Rook

done in Bath. She’d probed, hadn’t she? Delved into the mass and read what it was. Right, so she should center herself and do that again now. With a ghastly effort, she cut the screams and conflict out of her perception and delicately, cautiously reached out with her consciousness to touch and assess the enemy.
    It was like putting your lips to a straw and having a river poured into your mouth. Just before Myfanwy was washed away, she realized that she was sensing not just what the bodies were doing but everything they had ever done. Pent-up memory, agonizing in its desperation, flooded into her.
    Every inch of Myfanwy’s body was suddenly subject to all the sensations that the people in that police station had known. She felt fire licking her fingers while they had ice pressed against them. Her hair was torn out, and her scalp lovingly massaged. She strained tosee light, and she was dazzled. Every color permeated her rods and cones. Her lungs took their first breath, and she drowned. Hands and cotton and silk and mouths and leather and water and fingernails touched her skin, and she took a fist to the jaw and a slap to the cheek and a caress along her flank. She tasted spice and sugar and peaches and vomit and the bitterness of burned steak. She choked, and smelled perfume. She made love while she was fucked.
    Anyone else might have lost themselves entirely, but she was Myfanwy Thomas, and she had been born abruptly into herself. She knew everything she had experienced in her brief life, and she could separate her own sensations from what was being foisted onto her. Her thoughts floated on top, and she wrenched herself out of the morass.
    Okay, so I won’t be doing that again.
The whole dizzying experience had taken maybe a second, but in that moment Myfanwy had lived a few lifetimes. Without thinking, she opened her mouth, gasping for air, and felt something squirming against her lips. She clamped her jaws shut.
    This jolted her into action.
Fuck this!
she thought, outraged. She couldn’t scream or strike out with her fists, but her mind launched a wave that would have frozen an army in its tracks. Around her, muscles rippled in shock and lay briefly quiescent. She probed, hard and fast, and found something that made sense. She silently blessed Pawns Motha and Carmine. Thanks to their descriptions, she knew, vaguely, the layout of her surroundings. The fact that she had little air left in her lungs made thinking difficult. It meant that she’d have to work fast, especially since the mind controlling the cube seemed to be recovering.
    It wasn’t like touching a normal person, or a great number of normal people. Conflicting impulses and the patchwork welding of body parts made for a confusing space to navigate. Still, Myfanwy managed to pinpoint the place where all the instructions were coming from and did her best to cut it off from everything else. She remembered a trick Thomas had described and tried to pay the organism back by flooding it with sensations. She now had a fairlyample library to draw upon, and so she gathered up her strength and pushed out a rush of impressions, straining to overwhelm her enemy. But the brain absorbed the information easily, channeling it and distributing it among the array of lobes it had harvested from the victims.
Damn it!
she thought. That attack, combined with her efforts to isolate the brain, had exhausted her, and she felt her defenses faltering.
    Myfanwy’s lungs were burning.
Oh God,
she thought.
Help me! Help help!
Soft tendrils stroked against her ears and eyes, and she felt something pushing up into her nose. She was fading away.
Help!
There was no help. And she was out of breath.
    As she lost consciousness, she could distantly feel her body convulsing. Her nervous system was being invaded. And then, just as she had lost command of her limbs, she lost command of her powers. They roared out of her, chaotic, wild. A torrent of a thousand different orders and impulses, projected from her panicking brain and tearing into the meat that held her.
    All around her, flesh juddered and changed its grip, levering her body up into a standing position. The tendrils stopped shoving into her nose, and the hideous pressure eased somewhat. Distantly she heard a sizzling noise, and then she was no longer being held up by the cube but was taking her weight on her own legs. She was drawing in air that smelled of blood. Her eyes fluttered open, and she could see a dim pink light