Faces, faces, all around me. Sun-bronzed beauties and tattooed weight lifters in Hawaiian-print swim trunks. Dozens of them.
Obviously, this is a nightmare, and I recoil, trying to thrash away, to wake up.
But I’m already awake. And I can’t thrash anywhere. My hands are cuffed behind me with steel cables that cut painfully into my flesh. But still, when I reel back, I move. I drift around 360 degrees, and on every side of me are beautiful, young gawkers staring out at me, wide-mouthed, like I am the newest baby animal born at the zoo.
I look down, and my eyes are dazzled by the spotlights reflecting off the water under me. Okay. It’s starting to make sense. I am lashed to a floating pool chair and have been set adrift in the deep end. I’ve gone from party crasher to party focus.
One whole quadrant of partiers parts like a tan sea, and out steps Twyst, my Omen rifle in his hands.
“You’re awake! Good, ’cause I just want to congratulate you on a job well done, bro. You killed a bunch of people whose only job was to protect us. Hiding in the dark. Never even gave them a chance to fight back. You’re a real good goose-stepper. Good at following orders. Giving you a five-star review on Fascist Yelp.”
“I’m not so bad one-on-one either,” I say. “Want to untie me and find out?”
“Naw, bro, I got a better idea.” He makes a show of dumping the Omen in the pool so he can watch me watch it sink to the bottom. “Gonna livestream your confession.” He snaps his fingers, and the girl from the tower in the Pro-Bro baseball cap sets up circle lights and a tablet mounted on a tripod pointed in my direction. Even half-blinded in the middle of the pool, I can see that she doesn’t look a thing like the girl from my dreams. What was I thinking before? “Your deep state masters in the United States of Amer-i-K-K-K-uh got to know there are free alpha males out in the world they can’t push around or intimidate with their mind-virus propaganda.”
“Free? You’re free. What about this lot? They get the same freedoms as you?”
“Sure, bro. Everybody’s here of their own free will, aren’t you, everybody?”
“We are here of our own free will,” everybody says simultaneously.
“Totally convincing,” I say.
“What? Everybody here signed their releases before they got here, didn’t they?”
“We signed our releases before we got here,” everybody starts to say before Twyst waves them into silence.
“Wait a minute.” I look around at the slack, TikTok-ready beauty of the kids around me. “Are any of these people actually psiots?”
Twyst shrugs. “They all think they are. Or, I mean, they all want to be. Statistically speaking, at least, a couple of them are latents. I think that dude over there, the one in the Adventure Time hoodie, he can, like, create six cubic inches of mashed potatoes with his mind or something. Who knows? It’s not important. We all wanna be special, bro. It’s human nature.”
“It did seem a little convenient that all your ‘potential psiots’ are reality show–ready hot. Now that they’re all here, what exactly do you plan on doing with them?”
“What do I plan on doing with them? Whatever I want, bro.” He snaps his fingers, and all the photogenic normies around me drop into a heap on top of each other as if they practiced it. “Bodies, bodies, bodies, baby. I can see them like the keys of a piano. And I can reach out with my mind and play whatever tune comes to mind. Switch tracks, slow ’em down . . . speed ’em up. It let me become a champion in the ring, but before too long, switching off my opponents’ nervous systems so I could beat their asses just got boring, you know? I realized I was wasting my God-given talents winning gold belts on pay-per-view. My potential is unlimited.”
His eyes start to gleam. “I am the new Dionysus, the new party god. At first, I didn’t want to believe it. But then they all turned on me, first online, then the government. That’s when I knew. I had to get away from their jealousy, bro. I knew they couldn’t stop me, even though they’d try. That’s why I got to do some heinous acts to you, bro. Let the normie elites know: Messing with Mr. Twyst is not conducive to positive living. Or living, period.”
