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Part 6-25: Anchor

I flinched, unable not to, but then air punched out of my lungs and I opened my eyes to see the dim outline of vertical steel bars, behind which a curtain of dull blue plastic clung. A ravaging ball of pins and needles bloomed in the middle of my head and spread out to cover my face.

“B’wah,” I said, rubbing at my cheeks.

My voice was weird.

“Aw hell. Hell hell hell.” The words come out in a strange, pitched version of Deluxe’s chirpy range. There was no Queen’s Band on my hand, because my hand was hers. The pins and needles fuzzed away, and I was bombarded with the desperate need to find a mirror, but our kidnappers rudely neglected to equip the cage with one.

It was probably for the best, because instead of spending time being completely weirded out, I was able to focus on inner sensations. The crackling embrace of pins and needles wasn’t actually gone. It shook and pulsed right at the base of the back of my skull, and I recognized it as my familiar ring-tingles. I could also sense my other body—original Alena, sitting quiet and zoned out in her own cage. I moved her foot. Then I moved Deluxe’s foot. The controls here seemed to be similar to managing ghost-me.

I was trying to see if I could find Deluxe or her consciousness from somewhere within my own when my other body heard Alena’s cage open and someone barking orders. It sounded like, “She’ll see you now.”

It was much harder to concentrate on being real-me when inside of Deluxe. I made my own lips say, “Who.” It came out like a post-dentist slur-whisper.

“Get up, let’s go!” responded my chaperone.

I needed to abandon Deluxe. Hopefully, getting into her was the initial trial that Eden had been on about—maybe I could test the body snatching on the big bad herself in a minute. Worried that I might accidentally hurt Deluxe when exiting, but with no real time to overthink it, I pushed away from the sparkling feeling inside of my/Deluxe’s head, visualizing my ghost self exiting her.

The body resisted, but like a weak magnet. There was a give, along with a tug that encouraged me to come back, so I yanked harder. Tingles intensified as I did, but the tugging dissolved and out I stepped. Deluxe honked a snort and collapsed, giving me a minor heart attack. But her blue mist remained, and when I stooped over her I heard the soft and regular rhythm of sleeping lungs.

Meanwhile, a hand hooked into the crook of my real elbow.

“I’ll get us out, somehow,” I said to Deluxe, and dropped out of ghost mode entirely.

The fleshy prison of my old, regular self was both a weighty anchor and like jumping into your fresh, crisp bed after spending three nights at a camping festival. It’d probably been only forty or fifty minutes since I’d last split out, but in my mind I’d been to Fort Ticktock with Fergus for a good long while, then vividly relived a month or so of my past while at least partially separated from the bones and blood of my birth.

“God I could use a stretch,” I complained to the guard, a six-foot-five monster of a dude, wearing full fatigues, gear, weapons, even a damn helmet.

“Keep moving,” he sympathized, half guiding, half dragging me deeper into the tent. We exited a flap into a small space between the thick military canvas and the wall of the repair facility. An office door stood open, flanked by two more toughs in full regalia. In we went. It was indeed an office, but they’d hastily repurposed it as a server room of sorts: banks of blinking racks and wires crowded the already cramped quarters. As we moved past them, I resisted the urge to yank out a fistful of wires, given that my escort’s own fists seemed to be about the size of my head.

There was another door, this one of the storage closet variety.

Inside: no windows, but it seemed bigger than my bedroom. Maybe it was because most of the furniture was removed. There was only a card table with some chairs, and a smaller stacked rack of computer-server-machine thingies in the corner. The scientist fella—the darkest-timeline Deluxe—hunkered beside them. His breath was quick and he blasted away one handed at a laptop he balanced on his other palm.

The curly-haired witch sat at the table, and cocked her head as I entered, sending her stupid, perfect hair bouncing.

“Alena Bisk,” she said, tenting her fingers.

Should I say it? It was stupider than tearing out wires but wouldn’t (probably) result in a slap. It’d tip my hand and maybe sink my negotiation power—but it would totally fuck with her. And I didn’t even know if there was a negotiation to be had. Screw it, I thought, and beamed a bright, toothy smile at her.

“Hey Ms. Terradyne,” I said. “Can’t say I’m glad to see your sorry ass again. But tell me, please, I’ve been dying here—what what what do you use in that ‘do?”

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