Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It is a well-known fact that I am never surprised.

It is an equally well-known fact that whenever someone says they are never surprised, they are about to receive the biggest curveball of their life.

And if you want a couple of less well-known facts, here you go: it was two fifteen in the damn morning, and someone was trying to break down my front door. I don't mean regular pounding like you'd get with a battering ram; I mean it sounded like this person was hammering and kicking at the same time and smacking hell out of my doorbell for good measure.

Swearing in both English and German, I flung back my blankets and stalked into the hall.

The pounding increased, became more frantic. I unlocked my front door silently with telekinesis, yanked it open and came within half a picometer of PSI-blasting my visitor to vapor.

"Razputin?"

I gawked at the boy in my doorway, for once at a loss for words. He was filthy and dressed in rags, his hair tangled and matted with no sign of his beloved helmet and goggles, but there was no doubt about it: the youngest member of the Psychonauts – you know, the one who had been missing for the past six months – had just shown up at my apartment.

Without waiting for an invitation, Razputin shoved past me and stumbled inside, moving so erratically that I'd have taken him for drunk if he'd been an adult. Five steps in, he collapsed, landing heavily on his side with an impact that made me wince, and I saw how thin he was.

No. No, not thin; that's too generous a term. The kid was emaciated. Razputin had always been underweight, so much so that I'd believed him to be no more than seven or eight when we first met, but now I could have wrapped my hand around his upper leg. He was shivering violently, and there were several shallow cuts on his bare feet and legs. Put him on a trash heap or in a ruined house and he could have been the poster child for war refugees.

I closed and locked the front door, then crouched down and put my hand on Razputin's shoulder, intending to help him up long enough for me to get him to a chair.

The second I touched him, he TK'ed me into the wall with such force that my vision swam and I dropped to the ground. For a few moments, I lay where I had fallen, watching through hazy eyes as Razputin struggled to stand.

It was a pitiful display. He tried several times, growing visibly more desperate with every failure, only to fall back into a prone position each time. Whatever adrenaline had kept him on his feet long enough to reach my home had deserted him now. His chest hitched rapidly and he kept darting panicked looks around him, as though he were in a war zone instead of a modest, one-bedroom apartment in north Chicago.

Moving very slowly, not wanting to alarm him any more than someone or something clearly had already, I stood up.

"Raz?"

As soon as I said his name, he PSI-blasted the wall about half a centimeter away from my head, leaving a smoking hole in the plaster. My voice seemed to give him fresh impetus; he managed to force himself upright, rebounding off the walls like a drunken, slow-motion pinball as he lurched toward me. Something warned me that his intentions, whatever they may be, were far from friendly. I could raise a shield in time to deflect any attack, but the second I took defensive action, it would become a fight.

Razputin brought one hand up to his temple, then his eyes rolled back in his head and I crossed the space between us just in time to catch him as he collapsed. He twisted around in my hold, clawing and fighting with surprising strength for one so frail-looking, and spat a few choice words at me. I didn't understand any of them, but the general meaning was easy enough to comprehend.

"What—" I started to say, before Razputin seized my wrist so tightly in both hands that I found bruises there the next morning and fixed me with such a wild, crazed stare that I wondered if he even knew who I was.

"Don't tell anyone I'm here!"

That was the last thing on my mind. I was too stunned to even think of calling in reinforcements.

What did one say to a ten-year-old child who had been missing for a little over six months, only to turn up in this state? My work partner, Milla Vodello, and I had rescued traumatized psychic children on some of our earlier missions, but I usually left this sort of thing to her, and I'd never seen one as badly off as Razputin. Worse, I couldn't ask Milla for her input as she was in Porto Alegre on a solo mission, which rendered her out of telepathy range for at least the next two weeks. Even if she hadn't been, a distraction from me at the wrong moment could prove costly.

I stared down at Razputin, for once at a complete loss. The Razputin I'd known at camp had been enthusiastic – a little too enthusiastic, in fact – brave and refreshingly polite for a ten-year-old. This one was semi-feral and just as likely to defend himself with with his teeth as his psychic powers.

"Raz?" I said again.

He arched his back so violently that he nearly catapulted himself out of my arms and renewed his struggles, his lip curling up in an unmistakable snarl.

"Razputin, it's Sasha Nein. You're in my apartment, and you're safe. Nobody knows you're here."

One of those statements seemed to get through to him; he hesitated, holding himself completely rigid.

"Nobody knows you're here," I repeated more slowly, both because I couldn't think of anything else to say and because discovery seemed to be his biggest fear at that moment. "Nobody knows, and I won't tell anybody." That would be problematic later on – the search for Razputin was tying up a lot of agents and resources that could be better deployed elsewhere – but for now, I had no qualms about promising to keep him a secret if it eased his fears.

No response. His breathing was becoming faster and more shallow and his movements more feeble, eyelids fluttering as he desperately struggled against me and his own exhaustion.

"Razputin?" I made my voice as gentle as I could, which wasn't saying much. Gently soothing children had always been Milla's department; I favored a brisk, no-nonsense approach. "I want to take you into another room so you can lie down and get some rest. You'll be perfectly safe there. Is that okay?"

Still no answer. He didn't struggle or try to attack me, though, so I chose to interpret that as tacit consent. I couldn't very well leave him out here or sit with him like this all night.

"Alright, here we go." I stood up slowly, unsure if he had any injuries he wasn't telling me about. I doubted he could have fought me so hard if he had, but adrenaline can mask a lot of problems.

Razputin didn't react as I carried him through into my bedroom, his skeletal frame so light in my arms that it was like carrying a bundle of sticks and old clothes, and lowered him onto my bed, wishing I had a spare room for him. The sheets were still rumpled from where I'd been sleeping in them, but Razputin didn't strike me as the fussy kind. Hadn't he grown up in some kind of dilapidated circus caravan or something?

"Here." I TK'ed the covers up to his waist but didn't dare cover him fully. In his current frame of mind, I wasn't sure he'd make the distinction between being kept warm and being confined. "There are more blankets in there if you get cold." I indicated the closet in the far corner. "Use as many as you want. I'll be in the lounge if you need anything. I've locked the front door and there's a psychic shield in place, so nobody can get in." More to the point, Razputin couldn't get out. He could have the run of the apartment as far as I was concerned, but after spending six months tearing the world apart hunting for him, I'd be damned if I let him disappear again.

Not a muscle twitched in his face; he just stared at me with the same dark suspicion.

"I have to go to work tomorrow, so I may not be here when you wake up. We'll talk when I get home in the evening." That would give him the whole day to adjust, calm down and hopefully be ready to start giving me some answers. "In the meantime, try to get some sleep."

I walked out, closing the door softly behind me, and went into the lounge, buzzing too hard to even think about following my own advice.

Razputin was alive.

I sat down on the couch, staring at the opposite wall without seeing it. Razputin's disappearance had been so abrupt that none of us knew how, when or where he'd gone missing. Following the whole Brain Tank fiasco, he'd remained at Whispering Rock for the rest of camp. At the end of it, Ford had whisked him away for a special mission, and nobody had seen or heard from him since.

That had been just over six months ago. Between Milla and me, Coach Oleander and Ford Cruller, we'd done everything physically and psychically possible to try and find him. Milla, Oleander and I even had subordinate teams scouring every possible area. Every single avenue had been a dead end; Razputin had vanished as thoroughly as snow melting in spring.

And now, after all this time, just as I'd been starting to try and think of how best to suggest to Milla that maybe we should think about giving up, he'd shown up at my front door. How the hell he knew where I lived when he only really knew me as a counselor and instructor from Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp was a mystery for another time; right now, all I cared about was figuring out the best way to help him.

Food? Shelter? A ride to the Motherlobe? A phone call to his family, or maybe Ford? I was happy to give him all of those things once he was lucid enough to ask for them (and in the case of food and shelter, he obviously didn't have to ask) but right here and now, I had no idea how to proceed.

I lay down on the couch and stared at the ceiling, my mind half on Razputin.

What the hell happened to you?

One thing was horribly clear: Ford's 'special mission' had gone very, very wrong.

But this was Razputin we were talking about. He'd taken down the enemy that both Milla and I had been unable to beat, he'd saved Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp and all the other campers, and he'd done all that with virtually no training and no experience. The huge psitanium deposits around the camp had boosted his psychic powers, of course, but he'd still done astoundingly well. If it hadn't been for Raz, things would have turned out very badly for all of us.

I TK'ed the door shut, turned the lights out and closed my eyes, trying to work this through. I felt like I was trying to assemble a jigsaw that wasn't only missing the guide picture, but ninety percent of the pieces too. While I was still trying to figure out what to do for the best, I fell asleep.

Some time later, I was awoken by loud retching and opened bleary eyes to see that the light was back on, the door to the rest of the apartment was open, and my usually immaculate kitchen looked as though a tornado with gastroenteritis had whipped through it, leaving scraps of chicken bones, empty wrappers and cartons and banana peels.

The cause of all this – Razputin, who else? – was standing on his levitation ball and had just finished throwing up into my sink. He'd only been half successful, so that instead of having vomit in the sink, which would have been easy to clean up, some of it was in the sink, some on the floor and the rest of it dribbling down my counter. I don't know if he heard me stirring or sensed my gaze, but as soon as I focused on him, he whipped around to stare at me with huge, terrified eyes.

I sighed. "Go back to bed, Razputin. I'll clean this mess up." I'd also have to get some more food in before I left for work. I'd be surprised if he had much of an appetite after this, but I couldn't leave him alone all day with nothing.

"For future reference," I added, pointing to the appropriate door, "the bathroom's in there."

He barely glanced at it as he skirted around the edge of the kitchen, keeping his eyes fixed on me until he was almost level with my bedroom door, which he yanked open and dived through, slamming it behind him.

Ah, well. At least he hadn't attempted to bolt out the front door this time.

Upon closer investigation, I discovered that Razputin had ransacked my kitchen and wolfed down anything remotely edible, including a half-empty tub of low-fat vegetable spread, a small bag of brown sugar and my last banana. Not satisfied with this, he'd torn through my trash in a search for more food and discovered the chicken I'd tossed out two nights ago. It was a good thing he had thrown it all up so quickly, otherwise he could have added salmonella to his troubles.

I won't subject you to a long description of the cleaning process. Suffice it to say that I got everything wiped up, wiped down and copiously sanitized. For good measure, I filled the sink with a mixture of bleach and hot water.

I looked up at the clock. Six twenty. Certainly not worth going back to bed, even if I could have slept. I'd pick up some food for Razputin, then go in early.

I started toward the front door, then hesitated and returned to the kitchen. One thing I've learned as a camp counselor is never, ever assume that little kids have much in the way of common sense. I tore off a sheet of paper and printed a large sign on it.

Razputin,

DO NOT DRINK THIS WATER. It has bleach in it, your stomach will explode, and you'll die rolling around on the floor and screaming in agony. (I find that children are much more willing to obey an injunction if you take a minute or two to patiently explain the reasoning behind it instead of just barking out orders like a dictator.) If you're thirsty, get water from the bathroom faucet or juice from the refrigerator.

Sasha

I drew a large arrow pointing at the full sink and taped the paper to the counter, then left the apartment. There was a twenty-four-hour convenience store not far away, where I grabbed some fruit juice and a selection of sandwiches, breakfast cereal and milk. Hardly the most nutritious fare, but it would do. I hesitated and then, calling myself the worst kind of panderer, added a bar of chocolate and can of Coke to my purchases. That should keep Razputin going until the evening, when I planned to bring back something far healthier.

My hand hesitated over the chip section, then I added two large bags. Some neglected children tend to hoard food. If Razputin was one of them, I wanted to make sure that he hoarded things that would keep and be safe – if not particularly good – to eat after some time being squirreled away at room temperature.

I paid, took my bulging grocery bag back to the apartment and reinforced the psychic shield as soon as I was inside. That should keep Razputin in and any unwanted guests out.

After I unpacked the food, I let the bleach/water out of the sink, rinsed it several times, and went through my kitchen to make absolutely sure that there was no more old and bad food that Raz could get his hands on. Satisfied, I returned to the hall and knocked on my bedroom door, then pushed it open.

"Razputin?"

From his perch on my bed, Razputin half leaped through the ceiling, stumbled back away from me and prepped a PSI-blast but didn't fire. I suppose that was progress, of a sort.

"I'm going to work," I said."There's food and drink for you in the refrigerator. Don't bolt it all at once – you'll just throw it up again – and don't use the stove. If you want to hoard food, fine, but don't take things from the fridge. I'll bring back something for dinner tonight. Stay here and get some rest. Watch TV if you like."

No response, just another of those wary looks. I shifted my weight. I like silence as a rule, but this was starting to unnerve me.

"Right. Well. I'll see you later, then." I turned, thought of something and turned back. "Unless you'd like to come to the Motherlobe with me?"

That got a reaction; he backed off fast, shaking his head.

"Alright. I'll leave my office number by the phone. If something happens or you change your mind about coming in or you just need to talk, call me, okay?"

No response.

"I mean it, Razputin. I'm not doing anything today that can't be interrupted. If I'm not in my lab, you can leave a message for me. If you don't want to use your real name, just leave a message asking me to call home."

Nothing. I gave up. Maybe he'd feel safer later. Part of me – a large part, in fact – wanted to grab him and take him with me regardless of his wishes. Another, more illogical part insisted that the second I took my eyes off of him, he'd be gone.

