As soon as Chester's certain the sounds from outside have dwindled away, he scrambles over to the new arrival. Esau's limp and unmoving, covered in dozens of fresh bruises—but unlike the others, his aura is still visible, a muted yellow with no motion to it.

"Saw!" Chester says urgently, prodding his shoulder, then lightly tapping his cheek. After tense seconds, Esau begins to stir, then lets out a broken groan, yellow slowly ramping back to a less frightening intensity.

Chester lets out the breath he'd been holding. "Shoot, Saw. I'm so sorry." The apology is pure reflex, but he immediately realizes: this is entirely his fault. The Holy Mother read his mind back in the bedroom. She discovered that Esau opened the door for him as surely as if Chester had confessed.

Esau cracks his eyes open, looking up unfocusedly at Chester. His pain is churning into a constantly refreshing yellow mess—Anton must really have worked him over. But another color does manage to intrude. "Dammit," he red-says, faintly, then with more energy: "Dammit. I told you, Chess. I told you."

"Swamini-ji showed up to personally interrogate me and I still almost got away," Chester says, cringing at that justified anger. "I saw through it when she tried to fool me with kama rupam. But she also stole mind-reading from Sunset and there wasn't anything I could do."

"Mind-reading?" Esau says, a spike of peach which bursts, incongruously, into indigo. "Good."

Chester isn't quite sure what to make of Esau's relief. "No, really bad, actually. Swamini-ji's been stealing other people's powers all along. Even vashitva she stole from Sister Mandy, and it's gotten so much worse. Now she can read minds, shapeshift, make people love her, and blow up whoever those don't work on. We need to do something, or there's nothing stopping her from taking over the world."

"Exactly. She's about to take over the world. Good for her loyal devotees, bad for the fallen ones." Esau winces as he tries and fails to sit up, and his red simmers down into a tawny resentment as yellow batters it into submission. "And if she can read minds, that means she'll understand that I'm still loyal. I just made the mistake of trusting you one last time."

Chester's heart twists. "Saw…"

"Don't you dare go beige at me, Chess. What part of 'my duty is to Swamini-ji' did you not understand?" Esau rolls onto his stomach and starts dragging himself toward the bathroom, a stubborn dark brown joining his pain. "I'm going to wash up, then I'm going to sleep, and then when I see her again I'll beg for a second chance. But only for myself. It's up to you whether you want to keep playing hero, or come to your senses."

"But we owe it to—"

"No," Esau interrupts, a trace of red stirring back up. "There is no 'we'. I told you this would happen, and I promised you I wouldn't lift one finger to help you when it did." The dark brown solidifies. He braces himself against the doorway as he climbs to his feet, and then vanishes around the corner. The restroom sink's faucet turns on.

Chester glances down at his hands, then limps into the restroom to join Esau. They wash up in silence, side by side.

Chester gets his first glance in a mirror since the fight with Anton. He's an absolute mess. His skin is marred with bruises turning an ugly shade of contemplation. His cheeks are swollen, and the nose between them has a new and ugly curve (which looks actively painful, even if the pain from it has spread out into a dull, fiery ache). South of his nose, his face is a mask of dried blood. He briefly considers leaving it on as protective camouflage—maybe Anton will take pity and hit him less if he already looks like Tartarus warmed over?—but right now it's more important to feel like there's something, anything, he can do to turn this around. He wets his hands and scrubs what he can, being careful around the misshapen parts.

Esau, meanwhile, looks a different sort of awful. He took his blows a lot better—nothing's visibly broken, and the only blood is when he swishes some water around in his mouth and spits out red—but it looks like he took a lot more of them.

His feelings fade to a vivid but unfocused pinkish-yellow as he washes and the yellow of his injuries recedes. There's clearly something besides Chester that's distressing him.

Chester takes a stab at it when Esau turns the water off and limps back to the main room. "Will you at least tell me what you found out?"

There's a brief flash of peach he quickly suppresses—along with the beige of betrayal, which also isn't focused on Chester. That vanishes quickly behind guarded gray.

"No," Esau says. "Only that you were right. There's some bad stuff, Chess. Really bad. But she's going to read our minds later, and when she does, I want her to know that my lips are sealed. Not to mention, I'm pretty sure if you knew some of the things I found out, she wouldn't hesitate to have that rancher jerk shoot you. You'd be stupid enough to do something about them."

Chester's heart twists. Even through the background yellow, he can tell that some of Esau's secrets really are the stabby, pain-bleeding kind. "Those sound like the sort of secrets something should be done about."

"Thank you for proving my point." Esau sighs, his yellow paling into resignation. "Honestly, it's hard to disagree. But I'm a soldier. It doesn't matter what she's done. I don't get to choose who to serve."

"You always have a choice," Celestia's thin, colorless voice cuts in from the side.

