“My letters have been intercepted, and the results have been as expected. Henry and General Washington continue to be astounded at Howe’s inexplicable refusal to finish off the Continental Army. It makes me smile.”

I stared at the pie way too long to convince myself that it wasn’t mine. But there was no mistaking the small impressions that my fingers had left on the crust that were now baked in to the finished product.

“Can I help you with something?” One of the waitresses was setting down a big tray of apples next to my pie. Her jacket was covered in some kind of dust, her blond hair was frazzled, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in days.

“No, no. Was just admiring the dessert selection.”

“Yeah it is something else. Well, we’ll be bringing it out to the patio a bit later, so...”

“Thanks.”

I walked out of the kitchen reluctantly and went to find Duncan. He hadn’t even made it out of the foyer, where he was talking to a group of people whom I didn’t recognize.

“There you are, Jen. I was wondering where you had run off to. This is Tad, one of the LPs of our newest fund and his wife Julia.”

“Nice to meet you.”

I proceeded to nod along as Tad recounted in great detail their summer in the south of France. Eventually, the waiters appeared with little plates of Petit fours, so I knew it was time to go pie hunting.

The bigger desserts had been arranged in a buffet out on the deck and by the time I got to the pie, it was already half gone. I grabbed two slices and went to find Duncan.

“Here Dunc, some of my delicious homemade pie.”

Duncan looked at me quizzically.

“Oh, right. I almost forgot you brought that over. An odd choice by Jeff to have the dessert be potluck, but he’s always looking for weird ways to save money.”

“Yeah, strange. Well, cheers!”

We clinked our forks together and each took a bite. The filling was soft and warm and actually tasted good. If this programming gig didn’t work out, maybe I had a second career as a hipster baker.

I took a second bite of just the crust and froze. It tasted like streusel. Streusel that wasn’t on the pie when I left it under the bench earlier. I resisted the urge to spit everything back onto the plate and slowly chewed the crust, the chomping of my teeth amplified with every movement of my jaw up and down. Finally, the bite was gone but my heart was racing. What the heck was going on here?

That’s when the voices started.

“Mmm, this is good pie.”

“I hope Julia didn’t see me talking to Abby.”

“It actually worked.”

I clutched my ears and nearly fell over. The light din of conversation in the foyer had suddenly exploded into a cacophony of voices. If I concentrated hard enough, I could pick out the individual strands, if only for a moment.

“Time for another drink.”

“This house is so pedestrian.”

“Next party I need to have Barbara pick out something for Jen to wear. It’s embarrassing.”

That last voice I recognized. I stared up at Duncan, who was chowing down on the rest of the pie slice, seemingly unaffected by the voices and oblivious to the fact that he had just insulted me.

“Dunc, what do you think of my dress? Lisa lent it to me.” A lie. This dress had been in my closet since college. It was a miracle it still fit.

Duncan nearly spit out the pie, which sparked a coughing fit that continued for over a minute.

“Whoa, sorry. Wrong pipe. Your dress? It looks great, babe. You look good in anything.”

I glared at him, not sure whether to accept the compliment or call him on the-

“What are you doing?”

A woman’s voice cut through the others and I looked around the room to see who was yelling at me.

“I said, what are you doing?”

The voice hit me again a second time and I nearly fell to the ground. A chair was set nearby and I staggered over to it and sat down.

“Jen, what’s wrong?”

“Probably had too much to drink, she’s always been a lightweight.”

Duncan’s words and thoughts hit me back-to-back, but I didn’t want to deal with him right now. I just wanted the voices to go away.

“Just a bit of a headache. I’ll catch up to you in a bit.”

He nodded and walked away, leaving me alone with my thoughts and everyone else’s apparently.

“Don’t ignore me, I asked you a question.”

“Who, me?” I said out loud.

“Yes, you. But you don’t need to shout. I can hear you even if you don’t speak.”

“Oh.” I thought. “What do you mean, what am I doing? I’m being bombarded with the thoughts of half the people at this party.”

“Yes, I know. And you almost ruined a perfectly good experiment.”

“Umm, sorry?”

