December
Lucy's Age: 17
I texted Venice as soon as I got back from my run with Geoffrey. We'd layered up to brave the extreme cold, but that wasn't anything different than what we'd done dozens of times before. I'd been expecting for Geoffrey to crack a joke or two during the course of the run like he'd been doing lately, but he'd barely spoken two words to me the entire time.
I would have said that he was just preoccupied with whatever Imastious had him busy doing, but I'd seen that before and this wasn't it. It was like there was a different person walking around inside of his skin, a person who weighed every response and was considering each of our exchanges as if it was the first time he'd run into me.
It wasn't preoccupation, but it was something else, something I'd also seen before. I didn't know how to handle this, but I was hoping Venice did.
Venice texted back according to her usual schedule and agreed to meet me in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant eight blocks over from my apartment. I usually tried to make sure we met up further away from home than that, but by the time she responded it was starting to get late and I didn't want to walk halfway across the island to get back home, not in the dark at least.
I waited there for ten minutes with Venice's past warnings running through my mind the entire time. I must have checked the clock thirty times while waiting for the big hand to move from the six to the seven.
I knew it was too soon to panic, but I was terrified that something had happened to her. The Geoffrey whom I'd spent the last few months helping to loosen up a little—the one who'd joked around with me from time to time and who'd even been talking about taking me to the opera for my birthday—wouldn't have been too bad to talk to, but I was scared to death of this new Geoffrey.
I'd started to believe all of the good things that Venice had been telling me about Geoffrey, but with the way he'd been earlier in the day I was pretty sure that he'd kill me if he couldn't come up with an easy way to solve the problems Venice and I would be dumping on him.
I was freaked out enough by the time Venice finally arrived that I'd almost convinced myself to just leave even before the fifteen minutes were up, but she slid into my booth a few heartbeats before my courage would have failed me.
"What is it, Lucy? Do you have any idea the kind of hell I've been through over the last three hours?"
I'd been too wrapped up inside of my own worries to notice right off, but now that she'd shocked me back into reality I noticed that she had a massive bruise forming on one side of her face.
"Oh my gosh, Venice, what happened to you?"
"Imastious happened. He's got something in the works, so he stopped by to make sure that I still remember who's signing my paycheck."
I opened my mouth to say something reassuring, but nothing would come out. I'd hit Venice with an elbow to the face that would have broken two inches of pine and she hadn't had even the slightest mark just a couple of hours later. Imastious must have hit her with a baseball bat. I couldn't offer any reassurance because I wasn't sure there was any to be had.
"I went on a run with Geoffrey earlier today, but he was different. Not like a little different, like an emotionless robot who was trying to decide whether or not to just kill me and save himself the inconvenience of having to deal with me in the future. It was eerie, and it wasn't even the first time it's happened. I remember him getting like this a few times in the past."
Venice swore under her breath, but she didn't seem surprised, not really. It was more like she'd known it was coming and was just bent out of shape that it had happened now rather than later.
"Look, there's a lot I can't tell you, some of it because there are some things I don't fully understand myself, but Geoffrey does this sometimes. It's like he takes all of his emotions and locks them away."
"How is that even possible?"
"Look, it's not important how he does it—I'm not even quite sure how it happens, but it's some kind of defense mechanism against Imastious. The important thing is that we need to bring him back as quickly as possible. The more he interacts with people he cares about, or at least that he used to care about, the faster he gets back to normal."
I shook my head. Things were just getting too weird for me. Normal people couldn't just turn off emotions like she was describing. You'd have to be a full-blown psychopath to do something like that.
"You're not making sense. That's not even possible."
I stood up to leave, not sure what I'd do next, but positive that I needed to get away from Venice, but she grabbed my arm and pulled me back down.
"You're not just going to take everything I say on trust anymore, are you?"
"Not when you sound like you're living in some kind of fantasy world."
"Fine, hold still for sixty seconds and I'll give you the proof you're looking for."
Venice looked around, confirming that we were the only ones on this end of the restaurant, and then grabbed one of the paper napkins out of the dispenser on our table and tore off a corner.
"Watch the piece of paper."
I opened my mouth to ask her what she meant, but she'd already closed her eyes and it looked like she was concentrating extremely hard. A couple of seconds later the napkin corner shot across the yellow table.
I put my hand out to catch it, but then it suddenly darted back towards Venice. I waved my hand over the table, trying to see whether or not there was some kind of gust of air causing the paper to move around, but I already knew that there wasn't.
I watched Venice's prop skitter across the smooth surface of the table a couple more times before I grabbed her arm and told her to stop.
"Okay, you've got my attention, how did you do that?"
Venice rubbed her temples and for a moment she looked like she was second-guessing her decision to go forward.
"I guess I'm in as deep as I can get already. The truth is that I can do a lot more than just move a bit of paper around, but I'm not so good when it comes to fine control. I'm a telekinetic, it's one of the three main powers that…my kind of person can develop. Imastious and Geoffrey are both mentalists, so they can read people's minds."
Even with the proof of her unusual ability still fresh in my mind, it was hard to believe, but she was obviously serious. She waited for a second to see if I was going to say something silly about mindreading being impossible, but I managed to suppress the urge.
"That is why Imastious is so dangerous. He's extremely powerful, so if he decides that you know something important he's more than capable of just ripping the memory right out of your mind. You can train yourself to be harder to read, but if he wants the information bad enough then he can always just torture you until your mental defenses start to crumble."
Some of the pieces were starting to fit together now for me.
"So that's why you've been so paranoid about everything. You check in every few hours because you figured that you could hold for at least four hours if Imastious started torturing you."
