Blood circulated throughout my face, making it warm to the touch. A pounding headache made my head start to spin, a never-ending thump. There was a sense of doubt that washed over me. I firmly closed my hand into a fist, causing the blood to flow out, staining my knuckles white. It was quiet in the backseat of the Blues' car. The soundproofing made it so that I could hear the beating of my heart and the blood swirl through my veins. The Blue was talking very animatedly in what felt like a taunting cackle.

  The drive from the park to my house was short. I didn’t hear much of what the Blues said to my family. I lay down on one of the couches that was too small, causing me to crunch my legs toward my chest to fit snugly. My parents talked to the Blues for what seemed like forever before they came in.

  My father placed his hand on my shoulder, “How are you feeling?” he asked. He looked tired; his face was soft and relaxed, comforting me.

  “I’m ok.” I stretched my legs out before my mom picked me up. She hugged me for quite a while; I was her only son after all. She was warm to the touch, and her light perfume reminded me of home.

  “I had to tell the Blues about your other attacker. It could be related.” My dad had that stern look that told me he was thinking.

  “That's ok,” at this point, I was confident that it was the same person.

  “It's been a long day for you. Why don’t we let you rest?” My mom motioned for my dad to follow her. “Are you going to go home tonight? She asked.

  I shrugged. I didn’t feel like moving. “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Well, you can always stay here. It is your home after all?” I nodded

  I sat there in the dark for quite a long time. It was pitch black, and only the silhouette of a couple of inanimate objects could be seen gleaming in the moonlight. I felt cold, as if I had been doused in water several hours ago, and there was a soft breeze gently reminding me of how alone I was. My lips began to chatter. I had a blanket, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. It wasn’t the temperature. It took me several hours before I moved off that couch. When I did, my head felt like it was being held down by something tremendous. Eventually, I gathered up the mental strength to move off the couch. Leon was now integrated with the Minds, entitled to a life that very few had access to. No doubt that was what Leon was going to tell me. But there were more pressing questions. Who was after us?

  Several days passed by, and there wasn’t a word from Leon. It was odd; he should have called. It was a strange amount of time to not have heard from him. I carried around an unsettling tension in my chest, which eventually resulted in me calling him. There was no response. The only other option was to approach him.

  Leon always left the keys in a plant outside his door. When the door opened, there was a warm stale air that hit my face. Leon lived on the second floor of a house; his roommate Mark lived below him. Leon rarely saw Mark, as he was obsessed with CelTec games designed to improve susceptibility to The Minds. I doubted they did anything. Leon had been through his fair share of roommates in a short period. It wasn't fun, but he was satisfied with what he had.

  Mark wasn’t home, his door was swung wide open, and all of his lights were turned off. He had adaptive paintings hung on the walls that shimmered and changed shape as they bounced between different CelTec art. The door that led into his room had a crack in it that ran down the middle of the door. It looked new.

  There was a cup of tea that sat on the counter, the steam still rising off the lip. It filled the air with the warm and comforting smell of lemon grass. Leon and Cliff had a large section of carpet that stretched across the room. It had once been fluffy, but after about a year, it had been squished down until it was practically flat. They had one of those lamps that cast a warm orange light over the entire room. It was easy on the eyes.

  I yelled out for Leon. There was a rustling coming from upstairs, followed by a muffled shout of frustration. The door swung open, and the light from Leon's room bounced off the stairs. There was a potent stale smell that wafted down. Leon’s feet were heavily slapping against the floor as he walked out of his room. I could see from when he was walking down the stairs that he hadn’t been sleeping very well. The rims of his eyes were bright red; the blood-stained white sclera was oozing toward his pupil. He had a stain that ran down the front of his torn-up shirt, which he covered with a jacket as he was coming down the stairs. He had a cigarette softly clenched between his teeth, pushed towards the right side of his mouth. The smoke trailed behind him before freezing in the stale, unmoving air.

  Leon walked up to me, giving me a quick hug before beaming it towards the coffee. Leon’s eyes kept darting around like there was some kind of lurking danger.

  He tried to walk past me, so I grabbed onto his shoulder. “Leon, what's going on? You can't even say hi to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Leon shuffled back over to me. I could tell his mind was occupied.

  “When were you going to tell me about The Minds?” Leon walked over, picking up the tea that was sitting on the table. He stirred it carefully.

  “I was going to trust me. It had all just happened so fast that it was overwhelming. Plus, I was trying to build up the courage when we got shot at?” Leon sighed. I could tell he was stressed. “Plus, Chuck Thorne told me to keep it to myself at least for a little while.”