That's ridiculous, I scolded myself. He didn't disappear when you were in the lounge. He won't disappear now.

I compromised by forming a mental link with him. Not the strong kind that Milla and I have; this was more like a thread or single strand of cobweb. I couldn't pick up on any of his thoughts, but it would let me read his emotions and alert me to any sudden distress.

Right now, I was picking up nothing but dark suspicion. There was a vagueness attached to the emotion, meaning he wasn't suspicious of me personally so much as the whole situation in general. I suppose that was to be expected, since he'd only been in my apartment for a few hours. Maybe giving him his space was the best solution for the moment. I certainly wouldn't gain anything by overwhelming him and stressing him out.

"I'll be back at about five thirty. If I can get away earlier, I will, but I can't promise anything."

Silence, although I was now picking up a very faint hint of relief to go with the suspicion. Finally, I was going away, meaning he could relax.

I turned and walked out, and Razputin slammed the door so fast behind me that he nearly hit me in the ass. From the other side, I could hear heavy-duty thumps that suggested he was busy constructing a rudimentary barricade out of everything he could TK, including the bed.

I sighed. It was still absurdly early to go into the Motherlobe, but I could always find things to do there. At the very least, I could get some breakfast.

Some of you may be thinking that going from an apartment in Chicago to the Motherlobe in California would be quite the daily commute. If I had a normal job, you'd be right, but being a Psychonaut has its perks. I have my own personal transport system – a very limited version of the Otto-Ban – that zaps me straight to the Motherlobe atrium in a matter of seconds. This was Truman Zanotto's idea; the more widely-scattered the Psychonauts are, the quicker an agent can respond to a psychic emergency.

I went back into the hall and opened the door leading to the tiny storage space where I keep my vacuum cleaner, a couple of spare coats, a Christmas tree that Milla gave me five years ago that's still waiting to be unpacked and my highly-classified government-issued teleportation pad to northern California.

I stepped onto the pad, pressed the Teleport button and was promptly zapped two thousand miles west.

Chapter Text

It probably goes without saying that after being awoken twice by a semi-feral Razputin and forced to clean up copious amounts of his vomit on barely three hours of sleep, I wasn't in the best of moods when the Otto-ban spat me out in the Motherlobe's main atrium. A few people – permanent residents, most of them – were also there, and I skirted around them. I get along with most of the people in the Motherlobe, but my head was spinning too much to want any kind of company.

The smell of food drew me to the Noodle Bowl, which serves not just residents and workers but the general public as well. Ever since Fred Collins took over most of the cooking from Carole-Jean – he runs the place five days out of every seven – it's been gaining a reputation as a reasonably-priced, good-quality family restaurant. Bringing non-psychics in to spend time with psychics has been helping to break down some of the barriers between our two peoples as well, so it's a win-win. Pretty impressive for someone who's only nineteen. How Milla and I found him and his one surviving friend and brought them to the Motherlobe is a rather mundane story involving pyrokinetic mountain lions, six hamburgers, a roll of bandages and copious amounts of flowers. I shan't bore you with it.

I leaned on the counter, watching Fred fly from one station to the next. "Good morning."

"Sasha!" Fred paused in the middle of...something, his face lighting up. "You're in early."

"Yeah, I couldn't sleep." I leaned on the counter, breathing in the scents from the kitchen. "What's on the menu today?"

Fred beamed. "Salmon lattice, tomato soup with grilled tofu cheese sandwiches, pizza and mini-calzones, plus the usual toasties. I'm also making some cakes and there are two apple pies ready to go in the oven for the first lunch rush at twelve. As soon as I'm done prepping, I'll set up the breakfast buffet."

I glanced over my shoulder. The breakfast buffet at the Noodle Bowl – currently bare – offers a good selection of rolls, cold cuts, spreads and cereals and is well worth waiting for. Right now, though, I just wanted a light breakfast and seclusion in my office to think. More than that, I wanted to be back in Chicago helping Raz work through his trauma, but that wasn't an option just then. Taking sick days on less than twenty-four hours notice isn't my style, and it would raise more than a few eyebrows.

"Can you make me some coffee and an omelet right now? I'll pay you for them."

Fred blinked in surprise, but nodded. "Sure. Have a seat."

I sat down at an empty table, staring out through the huge windows at the rest of the Motherlobe. Technically, I was overstepping my bounds, since serving food off-menu isn't a part of Fred's job. One of the interns, Norma, had tried it on in the early stages, turning Fred into her own personal chef for ten days and running him to the point of exhaustion until Milla and I had intervened. I had Fred remake everything Norma had ordered, dished it up in one serving and refused to let her get up until she'd finished every bite. That was the last time she ever pulled a stunt like that. After that, we'd set up a strict rule for everyone: you eat what's on the menu, or you don't eat at all.

Non-technically, Milla and I had provided Fred with a home and a job doing what he loves best, so I figured I'd earned the occasional breakfast. Besides, Fred's only truly happy when he's feeding people, so it was part of my sworn duty as a Psychonaut to ensure his mental well-being by ordering a meal.

"Here!" Beaming, Fred set the plate down in front of me and placed a cup of steaming coffee next to it. The omelet was folded in a semicircle so perfect that it looked like a giant yellow protractor that had been garnished with chopped coriander and decorated with swirls of ketchup. A sprig of parsley was in the center, placed with mathematical precision.

"Thank you." I took a bite and sank into egg and cheese heaven. I have no idea how he matches the flavor to individual palates so perfectly, especially since he's not psychic. "How much do I owe you?"

Fred waved a hand. "On the house."

"That's—"

"I mean it, Sasha. You and Milla saved us; I haven't forgotten that. I can afford to give you a free meal if I want."

That was certainly true. As a permanent resident, Fred pays five hundred dollars a month in rent, which is the standard cost of a studio apartment here in the Motherlobe. All his ingredients are covered by the budget, and the Noodle Bowl serves at least seven hundred people, if not more. He rakes in between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars on a bad day.

I thought of Razputin. What was he eating? I guessed he'd probably found the food and squirreled it away somewhere. "Fred, can you make me something I can take home for dinner? It doesn't have to be special, just something light and nutritious."

I could see Fred was intrigued, but he just nodded. "Sure. Anything in particular?"

Good question. I had no idea what Razputin liked, apart from the obvious junk food that all kids love. If I gave him too much grease, I'd only be letting myself in for another round of vomit cleaning, and I'd have nobody to blame but myself.

"Maybe a quiche or a pie? Something I can eat cold tomorrow as well."

Another nod. Fred's curiosity was clearly rising, but he's one of those rare people who knows how to mind their business. "Okay. I'll send it over when it's done. You'll be in your office all day, right?"

"Yeah. Thanks." I finished my breakfast and headed to my lab. I had no pressing experiments, and my supply of test subjects had dried up, meaning I faced a day of tedium involving catching up on paperwork and admin tasks.

It's strange, but people seem to believe that when I'm not doing dangerous missions and saving the world with Milla, I'm sitting and staring into space or performing unauthorized and highly questionable experiments on human test subjects. (For the record, this is a vile slander. Every single one of my experiments here in the Motherlobe is completely authorized, and I resent any implications to the contrary.)

The truth is that, as one of the most senior agents in the Psychonauts, there are always a thousand and one things requiring my attention. The first one to cross my desk this time was an email from the Hoofburger Ranch. We have an arrangement: the Hoofburgers supply Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp – and recently the Motherlobe – with meat and eggs from their ranch, and we deduct the cost of that from their son J.T.'s attendance fees at camp. The amount we order far exceeds the cost of sending your kid to Whispering Rock, so we're essentially paying the Hoofburgers for the privilege of having J.T. as a camper. In other words, those simple, down-to-earth, good ol'-fashioned ranchers (their description, not mine) are not so damn simple.

That said, I like the Hoofburgers on a social basis, not just a professional one. The whole family is polite and friendly, and J.T.'s non-psychic parents love their psychic son unconditionally, which gives me hope for the human race. This particular email came with an invitation to a family barbecue on Saturday. A Hoofburger barbecue is not something one turns down lightly, and I felt a sharp pang at having to refuse, citing work as the reason. Until I figured out what the hell I was going to do about Razputin, I thought it was best to keep my schedule as open as possible.

Maybe I could take him to the Hoofburgers for the next invitation. He'd gotten on pretty well with J.T., and-no, that wouldn't do. I doubted anyone would consider the Hoofburgers to be dangerous except to cattle, but Raz's instructions had been clear enough. Betraying him wouldn't do much to convince him he could trust me.

I continued working through my accumulated paperwork and reports for the whole morning. I didn't want to start anything time-sensitive or even step away from my desk in case Raz decided to call. The thread connecting us was faint now, purely because of the distance, but I could tell he was no more relaxed than he'd been when I left.

At about one fifteen, my growling stomach became too loud to ignore, so I contacted Fred telepathically and asked him to send along some lunch (this is something that's allowed, but only by the most senior agents). Twenty minutes later, Alex Kernachan – a psychic teenager whom I'd rescued from a seriously bad situation six weeks ago and Fred's only permanent assistant – brought me a steak sandwich on toasted bread with caramelized onions and a handful of thick-cut fries. My favorite.

"Fred said it's on the house," Alex said as I reached for my wallet.

"Okay." Ordinarily, I'd have argued, but Alex doesn't handle confrontation at all well. "Tell him thanks. Did he send anything else?"

"Yeah. Here." Alex picked up a large plastic box and handed it to me. "Steak and mushroom pie, and there's a slice of apple pie as well. He said to tell you that if you keep it in the fridge, it'll stay good for a couple days."

Perfect. I tipped Alex five bucks and one thick-cut fry, set the box to one side, snatched up my sandwich and dived in. For some inexplicable reason, many people believe that I live in complete solitude and feed exclusively on mung beans and spinach, like some vegan monk of the 1300s. The fact is that I eat a perfectly normal amount for a man of my height and build and thoroughly enjoy a steak or a good barbecue. I just happen to have the metabolism of a hummingbird on crack cocaine, that's all. Anyway, it's impossible to taste Fred's cooking and not start inhaling it. I'd like to see you try.

The rest of the afternoon passed without incident. At three thirty PM – five thirty in Chicago – I set my files aside with a feeling of relief, picked up the box containing my pie and went home. My rank and service record both grant me far more leeway than most when it comes to my working hours. In the whole Motherlobe – which is built back into the mountain on several levels and is the size of a city, albeit a sparsely populated one – there are only two people who outrank me, and the jury's still out on one of those two.

I stepped into the Otto-ban and pressed the button to send me home. Five seconds later, I was back in my storage closet, the sudden gloom making me blink. I shook my head – Otto-ban travel always makes me a little dizzy – then opened the door,looking for my new roommate.

"Razputin?"

A single pulse of terror shot down our thread. I turned to my right to see Raz standing there, frozen in what must have been mid-step, holding a half-eaten turkey and cheese sub that I'd bought for him earlier.

"I see you're eating. That's good."

He just stared at me, seemingly uncomprehending, every muscle tensed in clear fight-or-flight mode. I might as well have spoken to him in German.

I didn't move. Didn't frown, didn't smile, didn't speak. I just stood there watching him, completely motionless, not saying or doing anything that could have been interpreted as the prelude to an attack or an attempt to get him to lower his guard.

Something in his face twitched and he glanced from me to the closet and back to me, his eyebrows coming together in a frown. Confusion mixed with disbelief and what I can only describe as wary curiosity rolled down the thread. If his feelings could be put into words, they'd be something like Uh, Sasha? Did you spend the whole day sitting in a storage closet?

"There's a transport system to the Motherlobe in there. I'm the only one who can use it," I added, which was a lie; it can be used by anyone whom I authorize. I just didn't want Razputin thinking that masked men were going to burst out of the closet.

The thread sent back a feeling of comprehension, but no more. That was concerning. In the past, any mention of psychic work or my job as a Psychonaut would have triggered an explosion of excited questions. Now? Nothing.

As I watched, Raz's gaze shifted to the box in my hands, and he tilted his head slightly to the side.

"This? This is a pie I brought back for dinner. Are you hungry?"

His gaze shot back to my face, the suspicion returning.

"If you're not, that's no problem. It'll keep until later, or even tomorrow."

No response.

"Okay, well, I'll put it away for now." I moved past him into the kitchen, pretending not to notice him scrambling away from me, and opened the refrigerator.

It was completely empty.

I put the pie inside and turned to face Razputin, who was now frantically cramming his sub into his mouth until his cheeks bulged.

"Razputin, I don't mind if you want to hoard food, but not milk. It'll go rancid and stink the place out and you won't be able to drink it anyway. I don't need to know where you hid it," I added, "but you have to put it back sometime before morning. Okay?"

Razputin swallowed his gargantuan mouthful with what looked like real effort and looked down. At least he hadn't refused outright. I'd give him until morning before I started searching for the milk myself.

I dragged a chair out from under the small table that serves as both desk and dining table, turned it around and sat down facing him. He didn't look much better now than he had last night. The ragged state of his outfit was even more apparent, and at some point, he'd wrapped several paper towels around his wrist, taping them so thickly that it resembled a small plaster cast.

I indicated it. "Are you injured?"

He recoiled, cradling his wrist to his chest.

I held out my hand, palm up. "May I see?"