Suddenly, he breaks out into a laughing jag. “Wow! Listen to me! Blah, blah, blah. Host can’t stop talking about himself. Gah! So lame, right? When it’s you who’s the guest of honor, bro, the man of mystery. I wanna hear your story. Like, for instance . . .”
He nods, and his blonde techie returns, carrying the Screamer down to the edge of the pool. Twyst crouches down and pats the device. “What were you going to do with this little guy, huh? Looks too fancy to be a bomb. You know what I think, bro? I think it might be some kinda brain-zappy power blocker. What do you say, bro? Am I warm? C’mon, bro, you can tell me, just give me a little wink or something.”
I stay mum. Unfortunately for me, the Screamer is insulated from technokinesis so psiots can’t turn it off remotely. That means I can’t turn it on remotely either.
Twyst leers at my obvious discomfort. “Yeah, I thought so. I thought so, bro. You can’t fool me. Well, too bad you never got a chance to plug it in.” He wags the plug of the dangling cord at me and stands up. “Still, what I can’t figure is, wouldn’t this thing shut down your powers too? ’Cause you got to be a psiot, bro. You got to be. Because, like I said, bodies are my medium. My canvas. That’s why I can tell, you don’t got one. Not a human body, anyway. Nothing I can lock on to. I can see why they sent you here to do me in, but I gotta ask, like, what are you, bro?”
“I’m just some guy,” I say, but my mouth has gone dry.
Twyst shakes his head. “Bull. These normies all want to be special. But you and me, bro, we’re the real deal.”
“I was sick. As a kid.” I know that under no rational circumstances should I actually be telling this jackass this, but I realize that he has the power to tell me some of the things I’ve always wanted to know about myself. “Scientists—my dad—injected me with microscopic machines that fixed me, and they took to me, bonded to me, after curing me.”
“Cured you of what, exactly?”
“AML—acute myeloid leukemia. Bone marrow cancer.”
“Bro. Bro. Listen to me. Somebody been, like, catfishing you, bro. Cancer, even after it’s gone, sings a song, bro, like a hum. Bone marrow too. And you—you’re like a library at midnight, bro. Nothing but silence.”
“No. No. My name is Ray Garrison. I am sixteen years old.” I am shaking my head. “There are nanites in my bloodstream, but the rest of it is me, it’s all me. Skeleton—muscles—brain—heart.” I strain against the handcuffs, and the chain goes taut as the bracelets dig into my real skin, stopped by my real bones.
“Dude’s losing it. Gotta get this segment in while he’s still coherent.” I’m barely conscious of Twyst spinning a finger around for his ball-cap-wearing tech to start filming. “Send out the e-blast. Let the Pro-Bros know we go live with a very special guest provided us by Uncle Sam in, uh, let’s call it five minutes.”
See? I tell myself. The handcuffs know there’s a body there. What else would there be? Just a me-shaped blob of nanites? Why, if that was true, I could just de-solidify my body and bones and slip the handcuffs off by—
I hear the splash behind me, but I still can’t believe it. I keep my wrists behind me, even though I can feel, I can feel there’s nothing restraining them anymore.
I am crying. I am crying and I can’t believe what’s running through my mind: I am a real boy, I am not a puppet, I am a real boy. I have a girlfriend in Canada!
I can’t stop myself anymore, and I bring my hands and wrists to the front of my body so I can see them. There are no wounds on my wrists, no marks on me.
I can look below into the water and see the handcuffs, unlocked and unbroken, drifting to the bottom of the pool.
I’m not a real boy at all.
I start screaming, and I can’t stop. Twyst whirls to look at me, and I look at him like I’m seeing him for the first time, him, the one responsible for this, the one who prevented me from going on with this beautiful dream of humanity forever. I stand up in the floating chair, and I’m still screaming; every phony vein and tendon in my body is standing on edge, and his eyes go glassy with fear. I am ready to leap off my floater at him and show him how much of a disadvantage it is to have real bones because I am going to break every single one of his with my bare hands—
“Bacchae, protect your god!” Twyst cries out, voice cracking.
