything more than a source of shame for them was so far beyond preposterous it was almost funny. The abuse I suffered at their hands was the sort of thing that gets people put in prison and gets social workers fired these days.

But the doctor was implying that they not only cared but had visited?

Nope, Sorry Doc, but I'm calling bullshit on that one!

That was all it took.

In that one sentence, the Doctor completely destroyed any hopes of maintaining the illusion that he had clearly been trying so hard to build.

"Fuckin' FINALLY!" Faye screamed at me as I materialized into the city.

"What the hell is going on?" I yelled back over the howling wind.

"You are under attack! There is someone in your city!"

"I fucking KNEW there was something about that asshole Doctor that I wanted to kill! Where is Jeeves?"

"He's holding the wall!"

"Alright, find out where Doctor McFuckNugget is hiding. I have a butler to catch up with."

"You got it, baby." She nodded firmly. "Oh, one more thing." I turned to look back at her in time for her to grip my collar and pull me into a soul-searing kiss before breaking it off and winking. "Fuck him up, baby! Nobody messes with my man!"

********

"Jeeves, what the fuck just happened?" I said as I appeared on top of the wall, casting a quick look out at the ominous-looking storm. "Where the hell have I been, and how long have I been there?"

My aged butler, the representation of my subconscious mind, didn't take his eyes away from his task as he answered me. He was holding his hands in the air and funneling a huge amount of power into the massive shield that now extended far above the walls. A lightning bolt slammed into it. That one bolt looked and felt powerful enough to do a serious amount of damage to my city. "The gas that man sprayed you with contained some sort of powerful hallucinogenic. Once you were unconscious, he took control of your hallucinations to create the psychiatric hospital you found yourself in. That was about four hours ago. I have been trying to neutralize the drug, but as soon as you 'woke' in the dream, he launched his attack. Sir, he is extraordinarily powerful. If you hadn't snapped out of it when you did, I'm not sure we would have lasted much longer."

Four hours? I understood that I had been in a form of the mindscape for all of the time I was in that room, but I still had the slowly fading memories of months of treatment bouncing around inside my head. It was extraordinarily disorientating.

"Alright, where is he?"

"He is making his way toward your westernmost power plant, Sir."

"Alright, time to kick some ass."

"No!" the butler barked unexpectedly at me. "Sir, I need you to listen very carefully!" He cast me a glance to make sure he had my full attention. I nodded urgently for him to continue. "He is powerful, but just like all other Evos, his power limits are finite. He is currently using a lot of power to maintain the illusion he has you in and a little more trying to sneak into a power plant to siphon off more. As far as he is concerned, you are still in the illusion!"

"O... kay..."

"It took us too long to get you out of there to be able to combat him head-on now. If he realizes you are out of there, he will focus everything on his attack. This storm may not be powerful enough to break down your walls now, but if he throws a little extra energy into it, that could change quickly. It would need both of us to hold them together. While we are doing that, he will get to your power plant and draw out more than enough of the energy he needs to finish you off! He will kill you, Sir!"

"Fuck! Alright, what is your plan?"

"We need to beat him at his own game. I can hold the wall for a little while longer. It is going to take him at least another twenty minutes to get to his target. He is moving slowly; he still thinks we haven't spotted him. Faye can track his position. That will free up a little more power for me to use here. In the meantime, I need you to do what he is doing?"

"What?"

"Maintain the illusion. Make him think you are still in there with him; while you are doing that, you also need to get into his city and shut him down!"

I glanced back out at the storm again. "His city is on the other side of that thing, isn't it."

"It is, indeed, Sir."

"Oh well, a little wind never hurt anyone."

"No, but a lot can kill you!"

********

"I barely remember my parents at all," I sighed, shuffling uncomfortably against the restraints as I leaned back in the chair, looking squarely at the doctor and trying to keep the anger off my face. "I certainly don't remember anything about them visiting since I was in the hospital." In an instant, I could sense that the restraints were cosmetic at best. Now that I knew that this whole thing was an illusion, I also became aware of the flimsiness of it. The restraints could be broken with little more than a determined tug, and the walls flanking each side of the rooms were paper thin. The illusion was not built to last, it was only designed to hold me until he could get into my city, and it was the hallucinogenic drugs that were doing most of the heavy lifting when it came to maintaining this deception.

