NEW YORK CITY, 4/25/2023.

TARGET: ADAM H. JAMESON.
LOCATION: PENTHOUSE SUITE.
SECURITY DETAIL: 12 ARMED SECURITY GUARDS.
MISSION: INFILTRATE PENTHOUSE AND USE ASSET TO GAIN INFO ON PROJECT “CHIRON”.

The security guard hit the ground with a dull thud. Red advanced up the hallway with her pistol out and gestured for Hannah to follow after her with a single command of her hand.

Hannah crouched up the hallway. The tails of her blue jacket nearly touched the ground beneath her and her bare knees were pressed up against the reflective black wall to her left, located in the center of the skyscraper and this weird atrium they were in. The elevator was in the center of this skyscraper, which she thought was unusual.

More gunfire. Red vanished and Hannah waited with baited breath. A single bead of sweat hit the back of her right hand and she shakily reached up to wipe the rest of the sweat off her forehead.

A guard impacted against the wall ahead of her and he slid down to hit the tiled floor in front of her and crumple into a heap. His handgun fell to the floor with a loud clatter.

“RAISE THE ALARM, WE GOT INTRUDERS!”

“Fuck,” Hannah whispered. Ideally, Red would take them out fast enough that they wouldn’t get to that part and call for backup. Ideally, there wouldn’t be any killing either, but that hadn’t worked out. She glanced back at the stairway access far behind her and the guard’s body that rested against the door, with one hole in his chest and another in his forehead.

The situation just got so much worse.

Hannah crept forward toward the end of the hallway and peered around the corner to her left. Blood splattered on the wall and the corpse of another security guard collapsed in front of Red, who crouched down and aimed down the hallway on her left.

The elevator dinged and both looked to the doors, which opened seamlessly. Hannah pulled her head back around and checked behind her, where a security guard stood with his Glock aimed at her forehead.

“The fuck is a kid doing here?” He waved his gun toward her in a dismissive motion, and she slowly stood up with her hands raised. The thud of her heart reminded her that she was alive for the moment, and with another gesture from the guard, she rounded the corner to stand in front of the elevator.

Four men with AK-104s, kevlar vests, military boots, and night-vision gear stepped off the elevator and surrounded her, their rifles aimed at her.

Oh fuck, oh fuck.

Hannah felt the world go hazy. Her vision swam in distortions, and the lights went out around them. Four bodies hit the ground in rapid succession, and one of them fired off.

The lights turned back on and Hannah shuddered. Her hand shook in front of her blue jacket, and she felt a curious warmth on her stomach, spreading down to her hip; soaking through the pockets of her shorts to slide down her leg.

“Hannah?” Red stood beside her and Hannah lifted a crimson-stained hand up toward her face. Her breath came in rapid, shallow gasps, eyes wide and focused solely on what was on her fingers.

“You’ve been shot, it missed your artery.” Red glanced toward the heavily-reinforced doorway that separated them from accomplishing their mission and swore under her breath in German. “I will bandage you.”

Hannah let out a quiet whimper. Her breathing had not improved; the rapid, shallow breathing was quickly turning to hyperventilation.

Red grabbed Hannah by the shoulders and maneuvered her over to sit beside the wall, where she pushed her into a sitting position. Bandages and gauze seemed to appear beside her with a faint flicker of the lights.

The elevator doors closed with a quiet whoosh behind them.

“We have to finish the mission,” Red told her firmly. “You will live through this; you are strong. I will bring you to him. You break his mind; we leave, we recover, we get paid. Do you understand?”

Hannah’s eyes stared blankly ahead. The world seemed to blur in front of her.

I’ve been… shot? 

It felt more like a rock had hit her, a pebble launched by a kid.

The elevator dinged and the doors opened again. Red grabbed her MP7 and sprayed it in the direction of the doors; the rapid-fire SMG shredded through the doors and sent wooden fragments spraying through the air and empty casings to the floor.

The elevator doors closed and the pain hit Hannah like a train crashing through a wall.

“OH GOD,” Hannah yelled. The pain. It was worse than a hot knife being slowly inserted, worse than the worst injury she’d ever had before in her life, and far worse than she had the words to describe at the moment.