Razputin took a step back, then hesitated.

"It's okay to tell me no. But if you're hurt, I can help." I TK'ed a kitchen cupboard open and brought my first-aid kit floating through the air into my lap. Psychonauts have a large variety of medical supplies and most of us are trained in how to apply them correctly, both in the field and at home. It wasn't all that long ago that many hospitals refused to treat psychics unless it was a literal life-or-death situation, and even then, only maybe.

He opened his mouth, then closed it again slowly.

"Alright." I kept my voice very quiet. "If you don't feel safe enough to talk to me yet, that's okay. But at least let me treat your injuries and stop them getting infected."

He shook his head. Very hard. Was that linked to his trauma, or just a child's fear of the pain?

"I'll be as gentle as I can," I added. I know I could have given him the stuff and let him clean them himself, but this was too good a chance to pass up. I wanted to connect with him on a more physical level, to show him that having me in his personal space wasn't a bad thing, and that I may not be a warm, nurturing adult like Milla, but I was a safe one.

I must have sat there with my hand outstretched for a good twenty minutes before Razputin plucked up the courage to approach me. It took another five before he placed his hand in mine, quivering slightly.

Very gently, I unwrapped the 'bandage,' peeling it away to reveal a savage ring of raw skin that ran around Razputin's wrist like an ugly bracelet. A burn, and a bad one at that.

"That must hurt." I released him. To my surprise, he stayed where he was. "Is your other wrist the same?"

He looked down, shifting his gaze from one foot to the other, hugging himself tightly, and nodded.

"The skin's not abraded like it would be from a rope burn." Keeping a careful eye on him for any sign of distress, I continued. "If I had to guess, I'd say metal restraints."

No reaction. I felt a very subtle shift in our thread, enough to tell me that my theory was right.

"Did someone do something to the restraints? Heat them or freeze them?"

Again, he didn't reply in words, but the same feeling of affirmation slid into my mind. Metal restraints, then. So Razputin had failed whatever mission he'd been sent on, been taken prisoner and somehow managed to escape.

I held out my hand again. This time, he didn't hesitate before giving me his and allowing me to start treating him.

I don't know how badly I hurt him. I know I must have done; burns are always far more sensitive to the touch than any open wounds. During the procedure, he kept his eyes fixed on my face and never lost that dark, suspicious look. I might have been insulted – after all, him coming to me for shelter hadn't been my idea – except there was something else in those eyes too. A kind of lost desperation, if you will. It was obvious that he didn't trust me (it would have been obvious to anyone who wasn't blind, deaf and pretty damn stupid on top of that) but on a deeper level, it was also obvious that he wanted to.

Out of curiosity and an effort to prevent the silence between us from growing too deep, I said, "Razputin, where are your parents?"

His expression darkened further and he drew back a little.

"Here in Chicago?" I asked.

He shrugged. Good. At least he was responding fairly consistently now.

"Illinois?" I tried.

Razputin turned his head away sharply, letting me know that this wasn't a line of conversation he was interested in pursuing. I let it go. Given the nomadic nature of the Aquatos, I don't know wasn't an unreasonable answer when it came to their location.

Or had he run away again? A slow, sinking feeling started in my chest and spread down to my feet. Had his father done this to him? They'd seemed close at Whispering Rock, Augustus teasing Razputin about his crush on Lili, lending credence to Milla's theory of see, darling, Raz was wrong about how his family viewed him. Look, they really do love each other!

I had been less convinced. Abused psychic children are a depressingly common sight, and one thing they have in common with their parents is that both are superb actors.

I knew Razputin's father had forced his way into his son's mind while the rest of the counselors and I had been incapacitated. I had no idea what he and his son had said to each other, but the mental world was the perfect place to secretly terrorize Razputin into pretending that everything was wonderful between them.

Had he gone to his parents after completing Ford's mission only to have them chain him up to prevent him from running away again? If so, it would certainly explain why he'd run to me and not Milla, since her first act had been to sell him out to those same parents back at Whispering Rock. I knew her well enough to know that she wouldn't do such a thing again, but I could hardly blame Razputin for being nervous.

Except I've seen several different types of abusers, and however bad a parent Augustus may or may not be, I really couldn't imagine him as the kind of man who would chain up and beat his son. He might lock Razputin in the caravan, but I was sure that was as far as he would take it.

Or maybe I was the second choice. It was possible that Razputin had run to Milla, found her place empty and decided to make his way to me instead.

It was a plausible theory with just one small flaw: Milla lives in Venice Beach. I could tell that Raz had traveled here to Chicago on foot from somewhere, but California?

I finished bandaging the first wrist. Razputin looked at it, turning it from side to side as though he'd never seen a clean dressing in his life, then slowly offered me his other one. Excellent.

I took it and started work. "You know, Milla and I have been looking for you. We've also put a lot of other agents on the job."

Something about that amused him in a dark, twisted way; he snorted with a half-smile that was little more than a sneer and looked away again. I turned his hand over and checked the underside of his wrist. It was swollen, and I realized with a sickening jolt that it was already infected.

"Razputin, I'm sorry, but this is going to hurt."

He hissed in pain, his face screwing up as I sponged disinfectant into the worst of the injury. I kept going, still speaking in the same low, level voice. "But having so many people tearing the country apart is keeping them from other jobs. I won't tell them you're here, but I think it's time to call off the search and let them get back to their regular duties, don't you?"

Razputin's eyes flew open, the link between us exploding with terror. Not rational terror of the I'm-an-arachnophobe-and-a-tarantula-just-fell-on-my-head kind, but blind, wild panic. Acting purely on instinct and long-ingrained reflexes honed by years of apprehending suspects, I gripped his hand before he could get free, holding him in place. I don't know what I would have done next, but it doesn't matter because at that point Razputin sank his teeth into my hand right up to the gums.

Someone once said that being bitten fires up all kinds of primal instincts. I think this is true, since my immediate thought was to wrench myself free and backhand Razputin across the face with all the force I could muster.

I'm proud to report that although I tore my hand out of his mouth, I retained enough self-control not to hit him. On the other hand, Dear Diary, today I did NOT hit a battered, severely traumatized ten-year-old boy who came to me for help! Hooray for me! isn't really the kind of thing one puts down for posterity.

Razputin scrambled backward and spat a mouthful of my blood onto the floor. Part of me winced at that (although now that I think about it, what did I expect him to do? Swallow it?) and I TK'ed him into the air, suspending him two feet above the floor.

"Razputin, I'm going into the bathroom to clean this up." I held up my hand, which was now streaked with thin ribbons of blood. "I'll be back in thirty minutes. Hopefully, you'll have calmed down by then." I started to add and we can talk, but clamped my mouth shut before the words could escape. Until I knew more about what Razputin had been through, I had no way of knowing what might trigger him, and a lot of adults use talk or discussion as a euphemism for you're in big trouble.

I had no idea if I was doing the right thing. I was relying on pure logic to guide me in this: my presence was likely to distress Razputin further. Therefore, if I wanted him to settle, I should leave the room.

I headed into the bathroom and shut the door behind me, then took out the first aid kit and set about treating the bite with sutures, a bandage and about two thirds of a bottle of TCP. Human mouths carry some pretty nasty bacteria, and this hadn't been the quick, frightened nip that most children do; Razputin had torn right into the flesh.

Had I screwed up by leaving him alone today? Had he taken it as me giving him some space to try and get his head together, or as abandonment? (Of course you're safe with me, Raz. Now be a good boy and stay here all alone in Chicago while I go to California for the day.)

I stared down at my bandaged hand, which was throbbing badly, and slipped a couple of painkillers into my mouth as I considered my options. I'd call in sick for the rest of the week, which would give me time to really try and make some progress with Raz. I wasn't naive enough to believe that a few days plus the weekend would be nearly enough time to work through this, but if I could just get him talking and responding, I'd count that as a huge win.

When I returned to the lounge after the promised thirty minutes, Razputin was in such a sorry-looking state that I immediately regretted not making it ten. Sweat stuck his clothes to his body and his hair to his forehead, and he was literally dripping with it to the point where it had formed a small puddle on the floor, mixing with my blood and turning it pink.

And God, he was a trained acrobat! In terms of physical stamina, he could have given any adult in the Motherlobe a run for their money. He wasn't in peak physical condition, but how hard had he struggled during those thirty minutes to exhaust himself to this state? How desperate must he have been?

Jesus, what the hell had I done? 

I closed the door behind me. Razputin's head, which had been lolling on his neck, jerked up and his eyes narrowed with fresh aggression as he saw me.

I have to say, part of me was impressed. He was so exhausted that to this day I don't know where he found the strength to move, he was entirely at my mercy and drenched in sweat from his futile attempts to escape, and he still wasn't ready to give up the fight. He may have been down, but out wasn't even on the horizon.

I waited for a few moments to see if he was going to break the silence, and then said, "So have you calmed down, or do you need some more time? Because I can hold you up there like this all night if I need to."

The look I got from him in response was so full of hate and fury that I'd half raised a psychic shield before remembering that Razputin was physically helpless and too exhausted to turn his psychic powers on me.

"Let. Me. Go." His voice was a croak that sounded more machine than human, every word requiring a separate breath. How long had he gone without talking prior to his arrival here?

"Why?" I held up my hand, giving him a good, clear view of the bandage. "So you can bite my other hand? That's not going to happen, Raz."

He thrashed violently in a useless attempt to get free before hanging there again, limp with fatigue, his breath rasping through bared teeth that were still stained with my blood. Saliva dangled from his mouth and fell to puddle with the blood and sweat already on the floor. "I'll bite your fucking throat if you don't let me go, you piece of shit!"

"That's not going to happen either." Since when did Razputin use words like that? He was outspoken and cheerfully blunt in the way of many ten-year-olds, but I'd never heard him seriously swear before. Certainly not at me. "If I let you down, you have to stay here."

Razputin didn't raise his head – I don't think he had the strength to – but he managed to glare at me from under his lids. "Only if you keep the hell away from me."

"Deal." I TK'ed him slowly across the room and lowered him onto the couch. He lay there motionless on his back, his chest hitching in short, shallow breaths.

I sat down on the same chair as before, putting us on more of an eye level, and waited until his breathing became more regular and the fear I'd been picking up on had subsided a little.

"It seems like today was pretty bad for you," I said quietly.

No response. Was he sliding back into his trauma or just trying to save what little remaining strength he still had?

"You could have called me, Razputin. I left you my number for a reason."

Silence. Shit.

I TK'ed the faucet and filled a bowl with cool water, not taking my eyes off of him. For those who may be wondering, yes, we can TK things without seeing them, but it's like you trying to operate in the dark. Perfectly possible, but it requires a little more concentration and effort.

Razputin snapped his gaze onto the sound, and tried to PSI-blast it, producing only a handful of sparks.

"It's alright, it's only water. I thought you must be feeling pretty sticky right now." I added a dishcloth to the bowl, then sent it floating over to the coffee table. "This will help."

I watched as he took the cloth and started blotting the sweat off his face and body, never once looking away from me. Whatever trust and rapport I'd managed to build up last night had been well and truly shattered.

In a quieter voice, I said, "Razputin, I'm not going to hurt you."

Razputin's response was the closest thing to a cynical sneer I'd ever seen on his face, the non-verbal equivalent of Don't give me that shit.

"If you don't believe that, then why did you come to me in the first place?"

He stared at me, the dishcloth frozen mid-blot, then went back to running it over his face and neck. There's nothing better than a wet dishcloth or towel when you're hot and sweaty; the water cools you and wipes away the perspiration while the roughened texture of the cloth scrapes away the old, dry sweat.

Just when I was racking my brains to think of how to keep the conversation going, Razputin said in a very low voice, "Because of the Mega-Censor."

"I see," I said, even though I didn't. There was no connection that I could perceive between that highly embarrassing incident in my own mental world and Razputin deciding I was his best chance at safety, but at least it confirmed that he was lucid enough to recognize me.

I sat there while he kept sponging himself off, not wanting to stress him by demanding answers too quickly. When he'd finished, I attempted to TK the cloth back, but he gripped it in a tight fist.

"Not done? Alright. You keep it as long as you want." I could think of nicer security blankets than a grimy, sweat-soaked dishcloth, but if it grounded him and kept him calm, I wasn't about to complain. I paused, wondering how to phrase the next question, then I decided to come right on out with it. "Razputin, what do you want from me?"

No response. Now he wasn't even looking at me; he just sat cross-legged, making a loose fist and pulling the dishcloth through it over and over again.

"Food? A place to stay?"

Nothing. Shit. Non-verbal communication was fine. No communication was a different story.

"You're safe here, Razputin. The only two people who know you're in this apartment are you and me."

Was it my imagination, or had he relaxed very slightly?

"Do you need me to hide you?" I asked.

His body jerked involuntarily at that, then he froze.

"Is that it? You came here to hide from whoever's chasing you?"

Very faintly, he nodded.

"I see." I took a deep breath, a nasty suspicion growing in my mind. "Razputin, I want to ask you something."

He gave me a wary, nervous look.

"It's a yes or no question, so you don't have to talk. You can just nod or shake your head. Is that okay?"

Razputin stared at me. I stared right back and waited. Consent was key here. I may have been in overall charge as the adult, but when it came to his trauma, I wanted him to be in no doubt that he was calling all the shots.

