Micheal opened his eyes again.

  The emotions of the previous scene had dissolved along with the liquefaction of the world. What remained was a vitreous detachment, sharper than before. As if consciousness were pulling away from the body with every heartbeat, sliding slowly toward drowsiness. A steady, inexorable process.

  In front of him stood a girl.

  Standing. Tight jeans. A simple blue hoodie. Delicate, Asian features. She was looking up at him.

  The room around them was clearly hers. Orderly, feminine, carefully kept without ostentation. Posters on the walls, shelves neatly aligned. Here and there, however, the continuity of space was interrupted: patches of watery, strontianite-colored resin sealed off corners and fragments of wall. Like static wounds in the fabric of reality. Motionless. Glossy.

  Her voice reached him filtered, almost unreal. Soft, coaxing.

  “Love, why that face? Aren’t you happy to see me?”

  She was smiling. A restrained, uncertain smile. Not fake, but fragile.

  Micheal muttered something. The words came out without passing through any conscious decision.

  “Of course I’m happy to see you.”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  A pause.

  “Don’t start, please.”

  She lowered her gaze for a moment. Then lifted it again. Dark eyes, deep, carrying a question she didn’t want to articulate.

  “Will you give me a kiss?”

  Micheal didn’t answer.

  He leaned down.

  Their lips brushed, then met. The contact was warm, real. For an instant, the drowsiness slowed, as if physicality itself were offering a minimal resistance to the drift.

  The warmth of her lips lasted a heartbeat. Then the stupor pulled him under. The room fractured—not in space, but in time. Layers of reality stacking like misaligned slides.

  She stood before him. Upright.

  The figure began to blur. The contours lost definition. Another image emerged—superimposed, then prevailing.

  She was before him. A head turned in profile. Asian features, left cheek flushed. Unmistakable posture: on all fours.

  In front of him, a head turned in profile—Asian features, left cheek flushed. Unmistakable posture: on all fours. The rest of her body swallowed by an aqueous resin the color of strontianite, motionless as glass. Everything frozen. The room, his own body—erased by the substance. Only these survived: her head, her right hand outstretched, and the sensation. A sharp pleasure, fixed at the instant of climax. Crystallized. The Mediator perceived it not as memory but as a permanent state—orgasm fossilized in phantom flesh.

  The resin collapsed inward.

  Sucked into an invisible point. The frozen scene imploded—head, hand, sensation—all compressed into a singularity that blinked out.

  Eigengrau.

  Then—

  Sidewalk. Shops. Afternoon sun cutting hard shadows across cracked pavement.

  The Mediator was walking. Anton beside him, mid-gesture, talking. The transition had been instantaneous. No fade, no warning. One reality replaced by another, as if someone had simply cut between frames.

  There was a small area within his sensory field marked by a clarity unmistakably sharper than any oneiric-mnemonic experience he had traversed since plunging into the Sea of Mooney.

  "...but self-correcting mechanisms. I can agree with Harari regarding science, but perhaps there are forms of government superior to democracy in their capacity to amend errors committed in the political and administrative sphere. So I started elaborating an alternative governance model. Let's see if I can provide a coherent synthesis of my conjectures. Let's start from a premise: I firmly believe that it should not be the people who select those who will hold power. An organization—one among multiple algorithmically sophisticated institutions specialized in this regard—completely external, devoid of any ties to the social body, should select a technocratic plan from among a plurality of plans, also elaborated by individuals coming from a milieu entirely unconnected to the society they will intervene upon..."

  *Why is he talking to me about this?* the Mediator wondered, perplexed. *From what I recall, I've always repudiated politics. The only thing I retain from it is a line: "power passes like an armed wind." It's not even a direct reference to politics, but to power in an abstract sense—though the interpretive key provided by the word "armed" allows a tenuous connection to the political sphere. Who was it? Saint-John Perse?*

  The Mediator's attention drifted while Anton continued.

  "Another organization will intervene to examine its progress, based on both objective and intersubjective criteria, calibrating over time the thresholds for golpist intervention—disembodied *casus foederis*, so to speak. The interconnection between the various city-states that would compose this new global arrangement would exist, yes, but would remain extremely limited regarding human resources and information. In this way..."

  "I broke up with my girlfriend," Micheal interrupted.

  The Mediator was caught off guard. Micheal's tone was restless, but not sad.

