It was all terribly familiar. She knew why immediately. Lauren was back in Callis. A place she hadn’t been since the day she was kidnapped.
She gasped in disbelief.
But it wasn’t Callis. Not really. She looked closer, taking a step forward, scanning the town from where she stood at the edge. Things were off. Writing on storefronts and signs was indistinct, vaguely forming words with indiscernible letters. People crossed the streets, their faces blurs. Cars and trucks passed with blurry license plates.
The longer she stood there, the more off it all felt. The air didn’t feel real. She moved her arms in front of her. The movements were loose, lasting longer than she meant them too. At the edge of her attention, the buildings in front of her shifted without moving. Like one of those optical illusions that tricked you when you didn’t look directly at them.
Lauren clutched her hands over her eyes. Everything felt wrong. What happened? Hadn’t she just been leaving the sewers? The harder she thought about it, the more her senses felt like they were betraying her. This felt like a place she shouldn’t be. And not just because of the bad memories associated with the real Callis. This had to be some sort of trick. She tried to focus on being back in the sewer.
“Ah, there’s no place like home, right?”
She uncovered her eyes and looked around. Standing ten feet away was the boy leading her out from underground. Mack. It was easier to remember now seeing him. He glanced curiously around at their surroundings, hands in the pockets of his white lab coat.
“What is this?” Lauren asked.
“Your mindscape.” Mack started strolling towards Callis. “Lucky you, not many get to see the inside of their own mind. This is just an abstraction, of course. Often takes the appearance of some place significant to us.”
Lauren rushed towards him. Everything moved wrong. Her legs churned like they were fighting against a rushing stream. Still, she caught up to him at his leisurely pace. She formed claws to stab into his back and pull him down, to force him to leave her mind and bring her back. This wasn’t a place she wanted to be, and it was definitely a place she didn’t want anyone else to be. This was a violation she hadn’t even conceived of before. He was so going to regret this.
The claws didn’t come. Her nails remained short and dull as she swiped for the intruder’s back at a speed that seemed wrong in how casual it was. He turned and caught her hand by the wrist.
“Uh-uh, Lauren,” Mack chided. Lauren tried to tug her hand away, but the strength she had come to expect was gone. Mack held his grip on her easily as his face grew stern, like she was some child trying to roughhouse.
Lauren dug her heels in and tugged away as hard as she could. Mack finally released her, and she fell backwards onto her butt.
Lauren looked down at her hands in disbelief. She couldn’t feel it. Not the strength in her muscles, or the bone formations, or any extra senses enhancing her own. She felt… normal.
“What… what did you do?” Lauren asked with increasing dread. She had thought before about having her powers removed, but this was too sudden. She felt vulnerable in a way she had forgotten. “Where are my powers?”
“Not in your head, apparently,” Mack said down to her. He smiled. He clearly relished Lauren feeling exposed. The psychopathic look warped his round, babyish face. “Still in your body though, for now. I should explain: I’m called Brain Drain. My psionic powers allow me to enter people’s minds, and take whatever I’d like. Memories, skills, even powers. Most people having few defenses against mental intrusion. It makes what I do pretty easy.”
Lauren snarled and stood. “Lilith put you up to this? That lying bitch.”
Brain Drain shook his head. “No. Lilith doesn’t know about this.” His expression became dreamy. “My beautiful porcelain-skinned goth queen doesn’t always know what’s best for her. She needs me to protect her from herself. If she wants your powers, I’ll take your powers. If she wants your personality, I’ll adapt it to myself. And if she just wants to manipulate you, she can manipulate me instead.”
Lauren swung for his jaw. Fuck her powers, she had been at this for a long time before them right in the town where they stood. This tall flabby piece of shit looked like he had never been in a fight in his life.
Brain Drain blocked her punch and backhanded her. His knuckles were hard against the side of her face. She flopped onto dirt and concrete. Her head rung like a bell. And there was no padding from her powers. She remembered what a real unadulterated hit felt like. The raw sting and the crimson taste of blood in her mouth. She felt fourteen again.
The tall boy’s shadow leaned over her.
“In case you haven’t figured it out by now, you’re pretty powerless in here. The mind is my domain. You’re just a floating consciousness in your own head. You can’t keep me out. I recommend you just stay down and let this happen. The less you resist, the less painful it will be. Maybe I’ll leave enough of you intact for you to not be a drooling vegetable.”
He started walking again.
Lauren sat up. She touched a spot of blood at the edge of her lips. Or the abstraction of blood on the abstraction of her lips. She watched Brain Drain head further into Callis. She got up to follow. Staying put and letting him do anything uncontested was the last thing she was going to do. It was her head. There had to be some way to drive him out. Some defense, or… something.
