“Okay.” That single word came as I slowly took a step back, then another. Before I thought about it, I was already sitting down right there in the trash, feeling something sticky on my leg. My voice sounded hollow. “I guess I knew this was gonna happen at some point. I just didn’t expect it to be this vivid. I mean, why wouldn’t I have a mental breakdown right now? Is this what it’s like for everyone? Am I talking out loud to people right now, or am I just lying on the ground all silent and catatonic while I imagine this? Am I really in a dump now and I’m just imagining you completely?”

  There was a moment of silence before the clearly imaginary figure murmured a soft, “Oh, kid…” A sigh followed, before she moved closer and knelt down in front of me. Her hand rose to take hold of her own mask, tugging it off to reveal a pale woman with short, deep chestnut brown hair and brown eyes. “Believe me, I know what this sounds like, and from what little I already know, you’ve got every reason to be losing it right now. But I promise, you aren’t hallucinating. This is real. When you showed up on the other side of that teleport, you were liquid. You were in that paint form. And when you threw yourself at… at us, you were still liquid, so she… absorbed you, the same way she absorbs blood from people. That brought you in here. It made you merge with us. You’re inside her mind, her… soul, I guess?” A brief flicker of obvious emotional pain crossed her face. “This is real, kid, I swear.”

  I just stared at her through teary eyes, giving a soft snort after a moment. “You know, unmasking yourself might mean something if I had any way to verify that was really what you looked like.” My throat felt painfully dry and scratchy, like someone had rubbed sandpaper over it. “This can’t be real. This sort of thing doesn’t happen. You really want me to believe I’m in Casura’s mind?”

  Hearing that name said out loud made the figure in front of me, or the figure I’d dreamed up as my brain completely shut down, flinch. She glanced away, her already pale face going whiter. It took her a moment to collect herself. “Yes. Yes, you’re in here with both of us. And if we don’t do something, she’s going to kill all your friends.” Her voice cracked with thick emotion. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry, kid. But you don’t have the luxury of sitting back and coming to terms with this on your own time. The world’s slower out there than it is in here, but it’s not completely stopped.”

  The words penetrated, bouncing around in my head for an eternity before I lifted my gaze to look at her as something came to mind. “Us? You said… you said I’m in here with ‘both of us.’” That was a realization that made my stomach clench a little. “Does that mean the… other one is--”

  “Oh, she’s here alright!” That came from the other side of the nearby trash pile, as another figure came stomping into view. This was another costumed woman, wearing tight black leather pants with just a little bit of red around the waist and bottom of the legs that led down into dark red boots. Beyond that, she had a red leather vest over a black sleeveless shirt, leaving her arms bare save for the spiked bracelets she had on her wrists. Her hands were sheathed in dark red gloves, and she had this reddish-black mask that looked like it was ceramic but was actually very hardened blood. It left the top of her head exposed, so sharp, spiky blonde hair was visible.

  Bloodfall, the other half of Casura. She came into view, snapping, “She’s right here, and she’s done coddling the little boy.” Before I could react, her hand snapped out to grab my arm, yanking me to my feet. “Now you listen to me, I’m pretty sure you being here in color means you’re the only one with a chance to get all of us the fuck out of this, so put on your big boy pants and snap to it. I’m not gonna be stuck like this forever.”

  “Stop, Octavia!” The other hallucination(?) pushed Bloodfall away from me, stepping between us. “He can’t do anything if you leave him curled into a terrified ball, so just wait a second. He was already starting to listen if you’d just back off for a sec.” She looked to me then. “She won’t hurt you, I promise. She can’t. Not permanently, anyway. We don’t have our powers in this place any more than you do. No one in here does. She has all the powers. She has all the control. But you actually have color.”

  My gaze snapped back and forth between them, and it felt like I was hyperventilating. “She-- what? What do you-- you’re both here?” Of course they were both here, duh. They were both combined to create Casura. It wasn’t like Casura was just Bloodfall with Mingle’s powers added in. From everything I’d read, and all the videos I watched, Casura was very different from Bloodfall. Mingle wasn’t the only prisoner in this mental construct th-- did I actually believe this?

  “Are you stupid?” Bloodfall snapped. “Yes, we’re both here. We’re all here. Now why don’t you prove you’re not one of the fucking zombies and start paying attention so we can fix this shit!”