Three dozen beach-blanket himbos and bimbos all leap at once and, without even bothering to stand all the way up first, cascade in a human avalanche on top of me and drag me off the chair and into the water.
I am strong, but they are many. I kick and punch off as many as I can, but as soon as I get one away, two or three more plunge down through the water to take their place. I don’t know how long I can stay submerged before I start drowning, but I have no interest in finding out right now.
Still, they’ve got their hands on my throat and arms and legs, and I can barely move. In the brightness of the floodlights pointed at the pool, their vivid shadows make it nearly impossible to see. I’m slammed cheek-first into the tiled floor and my lungs start to tighten. I have a brief thought that I can pull the same trick I did with my wrists with my whole body, turn into a floating cloud of nanites, and literally slip through their fingers, but I’m worried about doing that underwater. Would I just disperse like an oil slick across the waves? And besides, there’s a part of me that still desperately wants to maintain the fiction I am mostly a human being. Human beings can’t just turn into mist and re-form again. What am I, a Dracula?
I lash my hands out to keep them from completely flattening me at the bottom of the pool, and my right fingers wrap around the stock of the Omen rifle resting on the tiles. At last. Something is going my way. Jackass thought that was a flex, dumping it in the drink, but little does he know an Omen is completely waterproof.
I take the rifle in both hands and use the stock as a lever to push up through the mob trying to crush me. I kick through them with my feet and use a free hand to crawl up them until finally my head is above the surface. There are still a few Bacchae trying to gouge my eyes out or flail fists at my nose. Twyst has actually returned to his DJ station and is dropping some hot beats to my aquatic murder. What a total douche.
When I point Omen in his general direction, he drops the headphones he’s been holding to one ear and hides behind his deck. But what the AR reticule finds and the built-in targeting computer zeroes in on isn’t his useless bald head.
It’s the on switch for the Screamer.
I fire. The bullet finds its mark. The Screamer’s internal battery switches on, and the first neural shock wave ripples throughout the pool area. Everybody feels it, including me, and we all spasm, like a bumblebee suddenly buzzed past our ears.
But the real screams of agony come from beneath the DJ station, where Twyst’s brain is getting good and righteously cheese-grated. Psychically, I mean.
One by one, the kids trying to murder me detach and look at each other with rising mixtures of shame, fear, alarm, and, finally, anger.
“Twyst!” one girl yells. “He—he—”
“piece-of-shit mind rapist,” one of the biggest dudes yells, and soon they are all clambering out of the pool, looking around.
“Where is he?” the furious blonde in the ball cap yells.
I point helpfully under the DJ rack and whistle.
Twyst is struggling to rise—I must say, rather impressively—under his own power. The crowd lets out a roar of recognition and begins sprinting after him. Somehow he is able to put one foot in front of the other to get away. The mob pursues, ready to give this psychic predator a crash course in consent.
I am forgotten. I swim to the edge of the pool so I can reach out and crank the area radius on the Screamer to the max. The battery will burn out a lot quicker on this setting, but this way there’s nowhere on this tiny island Twyst can hide that his powers will work.
I pull myself up out of the water and catch my breath. My instinct is still to act like I have lungs. In the distance I hear shouts and automatic weapons fire. Were Twyst’s guards mind-controlled like his “contestants” and have they now joined the pursuit against their former boss, or are they also being pursued? One thing is clear: There’s only one psiot on the whole island, and he’s been neutralized, so the rest of Rising Spirit can move in.
I start to tell Nina the good news, but then I realize I no longer have the skull comm on me. The Bacchae must have ripped it off during our scrum, so it’s among the detritus on the bottom of the pool.
That’s when I see the figure moving stealthily between the trailers on the edges of the spotlights’ glare. Somebody who isn’t after anybody else on the island. Somebody with their own agenda.
“Harbinger,” I can’t help but say out loud.