Chapter 451: The Sunroom
Dean reached the first glass door before Arion realized he had decided to move.
After everything it had taken to reach Snake Island, everything they had done to enter the residence without raising an alarm, and the growing suspicion that Amaru had spent eight years under an artificial pheromonal system designed specifically to keep him controlled, the sight of the man sitting comfortably beneath the winter sun did something unpleasant to Dean’s patience.
He pushed through the door.
"You were quite hard to reach."
Amaru looked up from his book.
Dean made it three steps into the sunroom.
Then Arion caught the back of his collar and dragged him violently backward.
Dean stumbled against him, more startled than hurt.
"What the—"
"Stop."
Something in Arion’s voice silenced him.
Arion did not release his collar.
His golden eyes were fixed on Amaru.
Dean followed his gaze.
The prince was still sitting beside the windows, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, the open book resting loosely against his hand.
Except his face was wrong.
Dean stared.
Amaru had turned toward them, but there were no eyes looking back.
No mouth.
No nose.
Nothing.
His features had become an indistinct blur beneath dark hair, skin and shadow smeared together as though someone had tried to reconstruct a human face from memory and abandoned the effort halfway through.
Dean’s stomach dropped.
The book remained perfectly sharp.
So did the chair.
The plants.
The sunlight.
Only Amaru’s face had failed.
"What the fuck?"
Arion pulled Dean another step backward.
Dean’s field shifted with him, closing around Arion again.
The effect was immediate.
Amaru’s features returned.
Dark eyes.
Straight nose.
A faint line between his brows as though he were mildly irritated by the interruption.
Dean looked at Arion.
Arion looked considerably less convinced.
"Don’t move away from me again."
"I wasn’t—"
"You were nearly three meters ahead."
Dean stopped.
For perhaps three seconds, Arion had been outside his field.
Three seconds breathing whatever saturated this place.
Dean looked toward the sunroom again.
Amaru lowered the book.
The movement was smooth.
Arion’s hand tightened at Dean’s shoulder.
"It isn’t real."
Dean stared at him.
"The room?"
"Any of it."
That sounded impossible.
Dean could feel the artificial pheromones pressing continuously against the edge of his neutralizing radius. Inside the meter, nothing reached them. He was certain of that.
But the room existed outside the meter.
The windows were several meters away.
So was Amaru.
The plants.
Most of the corridor.
His field protected their bodies.
It did not necessarily protect everything they were looking at.
Dean understood the implication just as the sunlight shifted across the floor without any corresponding movement in the clouds outside.
His skin went cold.
"Duncan."
Arion activated the communication line.
Nero answered immediately.
"What happened?"
"The interior is an illusion."
There was a brief silence.
Then Duncan’s voice came through from farther behind Nero.
"What?"
Dean looked at the blurred edge of Amaru’s chair.
"Arion stepped outside my field for a few seconds. The room changed."
"How?"
Arion’s gaze remained fixed ahead. "Distance. Position. Objects where they shouldn’t be. The man’s face disappeared."
Nero answered before Duncan could.
"That sounds like Duncan."
Another silence.
Duncan’s reply was much less pleased.
"My ability changes perceived terrain, movement, and distance."
"Exactly," Nero said.
Dean looked toward the apparently warm sunroom.
The conclusion was ugly.
"They copied your ability."
"I never gave anyone permission to copy anything."
Nero sounded almost amused. "I doubt Claudia asked."
Duncan did not answer that.
Arion moved one hand around Dean’s waist.
"We’re leaving this section."
Dean looked at him. "The console."
"Yes."
They had already passed it.
The grey control-room door sat around the bend behind them, perhaps thirty meters away according to what they had seen on the way in.
Dean no longer trusted that distance.
Neither did Arion.
"I can keep the field stable," Dean said.
"I know."
Arion bent and lifted him.
Dean barely had time to catch his shoulders before he was held firmly against Arion’s chest.