  “Okay, wait, wait!” I held up both hands, still breathing so hard I could barely get the words out. “You keep saying I have color. What does that mean? What-- just… pretend I believe this is real and that I’m not actually laying in the grass having a complete mental break at this point. What does having color have to do with anything? My paint? Cuz I can’t use my paint at all.”

  Through all that, in the back of my mind, I was comparing the… possibility that this was a real thing with the virtual simulation world I’d gone into with the others when we were helping Paige. But that was totally different. That was a virtual reality simulation. A super-fancy one, sure, but that’s what it was. This? This was supposed to be an actual mental construct inside a person’s mind… or body… soul-- whatever. It was absurd. I was inside Casura? She had absorbed my paint-self the same way she did blood. She absorbed me and now I was actually here, like this?

  Bloodfall started to snap again, but (clearly reluctantly) fell silent as Mingle held a hand up. Then the Star-Touched looked at me. “Not your paint, your color. You have color. See, everyone else who comes in here, all the--” She paused, clearly trying to figure out how to explain it quickly. “When Casura takes enough of someone’s blood to permanently gain their power, it puts a version of them in here. But they’re not like us. We call them zombies, but they’re not after brains. They just… mill around, doing random stuff. Like really simple AI. They’ll even do what we tell them to, for a little while. Then it’s like they forget what they were doing and wander off.”

  “And all of them are in black and white,” Bloodfall put in sharply. “Not color. The only people who ever have color in here are the dork over there and me, that’s it. Unless she has color, but we wouldn’t know. Everyone else, everyone else we’ve seen, has always been grayscale. Until now, until you. She brought you in as paint, not blood. So you’re here in color. Which better fucking mean you can actually fix this whole fucking thing.”

  “Fix it?” I gave her a long, incredulous stare. “What, you mean like separate you two and put you back to norm-- wait, hang on, are you guys actually friends in here or something?” Only then did I realize that Mingle hadn’t called Bloodfall by that name. She called her… what was it, Octavia? She’d used her real name (apparently). And they were both just sort of talking this whole thing out with me.

  “Not on your fucking life,” Bloodfall hissed. “This is just a… truce. A temporary truce while we’re stuck here. You can only go so long without having someone to talk to, and the zombies don’t say shit. Besides, we can’t hurt or kill each other. Nothing sticks, we just reset back to normal after a few seconds.”

  “And believe me, she tried,” Mingle muttered. “But yeah, we’re the only ones in this place who can talk and think properly. The only ones with actual color. At least, until you came in.”

  I was in the midst of processing all this when another thing suddenly derailed my train of thought and made me jolt violently. “Time, time, you said time is slower out there, but not stopped. That-- she’s out there still, she’s with my friends. What’s going on, what’s happening? How slow is it? I mean, how much time do we have to stop her? I have to see what’s going on, I have to see if--” My voice cut off then, the lump in my throat impossible to speak past. I was petrified by the thought of just what was happening out in the real world with the others while I was stuck here.

  “Great, leave the kid in a panic about his friends so he’s not any good to us,” Bloodfall scolded the other woman before stepping over to catch my helmet with one hand, making me look at her. “Listen to me. It’s-- well shit, I ain’t gonna say it’s fine, cuz it ain’t. But it could be a hell of a lot worse. Shit’s moving at a glacial pace out there. We’re slowing it down as much as we can.”

  “To be totally accurate,” Mingle pointed out, “it’s more like we’re speeding time up in here, so it’s like things are moving super-slow out there.” She ignored the obvious glare Bloodfall sent her. “But here, we’ll show you.” With that, she turned a bit and pointed to the sky, directing my attention that way. A second later, the sky itself seemed to change into more of a giant movie screen. I saw a parking lot, the parking lot that Paige and the others were sent to, where the rest of the team had been waiting. The sky-screen was showing me what was happening right now.

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  And in this case, what was happening was… well, basically nothing. I wasn’t seeing things from Casura’s point of view or whatever, it was an actual overhead vision. Which-- yeah, I wasn’t sure how that worked, but I wasn’t gonna question it. I saw Casura herself lying on her back. Wait, no, she wasn’t quite just laying there. Her back was arching a little, legs partially raised. It was like she was in the midst of doing a kip-up after falling down, but was frozen like that. Except not totally frozen. Staring at her for a few seconds, I saw just the slightest hint of motion. It was like seeing a video that was moving forward at a pace of only a single frame every once in awhile.