Esau's body jolts. He yelps, orange and peach.

He whirls around to look for the source of the sound, breathing tight. He scans the room before his gaze settles in on Celestia. Behind Esau's back, Chester frantically mimes a flat hand across his throat.

"It's fine, Chester," Celestia says. "When the Holy Mother returns, we're in trouble whether or not this fine young man knows I'm awake."

Esau opens and closes his mouth, his peach receding into whirling colors. "H-how are you…"

Chester's not confident in Celestia's judgment, but the decision's already been made. "She's only mostly drained," he explains. "Blink and you can see her in the afterimages."

"I apologize for startling you. And I hope we can start fresh with some introductions. Saw, was it? I'm Celestia."

Esau throws her a resentful yellow-brown scowl. "That's Brother Esau to you. And, yes, assassin, I'm going to tell Swamini-ji you're awake. Plus everything else you do as you try to make me turn on her like you did to Brother Chester."

"She'll get it all when she mind-reads me anyway, Brother Esau," Celestia says. "This is just about you. She shouldn't be the only one with the truth."

Esau hesitates, slamming down a wall of maroon suspicion. But he can't maintain it. Black seeps through the cracks—along with orange. Chester thinks he knows that one: Esau's already learned so much, he's afraid there's going to be another fact he won't be able to ignore.

Esau turns his back on her and crosses his arms, fighting to maintain that maroon. "I don't care. Temptress. Deceiver. Everything you say is a lie."

"Then let's start with something we all know is true," Celestia says, undeterred. "You care about your younger brother very much, don't you?"

Esau immediately blossoms into vivid peach. He freezes, eyes widening. Chester stares at him, utterly confused. Esau catches Chester's stare as his eyes flick around, and falls into it—with a desperate radium green stirring up, limned with dark blue protectiveness.

Chester struggles to interpret those colors. Something she said just broke Esau. There's something he is desperate to protect Chester from, which was exposed to light in an instant.

But the only notable thing she said was "younger brother"… was that the secret?

A few moments' thought leaves Chester even more confounded—not by the relationship, but by the idea that Esau could possibly think Chester doesn't know. The ashram's official line is that all male devotees are brothers in the Holy Mother's family, equal seekers of enlightenment without regard to age or bloodline, but of course with Esau there has always been something more. Their uniquely shared color-sight is impossible to ignore, along with Sister Mandy's related power and their long-ago family-like sleeping arrangements.

But as Chester thinks through it, unease begins to gnaw at his insides. There's a whole constellation of implications connected to the idea of family, and there's definitely room for secrets in those darker corners. As one low-hanging fruit, Chester had long ago accepted Chryssy's word that Sister Mandy had abandoned everyone she cared about and that Brother Bill had blasphemed and spread lies—meaning that, even if they had been family, they were still awful people and Chester had been lucky to have the Holy Mother rescue him from their transgressions. But if that's not true…

Chester has had to question a whole lot of his beliefs since seeing Chryssy's true self. So far, the ones related to kinship have been low on the list. But a few puzzle pieces are already shifting around into their proper places.

"You're not afraid of me knowing that you and I are related. This is about Sister Mandy and Brother Bill. Our birth mother and father." Chester doesn't even need to see Esau's guilt intensifying to confirm that one. "Swamini-ji stole Mandy's power and knows the truth about both of their disappearances." While those are plausible as secrets, that's not what Esau is desperate to keep concealed, because they're not new revelations. "Brother Bill… oh." Chester swallows. "Our dad. I'm the one who ruined his investigation."

Now that Chester knows the villain was always Chryssy and not Bill, that one comes with a stab of guilt. But Esau's response is a spike of deep blue—a nonverbal wince of sympathy, not the reaction of a secret being blown open. And frankly, that guilt is a problem Chester can wrestle with when his own survival isn't an open question.

His thoughts are interrupted by a hand firmly clasping his shoulder.

"Leave it at that, Chess," Esau says, clinging to radium green. "I know how your brain works. I know I'm asking the wind not to blow. But I'm begging you, as a brother. Let Swamini-ji have her secrets and think about something, anything, else."

Chester swallows. Esau's right—his brain is already actively picking at the secret, as if it were an itchy scab. And right now, anything they learn of the Holy Mother's secrets could be crucial. But it's Esau. And he's very nearly groveling.

"I'll try," Chester says.

Esau lets out a breath, emotions destabilizing. Then smoldering red reignites, and he whirls back to Celestia. "Are you trying to get Chester killed? How did you even know that?"

"That's… not actually where I meant to go with that." Even as washed-out as Celestia's colors are, Chester thinks he sees peach. "I live on a different version of your world, and I know you're brothers because I've met our world's pair of you. But I think you actually are Chrysalis' children where I come from."