The training she’d undergone with Red bubbled up into her thoughts. The hydrostatic shock to the fluids in her body after the bullet had impacted push her fluids out of the newly created bullet hole in her torso.

Hannah raised both shaking hands up toward her face. A door to their left beeped three times.

The reinforced metal door swung open and a man walked through the doors. No, not a man. A tank. At least, the build of one.

A living giant.

He held a machine gun in his arms, an M240 she recognized from the lessons Red had taught her. The barrel swung toward them and light glinted off the glasses the man wore, although he wore only a standard osprey-style light armor set. It glistened in the air, something she hadn’t seen before with armor.

Red raised the MP7 before he could fire and shot a rapid burst of four bullets at his center mass; the bullets clattered to the ground with four distinct pings against the tile.

“My turn,” he squeezed the trigger of the weapon and the world went black. The sensation of being squeezed into a tight space made her shudder, and the world came back into focus with them on the other side of the elevator.

“Liquid armor.” Red vanished once again, which left Hannah alone.

The deafening roar of the machine gun sent splinters through her mind and she clapped bloody hands over her ears.

The edges of her vision pulsed to the rhythm of the bullets. Dust and ceramic from the walls and wood paneling from the elevator littered the floor around her.

“I can’t faint,” she whispered. When did she get four feet? Why were they blurry?

Time didn’t exist anymore.

There was only the aggravating, burning sensation in her stomach, and the warmth on her hands, and a taste of copper in her mouth.

“Hannah,” pain rippled across her cheek and she opened her eyes. A face swam into view with a few new scratches on it. White hair, and ice blue eyes. She opened her eyes wider and gasped, her hands immediately moved to her abdomen only to touch layers of gauze.

“We complete the mission,” Red urged, and she raised her hand; a small pill swam in and out of focus between her fingers. “Painkillers. You must focus. You still have to break his mind.”

The gross taste of the painkiller touched her tongue and she swallowed it before she could think about the stronger, coppery taste.

Pressure from Red’s arm on her back pushed her into a sitting position, and then up onto her feet. Dust and tiles littered the ground, as well as bodies. More bodies than she anticipated. There had only been 12 guards, but there were at least twice that many in these small hallways.

“What…” she trailed off. Red shushed her gently.

“Save your energy. You have to break his mind.”

Dimly, she recognized Red was bleeding too. The acrid smell of burned plastic and clothing flitted through her nostrils and she turned her head toward the elevator, or what was left of it.

Much of the marble around the elevator had been shredded by bullets, which left the bare machinery visible, and open air at the center. Hannah focused on the hallway floor tile and the white and teal coloring.

Move one foot in front of the other. Keep walking.

Her blue sneakers were stained with so much red. Her shorts were soaked. 

How much blood have I lost?

The vault door hung open and off of one hinge. The wall to the right of the vault was scorched black; most of the tiles were in a pile with only skeletal remains.

On the other side of the vault door, a rich mahogany table was overturned on plush red carpet. Bullet holes through the table let her see the riddled remains of a guard who had his back to the ground, a rifle still in his left hand, and his knees folded underneath him.

The glass walls of the penthouse had been reinforced, and none of the bullets through the fight had pierced them. Expensive diamond chandeliers lit the room, one of which was dripping gore from off of it and onto the carpet below, and a dismembered body that rested beneath it. The head was simply gone.

Her eyes roved over the many bloodstains and bodies on the plush carpet to finally rest on the shaking form of a man in a bathrobe and soap still in his hair. He had a strong chin, a straight nose, blue eyes, red hair, and he was struggling against a pair of handcuffs that kept him tied to a stripper pole.

“A kid!?” he yelled. He had no discernable accent beyond the stereotypical American, not even a New Yorker accent graced his panicked words. “The fuck are you doing with that child? Listen, if you let me go, I’ll give you whatever you want! I s-swear to God, I’ll give you anything you want!”

Red walked Hannah to him and lowered her gently to the floor beside the man, who looked at the teenager as if he had seen a ghost. His already pale skin lost all color, and his eyes looked like they were trying to escape from his skull. His left arm strained uselessly against the handcuffs.