She winced. The harder she thought, the more she became aware she was standing inside her own brain. For the millionth time, she thought about how weird her life had become. There had to be some way to go back to being normal at the end of all this.
She found Brain Drain inside a building on Callis’ main street. She vaguely remembered it being a law office. Not well enough for the names on the sign to be legible. She opened the door and marched in.
A blank-faced secretary sat behind the front desk, filing her nails as a fan swooshed back and forth on the desktop. Brain Drain was behind her, rifling through a filing cabinet.
Lauren clutched her head. She could feel a horrible tingle at her thoughts being sorted through. Was her brain in the skull in the body in her mind? Or was it in the mind world around them? Was she even herself right now? Ugh, too much to think about.
“Stop that!” Lauren demanded. “Get the fuck out!”
“I told you to wait,” Brain Drain said as his spidery fingers sifted through files. “You aren’t making me feel very generous,” he warned.
“If you don’t get out right now, I’ll—”
He slammed the cabinet drawer shut. Lauren winced from a twinge of pain in her head.
“Where are your powers kept?” He looked around. Deciding there wasn’t much else in the office, he walked back towards the front door, which Lauren was stubbornly blocking. When he reached her, he casually tossed her aside. Lauren went crashing into the waiting chairs against the window. She slid onto the floor as the entry bell dinged.
Picking herself up again, she followed him back onto the street. She was about to try hitting him again. But Brain Drain had stopped to look at something. Lauren circled around him and followed his eyes down the street.
Standing at the end of the next block was a teenage girl. She didn’t have a blurry face. She had Lauren’s face. She wore a green vest over a brown shirt and denim pants with worn sneakers. All clothes that came from the girls’ shared closet.
“Rachel!” Lauren cried.
It was only a memory. She had to remember that. But seeing her sister there felt so goddamn relieving. Lauren wasn’t alone in here.
Brain Drain scratched his chin. “A thought form? Interesting. You must have a lot of memories of this girl for part of your subconscious to take on her shape…”
Lauren wasn’t listening to his stupid explanation. She ran around him and down the street towards Rachel. Together, she could work something out with her Rachel memory. She lived here; she had to know how this place worked better than Lauren. And more than anything else, she just wanted to see her and hug her.
Lauren made it to the block Rachel was at the end of. But Rachel didn’t wait for an embrace. She turned and ran off around a corner.
Lauren’s relief turned into panic. “No! Come back! It’s me!”
She reached where Rachel just was and skidded around the corner. No sign of her down the street.
Lauren’s head twinged with pain again. It was like the world’s worst headache. She didn’t have much time. She had to find a way to stop Brain Drain from getting what he came for and leaving her an empty husk. She had no idea what to do. Her only hope, if she even had one, would be Rachel.
And there was one place in Callis to find her.
Lauren ran a route that she didn’t need to think about. She knew this whole town better than anywhere else in the world. All the late nights running wild with her sister, the thefts for Tommy or for themselves, the scraps with the boys, all led to the same place once they were sure no one was chasing them. She could find her way to their hideout from anywhere in town.
The further she got from Brain Drain, the easier it felt to move. The invisible current receded from her knees and eventually drained down to around her feet. On the way, she kept an eye out, hoping to see Rachel somewhere before getting home. She kept running down uneven sidewalks, taking familiar streets filled with neglected houses and cracked lawns behind chain-link fences. The closer she got, the clearer things became. Like her memories were now in high definition. She remembered which windows of which houses were broken. She remembered specific graffiti tags on concrete barriers and the video store that sold porn and drugs to truckers on the corner. She was close now. Her head pounded from more mental assaults.
An alleyway, their alleyway, cut through a block of houses halfway down Mender Street. She followed tire grooves worn into the gravel. Lining the alleyway were backyards, most of them with fences or overgrown bushes making do. Some garage entrances. Lauren and Rachel’s hideaway was one such garage. She found the dinged silver rollup door.
Lauren and Rachel’s home from the ages of 11 to 14 was a detached garage in the middle of a neglected town’s most neglected neighborhood. When they found it, they never expected it to last long. For weeks they kept their bags packed, ready to run to Tommy as soon as the owner or cops rolled up the door and found them sleeping inside. But the owner never came to check it. No cops ever pounded on the door. Slowly, they let their bags spill their meager belongings. They scavenged abandoned mattresses, placing them in opposite corners or sometimes dragging them together. Previously-empty shelves filled with broken toys and entertaining or useful bits and bobs they found, sometimes stole, or sometimes purchased.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
The garage had electricity too, the entire time they were there. They plugged in and huddled in front of a small space heater on cold nights. They tried not to leave it on too long, worrying whoever owned the house would notice a spike in costs. But they had a light from a bare bulb, after they taped over all the windows. When they were sure no one was around, they washed using the house’s garden hose while the other stood watch.
