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  The thought occurred to me that I'd fallen asleep in the middle of a round of chemo, despite having refused the treatment at every opportunity. I couldn't see the point in spending my last days puking my guts out, especially when the doctors themselves had confessed that my chances of recovery were basically zero.

  Had I really caved in and changed my mind about chemotherapy? Maybe, but I very much doubted it. This was a daydream, then. A particularly vivid one perhaps, but I reminded myself that the tumor's location was supposed to make me prone to wild flights of fancy and aberrant delusions. A daylight abduction by a squad of hopped-up military knuckleheads and a take-no-shit authority figure sure fit that bill.

  As soon as I realized it was nothing more than my imagination, I felt a wave of relief crash over me. The sensation was as sweet as it always was. I'd been a vivid dreamer for as long as I could remember. I knew firsthand the sweet reprieve when at last I understood that I wasn't actually naked in English class or suddenly missing my front teeth or that I hadn't been caught cheating on my fictional girlfriend.

  Relax, Adam. At least it'll all be over soon...

  The truth, that the dream had lied to my sleeping or misfiring mind, was the most perfect gift of all. It gave me a chance to step back into the life I had been leading before the fictional fracture.

  Of course! I knew I was too young for cancer to fuck me over. It was time to wrestle my way out of this dream or hallucination or whatever it was and get back to living my life. "I'm ready to wake up," I said out of the blue, feeling empowered and aware.

  "What's that, son?" the guy in charge of my abduction asked. The drugs had worn off enough for me to hear his voice loud and clear. There wasn't a hint of mist or dream to the tone, just the cold, stark weight of merciless reality. "You're not going to lose your shit on me now, are you?"

  I shook my head, ignoring him. "I've learned my lesson. 'Appreciate what you have', right? I get it now."

  He let out a world-weary sigh. "Martez, hurry up and get us there. I'd rather not have to dose him again before the flight, but if we take our time there's a chance his mind will split right down the middle. If he matters as much as the doctor says he does, that'd be bad."

  "On it," came the answer, followed by a jolt as the van plunged forward even faster.

  I smiled. Some dreams held on tighter than others. "Wow," I said, to me and not him. "My brain is a son of a bitch. It really had me going there."

  "Yeah?" he grunted.

  I nodded, the fabric of the hood rough against my face. "Yep. But do you know how I know it's all bullshit?"

  "I can't wait for you to tell me..."

  "When you start to look at the little details, the story always unravels. Happens every time."

  "Is that so?"

  "Sure is. Like, why did you guys bring all that firepower when you already knew so much about me? You couldn't have been expecting a fight, right? It doesn't make any sense. And then there's the goons from central casting, complete with an asshole Lieutenant who's ready and willing to apply his strict military code to an innocent civilian. I mean—"

  "Mr. Harris," he said, a chill rolling off his voice that gave me goosebumps. "Firstly, I'm a colonel. Secondly, though we have yet to be ambushed on an exfil, there's always a first time. Not everyone feels the Earth should be involved, and your name may have reached their ears before it reached mine. So, instead of critiquing your life as it takes an unscheduled turn, keep your mouth shut. If you can’t, I'll dose you to the eyeballs and happily suffer the consequences. My superiors won’t like having to wait an extra couple of hours for you to come back down, but they’ll get over it.”

  "Chill out, kid," Martez advised from the front. "This too shall pass and all that, yeah? Now's not the time to fight it. There'll be plenty of that ahead for you, I promise."

  Out of options, I had no choice but to do as they said and shut up. If I was right and it was a dream, it didn't look like arguing was going to end it.

  We kept on driving.

  Time still didn't mean that much to me, and eventually we came to a halt amidst a squeal of tires and the stink of burnt rubber. The instant we were no longer in motion, someone rumbled the van's side door open. They grabbed me again, hauling me quickly across what felt like tarmac, which jived with the earlier mention of a flight.

  The wind was blowing gently and I could feel the sun on my shoulders. I tried to look up at it, but the light couldn't get through the fabric of the hood.

  "You'll see it again soon," Martez told me.

  We must've parked right on the runway, because after only a few steps I was getting forced up a flight of stairs. They led me inside, where one of the soldiers was kind enough to slice my zip cuffs away before pressing me in to yet another seat. As soon as I was sitting down though, the same guy clicked a metal cuff around one of my wrists before snapping the other part around a strut in the armrests. He did the same thing to my other hand. The solid snick of them locking tight made my situation a little more real.

  After that, a three-point harness was looped around me and tightened as I heard the cabin door close. The interior pressure changed, pushing uncomfortably on my inner ear.

  "I don't see any need for this, now," the colonel told me, tugging the hood off of my head. Whatever they'd injected me with had vastly increased my sensitivity to light, and I was unfortunate enough to be facing a window when the world poured in and tried to gouge out my eyeballs with brightness.

  I was pretty proud of myself for not shrieking like a child, but when I jerked my hands up to cover my eyes, I forgot about the handcuffs. They pulled tight against the armrests, which meant that I ended up punching myself in the nose.