  The others were there too. Paige… Paige was lying on the ground where she’d apparently fallen after I managed to knock Casura away from her with that collision. The collision that ended with me inside… here. She was in costume and everything, head raised to stare at Casura while mostly-frozen in the midst of starting to roll backward. A few feet away, Echo was still on her feet, half-turned as though reaching out toward Paige to catch her. Sierra-- or Style in that costume-- was crouched on the far side of Echo, and starting to extend her own hand at Casura. Or maybe at me, if this was all happening a second or two after I’d disappeared inside of her.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the team and a few others, everyone who had been waiting to help what should have been just the former hostages, were surrounding that area in a circle. Alloy, Trevithick, Calvin, Hobbes, Qwerty, all of the Cuddles, Broadway, Pack, and Eits. Yes, it might’ve seemed like overkill to have that many people waiting like that when the plan had been for just the hostages to show up in that spot, but we hadn’t been sure what special defenses Casura might’ve had in play. We’d been worried about hired (or threatened into service) guards, robot defenses, power-based minions, any number of potential problems that could’ve been teleported along with the ones we actually wanted to save. The list of possibilities hadn’t really been short.

  And yet, in all of that, the people there were only ever supposed to fight minions, not Casura herself. They were there to deal with extra problems, not her. They didn’t stand a single icicle’s chance in hell against her. If I didn’t find a way to do something in here, I’d have to see her kill all of them one by one, on a sky-sized screen in the slowest motion possible.

  Snapping my gaze away from the sky, I demanded, “It’s gonna stay super-slow like that, right?”

  “Eh, basically,” Bloodfall confirmed with a vague shrug. “The two of us control how fast or slow it moves. That’s about as much as we can slow it down. If we wanted it to go faster, it would. So--”

  “Octavia, we talked about this,” Mingle lightly scolded. “You don’t have to jump straight to threatening people to get what you want all the time. He already wants to do everything we need to get out of here. We’re all on the same side here. Which means no threatening to speed things up out there. I mean, he’s not dumb, he knows you want him to succeed at this as much as he does.”

  Bloodfall-- or Octavia-- growled just a little under her breath. “I told you, don’t tell me what to do. And--” She stopped there, obviously trying to find a flaw she could pick into what Mingle had actually said. In the end, she just snarled out, “I was just reminding him that it’s only that slow right now cuz we’re making it that way. So if the kid thinks he can ditch us, or find a way out of here without helping you and me get out too, he’s got another thing coming. Got it, little boy?”

  “Got it,” I agreed immediately, not wanting to get into a whole thing with her right then. Better to just let her have it and move on. “So, what do we do about that? How can I help? How can I separate you, or do anything? You said something about fixing this, so how do we do that?”

  The two of them exchanged glances and a moment of silent communication before Mingle looked back at me. “Okay, so here’s the deal. We’ve sort of worked out that everything in here is controlled from the top floor of the biggest building in that city over there. That’s where the main… uhh, heart or brain of this place is. It’s the central core. And it’s where she is.”

  “She?” I echoed uncertainly while looking that way to stare at the skyline. “You mean Casura?”

  A hiss of annoyance escaped Bloodfall. “Our combined self, yes. Not that we’ve ever seen her. Not really. We see her shadow moving by the windows at night sometimes. But any time we try to go inside to throw her out, we… uh, can’t. We can’t go any further than the ground floor. We know it’s where we need to go to turn this shit off and split up again, but we can’t get in there.”

  “So, maybe you can,” Mingle added. “We think maybe since you came in a different way, you might be able to get to that top floor and… do something about it. You might be able to fix us.”

  My mouth opened and shut as I absorbed that. “I… that’s a lot of ifs and maybes. But…” Swallowing, I glanced at the sky screen again. Things hadn’t changed much, but they were definitely still moving forward. Just incredibly slowly, thank God. I had to move. Whatever I was going to do, it had to be soon. “But I don’t have any better ideas, and you guys know this place.”

  “Yeah, we know it,” Bloodfall muttered darkly before stepping back. “Which means we also know that just being inside that building, before we got kicked out of it, gave us some level of control over the body. Those were fun times.”

