Chapter Two

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“You’re getting better, but you’re still dropping your guard.” To demonstrate her point, Cassie reached out and hit me on the shoulder where I’d let my hand drop down out of position.

She did not hit me full force. But Cassie was a werewolf, and not a pushover even by their standards. Punching me at full force would damage things. Partial force still hurt like hell and knocked me off balance. She did not, as I had learned, believe in going easy on people.

Not for the first time, I wondered whether I could have found someone else to practice my hand-to-hand with. Cassie was skilled, enough so to have thoroughly confirmed my suspicion that she was at least a few hundred years old. But I could have done without the bruises, much as I would have been fine with learning to track someone by scent without having to deal with scent masks quite this nasty. She’d used one involving bromine last month, and that was…I had literally had photosensitive seizures that were less of a sensory hell than trying to track someone through a bromine scent mask.

But life didn’t believe in going easy on people either, in my experience. So I didn’t complain, just got my balance back and raised my hands into a better guard. She waited exactly long enough for me to do so before launching a quick jab that I barely managed to slip away from.

“So you think you’re going to be getting attacked in New York?” she asked me, following the question with a feint at my face. I didn’t fall for this one, and got a decent hook in; she sidestepped enough to take a fair amount of the impact out of it, but I got some through.

I wasn’t swinging at full strength either. Even without the consideration that we’d be injuring each other, it wouldn’t be useful. It was the same reason I didn’t go full force while, say, taking fencing lessons from Capinera. As my old aikido teacher had put it, if you’re counting on strength to make the technique work, you’re going to get fucked as soon as you meet someone stronger than you are. And while there weren’t many humans stronger than I was, that didn’t matter much with the twists my life had taken recently. I didn’t train at full strength or speed, because if I did I’d learn to rely on those rather than build the technical skills I was here to develop.

“I get attacked everywhere,” I pointed out. “But yes, more than usual. Whole situation is fishy as hell, and I’m guessing there’s a lot that I’m not being told.”

“But you’re still going.” Cassie punctuated the sentence with another jab, but I’d kept my guard up this time, and was able to turn the strike aside relatively easily. She had a tendency to carry on conversations during training, I had found; she hadn’t said why, but I suspected it was to make sure I could do the exercise even while cognitively distracted. It would be her style.

“I owe Saito,” I said simply. I didn’t elaborate. She would understand. If I hadn’t already been confident that Cassie was the sort of person who understood debt as more than just an optimization task, the werewolf spending this much time giving me lessons for little more than the cost of a mortal tutor’s time would have convinced me. I hadn’t even cashed in a favor for this, and yet here we were.

As expected, Cassie didn’t question that statement. “And you think this is important to him,” she said instead.

I feinted at her face, then caught her foot with mine while she slid aside from it. It wasn’t the cleanest foot sweep, but it worked, and she fell. I gave her a moment to get back up, grinning. I hadn’t been expecting to pull that off. “I think I’ve been gone for close to twenty years, and this is the first thing he’s asked for in that time,” I said after a moment’s thought. “And that makes me think it’s probably more significant than he’s letting on.”

“Makes sense,” the werewolf told me, and then hit me on the jaw hard enough to knock me on my ass. “But your footwork got sloppy. Stand up and try again.”

I sighed, shook my head to clear it, and pushed myself back to my feet.

---

I spent another hour or so with Cassie, during which time I got thrown around and battered in an impressive variety of ways. I was getting better, though; she told me so herself, and Cassie didn’t believe in false compliments. I was starting to tag her more often, and my throws and grappling were almost on par with hers. I was pretty sure that she’d still demolish me in a real fistfight, but improvement was happening.

Eventually, though, it was time for her to get going, and time for me as well. I said a quick goodbye, then went for another run. It was almost sunset when I emerged from forest into suburbia. Opari lived not far away from me. Or, at least, she had a house not far away, where we did these little sessions; I wasn’t sure whether she actually lived there.

I was almost literally dragging my feet once I got close. I could talk a good game with Saori, but the truth was that these particular lessons were…uncomfortable in very different ways than just getting the shit kicked out of me by a werewolf. I liked Opari, and these sessions were definitely helping. On a few occasions they’d even been fun. But it was still a struggle to force myself to do this, every time.

But there was no way out but through, so I eventually walked up and knocked on the front door.

