The Elders (Mind Dimensions #4)(71)

When it hits eight o’clock, I press my fingers to Thomas’s skin.

With a guttural sound, a second Thomas shows up in the room.

In my peripheral vision, I see Eugene press something on the device. He presses it with a flourish and the kind of finality that tells me it’s on.

Only the welcome emptiness of Level 2 never comes, and the newly animated version of Thomas rushes toward me.





Chapter 23





I expect him to attack, but instead, Thomas pushes me aside with an urgency that almost sends me sprawling to the floor. I bump hard into his frozen self, and the statue-like Thomas falls down. This clears the way for the animated Thomas, who proceeds to get into the position his frozen self was in and grabs Mira by the throat.

“Eugene,” I whisper. “Why am I still here?”

Mumbling something in Russian, my friend frantically examines his machine.

In stunned fascination, I watch Thomas choke Mira with such force that the veins on his hands strain from the exertion.

My best guess for Thomas’s strange behavior is that, in his Guided state, he must not understand that she’s frozen. He must not realize that whatever he does to her here won’t stick.

The Super Pusher must’ve been too specific in his Guiding, commanding Thomas to break the door down and put his hands around the girl’s neck, while forgetting to specify that the goal was to kill her and not just give her neck a strong squeeze.

I chance a look at Eugene. He’s unplugging cables, then firmly plugging them back in. He must think a loose connection is responsible for our delay.

A dreadful thought occurs to me. What if the machine did activate, but it can’t send me to Level 2?

No. No point dwelling on what-ifs.

I need to act, because at any moment, Thomas may turn his attention to Eugene and me. I have no idea what else the Super Pusher planted in his head, but I don’t want to find out.

Taking advantage of Thomas’s laser focus on Mira, I give him the karate-style neck chop I never got the chance to execute on the Island.

To my shock, when my hand connects with Thomas’s neck, he doesn’t react in the way I expected him to.

That is, he doesn’t fall to the ground in agonizing pain.

Trying to make sense of his lack of reaction, I hypothesize that, while in this Guided state, Thomas doesn’t feel pain in the usual way.

But he does feel something—because he turns around, and without much ado, reaches for my neck.

I counter his attack by clasping my fingers around his wrists, stopping him from locking down the deadly move. At the same time, I give his shin a good kick.

Thomas stumbles. Seeing that he’s about to fall, I let go of his wrists, but he instantly reacts by parroting my earlier move, and my wrists end up in his vise-like grip. As Thomas falls, he brings me along for the ride.

I manage to land on top of him, making sure my knee hits his side. Though he doesn’t react, the move allows me to free my hands. I try to restrain him using an Aikido move, but he doesn’t let me get the grip I need. As I struggle to gain the upper hand, I find myself in a position that might look embarrassingly like the one Caleb and Eleanor are in back in the real world. Oddly, instead of wrestling me back, Thomas goes for my neck again.

The command to strangle must really be bouncing around in his head.

I vaguely recall how the black-masked attacker tried to strangle me; it must be the Super Pusher’s signature move.

In Thomas’s effort to wrap his hands around my throat, his fingers unhook my helmet’s strap. I crane my head out of the way, but to my horror, all I accomplish is dislodging my cable-adorned hat. It clanks as it rolls across the floor.

Shit.

Even if Eugene manages to restart the machine, I’m not hooked up to it anymore.

“Dude,” I yell. “My helmet.”

A shot rings out. My ears feel as if someone smacked each eardrum with a baseball bat.

My stunned brain comes up with an explanation: Eugene found the gun I’d thrown at the wall. He’s insane to have used it, though.

There’s blood everywhere.

Thomas keeps attempting to choke me. I don’t know whether I should feel relieved or panicked that he’s alive.

“I shot him,” Eugene says, sounding panicked himself. “Why is he still fighting?”

“Eugene, focus on the machine,” I manage to croak, and then hit Thomas with an elbow. “If you kill him, you’ll make him Inert and that will ruin everything.”

My move with the elbow does nothing other than position me in a way that allows Thomas to twist his body. He uses his momentum to execute a head-spinning maneuver—a Hapkido-style throw that, from my vantage point, feels like I just executed a perfect somersault. In the next moment, I’m on my back, with Thomas’s knees on my biceps and his full weight pinning me down. The nasty gun wound on his thigh might as well be a mosquito bite for all the attention he’s giving it. His calloused hands wrap around my throat again.

I try to move, to buck him off me—to do something, anything—but he has me thoroughly trapped.

I keep twisting every which way, but all it accomplishes is creating a wave of tiredness that spreads through my body like the aftereffects of twenty shots of tequila. The lack of oxygen must already be taking its toll.

Apparently emboldened by my weakening struggles, Thomas tightens his grip.