There was something simple about that life. Not good, but simple. The world started at one side of town and ended at the other. One day, they were going to cross that endless hazy stretch of desert and start a new life somewhere else. Maybe they should have just stayed in that garage.
Daylight streamed into the garage’s interior as Lauren pulled up the door. Everything was how she remembered it. But then again, it would be.
Rachel sat on her mattress in the right corner, back to Lauren. She rocked gently, old springs squeaking.
“Rachel…” Lauren tried to say. She gently stepped forward. She ignored the pounding in her head growing more frequent.
There was so much she wanted to say. All of it would be pointless. She’d be talking to her own memories. This wasn’t her. This wasn’t a reunion. She needed to ask for help.
Lauren swallowed down her welling emotions.
“Rachel… I need your help. Please. He’s killing me. Is there anything you can do? How do I get him out?”
She stopped her rocking. Lauren stopped moving forward.
Rachel disappeared. There one moment, gone the next.
Lauren lurched forward. “No…”
She bent and swiped at where Rachel had just been, like she had merely turned invisible. There was nothing to feel. The memory, or presence, or whatever it had been was now gone.
“No, no…” Pressure hammered Lauren’s head. Her eyes felt like they were going to pop. She stumbled back out of the garage. This couldn’t be how it ended. Powerless inside her own mind. Where were her adaptation powers? Didn’t this count as something to adapt to? Maybe this was all happening too quickly. There was no sense of time passing outside her head. Maybe she was already dead in the second it took Brain Drain to make mental contact.
She found her way back to the street. The pain was now continuous. It left no room to think. She couldn’t find Brain Drain to try attacking him again in time. She fell to her knees. She couldn’t even move anymore.
The door of a nearby house opened. Lauren could barely raise her head enough to see Brain Drain walking out of it. He carried a brown sack stuffed full of objects. He saw Lauren collapsed on her knees and waived at her like a friendly neighbor.
“There you are! I was just coming to find you. I’m nearly done taking everything I think will be useful to me.” He swung the sack over his shoulder. “Almost out of your hair. But I would like to find your powers…”
He walked across the scraggly lawn to the street.
“You wouldn’t happen to know where you’re keeping them, would you?” he asked genially.
Lauren couldn’t speak anymore. She could barely move her eyes. But she did move them. Enough to see a figure appear in the dark doorway Brain Drain had left from. Rachel.
Lauren’s jaw trembled. Brain Drain walked up to her, shaking his head sympathetically.
“Looks like you will be a vegetable after all. I’ll just have to console Lilith. She really did like you.”
Even if Lauren could speak, she wouldn’t warn him that Rachel was walking up behind him with purpose.
“Don’t worry. Part of you will live on in me. I’ll inherit your memories, your tastes, your quirky little habits. At least until I drain someone else. I think—”
Rachel reached him. She grabbed the back of his head. He yelped and dropped his looting sack.
Rachel did not have any trouble attacking him. She forced the larger boy downwards and bashed his forehead against the street. Brain Drain was too stunned to do anything but moan as he came back up and saw a smear of his own blood left on the asphalt. Rachel flipped him over and straddled his chest. She wrapped both her hands around his throat and began strangling him.
The pain splintering Lauren’s mind ceased. She gasped in relief as the pressure cleared. Brain Drain’s sack had deflated. He flailed his arms up at Rachel. Her grip didn’t slacken. The boy’s face was already turning purple. Rachel wasn’t just stopping him from breathing. She was crushing his throat.
Lauren approached. She put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. “Rachel.” She shook her sister. “Rachel, I’m okay. Get him to let me out of here.”
Rachel had no plans other than to kill the invader. Blood vessels popped in his bulging eyes. His tongue lolled out the side of his mouth.
Lauren shook her sister harder, trying to dislodge her. She didn’t know what death meant in this place, but this was too much. She just wanted to be in the real world again.
“Rachel, get off!”
She looked up at Lauren. And Lauren realized it wasn’t Rachel at all.
Rachel didn’t have a scar on her jaw and under her left eye. Lauren did. The face she had assumed was Rachel’s was hers.
Lauren stared at the her strangling Mack to death. The powers he was looking for had found him. This was the thing inside Lauren. Her sense. Her killer instinct.