As soon as I had materialized back into the illusion, I saw it. The man staring back at me with a patient smile on his face was the very same man from the diner, the one who had caught my attention and then brushed it off so easily. I would love to berate myself for my carelessness, but it was becoming more and more obvious to me that this man was not just anyone, but was a powerful Evo who had, no doubt, used some trick I wasn't aware of to let my scrutiny wash over him like water off a duck's back. It was an impressive ability, one that I would have to painfully pry out of him when all of this was finished.

Yet the face of the man, despite there being something oddly familiar about it, was not one I had ever seen previously. I didn't know how to explain it. It was a little like deja vu, that inkling at the back of your mind that you had seen or experienced something before. Where it differed from that, though, was that I was recognizing something in the doctor deeper than his outward appearance. It was like an animal recognizing someone by their scent, something more basic than sight.

"Hmmm," The Doctor frowned at his papers. "That's strange. Talking about your parents was what led to the clarity in your memories of your dreams. You were able to remember them quite clearly yesterday."

"I... don't know what to tell you, Doc."

"Alright, let's take a step back. Do you remember the memory exercises we talked about?"

"The ones about relaxing, clearing my mind, and letting the memories come on their own rather than forcing them?"

"Yes, exactly. Well done."

I nodded and settled back into my chair. "I will try,"

"That's good, Pete. That's very good. All you can do is try."

I swallowed the urge to call him a cunt, and let my eyes fall closed.

I hopped off the walls of my city and started sprinting as fast as my legs could carry me toward the storm. The winds gusted and howled around me, and forks of lightning webbed through the swirling vortex of cloud above my head. I managed to run for all of about twenty-five feet before the winds picked me up and threw me back against my walls. The air was knocked out of my lungs as my back impacted the smooth, white granite.

Lightning slammed into the ground just in front of me, another bolt hitting a little to my right as I crumpled to the floor, desperately trying to suck in the much-needed breath. I could almost feel the sand and stone in the mindscape soil melting and turning to glass under the enormous amount of heat and energy generated by the lightning. I had to question the logic of making the mindscape as realistic - in terms of physics - as it was, but that was a thought for another time.

"Remember the duels!" Faye's voice echoed from out of nowhere.

I blinked for a moment, my mind trying to latch on to what my paramour was trying to tell me before I rolled my eyes and groaned at the obviousness of my mistake. Dueling, she had told me, was a sport developed as a way to practice skills used in real combat. There was no denying that 'real combat' was precisely what I was facing now.

I muttered something that would make a nun blush and pulled myself back to my feet, took one more look at the storm, and spawned a giant 7ft tall, burrowing mole into existence in front of me. The mole was wearing a World War II-style metal combat helmet and a pair of leather flying goggles; he looked at me with a twitch of his whiskers before turning toward the enemy city. In only a few seconds, apparently instinctively understanding his task, the mole had vanished into the ground, leaving a hole - large enough for me to jump into - in his wake.

Did you ever see that cartoon where the ducks all jump from a diving board into a pile of money and swim through it like it was water? You know, instead of breaking their spines and faces on impact? For reasons I will never fully be able to explain, that is what ran through my head as I scrambled into the hole and sprinted after the mole.

"I don't know Uri very well," I said slowly, frowning with my eyes closed in an attempt to pretend I was concentrating. "Someone else thought I should meet him, but..."

"But you can't remember why?"

"Oh, I remember why. I just can't remember who."

"Ah, okay. So why did this person want you to meet Uri?"

"He is in charge of something. Before me, he was the most powerful Evo ever known, but..." I frowned a little harder. "It's like he is management or something. He's not in charge of everyone, or everything, or anything like that. He is not at the top of the pyramid, but he is pretty high up. The person introducing us thinks he may have a use for me. At least that is what I think he thinks."

"And is he right?"

"Am I useful?"

"Yes."

"I'm not sure. The meeting hasn't gone well. Uri seems to be threatened by my powers. Like the big dog suddenly being introduced to a bigger one. He doesn't trust me."

"How does that make you feel?"