At last, he nodded once, stiffly.

"Alright. First of all, I'm not going to ask you for any details about what happened to you," I said. Part of that was concern for Raz's well-being. Part of it was pure squeamishness. Razputin was one of the toughest, bravest people I'd ever met; I didn't want to think about the kind of extremes his enemies must have gone to in order to scare him into silence. "How much you share and who you share it with is entirely up to you. Just tell me one thing: were the people who did this to you psychic?"

Razputin's breathing increased, his body suddenly tense and his eyes widening.

"You don't have to give me any names." That was assuming he even knew any. People who traumatized children to this extent were usually smart enough to use pseudonyms. "You don't have to share anything about them or about what happened to you until you decide you're ready." I emphasized the word you very slightly. "Maybe you'll be able to tell me one day, and that's okay. Or maybe you'll be able to tell someone else, and that's okay too," I added. I didn't want Razputin thinking that he was forbidden from going to other adults he might trust, such as Ford or Milla.

Now Razputin was gripping his knees tightly, staring at nothing, and I could see a faint sheen of perspiration on his face. Damn. Had I pushed too hard?

"I'll protect you whatever the answer is," I added, "but I need to know what I might be up against. Did other psychics do this to you?"

There was a silence so long that I didn't think he would answer at all, then he nodded.

"I see." That explained Razputin's insistence on absolute secrecy; he didn't know how many other psychics I knew or spoke to on a regular basis, so he had no way of knowing that I wouldn't shoot off my mouth to the wrong person. "Alright. You're safe now, but we need to work out a way to stop these people from hunting you." Arresting them and throwing them in a pit so deep they'd see the stars at midday would be my method of choice, but that would have to wait until Razputin felt ready to share more details. Telling him that he was safe was one thing, but I suspected it would be a long time before he believed it.

I think better with nicotine, so I TK'ed my cigarettes over to me – I keep a pack in every room for emergencies – and opened it.

Four left. Strange; I could have sworn there had been five when I left that morning. Oh, well. It wasn't the first time I'd miscounted or misremembered, so I shrugged and shook one out, then psychically lit it and glanced back at the couch. "Do you—"

The couch was empty, and the door connecting the lounge to the entrance hall was now ajar. Through it, I caught a glimpse of Razputin disappearing into my room, closing the door silently behind him. It seemed the talking was over for tonight.

I only hoped I'd have more success tomorrow.

Chapter Text

The first thing I did when I woke up the next morning was email the Motherlobe to tell them I'd come down with a bad cold and wouldn't be in for a few days.

The second thing was open the refrigerator. The milk was back where it should be, although a quick search of my other cupboards revealed that Razputin had taken a box of breakfast cereal in exchange. Well, fine. At least that wouldn't go bad, although I was beginning to worry about a possible roach infestation. The milk didn't seem to be rancid, and it looked like Razputin had drunk most of it before returning it anyway. Good.

The third thing I did was check my cigarette packet.

Three left. Yesterday, I'd been willing to give Raz the benefit of the doubt. Today was different. I knew damn well I hadn't smoked any out of that packet last night, and contrary to what a lot of campers and some of the interns mutter, I don't sleep-smoke.

The door clicked open behind me and I turned to see Razputin standing there, rubbing one foot awkwardly on his other leg.

"Oh. Uh." He squirmed a little. "I thought you were still asleep."

"I'm an early riser. Did you sleep well?"

He looked away, hugging himself. "Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I, uh, I slept great."

"Good." I didn't call him on this obvious lie, partly because I was too relieved he was speaking again, but mostly because I had something more important to discuss with him. I held out the cigarette packet. "Razputin, do you have something to tell me about this?"

Razputin stared at it, then up at me and shrugged. His facial expression was superb – innocent with just the right amount of confusion – but there was suddenly a narrow, watchful light in his eyes.

"They're cigarettes, Sasha. What do you want me to tell you?"

I set it down on the table. "To begin with, you could explain to me how it is that at least one of them is missing."

Razputin shrugged again. "You probably just smoked it and forgot about it."

"We both know that isn't true."

He took a small step back, his eyes darting back and forth. "You think I've been smoking them?"

I would have preferred that explanation to my own, much darker suspicions. "Roll up your sleeves and show me your arms."

He gripped the ends of both sleeves, holding them tightly in place. "Why?"

"I want to check the dressings on your wrists," I said, which wasn't quite a lie. "They may need changing."

Razputin eyed me warily, then rolled up both his sleeves just far enough for me to see the dressing and held out an arm for inspection. I took his hand in a firm hold, too firm for him to pull away, and TK'ed his sleeve up, exposing the whole of his lower arm.

There were, as I had suspected, the burns. Some were light, others so raw and deep that I thought he hadn't just ground the cigarette out on his skin; he'd really worked it in.

I looked at them, then at him, keeping my face and voice as normal as I could. "Wait here. I'll get the first-aid kit."

I fetched it from the bathroom – keeping it there was shaping up to be rather inconvenient, but fetching it and putting it back at least provided me with a valid excuse to leave the room and give Razputin a few minutes of breathing space – and took it into the lounge, where Razputin was now perched on the back of the couch and eyeing me suspiciously.

I sat down, held out my hand and waited, just like yesterday. This time, it only took a few minutes for him to approach and let me start treating his hurts.

"Why cigarettes?" I asked idly, as though we were discussing nothing more interesting than his favorite sport. To be honest, I was less concerned about this than I would have been if I'd found him cutting himself, since burning oneself with cigarettes could hardly be considered a suicide attempt by even the most twitchy psychiatrist. Not that I'd really been worried about him in that respect, but still...the average rate of depression, self-harm and even suicide in psychic children is in itself depressing. One of Razputin's fellow campers – a ten-year-old boy called Clem – is the main reason why the children at Whispering Rock are no longer allowed metal cutlery.

Razputin didn't answer.

"If you tell me what you were hoping to achieve, maybe I know of a way that doesn't involve you hurting yourself."

He opened his mouth, then shut it and shook his head. I felt a quiver through our mental thread, a stray thought that flashed through before he could stop it, one that had to do with sleep.

"You were trying to keep yourself awake?"

No response, but a twinge of affirmation shot down the thread, and relief flowed through me. Thank God. If he'd been self-harming for a more serious reason than just a desperate desire not to fall asleep, I'd have brought someone else in on this regardless of his wishes. I'm a qualified therapist – all Psychonauts are – but my specialty is adults and older teenagers, and I haven't done any sessions for about eight years; in fact, I'm not sure if my license is even still valid.

"You're not in trouble, Razputin." I put a touch more seriousness into my voice. "But you know I'm not going to let you do this again, don't you?"

"Are you mad at me?" This in a dead monotone that said he just wanted me to hurry up and get the punishment over with.

Well, it's very bad for children to get what they want all the time.

"No."

Long silence. "You should be."

"Why? You're afraid of falling asleep, and you've been resorting to more and more extreme measures to stop that from happening. That makes me worried, not mad." I finished the bandage and sat back, giving him a little space. Between the cigarette burns and the ones I'd found on his wrists, his arms were now wrapped in bandages from the wrist to the elbow. Not that the burns were that bad, but I hoped the dressings would act as something of a shield from any future attempts. If I knew why he was so afraid to sleep – or to be more specific, what his captors had done to him when he'd fallen asleep in the past – I could start to build around it, but I was frightened of pushing too hard and causing him further trauma.

More silence. Razputin stared down at his bandaged arms, running his fingers over them with the absentminded air of someone stroking a cat.

"Aren't you gonna hit me?" he said at last.

"No." The fact that he even thought it necessary to ask me such a question was heartbreaking. Thinking something a little more was called for, I added, "I don't hit children."

Pause.

"You can't make me sleep," Razputin muttered, although there was an uncertain note in his voice. Clearly, he had no idea whether I could or not.

"Your own body will do that without any help from me." I nodded at the newly applied bandage. "No matter how much you punish it."

No response. I replaced everything in the first-aid kit, set it down on one side and turned back to face Razputin, who promptly backed out of arm's reach.

"Alright. I think there are some things that we need to get straight before either of us is much older." I paused, trying to gather my thoughts into a cohesive order. "You're safe here. I know you don't feel safe after everything you've been through, and that's understandable, but you are. Nobody's going to hurt you, Razputin, and that includes me." I gave my words a few seconds to sink in, then continued. "That said, if there's somewhere you'd feel safer, like with Milla or your parents, tell me and I'll take you there. Don't worry that you're going to upset or offend me by asking, because you won't. So let me ask you: is there somewhere you want me to take you? Or can I call anyone for you?"

Razputin shook his head hard.

"Then you're stuck here with me, because I'm not going to turn a ten-year-old boy onto the streets of Chicago. Especially not after you've come all this way."

His expression didn't change, but I was still maintaining my gentle connection with his mind, and I felt a sudden withdrawal, like a kind of mental cowering. Razputin did not want to talk about his journey to my place.

Casually, as though I'd meant to continue in this vein all along, I said, "I brought some food home from the Motherlobe yesterday. Nothing fancy, just a couple of pies, but the chef at the Noodle Bowl is pretty good." I paused, waiting for any danger signals and then, when there were none, added, "Think you could eat?"

He looked up at me swiftly, but the eagerness in his eyes was quickly snuffed out by something far uglier.

"What do I got to do for it?"

What the hell was I supposed to say to that? "Nothing."

The look shifted, became warier. "How do I know this isn't some trick?"

"You want to eat. I want you to eat. Where's the trick? And you'll be stronger and better able to defend yourself if you're not faint with hunger."

That worked; the suspicion vanished and he straightened up a little. "Is it rabbit?"

"The pie? No, it's steak. There's an apple one too. Come on, it won't take long to heat up." I stood up and waited for him to precede me into the kitchen area. The poor kid needed sleep more than food, but psychics can't influence natural processes such as sleep or hunger, so my powers were useless in this matter.

But there were other, non-psychic options still open to me.

I put the pie in the microwave for a few minutes and poured out two glasses of milk. I don't often drink milk – I prefer coffee, which I knew Razputin loved too – but the last thing he needed just then was caffeine.

Razputin waited until I'd eaten most of my slice, then grabbed his own and practically inhaled it, gulping down chunks of beef and pearl onions so fast I could see his throat bulging with every swallow, then chugged the whole glass of milk without stopping and sat there staring at my plate with huge, hungry eyes.

I raised my eyebrows. "There's more if you want it."

He went white and shook his head hard, looking away.

"Alright then." That probably wasn't a bad thing. Too much rich food would make him throw up again. "It'll keep." Seeing his eyes were beginning to take on a glazed look, I added, "In the meantime, why don't you lie down and get some rest?"

He shook his head, but slowly. I touched his mind very gently, and what I found almost knocked me on my ass. This wasn't ordinary stubbornness or a bid for control or even a child's not wanting to go to bed one nanosecond before they had to. The mere thought of sleep itself was terrifying him to the point of hysteria.

NO! NO! If I sleep it'll all be over and I'll be back there when I wake up and I can't face that nonono not again not again NOT AGAIN—

I stared at him in shock, some of the pieces falling into place. "You don't believe any of this is real, do you?"

A quick, terrified look was all the confirmation I needed.

"Mein Gott." I felt sick to my stomach, speaking without thinking. "What the hell did they do to you?"

And yet, the cold logic behind it made a twisted, sadistic kind of sense. How better to silence Raz than by forcing him to live through situations where he wasn't believed? Or worse, situations where he was believed and helped, only to smash it to pieces and return him to where he was, then brutally punish him for speaking out? This was gaslighting on an epic level, one that required a phenomenally strong psychic. Who the hell was powerful enough to do something like that?

Well, me, obviously, and Milla. Ford and Oleander. Agent Forsythe and Truman Zanotto, definitely. Likewise Otto Mentallis, but I was damn sure that none of the people on that list would dream of pulling something like this.

"Raz, this—"

"No!" He screwed up his face, shaking his head hard.

I paused, surprised. "No, what?"

"Don't call me that, Sasha! Don't ever call me that!"

Confused, but willing to respect his wishes, I nodded slowly. "Okay. Razputin, then. Can I call you that?"

Small nod. Now that I thought about it, he'd reacted badly when I'd addressed him as Raz before too.

"Alright. Razputin, this is real. I'm real. You're real. If you fall asleep, you'll wake up right here in my apartment, and I'll be here too. I won't abandon you. I promise."

Nothing. The shutters were back down in front of his eyes. He didn't believe a damn word I was saying, and pushing the point would just irritate him.

"If you don't want to sleep, that's fine, but at least lie down. You look like you could do with some rest."

Actually, he looked like he could do with a damn good shower, a change of clothes, at least twenty square meals and preferably a visit to the hospital, but one step at a time.

"I'm not. Going. To sleep."

"Fine. Stretch out on the couch then. If anyone deserves a lazy day in front of the TV, it's you. I'll put the first-aid kit away, then we can find something for you to watch."

He thought about this for a while, then clambered onto the couch and sat there, curled up in a tight, rather twitchy ball. "Don't be too long, okay? Okay?"

"I won't. If anything happens, you can call for me and I'll come."

The cynical look was back on his face now. "I tried that before. You didn't."

I paused in the doorway, guilt for a crime I hadn't realized I'd committed striking me to the heart.

