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Part 6-13: Earlier

How long ago had I done this to Jimena? My sense of when was getting loopy, especially after the timeless napping I’d done in Fort Ticktock. It felt like an hour and forever ago all at once. I hoped it was an effect of basic trauma and not permanent psychosis.

I blinked these errant thoughts away and concentrated on the task at hand. I was sitting inside my best friend and roommate, dealing with an odd flow of new sensations and suggestions of feelings. Helplessness was one, wrestling with a repetitive, determined thought pattern that did not reveal itself to me. Frustration lingered at the edges of it all, a bystander to the bigger battle in her mind.

Like before, as I got settled, a keyshard blob came wiggling up out of the ground, little antennae waving. This had freaked me out with Jimena, prompting me to jump out of her. Now that I’d come to see them less as enemies and more as tools, I was somewhat relieved to see it. It meant my voodoo was reacting.

Eden had a preferred recipe: willing target. Shared memory. And a smell.

I closed my eyes, and tried to quiet my own head, tried to let hers fall into the backdrop as well. I imagined the particular musk of our condo: a smell I’d long gotten used to, but one that never failed to announce itself if I’d returned after being away for any length of time. It was an almost woodsy scent, not dirty or gross, thanks to the high-tech air filtration system Deluxe had running 24/7. Yet aquatic and of fresh sweat too—again not locker room funk, but a cocktail of life and two dozen plus living, breathing organisms.

It was ours, and ours alone. I hoped it would serve as both the memory and the smell.

The sensation of alien thought slowed, easing away, and felt as if I was feeling myself fall asleep while being fully conscious of the experience. I risked opening an eye to see if maybe that had been it: boom, was I Deluxe now?

My blobby bros had appeared en masse, forming one of their classic cult circles around us. All their creepy feelers and weird knobby appendages stretched towards me, frozen in place. I wiggled my fingers, prompting some sparkling, fizzing feelings from the Queen’s Band, but my roommate’s finger remained still.

“What now?” I whispered. The blobs offered no insight.

Maybe a better memory? Keeping our condo’s unique bouquet firmly in mind, I closed my eyes again and ran through a mental catalogue of shared experiences, wishing that I had access to my smartphone and its trove of social media. Birthday parties, pet adoptions, moving! Her helping me pack. That time I introduced her to televised basketball during playoffs, she loved it. The first time we met, all the drama that—

As I passed over the memory of the day we met, the alien thoughts twinged. I heard myself talking, echoing back through time.

A gravity well opened under me, as chills swept up my legs (our legs?) Panicky, I sunk, paralyzed and unable to grab anything, open my eyes, or do much at all. I fell, spinning, our two voices speeding up like a tape recorder jacked to triple speed. They gibbered faster, blasting past chipmunk to a pitching whine.

Ozone stink rolled through me. Colours swirled. A great force hooked into the middle of my brain and wrenched me sideways and down. It hurt, distantly. I resisted out of pure instinct, failing pathetically.

As I hit the core of whatever planetary will had sucked me in, I zoned out, disoriented, like waking up halfway then slipping back into slumber. But it got worse. Way worse. I woke up, standing. I was in a small restaurant, behind the cash register. I was distinctly aware I was dreaming, and I knew exactly what would happen next. This was the memory I’d summoned, after all. But as the door chimed, a circuit tripped, and all my recall and dream certainty dissolved in a draining whoosh. I had but two seconds to comprehend and be horrified at what it could mean, then all was well—monsters, shadow organizations, pocket dimensions, superpowers, and mortal danger were low on my list of concerns,

because it is summertime.

It is summertime, almost two years earlier.

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