I stifled another groan at the cliche question. "Pissed," I answered honestly. "I didn't ask for any of this. I knew nothing about this world before the accident, and now I'm expected to slot seamlessly into it when I don't really understand it."

"You feel frustrated with your new reality. Things have changed that you have no control over, and now other people are making demands of you, or have expectations of you, that you don't know if you can accommodate."

"Err, yeah, pretty much."

"Does that sound familiar to your real circumstances?"

"You think that is another metaphor for what is really happening to me?"

"It certainly sounds like it to me. But what do you think?"

"Erm, I guess. Yes."

"To me, Uri sounds like the manifestation of your unwanted expectations and limitations. If your power is your mind's answer to your injuries, then Uri is the part of you that understands your need to deal with it and accept the consequences and changes that come with it."

"Err... What? If he was the manifestation of my unwanted expectations, why doesn't he trust me? Shouldn't it be me not trusting him?"

"Do you trust him?"

"Okay, yeah, fair point." I clenched my eyes closed a little tighter, apparently making a good show of appearing to let my mind wander. The doctor, his own mind busy elsewhere, was happy to sit in silence and let me... remember.

********

The logic that seemed to be so senseless in the damage done to the mindscape by the lightning seemed to vanish in the tunnel. Moles, nor any other type of burrowing animal, or machine for that matter, do not leave gaping, clear tunnels behind them. The dug-away soil has to go somewhere. Machines have huge conveyor belts that carry the waste soil somewhere else. Moles just leave a thread of looser soil behind them. Either way, it wouldn't be clear without help. But that logic didn't seem to apply here. Maybe it was a process of my will, I wanted a tunnel, and the mole was giving me one. Maybe the mole was eating the dug-away soil. I didn't know, and as I listened to the muted rumbling and howling of the storm above me, I wondered if this was the best time to be asking these sorts of questions.

Whether it made any logical sense or not, the mole was making astonishing progress, and I was having to maintain a steady jog to keep up with it. I had no real perception of how far we had come, but I could FEEL the enemy city drawing closer. His walls, just ahead of me and towering above me, were strong and ancient. Maybe not as strong as mine, but the difference was significantly smaller than anything I had felt before. It would seem that Uri may not have been the most powerful Evo alive before I came along.

But like any other wall, mine included, they had a weakness: As tall as they could grow to be, as thick and as impenetrable as they were, their strength stopped just below the surface. The mole seemed to understand this just as well as I did and started angling the tunnel downwards again. He appeared to know exactly how deep he would need to be to get beneath the doctor's wall's foundations. I picked up the pace to catch up with him. I had no idea where, in the enemy city, we would emerge, and I had to be ready for a fight as soon as we broke the surface. If I was too far behind my mole, the Doc could just collapse the tunnel with me still in it before I had a chance to get out. Then the game would be up.

At the same time, drawing upon the massive energy reserves at my disposal also would be a bad idea. I could have launched one of those energy bolt things from the top of my wall just as I had in the duel against Rhodri and Neil. But if I had missed, or if it hadn't worked, the facade would have been broken, the Doctor would have known I was here, and Jeeve's warning would have come to pass. The same applied to the part of the doctor currently sneaking through my city.

I could see him now, almost as if I could see him through Faye's eyes as she tracked him. Flitting from one darkened alley to another, working his way slowly but inexorably toward the looming shadow of one of my power plants. If that power plant suddenly ramped up its output, the doctor would know, and I would face the same result. Don't get me wrong, it was going to happen, but I needed to be in position before it did.

The mole eventually leveled out his trajectory, heading horizontally for a few more yards before angling the tunnel upwards. After only a few more short minutes, beams of light streaked down from the cracks above him as he broke through the surface. He popped his head out of the hole, looked around him, and then scampered up and out of sight. I followed him carefully.

I don't know what sort of witchcraft the mole had been using, but he had brought us up in a narrow alleyway between two buildings. Unless someone was standing perfectly in line with the opening on either end, it would have been impossible for them to see into the alleyway well enough to spot our intrusion. Giving the mole a grateful nod, which was replied with a stiff, formal salute from the rodent, I made my way to the one end of the alley and poked my head out to take a look around.