  It caught me off guard. What was the point of keeping something as big as this a secret?

  “He enrolled me in an Academy that teaches me about The Minds. The same one that he went through. I’ve been going there for a couple of weeks.”

  I had heard of the academy before, but I had never actually met anyone who attended it. It didn’t make much sense why Chuck Thorne would be keeping secrets. “What else is going on? You look like shit.”

  He looked up at me reductively, then looked around his house, “A man visited me that same night after the shooting. He might have been the same person who visited you; he spoke as you described it, wispy. I knew he wasn't the shooter because he would have been limping.”

  I paused for a second, “What do you mean, he came to this house?”

  Leon nodded. “Came in through one of the doors. He was wearing a solid black mask that kept his face covered. I was in this kitchen, the same as we are right now.

  “Don’t be scared,” He had said, he had a gun pointed at me. “This whole place is miraged.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked if I had never heard of a mirage before.

  “It's just a way to hide from people with The Minds. Shut up, let me tell the story,” there was a hint of fear in his voice. “Chuck Thorne had been closely monitoring me at school. I thought it was weird that he was taking so much time out on me. So I looked into the school and found something interesting. It was the same academy that Chuck Thorne had attended after he graduated. Now here's what's interesting: your father attended the same academy after graduating.”

  It was impossible in order for someone to go to the academy they need to be integrated. But my father had always been disconnected, I was sure of it. “That's not possible.”

  Leon leaned in closer. “I know, so I pulled your father's files. The school has a physical archive that has been completely abandoned in the basement. It wasn’t hard to break the lock. In your father's file, it said he was specially admitted because Chuck Thorne would not attend without him. But then your father was dismissed after his first year. The file said that it was because of his involvement in the Spades?”

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “The club that they started in college?” My head started to spin.

  Leon finished his coffee. I could tell he was high on caffeine. Yes, but here's the thing. I pulled the school's financial records. Chuck Thorne started giving huge sums of money to the school after that first year. I mean hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  “Where did he get the money from?” I asked.

  “No idea, but the school expedited him early and put him on the board of directors. So he had a major pull within the school, and he kept donating to the school all the way up until about five years ago, when they stopped keeping physical files.”

  “Ok, but what does this have to do with The Masked Man?”

  “Well, he started to pressure me about what I was doing at the academy. I thought he knew that I had accessed the files and was going to kill me if I didn’t tell him what I knew, so I did.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, he told me that he wasn't after me because of what I had found out, but that the shooter might have. He told me he interfered with the shooter. Which is why we weren’t killed that night. He said he would look out for us and that we had to trust him. There could be more assassins, and to make sure that no one follows us. He said he would protect us as much as he could and that he had other people following us. Then he said he had to make sure our stories were the same, so if we got caught, we would be unharmed. He gave me a file and then blindfolded me and knocked me out, same as you.”

  “What was in the file?” As I asked, there was a rustling noise before a snapping of a twig outside. Leon's eyes grew wide, overly paranoid. We sat in silence for a minute or two, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did.

  Leon whispered, “Not here, we have to go somewhere else.”

  “How about the stables?” I whispered back, and Leon nodded in agreement. “Tomorrow at nine we will meet there.”

  The stables were a series of multistory buildings that had been shelled out and abandoned. They now hosted a series of sporadic paintings from a group of graffiti artists known as the Shells. We used to play in these buildings when we were younger, often running through the various hallways playing hide and seek and roaming through the hallways for any apparent danger with our fake guns. The stables were hidden and disconnected from any major road or power grid. Completely off the grid. Leon was wearing a jacket with the hood pulled tightly down over his head.

  When I met him, he hugged me tight and much longer than usual. His eyes darted back and forward over the tops of the buildings.

  “So what is in the file?” I asked him, I had barely slept the night before in anticipation

  “Some of it is blanked out,” Leon said as he handed me the file.

  My parents' photos were smack in the middle of the pages, but the photos weren’t recent; they looked much younger; age hadn’t carved them out yet. There was a name that was crossed out, listed as dangerous.

  “Any idea who that could be?” Leon asked. I shook my head. There was too little to go on, just a description, black hair, brown eyes, six feet tall, sitting at two hundred pounds.

  There was a letter in the back of the file addressed to my father.

