"And what is the capitol city of Erathik?" Hugh asked, and broke my nose.


    "Gah! Fuck! No wait, that''s a trick question," I said, blood streaming down my face, "Erathik is the capitol of Erathik. You dick."


    "Bah. Name calling? You should have been able to answer and dodge my attack, Calliope."


    He was right, but I couldn''t tell him why I was fucking up. I couldn''t even lie and say I was staying up late, because he knew when I went to sleep, and I couldn''t tell a slightly truer lie and say I was fucking around in my memory palace at night because he still didn''t know I''d figured out how to get in there from our rooms. Basically I had to just act like I was an idiot all of a sudden, and Hugh was going to decide that was because he''d let me deviate from his sadistic training regimen for most of the day.


    Well, no. No, Hugh was too smart for that. But he would certainly still say he''d decided that, in the hopes of pressuring me into telling him what was really going on. I''d missed more and more trivia questions and attacks as the afternoon progressed, and while he might believe I''d forgotten the difference between Tahikk (creepy organic parasite implants) and Tarmestal (a plane of nothing but rock known for mining and penal colonies) I didn''t have a good reason for mixing up the Free States with the Coastal Alliance - it had been a softball question. He had to be curious.


    Really it was my fault for scheduling the day badly, since the pattern had already become clear. I excused myself to go to the healing pod and fix my nose, and a moment later was in my memory palace. "Okay, the plans for a clone army are for sure on hold."


    "I know," my duplicate said as she approached, "it''s hitting me too. Seems like it''s about six hours, give or take. We could run a few more duplicates maybe before it was an issue, but right now it doesn''t seem like it would be worth it. You ready?"


    "No, dumbass. We''re supposed to update the whiteboard first."


    She sighed. "Right. Right. See, this is the problem."


    "You''re telling me? I just had my nose broken by Hugh because of this... memory leak, or whatever it is."


    I''d been tweaking the settings on the connection to my oydirme duplicate and had gotten it to what seemed like the optimal setup, but it still caused problems after a while. If we didn''t occasionally synch up so it was one unified consciousness controlling both the oydirme and my mind, I got more and more distracted while the duplicate got... dumber. Nothing too bad, she wasn''t going to forget how to talk or anything - she just went into stoner mode and zoned out or forgot stuff.


    "Okay," she said, "I wanted to go for something we for certain hadn''t read before, and there was a book in the pile about one of the planes."


    "Ugh," I moaned, "not more trivia. I was just doing trivia with Hugh."


    She ignored my protests, of course. "Question one! How many families of great spirits are there?"


    "Fuck you. Twelve? No, five. I don''t know."


    "Holy shit! Yes! To both! There were twelve, I guess because everything has to be a fucking multiple of six here, and then some got killed and now there''s probably five."


    "Only probably?"


    "Eh. The queen of the Sargher took one over somehow but it only kinda counts, and there are two that are only presumed wiped out. One are these tall skinny guys that look like robes with eyeballs for heads, like just one giant eye, and the other are these things that look like a more animalistic version of Bowser."


    "What, seriously?"


    "Kinda? Spiky turtle shells, lion heads. Six legs though, and a long tail. Still, they''re... Bowser-esque, in a fishy way. Anyway for those two families there''s at least a few members that just vanished and might theoretically show up someday. None of that sounds familiar?"


    It did not. "Nah, but getting the number right feels important. Something is getting through passively, so having you read a ton of shit is still a good plan."


    "Except it''s boring as fuck, most of these books are just so dry. You can''t make me do the shit you''re not willing to do, because I''m still you and I''m also not going to be willing to do it. Anyway. I wrote down some more questions, we can both take the quiz after we synch up and see what stuck." There seemed to be a minor loss in information when we synched up, but I didn''t think that was a guaranteed thing. It was worse the longer we waited, so it was probably part of the same problem that made me distracted or her spacey.


    "Okay," I said, "whiteboard time. I... did very little. Hugh has been needy today. I can''t tell if there''s a change in my mana regeneration, or if there''s more or less environmental mana here in the memory palace. I wish Katrin could check it somehow, but even if she were here I think she might need to be physically in the memory palace and if she was she''d presumably smash everything to pieces or fall through it like smoke or something, I''m not even sure which. Anyway, if we did consider the clone army plan we''d need to get that checked. Even if the link itself is free, you might be pulling some mana passively like... eating. The other two probably are, too."


    "I still don''t know what they are," she said, "but I got distracted reading about Enimondoa. I wanna go there, it''s like fairyland. Uh, not the Xeyul kind. That was a fairy forest place. I mean fairyland like... it''s all these crazy spirits and alien landscapes and shit, and the spirits are way more... I don''t know, they have cities and shit. Speaking of. Don''t kill me or anything - or if you do you have to do it while we''re synched so I''m not an independent personality dying - but maybe this just isn''t the right spirit for doing this shit. Our mind is... y''know, our mind. This thing is just a dream spirit. Can we get more minds?"