Again, there was something painfully, almost glaringly familiar about the city I now found myself in. I was way past the point of being able to tell how the doctor had so completely managed to hide his identity from me. I couldn't tell if it was the drugs he had sprayed into my face, whether he was affecting my memories, or maybe he was very good at disguising himself. Perhaps it was all of the above, but it took me a few seconds of fruitlessly racking my brain to work out why it looked so familiar before I remembered why I was there and ducked back into the alley.

Every city I had ever been in had some sort of theme, but this one was different. The overwhelming majority of buildings, including the walls, looked like they had been pulled straight out of the medieval era. All of the specialist buildings - his hospital, his library, and a new one I hadn't seen before, something that looked to be a theater of some kind, perhaps an opera house - all could have been described in one of Chaucer's books of Ye Olde England.

I frowned for a moment. I vaguely remembered comparing a city to something out of Chaucer before.

I shook it off and kept looking around. If all the functional buildings looked like they belonged in the middle ages, the other ones - the placeholders and decorative buildings, as Marco had called them - were a hodgepodge of every other conceivable era, and with no discernable pattern to the differences between them. A building from the revolutionary era was leaning against one that looked like it came from Renaissance Italy, and on the other side of it was a townhouse that could have been pulled out of turn-of-the-century New York. Across the narrow, cobblestoned streets was one of those steel and glass, boxy monstrosities that were popular in the 70s, and the house next door looked Elizabethan, with its stark white walls, black cross-boards, and yellow thatched roof.

I peered round the corner a little further, my eyes instinctively being drawn to the top of the wall facing my city to see a single, lone figure - immediately recognizable as the doctor - standing atop them and waving his hands at the storm as if he were conducting some unseen orchestra.

It took every single measure of my self-control not to hurl one of those energy blasts at him there and then, just for the satisfaction of watching his body being eviscerated by the force of the impact. But all that would happen would be he would reappear, still inside his city, a few minutes later and would carry on where he left off. More than that, he would know I was here. I had to play smart, not hard.

I muttered another few utterances that would be grossly out of place in polite company and darted into one of the streets, away from the wall and toward his city center. The mole was bounding along next to me, his tongue hanging dopily from the side of his mouth and flapping in the wind, his combat helmet was bouncing comically on his head, and the look in his eyes, behind the slightly off-center googles, suggested he was having the time of his life!

Slowing for a second, he reached into the pouch on his belly and pulled something out, handing it to me. It was about eighteen inches square, about three inches deep, was covered by a khaki-colored cloth, and had handles hanging off it. I frowned at it, slowing my run to take it. I couldn't quite recognize what I was looking at. I glanced back up at him in time to watch him pull another one out of his pouch and toss it through the doorway of one of the buildings we were passing.

It looked to be the Doctors hospital.

I shrugged and did the same, my bag-looking thing sailing through the air and smashing through one of the ground-floor windows of his school.

I winced at the crashing sound as the glass shattered. I chanced a glance over my shoulder in time to see the shape of the Doctor on the wall as he spun sharply around and peered down the street after us.

"NO!!!" his voice echoed from behind us. He launched himself into the air, landing nowhere near as far behind us as I would have liked, and started sprinting up the street in pursuit.

********

"It is the relationship between the nurses that also interested me, were they already..." The Doc froze mid-sentence. His eyes rose in shock to mine.

"Got you, mother fucker!" I snarled at him, ripping the arms off the chair I was sitting on, jumping up onto my suddenly repaired legs, launching myself across the room, and driving the stake-like armrests down through his forearms and pinning him to his own chair. My forehead smashed into his face, and spread his nose across his cheek as he howled out in pain.

"That was a nice trick," I growled dangerously. "You are going to tell me exactly how you pulled it off as I am peeling the skin off you!"

With a look that was a mix between shock and abject terror, he suddenly vanished. The illusion collapsed around me. The walls, the door, the chairs, and the shitty wall art all melted into nothingness, and I was back in his city, racing toward its center.

"NO!!" came another desperate howl from behind us as my legs carried me faster than I thought was possible.

Now, Faye!

Somewhere behind him, in the depths of my city, my fiery-haired warrior goddess threw herself at his likeness as it snuck toward my power plant. Imbued with some extra power, courtesy of Jeeves, she quickly got the upper hand and started pushing him back. Swinging, clawing, kicking, biting and hissing with every attack, she ripped into the avatar with a fury that could only come from a woman protecting someone she loved.

