A bead of sweat dripped down Dyna’s forehead as she slowly slid an activated blasting cap into the plastic explosive. Prior to this, it had all been fun and games. She could jostle the C4 around as much as she wished, juggle it, and even toss it against the wall in an attempt to deform it. The shadow monster lurking around put a bit of a damper on things but at no point had she been worried about blowing herself up.

Now? Dyna wanted to get this over with and get away as fast as possible.

She wished she had Beatrice on the line. An unshackled artificial intelligence guiding her would have done a lot to reassure her that she wasn’t forgetting anything. Still, Dyna was being as careful as she could be. The clacker itself was shut off—she had checked no less than seven times—and the blasting cap had sat on its own after being powered on for several minutes. Dyna wasn’t actually sure if she should be sliding an activated blasting cap into the plastic explosive but she felt like turning the power on after inserting it might cause even just a small spark that would see it all going up in her face. If that happened while doing it this way, it would be just a firecracker going off.

Everything in place, Dyna took several careful steps backwards, hesitant to even breathe on the devices. Having left the lower laboratory and armory section, Dyna quickly found what she assumed to be the central support shaft of the psionic radar tower. If it wasn’t the central support, she hoped it was at least important enough that the twenty-four bricks of C4 arrayed around the steel shaft would shut this place down.

If it wasn’t the central support or important, Dyna still had the last-ditch option of hoping that her power made it important or, at least, made the explosion large enough to take out the entire structure. Dyna had no idea what kind of yield she was looking at with twenty-four bricks each the size of her forearm but pop-culture osmosis told her that it would probably be a fairly spectacular spectacle. As long as she wasn’t caught in it.

Dyna had an urge to just leave now. Take the tram back up out of the sinkhole, get far enough away that none of the exploding building would likely hit her, and then hit the clacker. That, however, would leave her stranded in Puerto Rico. Maybe not stranded stranded but not in any position to assist with the goings on at Tartarus or the Carroll Institute. Dyna was trying not to think about it, not wanting to influence anything unduly, but without Beatrice giving her information on the outside world, she had no clue what was happening outside this place. For all she knew, Alpha was raiding the artifact vault at this very minute, although Dyna doubted that the former administrator would be there in person.

Her only real lead on Alpha’s location was through the noosphere. Dyna didn’t know what she would find on the other side—maybe nothing at all, maybe Alpha lounging in another monologuing room—but that was her lead and her only destination. And, as far as she knew, the only way in was through the portal Frankenstein had been trying to get opened.

That meant descending back into the facility with a dangerous shadow monster on the loose.

Taking the ladder back down to the hidden passage did make Dyna question her own sanity. She had just rigged the building to explode and she was going back in.

Reaching the hidden, cramped corridors, Dyna kept one hand on her watch and the other hand clenched around the strange artifact she had found. Although she still didn’t know what the little fuse-spark cylinder was or what it did, she did feel like it would do more to Specimen Seven than her gun.

Moving past the armories and the control room, Dyna started to feel the hairs on the back of her neck sticking on end. Despite the odd hum that still permeated the lower levels, the entire building was just too quiet. Which made sense. There wasn’t anyone alive down here. Of course, that didn’t stop her mind from wandering back to Alpha’s accusations that she was unintentionally setting up situations around her to play true to movie tropes.

Dyna didn’t know what to do to stop that aside from powering on the Continuity Engine once again.

Careful to avoid directly stepping beneath any part of the ventilation ducts that ran through the corridors, Dyna made slow and steady progress toward the noosphere portal room where she had found Frankenstein earlier. Not once did she detect any moving shadows in the corners of her eyes.

Dyna hoped it had dissipated or maybe had fallen into a food-coma after eating Frankenstein.

It was a good thing her power didn’t affect people’s minds—or tulpa’s minds, as far as she knew—or else her expectations to the contrary would have seen it jumping out at her as she walked down the corridors regardless of her precautions taken against the ventilation system.

To her great surprise, she arrived at the noosphere portal room without incident. Dyna tried pressing her ear to the door in an attempt to discern whether or not Specimen Seven was still on the other side but the hum from the portal device was as loud as it had been the first time around. She couldn’t hear much of anything. Maybe faint clanking noises. That might have been her imagination.

Ready to reset time if she spotted anything attacking her, Dyna pushed open the door.

The first thing she saw was a bright diamond in the middle of the portal frame, bright enough to force her to notice it for a moment before wincing at the intensity and glancing around the rest of the room. Frankenstein was on the ground not far from where he had held Dyna at gunpoint. Most of him, anyway. He wasn’t entirely intact.