  “Oh. You caught me off guard… h-how do you feel?” Anton asked, hesitant.

  “I liked her as a girl. Different from all the others I’d dealt with. But I didn’t love her. She loved me, though. I was sure of that. I’d already understood it…”

  “We’d even talked about it,” Anton said.

  “Yeah…”

  A moment of silence. The Mediator began to recognize the nature of the unease simmering in Micheal’s emotional circuits, and felt a deep melancholy.

  “One day, while we were in bed, she was looking into my eyes, smiling. I felt something strange. It was as if I suddenly understood that behind that gaze there was a complex life, rich with emotions, memories, aspirations, neuroses. Like mine.”

  “Sonder,” Anton said seriously.

  “Mm?”

  “That’s the neologism that was coined to name this awareness. Sonder. A beautiful word. Had you really never felt it before?”

  “W-what… what does it matter? Sonder isn’t the problem.”

  “What else happened?”

  “I felt like shit. I’ve done plenty of stupid things in my life, but I’d never really felt guilty before, maybe because I was completely shut inside myself.

  I was using her. I saw her as sperm receptacle. I didn’t care about what she said. Her worries were just annoyances. She did all the emotional labor in the relationship; I only thought about the fact that every now and then I got to have sex and receive some sincere affection during my darker moments.”

  He stopped. He breathed.

  “When I saw her smile, I realized I’d never stopped treating her like an object, only now I was aware of it. And she kept looking at me as if I were something precious. As if I deserved that devotion.

  But I didn’t deserve it. I don’t deserve it. And going on would have been worse than ending things.”

  Anton said nothing for a few seconds. Then he nodded, slowly.

  “You did the right thing.”

  The tone wasn’t one of moral approval. It was simple acknowledgment: you did the only thing you could do.

  The Mediator sensed a knot in the throat, or at least what, in Micheal’s body, corresponded to a knot in the throat. He wasn’t sure whether it was residual emotion or empathic interference. It didn’t matter.

  The melancholy remained.

  The Mediator felt a hand stroke the back of his neck, scratch through his tousled hair. And he felt the surprise and alarm flare through Micheal’s body.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted, jerking away.

  “I-I was trying to comfort you,” Anton said, flinching at the angry reaction. He didn’t dare look Micheal in the eyes when they stopped.

  Reality shattered.

  Or rather, it frayed. The sidewalk, the shops, Anton himself dissolved into chromatic filaments that slid away like water on vertical glass. Everything flowed without gravity, without direction, simply ceased to be where it had been.

  Eigengrau swallowed him.

  When Micheal opened his eyes again, he was lying face down, stomach and cheek pressed against a warm surface. The warmth was pervasive, almost organic. Like being immersed in amniotic fluid that had forgotten it was fluid.

  The surface beneath him pulsed with shifting, undefined colors. He pushed himself up on his arms, numb and sluggish at first, but gradually recovering an ordinary strength.

  Beneath him: a panel.

  As wide as his outstretched body. The colors inside it seethed in lazy, hypnotic vortices.

  He turned his head.

  Other panels, hundreds, thousands of them, stretched out in every direction, forming a surface that curved gently. In some, the colors boiled. In others they formed chromatic Bénard cells: currents rising and falling, hexagonal patterns emerging and collapsing, layers of red, blue, green cycling through impossible convection.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  He got to his knees, then to his feet. He swayed.

  The bone-white space emitted a hesitant light, threaded with chromatic veins that shifted between aragonite and topaz, amaranth and verdigris. They danced with an unreal elegance, like textile textures that had suddenly become conscious.

  But that space was not around him.

  It was beyond. Above, below, concepts that here lost their meaning. A sky-abyss that enveloped the structure on which he stood.

  He looked ahead. The surface curved upward, forming a wall that rose until it vanished. He looked behind him: the same. He was standing on a ring.

  A colossal toroid.

  Its surface, composed entirely of these pulsing panels, extended in every direction, following the impossible curvature of the ring. There were no longer 1s and 0s as before. Only colors in constant fluctuation, fluid movements obeying incomprehensible geometries.

  From time to time, in the nearby panels, something seemed to take shape. Fragments of faces. Outlines of objects. Shadows of scenes. But before he could focus, the colors mixed again.

  He walked.