Opari opened it just a few seconds later, looking nothing at all like an eldritch horror. She looked extremely nonthreatening; she couldn’t be over five feet tall, and if she weighed above a hundred pounds I’d be surprised. Generically European complexion and features, strawberry blonde hair, and freckles rounded out the impression of suburbian WASP placidity. The only really remarkable thing about her appearance was the eyes.

My eyes were vivid green, just barely within human range. Opari’s were sort of similar, a blue-green tone so intense that it looked a little unnatural. And then you looked closer, and you realized that it was so intense that it physically hurt to look at her eyes too closely, like your brain was aware that there was information striking the retina that it wasn’t equipped to process or understand.

And then you realized you couldn’t look away.

That, generally, was when Opari started to seem like she belonged in an auteur psychological horror film.

Normally, I would assume that kind of surreal, too-intense sensory experience was just my brain trying to process the feeling of her magic. But I’d talked to other people, and they said they felt something similar, like looking into Opari’s eyes involved staring at a color so alien that it was physically painful to see. Saori described it as being sort of like a blacklight, the equivalent of seeing the dim glow of a violet light that extended well into the ultraviolet range.

Except green was in the middle of the visible spectrum, and so extending into that greener-than-green counterpart would require moving orthogonal to the ordinary spectrum of light. And that, really, made Saori’s analogy perfect for describing Opari.

“Hey there,” she said, stepping back from the door and waving me inside. “You want some tea?”

“Sure, sounds great,” I said, stepping across the threshold. I couldn’t feel any wards on it, which was part of what made me wonder whether she actually lived here or just had the house lying around for some reason.

“Alright. Make yourself at home.”

I nodded, kicked my shoes off, and went to sit down on the couch. It was a sleek design, very modern, all stainless steel and black vinyl. Opari seemed inclined that direction in general; the coffee table was metal and glass, the end tables the same. Nothing organic, nothing to soften the sharp, sleek lines of the aesthetic.

It was comfortable, though, and I settled in to wait on tea. It didn’t take long; just a few minutes, and then she was bustling back out with a glass teapot and cups, and a plate of pastries.

She let me pick which cup to use, and poured the tea from a shared pot. It was a nice gesture, though I was resistant to poisons and probably didn’t have much to worry about regardless. I took my cup, a smaller plate, and a cream puff. She put on music, some unobtrusive, calming song that felt nice on my skin. She had a full playlist of those, specifically for me. She had her plate on the other end table, sitting next to me on the couch.

We sipped tea for a few minutes like that. But then, eventually, inevitably, Opari said, “You ready?”

It was a sincere question. I liked that about Opari, in a weird way. She didn’t get offended that people reacted this way. She understood that her presence was often uncomfortable for others. She knew perfectly well that I felt anxious right now, and she didn’t blame me at all. She was a friend, and I was pretty sure this was both safe and beneficial, but I was still…anxious.

I didn’t know what Opari was. Not really. My understanding was that she was human, sort of, but in a position somewhat similar to Raincloud. She had something else living in her mind with her, present since birth.

But Opari’s passenger was…less benign than a cypress spirit. Much less benign.

I finished the cream puff, and then nodded. “Yup,” I said, and looked into her eyes.

I’d observed, this winter, that I wasn’t very good at resisting mental magic. I’d noticed that it kept hitting me hard, and I’d wondered whether resisting that kind of mental influence might be a trainable skill. It turned out that it was. The problem was that, well. There were exercises I could do, and did; cognitive and meditative practices, focusing techniques, a variety of other tools. But at the end of the day, the only way to really get good at implementing those techniques was to practice.

And so I looked into Opari’s eyes, and rather than pull myself away again, I let go. I let myself fall into that too-real shade between blue and green, and I felt something probing at the edges of my mind. This didn’t actually need the eye contact, as I understood it; that was just a convenient way to anchor the experience. The actual magic happened in…other ways.

That presence didn’t push hard. It didn’t have to. Saori had said that Opari could crush my soul like an eggshell, and while I didn’t really know what a soul was, or if the word even had meaning, I fully agreed that she could shatter my mind like a thin sheet of glass if she chose. It was like she had an ocean inside her, and now it was pressing in on me on all sides, cold and vast and fundamentally alien in a way I couldn’t even begin to describe. The pressure dominated my senses, obscuring the world around me in favor of that mental perception of an outside mind touching mine, a cold ocean and a color too green to be real.