  "Calm the fuck down, Adam," the Colonel growled. He let the blood run down my face without bothering to clean me up, but at least he reached over and slid the window's shade halfway down. "Better?"

  I nodded fiercely, the action making even more drops of blood splatter on my shirt and fall into my lap. "Will you please at least tell me where you're taking me, now?"

  He gave me a sidelong glance before shifting in his seat to stare out the bottom slice of window. "Sorry, but this isn't my first rodeo. I used to tell them a little bit, but I don't anymore. It's easier on everyone."

  "Them? You mean the people you grab? Why not?" I sounded like I was whining, but so be it. How dare this guy conceal information he'd given to other victims of the same treatment?

  "Because it's a waste of time. None of you are ever ready to hear the truth, and I don't feel like arguing with you about it. Look, if you want to talk, let's get the initialization parameters out of the way instead of barking up this tree. What do you say?"

  I blinked at him, my eyes still stinging from the light. "I say that I have no idea what you're talking about."

  "That's fine. It's easy. They're just Rorschach tests. You know what those are? The inkblots where you try your damnedest to see a butterfly and not your momma's vagina?"

  I wrinkled my nose. The Colonel sure did have a way with words. "I'm not a moron. I know what a Rorschach test is..."

  "Good. Let's run through some, then."

  This guy certainly didn't strike me as a trained psychiatrist, but that didn't stop him from dutifully removing a digital recorder from his breast pocket and turning it on. "For prosperity, and all that horse shit," he said, making sure to speak directly into the device. "The doctor gets what she demands, despite the princess not having any fucking results to show for it after we've spent untold trillions of dollars and man hours." He shook his head and started again. "Subject Adam Harris. Initialization imagery interview."

  Once he got that out of the way he reached into the seat in front of him and pulled out a stack of the vaunted Rorschach tests he'd alluded to, holding them inches from my bloody nose one by one and demanding that I blurt out the first thing that came into my mind.

  I did as I was told. If he had some nefarious purpose in mind, I didn't see how answering these usel
ess questions would be helping it along.

  I tried to remind myself that I didn't know enough about what was going on to immediately assume that he was 'evil'. If, on the off chance this was actually being done for my benefit, it didn't make any sense to dig in my heels or give bullshit responses.

  Who was I kidding, though? These tests were basically random. I gave him honest answers, but I certainly didn't find enlightenment or any sort of solace along the way. If it looked like a tulip, I said the word 'tulip'. If it was an animal that appeared to have antlers, I called it a moose.

  Except for the skinny one, which I decided was a deer.

  End of fucking story.

  The whole time the Colonel just sat there and jotted down my answers, despite the fact that the digital recorder was getting all of them too. I couldn't really see what he was writing, not with the Rorschach tests practically smooshed against my face like this. I'd always been told that there were no right or wrong answers to these things, but that might not be the case here.

  Nobody kidnaps a guy and then asks him a bunch of questions if the answers don't matter, right?

  There weren't very many pictures anyway, maybe only twenty or so. Once he'd worked his way methodically through them, the Colonel gave himself a curt nod. Mission accomplished, he stacked them once more and put the ever-present manila folder on top, sliding everything into the back of the seat in front of him. " Very good," he told me, with an air of finality.

  "Did I pass?"

  He shrugged, the first un-military gesture I'd seen him make this whole time. "To tell you the truth, I wouldn't have a fucking clue." With that, he turned off the recorder, standing and sliding past me as he pocketed it. If I could have reached him properly, I might have tried to pickpocket him with a little sleight of hand.

  I couldn't though, so I didn't. I settled for watching him walk up the aisle of the private plane to confer with someone a dozen rows ahead of us. The passenger compartment wasn't very big, but since I was in the back row and he was now in the front, he'd managed to get as far from me as he was physically able.

  The rest of his soldiers were up there too, although the guy he was speaking with looked like he was cut from a different cloth. Maybe he was the shrink, and the Colonel was reporting on my answers to the test.

  Or maybe not. I had no real way of knowing, and speculation was going to get me nowhere fast. Not when I had other things I could be doing...

  For the first time since this little escapade had begun, they'd left me to my own devices. I tried to see if anyone was tasked with keeping an eye on me, but nobody was bothering to look in my direction.

  At long last, I was ready to cause a little of trouble. What was the worst they could do to me if I got caught? Kidnap me again?

  The way I saw it, I wasn't going to get many chances to learn more than they were willing to tell me. I'd be a fool if I passed up an opportunity to start filling in the sizable gaps in my knowledge.

  Besides, it was the Colonel's own fault. He'd made it clear that he could share more with me than he was, which meant that it was time for me to work a little magic.

  I hadn't spent the last three and a half years working at the Hocus Pocus Focus for nothing. Handcuffs like these were literally child's play. I'd taught eight-year-olds a dozen different ways to get out of them and I used the simplest method now, folding my right palm in on itself until the base of my thumb and the bottom of my pinkie touched. Once they did, I slid my hand free and didn't waste any time being coy.

  The manila folder was still in the seat pocket, and I grabbed it. The one thing they couldn't take away from me was knowledge, so I opened it up and started reading as fast as I could. No matter how pissed off they got at me for stealing information, once I'd filed it away in my out-of-warranty brain it was mine for good.