"I never heard you," I said. Contrary to what non-psychics – and many psychics – believe, telepathy isn't just a matter of thinking as hard as you can at someone. It's a separate psychic technique that we don't teach to children unless there are extremely extenuating circumstances.

Razputin shrugged and looked away, picking at a loose thread with a ragged, bitten fingernail. "Yeah, well. Whatever."

I let it drop. Protesting my innocence wouldn't get us any further forward. Instead, I took the first-aid kit back into the bathroom, then went into my bedroom to find those damn cigarettes.

Inside, the bed was untouched, but Razputin had dragged the blankets and pillow into my closet and made a little nest for himself. He'd had enough presence of mind to repurpose one of my shoes as a doorstop, so at least I didn't have to worry about him getting shut inside. After a lot of searching, I had both my missing cigarettes back along with the locations of three food stashes, each of which I replaced exactly as I'd found it. I also collected up all the spare cigarette packets I had lying around the apartment and stuffed them into my pockets. I'd dump them at the Motherlobe when I went back.

When I returned to the lounge, I saw that things had panned out exactly as I'd expected: the combination of a full stomach and a soft place to rest in a cozy room on top of his extreme sleep deprivation had all proved too much for Razputin, and he was now sound asleep.

I sat down and switched on my laptop, logged into the Psychonauts network and started making a list of all the rogue psychics I'd put away or helped to put away along with a note of where they were currently incarcerated. I had no idea if one of those had escaped or been released and decided to revenge themselves on me by targeting Razputin, but I had to start the investigation somewhere, and until Raz felt ready to share the details, this was the only lead I had.

Half an hour later, I had a list of five potentials who had recently been released. Two of those had agreed to PSI-banding in exchange for an early release, so I crossed them off the list. PSI-banding involves the person wearing a device around the clock, one that cuts off access to their psychic powers. It can't be removed or tampered with except by the psychic who applied it, but it's usually in the form of a ring or bracelet, so unless you know exactly what one looks like, you'd never recognize it.

I lit up a cigarette and started going through the remaining three names on my list.

Samuel Nash – strong pyrokinetic, burned five people alive.

Unlikely. Nash was an old-school villain, but in his own twisted way, he was strangely honorable. His apprehension and arrest was between him and me. He might kidnap Razputin to try and draw me out, but I had a hard time believing he would torture a child just to upset me, and in any case, if he had done it, I would have received a list of demands long before now.

Anthony Harcourt – clairvoyant, blackmailer.

I could certainly imagine Harcourt torturing Raz based solely on what I'd found in his living room when I made the arrest, but his powers didn't match his ambition. Harcourt considered himself a kind of feared dark lord whose name is only whispered in broad daylight, but in reality he was no more than the psychic equivalent of a playground bully. Vicious but weak, and nowhere near capable of creating a construct like the ones that had fooled Razputin. When I'd arrested him, his reaction hadn't been denial or a counterattack, but simple indignation that it had taken us this long to get around to it. In the end, I'd told him in a rather exasperated tone that people were clearly too frightened of him to take action. By that point, I'd have told him there was a global manhunt of invisible psychics combing the area for him if it would have shut him up. I got a few letters from him after he was in jail, claiming I should be grateful to him as his arrest would clearly make my career. (I was a low-ranked agent in those days.)

No, it couldn't be Harcourt. I drew a line through his name and moved on.

Tim Atherton – strong TK/lev/cryokinesis powers. Excessive counts of property damage, several people injured, three deaths

And Tim Atherton was out of the question. He was a kid who'd suffered abuse for being psychic, retreated into the world of comic books and firmly believed that his powers made him a modern-day superhero. He even made himself a mask and costume. I wish I were kidding.

Unfortunately, comic book superheroes don't have to worry about the aftermath of their actions. People don't get hurt unless the writers want them to, and the only consequences for smashing up half the neighborhood and flinging bad guys through glass in your quest to stop the villain is a tickertape parade and the key to the city. Reality is not that simple. I'd had no contact with Tim since his arrest and five-year imprisonment, but Milla sometimes visited him. According to her, Tim never understood why he'd been arrested instead of recruited and flown straight to the Motherlobe. Now he was free, it was only a matter of time before he tried playing Superman again, but his hero complex meant he would never dream of playing the supervillain.

I sent another email to the Motherlobe requesting immediate and frequent updates on the movements of those three, purely to feel as though I was doing something, then glanced over at Razputin. Still asleep, although there was a tense, miserable look on his face that told me his dreams weren't exactly pleasant. Entering dreams isn't something we can do - we just end up in the usual mental world - and given the trauma he'd already suffered at the hands of this mystery psychic, there was no way I'd go into his mind without his full consent either. I could do nothing but sit and watch him suffer and try to be there when he woke up.

At least he was a little cleaner now. First priority when he woke up would be getting him into a shower, washing his clothes and cleaning up any remaining hurts, such as the cuts on his feet and legs. Those were minor and shallow enough for him to take care of himself.

As for the rest, well, I couldn't force Razputin to confide in me or feel safe, but much like I had with his sleeping, I could help the process along a little. If I could just persuade him to let me into his mental world, I could get most of the answers I needed for myself.

I closed the laptop and stared out of the window at the Chicago skyline, the beginnings of a plan forming in my mind.

Chapter Text

The peace only lasted about fifteen minutes before the nightmares kicked in, and when they did, it was instant. One minute, Razputin was lying on my couch. The next, he was thrashing around wildly, his back arching so much that I could see open air beneath him, crying out in his sleep.

And I could do nothing but watch. Every training seminar I'd attended, every child psychology text I'd ever read – and there had been plenty of those – agreed on this point at least: never wake a child in the middle of a nightmare.

Of course, the people behind those textbooks and seminars had never encountered a psychic kid quite like Razputin. Hell, neither had I, and I'd been working at the Motherlobe for nearly fifteen years and at Whispering Rock for the last five.

"NO!" Razputin catapulted himself out of sleep and onto his feet, just as every piece of tableware I owned exploded into shards.

"Razputin!" I raised my voice, speaking loudly but not – I hoped – angrily, and he fixed me with a combination of terror and bewilderment, his chest hitching as he fought for air in strange, whooping gulps. Now that I had his attention, I continued in a softer voice. "Razputin, it's alright. I just need you to slow your breathing for me, okay?"

He inhaled deeply and breathed out several times in a hoarse whistle that made him sound like an asthmatic vacuum cleaner. The terror faded, leaving him looking lost and confused.

"Good. You're safe now. You're in my apartment in Chicago. Lincoln Square, if you're interested." Not that the various neighborhoods would mean anything to him, but the extra detail might help ground him a little.

He started to roll off the couch, then froze when he was halfway off. Not the terrified freezing of someone paralyzed with fear, but the fixed motionlessness of a child who's just spotted something fascinating. As I watched, he bent over the arm of my couch, turning his head slowly from one side to the other.

"What are you looking at?" I asked.

"This couch has little hairs on it. Dust, too."

"Very likely. I haven't vacuumed for a few days."

Razputin ran his hands over the couch, tracing patterns on it. "Where'd you get it?"

"There's a good shop not too far from here." What any of this had to do with our current situation was a mystery to me, but it seemed to be calming him a little, so what the hell; I'd take it.

He reached out and picked up a single hair, winding it around his finger and pulling it tight, then plunged both hands into the gap between the seat and the armrest, pushing and squeezing it like he was kneading dough.

"How could someone make me imagine this?"

My heart leaped and I pressed home this advantage before he could talk himself out of it. "They couldn't. A lot of things in a mental construct are essentially copies. Cars look identical, for instance, or refrigerators, or you might see the same posters over and over again." I pointed at the window. "Go take a look outside. Look at the people. Their hairstyles, the clothes, what they're doing or carrying. Look at the cars; all different makes, models, colors, license plates. No psychic, no matter how powerful, could put this level of detail into a construct and keep it going for so long."

He stared at me, his gaze clearer than it had been before. There was something more now: hope. It was a frightened, suspicious hope, a hope that expected to be crushed at any second, but it was there.

Turning, he reached out and ran the tips of his fingers across the glass, then pressed his hands against it and leaned on them, staring out the window at the city.

I sat there and waited, letting him take his own time. At last, he turned to face me.

"It's...real?" It was half a statement, half a question. "It's really real?"

"Really real."

"I'm really here? You're really here?"

"Yes."

Razputin slid off the couch and approached me in a sidling, hesitant way, one foot dragging behind the other. As soon as he was within arm's reach, he reached out for my hand, stopped just short of making contact and glanced up at me, clearly unsure.

I held my hand out, palm up. "Go ahead."

He did so. First my hand, then each one of my fingers and my thumb was poked and squeezed in turn. Apparently satisfied that he was dealing with a hand instead of, say, a cunningly disguised grenade, he went back to the window, smooshing his nose against the glass.

I joined him there, being careful not to crowd him. "Nice view, isn't it? That's one of the main reasons I chose this apartment." It had been one of my demands: if the Psychonauts were serious about having me work for them, they could start by getting me the hell out of the filthy, leaky room in Fuller Park that I'd been sharing with eight other illegal immigrants and into a place of my own in a better neighborhood. Three days later, I'd been called to Truman's office, who'd had a bunch of real estate brochures for apartments fanned out on his desk. Truman had simply waved his hand at them and told me to pick the one I wanted. It hadn't exactly been a gift, since it had been completely unfurnished and the Psychonauts had withheld a chunk of my salary and mission bonuses until they'd recouped both the cost of the apartment and twenty percent interest, but I'd never had to pay for anything more than typical utilities and running costs.

Razputin swallowed, his breath fogging the glass.

"I'm really here?" This in a low voice, as though voicing it would make it all disappear. "I actually made it?"

"Yes."

He turned and pressed a hand to my chest, moving down my torso, then drew back a little and stared up at me, his eyes getting bigger and bigger.

Even though I picked up his intent through the thread, I barely had time to brace for impact before he catapulted himself at me and wrapped me in the tightest, most desperate hug I've ever received, clinging to me with all four limbs like a baby monkey.

"Ah...yes." I cleared my throat and patted him gingerly on the shoulder, wishing I was better at this sort of thing. "Well."

Fortunately, this less-than-stellar response on my part had the opposite effect to what I'd expected; instead of making him feel hurt or rejected, his mental energy exploded with relief and he tripled the hug. My awkward reaction proved it was me. It was me, I was here, he was here and that meant he could relax for a little while.

As for me, I sat back down on the couch with him and started having a mental argument with my own arms, trying to convince them to return the hug or at least offer some kind of physical comfort.

"Why didn't you turn around, Sasha?" There was a hint of long-choked tears in Razputin's voice, tears that he was too proud to release in front of me. "I kept screaming and screaming to you in my mind, but you never turned around."

I swallowed, feeling sick to my stomach. I'd planned to stay with him for his first briefing, maybe even go along with him on that mission, but Ford had received an urgent assignment requiring both my and Milla's attention and we'd had to drive off in a hurry, leaving Razputin to be sent into the field alone.

"I didn't hear you, Razputin."

He stared at me, eyes flicking rapidly over my face, legs still locked in a death grip around my waist. Desperate to believe me. Unable to trust.

"If I had, I'd have turned around right then."

Slowly, he moved back in to rest his head on my chest again. He wasn't even close to being convinced, but from what I was now gathering from his mind, he no longer believed that he was trapped in a mental construct.

I still couldn't bring myself to hug him, and in an effort to take my mind off of how damn awkward this was, I went back to my original problem: who the hell had taken him? Trafficking was the only explanation I'd been able to come up with, and it was still the only one I could think of. Psychics are very highly sought-after as bodyguards. In most cases, they're treated more like attack dogs than actual people, kept in 'kennels' or even cages until they're ready to be rented out to whoever can afford psychic protection. I've taken down enough of those trafficking operations to know that the traffickers prefer children, who are easier to break. There's a reason that the Motherlobe uses top-ranked agents like me and Milla as camp counselors at Whispering Rock instead of palming it off on a couple of weaker saps: a collection of psychic kids free for the abducting would be far too tempting a target otherwise.

"Razputin, when you were in that place, did you see any other children there? Or anyone who was in the same situation as you?"

He shook his head, every muscle suddenly tense.

"I see." That didn't mean anything, of course. I'd seen PSI-trafficking victims isolated in soundproof rooms with no human interaction apart from their 'trainers,' and I'd seen other victims stacked in cages like battery hens. "Alright. Do you want to talk about something else?"

He nodded so hard that his face blurred.

"Okay. While you were asleep, I did some thinking about how to stop those people looking for you. I think I found a way."

Razputin pushed himself away from me, and a little part of me hated myself for how relieved I was. "He won't stop, Sasha. He'll never stop."

I turned to face him and rested one arm across the top of the couch, trying to look as relaxed and unconcerned as I could. "Not even if he thinks you're dead?"

Razputin blinked. "Dead?"

I nodded. "I file an official report to that effect, pull all the agents off the search, and everyone stops looking for you, including him. You'll be completely safe here."

He sat down again, hugging his knees tightly to his chest and watching me over the top of them. "I dunno, Sasha. Isn't there, like, something doctors can do that stops people being dead?

"If you're talking about resuscitation techniques, then yes, but—"

"So he's not gonna stop," Razputin interrupted. "He'll just say, oh, Raz is dead but when I find him I'll take him to the doctors who'll bring him back to life, and I don't gotta be careful because nobody else is looking for him now."