  The panels held beneath his feet. Each step produced a subtle vibration, like a taut membrane. The curvature of the surface was barely perceptible, yet he knew that if he kept going he would complete a full circuit of the ring.

  He was standing on the skin of a toroidal structure suspended in a bone-white space crossed by dancing chromatic veins.

  His skin, instead, was completely adamantine, smooth and glossy. He was naked, yet sexless: the body possessed the aseptic neutrality of a mannequin, lean and long-limbed, identical to the one he had before the metamorphosis reshaped it into the muscular form he had assumed in the fantasy world into which he had been hurled.

  And somewhere, on that infinite surface of pulsing panels, he felt that something or someone was waiting for him.

  And she didn’t keep him waiting long.

  “Mikeyyy!”

  He heard a voice he knew all too well. A shiver ran through him—cold, electric. He turned.

  Audrey was there.

  She was running toward him. Mauve hair flowing freely, long and fluid. Irises of the same impossible color. She wore tight clothes—a black crop top shifted into mauve, short shorts in the same hue, with faint patterns barely visible. Knee-high socks. Everything mauve. Pale skin, almost luminescent against that chromatic uniformity. Sharp, symmetrical features. Beautiful in a way that was unsettling.

  She leapt onto him.

  Micheal staggered. She wrapped herself around him—legs locked around his torso, arms tight behind his neck. The warmth of her body was real, too real. He took a step back, then—instinctively—grabbed her ass to keep her from falling.

  He was terrified.

  And aroused.

  Had he possessed a penis in that moment, it would have been hard. But there was nothing. Only the smooth, adamantine surface where it should have been.

  And yet the arousal remained—disconnected from anatomy, a pure limbic discharge.

  She began kissing him. A kiss on the cheek. One on the neck. Then the other cheek. Small, light kisses, almost playful, yet heavy with an intimacy he had never asked for.

  Micheal restrained himself from touching her everywhere. His hands stayed fixed against her body—a muscular tension he struggled to maintain.

  Then Audrey kissed him deeply. On the mouth. Her tongue searching for his. Heat, pressure, saliva. Real.

  Micheal didn’t pull away.

  Not because he wanted to—but because he couldn’t.

  When the kiss broke, she slid down. Her legs unlocked from his torso. Her feet touched the ground—or whatever passed for ground here. She detached herself slowly, unhurriedly, her hands gliding from his neck to his shoulders, then away.

  She stood in front of him, smiling.

  Those mauve eyes stared at him. Amused.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  "There's something I missed much more, actually."

  And she touched him. Right there—where his penis should have been. Her fingers pressed against the adamantine surface, smooth, empty.

  The Mediator's arousal remained unaltered. In fact—it increased. But he wanted to jump on her. He wanted to have a cock. And he experienced this fact as yet another abuse she was perpetrating against him.

  "Shame," Audrey said, withdrawing her hand with studied slowness. "We'll make up for it when we get back home, right Mikey? I bet you can't wait."

  Her expression was sly. She knew exactly what she was doing.

  *Bitch. Fucking bitch,* the Mediator thought.

  "What are you doing here?" he said, affecting—poorly—detachment.

  "Don't be so harsh with me," she replied in a childish voice, shrill, saccharine. She scratched his chest with her nails—light, provocative. "You had a nice body before too, you know? But with muscles you become a real stallion."

  She moistened her lips. Slowly. Sensually.

  The Mediator didn't know what to say. He was anxious, confused. The body betrayed every attempt at control—tense, reactive, aroused against his will.

  "Anyway..."

  She gave him a push. Light—almost playful.

  But for him it was strong.

  He fell backward. Off-balance, with no chance of recovery. He ended up on a chair—which hadn't been there an instant before, but now was solid, real.

  He landed awkwardly. The body moved automatically—his arms ended up on the armrests. Immediately, two handcuffs erupted from the ultra-variegated, iridescent surface of the chair. They closed around his wrists with a sharp snap. Metallic. Definitive.

  The Mediator didn't struggle.

  Not out of pride. Out of calculation. Resisting was useless. He tried to stay calm—even though calm was an illusion, and he knew it.

  She looked down at him. Like a hawk staring at a field mouse from the sky. He was her morsel.

  Audrey smiled.

  "So," she said, crossing her arms under her breasts. "Let's talk a bit, Mikey. You have questions for me, I imagine."

