I didn't tell anyone about hollow_choir. Not Doug, not Yankovic, not the Numbers standing guard outside my window at night on a rotation I'd quietly doubled without explaining why. Some threats got smaller the moment you said them out loud to someone else, borrowed strength from being shared. This one, I suspected, would only get larger — more real, more permanent, the kind of thing that stopped being a strange comment on a forum and started being a fact of my life the second I let it become one to anyone but myself.
So I did the thing I always did when a threat I couldn't immediately fight showed up on my doorstep: I got stronger instead of scared.
It was, I recognized somewhere in the small hours of one of those six sleepless nights, a pattern I'd been running since the very first week of this second life, back when the threat had been nothing more exotic than a bully's fist and my answer had been a stolen power I barely understood yet. Every escalation since then had followed the same shape — fear, then preparation, then strength, each cycle a little faster than the last, each threat a little larger than the one before it. I didn't know, lying awake and running the shape of that pattern over in my head, whether it made me resilient or simply predictable to anyone patient enough to have been studying me as closely as hollow_choir apparently had.
I called Elias in on a Tuesday, no stream, no audience, just the two of us in the new warehouse with the overhead lights turned low enough that the space felt more like a room than a stage. He arrived hesitant, shoulders hunched the same way they'd been the first night, and I understood, watching him cross the floor, that whatever relief he'd felt walking out hypnotized and unburdened a week ago had curdled somewhere in the days since into something closer to dread.
"You're not fighting tonight," I told him, before he could ask. "I want to talk. And then I want to try something."
"Try what?"
"Something I think worked the last time, but I only got one shot at it. I want to understand it properly before I decide what it means for either of us."
He didn't ask what "it" was, which told me some part of him already suspected, the way a body sometimes knows a diagnosis before a doctor says the word out loud. I sat him down, met his eyes, and this time I didn't reach for a command at all — just held the contact, steady, and asked him plainly instead of ordering him.
"Will you let me do this? You can say no."
It was, I realized as the words left my mouth, the first time I had ever asked instead of taken. Something about that felt strange enough that I almost took it back.
I thought, in the half-second before he answered, about every homeless man, every teacher, every negotiation I'd walked into already knowing the outcome before the other person had a chance to object to it. Asking cost something none of those encounters had ever cost me — the genuine, uncomfortable possibility of a real no, one I'd actually have to respect rather than simply route around. I didn't examine too closely why, tonight of all nights, that possibility mattered enough to voice out loud.
Elias was quiet a long moment, unhypnotized, entirely himself, weighing an offer that wasn't really an offer at all — we both understood, without either of us saying so, that "no" would change very little about the actual balance of power in the room. But he answered anyway, slow, deliberate. "If it means nobody else ever finds out. Yeah. Do it."
I hypnotized him properly then, full submission, the purple flicker catching and holding, and reached again for the well underneath the command the way I had the first time — except this time I went slower, more deliberate, paying attention to the texture of the resistance instead of just pushing through it as fast as I could. It came easier the second time. Not effortless — there was still a real, physical cost to it, a strain that sat behind my eyes like the beginning of a headache — but easier, the way any skill gets easier the second time you attempt it with your eyes actually open to what you're doing.
The warmth spread into my hands again, stronger this time, lingering longer before it started to fade. I picked up the same length of rebar from last time — I'd kept it, oddly sentimental about the thing — and bent it further than before, a full loop instead of a slight angle, my fourteen-year-old wrists doing work that should have snapped them in half.
I let it fade naturally this time, timing it on my phone. Ninety seconds. Nearly double the first attempt.
"It grows with practice," I said, mostly to myself, watching the last of the warmth ebb out of my knuckles. "Or it grows with how deep the trance goes. Or both." I looked at Elias, still hypnotized, still patient, still waiting for whatever came next with the flat calm of a man who'd stopped being able to refuse anything asked of him in this state. "I need to know which."
I spent the next hour testing it in pieces, methodical the way I used to be methodical about spreadsheets in a different life. I kept a running log on my phone between attempts, numbering each one, jotting down what I'd changed and what I'd gotten back for it, the same instinct that used to make me track macros and workout reps in my old body finding a new, considerably stranger use.
Trial one: shallow trance, held thirty seconds, reached for the well immediately. Nothing. Elias's eyes stayed glazed but present, and when I tried to draw on whatever sat under the command, I found only the command itself — obedience, thin and surface-level, nothing underneath it worth taking.
