I crossed the threshold of the Ayela Arcana Sanctuary one last time, finding Pitch waiting for me, seated on my shiki cushion, a stack of Known Cosmos books in his lap.

  At lunch, Nanna said it was as though the sanctum had been built for me.

  Had it?

  I took in the room, the man, the books—lapis blue, ice pink, kelley green, and fire engine red. There would be a fifth book with the words Known Cosmos stamped on the spine. Deepest purple.

  Mine.

  Did that mean?

  “Bitsy? Will my book be published with the Sibsil Creed pseudonym?"

  “Do you want it to be, Sam? Or do you prefer Ayela Scarsdale?” she asked, brows raised.

  I shook my head, “No. No, if it’s going to be a Known Cosmos book, it should be Sibsil Creed, right? Honestly, that makes me feel a lot better. The anonymity. It takes off so much pressure. Makes it less personal. I don’t want this story to blow up in my face.”

  Bitsy nodded, “Then welcome to the family, Sibsil Creed version 7. I think we’re going to do great things together!”

  I grinned at her, “Thank you, Sibsil version 5, but—wait. Who's version 6?”

  Bitsy pointed to Pitch with her chin. “My son's working on a book. I’m not sure where it goes in the series yet, and I think that’s because your stories need to come first, Sam. Soon you'll see what Pitch has been up to, but I want to hear your questions since you’ve finished reading the books. What you’re confused about helps me see how the public will react."

  I paced around the Sanctuary, trying to connect the dots. Somehow, I was supposed to fit into the puzzle of Bitsy’s family. How did my story mesh with the rest of what was hidden in this sanctum?

  “You’ve got four books already, and another that Pitch is working on. Then the fifth book is my autobiography, Discordant. But I’m not in your family. I’m a wild card. A perfect stranger. Not even from Andromeda!"

  "My book is set in Wyoming, Earth, Milky Way. It’s completely different from everything else. No telepathy. No augmented other than the Methodist music minister playing piano with me. There’s barely anything supernatural about it at all—“

  HC interrupted, “There's your dreams, Sam. Your poems hint at bridges between two worlds. And when we first met, I talked about seeing the Red Phoenix in my dreams."

  He smiled, “Those slightly weird references are grounded in charming, relatable stories of everyday life on Earth. That'll draw in a new crowd for Sibsil. Hell, it could even be published concurrently with the other stories, or before them!”

  Bitsy nodded, “Exactly. I’ve been trying to work out how to introduce ‘Mafia Moms’ and Discordant, but I don’t have it yet. It’s like the threads of these stories are still wanting to weave themselves together before we can figure out how and when to market them.”

  “Web serials are fantastic for that,” HC recommended. “You can even do something that publishes rarely, like once a week or so. Slowly drip-by-drip over time as you’ve done for the past century, but with full chapters instead of tiny snippets.”

  “But how does it all fit together, HC?” I wondered, not for the first time.

  "I mean, yes, me writing a dreams-to-lovers romance is really cool since that’s how Ryst and Nayth met. And a lot of people have already seen the Dream With Me Now graphic novels and cartoons, but how does my story about tech corruption tie in to what Bitsy’s family has been doing for generations? None of these concepts are connected,” I pointed out.

  “Aren’t they?” Bitsy asked patiently.

  What did she know? I looked at Pitch, who watched me with steady eyes. There was something here, something they wanted me to see.

  They weren’t gonna tell me, were they? They wanted to know how the public would react to their treasure? Well, put it together, Time Sleuths.

  “Everybody, there’s a big secret in here we missed. Come on, Sleuths! Dig with me! Where’s the truth that connects our journey to all the books we’ve just read?"

  “Discordant exposes the deception in Discord and Purple Road,” Cora began.

  Rhoda chimed in, “Then ‘Mafia Moms’ shows corruption in the gaming industry and the truth of Janelynn Morovic, daughter of the Galactic Minister of Tech."

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  What did that have to do with the rest of the books housed in this Sanctuary? How were dreams connected to the cyber mafia? What did the Tech Guild have to do with any of it?

  My friends and I reeled off all the revelations we’d read since arriving in Shurwinn.

  "Peydran Madrano, Bitsy’s great-grandfather, hacked his cybernetic relay, giving him control of any wireless tech with just a thought,” Nanna pointed out, and everyone else piped up.

  What Peydran could do wasn’t mech magic; it was a tech-brain merge. Not so very different from Ryst Nova’s telepathic mind merge, but with technology rather than a mysterious psychic phenomenon.

  It was sending information along normal, human brain pathways but using the operating system of a computer. It didn’t give him abilities to predict the future or affect his dreams, but he was exceptional and kept that fact secret from the world at large.

  Peydran’s husband, Ren, was a musical savant who wrote songs that were prophecy, and he’d predicted the building I was standing in and the books it housed in a song.