  The tone was sweet. Almost maternal.

  But her mauve eyes were cold.

  He had so many questions. But he didn’t know where to begin. And in any case, he couldn’t believe her. How long had it been since he had promised himself never to stop doubting? She had just reminded him.

  “No, I don’t have anything to ask you.”

  “Really? You’ve seen Anton again after all this time—even if only you have seen him—and you don’t want to know why?” she said, feigning disappointment with calculated perfection, as if that remark had nullified every effort he’d made.

  “I do have a question.”

  “Go ahead, dear.”

  “What the fuck do you want from Anton? You said he ended up in our world too, right? Send him back. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “Aww, how sweet. You care that much, huh?”

  “He’s the only real friend I’ve ever had.”

  You can’t understand, you lunatic, he thought angrily.

  “I never said I don’t understand. On the contrary, I understand perfectly why you care so much. By now you must have realized that I know things about you that you have completely erased. Not only memories of bonds wiped away by your arrival in this world, but also fragments you had buried when your memory was not yet… let’s say, under control.”

  She sat sideways on his left thigh. She began drumming her fingers on his right thigh—slow, irregular, hypnotic.

  The Mediator gathered his courage.

  “How do you know these things? And why should I believe you?”

  “You don’t have to believe me. That’s irrelevant. What matters is that you know them.”

  “Why?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does. I won’t let you touch Anton.”

  She laughed. A crystalline, cruel laugh.

  “And what exactly do you plan to do, little pup? You’re tied to a chair. You’re powerless. Stay where you are and save your breath.”

  How do you deal with a monster like her? the Mediator thought, helpless.

  Audrey went on, her tone light.

  “Anyway, it would be more accurate to say Antea now. Anton has become a girl. His friend Mark—if he can still be called that, since you basically stole him away—renamed her. He spends most of his time trying to repress the urge to jump on her and fuck her. She’s become really hot, you know? I even envy her body a bit. And… well, you’ve seen me, right?”

  She laughed again, self-satisfied.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?! Why did she become a girl?”

  “Because she always wanted to be one, even though even now she denies it to herself. A repressed desire, buried deep. In a sense, her arrival in this world fulfilled the dearest and most hidden wish she ever had.”

  “I don’t believe it,” the Mediator said, his voice tight. “Anton wanting to be a woman? That’s… absurd.”

  “Absurd?” Audrey tilted her head. “She suppressed her true identity. Gender dysphoria never acknowledged, never processed. Hard to say why. Developing an early nihilistic bent, becoming moderately dissociated from reality… all of that led her to avoid the fundamental questions. The ones that would have allowed her to understand how she truly wanted to live. She chose the easier path. She’s just a coward.”

  She said it smiling—a malicious, razor-sharp smile.

  “What the fuck do you know about Anton?” The Mediator felt anger rising. “Don’t talk as if you knew him, bitch.”

  “Oh, look how fired up he gets. How sweet when he defends his beloved.”

  He stared at her, stunned.

  “Don’t make that face. I’m about to reveal an uncomfortable truth about your past, sweetheart. Anton always fooled around on the surface of his unconscious, like a good little coward. But you know what? You’re a coward too. He always wanted to be a woman. You always wanted him to become one.”

  A pause. Calculated. Surgical.

  “We could call it ‘ Proxy gender dysphoria.’ What do you think?”

  The Mediator felt something collapse inside him.

  No.

  It wasn’t true.

  It couldn’t be true.

  And yet, as he denied it, something deep down—where buried memories lay like submerged debris—shifted. Trembled. As if that sentence had awakened an awareness he had always possessed but never acknowledged.

  “You’re lying,” he said. His voice came out hoarse.

  “Am I?” Audrey tilted her head slightly. Her mauve eyes glittered, amused. “Then why are you so shaken? If you were truly convinced I was lying, you’d just be angry. Instead, you’re terrified.”

  She stood up, then straddled him, settling onto his lap in the typical riding position. She kissed him. This time, he didn’t respond with his mouth. He was dazed.

  Then Audrey brought her lips close to his ear. Her neck at close range, pale skin almost luminescent against the mauve of her hair.

  “Your unconscious wanted Anton. But as her. A version you could fuck without feeling wrong. You never thought about it consciously—too straight for that. But every time an intelligent girl bored you, every time none of them felt right… it was because she wasn’t him.”