Lauren was back in the sewer. She slipped out of her head as easily as she had entered it. Her own hands were wrapped around Brain Drain’s throat. Eyes quickly losing their light looked into her own. He had gone limp. Spittle oozed from his mouth.
Lauren dropped him and stepped back, horrified.
The boy flopped to the ground, head hitting hard. His face turned a slightly lesser shade of purple as blood was relieved. His hand twitched. A gasping breath escaped his throat.
Lauren looked at her own trembling hands. She could still feel the soft pressure of his throat on her palms. The throbbing veins.
She ran for the sewer entrance, ready to finally escape this hell.
The Rosewell Express operators did not ask questions about Lauren being soaked and covered in gunge. They did not ask about her regrowing fingers, or the look of fresh horror that her face was no doubt locked in. They didn’t ask about her crying as she departed the train and took the elevator upwards and reentered campus.
They must have told the administration though, because Headmaster Knapp and Agent Dodds were waiting on the lawn under an umbrella.
Lauren accepted a cup of hot cocoa with trembling hands. She sipped it. It probably tasted good in some other circumstance. Right now, she focused on the warmth.
“What on Earth were you doing in the sewer?” Dodds asked, disapproval heavy in her voice. Lauren looked up at her, the loathing she felt hopefully communicated clearly.
They were in the administration building, in some plain meeting room. Lauren still wore her soaked clothes caked in stinking grime. She was shepherded into an immediate debrief. If they hadn’t insisted on it, she would have. Every second wasted was another second Mara was in chains. Following Maudlin had been a stupid, selfish distraction, one that had almost gotten her and by extension Mara killed. No more of that. They’d strike back tonight. Lauren just needed a team.
“Trish,” Knapp chided. “Lauren’s clearly been through a lot. Let’s let her tell us what happened at her own pace.” Knapp gave a smile that naturally exuded warmth and support to Lauren. “We’re aware that you and Mara have been having your own underground adventures. Maybe you can start with why?”
Dodds crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. There seemed to be some disconnect on that point.
Lauren shifted in her seat, her feet squelching in her boots. She needed a shower and a rest. Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten all day. Her head swam, the lights of the room forming halos in her vision. There wasn’t any time. There were now two missing souls pressing in on her chest. She forced the words out.
She told the two women about her and Mara’s forays into the Warrens. Meeting the Skells, and hunting their monster. She told them about finding the subterrans, and Mara being kidnapped. She left out the encounters with Maudlin, and the New Lords’ hideaway. She let them think all of her wounds were from fighting the burrowing monsters. Her business with Lilith was hers alone for now. After she got what she was promised, BASTION could raid the place for all she cared.
“I need a team,” Lauren rasped at the end of her story. “We need to go rescue her tonight. The subterrans turn people into monsters. We need to hurry.”
While Knapp listened intently, her face brimming with concern, Dodds seemed less than impressed with Lauren’s accounting of her day.
“And how do you know about these subterrans?” Dodds asked.
Confused, Lauren sat up straighter. “I just told you I fought them.”
“And this is how you learned their names? And the fact that they enslave people to turn them into warped thralls?”
No. Lauren had learned all that from Lilith. Not something she was prepared to admit.
Knapp put a hand on Dodds’ shoulder. “I’m sure Lauren learned about them in Ms. Almstead’s class. Subterrans have been menacing the surface world on and off for the past century at least. Their threat is well documented, if not the fact that they’re now burrowing underneath Pacific City.” She turned her glass-magnified eyes to Lauren, seeking the truth.
“Yeah,” Lauren said, latching on to that. “I learned about them in class.”
Dodds’ expression did not change. She was unconvinced. She sniffed.
“In any case, we are certainly not assembling a team to go rescue Mara in the near future.”
Both Lauren and Knapp were startled by that.
Lauren was the first to speak. She was almost too shocked to be angry.
“What…?”
Knapp tilted her head at her peer. “Trish…” Her voice was full of dismay.
Dodds held up a hand to stop any argument. “I’m sorry, but I have to override your authority as headmaster for the sake of national security. A slaver party of subterrans in their natural environment is a sector-class threat. I will immediately set scouts to investigate the extent of the underground invasion. What I will not do is send a bunch of inexperienced, underdeveloped teenagers that represent the future of this country belowground to be killed or mangled to rescue one student. One who’s been dodging the entire purpose of being here in favor of her rats. I’ll schedule a response once I know what we’re dealing with.”
A ball of white-hot fury condensed in Lauren’s heart. Her first few words after hearing that were angry gibberish. She seethed, “but you will send us out into the city to look good for your cameras? For your career? Is that what we’re good for to you?”