"That was not what I meant."
"You moved too fast once."
"I can walk."
"Not until this is off."
Dean considered arguing.
Then the corridor ahead appeared to lengthen by several meters.
He wrapped both arms around Arion’s neck instead.
"Fine."
Arion ran.
The illusion reacted.
The elegant corridor shifted around them as they moved, limestone stretching and contracting beneath Arion’s boots while doorways appeared closer than they were and then slid impossibly farther away. The paintings along the walls changed positions when Dean looked away from them. One window became three.
Dean held the field as tightly as he could.
Arion stayed completely inside it now, Dean pressed against his chest so there was no chance of separation.
"Right," Duncan said through the communicator. "The control room should be after the curve."
"Should be?" Dean demanded.
"I have never seen what you are seeing."
"That is becoming very clear."
Arion reached what looked like the corner.
It was not.
His shoulder struck a wall.
He recovered immediately without dropping Dean.
Nero’s voice came across the channel. "Definitely Duncan."
"Thank you," Duncan said flatly.
"But this is stronger."
"That is not reassuring."
Dean felt the synthetic output hammering constantly against his field now, far heavier than before. Perhaps the system had detected movement. Perhaps whatever mixture filled the central section had simply become more concentrated as they approached its source.
They still did not know what else was in it.
Duncan’s perceptual ability explained distance and terrain.
It did not explain a constructed human face.
Or sunlight.
Or an entire residential environment.
Someone else’s traits were in the cocktail too.
Perhaps several people’s.
Arion rounded another apparent corner and this time found the gray door.
Dean reached down and hit the access panel.
Nothing.
"Duncan."
"Override code seven-four-nine-one-six."
Dean entered it.
The door opened.
The control room beyond looked absurdly domestic.
Wooden cabinetry.
A small desk.
Books.
Dean did not believe a single centimeter of it.
"Where is the shutdown?"
Duncan hesitated.
"The main console should be directly opposite the door."
There was no console.
Dean looked at Arion.
"Put me down."
Arion did.
Dean kept one hand hooked through the back of his shirt to make absolutely certain the distance between them remained within the field.
Then he walked forward slowly.
The desk blurred.
Dean reached through what looked like polished wood.
His fingers touched cold glass.
"There."
The illusion rippled.
Arion stepped beside him and swept one hand across the false image until the physical console responded beneath his palm.
A screen appeared where there had been books.
Dean found the environmental controls.
CENTRAL PHEROMONAL OUTPUT: ACTIVE.
He did not bother with gradual reduction.
"Ready?"
Arion looked toward him.
"Do it."
Dean shut it down.
The ventilation system died.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the sun went out.
The transformation moved through the building in pieces.
Warm limestone became seamless grey medical flooring.
Dark wood panels dissolved into pale washable walls.
The paintings disappeared entirely, replaced by sealed observation windows and embedded monitoring screens.
The elegant staircase they had passed had never existed.
Neither had the dining room.
The library became a clinical supply area behind reinforced glass.
The study became an examination room.
The comfortable corridor narrowed into something institutional, brightly lit, and unmistakably medical.
Dean stared.
There were handrails along the walls.
Emergency oxygen ports.
Observation cameras behind smoked glass.
A trolley loaded with sealed medical equipment sat precisely where he remembered seeing a decorative table covered in flowers.
The air itself felt different now that nothing pressed against his field.
Arion slowly released him.
Dean looked back toward where the sunroom should have been.
There was no sunroom.
At the end of the clinical corridor stood two reinforced glass security doors leading into another sealed medical section.
Dean’s jaw tightened.
Nero’s voice came through the communicator.
"So Duncan’s ability was in the mixture."
"Yes," Dean said.
Duncan answered before Nero could continue.
"Then you don’t know what else they put in it."
Dean looked around the medical clinic Claudia’s pheromones had hidden beneath a beautiful private residence.
"No," he said.
That was the problem.
They had absolutely no idea.