Venice looked tired. She'd come into the restaurant battered and angry, but now she just looked like she wanted nothing more than to go home and fall into bed.
"Yeah, that's about the size of it. Geoffrey is operating on borrowed time now. He has been ever since I found out about you. I've been a very obedient girl when it comes to Imastious now that I know about you, but it's only a matter of time. Eventually he'll invade my mind and find out what Geoffrey has been up to for the past few years. I should have killed myself months ago."
My mind whirled as I tried to understand the implications of what she was telling me. "So Imastious will know about me, but I could lie low, which would mean that he couldn't use me against Geoffrey. This doesn't have to be an either-or situation, you don't need to do anything drastic."
Venice shook her head. "No, you're still not getting it. Imastious has been inside of Geoffrey's mind multiple times over the last few years, but he doesn't seem to have clued into your existence yet. That means that Geoffrey has found a way to keep at least some of his memories safe from Imastious, which shouldn't be possible, not considering how much stronger Imastious is than Geoffrey."
"So he'll kill Geoffrey just because he can't control him?"
"Yes. Imastious is terrified of someone from inside his organization taking it over and dethroning him. I don't know how Geoffrey is doing it other than that it seems to be associated with Geoffrey losing access to his emotions on a semi-regular basis, but if he's hidden your existence from Imastious then I can guarantee that he's got other plans in the works, plans which are a direct threat to Imastious."
I suddenly felt incredibly small. Venice had just thrust me into the center of an extremely dangerous world and the fact that I'd already been in danger and just hadn't known about it didn't do anything to alleviate my feelings of powerlessness.
"So what do we do? Can we just run?"
"I'm not sure. You could, but Imastious has done things to my mind. I tried to run away before and I just ended up in one of the locations he programmed me to go to. Geoffrey might be able to scrub my mind clean of Imastious' booby-traps, but with the way he is right now I'm not sure that he would agree to help me."
"But that's crazy, Venice. Surely he'd help you get away if it would mean that his secrets would stay safe from Imastious."
Venice shrugged uncomfortably in the way I'd started to realize meant that she was about to make reference to the aspects of Geoffrey's personality that she was least comfortable with.
"This version of Geoffrey isn't very warm and cuddly, Lucy. If I were to go to him right now and spill my guts he'd know that something would have to be done, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he'd decide to help. Geoffrey just loses the good emotions when Imastious goes inside his mind. The guy you went running with today is nothing more than ambition and a pure hatred of Imastious. He might just decide that killing me is the easiest solution to the problem I created."
"So we don't tell Geoffrey now, we wait until he's back to normal and then we tell him."
Venice looked like she was nearly ready to cry. "Yeah, that's pretty much what I was planning on doing, but this isn't my first time trying to help him get back to normal. I've spent years trying to break down his barriers, but Imastious always makes another incursion into his mind at some point or another and I've never been able to change him fast enough to get him all of the way back before he flushes all of his emotions again."
"Get him back? You mean that he used to be better than this?"
"Yes. Nine or ten years ago. Things had been so bad for so long, and then Geoffrey and Imastious let me start running operations for them. We spent a ton of time together over the course of several months and I fell in love with him. He kept telling me that it was dangerous, that I shouldn't be trusting him, shouldn't be making myself vulnerable, but I couldn't seem to help myself."
Venice looked down at the table for several seconds before shrugging. "I think that I almost had him ready to make a run for it with me, but there was something holding him back. It turns out that something was you."
I'd only known Venice for a short time, but she'd gotten such a bad deal out of life that I couldn't help but feel bad about the fact that I'd been the one to ruin her chance to get away from Imastious.
"Okay, I'm in. How do we go about getting Geoffrey back to normal as quickly as possible so that we can all get away from Imastious?"
"Are you sure, Lucy? You're the one person who can walk away from all of this and never have to look back. It might not be a good idea to get yourself even deeper into the craziness of my world."
"I'm sure. How can I help?"
Venice took a deep breath and then started laying out her methodology.
"Mostly it comes down to human interaction. Just being around other people seems to help, but the more intimate the interaction the faster he tends to come back."
"So what, you want me to flirt?"
Venice shook her head. "No, at least not at first. He's not going to let anyone get away with that kind of stuff initially. He's going to be pretty standoffish and cold for the next little while, so you're going to want to start off with non-threatening interactions for the time being."
My jaw practically hit the floor. "Venice, I was joking. I don't really think of Geoffrey as my father, but it still would be really, really weird to flirt with him. Besides, he's yours. The last thing I'd want to do is go up against you when it came to trying to get some guy's attention."
I felt my cheeks heat up as the blush worked its way up from my shoulders. "I…well, I wouldn't want to ruin our friendship, not that any guy would ever choose me over you in the first place."
The look that Venice gave me was indecipherable, but after holding it for a couple of seconds she just shrugged. "I value your friendship too, Lucy. I think you might be surprised just how many heads you turn over the next few years, but that's a conversation for a different time. You need to be careful though thinking of Geoffrey as the same person you were spending time with last week and the week before. The thing that is wearing his skin isn't him. It's got most of his memories and over time we should be able to help it uncover the underlying character traits that make Geoffrey worth saving, but that isn't Geoffrey, not really."
I hadn't forgotten the way that Geoffrey had looked at me earlier, but her warning was finally starting to sink in. He really had been trying to decide whether or not I was worth keeping around while we'd been running.
"I understand. Don't push him, because he doesn't have any of the normal attachment to friends or family that you'd expect out of someone."
"Exactly."