“Lauren,” Dodds warned.
Lauren stood, her chair nearly toppling over.
“What fucking use are you?” Lauren spat out. “What use are any of you BASTION assholes? Just to tell us what to do? Who to protect? Those monsters are also kidnapping and killing people who can’t protect themselves. But you don’t give a fuck about them because they don’t pay taxes, right? You don’t give a fuck about any of us poors.”
Dodds’ steely gaze didn’t waver.
“Right?!”
Knapp gently took Lauren’s elbow and steered her backwards to the door. Lauren let herself be led, but she never broke eye contact with the BASTION agent until the door closed. Knapp put her hand on Lauren’s back and led her to the outside door.
“Let me handle her, Lauren.”
Knapp stood on the steps of the building with her hands in her pockets. Lauren paced on the walkway and grass. Her fingernails dug into her palms. Angry tears spilled down her face. She wiped them away roughly with fists. It was so fucking unfair. Why couldn’t she just do this herself? She was supposed to be strong. She was supposed to be stronger with every fight. Why were there still things she couldn’t do by herself? Her emotions were still shot from the mental invasion she suffered and strangling Brain Drain. It was too much. Her head and heart hurt too much. Something was going to burst. None of this was fair. A growl seeped between her teeth.
“I know. We’ll get her back. I promise.”
Lauren shook her head. Knapp couldn’t promise anything. God, why did she have to follow Maudlin? But she wouldn’t know anything without having followed. Because BASTION didn’t help her. The school didn’t help her. Knapp was a liar, saying the school was to help the students. It was to turn the students into weapons. Hogan had warned her about this, that day at the café.
“You can’t just abandon her,” Lauren begged.
“We aren’t.” Knapp’s tone was firm. “I know what they do, Lauren. I know what the end result looks like. We won’t let it come to that.”
“Then give me a team to go after her.”
Knapp sighed deeply. “I can’t disobey Dodds. I don’t have the power.”
Lauren shivered in the continually falling rain. There was no strength left in her. In her muscles, maybe. But not where it counted. In her spirit.
Knapp looked up at the dark sky. Droplets fell onto her glasses. She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again.
“Doing the right thing is tricky. Sometimes it requires following what you feel in your heart. Sometimes, doing the right thing upsets people. That’s the burden of power. Using it for what you feel is right.”
The headmaster left it at that. She returned inside the administration building.
Lauren was left to process her words.
In her room, she cleaned herself thoroughly in a boiling hot shower. Her fingers were nearly fully regrown. She dried and changed into fresh clothes. As she cleaned herself, her mind worked. She stared at herself in the mirror.
The path forward was narrowing. What she needed to do and what she was being told to do were becoming increasingly incompatible. Lilith had presented her with a binary choice: be her lapdog, or BASTION’s. Follow someone. But nobody’s path was her path. Not Mara either. Not really. If this madness was ever going to end, Lauren couldn’t just trust someone else’s path. She had to start walking her own. And like Knapp had said more eloquently, she was going to get shit from all sides for daring to do that.
She finished drying her hair. When was getting shit on ever not the case for her? Might as well get something from it. It was simple, then.
Lucy was in the kitchen. She looked over her shoulder as Lauren came out from the hall.
“There you are! I was just making some sandwiches. Come here and tell me about your day.”
Lauren sat on the countertop and shoveled a turkey and cheese sandwich into her mouth. Lucy took in her hunger, her look, her slightly diminished fingers, and made Lauren two more sandwiches before she got into asking questions. The sandwiches each had a lifespan of seconds. Lauren wiped her hands on her pants before Lucy could hand her a napkin. She waited for her friend to explain herself.
Lauren didn’t start with her story. She started with a question.
“What’s it called when you convince a bunch of people to do something they aren’t allowed to do?”
Lucy thought about it for a moment.
“I think there’s a few different words for it. Maybe an insurrection?”
Lauren nodded. “I think I need to do an insurrection.”
In the mood for something cozy, spicy, and otherworldly? Join Dr. Ryst Nova in the Andromeda Galaxy, 700 years from now. Ryst survives an attempt on her life, but now she's hearing voices she can't explain and dreaming of a man she's never met. When she goes looking for him, what does she uncover, and could she set in motion a string of events that will break reality itself? Find out in .
What to Expect:
- Female & male leads.
- LGBT male lead & cast.
- Neurodifferent and nonverbal characters.
- Slow burn romance that turns NSFW spicy.
- Telepathy, Tantra, & psychic phenomenon.
- Five book series. For the stand-alone Comedy Space Operas, start in .