    I''d been wondering the same thing, not surprisingly. We had these talks right before synching to make the most of our diverging thought processes, but a lot of the ideas we had were still basically the same. "Ethically? No idea. But ghosts are more... people-y than minds are alone, so maybe we can make you combine with another spirit?"


    She nodded, launching into the next part of that train of thought - we hadn''t diverged enough this time. "But they only do that when the body dies and the lutore collapses. Can you stitch them together after the fact? Did the stuff from Harmid''s office have anything on that kind of thing? Why am I asking you, you don''t remember either."


    Whatever books we had were what she could check - the copy couldn''t use divination, which kinda made sense. It couldn''t control the body, and also I couldn''t pull it to my body the way I could with my mind. We had quite the library building in the memory palace, but it was spotty at best; some of the books were hyper specific, and others were too general. Any given topic was probably at least mentioned in passing, but not what you really needed. I''d tried to use divination on the actual library, but it was still not letting me - I needed to figure out what the exact rules were there. It seemed like any wards that fully separated my lutore from the planar membrane would keep me from using that ability, but I''d been able to keep using it once started after shifting my mind''s thread to the fate layer.


    That implied that I was somehow breaching the wards, not just bypassing them.


    I''d been able to go back and use divination on myself in the room and hallway since then, although the mana cost was significantly higher and I had a hard time getting through walls. It had still let me peek a little into some new areas, but I hadn''t done it much. "I should do that," I said aloud, and then clarified in case my double hadn''t been thinking about the same thing, "go spy on shit now that divination kinda sorta works here."


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    "Yeah, why haven''t we done that more? Although... could get us in trouble with... uh, the trouble detector guy."


    "Barick."


    "Yeah, him. Sorry. I''m getting dumb, can we synch up please?"


    I was sure there were some other topics we were supposed to be covering, but we''d waited too long and were getting scatterbrained. I could prevent that side effect by doing as much as possible to isolate the copy from my thoughts, but I was still sure this would be useful and I also didn''t really like the idea of her diverging too far. "Yeah, fuck it. Ugh, we''re bad at this. Katrin would have written up proper scientific plans and shit, and kept us to it. Oh! Wait, I remember what I was supposed to talk about."


    The duplicate looked annoyed, just another reminder that I preferred being the "real" one. It was fine, she could wait a few minutes before we synched up and reset. "Okay so as far as the range goes - I tried making a regular flavorless thread go to Katrin, since it should just ping her and then unravel. Nothing. It wouldn''t form properly."


    "Wait, with or without the fate layer?"


    "Without. And then I did it with, and it worked fine. So the fate layer is needed to make it find people you''re not in range of. Though obviously I don''t know the actual range yet. But this raises another question, which is... should we be tagging people every time we have enough mana? I could spy on anyone, right? Hammersmith even, like... world leaders and shit."


    "Except human Callie managed to reverse it on you."


    "She... yeah. But it took her years, and that thread isn''t as... customizable... as mine. It''s wild magic and made to do a specific job that should have ended a decade ago. No wonder it''s busted. Mine would be able to turn the connection on and off."


    "You hope."


    "Yeah. Yeah. And if I''m wrong, and still don''t know how to get rid of them... but still, it''s something to keep in mind."


    "For sure. Could you use it on people on Earth?"


    "Fuck. Maybe? Okay this is good, see? This is why we talk to ourselves when we''ve spent some time apart. Okay, that''s my new action item."


    "Breaking out the corporate lingo? Reminds me of when we''d pretend we were working at Universal Servicing Systems."


    With that memory in mind, we clasped hands and I opened the floodgates so we were sharing everything in both directions. The method I''d worked out was to stay that way for five minutes or so, separate and have a minute of silence to gather ourselves, do some sort of test to see what we''d retained from both sides - though the loss was always greater from the duplicate''s side - and then head out to work on whatever. I had to do something for those five minutes of course, so I usually used that time to do my meditation with the old keychain template - I still wasn''t sure why it relaxed me so much, but whatever.


    The duplicate could do the templating thing somewhat, which wasn''t a shock - I''d already figured out that doing it on a local scale didn''t really use my Dumine, and the oydirme did something related naturally. Doing it while synched up was a little tricky, but I felt like that just made it good practice. When we were done, I realized it had been longer than I thought but thankfully Hugh hadn''t bothered me - I''d been in the habit of doing these meetings with time cranked up as much as I could so in the outside world it hadn''t been a suspiciously long time. Still, it was long enough he''d know I was dicking around in my memory palace.


    Well, whatever. Let him wonder.


    I headed back to my body and went through the motions of working with Hugh, and since I''d synched up so recently I wasn''t distracted by memory leak, but I was still not at my best. Something was nagging at me, and the more I thought about the feeling the more certain I was that there was some idea I was struggling to integrate - something that both me and the duplicate had some part of, but I now needed to put together. It was maddening, this sense that there was a jigsaw puzzle scattered in front of me but I didn''t have the first clue what it was even supposed to look like.