I pushed back, and it was a bizarre experience, the same as it was every time we did this. There were a lot of kinds of mental magic, and mostly I’d been around emotional manipulation of various kinds. That was surreal, and often disturbing, but I understood it.

What Opari did now was more cognitive. I tried to push back on that pressure, tried to maintain the integrity of my own mind. And then I felt the cracks start showing. The focusing exercises started to fracture, and it was like someone else’s thoughts started to show up inside of mine. I would try to mentally recite a mantra or find a specific idea to focus on, and then slip sideways into a completely unrelated thought.

At first those thoughts were…meaningless. They were so alien, so unlike my own mind, that I couldn’t even tell what I was thinking of, just an awareness that I’d slipped into a thought pattern other than what I meant to be thinking. Each time, I pulled myself back to center, pulled my thoughts back to where I was trying to hold them.

But each time it felt harder. The alien ideas were starting to feel more like my own, and I didn’t immediately realize they weren’t. I’d be trying to mentally repeat a specific phrase, and then be reciting poetry to myself, and didn’t even realize I didn’t know what language it was in until I’d gotten through three stanzas. I tried to hold a mental image in the front of my mind, and didn’t realize it was changing until I was looking at a fluid too-green fractal pattern too complex for a human mind to be imagining it in such detail.

And then, inevitably, my resistance failed completely, and I could feel myself snapping into alignment with those alien thoughts, could perceive my thoughts and feelings falling into patterns nothing like my own but which felt utterly like my own, and conscious processing shattered, to the point that I couldn’t even tell what I meant to be keeping out of my mind and—

Opari blinked. I slumped down, dazed and a little nauseous, with a headache starting to build already. It took me a full minute to get myself together enough to sip more tea. After doing one or two practice sessions per week for close to four months, this was a familiar experience. But it was still incredibly jarring, and it left me feeling pretty loopy.

She didn’t interrupt, just sat and drank her own tea with a serene smile. This, too, was something Opari had no illusions about. She knew that this was painful for me, that I was struggling to get my thoughts in order again. It didn’t trouble her, and she didn’t rush me.

I didn’t know what Opari’s passenger was. I didn’t want to know. I’d felt that presence enough that I was certain I was happier not knowing what I’d been getting overpowered by just now. I wasn’t sure how separate it was from Opari herself, either, and I wasn’t sure I even had the capacity to grasp the answer to that question. She’d sworn, and I had no reason to doubt, that this wasn’t causing me lasting harm. And I could tell that I’d gotten better; I’d resisted significantly longer this time, and against greater pressure. The first time she did this, I’d cracked within moments. This was building that capacity significantly.

Still. I didn’t want to know.

“That was a rough one,” I said eventually. I sipped more tea.

“Some days are like that,” she said, in a gentle, empathetic tone. “Do you need to stop on that?”

I shook my head. “No, I can keep going. Just need a few minutes.” This, too, had been improving with time. I could pull myself back together again more quickly and thoroughly, could recenter my thoughts better. The first five sessions I’d only managed one round each, but now I could usually handle half a dozen.

“Take your time.” She ate half a cookie, looked at the other half like she wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting to see.

I drank more tea, and then eventually said, “Okay, I’m ready,” and met Opari’s gaze again.

The first round she’d mostly been targeting language and visualization. This time, she attacked via long-term memory, pulling various memories up towards the forefront of my mind. As I reviewed those memories, I found bits of alien memories inserted in the stream of my own recollection, and at first it felt jarring. It felt like hitting a mental block, an interruption that made the memory it was embedded in feel discontinuous, sort of like general anesthesia. Then it felt like déjà vu. Then it felt like I’d just forgotten these things, and something was prompting this other memory, reminding me of it. Then it felt seamless, and I started to slip, and I fell, and she let me go.

“You’re doing well. Just not quite sideways enough that time. Try spinning faster.”

Right. Spin faster. Because that instruction made total sense. It wasn’t that Opari was trying to be difficult, either; she was being completely sincere in her attempt to offer guidance. In a weird way, it was the profoundly alien nature of this experience that made me so sure of that. I had direct, tangible experience of what it was like to think in the ways Opari did. Those ideas were so strange, so dissimilar to my own perspective that even in the immediate aftermath I couldn’t put words to the thoughts I’d just been thinking.

