Freaky Friday

There was a way. He’d thought it possible for years, ever since Tezzeret had told him of his “mind-storage” device, ever since he’d felt the minds of the traitor and the nezumi shogun and realized they were, indeed, objects that he could manipulate. And now, now that he’d touched Kallist’s mind once more, felt its weight, its shape, its essence, Jace was all but certain.

No, a planeswalker couldn’t take another person with him through the Blind Eternities. But another mind? That, Jace knew, he could do. He could hold Kallist within himself, just long enough to make the journey and to find another body, a new body, for him to inhabit. It would mean erasing the mind of someone else, to make room for Kallist’s own, but Jace was certain he could find someone who deserved it. Kallist would never forgive him; he knew that before he even started. But he would be alive, and Jace owed him that—even if it wasn’t what Kallist thought he wanted.

With a deep sigh, Jace thr*st his mind into his friend’s. Again he cradled it in his grip, tenderly examining it from all sides. And then he did what he’d never tried before—what nobody, to his knowledge, had ever tried before—and drew it to him.

He was Jace Beleren, mind-reader, planeswalker. And he knew he could do this.

Knew, right up until the moment that Kallist’s mind truly entered his own, and everything went wrong.

Jace thought he could keep them separate, that he could keep the him that was Kallist in a tiny corner of the him that was Jace. Two minds sharing a body, yes, but far from equally. As they touched, Jace’s protections popped, soap bubbles on the wind, for this was a pressure of a sort he’d never known. It wasn’t an attack, it wasn’t communication, it wasn’t anything he could have imagined—and what Jace could not imagine, he could not weave into his spells.

Already he was experiencing memories not his own, remembering dreams he’d never had. He seemed to be staring at the room from two different angles, staring at two faces, and he couldn’t recall which was his. His head began to throb, his concentration to blow away like perfume on the wind.

Desperately he tried to stop the spell, to push Kallist’s thoughts back where they belonged—but even if he’d had the power or the focus to do so, Jace had already forgotten how, the knowledge buried beneath the flood of someone else’s mind.

Still he pushed, running on instinct now rather than knowledge, struggling to separate the thoughts of his friend from his own, even if he could no longer remember which was which, who was who.

On it went, and on, until finally what had nearly become one was indeed two once more. And Jace, who had been Kallist, and Kallist, who had been Jace, lay unconscious together on the thin rug of the anonymous flat.

***

Agents of Artifice, Chapter 21