Esau throws his arms up in the air, the red bleeding off into frustration. "Great. Just great. With everything else that has happened today, you being from some stupid alternate dimension or something is just insane enough to be the truth."

"It is true," Chester says. He has trusted the unicorns on that since the beginning, but he realizes Esau doesn't have to. He points at Holds-the-Fire. "Holds-the-Fire—she's the one I mentioned that can do a sparkling gold aura—has a duplicate from Celestia's world, and I've met both versions of her. Ember, the other one, is out at the edge of the ashram right now, trying to find a way to sneak in and save us."

"Even if that's all true," Esau snaps, shading back into gray, "it changes nothing. I'm still not going to help you against Swamini-ji."

"Then, Brother Esau, may I make a request that has nothing to do with her?" Celestia says.

"Will listening to it get you to leave me alone?" he asks, pastel red stirring up.

Celestia studies him for a bit, as best she can without turning her head. "If that's what you wish. So, when Chester and his friends win this fight… when you no longer have to choose between your family and your duty… I would like to take you to visit the other version of you."

"Sure, whatever," Esau gray-says, and limps over to an unoccupied section of wall, settling down to the hard concrete floor.

"Please take the question seriously, Brother Esau. In the other world I have substantial resources, and I assure you that if you say yes, I won't hesitate to follow up."

Esau lies down on his side facing the wall, wincing as his weight settles in. "In this ridiculous hypothetical where you somehow go from being paralyzed in jail to challenging Swamini-ji at full transcendence?" he gray-says. "Sure, why not."

"Marvelous. Thank you."

Esau says nothing more.

Chester glances back and forth between the two of them, thrown. Esau had been absolutely dead-set against helping, true, but Celestia had still seemed oddly willing to concede failure there. Having been outmaneuvered by her several times already, Chester had been happy to let her superior intellect take the lead in recruiting Esau to their cause—but the exchange doesn't feel like a win.

"Celestia?" he asks, giving up and confronting the question dead-on. "What made that so important that you had to get it settled now?"

Her eyeballs shift to Chester, and she goes to the effort of a twitchy-eyed near-wink. He gets the sudden suspicion that she had been waiting for him to ask exactly that question.

"Because Brother Esau has spent so much time trying to protect you that I don't think he fully appreciates what you're capable of," Celestia says. "And I think it'll do you both some good to learn how the leader of the changelings reconciled with his older brother."

Chester's pretty certain that Esau's peach is a pale shadow of his own.

"Leader?" Esau says, rolling back over. He looks back and forth between Chester and Celestia in dark gray doubt. But as he considers the idea, he can't suppress some stirrings of blue-brown pride.

Chester, meanwhile, is trying to wrap his brain around the idea. It would be so easy to reject it out of hand if Holds-the-Fire hadn't already told him to challenge Chryssy for pack leadership, with the casual certainty of someone looking at a credible candidate. Chester can dismiss Celestia's words as a pep talk—she's very good at those, though her permanent maternal protectiveness also colors her opinions with maternal optimism—but with Holds-the-Fire, who looked straight into his soul and said it anyway? That's different.

"Nobody's asking you to betray the Holy Mother, Brother Esau, even after everything that she's done to you," Celestia says. "But you've never truly seen Chester in action before. I think you should do what you promised, and not lift one finger while he takes on the Holy Mother. Watch how your brother handles this and give him a chance to surprise you."

Boy. No pressure with that one. Chester's going to have to step up.

(He catches himself and marvels, for a moment, at the full scope of Celestia's rhetorical judo. She simultaneously pushed Esau from the Holy Mother's team onto the sidelines, and kicked Chester's brain into a leader mode he didn't realize he possessed.)

… Speaking of stepping up. Chester has gotten insanely distracted here. Holds-the-Fire still has a creepy bloodstone power source in her, and every time he starts dealing with that, something new comes up.

"First things first," he says. "Our zombie problem."

He eyes Holds-the-Fire. Of course, it's easy to say it's time to fix her, and hard to know where to begin.

Well… if the issue is that she's too drained to resist whatever the bloodstone is doing, then what if he feeds her some love energy back? The idea that he's capable of a siddhi still feels like a wild hypothetical, but there's no time like the present to give it a try.

Chester crawls closer to Holds-the-Fire, then pauses. Of course, if it doesn't work, he's going to get grabbed by a zombie again, and that leaves him no safety margin. Maybe he should do a dry run.

He diverts over to Sunset's still form. "I've got an idea, but I need a proof-of-concept first." He pushes his sleeves back, hovering his bare arms over her shoulder, and tries to think through exactly what he needs to do.