Her comment was a sincere attempt to help, and probably quite insightful if I could tell what it meant. It wasn’t Opari’s fault that the only time when I might be able to figure out what the hell she was telling me was when she’d already infiltrated my mind enough that I didn’t need to be told, because I was thinking with her thoughts.

“Thanks,” I said, rather than try to explain any of that. “I’ll try that.”

“Alright. Are you good for another?”

“Yeah. I’m ready.”

Round three targeted agency and volition. Desire, goals, and perception of value all started to crack apart. That one was particularly mindfucky in some ways; by the end, when my resistance crumbled fully, it was because I’d stopped trying, stopped wanting to try. I just allowed her inside.

She let me go; I sipped tea and tried to center myself again. It was harder this time. I’d gotten much better at this over the past four months, but it was tiring, and recentering my mind got harder each time, less complete. Eventually, I decided I was ready. I met her gaze, and I dove back under the surface of that aquamarine ocean.

The fourth time she hit executive functions and attention. I held up better under that one. Shadow targeted those functions strongly enough that I’d been getting lots of practice. Even when it wasn’t trying, Shadow just…had a tendency to fade away from one’s conscious attention, and it took deliberate focus to shrug that off. But then I got distracted by that memory, and Opari slid inside, and as soon as she sabotaged my ability to sort priorities I was done.

It really was remarkable how broadly effective she was. Opari seemed capable of attacking any cognitive function, any form of thought. She could hit emotion too, but she hadn’t during these sessions. She’d told me that when she did that, people tended to break. I hadn’t asked why. I didn’t want to know. I liked Opari, but I had to admit she creeped me right the fuck out, too. Mental manipulation wasn’t the only thing she got from her passenger, either; I’d seen her throw around a few other kinds of magic, and I was certain there were more that I hadn’t observed.

Honestly, I was pretty sure the only reason Opari wasn’t a major player on the local scene was that she didn’t feel like it. I thought that was probably a good thing for everyone involved.

Fifth was another round of memory, more focused on short-term this time. Sixth she went for planning and prediction, which had a lot in common with when she took out agency, but was even more of a mindfuck. It wasn’t even that I stopped being able to want other than what she told me to. I still wanted to keep her out by the end. I just…couldn’t connect that future goal to my current actions, and didn’t bother trying to pursue it as a result, and she swept inside.

“Okay,” I said after the sixth round, once I’d gotten language functions working again. Mostly working; I was still slurring a little, but it was comprehensible, and slightly louder than the ambient music. “I think I have to stop on that one.”

“Alright,” she said, smiling gently. “Take a few minutes to get your bearings again; I’ll make more tea.”

Opari made more tea, and also sandwiches, and didn’t ask me to talk while I consumed them, just sat and kept me company. The music was still playing, gentle and soft on my skin. She always did this after these sessions. She said that since this experience left me in a markedly altered state of consciousness, she wanted to make sure I leveled out some before I left. Sustenance helped with reorienting myself, as did time to recover, and so she provided these. Some kinds of music were particularly soothing for me, and she’d taken the time to put together a whole playlist of it. Opari felt responsible for making sure that I was in a good headspace before I went back out into the world, since she was the one who had fucked me up. Sometimes, after particularly intense sessions, she even checked in on me the next day to make sure I was recovering well.

It was thoughtful of her, and also a little unsettling. It wasn’t just the awareness that this empathetic and compassionate treatment was coming from the same source as those profoundly alien and invasive thoughts. It also always felt like a very strange sort of intimacy. It reminded me more than a little of doing aftercare following a kink scene, and I wasn’t sure the resemblance was as coincidental as I’d like.

Opari enjoyed this. I didn’t pay her for these sessions, not even the kind of token payment I offered Cassie for training me. Opari actively enjoyed repeatedly peeling my mental defenses open, found it a pleasant way to spend an evening; she didn’t get a lot of people willing to let her do this to them, which surprised me not in the slightest. In this case, the payment and the service were one and the same, and when I stopped and really thought about it, that was more than a little disturbing.

I ate, drank more tea, and got my head back in something resembling a stable state, though I still felt dazed, like it was hard to put my thoughts in order. Opari smiled at me with an alien green ocean behind her eyes, thanked me for the pleasant evening, and sent me on my way.

It wasn’t hard to see why Saori thought my current choice of hobbies was absolutely bugfuck insane.

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