The sensation of talking with someone in my mind was incredibly disorienting and-

“Stop that. You know I can hear what you’re thinking, right? I just didn’t think you would be able to hear me back. That has made things ... interesting.”

“Glad I could help.”

“I’m not sure I would go that far. But you’ve piqued my curiosity, so I’ll let this go a little more before I get rid of you.”

Crap. Crap. Crap. I knew I shouldn’t have eaten some of the apples. Wait, could she hear this? I needed to come with a plan bef-

“Too late. I heard it. I told you, it’s like you’re shouting in my ears from a foot away. So you’re JadePhoenix42. Kind of a dumb handle if you ask me. But I guess a small thanks is in order, though, for baking such a delicious pie. And for solving the mystery of why you can hear everyone too. That would have been bugg..”

I shut my eyes tightly and blocked out the rest of the voices. Instead of trying to block my tormentor’s thoughts too, I would channel them into a place where I was in control, my anti-meditation skills finally proving their usefulness.

I imagined myself in a bare room with no doors. Without warning a big sheet of glass appeared on one wall that looked out into another room. I could vaguely see the contents of that room and the formless shadow of my tormenter, who was perched at the glass trying to listen. If my thoughts were loud, my “voice” would carry through the glass and she could hear me. But if I whispered, then she was cut off and my thoughts were still my own.

Excellent.

Now to figure out how to get rid of this woman. So I asked what I thought she would think was a stupid question.

“Because of the apples? When I ate them earlier, nothing happened.”

I saw the shadow of the figure behind the glass move, but then the figure disappeared and a new image appeared on the glass. It was the fuzzy outline of someone walking through Running Brook Orchard. The image vanished as quickly as it appeared and I forced myself not to think about it further.

“Of course not. Did you let your boyfriend over there have some?”

“No.”

“Right. Then there would have been nothing for you to hear. The apples create the link that allows thoughts to travel from one mind to the other.”

The mention of the apples again triggered another scene to start playing on the screen. But it wasn’t like watching a movie. I was reliving a memory through her eyes. It was the orchard, except this time at night. I watched for a few seconds as she walked down the familiar rows of trees, before the memory flickered off again.

“Oh, that makes sense. Like the vervorium linking places.”

“Yes, exactly. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to get going and you-”

“Wait, but then what about the pie?”

“Do I need to lay everything out for you like a kindergartner? When you baked the pie, you degraded the apples so that the linkage between minds only went in one direction. Like a one-way mirror. At least, that was my theory before tonight and now that I’ve proven it, I-”

“Ah, now I got it. But hold on a second. There was streusel on the pie that I didn’t put there. Was that part of it too?”

“Don’t be stupid. Your pie just looked so bland, so I needed to make it more appetizing. Anyway, I’m glad we cleared this whole thing up, and I really do need to get on with the mind wiping and all so-”

“But why didn’t you just go get the apples yourself?”

The memory resumed and this time I could feel what Beatrice was feeling too. I didn’t know if that was her name, but I needed to call her something other than “that woman” or the “mind reader,” and it was the first thing that came to mind.

I felt the thrill of sneaking into the orchard at night, felt that thrill turn to terror as her feet submerged into the same soil that my foot had been trapped in, felt that terror turn to fear and desperation as she struggled to free herself.

“Well, because you so helpfully agreed to get them for me for seven iron. What an asinine question. Quit stalling so I can-”

“Not buying it. If I knew about these apples and what they did, there’s no way I would let some random person know that there was something different about them.”

“You’d be surprised at how desperate some people are for tokens. They don’t ask questions and are just happy to have the chance to get-”

“No. I think that you would have gotten them yourself but you were afraid of going back to the orchard.”

The memory flickered off but it gave me an idea. It was a wisp of a thought, a puff of smoke, there and gone in an instant. I couldn’t risk Beatrice hearing it and ruining the plan before I could execute.

“What? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s an apple orchard, not a torture chamber. You know, you are starting-”

In my mind, I ran over to the glass wall and started “shouting” as loud and fast as I could.

“You got stuck, just like I did. Well, probably worse. You went at night and no one found you until the next morning. I can just imagine the state you were in when they dug your feet out of the ground.”