I stared at him, waiting until he fell silent before speaking again. "As I was about to explain, those techniques are limited and not at all guaranteed. The longest period between death and successful resuscitation on record is seventeen hours, and that's the exception, not the rule. He'd have to make plans to steal your body and—did I say something funny, Razputin?"

Razputin shook his head, clamping both hands over his mouth. I knew I hadn't; the laughter that had bubbled out of him hadn't been the ha-ha, funny joke kind. This laughter had had a darkly hysterical note to it that I seriously didn't like.

And then, like someone flicking a switch, it stopped. His face straightened out instantly, and he looked so calm and demure that if I hadn't known better, I might have thought I'd hallucinated that laugh.

"I'm sorry, Sasha. It's fine. I'm okay."

He was unmistakably not okay if he was shutting off his emotions so efficiently, but this wasn't the time to delve into them.

"Alright. To return to your question, if we tell everyone you're dead and nobody finds you for twenty-four hours, it would be too late for any doctor to bring you back."

Razputin frowned. I could see him trying to turn everything I'd told him over in his mind, searching for holes. At last, he said, "Will people believe it?"

"Yes." I put all the conviction I could into my voice. "If it comes from me, yes."

"And...you'd tell everyone?" he persisted, in the tone of someone picking at a scab with no clear idea of what's going to ooze out from underneath. "Milla? Truman Zanotto?" He swallowed hard. "F-Ford?"

"Yes." The consequences I'd face for doing so would be nothing short of biblical, but I'd deal with that when the time came. "But this comes with a price, Razputin. If you're dead, you can't be seen wandering around outside. You'll have to stay here in my apartment for the foreseeable future. Would you be willing to do that?"

He hesitated. "Do I get food?"

"Of course. If I have to go to work, I'll leave food for you like I did before. Other than that, all the time you're staying with me, you'll eat what I eat." That said, I have never understood the logic behind forcing a child to eat food he or she genuinely hates, as if doing so will magically change their tastebuds, so I added, "Are there any foods you don't like? Any allergies?"

"Uh...I don't think so. I've never really eaten city food, though, so I don't know." Something flickered in his eyes, something dark and ugly, and he looked away. For a moment, he just sat there like an unplugged robot, then he shrugged and said, "I'll eat pretty much anything. Except bacon. I don't like bacon. Or duck."

I blinked. Of all the dislikes I'd expected to hear (broccoli, spinach, peas, etc) bacon and duck hadn't even come close to being on the list. "Alright. I hardly ever eat either of those things myself, so I don't think it'll be an issue. Now, if we're going to fake your death, I'll need some more information to make it sound authentic, such as the route you followed to get here when you escaped from your captors."

"Why?" No suspicion this time, just confusion.

"Because if they think you're dead, they'll stop hunting for you. But if they know you escaped them at nine AM in Florida, and I tell people I found you dead of exposure at nine fifteen AM in Alaska on the same day, they're going to smell a rat. They might wonder why I'm saying something that couldn't possibly fit the facts—"

"—and he'd figure out you and I had met." Razputin shivered. "And that would be really bad. Really, really bad. Like, so bad there isn't a word that even comes close to it."

He. So there was only one psychic. Or to put it another way, only one psychic whom Razputin was frightened of.

"Yes." Carefully, I TK'ed my atlas out of the bookcase and opened it to the USA page. I put it on the table and sat down behind it, deliberately positioning it just a little too far away for him to see. If he wanted in on this discussion, he'd have to approach me.

To my surprise, he did so readily enough, clambering onto the other chair and peering down at the map. "Where are we?"

"Here." I tapped the tiny dot marked Chicago.

"Oh. What about Whispering Rock?"

I pointed to northwest Montana. "About here. Razputin, I understand you would have stayed away from populated areas, but did you notice any landmarks on your journey?"

He screwed up his face in deep thought, then nodded slowly. "There was one place. I don't remember exactly where, but the sign said it was a national monument."

"Perfect. Do you remember the name?"

He went red and shook his head. "No. I just remember it was a monument 'cause I'd always wanted to see one of those, but Dad said we couldn't. And I wasn't thinking too good by then. I kept thinking I was being hunted – well, I was being hunted – and I'd barely eaten or slept or drunk anything. I'm sorry, Sasha."

"It's alright, Razputin. Can you describe the monument?"

Razputin nodded eagerly. "Yeah! It was like a bunch of hills near a river. I always stayed close to rivers 'cause, you know, free water."

And free norovirus, and free e.coli, and free giardia, and free who the hell knew what else? Unfortunately, a bunch of hills near a river wasn't much help.

"Did you go inside the monument or just read the sign?"

"I went inside. I thought maybe there'd be trashcans or something and I was hungry. You know, people throw away way too much stuff and most of it's only a little bad."

"Mm. I've found parks are good places for that too."

In spite of the seriousness of the situation, I had to smile at Razputin's astonished face. For a moment, I was looking at the eager, enthusiastic ten-year-old who'd broken into Whispering Rock months ago, and a heavy feeling settled deep into my chest. Somehow between then and now, that bright, inquisitive boy had been destroyed and warped into this bundle of trauma.

"I didn't always live in such a nice part of this city, Razputin. Now, what did that national monument look like? You mentioned hills. What was special about them?"

He blinked, and the moment was gone. "They were weird. I mean, really weird. Like someone decided to put speed bumps in a field. And there was this long, wiggly mound as well, kinda like a giant snake."

I TK'ed my laptop over to join the atlas and did an image search on Google for man made hills giant snake national monument. The fourth one looked promising, and I turned the screen around to face Razputin.

"Is this it?"

His face lit up. "Yes! Well, I didn't see anything like that top photo, but I saw those." He pointed at the burial mounds.

"Effigy Mounds." I stared at him, wavering somewhere between shock and awe, and slowly closed my laptop. "You walked from there to Chicago? It must be two hundred and fifty miles!"

"We used to do a whole bunch of walking in the circus. I always hated riding in the caravans 'cause they're so small and you can hardly see anything out of them 'cause the windows are, like, really tiny. And Dion always got pissed 'cause we could barely move around, so I used to get out and walk. If the weather got bad, I'd ride with my Nona."

Of course, there was that. Razputin was used to hiking and living off the land in all kinds of terrain; he could easily cover far more distance in a day than your average ten-year-old. In his world, cars were things that happened to other people. Back at Whispering Rock, Milla had found him hanging around her car and spent a couple of hours explaining what everything in it did while an excited Razputin bounced around it and in and out of it like a two-legged squirrel and fired non-stop questions at her. For some reason that neither Milla nor I could fathom, he'd declared the windshield wipers the coolest part of this demonstration.

"Do you know how long you were traveling in total?"

Razputin shifted his weight, the light dying from his eyes. "Maybe...a couple months? I don't really know. It's not like I had a calendar or anything. And I didn't really know where I was going either."

I frowned. "What do you mean, you didn't know? You came straight to my front door."

"Yeah." Razputin frowned and tipped his head on one side, tapping it like he was trying to knock water out of his ear. "I...I can't explain it, Sasha. Somehow, I just knew where I had to go. Like, I knew I had to start going further south, or I knew I should follow the river until I knew it was time to stop. I didn't know the whole route, but it was like something was showing me the way two or three steps at a time. It—after I escaped, finding you was all I could really think of." In a much quieter voice, he added, "I guess I hoped...maybe you'd help me."

"I'm glad you did, Razputin, and I will help you." I returned to the atlas, pulling it closer to me in what I hoped was a natural-looking move and not at all an attempt on my part to entice him a little nearer. "So what shall we say happened to you and where?"

Razputin leaned forward, then stood up on his levitation ball to examine the atlas more closely. "I got eaten by a grizzly bear?"

"I don't think there are any of those in Iowa." Even if there were, my ursinology was nowhere near good enough to lie convincingly about a bear randomly attacking and killing a child. I compromised by saying, "And if you did get eaten, it's unlikely there would be enough of you left for me to identify."

He deflated a little. "Well, it's near a river, so let's say I drowned. You know my family has that whole water curse thing going on, right?"

I sat back. "There are no such things as curses, Razputin, but your idea has potential. Drowned bodies are a rather unpleasant sight, which explains why I didn't call Milla; I wanted to spare her that. And you could still be identified. We can say you called me to come find you, but I was too late."

"What if he finds out I wasn't there?"

I closed the atlas and TK'ed it back onto the shelf before answering, "I thought of that as well. If you give me consent to enter your mind—"

Razputin leaped to his feet and backed off so fast he sent the chair tumbling across the room. "No!"

"I won't interfere with anything. If I can just find a recent memory, I can use that to write my report."

I could feel the war waging in his mind, his uncertainty coupled with a tearing, desperate need to let someone in to try and soothe some of the anguish and trauma he'd been keeping locked up. There was another, darker emotion bubbling just below the surface of that: we weren't family and this wasn't Whispering Rock, so I had no obligation to look after him and his right to shelter in this apartment was entirely dependent upon my whims. Telling me no might cost him his bolthole. Telling me yes might cost him even more.

"It's your call," I added. "Five minutes, Razputin. No more. I promise."

Razputin shot me a narrow-eyed look. "One minute. And then that's it, Sasha! You don't ever come in my mind again!"

"Not without your consent, certainly." One minute wouldn't be anywhere near long enough to accomplish anything as far as healing his mind went, but that was alright. The purpose of this first visit wasn't to heal him; it was to show him that he could trust me to respect his boundaries, and that nothing bad would happen to him if he let me in.

I unfastened my watch and held it out to him. "Here. You'll have to time me."

He reached out, then changed his mind at the last second and TK'ed it out of my hand instead, holding it tightly as his breath quickened, sweat already glistening on his forehead. Even as I watched, he started to tremble.

"Razputin?" I spoke very softly, but he still jumped as though I'd just fired a cannon in his ear. "Look at me."

He did. There was nothing coming down the thread, but I'd have to have been blind not to see the sheer terror in his eyes.

"You're really not okay with this, are you?" I said in the same soft tone.

Razputin shrugged, a look of bitter helplessness on his face. "Does it matter how I feel about it? You're gonna do it anyway."

"That's not true."

No reaction. I could sense him beginning to withdraw, pulling back into his shell. Shit.

"Alright then, how about this?" I said. "I'll tell you how you seem to me, and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong. If I say something upsetting or if you feel like I'm pushing too hard, tell me and we'll stop right there." I took a deep breath, my eyes never leaving his face. "I think there are a lot of different parts of your mind, and none of them can agree on anything. The first part is insisting that it's safe to trust me because of who I am. Another part keeps screaming not to be so stupid and it was a mistake to come here, since the last person you encountered spun your life into a living hell and did everything he could to stop you escaping or seeking help, and since nobody was able to rescue you before you escaped, it's obvious that you can't depend on anyone but yourself. Then there's a third part telling you that adults haven't exactly covered themselves in glory as far as you're concerned, and this would be a really bad time to start trusting them. A fourth part of you is saying that it's not safe to confide in anybody, because if you like them, you'll be dragging them into the crossfire and you want to keep them safe, and if you don't, well, that's reason enough. The fifth part is trying to guard your experiences in the same way you'd guard an injury, because poking around or letting other people do so is much too painful."

I paused to observe his reaction. His gaze was fixed on the table, but he was so still that I was certain he was listening. I wasn't picking up any signs of obvious distress, psychic or otherwise, so I continued.

"The sixth part wants you to submit and do whatever it takes to keep me happy because it's frightened of what I'll do to you if you piss me off. The seventh part is begging you to just surrender control of the situation completely because it wants the other six to shut up and let it get some rest, and there's an eighth part that's constantly playing devil's advocate by saying Yes, but… every time any of the other parts seem to be gaining the upper hand, making it impossible for you to know how or what you're really feeling. That just adds to the confusion, because you're constantly scrambling around trying to figure out what the hell the right response is supposed to be, and on top of all that, there's a ninth part that gets its kicks by whispering to you that you're not safe, that you're never going to be safe, that your torturer has learned where you are and that he's coming to get you. So you're jumping at shadows and afraid to go to sleep, which just makes the whole mess in your head even harder to straighten out. Then the first part tries to insist that I can protect you from that person and you should trust me, and the whole cycle begins again, over and over and over."

"You think I'm crazy."

I think he meant for it to sound defiant. Instead, he just sounded desperate.

I shook my head. "Not at all. I think all those parts are making you scared and confused. I think you're angry at your torturer for what he did, and you hate yourself for not being able to stop him. I think you're furious with me and Milla for not being there to protect you. I think you're constantly living on a knife edge that keeps getting narrower and narrower because you feel like you can't trust anyone to keep you safe, but you have no idea how to keep yourself safe either." I paused, then went on in a softer voice. "More than anything, Razputin, I think you're very, very tired."

I could pinpoint the exact moment when his defenses cracked. The bitterness melted off his face and fear and pain flooded in, twisting his expression to give me a brief glimpse of the scared, traumatized child beneath.

He stumbled toward me and didn't sit in my lap so much as fall into it. I felt a strong telekinetic pull on my wrists, not violent but too powerful to just shrug off, and Razputin tugged both my arms around him. Apparently, I was going to hug him now. The small part of me that never stops being a counselor and instructor was a little impressed at how much his TK had improved; manipulating two objects independently requires a surprising amount of concentration and focus.