  Cliff,

  “We’ve come a long way since our college days. If it wasn’t for our time together xx xxx xxxxxx. I don’t quite know if we would still be quite as good friends. It seems that the paths that we are taking are starting to diverge after you xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. That's ok, I understand that you have to do what you see is best, as do I. Congratulations on your engagement with Jessica. But you must be careful of her plans xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. This poses a great threat to CelTec. Without CelTec managing The Minds, the world will fall into chaos. For the sake of progress, CelTec cannot allow the development xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. CelTec has a new weapon, which they call The Puppets; this technology is still largely in development. Xx xxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. It would be a soft death. I applaud you in your fight to help this world, and I will do anything in my power to keep this family safe. Your dedication to xxxxxxxxxx is powerful. But, everything has a price, and this fight is not worth the livelihood of your family. I will always be by your side, looking out for you. I hope our paths don’t have to cross. But I warn you, there is danger continuing on this path.”

  Your good friend, Chuck Thorne

  Leon looked at me while I was reading, “The Minds are weird, it's almost like my subconscious gained the ability to act. There was a 3.5 billion dollar payout that CelTec offered your family. But they declined”

  “What does he mean by a soft death? This is a threat to my parents.” I looked at Leon. He was watching me keenly.

  “A threat or warning could be read either way. All I know is that your parents got the message. There's another letter in there from your dad a couple of days later, but it's completely scratched out.” Leon said.

  “So what now?” I asked

  Leon looked at me hesitantly, “Well, I talked to Lily about all of this, and she looked into it for me. She believes that the answers we are looking for are hidden in Chuck Thorn’s office inside the CelTec building. I reached out to Flicks to see if he could get me inside. He said it would be tricky, but he could do it. I was planning on going tonight.”

  I looked at him as if he had gone mad. “It's suicide, you don’t think Flicks will rat us out to Chuck Thorne,” I said skeptically.

  “He will, he's way more loyal to us than he is to his father. Plus, he's an anarchist at heart. He’s supposed to meet us here. Don’t you want to find out what CelTec is really doing, why your parents are involved in this? It's about time I joined the fight.”

  I shook my head, wondering what I had gotten myself involved in.

  When Flick finally arrived, he was wearing large olive green cargo pants and a deep orange shirt. He had this huge, grinning smile that he always carried with him. It was always interesting to me that Flicks didn’t have The Minds, given that he was Chuck Thorne's son.

  His eyes sparkled; he loved to create chaos, there was no doubt about that. Growing up, he wasn’t too close to Chuck Thorne because Chuck Thorne rarely spent time with him. I always knew that Flicks resented him for it.

  Flicks looked around as he rustled around for something in his pocket before pulling out a small, solid black cube. He put the cube on the floor before pressing his palm into the cube. The cube sank into the table, turning the whole floor into a liquid black. “Hold on one second,” Flick frantically started typing something into his typepad. “This is meant for someone with The Minds, but I made a few tweaks. Hold on, found it.” Flicks flung his Typepad onto the surface, overlaying it in the same black color. Straight white lines begin to pop out from the center of the floor until they encircle the entire table.

  “This is it, this is the map.” Flicks pinched the surfaces as the map expanded even further. I was thoroughly amazed as Flicks swiped through the different lines before zooming in on a small label “CT” for Chuck Thorne. “Now I can show you how you can get there, but it's a little tricky.” Flick took his Typepad off the surface for a second before placing it back down.

  Flicks pulled a long device in the shape of a rectangular prism; three multicolored cubes lit up; each one had an arrow in the middle of it. “This is a map my dad designed for me when I was a kid because it would help me navigate the building when he would have to stay late. I will set it up beforehand, but you have to be careful.” He poked each of them, and they began to flash. “There are some safeguards in place to prevent people from getting to sensitive areas inside the building; his office is one of the more secure locations to get into. If the light blinks slowly, then it means there's danger. If the light starts to blink rapidly, you have to make sure to stay as still as possible.”

  “What happens then?”

  “It's called Mirror Dyskinesia, and trust me, that's not something that you want to experience. The building has a sixth sense and will probably try to trap you, so take it slow. If you get in before midnight, there won’t be any guards. The guards don’t arrive until the last person has left the building because as long as someone is there, the defenses will remain active.”

  “Why do you talk about the building like it's alive?” I asked?

  “Depends on what you mean by alive. If you're talking about having a beating heart, then no. But everything about the building is meant to be adaptive; it changes and can become aware of things. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is conscious. But the building can make decisions. You’ll have to be careful. I always went with my dad, and he told me I was safe to be in the building because he was with me, so it was aware of our presence. I’m not sure what will happen if the building becomes aware of your presence, so you have to be careful not to get caught by anyone. The hardest part is usually getting inside the building. But I think I know of a way, there's a secret entrance that employees used to use to get in after hours that only opens at a very specific time. We could get in tonight, but we have to leave soon.