Either he didn’t know he could break his thumb to escape, or he was too much of a pansy to go through with it. I’m surprised she didn’t handcuff his ankles together.

“Break him,” Red instructed. Hannah tapped the bandaid on her face; the memory came flooding back via Psychometry.

How to Break A Mind by Hannah Smith.

Hannah slapped her hand on the man’s forehead. It didn’t really matter what she touched, as long as it was skin contact, but she thought the forehead made perfect sense.

Her eyes unfocused. Her irises shifted through various human eye colors while she infiltrated this rich man’s mind.

Minds were never the same. Even the most well-organized minds had various defensive techniques to stop people from infiltrating them. That’s where they underestimated her; every organized mind had holes, everyone had a weak spot, a flaw in their mental barrier, something they feared, they were allergic to, something they needed to hide from, even if they pretended not to—especially if they pretended not to.

Hannah floated in the mindspace. Her brain interpreted his signals to create a landmark, where he had anchored himself. He’d had mind resistance training of some kind, to keep himself from divulging secrets on accident.

His brain created the space of a square house. The walls were black, the lawn perfectly mowed, a chimney on top of the modern minimalist display. There were no windows. Of course not; windows let things in. There wasn’t even a door. It was a bunker more than a house, a place to hide and wait things out, not a place to be lived in.

Not a place of memories to be created, kept, cherished. A place only meant to allow survival, of the barest fashion.

Hannah pressed her hand against the smooth surface of the walls. The human brain was capable of incredible detail, able to conjure extremely detailed images in the blink of an eye, but it was imperfect. Many mindscapers were practiced artists, but every artist had a flaw.

They were only human.

A snake swam through the surface of the house. After all, what if the walls were made of amber?

Her suggestion pushed her version of his mind fortress back against him. What if the walls were made of amber?

Many were trained to keep a mental image of their mindscape and focus only on it while they were under attack. If they thought of something else, their concentration wavered, which created ripples in the mindscape. Ripples she could exploit. It was about finding what would break their concentration; how strange, or mundane, she could make things until she broke their defenses and could look through their memories.

The walls didn’t budge. The snake vanished as if it had never been. The man lived in the top floor of a skyscraper and had reinforced windows, heights wouldn’t likely be a fear, but maybe something that lived in the ground.

Gophers are eating your shoes, Hannah pushed.

Gophers? eating my shoes? the mind responded, and her hand sunk through the wall.

People thought that well formed mental barricades were about brute force, but that wasn’t what she’d experienced. Or, not in normal humans. Metahumans might be different. What worked for her most often was the unpredictability of a disorganized mind to a well-organized mind. The chaotic nature of her thoughts, their continued surprise at her appearance, taking advantage of any internalized misogyny many of these old boomers had at seeing their forces decimated by a teen idiot and a single metahuman with fire and shadow and bullets, worked to create a powerful cocktail.

Inside the mental house. The mindscape didn’t show the interior of an actual house, but rather, a shifting mass of organized shapes. Organization in the face of chaos.

Hannah looked around the room, forced by her mind into three dimensions with walls that she could explore. She could feel the pushback of the organized mind against the infiltrator. He was stronger than her, but it wouldn’t take much longer to crack his brain.

More often than not, it wasn’t strength that won these battles. Many of these people had powerful minds, well-organized, cultivated and carefully constructed to serve them the best they could.

What won was ingenuity, and momentum.

Momentum was a powerful principle, in and out of the mindscape, even with time factored much differently here.

Hannah stepped around the objects. They were distractions. What she needed would be closer to his core, his constructed identity that housed this mindspace. She scanned the walls for a door, then looked upwards. A mindscape could be formed into a three-dimensional space, but that didn’t mean that it had to apply to real-world rules of space. He liked being high up.

She pictured herself on the ceiling and moved there in an instant. Gravity held little meaning here. Her knees touched the ceiling, and she pushed against his mind.

There are worms in your nose, tickling your nosehairs.

In MY NOSE? came the response. For a split second, the ceiling shimmered.

He was getting faster.

Bats are doorknobs.

What? No, kid.

Hannah straightened. Distantly, she knew, Red was watching over her body, and she was staring blankly at the guy with the gun leaning behind the mahogany table… the bullets hadn’t penetrated through his armor. He was faking it. She could sense his mind working, even if she was too deep in Adam’s mindspace to do much about it.