We stayed there like that for some time. I think if nobody had asked anything more of Razputin than to lie there quietly and be held for the rest of his life, he'd have been quite content. As for me, I was still struggling with this brand-new sensation of having something in my arms that was small, warm and undoubtedly alive. If this made Razputin feel safer, well, fine, but that didn't mean I was comfortable with it.

"Sasha?"

"Yes?"

"Were you reading my mind just then?"

"No. It was just deduction on my part. Sadly, you're not the first abuse victim I've encountered."

He emerged long enough to peek up at me. "I wasn't abused, Sasha."

"Abuse takes many forms, Razputin. Not all of them leave physical scars." I indicated the bandages around his wrists. "What else would you call chaining someone up like this?"

"Yeah, but he had to do that."

A heavy weight settled slowly in my belly. If Razputin had been successfully broken to the point of justifying his own torture, this was worse than I'd thought. "Why did he have to?"

Razputin ducked his head again, playing with a loose thread on my sweater. "'Cause...you know. I was bad. I needed to be trained up some more. It was my own fault for being such an ornery little shit."

Jesus Christ, what the hell had Ford sent him into? "None of that's true."

Razputin squirmed a little, getting more comfortable and TK'ing my arms around him again. He was now curled up entirely on my lap, resting his head against my chest and clutching my sweater in both hands, and my legs were beginning to go numb. "I dunno, Sasha. I think it kinda is, you know? I mean, suppose you told me not to go stick my hand in a bear's mouth and I went and stuck my hand in a bear's mouth and the bear bit my hand off, wouldn't that be my fault?"

"The two situations are extremely different, Razputin. This person didn't have your best interests at heart. He only wanted to make his activities easier for himself and stay out of trouble."

Razputin frowned. "But...he said he didn't want to do any of that stuff. That once he'd trained me to be good, he wouldn't have to do it anymore."

Translation: once he'd broken Razputin's spirit completely and turned him into a meek, obedient, eager-to-please little slave. Having had ample experience of Razputin's fierce independence at Whispering Rock, I wondered if his captor had known exactly what he was letting himself in for.

"Razputin, listen to me." I spoke very softly now, forcing him to lie completely still if he wanted to hear. "You did nothing wrong. Nothing bad. You are the bravest, toughest, strongest young man I've ever known. And you won. You beat him. He didn't break you; if he had, you'd never have even tried to escape. But you did. You got away, you gave him the slip and you made it all the way to a safe haven. Do you have any idea how many people there are – adults as well as kids – who've tried and failed to do what you did? Who were so beaten down that they couldn't summon the strength and courage to try at all?"

I could feel my words start to take effect, soaking into his psyche like water into parched earth. I'd dealt with enough trauma victims to know that it wouldn't all be sunshine and puppies from here on between us. The fury and self-loathing were still there, just like the confusion. Paradoxically, the safer he felt with me, the more likely he was to lash out at me, since he knew he could trust me not to beat him to a pulp for the crime of expressing his emotions.

"Sasha?" Razputin's voice was equally quiet now.

"Yes?"

He swallowed. "Do you—do you still wanna come into my mind?"

I looked down at him. "That depends. Do you trust me enough to let me in?"

Razputin bit his lip hard and didn't answer.

"It's your call, Razputin. Your mind. Your rules. It's okay if you need more time."

He shifted his weight. I wouldn't have said it was physically possible for him to curl any smaller, but somehow he managed it.

"If I say yes, what'll you do?"

"Go in, look around and come out again. Once I see your mind for myself, I can start working on how best to help."

There was no answer, but I felt something shift at his end of the thread, like a door being opened. That was all I needed.

I carried him back over to the couch and got comfortable. Entering the mental world puts the psychic into a comatose state, and I didn't want to risk falling off the chair. Razputin didn't move or even react apart from tightening our mutual hold, latching on with his legs as well as his arms.

I took a deep breath and slid into Razputin's mind as gently as I could, already dreading what I was going to see there.

Chapter Text

One thing that never fails to keep me interested in my job as a Psychonaut is the fact that every mental world is different. The mind is formed by our life and experiences as well as our own tastes and personality, which means that an individual mental world can resemble anything from the set of a slasher movie to a psychedelic Dali-esque landscape.

Upon entering Razputin's mind, I'd expected chaos. Hell. Stormy seas; large waves are often a sign of extreme emotions. Maybe a huge representation of his captor looming over the landscape.

Instead Razputin's mind was a black void, with only dark gray clouds to differentiate between the land and the sky. Mist swirled around me, and in the middle of the emptiness was a battered, run-down circus caravan.

I approached it cautiously. There was no sound, nothing to suggest I was walking on anything but empty air. Worse, there were no censors, which concerned me more than anything. Censors – those mental bureaucrats that exist to destroy foreign entities in the mental world – are annoying, but their size, number and appearance all serve as a good gauge of an individual's mental health.

(No, I am not going to comment on the Mega-Censor in my own mind. That was a one-off anomaly. It has nothing to do with this, alright?)

What did this—ah. I slowed to a halt, letting out a silent exhalation of understanding.

Of course.

One of our campers at Whispering Rock lives on a ranch, so his mental world is a prairie. Mine is a crisp white cube, with the bulk of my mental world on the inside, where nobody except me has access.

But someone like Razputin had no frame of reference. No real sense of identity or roots or belonging except for the circus. A run-down circus caravan was his world. Places were nothing but ever-changing backgrounds, his surroundings shifting and changing every few days. No permanence. No stability.

The Aquato living arrangements would have to be investigated, but that was for later. Much later. I made a mental note to suggest to Razputin's family that they settle permanently in the public area of the Motherlobe. They could still perform and earn money, the children could get an education, and any psychic talents that they had could be carefully nurtured.

The caravan door opened easily, and I stepped through it into a long wooden hallway that stretched out ahead of me, illuminated just enough to see two or three feet in front of me. Faded patches on the walls suggested pictures that had been removed, or maybe posters.

No emotional baggage. No mental cobwebs. No figments, which was almost as concerning as the absence of censors. A child as bright and creative as Razputin should have had a mind that was thick with figments of the imagination.

I reached the far end of the corridor, pushed open the door and stepped into a garden of long, twisted thorns and vines that squirmed around me like oversize maggots. There was a path of sorts, but it was mostly overgrown and of the same non-substance as the 'ground' that surrounded the caravan.

I continued on, every sense alert for some message from Razputin; notification that the agreed upon minute was now up, panic, fury, anything that would tell me to break out the smelling salts and leave his mind. The path curved around the thorns, around the stunted trees and occasionally around back on itself to reveal a brand-new arrangement of venomous-looking flora.

It was warped, and it was fascinating. For the first time in my life, I was seeing a mind that belonged to a victim of prolonged trauma and abuse, but one entirely without a central theme, like a flower growing and blooming with no leaves or stem.

Here and there were bright blue rectangular constructions that I recognized as Mental Blocks. A few were small – no larger than bricks – while others were more like breeze blocks, and one or two the size of shipping containers. I'd seen plenty of these before, when someone's walled off emotions and memories that are too painful to revisit.

Usually, mental blocks are no real problem. If you've ever begun a sentence and lost your train of thought halfway through (and who hasn't?) then more likely than not, a mental block just sprouted up in your head. The censors come along and take care of it, you remember and then things carry on as normal.

More serious cases consist of artificial blocks, where people have suppressed painful memories, or hostile psychics have constructed them to cut off vital recollections in their targets' minds, such as a piece of vital evidence.

What intrigued me was that Razputin hadn't put them there. People have their own unique kind of psychic signature, and I didn't recognize this one at all. Unfortunately, I'd promised not to touch anything in Razputin's mind – and breaking mental blocks isn't my specialty – and so I had no choice but to leave well enough alone for the time being.

Up ahead, the path forked and split into two. One was as thick with briars as the one I was walking on. The other was soft brown dirt and beautifully tended with clusters of wildflowers sprouting on either side, their fragrance filling the air.

That's not Razputin's. I'd never visited his mind before, but he'd visited mine on a number of occasions, and I knew his psychic signature. This area was as incongruous as seeing a paragraph in a letter in completely different handwriting.

I stepped onto the dirt path. Nothing happened. No charging mental behemoth, no high-powered assault; just me surrounded by flowers...and why did that make me think of Rossetti? ("Oh, what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly; their scent comes rich and sickly?"/"A scaled and hooded worm.")

I began walking, and the path stretched out ahead of me like a high-speed psychic conveyor belt.

—Razputin? Can you hear me?

No response. Shit. I turned to leave, but Razputin's mental world had vanished completely, leaving me trapped inside this new construct. Instead of the thorny path, I was now facing a bright, red-and-white striped circus tent.

Alright. I ducked through the tent flap and emerged in a bright, sunny field, with a forest in the background and a waterfall and river nearby. Birds flew happily through the sky, and I even saw a couple of deer and horses grazing in the meadow. All that was required was a rendition of Rossini's Ranz des Vaches and the pastoral scene would have been complete.

I turned very slowly on the spot, trying to take this all in. Scattered around me were several circus tents, all with happy smiling faces on the top, and four large, expansive caravans, each one painted in bright colors and looking like the Rolls Royce of circus caravans, a far cry from the dilapidated wreck I'd seen at the beginning. The tent I'd come through had vanished completely, stranding me deeper in this construct.

I completed the turn and came face to face with a beaming Augustus Aquato – Razputin's father – less than three inches away from my nose.

"Hi there!"

"GAH!" I stumbled back, my heart rate tripling. Augustus took advantage of my shock to lunge forward and seize my hand in both of his, shaking it so hard that it blurred.

"You must be one of those wonderful psychics my amazing, talented and much-beloved son Razputin is so enamored with!"

Razputin – a psychic projection of him, not him in person – materialized next to his father, wearing an identical smile. All around me, people who I presumed were his siblings or other family members began emerging from the tents.

Augustus let go of my hand and I took a few paces back, looking around in a vain attempt to get my bearings. Everywhere I turned, I saw great big smiles. Impossibly wide smiles in some cases, showing impressive amounts of gleaming teeth, and I was uncomfortably reminded of an Arab proverb that Gisu – one of our interns – was fond of quoting: just because you can see the lion's teeth, don't assume he's smiling at you.

Augustus put a hand on Razputin's shoulder. "Razputin, go tell your mom there'll be one more for supper!"

Razputin beamed up at him. "Sure thing, Pappy! Golly gee, it sure is swell having a real live psychic here!"

"It sure is! We love all psychics here!"

"We sure do, Pappy!" Razputin took my hand and tugged. "C'mon, Mr. Psychic! Mom's this way!"

For want of any better ideas, I allowed myself to be pulled along the path, Razputin skipping – yes, skipping – by my side. In all my years as a Psychonaut, I don't think I've ever been so confused or wrong-footed by a mental world.

Was this a construct he'd put together as a young child? True, I didn't recognize the signature, but I'd been expecting Razputin's signature as it is now. Signatures can change, much like handwriting. Had his childhood been so miserable that he'd created an inner world where everything approached Stepford levels of happiness? He wouldn't be the first psychic child to do so by any means, and if he'd made this before reading about me and Milla and subsequently forgotten about it, it would explain why this Razputin hadn't addressed me by name.

It didn't, however, explain why he was the same age as the Razputin in my apartment. Nor did it explain the oddly stilted language, which sounded as though it had been penned by a wannabe sitcom writer in the '50s. While it's true that a person's attitude and speech patterns don't always match their mental state – someone who curses up a storm in the physical world might be very shy and nervous in the mental one, for example – I was reasonably certain that Razputin had never in his life uttered the word Pappy, let alone golly gee.

"So what's your name?" Razputin asked, as he bent down to pick a flower and sniff it appreciatively, then offered it to me.

I took it. "You don't recognize me? I've been in True Psychic Tales."

This isn't usually something I brag about, but for a TPT geek like Razputin to ask who I was—well, to say it triggered a red flag the size of Nevada was to put it mildly.

Something shivered very briefly in his face, like a ripple passing through a reflection. "Oh yeah! Which issue?"

"The third one," I said, which was a lie. Milla and I hadn't debuted until #97, and then it had been a tiny, one-page story.

Incidentally, there's something I want to clear up, because it often surprises people who meet me in the flesh: I look nothing like my comic book counterpart. I granted TPT permission to add me to their line-up of psychic heroes on the condition that they made me look different, and they took me a little too seriously. To clarify: I'm five foot eleven, not seven foot five, my head is not shaped like a brick – it's a perfectly normal oval – and I'm certainly not green. I am German and do have black hair, though, so partial points, I guess. Granted, TPT turns all of its characters into walking rainbows, so at least it's not just me, but it doesn't do much to normalize us in the public eye.

On the other hand, it does make it impossible for anyone to identify us based on our comic book appearances, thus guaranteeing all Psychonauts a certain amount of anonymity, so perhaps I shouldn't complain too much.

Another tent, this one shabby and patched, caught my eye. I started toward it, and Razputin darted in front of me so fast that I nearly walked into him.

"Oh, you don't wanna go in there, Mr. Psychic!" He gave me the same bright, unsettling smile as the rest of his family. I drew back, noticing for the first time that his mouth seemed to contain far more teeth than the average person. "There's nothing fun that way!"

