There’s a blur of movement in my periphery.
I twist for it, sword ready—but it’s too late.
The moment of distraction has given a nail-swordsman an opportunity, and the beast has cashed it by burying its sword-like claws in my sister’s stomach.
Chapter Thirty-Two
As I behead my sister’s attacker, I make the fastest decision of my life.
If I don’t use my powers, Asha and her husband will end up homicidally insane, as will their fellow Escapists.
No. Not on my watch.
Feeling like I’m throwing off shackles, I summon my dreamwalking ability and heal Asha’s wound. Then I counter Phobetor’s gravity reversal with one of my own, adding in extra air resistance for good measure.
Kojo’s lethal plummet slows to the gentle downward drift of a feather.
I start to jolt him awake, but another tendril leaps out of the magma sky and strikes his head. Again, a brain hologram shows up, and as I watch in horror, my brother-in-law is Overtaken.
Then this happens to another Escapist.
And another.
I shake off my stunned paralysis and channel all of my terror and grief into jolting the rest of the Escapists awake.
To my shock, it works, though this is exponentially more people than the maximum I’ve jolted before.
Asha must realize our power embargo is at an end because my shoulder heals, as do the other aches and pains in my body.
Phobetor gestures again.
Felix’s suit melts around him until nothing is left as every single one of our remaining allies dies in similarly torturous ways—and no matter how much I push back with my power, I’m unable to stop the slaughter.
Soon, Asha and I are the only ones left, and our disguises disappear, leaving us looking like twins again.
Staring at the monsters around us with anguished eyes, Asha jerkily makes a circle with her hand.
The nearby monsters turn into vapor mid-leap.
I do the same, trying to ignore the fear squeezing my chest, the awful certainty that we are losing.
“We need to keep fighting,” I tell Asha when her gaze meets mine, but I can see the same despair written on her face.
Still, her back straightens, and she nods grimly.
We turn to attack a new crop of monsters, but we don’t get far.
Two new bolts of magma snake from the sky toward us.
Asha extends her hand, her features contorting in an echo of Kojo’s strained expression.
The fiery tendrils shimmer in the air and dissipate.
Two more show up, and Asha destroys them too.
In the distance, Phobetor’s figure grows impossibly larger. “End them!” his terrifyingly beautiful voice booms, and millions of his minions close ranks around us, like a hangman’s noose.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Multibody technique!” I shout as I leave my body.
Leveraging my panic and desperation, I make two of me, then the two make four, and those four make eight, and so on until my powers fail on the twentieth split—but by then, there are more than a million me, for such is the power of exponential growth.
Asha has done the same, but faster and one extra time, so there are over two million versions of her on the battlefield now.
Each of us is hungry for battle.
The only problem with splitting so many times is that it leaves very little power to do anything flashy to the monsters. No matter. We kill them with our katanas, while Ashas do the same with their swords.
One of me kills a vulture and an angler in a single strike.
Nearby, a version of my sister beheads a tardigrade and disembowels a nail-swordsman.
“How about you and I act as generals from my dream palace?” I pant. “I think the rest of us won’t miss us.”
She nods, and I use what little power I have left to teleport the two of us into that very familiar environment as the legions of ourselves continue cutting through the monsters toward Phobetor.
Once inside the dream palace, I face her. “What’s the new plan?”
In the time I ask the question, hundreds more monsters are slain by us on the battlefield.
“I don’t know.” Asha looks hunted. “Maybe we figure out the Two as One thing?”
“Even if we do, then what?”
She chews on her bottom lip. “The copies of us could hold back the subdream monsters as we approach Phobetor and use the mystery skill to kill him.”
As she speaks, the other us advance toward our enemy.
Worryingly, Phobetor doesn’t look at all intimidated.
“We’re overleveraged on dreamwalker powers,” I say. “I could barely teleport the two of us here.”
Asha squares her shoulders. “Let’s think positive. Maybe the mystery technique needs only a little power. If so, I could spare that.”
“Fine. Let’s focus on figuring out the Two as One bit.” I rake my fingers through my fiery hair. “The stress isn’t helping jog my memory at all.”
Asha nods grimly. “I’m drawing a blank too—exactly as if there were a black window blocking my childhood from me. Except I could never locate one, same as you.”