  Then the two of them had a son and gave him the name “Euridyne,” meaning “Wind of Power.” That was also one of Ren’s lyrics, written before Euri was born. And when he grew up, that boy could control the wind with intention alone.

  Euri’s girlfriend, Shah, and her twin, Ronnie, were the kids of the man who grew this Sanctuary out of the ground with his mind. Borden Sloan was Talented beyond measure, and his kids weren't schleps either.

  We looked at the marble reliefs on the walls of the inner chamber in the Sanctuary, recalling the oil painting in Book 1. Ronnie was a nonverbal artistic savant, and his twin sister had called him “the most gifted painter in the Known Cosmos.”

  Together, that team of people had created so much more than the building we were looking at.

  They colonized an entire system, giving the Talented and augmented a safe place to live: Five Spheres.

  Then the epic scale took a quiet turn. A low hum of family and love.

  Rory and Slydar Joon, telepaths with exceptional children like Bitsy. More Talented and augmented joined them on Five Spheres, but very little in their story was supernatural.

  Weird dreams here and there, loved ones in the Unknown Cosmos communicating with scents on the breeze, and a vague mention of earthquakes.

  Then that ever-present drum in the background: something is coming.

  Something big.

  What the fuck was it?

  “Bitsy, is everyone in Five Sphere Talented or augmented?” I asked, skeptical.

  She shook her head, “No, Sam. We don’t have a registry, so it’s impossible to give you a head count, but I know people who are just regular folks. They are aware, however. Everyone knows someone who’s got a Talent or an augment. So we live openly and freely, unafraid and unashamed. It’s very easy to forget that we’re unusual compared to the rest of the 9 Galaxies.”

  “But people don’t forget,” Rhoda countered. “I read your grandfather’s story, Bitsy. Slydar Joon grew up in a family of telepaths who lived off-grid on Dliptonia because they were afraid of those in power. Your great-grandfather Muller was so paranoid about his telepathy being discovered that he got augmented off the books. I bet that memory is long. People don’t forget that kind of fear easily.”

  And there were a lot of people. Millions of them.

  Refugees seeking asylum in Five Spheres. Like Rhoda with Filly bonding a mirka and wanting to keep him safe. Wanting to go somewhere he could fit in and feel normal.

  Like Cora and me. Needing a home that felt relaxing. A world where we belonged.

  All of those people had congregated in a far-off corner of Andromeda Galaxy.

  A hundred years passed, and I’d bet my life that those refugees hadn't been idle in the last century.

  No, if you were different, if you had someone to protect, you wouldn’t sit by strumming your fingers while the powerful plotted and stomped on the small.

  You’d plan too, just in case. You’d want to be ready for the day someone with a lot of influence wanted to hurt the people you loved.

  If I were augmented and could control tech with a thought, how tempting would it be to go on stream all the time and traipse through any program I wanted? The whole world was a game waiting to be played.

  And suddenly I knew.

  “Hold on a minute! HC, you and Rhoda convinced me Discord wasn’t driving me insane on purpose. That it was bots spewing out random quotes from movies or pop culture, and I tripped over it coincidentally,” I said, lights coming on.

  “What if that wasn’t true? Discord knew what we talked about in our DMs, HC.”

  He nodded, and I kept going. I was on a roll!

  "It probably tracked me playing your song, 'The Tears I Keep' on repeat, and saw my emotional poetry on Purple Road. My book Moons Dancing was open for anyone to read."

  String together my DMs, music, and writing, and what did you get?

  An unstable young woman. Vulnerable. A target.

  Or.

  What if it wasn’t a bot?

  "What if I was right in the beginning? Was a human intelligence behind every interaction I had? Someone was targeting me? But not to drive me insane,” I looked to Rhoda, but she hadn’t put it all together yet.

  “Think about it, guys. An augment recognizing patterns. Seeing a writer with special dreams and a book about connecting people in unusual ways."

  HC DM'd me about his own powerful dreams of the Red Phoenix. He’d even said my dreams were prophetic!

  And that wasn’t all.

  "I sent the files I beta read to HC, and he saw my full name. Any sophisticated hacker could’ve seen that and learned my parents died on the Resistor, giving me motivation to fight back against the cyber mafia."

  A human looking for someone like me could put all of those facts together and find me an interesting quarry.

  What if they hadn’t been trying to hurt me, but recruit me?

  Me: a writer who was different, special, and had a vendetta against the powerful. And a platform to do something about it.

  Were the messages clues to tip me off?

  I looked at Nanna, and there was a triumphant grin on her face. She got it!

  "Guys, what if all of that time, I was interacting with intelligent, living, breathing, augmented humans who could control tech with their minds?"

  “Informants?"

  I whirled around, words flying outta my mouth like a dagger hurled at Pitch, “We aren’t the only ones who’ve figured out the tech conspiracy. The augments know, and they’re already on the inside.”

  Pitch’s lips quirked, smothering a grin.

  Nailed it!