Red was in trouble. But she couldn’t leave now; there were only three ways out of the mindscape. She could leave willingly, the mindscaper could push her out, or someone could remove her physical contact and force her to leave.

I like your carpets.

Really? Thanks, I got them—

The ceiling shimmered. Rich people could sometimes be suckers for compliments on things they spent money on that they hoped people would notice, but were never noticed. It was a rare success, and in this case, it worked.

Hannah found herself standing in an empty field. He was there, a construct of his mind. He was taller, leaner, and had more muscle. He wore a track suit and stood in sunshine, alone. A brook babbled ahead of him.

“You could just let me have the information,” she spoke. Her voice distorted for a moment while the information bridged the gap; then refocused, and he reacted to it by turning toward her.

“Do you know who I work for? Do you know how well-trained those fucking security people were supposed to be? Do you have ANY idea how humiliating it is to watch your entire private security get obliterated by a single person, GUARDING A FUCKING TEENAGER!?” he screamed at her, his face distorted, spittle flew toward her face; she mentally wiped it away before it could touch her.

“And we’ll leave you alive if you give us the information we want.” Hannah scanned the area. People liked to hide things in plain sight, shaping information into anything they wanted. He hadn’t been the smartest with his, though; it was the brook. Being this close to his constructed mind let little things slip by; he viewed information like water, navigated through tunnels in the internet, droplets of knowledge that tapped into his phone, moisture in the air like radio signals pushing information around and through barriers to be accessed, interpreted, read, consumed.

Water.

“I’m not giving you shit. Get the fuck out of my fucking mind, you fucking child.” He reached out to grab her, a mindspace-physical reaction to her mind digging so deeply so quickly into his mind. A matter of guesswork and continually catching the other off guard had enraged him to the point of trying to strangle her.

She couldn’t really blame him for fighting back, even if he was trying to hurt her.

Hannah pushed on his mind and reappeared behind him, at the edge of the brook. His mind sent more details; the humidity in the air, the dirt that crunched under her foot when she pushed against the ground to reach down into the flowing water.

Her fingers brushed against the information and she focused on the information she needed, and the memory he’d have of viewing it.

Project “CHIRON”. A top-secret military intelligence project in association with some shady alien-tech dealers.

A memory appeared within the mindscape; a hand, reaching into a drawer to pull out a folder. A code: 46, 25, 18, AA, punched into a small lock. The drawer was made out of a reinforced metal material of some kind she hadn’t encountered before, and lit up. There were no shadows within the drawer, and the file rested on top of a clear glass support.

“S L E E P ! ! !” Hannah ROARED, a burst of psychic energy COMMANDED his mindspace to heed her will. This was the most brute force she used in her mind-breaking.

“I’m not tired,” Adam grunted. Hannah raised her hand out of the water and turned toward him, noting the ring on his left hand.

“Your ring is broken,” she pushed. The world rippled and he quickly checked his ring. The world pulsed again, and he fell into a deep nothingness, straight through the floor of the mindspace.

Hannah lurched forward and gasped. His head lolled to the side and she clenched her teeth.

“Behind you!” Hannah yelled, her hand extending to point at the guard behind the mahogany table. Red turned just as he opened fire, a HK416 on his chest. Dust sprayed through the air and crimson splattered the table; Red lowered her pistol and checked the graze on her right arm, which meant both her arms were wounded now.

“I am fine,” Red assured her, “where is the file?”

“In this,” Hannah pointed to dresser on the far side of the room. “It’s locked, the code is Four-Six, Two-Five, One-Eight, the letter A twice.”

Red made her way over to the other side of the room with her pistol in the hand of her good arm. Hannah slid off the man she’d been partially propped up against and hit the ground with a dull thud and a muttered “oof”.

Adam snored beside her, still chained to the stripper pole. Hannah resisted the urge to kick his face and break his nose.

“I got it,” Red straightened and quickly made her way back across the room toward Hannah. “We are leaving.”

“I won’t miss this place, fam,” Hannah quipped before the world went dark and the squeezing sensation returned.