He also wasn’t moving. As expected of a man lying in a disturbingly large puddle of his own blood.

Shifting her eyes toward the Continuity Engine, Dyna frowned. The plug was back in the wall outlet and the bright LED lights on the circuit boards were blinking with fervor. Her memories after unplugging it were a little hazy but Dyna didn’t think that Frankenstein had plugged it back in before his incident. Had that been from her power?

When had it been plugged in?

She hadn’t wanted to think about it but she kind of got the feeling that the C4 and maybe even the fuse artifact had been created rather than naturally existed here.

Movement near the portal made Dyna tense. The shadow that was Specimen Seven had barely been visible crouched near one of the large wires coming off the portal frame, not far from the Continuity Engine. Between blending in with the background and the bright light forcing her to squint while looking at that half of the room, Specimen Seven might as well have been invisible.

The strangest thing about it wasn’t its presence, which Dyna had basically expected after not encountering it throughout the rest of the facility, but what it had been doing. It stood, full and upright, dropping a wrench to the floor as it did so. The wrench it had been using to, Dyna assumed, repair the portal frame.

Specimen Seven stood fully, cocked its shadowy head to one side, and spoke.

“Oh. It’s just you.”

Dyna blinked several times in rapid succession at the familiar tone of the slightly distorted voice. She had heard that exact line a few times since arriving here, delivered with the same inflection each of the three times.

“Frankenstein?”

The shadowy figure swept his elongated hands from his chest to his legs in a sweeping presentation of himself. “In the flesh. Sort of.”

Dyna hadn’t the slightest clue of what to say. Her mind went completely blank as she tried to figure out what might have happened. Eyes flicking down to the very dead body, she blinked a few more times before her mind wandered back to conversations with November. It hit her. “It integrated you but you were too much for it.”

“Something like that,” Frankenstein nodded. “Released too early, Specimen Seven was less a proper thinking tulpa or even a brain-dead zombie-type like what we use for soldiers. It ripped me out of my body and just look at me now,” he said, spinning around like a little girl proud of her new skirt. “I think I just achieved immortality. Our studies show that tulpa don’t age. Though I don’t seem to have a proper body at all at the moment.” Pausing, he glanced down, shrugged, then looked back up. “I suppose I should be thanking you.”

“I’m sensing a but…” Dyna’s fingers tightened around the bezel of her watch. How long had it been since she opened the door? She really wished she still had Beatrice in her ear. It felt like thirty seconds but it could have been three minutes for all she knew.

“But you tried to kill me.”

“I tried to kill you?” Dyna barked, unusually incensed at his accusation. “You had a gun to my head. Your own monster killed you!”

He paused, considered, and shrugged once again. “Maybe so. Doesn’t matter. Alpha wants you dead too.”

“You’ve gained functional immortality and you’re still following Alpha’s commands?”

Dyna wasn’t sure how she read a shadow monster’s body language. The way he stilled and twitched his head to one side still looked like a human-enough moment of confusion.

“That is odd,” Frankenstein admitted. “I wonder if Specimen Seven integrated with enough of the tulpa that this body is now beholden to the command signal…” His head slowly turned back to Dyna. “A problem I will solve after dealing with you, before Alpha can deliver any other commands—”

As he spoke, he moved forward. It wasn’t quite stepping forward so much as it was drifting forward but it was fast enough that Dyna twisted her Bezel before the creature that could tear a person in half could reach her.

Much to her chagrin, Dyna found herself in the middle of swinging open the door. Too late to back out. Mentally berating herself for trying to get as much information out of Frankenstein while he was still talkative rather than resetting the second she thought about the time, she quickly turned her eyes through the room until she spotted Frankenstein’s shadowy form blending in with the wall. He was in the middle of replacing one of the cylinders with wires coming off them around the main portal frame ring.

He continued tightening a bolt for a moment, making Dyna wonder how she missed the movement the first time around.

Her mind raced as she tried to come up with a solution to the situation that didn’t involve resetting time fourteen million times.

Dyna took a few steps inside, stopping at the portal control panel she had seen Frankenstein standing at the very first time she had walked in on him in this room. As she did so, Frankenstein set down his wrench and stood up.

“Oh. It’s just you.”

“Frankenstein,” Dyna said, trying to look startled.

“In the flesh.”

Good. It looked like they might have a few seconds of friendly chat before he tried to kill her.

Frankenstein made basically the same speech he had made the first time around, making Dyna wonder if he had rehearsed it in preparation for her arrival, knowing she would come back. Whatever the case, it didn’t really matter as she tuned it out, staring at the control panel in an attempt to figure out how to get a proper portal to the noosphere opened up.

