by Alex Powell
Fox frowned and tried to think back. How long had this been going on, since King had been taken? He’d been getting ready for his trip. That had been about a week ago.
His heart throbbed in anguish. Just one week. That was all it had taken for his plans to fall apart, and for the government to capture not only King, but him as well. Plus the spy. At this rate, it would take less than a month to find the rest.
“How long have I been asleep?” he asked dully.
“Almost a day,” King reported. “When they brought you in, those nasty robed men were here, too. From their conversation, they aren’t planning anything nice for you.”
“I had no doubt of that,” Fox said, barely loud enough to be heard.
“I think they’ll be back soon. They told me they were monitoring your Cerebrum activity and would know when you’re awake.”
“Great. How thoughtful of them.”
“The robed ones are really not very nice,” King said quietly, and Fox could hear him shifting nervously on the couch behind him. “They kept shooting Eighty-Eight. I didn’t like it.”
“How can you tell them apart, King? That’s the strangest thing, that you know which one is which when they all look the same. They’re not even like twins, they’re virtually identical.”
“Except Seven.”
“What?”
“Seven. He’s got blue eyes.”
“How do you know that?” Fox finally opened his eyes to stare at King in amazement. “Did he tell you that?”
“No, he just does. The rest have brown eyes.”
“They’re wearing goggles. How can you see their eye colour?” He groaned as he pushed himself into a sitting position. Moving sent a wave of pain through his body.
“You’re not looking properly. The goggles don’t matter. They’re not really there, after all. It’s all in your head.”
“That’s true,” Fox said carefully. “How do you do it?”
“I don’t know, really. I just can.”
“Does that mean you can see through clothes, too?” Fox asked, frowning. He winced as the action made the space behind his eyes ache.
“I can, if I wanted to. But I can also see through your very form, because that doesn’t exist either. It’s a pattern. A thought pattern, because it’s your mind that is constructing all this.”
“You can see inside my head?”
“After a fashion. I can see the patterns that your thoughts make in reaction to things you see and words you hear. I thought I might even be able to touch them, but that doesn’t seem like a good idea at the moment.”
“Is that how you did it? Is that how you got your memories inside our own? You can see them from outside our projected form. That’s incredible.”
“They’re all different. That’s how I can tell them apart, because they all think in patterns, and each thought pattern is unique, even if they can be similar.”
Fox stared in awe. King could already do all that, even without all of his memories of being able to do so before. It should be impossible.
Before anything else could be said, a gong sounded.
“Death comes knocking,” King whispered, and curled in on himself, as if by making himself as small as possible, he might pass unnoticed.
“Is it the robed people?” Fox asked.
A door appeared in the sitting room, and it opened by itself.
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” a gloating voice hissed through the room. “Two rats in a cage, is what it looks like.”
“Well said, Cat. Well said.”
Two men in robes glided into the room. Fox found himself wishing with all of his willpower that he could hurt them somehow, was able to lash out in a way that would harm them, make them pay for what they had done, what they were still doing to all of them.
“It’s no use,” King said. “I tried that already. Didn’t work.”
“Good advice, Rat King,” the Cat said, cackling. “You’re powerless here. Rats.”
“Where shall we start, Cat?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Reaper. I’m looking forward to this, so we can start anywhere you like.”
Fox looked around the small room, and for a few seconds, he thought he might be able to escape by opening a door into the rest of Seven’s head. He’d seen only a few rooms when he’d gone through before, but the brain could imagine endless possibilities. He could hide from them there, and they might never find him.
A moment later, he remembered what Seven had been up to before Fox had been captured, and that by running around in his head, Fox might accidentally reveal something Seven wanted to keep hidden. Seven wasn’t even here to defend himself.
He shouldn’t care probably. Seven was one of the people threatening him, holding him captive. He’d admitted that he was the one who had shot Fox with the tracking dart.
He’d taken too long thinking, and the Cat and the Reaper closed in while he sat motionless. He didn’t have a chance to try and evade them, and the Cat leaned forward to invade his domain.
Strangely, he couldn’t see a face beneath the cowl, as close as he was. He still felt a bump against his head, as if there actually was a solid person there.
Then they were whirling away and falling into Fox’s domain. Immediately they were in the middle of the deserts of Egypt again, exactly like Seven had seen the last time he was here. It was hot, and the sun was relentlessly blazing down on them. The air shimmered with the heat, and the sand dunes stretched off into the distance.
“You keep giving me pain to fuel the heat of my desert.” Fox laughed as they struggled up out of the sand. “The more you torment me, the hotter it will get.”
“We still have you,” the Cat snarled as he lunged at Fox.
“No,” Fox said as he shot into the sky, a hawk to ride the thermals of his own pain. “You don’t.”
The Cat and the Reaper waved their arms in outrage as he disappeared into the air. He could see his domain stretched out below him, mostly endless waves of sand. He didn’t know if they would look more carefully at the sand in which they were struggling. It might reveal more about him than they imagined, but it would be disjointed, just small snatches of thoughts and memories.