Trial two: deeper trance, same duration. A flicker of warmth, there and gone before I could even confirm it was real, gone too fast to test on anything.
Trial three: full submission, the kind Doug's crew lived in permanently now, held for nearly a minute before I reached. This was the one that worked — warmth spreading fast and sure into my hands, strong enough that I bent the rebar in one motion instead of working it slowly the way I had the first time.
What I learned, by the end of it, was this: depth mattered more than duration. A shallow trance, however long I held it, gave me nothing. A trance deep enough to touch the parts of a person that didn't ordinarily surrender — memory, identity, the things Doug's crew had lost permanently — gave me real, if temporary, access. And the effect didn't stack. I tried, once, holding the connection through two separate cycles without breaking it, hoping for something cumulative. All it earned me was a headache sharp enough to make my vision swim and no additional warmth at all.
"It's like a bucket," I said out loud, mostly to hear the theory in my own voice instead of just my own head. "Fill it, draw from it, let it refill. You can't just keep dipping the same cup in before the well's had time to catch back up."
Elias, still hypnotized, said nothing, because I hadn't asked him a question, and I found myself, in the quiet after, oddly grateful for a conversational partner who couldn't interrupt a thought before I'd finished having it.
A well, not a pipe, I thought, rubbing my temples, watching Elias blink back into himself for the second time that night. It refills. It doesn't just keep flowing because I want it to.
"You alright?" I asked him, once the hypnosis broke.
"Tired," he said, rubbing at his eyes with the back of one broad hand, and it was the first unprompted word he'd offered me all evening, small and human and entirely his own. "Feels like after I do something with the strength. Like I used it, even though I didn't."
That detail sat with me longer than anything else from the whole night. It wasn't a free lunch. Whatever I was taking from him, he was paying for it too, some cost split unevenly between the two of us in a way neither of us fully understood yet. I thought of Yankovic's voice on the phone — you sound like a boy who just found his first real toy — and, for the first time since I'd started down this road, felt something that wasn't quite guilt but stood close enough to it to make me uncomfortable.
"Does it hurt?" I asked him, before I could stop myself, curious in a way that had nothing to do with the log on my phone.
He considered the question with the same flat honesty he brought to everything now, unhurried by any need to spare my feelings. "Not exactly. More like — you know when you've been holding a plank too long, and your arms are shaking but you're not letting yourself stop? Like that, except it's not my arms doing the holding. It's something further in."
"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it more than I expected to when the words left my mouth.
"You asked," he said. "Didn't have to. Most people who use somebody don't bother asking after."
I didn't have a good answer for that, so I let it sit, filing his words away next to Ashford's and Yankovic's in the same growing archive of things people kept telling me about myself that I wasn't yet sure I wanted to hear.
I sent him home with a driver and an extra hundred dollars he hadn't asked for, and sat alone afterward turning the whole evening over, weighing what I'd learned against what it had cost to learn it.
There was a version of tonight's work that felt, in the abstract, like any other research project — variables controlled, hypotheses tested, results logged and ready to inform the next attempt. But research projects didn't usually leave the subject sitting slumped against a warehouse wall, drained in some way I still didn't fully understand, describing his own exhaustion in the flat, hollowed-out voice of a man too tired to be afraid of what he'd just admitted. I thought about my old life again — the actual research I used to sign off on, secondhand, from a comfortable distance, never once having to sit in the same room as whatever the fine print of a project actually cost somebody else to produce. I'd never had to look that cost in the eye before. Now I did, every single time, and I noticed, with a small, cold clarity, that the looking was getting easier rather than harder, the same way everything else about this life had gotten easier the longer I let it.
I thought about the log on my phone, rows of numbers and durations that would have looked, to anyone glancing over my shoulder, like nothing more sinister than a workout tracker. That was, I supposed, exactly the problem with how easily this was starting to fit into the ordinary architecture of my life — filed, categorized, optimized, no different in form from anything else I'd learned to manage since waking up in this body. The form was familiar. What it actually cost the person on the other end of the log was not, and I was aware, folding my phone shut and heading for bed, that the gap between those two things was exactly the gap Yankovic had been trying to warn me about all along.
I thought, not for the first time, that every answer this power gave me seemed to arrive with a new, more complicated question folded up inside it — and that I was, increasingly, choosing not to unfold most of them.