Naturally, I immediately made a beeline for it, grabbed the tent flap, flung it open and plunged through it. It sealed itself behind me, but I was fine with that. The Stepford Circus had been unsettling as hell; I didn't want to go back before I had to.

Despite Razputin's quasi-warning, the tent was empty. Dust covered the ground and stirred up whenever I moved, and there were no visible exits or signs of life.

At the back of the tent was a memory vault.

As any psychic knows, memory vaults offer the most insight into a person. They're where our mind locks up key events in our past. Usually, vaults just scamper around like big, turquoise puppies, and the only way you can get them to give up their contents is by PSI-punching them. (For those bleeding hearts who think this is cruel, allow me to point out two things. One: vaults are psychic manifestations and as such, it is impossible to inflict pain on them in the same way that it's impossible to inflict pain on a thought. Two: vaults are surprisingly nimble, and no other tactic short of PSI-punching will work. Speaking as someone who has investigated countless vaults in my career, let me tell you that by the time you've chased the little bastards all over the mental world only to have them dodge at the last second, you would not believe how damn satisfying it is when you finally do manage to land a punch.

Except this vault wasn't scampering around. It was cowering in the back of the tent and whimpered as I approached. I almost felt bad about hitting it (the key word being almost).

As soon as I did, it flopped down on its belly and opened its mouth (or door, whatever) holding out the memory on a tongue the size of my torso. Like all memories, it looked like an old slide show in the form of a picture reel. The label on it read Razputin's Recapture.

Already dreading what I was about to see, I picked it up and began spooling through it. Maybe it would show me Razputin's captors, or some kind of geographical landmark or something I could use to begin searching for them.

Slide one: Razputin running, a look of terror on his face. Both his wrists were cuffed and there were long lengths of chain flying out behind him. The background was a generic forest; nothing that would have helped me track down the ones behind this. All I could tell was that he hadn't been held prisoner in a city, and I knew that already.

Two: Razputin tripping over one of the chains and sprawling on the path.

Three: a foot wearing a nondescript shoe and pants.

Four—

—NO!

The sudden hysterical terror was so strong it knocked me back a pace or two, and the vault snapped its mouth shut and galloped off. Half a second later, I was blasted out of Razputin's mind and back into my own body with enough force to send me tumbling backwards off the chair.

"Well." I got to my feet, staunching my now bleeding nose on the back of my hand, righted the chair and sat back down on it. "That was unexpected. Did you mean to do that?"

Short pause. "Yeah!"

"I see." I've fallen out of the mental world before, and I've left under my own power several times, but this was the first time that I'd ever been forcibly evicted by the mind's owner. The attack had been so fast that I'd had no time to even think of deflecting it, and so powerful that I doubt I would have succeeded in any case. "When you're feeling calmer, perhaps you can explain to me how you did it."

He stared at me, confusion now mixing with his terror. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. I was supposed to be furious, maybe even hit him or TK various objects at him for daring to turn his psychic powers on me or deny me entry to his psyche.

"Don't go near any more of my vaults, Sasha!"

"Alright." Off his surprised/suspicious look, I added, "If you'd told me that before I went in, I'd have left them alone. Next time, I'll stay away."

The suspicion darkened. "Yeah, you just better!"

I was far too pleased with his implied consent for another foray into his mind to comment on this. At least he hadn't said anything along the lines of there not being a next time.

"Alright," I said again. Glancing up at the clock, I saw to my surprise that I'd been in Razputin's mind for the past fifteen minutes. "Can I ask you a question about something I saw in your mind?"

A very faint trace of his old curiosity came back into his eyes and he nodded.

"What do you call your father in your family?"

He frowned, puzzled not so much by my question as the reasoning behind it. "You mean like the Grulovian word for father? That would be tvehta."

I shook my head. "No, I mean how did you address him in normal conversation? Dad? Papa? Father?"

"Dad, of course. Why?"

"I found a circus area in your mind that was rather intriguing."

He took a step back. "Wh-what do you mean, intriguing?"

"Just that. There were constructs of your family members. At least, I assume that's who they were. You, your parents, rather a lot of siblings and an elderly woman who I presume is your grandmother."

"My Nona. Yeah." Something in his face softened very slightly. "She's cool. But what's weird about any of that?"

"The fact that they all seemed to love you, you loved them right back and your relationship with them was sunshine and roses."

A hurt look appeared in his eyes. "You think it's weird that my family loves me?"

"I think it's weird that someone created an area solely to emphasize how much your family loves you. When you first arrived at Whispering Rock, you were terrified when Milla said she was going to call your parents. You told Ford that you believed your father had attempted to kill you and make it look like an accident on numerous occasions. You also displayed strong reluctance to approach the caravan in your mind during the first Brain Tumbler experiment. That's not taking into account the fact that you ran away when you were just ten. I don't mean storming out of the house to make a point and sneaking back in time for dinner; you had no intention at all of returning. Based on all that, would you say that you have a good relationship with your family?"

He nodded. "Yeah. Especially my dad. We've always been pretty close."

That didn't gel at all with any of my previous interactions with him or Augustus, but I shelved that thought for the time being. "Then why didn't you attempt to contact them? Why come to me instead?" I started to ask why he hadn't gone to the police, then shut my mouth on that hard. Given their refugee status and what I'd heard from Razputin at Whispering Rock, I was pretty sure the Aquatos were in the country illegally.

His face twitched very slightly. "I—I don't...maybe the guy chasing me would have...found my family?" The twitching stopped and his expression cleared. "Yeah! That's it!"

"Hm." Intriguing. It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't exactly the truth either.

Or maybe it was simply a matter of logistics. If Razputin had been kidnapped and taken to somewhere in Iowa and the Aquato circus was currently in, say, California, my apartment was certainly the closer refuge of the two. "So tell me, if you and your father were that close, why did he make a point of training you so harshly?"

Razputin shrugged. "He had to. I mean, our family has a lot of enemies."

"Really? Who?" When he was silent, I pressed a little harder. "If my son had enemies, I'd want to make sure he knew exactly who they were and how to spot them. Otherwise what's to stop them from lying their way close to him?"

Shrug. "City people. Psychics. The government. The police. CPS."

I wondered what Augustus would say if he knew that his son was now squatting with someone who officially ticked three and a half of those boxes (Psychonauts have full powers of arrest when it comes to psychic-related crimes, and no power outside of that) and filled in the other on an ad-hoc basis. Officially, the Psychonauts aren't affiliated with CPS. Unofficially, we have an arrangement: CPS throws any and all psychic children it encounters our way, leaves us to somehow find a way to cope with them and never bothers to follow up or ask questions. This situation isn't exactly ideal, but it beats the hell out of the alternative (throw the psychic kids into the system and abandon them to abuse from psychophobes that usually proves fatal).

"What did he say they would do to you?"

Another shrug. "I don't know. Something real bad. He just wanted to make me stronger and help me develop my psychic powers, so...so he..." He frowned and shook his head, cuffing himself lightly on the temple like he was trying to knock water out of his ear.

Classic sign of poor mental modification. Unless you're extremely good and/or experienced, the victim knows that something isn't right, but they don't understand what or why. Put very, very simply, it's similar to that feeling you get when you enter a room and then suddenly can't remember what you went in there for.

"Razputin, back at Whispering Rock, you hated and feared your father to the point where you believed your life was in danger from him. Then he showed up, forced his way into your mind, came out again and it was as if you always had a wonderful relationship with him. Even if you were wrong in your original assessment of his feelings toward you—" and I did believe he had been— "ten years of fear and hatred is not overcome so easily. At the very least, your relationship would have been extremely awkward, and he would have had to put a lot of effort into regaining your trust." I paused to judge the effect my words were having on him, then added, "I imagine he decided to take the easy way out."

Razputin stared up at me, his face suddenly gray. "He's been controlling the way I think?"

"Nothing that sinister. If my theory's correct, he simply made you forget all the fear and bad feelings that you had for him. Even the most powerful of us can't erase memories, but we can suppress them. I believe that your father may have hidden your troubled past with him inside several mental blocks, then created the construct of a warm, loving family to make you believe that things had always—"

"Get it out!" Razputin reached up and clawed at his head as though he meant to dig his way in and yank the block out with his bare hands. Blood began to ooze past his fingernails. "Get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out—"

I caught hold of his wrists and pulled his hands away before he could actually rip his face to pieces. "I can only do that if I enter your mind again."

"Do what you gotta, just get this fucking thing out of me!"

Both to calm him down and to take advantage of his permission before he could withdraw it, I dived back into his psyche. This time, I didn't hang around chatting to the Stepford Aquatos; I just PSI-blasted every mental block I found and returned to my lounge in the real world.

It was empty.

"Razputin?"

The unpleasant, squelchy sound of vomiting came from the bathroom. Ah. I relaxed a little. At least he'd made it to the toilet this time. Destroying mental blocks can have a serious effect on a person's psyche, but I wasn't about to leave even the tiniest one intact, as doing so would have had an equally serious effect on Razputin's ability to trust me.

Besides, I doubted I could do anything worse to his mind than what it had already suffered. His entire psyche, which hadn't been exactly healthy to begin with, had been either locked away in an area I hadn't found yet or systematically eroded by his captor, or both.

The door creaked open, and Razputin crept back in, pale and clammy-looking.

"Feel better?" I asked.

He nodded and clambered onto my couch, curling up and nestling back into the cushions.

"I'm sorry. I should have warned you about the backlash."

"It's cool."

I watched him, my mind turning on an unpleasant axis. Shattering the delusions that Razputin's father had programmed into him might have been good in the long run, but looking at the poor kid now made me wonder if I'd done the right thing.

"Yeah." He lifted his head to stare hard at me. "You did. I'm through having people fuck around with my head, Sasha. My mental space has room for one person and one person only: me. And you can tell my father that if he comes calling."

I doubted very much that any of the Aquato family would ever sully themselves by visiting a known psychic's house, even if they did somehow manage to get my address, but I just nodded.

We sat in silence for a while, then Razputin said abruptly, "Why?"

"Why what?"

A burst of irritation at my obtuseness shot down our thread. "Why did my dad do that?"

I shrugged. "Without knowing what happened when he went into your mind, it's difficult to say. If you want my best theory, it's that while he was in there, he saw something that made him realize how you viewed him. He was shocked and wanted to rebuild his relationship with you, only he chose a very easy – and very wrong – way to do it."

The look in Razputin's eyes became more calculating. "Is it easy? Making people forget or...or think the way you want?"

"Fairly easy, yes." I put on my best, sternest Camp Counselor Voice. "And if I ever catch you attempting such a thing, Razputin, you'll wish you had never heard of Whispering Rock."

He laughed at that, a low, dark sound that went on for far too long. "I've been wishing that for the last six months, Sasha."

I moved a little closer. "I saw your surroundings when you escaped."

All humor vanished, and Razputin pushed himself further back into the comfort of my couch, every inch of him screaming keep back.

"The man who hurt you, Razputin, do you know if he had anyone working for him?" I asked. If he did, we were dealing with a large-scale operation and I'd need to bring in more agents before I could realistically hope to arrest the mastermind behind it.

He shook his head. "No."

"No, you don't know, or no, he didn't have anyone working for him?"

"He didn't have anyone. He...didn't go out much. He was too busy screwing around in my mind and making my body do stuff."

My own body went numb, every cell recoiling in shock.

"Cadakinesis?"

I barely mouthed the word. Of all the fates I'd suspected Razputin had suffered, being trapped in his own mind and turned into a living puppet by another psychic hadn't occurred to me even in passing.

Jesus.

So somewhere out there, an extremely powerful psychic – or more likely a group of them – was going around forcing their way into children's minds and taking over their bodies. No wonder Razputin had freaked out so much at the thought of letting another psychic into his mind.

Jesus.

What had they made him do? I'd only encountered three cases of cadakinesis in my career as a Psychonaut. One had been consensual; an agent with surgical skills had been injured, taken over his partner's mind and used her hands to save his own life. The other two had left their victims traumatized to the point of catatonia. Even the agent who had consented had been badly shaken and eventually requested reassignment. Last I heard, she was working in psychic admin in Seoul.

"I see." My voice rang oddly in my ears, and I picked up my phone.

"Who are you calling?" Razputin demanded.

"Truman Zanotto. The sooner we can stop whoever did this from searching for you, the better." I dialed Truman's number – the Psychonauts aren't allowed to use speed-dial in case our cell phones fall into the wrong hands – and waited.

Just when I was on the verge of giving up, Truman's voice came on the line.

"Yeah?"

"Truman? It's Sasha." I paused, trying to think of the best way to say what I had to. "I...found Razputin."

"You did? Thank God! Is he okay?"

"No." No need to lie at this point; Razputin was definitely not okay. I paused, gathering my wits. How would I really react if I'd found Razputin's body? I've never been a demonstrative man, much to Milla's endless despair.

There was a long silence. "How not okay?"

"Very not okay," I answered, with both perfect truth and a fine disregard for the rules of grammar. "I found him in Iowa following an anonymous call." I hesitated, Razputin's suspicious eyes boring holes in me, then added, "He didn't make it."

Even longer silence. "You're certain?"

"I'm certain." I met Razputin's stare as calmly as I could. His eyes narrowed slightly, and I got a little ripple of uncertainty down our thread. He would believe me only after I said the words, and not a moment before. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, then opened them again slowly.

"Razputin Aquato is dead."