    When we got back to our rooms at the end of the night, I headed straight back to my memory palace even though I knew Hugh had to be getting suspicious about what I was doing. I found the duplicate sitting in the pile of books, flipping through one.


    "The only one I could find is the source he had for the Granch," she said, "and I think it might be helpful. Halenvar started using them around the time they were sneaking back into Brinkmar, and the Clockmaker was known to work with this demigod named Arvoh who is some sort of expert on the planes and spirits and shit. So. It''s possible, maybe, that they were made there? I mean, people do seem to agree they were manufactured somehow. And if there''s notes of any kind, anything about how you change oydirme, well. That''s what I am, right? Could be we can beef me up some, get me closer to being like your mind."


    That was it.


    "You said it earlier, that we need more minds. Right. And I was talking about how far the fate threads could reach, and possible targets. Oh my god. Yeah. This might work."


    "You''re doing the thing, where you talk in partial sentences. I can''t hear your thoughts right now, fucking spit it out."


    "Sorry. Uh. I already have two minds."


    She dropped her book. "No. Wait. Would that work? Is Connie''s... it would be a ghost, right?"


    "Sure, but that''s even better - right? I mean... yeah, ghosts tend to be kinda emotional and flaky. But they''re smart, and once we have her tethered we can... I don''t know, keep her stable. If she even needs it."


    My double was nodding. "Right, when I - you - we - talked to her right after she died she seemed fine. Calm, actually. And then when we saw her for a second... I mean, if that''s what that was, I''m not a hundred percent sure, she was smiling and... yeah, probably it''s fine."


    "And if we can get her back, keep her stable, then maybe we can have Rutlen grow her a new body and put her in. And we''d still be linked, but that''s fine."


    "Man, I should probably be trying to... I don''t know, be your less impulsive side and talk you out of this? But I''m too excited about the idea. You should do the flavorless fate thread first, just to see if it connects to anything. As a test."


    I dropped back into my body and spun up a plain fate thread, feeling my mana plummet. I was looking for Connie''s ghost, a mix of her body and soul. I tried to picture her as I''d seen her after she died, and for good measure imagined the ghost I''d talked to in the Necropolis. The thread formed, and... seemed to just wave back and forth feebly in the air for a minute or two before unraveling. Shit. It couldn''t find her. Had she moved on? Gone to the plane of the dead, on the other side of the pit in the Necropolis?


    It was possible even fate threads couldn''t reach there. Hell, it was possible they couldn''t target dead people at all; I''d been told that when someone died the fate threads attached to them fell away and looked for a new target, but was that because they had to or because dead people suck at getting anything done? It could also be that the way they attached to a living person was different from how they attached to a spirit, and so death would disrupt it. There were a hundred more possibilities I wasn''t educated enough to even think of, probably.


    Regardless, I wasn''t about to give up that quickly. If she hadn''t moved on, where would she be? Still in that basement in Zistarne, maybe? But no, I''d seen her since then. Probably. If that was true, it implied she was with me somehow - and that would make some sense, since I was pretty sure we''d had the same domain in Ematse and Erima. I''d had a dream about her before I knew she existed, shared a nightmare about the damage done to her by the temporal mana. And it might have been how I remembered what happened when she rewound time.


    So her mind had been in the place that later became my memory palace, and her soul had been in the same place as mine. When she died they should have been pulled out and combined into a ghost before descending into the plane of the dead, but maybe it got stuck? If not in my mind palace, which had for sure been empty when I got there, then maybe in its equivalent in Erima. I''d never really tried remotely tapping into my soul other than confirming I couldn''t do it the same way I did to my mind, but that was before I''d added the new thread.


    I should be able to now. And even if Connie''s ghost wasn''t hanging out there, it was a chance to see another plane. Honestly I should have done it sooner.


    I opened my eyes to a world of swirling colors, the walls of my spherical domain visible all around me. It was like watching an out of focus movie, fragments of things from my life projected onto the walls in shapes of fire. Where the mind was concrete, this spirit was abstract and focused on emotions. It was... beautiful. I turned, feeling like I was floating, and scanned the entire domain - it didn''t take long, since I was just hovering in the center and the rest was empty. I couldn''t say for sure if the border was twenty feet away or a mile, but I felt sure I would see anything else in there with me.


    Just as luminous as the rest of the world around me, I saw my own hands glowing with this amazing light. Like the rest of Erima, it was an impression of the physical world rather than trying to match it perfectly - but for that it was no less accurate. My fingers were longer, wrists more delicate, and that inner glow shone through translucent skin of orange and gold. It was so familiar, and as I looked closer I realized why. The glow had distracted me so much, but I could imagine what that skin would look like if the light were snuffed out. The strange proportions, the crystalline material, the little facets like marks of a chisel.


    My soul was carved from amber.