  A pause. She drummed her fingers on the Mediator’s adamantine chest. Slowly.

  “And Anton? Same exact mess, from the other side. She loved you. She wanted to be yours. But only if she were a woman. Dysphoria and desire mixed so well that even she could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. Perfectly reciprocated love—buried so deep that neither of you ever saw it.”

  She stood up. She detached herself from him with fluid, almost feline movements. She took a few steps back.

  The Mediator’s mind was a pre-verbal broth. Thoughts unable to take shape. Nameless emotions piling up, pressing in, shattering before they could solidify into anything recognizable.

  Audrey turned her back and stretched. The tight shorts wrapped a round, firm, protruding ass, the kind that drags the eye whether you want it to or not. Full but toned, the perfect curve between back and thighs. She said, “Ahhh,” with deliberately exaggerated pleasure, arching her back slightly so the fabric pulled even tighter.

  She turned around.

  “Are you shocked? Why? You should be happy. Your beloved exists for real now. I can already see her chasing you down to latch onto your cock. Can’t you?”

  Her smile looked so sincere that the Mediator felt disgust.

  She stepped closer again, bent at the waist to ninety degrees, their faces very close. They stared at each other.

  She gently blew on his lips.

  Allodynia.

  As if she had spat a micro-hurricane, the Mediator’s chair was flung backward, like Sweeney Todd’s. He jolted. The handcuffs at his wrists came loose.

  He fell into a chromatic vortex that had formed behind him.

  And was swallowed.

  He ended up in a streaked, laminar liquid flow.

  His cenesthesia became unmanageable, bombarded by emotional impulses of every kind and by simultaneous flashbulb memories. It was as if his consciousness had turned into water at its critical state. A superposition of thousands, perhaps more, nonlocal alternative mental states.

  His consciousness was the point where the information stored in the toroid and entropy began a showdown to the last paradox.

  Until some fragments of scenes detonated before his eyes, as if they had won a mnemonic battle royale and forced themselves into reality. They reified one after another, while cenesthesia slowly came back under control.

  He saw again the notebook bound in black.

  This time everything was blurred, except for the inscription.

  Sharp. Motionless. Inescapable.

  My wind is the pulpit

  of a female specter.

  The transition from that fragment to the next was abrupt, as if it had taken place within the ocular saccades.

  He was panting. Or rather, his consciousness occupied a state whose physical equivalent would have been panting.

  He suddenly found himself in a room. It looked like a hotel room. Decent: sand-colored walls, warm yet impersonal lighting, a double bed with a geometric bedspread pulled tight with excessive precision, a minimal desk pushed up against the wall, heavy curtains filtering an indistinct exterior.

  “…that depth in conversations between people doesn’t exist. People are condemned to be superficial.”

  It was Anton’s voice. The tone clashed with the content of the message, too flat, almost indifferent.

  The Mediator found himself inside Micheal’s body. He was in his underwear. He was trying to restrain himself. But for what reason?

  He misaligned his attentional window from Micheal’s. To his left there was a large mirror mounted on a white wardrobe. In the left portion of the peripheral visual field, the one that Micheal, absorbed in his attempt to rein in his restless imagination, ignored, he saw Anton reflected in the mirror, sitting on the bed as he spoke. He was no longer paying attention to what he was saying, but he registered with precision the point toward which his gaze was directed.

  He was staring at his cock with her eyes wide open. He looked away, then focused on it again.

  The cock was half hard. The bulge extremely swollen. If the eyes of that body had been connected to what the Mediator was perceiving at that moment, they would have been wide with disbelief.

  Then, as if the transition had taken place during the eye saccades - again- he found himself in another place. His consciousness jolted.

  In front of him stood a girl.

  Standing. Tight jeans. A simple blue sweatshirt. Delicate features. She was looking up at him.

  The room around them was clearly hers. Tidy, feminine, cared for without ostentation. Posters on the walls, neatly aligned shelves. Here and there, though, the continuity of the space was interrupted: patches of watery resin the color of strontianite sealed corners and fragments of wall. Like static wounds in the fabric of reality. Motionless. Glossy.

  Her voice reached him filtered, almost unreal. Soft, coaxing.

  “Love, why that face? Aren’t you happy to see me?”

