I watched the jet’s stats as we climbed. It had no issues. Then I thought of a possibility, “Ghost are you feeling anything?”

Rachel said, “No,” but she also gave the smallest shake of her head as if I shouldn’t talk about it.

Then she started tapping on her left forearm, using the “keyboard” I’d built into our suits. It was just a setting that made letters appear on either sleeve and turned the spots touch-sensitive.

Her text appeared in my HUD.

“Someone’s trying to find us. It feels like an Artificer, but clumsy. I’m hiding. If Kee taught you how, use it. Otherwise, try not to think about anything unusual.”

It was very like what Lee had said when we felt the presence of another Artificer at the site of an old battle during his race’s civil war.

As of that moment, I got it—Magnus. And since Kee had taught me a technique for hiding from other Artificers, I started trying to use it—though “use” might be an exaggeration. Most Artificer skills that I could master amounted to pulling in power and adjusting my relationship to my physical reality, either moving out of it or staying within and extending myself into the nearby realities around me.

This was different. Instead of pulling power in, I was supposed to match the ambient energy around me, not unlike the camouflage mode of our suits. That meant sensing the relevant energy first of all and letting it flow through you so that there was no distinguishing what was inside you from the outside.

It made me think of the heat death of the universe, which Kee caught from my thoughts, causing her to say, “Oh, you’re so young.”

It felt very like hearing the same from an aunt when you were four and said something so naive that she found it cute. Given that Kee was old enough to have seen more than one universe end, I couldn’t take offense at the implied condescension.

Aloud, I said, “Cap, you’ll want to be ready to fly the jet. I’m not going to be able to pay attention for a moment.”

Not waiting for an answer, I extended my senses, but passively. I felt the energy of the reality around me and the others that existed only a twist of the mind away. Rachel and I existed in more than one, but I couldn’t sense her at all.

I could also sense another presence, this one sifting through the energies around us systematically, trying one section in a blast of energy and then the one next to it.

I then knew what Rachel meant by clumsy. It had a pile of power behind it, but didn’t close the gaps. Oddly, it reminded me of mowing the lawn.

When you mow, you go over the edge of the line you last mowed. If you don’t, you’ll have a line of grass growing between the mowed sections. Also, to the degree that you can, you go across systematically so that you only travel to one spot once and don’t have to detour over stuff you’ve already mowed to get a spot you missed.

The search pattern that I assumed was made by Magnus using Lee’s device was even worse than that. If I wanted to compare a device that could destroy galaxies to a lawn mower, this felt like a riding lawn mower only barely under the control of the five-year-old operator, trying to stay on a straight line, but overcorrecting, traveling into the already mowed territory, whipping back into a completely unmowed area, and turning around to go back to more or less where they’d left off.

Weirdly, it reminded me of Ray after he’d gone through the power impregnator. He had the power to copy other people’s powers, but he’d never trained to efficiently use them. So when we fought, I had that advantage—my only advantage.

In the moment it gave me hope. I’d beaten Ray. Maybe I could beat Magnus.

Right then, however, the way to beat Magnus was to take a deep breath and let the energy of reality around me flow through me the way it would if I wasn’t there.

I concentrated on that flow, pretending I was part of it without drawing power in, letting it pass through. I didn’t feel like I was becoming one with the universe, but I wished I could.

What I did feel though, was a burning heat as Magnus sent a probe our way. It passed without “touching,” but it felt close. I thought back to my fight with something I suspected might be Magnus just before fighting the mushroom zombie horde. I’d hurt him then–if that creature lurking in the “in-between” space had been him.

I didn’t know whether I’d hurt his mind, soul, or an avatar, but that burning heat might be able to hurt me.

Without opening my eyes, trying to keep myself within whatever state this was, I pointed in a direction Magnus had already searched and said, “Go that way.”

I kept my arm up for a while, hoping I was clear enough that Cassie would get it even if I wasn’t talking clearly.

At the same time, I worried that Magnus would make a poorly controlled sweep backward, putting us directly in his view.