  Except, a lot of what I was scanning made no sense at all. I knew most of the words, but contextually I was completely lost. Labyrinth? Save Point? Whatever they were up to, they'd been at it a long time, working in secret. I kept seeing the initials LEO and I didn't know what it stood for. Pissed off, I ended up skimming large portions of a report that I simply didn't have the background knowledge to understand.

  It wasn't like they laid out exactly who they were or what they were planning, but what little I could glean seemed to back up what I'd already been told by the Colonel. They were part of some secret government operation that had decided to target me. There had indeed been others who'd taken the same journey I was on, but the 'who' or 'when' or 'why' was completely absent.

  Now that I had a chance to read through it, at least I could see exactly how much they knew about me. It started with a long list of every job or interest I'd ever held, going all the way back to the shitty sandwich artist one I'd quit in my first year of high school. But even that wealth of knowledge was strange, mainly due to the glaring omissions.

  Everybody was always worried about Big Brother and data collection, but it wasn't like they had my porn preferences on file. That couldn't have been hard for them to grab, but they'd ignored it. I'd gotten suspended in my junior year when the wrestling coach had caught me attempting a white boy version of tagging across a block of lockers, but that wasn't mentioned.

  I'd pirated movies, cracked video games, even dipped into Absolute Reality servers on the back of a black-market Redhook, but they didn't appear to give a shit about any of it. The magic camp I'd gone to every summer since I was thirteen, though? They were all over that.

  It looked like they'd put everything worthy of inclusion on a dartboard, done a dozen shots of tequila, and then started throwing. I flipped to the last couple of pages to see if there was some type of summary or epilogue that would shed a bit more light on all of this.

  There wasn't.

  There was a picture of me, though. A recent one. Despite the telephoto lens they must've used to snap it yesterday, the quality was astonishing. I was paying the pizza guy, but they'd scrubbed him out of the image and used the blank space to list a bunch of statistics and assign me a numeric value for each.

  There, right before my eyes was Adam Harris, deconstructed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Core Statistics

  Flesh

  Strength4

  Stamina4

  Intelligence7

  Finesse

  Dexterity8

  Perception6

  Wit7

  Friction

  Fortitude4

  Endurance3

  Resolve2

  Physical Buffer0

  Mental Ward2

  AptitudesNone As Yet

  ProgressionNone As Yet

  There were some messages scrawled in the margins, and they clearly weren't meant for me.

  'These are the stats the Citadel has assigned to the target. You've been watching him for almost 24 hours, colonel. Do they seem right to you? I'm worried about some of the lower scores, particularly Stamina, Endurance and Resolve. The last thing any of us need is to bring a quitter on board. I know we have the option of blackballing him, but that means that we'll be forced to use the next name that appears on the list. In addition, he's been given thirteen days over there. That's incredible, and even if he's a complete loss I'd rather see if we can work on him.'

  I glanced back up at my statistics. Whoever had written the message had every reason to be worried, though the Citadel, whatever that was, had probably been a little bit generous in its assessment. This fucking death sentence had taken its toll, but they'd still given me a Dexterity of 8.

  Considering that most magic was all about sleight-of-hand, I allowed myself to enjoy a moment of professional pride.

  I didn't think I was going to learn anything else from the contents of the folder, which meant that I'd better put it back where it came from before I got caught.

  Right on cue, I heard the Colonel ended his conversation and glanced over to see him wearily standing up. I had half a second to replace the report in the folder and stow it before his res
tless gaze swept over me, and when it did everything was right back where it belonged.

  I didn't think he'd caught me. Now that the papers were in place once more, I coughed loudly and shifted my weight in my seat, using the sound and the movement to conceal the noise of me re-clicking the handcuff tight around my right wrist.

  I moved my legs as he edged past and sat back down in the window seat. I didn't want the silence to give him a chance to work out that he might have missed something, so I broke it. "Are you ready to tell me where we're going?"

  "No." For the first time since we'd come on board, he was strapping himself into his seat. They'd been the ones to buckle me in the first time around, but now that I watched him do it I was struck by how hardcore the equipment was. It wasn't just a click and slide affair; he was tightening up a full-on three-point harness just like the one they'd strapped around me.

  I looked down at myself. Just as I thought, I was secured by the same sort of rig. Strange... "Why not?" I asked absently.

  The Colonel gave me a grin that could have easily passed for a grimace, had his gray eyes not sparkled. "Quiet down, now. One of the few joys I get in this job is the look on your face when you finally realize you aren't on a plane."

  The intercom crackled above us. "Entering LEO in ten seconds. Brace."

  The soldiers were pros. They'd already secured their gear and, as I glanced around, I couldn't see anyone who looked even the slightest bit worried.

  My own mouth felt like it was lined with sandpaper. I looked over at the window, but the shade was still most of the way down. All of the windows were like that, actually. What I'd taken for kindness when the Colonel had blocked the sun had only been a pretense to conceal the sky from me. "What does LEO mean?"

  "Low Earth Orbit. That's where the Station is, constantly falling to the ground and managing to consistently miss."