They would never reach the pyramids, and the banks of the Nile. He’d shift them from one end of his domain to the other, and it wouldn’t matter how far they walked. It was out of their reach.
He went back down and decided that, since they were here already, he might as well entertain them. A nice mirage of an oasis might give them some hope of salvation.
He also wondered if he should let them out.
As he flew, he saw something he wasn’t expecting to be there. A small figure sat on the banks of the river, taking a rest underneath a palm tree that offered refuge from the sun. Fox dived down and landed beside King.
“Oh, hello. Is this your domain?” King said, leaning against the tree.
“Yes. Sorry it’s so inhospitable at the moment, but I have unwelcome guests.”
“Nice of you to give me some shade,” King commented. “It’s very hot in here.”
“I have pain to fuel the heat for days,” Fox said, watching the opposite bank as a crocodile slid into the water and disappeared.
“Yes, the fuel you have is endless. You have more fuel for this heat than you ever imagined.”
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say,” Fox said, taking wing once more.
“Yes, you do.” King’s voice echoed up after him.
He went back to check on the Cat and the Reaper and found that, much like Seven, they didn’t have much tolerance for his desolate wasteland. They hadn’t even made it as far as Seven before collapsing on top of a dune, miles from anywhere.
They had tried to think up an umbrella to shade them, but it looked as if it had melted.
“You can’t stop us!” the Cat hissed as he miserably tried to dig himself into the sand. “We’re going to make you give up all your knowledge!”
; “Good luck with that,” Fox said.
Deciding he didn’t much like it when they were in his domain, he booted them out. It didn’t take much doing, weakened by the heat as they were. He decided to stay in his own domain, with King. If they wanted to break in again, they were welcome to try.
He remade his domain, hoping that King didn’t mind the shifting.
A moment later, they were still on sand, but facing the incredible crystal blue of the sea in Bora Bora. Fox imagined tables set up with huge umbrellas all over the beach, like the resort he’d stayed at one time. There were also platforms with bungalows built over the ocean, with thatched roofs and hammocks swaying in the breeze.
“This is a bit better, I suppose,” King said. “Why here, though?”
“It’s similar enough to the desert that I can bring up again if I’m being invaded. It helps to be fast when marshalling a defence.”
“I suppose that’s true.” King settled into a wicker chair. “It would be nice to have some lemonade or something.”
“It would be, wouldn’t it. You know, the agents that live here, in the Cerebrum. They’ve never tasted lemonade. Isn’t that sad?”
“Why should they miss it when they’ve never known to miss it?”
“You have no memory of it either.”
“It’s a bit strange. I’ve heard of it, and when I imagine it, I have a very good idea of what it should taste like, as if I have a sensory memory of having had some before. So I must know what it tastes like. I don’t have a memory of drinking it, but I know I must have.”
Something inside Fox swayed.
The ocean grew misty around the edges. It wasn’t supposed to do that, become misty with the sea beginning to froth.
“They’re doing it to you again,” King said. “Better get that desert.”
“Dream Dust,” Fox muttered angrily. “I’ll show them desolation.”
Abruptly, it was so cold that Fox could feel himself starting to go numb. He remembered well, because it was only a few days ago that he’d had to run through this weather to get from his transport to his hotel. The wind whipped across the landscape that had no natural obstacles to break it. The loose snow blew across the crunchy top layer, making patterns.
“I know this place,” King said. “It’s a place I’ve been before.”
King was wearing a thick parka with a fur-lined hood. Fox, being the silly man that he was, still had on the shorts he’d been wearing in Bora Bora. Fox made himself a fox, a white one this time, with thick fur. He and King walked down a road—or at least Fox thought it was a road. There were piles of snow on either side of them, pushed back from the area on which they were walking, and Fox’s feet slid on the ice.
“Winter in Canada,” Fox said to King. “This is where we are, somewhere.”
If the edges of his domain were blurring, he couldn’t see it from here. There was nothing to see, because the horizon disappeared anyway and faded into the sky, both an endless grey haze. The wind picked up, and it began snowing. Soon, Fox could hardly see King.
There was someone in his domain again. He hadn’t heard them knocking, but they’d managed to get in anyway. He supposed if the walls of his domain were breaking down that much, he wouldn’t feel if they got in. He went anyway, to see if he could get them to leave.
The Cat and the Reaper were back.
“Do you think we don’t know where we are?” the Reaper snarled over the howling wind.
“Or that we’re not used to our own weather?” the Cat added.
“You think this is worse than the desert?”
“Our winter is like this every year. We know how to survive a blizzard.”
“Strange, that the Dream Dust hasn’t made you less coherent.”
“You should have little resistance at this point.”
Fox knew next to nothing about Dream Dust, apart from what he’d already witnessed. He didn’t know he was supposed to be more cooperative, but if he could still fight back, that was a good thing in his books.
“You knocked me out before,” he pointed out, blending in his fur with a nearby snowdrift.
“Yes, but that was only to make sure Seven captured you,” the Reaper said. “We purposefully overdosed you to ensure you didn’t escape.”