And as I recounted what I had just seen back to Beatrice, I felt the same feelings resurface in her mind and the linkage between us began to weaken, the joined rooms becoming fuzzy.

“You were cold and tired, your pants were soiled, and then, for good measure, they dropped you on the dirt and gave you a few nice whacks in the stomach. Then they stood you up, walked you out of the orchard, and tossed you onto the road. Guessing they banned you for life, not that you would ever go back, the trauma-”

“STOP IT!”

The force of her voice pushed me out of the room in my mind and nearly out of the actual chair I was sitting on in the real world. I straightened myself up and tried to refocus on the room, only for the voice to-

“You know, I was going to go easy on you, just push you to drink a little too much so by tomorrow you wouldn’t be sure if this was real or not. But now you’ve really pissed me off.”

The rooms snapped back into focus, except, this time, instead of the glass divider, there was an old wooden door between my mind and her mind. As the knob began to jiggle slowly, I retreated to the back of my room.

“Oh have I? The way I see it, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if it wasn’t for me.”

I tried to keep up my confident front, but I could feel the fierceness of her anger increasing like a shark that smelled blood.

“Not a great way to repay someone who helped you out, now is it?”

“You got paid what you agreed to,” she yelled through the door. It began to open, but the wood was warped and Beatrice had trouble pushing all the way through.

“Maybe so. But had I known when I agreed to your Quest what I was really fetching, well…”

“Well nothing. I found the apples. You’re just a pair of hands. A pair that has overstayed its welcome, so if you don’t mind, I think you’ll be going now...”

The door flung open and I saw her for the first time. Except it wasn’t the first time, I realized. I had thought Beatrice was likely the snooty wife of one of Jeff’s investors, but this made much more sense. The perfect way to infiltrate a party full of rich people with lots of secrets to be purloined.

Because no one ever pays attention to the help.

The avatar Beatrice presented in my mind was different than the frazzled waitress I had seen in the kitchen. The dusty jacket was replaced with a long black gown, her blond hair was long and stick straight, and there were no bags under her piercing green eyes. She stared at me, cowering at the back of this room I’d constructed and smiled.

“Nowhere to run, Jade,” she said, as she slowly walked the length of the room toward me.

She was right. I had nowhere to run. My back was against the wall and the only thing separating me from her was time.

Wait.

That was the answer.

If I couldn’t run away, then I would make her keep running to me. Because after all, this whole room was of a construction of my own making. It could be as long as I wanted it to be.

As the thought finished, the room exploded and I felt myself being flung backward. When the dust settled, I was still against the same wall, except instead I was now at the end of a very long hallway.

“Neat trick,” Beatrice yelled from the other end. “But I’m going to catch up to you eventually, so all that you’ve done is postponed the inevitable.”

Beatrice trudged down the hallway in her heels but that gave me precious moments to think of how to stop her. With the orchard memory used up, I didn’t have any of her own pain left to use against her.

That was OK, though, because I had plenty of my own to spare.

“Can I tell you a story?” I shouted.

“It won’t take long. I’ll be done by the time you reach me. I was having a drink with a dear, dear friend the other day and he was telling me about he got into a right nasty scuffle with a bunch of street toughs and things got ugly. One of them had a knife, you see. And not one of your everyday, run-of-the-mill knives that just stabs someone and makes all the blood come out. No, this knife was different.”

“Enough.” She was getting closer, maybe only 10 feet away. “Get out of this house now or-”

“It left a mark on its victim that just wouldn’t go away. And then my friend, who loves a good joke, pulled up his shirt and…”

I pulled up the bottom of my dress while calling up the image of Steve’s green scar. It was as horrifying as I had remembered it, and I felt a shudder ripple through my body. I looked down and there was the scar, criss-crossing my stomach like a lightning bolt, its otherworldly glow casting the hallway with an eerie light. I looked up to see Beatrice only a foot in front of me, and the last thing I remember before the floor dissolved underneath us was the small purple stone around her neck shimmering softly as we fell into a black abyss.

Next: Jen deals with the repercussions of her fight with the mysterious blonde.