She had seen the control panel before. A few times, actually. She had even seen it in operation. It was the exact same model the Carroll Institute had taken from the meat packing plant.

The portal was already partially open. The initial work had already been done. Dyna was a little surprised that Frankenstein had been working on the portal while it was active but the part he had been changing out was almost certainly one of the components that would widen the portal into something someone could pass through. Assuming they all worked, Dyna figured that she could open the portal with a slow pull of one of the levers.

Dyna reset time several times, going over every step of her plan.

She tested a few parts of it, checking how Frankenstein would react to certain actions. Drawing her gun always resulted in him rushing toward her. As did most actions besides casually chatting. She could fiddle with the control panel to an extent, as long as she didn’t look like she knew what she was doing.

A part of her was tempted to shoot the Continuity Engine. The other part feared another stab of pain in the brain that would allow Frankenstein to kill her before she regained the mental clarity to reset time.

Two dozen practice runs gave her everything she needed to know. Probably.

Hopefully.

There were a few things she hadn’t tested. Couldn’t test. She only had a single minute, after all.

Dyna strode into the room and twisted a knob on the control panel before noticing Frankenstein.

“Oh. It’s just you.”

“Frankenstein?” Dyna said, leaning forward against the control panel as if to get a better look at his new body. As he looked down while gesturing to himself, she flipped a small toggle switch. The humming drone in the background noise of the room gained a slight warble but Frankenstein paid it no mind as he started into his speech.

Functional immortality. He supposed he should thank her. All the same stuff he had said the first time around, so long as Dyna replied with a relatively similar response. That gave her opportunities to wait for the few moments he was distracted to pull a lever or twist a knob.

“You’ve gained functional immortality and you’re still following Alpha’s commands?” Dyna asked.

Frankenstein paused, going still just like before as he considered the question and maybe made some introspective investigations. It was the longest pause that Dyna would get. The last pause as well, as Frankenstein would attack shortly after coming to the realization about the command signal.

Dyna’s left hand curled around the largest and most obvious lever on the control panel. Pulling it down to the third slot stopped the warbling hum. After a small cracking noise split through the air, the portal started ripping open properly. In the same smooth motion, Dyna slipped her hand into her pocket and felt for the power button on the detonator clacker.

Frankenstein, jolted from his internal thoughts by the portal opening up, looked back before taking a swift drifting step toward Dyna.

Raising her right hand, Dyna unclenched her fist.

Frankenstein stopped abruptly.

The little spark held in the fuse-like container still puzzled Dyna. She had no idea what it did even after trying to use it in a few of her testing resets. All she knew for sure was that Frankenstein did not want to be close to it. Having had only sixty seconds for testing purposes, she wasn’t sure if that fear would last indefinitely or if Frankenstein would either get over it or maybe find a workaround.

Or just realize that Dyna had no idea what it was or how to use it.

“You might as well just give up and die. I promise I’ll make it as painless as possible,” Frankenstein said. “Even if you manage to get to Alpha, there will be a new Alpha some day. You are simply too dangerous to leave alive. As you have so adequately demonstrated today.”

“Give up and die?” Dyna took a steady step, slowly crossing the room. For each step she took with the small artifact held out, Frankenstein took a step in the opposite direction. “That didn’t work when Alpha asked and it definitely isn’t going to work now.”

“Shame. I—”

“Hey,” Dyna said abruptly enough to make him pause and miss a step. She didn’t want him shutting off the portal before she jumped through it. “You’re immortal as far as aging is concerned, right?”

“Tulpa don’t age.”

“Physical punishment?”

“I watched an entire team unload magazine after magazine into Specimen Seven. I’d offer to let you try but I’m afraid—”

“What about a building falling on you?”

As soon as Dyna spoke, she jumped toward the portal, crushing the clacker as she moved. The building, even underground, shook violently. The lights flickered and failed, leaving the room illuminated only from the light of the portal. Even that only stayed up for a second longer.

The ring of light collapsed, vanishing entirely.

Dyna, panting for breath in the noosphere, snapped her head around to ensure that she was alone.

She looked at a fuzzy version of the portal room. Not all the details were clear, having likely only been observed and thus imprinted into the noosphere by very few people. Frankenstein wasn’t anywhere near her.

He was trapped on the other side.

Hopefully, he was dead with that semi-transient body not able to ignore a whole building falling in on him. If he wasn’t dead, hopefully he was trapped. At least until Dyna could call up Doctor Darq and see if Tartarus could use their expertise to contain him.

Until then, Dyna could only look around her new environment. The strange thought-mirror of Alpha’s underground workshop.

Where would Alpha have gone?