The man turned to look at Nona. So did the horse.
Then the girl’s voice was in her mind. I am Colene.
I am Nona, she replied in her mind, amazed. What kind of magic was this?
Hello, Nona. We are friends. And the thought was so sincere that she believed it.
CHAPTER 2—COLENE
COLENE gazed at the young woman. She was lovely, in a red dress, no, a knee-length tunic, with thick black, no, dark brown hair. She was the anchor person, obviously. What a relief! Colene already knew this was a nice woman, because her mind was nice.
The language was unfamiliar, of course. But that didn’t matter, with Seqiro’s telepathic ability.
However, that did not necessarily mean that this reality was safe. They had to learn more about it, in a hurry. They had just escaped an awful situation in another reality, and had some real problems to work out between themselves, and some significant unwinding to do. New trouble was the last thing they needed—but they had to be prepared for it.
Nona reminded Colene of herself of a few weeks before. That was funny, because Colene was fourteen and Nona was evidently several years older. It was the naïveté and hope and underlying desperation of her situation, all coming through as background emotion: Colene had been that way, and Nona was that way now. So it was as if the four of them were on a fantastic roller-coaster ride, without seat belts, hanging on as the ride became impossibly wild—and now suddenly a fifth passenger had dropped into the car.
Are you the Megaplayers? Nona asked.
The whats? What was this? Oh, Nona thought they were godlike figures, because of their sudden appearance from seemingly nowhere.
We are travelers. Colene clarified. Not gods. Just three people. A suicidal girl from a science world, a decent man from a magic world, and a woman who remembers the future and not the past. And a horse. He is Seqiro, and he is telepathic.
What?
He can read minds. That is how we’re talking. We’re bypassing language. That is, what I think is being translated into your language by your brain, and what you think is being rendered into my language. That’s how it works.
This is amazing magic!
“I can remember it better if you speak aloud when possible,” Provos remarked.
“And this is Provos,” Colene said immediately, projecting the thought to Nona. Seqiro cooperated so well that it was just as if she herself were telepathic. But without the horse, it would not have been possible.
Nona faced the older woman. “Provos,” she agreed.
“And Darius.”
Nona faced the man. “Darius.” She had no problem with speech; it was just that she spoke a different language.
Then Nona turned and gestured toward a man of about her own age who was approaching with a nondescript white dog with a yellow collar. His clothing was solid blue. “Stave,” she said. She indicated the dog. “Cougar.”
Then she faced the man and dog and spoke in her own language. Colene listened just enough to verify that it was completely alien, as she had expected, then tuned in on Nona’s mind again.
“…and when I turned back, they appeared from nowhere,” Colene translated. Seqiro could send to them all simultaneously, if Colene asked him to and focused on it, but this was easier now that the introductions had been made. “They say they are not the Megaplayers, and their size suggests that this is true. But they must have remarkable magic, because—” She hesitated, and Colene caught the fringe of a complex network of concerns.
Colene stopped translating, intent on the thought. There was danger of some kind, she realized, but she couldn’t pick up its nature. Nona meant them no harm, but someone else might. Not Stave, not the dog, but someone.
“I think no one here can understand us,” Colene said for herself. “Verbally, I mean. So we might as well talk freely. But someone else may. I’ll ask as soon as she stops explaining to Stave.”
Stave was looking duly amazed. Now Colene touched his mind. Hello, she thought.
His gaze shifted from Nona to Colene. His jaw dropped. Mind-talk magic! he thought.
Nona evidently was telling him the same thing. No, she wasn’t; she was saying that she was guessing about the visitors. Why was that, since Colene had explained about Seqiro’s mental ability?
Then Nona paused, and Colene asked her: “What danger?”
Now it focused. Nona answered directly and silently, but Colene spoke the words again for the benefit of the others. “The despots rule here. They take whatever they want. I must take you to them, or my village will be punished. They will treat you well, until they know how they can use you. But you must not let them know about your mind-magic, for if they knew you could fathom their minds, they would kill you instantly.”
There it was. “Why?”
“Because there is no magic of that nature here, and they will fear it. It is their great power of magic that enables them to hold us in thrall. They destroy any theow who evinces magic other than illusion.” Theow was an obscure word meaning peon or peasant; Colene dredged it out of her memory because it fit. Nona’s concept had nuances of servitude, poverty, and horror; it seemed that the common folk suffered here as they did elsewhere, while those in power exercised their prerogatives ruthlessly.
“But you have magic,” Colene said, reading this ability in Nona. There had been a time when she did not believe in magic, but she had experienced too many strange things recently to doubt it any longer. She had had no personal experience with it, but Darius was a magician in his home reality.
“I am the ninthborn of the ninth generation,” Nona thought and Colene spoke. “I have the magic of the nines. I can conjure, float, attract, transform, and heal. But only my mother and Stave know, for it must be secret until I find the Megaplayers. The despots would kill me. They would know that I seek to overthrow them and restore grace to our world.”
And so Nona had become an anchor: one of the five people who defined the slice of reality that crossed an infinite number of other realities, enabling them to travel to completely strange worlds. She had sought the Megaplayers and inadvertently tuned in on a Virtual Mode. She was surely a special person, with one terrific surprise coming.
But could Nona’s access to the Virtual Mode help her solve the problem of her world? Perhaps only if the mystic folk she sought were on one of the realities this Mode crossed.
“What are we going to do?” Darius asked Provos in his own language. Colene picked up on it because Seqiro translated the thoughts to her mind.
“We visited the despots, where Queen Glomerula sought to seduce you and Knave Naylor sought to rape Colene,” Provos replied promptly in the same language. She did not know more than a few words of Colene’s language, but with Seqiro present it made no difference.
Colene jumped. She had not had a lot of experience with Provos, but understood that the woman remembered backwards: she knew her future but not her past. Suddenly Colene appreciated how useful an ability that could be.
“You seem very sure,” Darius said wryly.
“I am. My memory is quick when we spend enough time in a single reality.”
Do they succeed? she thought to Provos.
“No,” But the woman smiled obliquely, almost before the question.
Colene was relieved. “Then let’s go to the castle and get this over with,” she said. “We’ll be moving on through the Virtual Mode soon, but Nona deserves to know her role in this.”