This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The mindspace that fit him was black.

Not empty-black, though. Not the cold, hollow dark Elias might have braced for. It was the other kind — the comfortable black of a room with the lamp just blown out, the dark behind your eyes as you settle into sleep, the soft heavy black of a blanket pulled up on a cold night. There was nothing frightening in it at all. If anything, it was the most restful place he'd been inside in all his searching, and the moment he'd touched it he'd known, bone-deep, that it was meant for him.

He'd thought about why, afterward, lying in bed with the headache thudding behind his eyes. And he thought he understood it.

Black was the color that took in all the others. Every shade of light, swallowed up and held. And that was what this mindspace felt like — not nothing, but room for everything. A space that could take in anyone, accept anything, and never once turn it away. Of course it had fit him. He'd spent his whole life wanting, more than anything, to be the kind of place where small forgotten things were welcome.

It seemed his turtle wanted the same.

The moment he woke from the crash, he had Sebastian bring her in.

Sebastian set her down on the bed with great care, and Elias, headache and all, pulled the turtle into a hug.

He recognized her now that he was looking properly. She was one of the older ones — one of the sleepiest turtles in a herd of sleepy turtles, which was saying something. If you ever spotted her at all, she was asleep, or just about to be, or blinking slowly awake from a nap she fully intended to return to. Out of five hundred turtles she had somehow managed to be the most committed to doing absolutely nothing, and she'd done it with such total contentment that Elias couldn't help but find it endearing.

She seemed entirely unbothered to find herself on a mattress. If anything, she approved. She gave a wide, unhurried yawn, crawled the short distance to Elias's side, tucked herself against him, and closed her white eyes.

Elias huddled around her shell and formed the contract.

The turtle didn't make a production of it. There was no great moment of decision on her end, no weighing of the bond the way Briar had once trembled over it. She simply accepted, the way she accepted sunlight and naps and being carried around — without fuss, without doubt, as though of course this was happening, and it was nice, and could they please go to sleep now. The connection settled into place between them, quiet and warm.

He thought long and hard about a name.

He turned a dozen of them over while she dozed against his chest, and in the end he landed on Angel. A quiet thing watching over his mind, keeping it safe, a shield he'd gone looking for through five hundred turtles and thirty-seven mindspaces. It felt right.

"Angel," he tried, out loud.

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Angel did not appear to care one way or the other. She didn't crack an eye. But the contract carried more than words now, and through it Elias felt the small contented hum of a creature that was, in its own sleepy way, pleased. She liked it. She just wasn't going to make a thing of it.

And then, through that same new bond, her drowsiness reached him — warm and slow and enormously persuasive — and Elias found his own eyes going heavy. He didn't fight it. He huddled closer around her shell, Briar wound a vine snug around his arm, Valentine settled into his place at his neck, and the four of them drifted off together in the lamplit quiet.

At some point Sebastian came in, took one look at the pile of sleeping creatures on the bed, and laid a blanket gently over the lot of them before slipping back out.

The next day they did it again.

Angel used Mind Acceleration on him, and Elias went down into that comfortable black and explored it. He'd worked out the third step somewhere during the long thirty-day search, in between all those mismatched mindspaces — it was simply this, done over and over. Keep returning. Keep reaching. Build the connection deeper, one visit at a time.

So that was what they did.

Day after day, Angel accelerated his mind, and day after day, Elias sank into the dark and came to know it better. It stopped being a place he visited and started being a place he knew. He learned its weight and its warmth, the particular hush of it, the way it seemed to breathe slowly around him. After two weeks of it, the black had become so familiar that moving through it was second nature, no more strange than walking through his own home in the dark.

And then, one day, something new was born between them.

It was different from the contract — and not in the way he might have guessed. The contract was the soul-level bond, the unbreakable one, two souls making an eternal promise to each other. This was something else entirely. This was a bond of the mind. Where the contract joined their souls, this joined their thoughts; where the contract was a promise, this was a sharing — two minds quietly becoming one. And when it first caught, Elias felt, for one extraordinary moment, as though his mind and Angel's were not two things sitting side by side but a single thing. As though the black and whatever he was had quietly stopped being separate.

It lasted only a breath. But he knew what he'd felt, and he knew the third step was done.

The fourth step, though, he still couldn't crack.

For all the progress, for all that new mind-bond humming strange and deep between them, the final piece of the evolution stayed out of his reach. His questions narrowed it, circled it, and never quite closed on it. He could feel he was near. He just couldn't see it yet.

So one afternoon, having woken from the day's crash with Angel tucked warm against his side and his head still aching dully, Elias simply lay there and thought about it. He turned it every way he could. He chased it in circles. He got nowhere, and the headache made the circles harder and harder to hold onto, until eventually his thoughts went soft at the edges and Angel's endless drowsiness pulled him gently back under.

He fell asleep without meaning to, one arm draped over her shell.

He didn't feel what happened next. He was fast asleep, and it was the quietest thing in the world.

As he slept, the connection between them — that new bond of the mind — went on working without him. It deepened on its own, the way a root keeps growing in the dark, whether anyone is watching or not. And slowly, softly, mental spiritual energy began to rise off of Angel. It gathered around the sleeping pair of them, a faint dark warmth, pooling and settling over Elias like one more blanket laid on top of Sebastian's.

And little by little — so slightly that no one watching would have caught it, not even Elias if he'd been awake — Angel began to grow smaller.

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