“I suppose it was always possible he could start building up an immunity,” the Cat offered. “It usually has the opposite effect, making one more susceptible to its use, but everyone is different.”
“This is our own city, so we should be able to navigate it easily.” The Reaper looked around. “It’s a blizzard, so that makes it slightly more difficult.”
“We just have to figure out where we are.”
Fox laughed. “I hope you memorized all the rural back roads.”
“Why is that?”
“That’s where we are, right now. Winnipeg is at least five kilometers from here.”
The blizzard cleared slightly, revealing tall trees, bare of their leaves, lining the road. Close by stood a mailbox, and beyond that, a barely recognizable driveway with an address number nailed onto a wooden post. There was no road sign to point them in the right direction.
“Of course, since this is my domain, I know how to get there. Bye!” Fox sang and disappeared to the place he had left King.
King had found a little coffee shop and had taken refuge inside it. They sat together for a while, waiting for the storm to clear. King didn’t say much, but held on to a mysteriously acquired cup of coffee. He couldn’t drink it, but holding onto it and feeling the warmth it generated might be comforting.
Eventually, the two presences inside the domain left, and Fox breathed a sigh of relief.
“Back to Bora Bora?” he asked King, watching the snow fall out the window.
“No. I like it here.”
The wind had stopped, but the snow was still coming down in big, fluffy flakes.
“King,” Fox said hesitantly. “Is this your home?”
“I don’t know,” King replied, voice distant. “It feels a bit like it, though.”
Fox settled in to wait, and considered for once that maybe the landscapes he saw as desolate or hostile, another might find beautiful. Even his desert. Fox leaned back and tried not to fall asleep, hoping that wherever all his comrades were located, they were safe.
* * * *
Seven returned to his domain to find the Cat and the Reaper spitting mad. They were pacing the sitting room in circles around what looked like a Private domain.
“Why is there a Private domain in my sitting room?” he asked, a perfectly reasonable question seeing as people weren’t supposed to be able to set up a Private domain within another Private domain.
“We should have transferred out.” The Reaper waved a robed arm above his head. “This domain should be outside of yours. It would be right next to it, yes, but it would be out.”
“Is that Fox’s domain?” Seven tilted his head as he examined it.
The Cat folded his arms. “Yes, rotten little dust-resistant mite that he is.”
“Where’s King?” asked Seven. “Did you put him somewhere else?”
“No, he’s in there with the other one.”
Seven sat on his sofa and stared at the domain. “I guess I should go in and try to retrieve them again.”
“As if you would fare any better,” the Reaper snapped haughtily.
Right. They’d probably ended up in Fox’s desert. Seven didn’t feel sorry for them at all, after all the things they’d done to King, and him, and Eighty-Eight. Everyone else too, probably.
“At least we can get him to give them a message,” the Cat added.
“I can do that,” Seven said and shrugged. “Don’t you have a spy that might help with this? They probably know lots about Fox, and know something that could be the key to getting into his head.”
“Yes, we do.” The Reaper looked thoughtfully at Seven. “Good job. You can tell those two rebels in there that if they don’t surrender themselves, we can
stop taking care of their bodies, and then when they’re too weak to resist, we’ll get them.”
“You could just do that instead,” Seven said, wondering if there was an extent to which their cruelty didn’t reach.
“We need them alive, with their information,” the Cat sighed. “They probably know that, too, the bastards. Let’s go, Reaper. We can come back at some other point anyway. We have rebels to find.”
Seven waited a few moments to really make sure they were gone before knocking on the domain. A door opened, and a gust of snow blew into his sitting room. Seven poked his head in and his eyelashes started to clump with ice.
“Fox?” he called into the domain. “King? Are you there somewhere? It’s Seven.”
Immediately, a little white fox appeared in front of him. “Are they gone then?”
Seven tilted his head. “This is an odd place. What did you do that made them so mad?”
“Resisted them.” Fox yipped and jumped on the spot. “They didn’t find out a thing from me, I can tell you that right now. Do you not like this place?”
“It’s snowing,” Seven observed. “It’s getting my rug wet.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Without waiting for a reply, Fox bounded to the door and looked around the corner, jumping back as he found himself in Seven’s domain. “That’s not possible! How are you doing that?”
“I’m not doing anything! You were the one who made your domain fit inside mine. I’m just as baffled as you are.”
“Want to come in?” asked Fox. “It’s a bit cold, but there’s a nice coffee shop King found in here that I quite like.”
“Okay,” Seven said, stepping into the domain.
It really was cold. His outfit wasn’t made for cold weather, and Seven still couldn’t alter his appearance in any substantial fashion. Fox jumped up and scrabbled into his arms. Seven stared in astonishment until they whirled away and reappeared outside of a brown- and cream-coloured shop. King waved at them from inside.
Seven cautiously stepped inside and saw a counter, with coffee machines and all sorts of equipment with mysterious functions. He pulled on a spout, and it emitted a steaming stream of coffee. After locating a large mug, he poured himself a cup.