The mole - and I was starting to seriously wonder if I should adopt and name him - launched himself into the air, spinning as he rose and flinging more of the packages out in every direction. Some smashed through doorways, and others crashed through windows. Some bowled over surprised-looking ghosts who were watching us pass with a look of astonishment on their faces. The mole hung in mid-air for just a moment, facing back up the street to our pursuer, flipped the doctor off with both dirt-caked paws as his momentum carried him along at the same speed as I was traveling, spun back towards the city center, landed, and carried on running. The whole maneuver had been completed without him even breaking his stride.

And yes, it looked as hilarious as it sounds.

Every building we passed had one of the packages thrown into it, a seemingly endless supply of them being pulled out of the mole's pouch and distributed with extreme prejudice to anything with more than a few walls and a door. The only building that was spared was his library. I hadn't quite worked out what we were throwing, but I knew they would do a significant amount of damage, and I wanted his library intact. That place contained his memories, and I wanted to know everything that this asshole knew.

Starting with who the fuck he was and why the fuck he had attacked me!

Finally, breathless and panting, we reached the extraordinarily large well at the very center of his city. Every well I had seen or even heard of was just as you would expect an old-style well to look. A simple stone circle, six or so feet in diameter at most. The doctor's well was enormous. It yawned out to what had to easily be thirty or more feet, five times the size of Uri's. I stopped as I approached it, turning to face my assailant, and raised my hand out to my side, holding it an inch above the stonework of the well.

I don't know how I knew what to do when I got there. I just knew. It was instinct, and I was in no position to argue with it. At this point, with his avatar in my city beaten back away from my power plant and his lack of concentration causing the storm to die out, I knew that in a straight fight, this son-of-a-bitch didn't stand a chance against me. But I was in a particularly vengeful mood after the deception, and I wanted him to suffer.

Whatever my gesture meant, he recognized it.

He came skidding to a halt a few dozen feet away from me, holding up his hands in pleading surrender. "No, please, don't. I beg you," he whimpered, his eyes fixed firmly on the hand hovering over his well.

The mole nudged me, reaching into his pouch and pulling something out before handing it to me. It was a remote detonator, the kind I had seen in dozens of video games over the years. I suddenly understood what those packages were.

They were bombs.

"Ohhhh. Nicely done!" I grinned at him

He saluted back and started scratching at one of his sides, peering down into the well behind him. The man's pleas were apparently too boring to pay attention to.

I looked at the doctor, his face paling in fear as his eyes flashed between the two perceived dangers. I sniffed, shrugged, and leveled my gaze at him. "Jeeves," I said out loud, waiting a few moments for my aging butler to appear in the street behind the doctor. I nodded to the doctor's library. "You know what to do!"

"Yes, Sir." With a nod and a demeanor that made my request feel like the most normal thing in the world, Jeeves turned and headed toward my attacker's library.

"No! You can't! I won't let you!" He screamed before he threw himself at my butler, a figure who was never really there to start with. He was a simple representation of my will. The doctor passed straight through him, landing heavily on the cobblestoned street. He watched Jeeves walk casually towards his library before casting a look back at me... just in time to watch me squeeze the trigger on the detonator.

The doctor was just pulling himself to his feet as the explosions ripped through the city. One detonation after another, each one colossal in size, rocked the city to its very foundations and threw the doctor back to the ground. His hands came up to the sides of his head, clawing at his skin as a blood-curdling scream tore from his lips. Each building that erupted into a hail of fire and debris represented part of his mind, and those parts were being blown to pieces around him... and inside him. The agony on the man's face was the result of a very literal definition of brain damage.

His forge and his school erupted into a cloud of flying masonry, billowing flames, and clouds of dust. His bank rocked on its foundations and then crumbled into the street. His library, the only building scheduled to be spared, was flanked by an armory on one side and an observatory on the other. Both of them were reduced to smoldering, smoking piles of rubble. His clinic, the only building capable of healing the others, was burning but had somehow managed to stay standing and mostly intact.

The mole was looking at it in annoyance, almost willing it to collapse.