  “Even if it takes more time to get up to the top and figure out how to fix the whole thing,” Mingle explained, “just being inside the place should give the three of us enough control to stop Casura from actually killing anyone out there. Should. Hopefully.”

  Bloodfall summed it all up with, “So unless you want to sit and watch all your friends get brutally tortured and murdered, I suggest you move your ass.”

  This felt weird, and not just for the whole ‘walking around a mental construct world’ sort of weird. It felt weird to listen to Bloodfall. She was still a villain, after all. She was a killer in her own right. But this was kind of an extraordinary circumstance. And it wasn’t like this would be my first time playing nice with a Fell, even if they usually weren’t as bad as this one had been. Yeah, even before she became half of Casura, Bloodfall was pretty nasty in her own right. But right here, right now, none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered at all was saving my friends.

  Steeling myself, I straightened up and gave as firm a nod as I could manage. “Okay. I still don’t know how much I believe this is real and not a complete mental break on my part, but assuming it is, I’m ready. Let’s get over there and see if you guys are right. Before…” I was about to say ‘before it’s too late,’ but just couldn’t bring myself to finish that. So I ended the sentence there.

  “Yeah, and we might wanna pick up the pace,” Bloodfall noted with a glance skyward. “Or, if you don’t actually care what happens to your pals out there, we can just take a nice, leisurely tour around the city. It’s not like we’ve actually been able to show anyone around before. There’s this really nice view of a waterfall out on the far eastern side, as long as the fucking zombies aren’t--”

  “No, I care, I care, let’s go!” I was already moving, sprinting around the trash pile on the way out of that damn dump. A reflexive glance up at the same time Bloodfall looked that way had shown me all I needed to see. Casura was about halfway through that kip-up. The world out there might’ve been slowed down dramatically, but it absolutely wasn’t frozen. We had to move.

  Now really would’ve been a great time for my powers. Or any powers, really. Hell, I would’ve settled for a bicycle. Instead, we were running together through the dump. At least for this first part. Apparently these two always ended up being transported nearby whenever a new ‘zombie’ showed up. That was how they happened to be close enough for me to run across immediately in the middle of the dump like that. Every time Casura absorbed enough blood for another zombie to appear somewhere in this mental construct world, those two would be poofed over to it. Was that because she was using both of their powers to absorb someone’s blood like that?

  I had no idea, and there wasn’t time to sit and wonder. I just pushed myself to run faster, sprinting through that dump while desperately trying not to think about how much damage Casura could do, even in just a few seconds. Even with time slowed down as much as it was, getting out of here, finding a car, and then driving all the way to that tallest building just to climb up to the top floor would take-- fuck, no, I wasn’t thinking about it. I wasn’t thinking about it! I was just moving, god damn it, I was fucking moving!

  Finally, we rounded yet another pile of trash and saw the front gate of this (literal) dump. Even better, there was a car sitting there by what looked like some sort of office trailer. It wasn’t an amazing car, just some old sedan. But it was a car.

  “God, I hope you guys mind-manifested keys for this thing!” I found myself saying while going for it.

  “They’re mind-cars, they don’t need keys!” Bloodfall informed me, already hot on my heels. “Just turn the ignition. And who said you were driving anyway? You’re like twelve!”

  Reaching the car by that point, I grabbed the handle and turned slightly to stare at the woman. I didn’t say anything, and she couldn’t actually see my face. She saw my body language, and the blank visor gazing at her. For about two seconds, our eyes met.

  She blinked first. “Twelve-year-old’s driving, okay, let’s go! I call shotgun!” Just like that, Bloodfall slid across the hood of the car and jumped into the front passenger seat, while Mingle took the back without comment.

  Yanking the other door open, I dropped down inside, fastened my seatbelt quickly, then started it up. That time, I couldn’t resist glancing at the sky once more while shifting into reverse. The tires kicked up a wild dust storm while I saw Casura just starting to land on her feet, eyes tracking each person around her. She was already choosing a new target.

  A snap of the wheel brought the car around as I reversed out of that spot, sending the spray of dirt and pebbles clattering noisily into the nearby fence. My foot found the gas once more, as I shifted into drive, my foot already starting to push against the gas pedal once more to send the old sedan rocketing out of the dump.

  And that was when we saw the army of zombies in our way.

  Joke Tags: AI Zombies? Oh No? Casura Is Responsible For Google Gemini? She Must Be Eradicated!