  She smiled. A restrained, uncertain smile. Not fake, but fragile.

  Micheal muttered something. The words came out without passing through any conscious decision.

  “Of course I’m happy to see you.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it.”

  A pause.

  “Please don’t start.”

  She lowered her gaze for a moment, then raised it again. Dark eyes, deep, heavy with a question she didn’t want to put into words.

  “Will you give me a kiss?”

  She was taller than the Asian girl. Her lips were closer.

  The female specter… thought the Mediator as he contemplated her, aroused.

  Their lips brushed, then met. The contact was warm, real.

  Micheal grabbed her ass, one hand on each cheek, through the tight jeans. The stretched fabric, the full, firm shape under his fingers.

  The arousal exploded—not gradual, instantaneous, violent.

  That ass was perfect. Better than Audrey’s. Similar volume, but better proportions. Higher, more toned, the curve more precise. As if it had been sculpted specifically for his hands.

  The kiss deepened, passionate. Micheal held her tighter, his fingers sinking into the compact firmness of her buttocks.

  Then he tried to lift her. She helped, letting herself be picked up. He gave her a smack on the right cheek as he held her around the waist with his left arm. He closed his eyes while kissing her. When he opened them again, as their tongues writhed against each other, he saw with horror that he wasn’t kissing the female specter, but Anton.

  Blackout.

  A retch. The body jerked. He felt the pressure of Audrey’s ass on his head, then nothing. She had jumped away.

  “Fuck! That’s disgusting. Be careful not to puke on me, asshole. You’ll dirty my shoes.”

  He could see her legs, the skimpy, elegant mauve dress. The right word to describe what was going on in his mind was “shitstorm.” The vomit surged up his esophagus. He shot up and threw up.

  “Bleah,” said Audrey.

  “And I thought love was supposed to be something beautiful.”

  The Mediator felt besieged by the other identity fragments. He tried to keep control. In his head something seemed to have changed, but it was impossible to say what. He was panting.

  The kitchen. He was back.

  He moved away from the vomit, sitting elsewhere, trying to pull himself together while Audrey said something to him.

  “Don’t waste time. Get up.”

  The Mediator stayed still, as if he hadn’t heard her. But he had heard her, he just didn’t have the strength to get up. He wanted to rest.

  “Didn’t you hear me, fuck?” She raised her voice, came closer, grabbed him by an arm and lifted him effortlessly, then dragged him and dumped him awkwardly onto the chair he’d been sitting on before she entered the kitchen and set the Peripeteia in motion.

  Then she sat on his cock gracefully, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  She rubbed against him. His cock hardened. The Mediator started touching her, spontaneously.

  “Hey, hey, hey, keep your hands in check, pup. We can’t do it now.”

  The Mediator rested his lips on her left shoulder and his hands on her legs, and calmed down.

  “I want to show you something.”

  In front of them a tangle of dynamic, delicate mauve whorls formed. Inside it, a mist of the same color appeared. The whorls quickly spread out and disintegrated, while the mist expanded in midair. Within that expanding mist an image formed, growing at the same pace. When the very rapid process came to an end, they had before them an extremely well-defined screen.

  How many fucking things can she do? thought the Mediator, who was anxious.

  On the screen, a high, angled shot, as if taken from a low rooftop or a second-floor window.

  The street was stone and compacted mud, narrow and irregular. On either side, low buildings with flaking walls, a few oil lamps hanging and casting patches of yellowish light.

  At the center of the frame, Antea—frozen at the moment of acceleration.

  Her body slightly leaning forward, her right foot just lifted from the ground, the short black skirt rising with the momentum. Tight black top, loose hair suspended in midair. Long legs tensed in the effort to walk faster, her face taut, eyes fixed on the carriage.

  Behind her, Nahely and Mark—still, both slightly turned toward the blonde woman who was hugging the… her old man? Mark wore a neutral expression; Nahely looked curious.

  In front of Antea, the carriage—polished wood, iron-reinforced wheels. Empty, waiting.

  Everything motionless. The exact moment when Antea had quickened her pace to get away from the stares, captured in an unnatural sharpness.

  The Mediator’s eyes flew open. His heart began pounding hard in his chest.

  “She’s identical to your ‘female specter.’ Crazy, right?”

  The Mediator stretched out his arm, as if he wanted to touch the screen.

  Anton, he thought.