The last building to be shattered by the deafening cacophony of explosions was the only building I hadn't initially recognized. A red brick construction with a semi-circle billboard jutting out over the main entrance. A theater.

It vanished in a cloud of fire, broken glass, and a fractured brick.

What happened next was not only hard to explain but seemed to take place in slow motion. The screams from the Doctor stopped in an instant, his eyes widening as he looked over his shoulder at the remains of the theater. His face, old and weathered, with deep-set wrinkles extending from his eyes, immediately started to change. His grey hair turned blonde, his hairline shifting forwards and lower down his forehead, which in turn seemed to shrink towards his eyes. His mouth widened, his lips thickened, his skin lightened, and his body seemed to physically shrink by a few inches. In the place of the man in his forties looked to be a completely different man in his early twenties.

A few seconds later, he changed again, and then again, and then again. Each time his appearance morphed him into what looked to be a completely different person. An old, balding man, a brunette girl who looked to be no older than in her early teens, a heavily pregnant blonde woman, a grossly obese ginger man, a slicked-backed haired man who wouldn't have looked out of place in the Italian mob, a hunched over, white-haired old lady. Over and over, his appearance changed before my eyes.

With each new iteration, the crowd of his city's ghosts gathered around him. Unlike the ghosts of my city, these were not people who had made an impact on his life, I quickly realized, but the spectral images of his previous victims.

Marcos's voice from the party suddenly echoed through my mind.

"Someone is attacking Evos... All of them were found in catatonic, vegetative states... They're just locked in there. If I had to guess, I would say that their wells were drained and their palace destroyed. I think that whoever is doing this is... one of us."

The man in front of me, changing from one physical avatar to another over and over again, was the Evo responsible for the serial attacks on other Evos, and each ghost, now snarling and growling dangerously at him as they gathered around, was one of the many, many victims he had claimed. Marco had thought there were only twelve of them, but standing in a large circle around us had to be a number closer to fifty. And it was his theater that allowed him to completely reinvent himself after each attack.

The physical representation of creativity, of pretending to be someone else, of putting on an act, and as the last of its remains clattered onto the cobblestoned streets I suddenly realized why the man had looked so familiar.

"Sterling! You little fucking prick! You're supposed to be dead!"

The young man, no older looking than I was, had been the victor in the duel with Fiona, the one I had watched while sitting next to Faye at the party. Their battle had been immediately before mine, but now that I cast my mind back, his victorious departure from the duel was the last that I had seen of him all night. It was entirely possible that I had just missed him in the crowds and the chaos of the attack, but as I glared at him, I was starting to wonder if we had found our mole.

I looked to the other mole to my side. "No offense."

My furry, helmeted assistant shrugged and started to wander back home to our city.

Sterling looked up at me, a mix of terror, fury, and indignation washing over his face as I held his eyes. "Jeeves," I said without breaking my gaze. "Take it all."

"Yes, Sir."

"No!" screamed Sterling, this time launching himself towards me in a last, desperate attempt to survive. "I am the most powerful being in the world! I won't let you!"

He wasn't even a few feet away from where he had been kneeling when I dropped my hand and rested it on the rim of his well.

I drained him. Every single ounce of power, the parts that were his, the parts that had been stolen from his victims, and his entire capacity to generate more, was sucked out of his mind and washed into my own city. The bluish hue from my city glowed brightly on the horizon for a few moments as everything that made him an Evo of any measurable power was permanently and violently ripped away from him.

He collapsed to the floor and sobbed.

"Now," I said dangerously and menacingly, my voice dripping with vengeful intent as I leaned over him. "We are going to have a little chat."

I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, ignoring his feeble and useless thrashing, and dragged him back to my city.

********

And that's it for chapter 16

The notion of an Evo-on-Evo serial killer was another one of those concepts that have been bouncing around my head since the easiest days of this series. In fact, the very first idea I had for this series, before Evos and the Conclave, before the sect and the alternate history, was to write this as a mind-control murder mystery. The story has evolved since then into what you know and love, but I wanted to keep this idea as part of the narrative. I hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you for your comments and feedback. It never ceases to amaze me how supportive and receptive the readers of lit can be. I look forward to hearing what you think of this, and my other story - The Island - in the comments or on the Discord Server.

Stay Awesome.

Nova