The concept is simple enough: gather his own love energy, then send it to his target. In theory, it's not terribly different from the mental "pushing" he's already been doing trying to send thoughts back and forth via bloodstone telepathy. But there's another component to it beyond just thinking emotions at people. When Holds-the-Fire commanded her wolfpack, she generated an extra layer of emotion she wasn't feeling for the command, a layer which Chester could see. Chryssy, too, had created an extra cyan layer she pumped into her victims. If Chester could see his own colors, it would be easy to experiment and then tell if he was onto something, but…

… damn it.

"Saw?" he asks, projecting cringing apology.

Esau stares at him, maroon. "No."

"I'm not asking you to lift a finger," Chester says. "Just to tell me what you see."

"A hopeless, stubborn dreamer about to get himself killed."

"Yes, I can see myself too," Chester says. "But I can't see my own colors."

Esau shifts into pink as he realizes Chester's implication. "You're really asking for my help again? After everything?"

Chester ignores the question and thinks of Holds-the-Fire. Re-summons the feelings he felt about her after that artificial infusion. Thinks of that triumphant tooth-lick… no, he needs something uncontaminated by lust. He thinks of that moment they simply stared into each other's eyes, him seeing her radiating blue, and her sensing the wolf equivalent in him. That moment when they realized their mutual trust was really just that simple, before he made everything so complicated. How she deserves so much better than what she's gotten—how she deserves only the best of him. And how he's willing to go through anything to be that best Chester for her.

"Am I cyan?" he asks—letting himself marinate in love again, but genuine this time.

Esau groans, a resigned pale yellow. "I regret everything about the phrasing of my promise. Yes."

Chester mentally checks off step one. Captures and holds that feeling, keeping part of his brain frozen in that moment. Then thinks about determination. He's got to get this siddhi right—there's so much riding on it. Tries to feel that determination and that love both at once, both at equal intensities, but keeping them separate.

"Now just kind of muddy blue," Esau says. "No—like concern but with brown instead of yellow. The two colors aren't mixing."

Chester pictures the determination burrowing down underneath the love. Coalescing into an earthy brown planet at his core, surrounded by a cyan atmosphere.

"And now you're going cyan again," Esau says. (By the increasing light violet in his tone, he's getting into this despite himself.) "Though the brown's still there underneath."

Good so far. Chester visualizes his determination shifting to the outside, an impregnable armor around the love beneath.

"Brown over blue," Esau says. "This looks like basic practice in faking emotions. Are you going somewhere with this?"

Chester certainly hopes so. Step two—controlling colors—gets a mental checkmark, and he pictures all that cyan concentrating from his core into his hands.

A day ago he would have called the idea insane; hands can't feel love. But now he's got enough experience to ignore that voice of protest. This is no longer about the emotion—he's got a block of abstract color, and he's seen from his telepathy experience that he can push colors between people with his mind. So why not use that exact same technique to push the color around in his body?

"Oh!" Esau violet-says. "We can do that?"

Excitement grips Chester, dissipating his focus. "Do what? What do you see?"

Esau sits up, violet strengthening. "Well, for a second there, you had the cyan focused into your hands. Can you imagine the messages we can send that way?" A ripple of spyfeel stirs up, then holds, as Esau tries to replicate Chester's experiments—caramel and violet overlaying each other, and then trading foreground and background.

Chester files away the idea of hand signals for later. "Admittedly, that would be pretty cool. But right now I'm trying to do something even trickier, and taking it one step at a time."

Esau stares at his hands, caramel brightening as he focuses. Then his violet seeps back to the outside, but remains full-body.

"What about me?" he asks after long moments.

"Uh, nothing," Chester says. "If you're trying to focus color into your hands, I mean."

It throws him a bit that Esau can't replicate something which felt so natural to him. Especially since Esau has more experience than he does with faking emotions. Was what he just did harder than he thought? Or maybe Esau's missing context, like the brushes with telepathy, that Chester is taking for granted?

"Hnh," Esau says, caramel dissolving into light violet as he gives up his manipulations and lets natural curiosity take back over. "How did you do the hand thing?"

"I'll show you once we get this sorted out," Chester says. "Spot me again for a minute."

Chester turns back to Sunset, replaying his preparations and getting the love and determination firmly fixed in his thoughts. Then he pushes the cyan back down to his hands, leans over her, and lays his hands on her colorless shoulder.

This is the simplest part—and also the most likely to anticlimactically, silently fail.

Chester knows the components and knows the desired outcome. He just finished turning emotions into abstract energy that he can move around his body. He already knows pushing emotions into other people's brains is possible; why not energy? But now he's trying to take those ideas, and the glue of some wild speculation, and assemble the pieces into an actual, practical effect. This goes beyond vashitva—this is reverse-engineering the opposite of Chryssy's prakamya, coming up on the fly with a siddhi he doesn't even have a name for.

A large part of him is convinced it simply can't be this simple. And that part does have logic on its side. If it was, the Holy Mother wouldn't have been able to lord her single stolen power over the ashram for a decade and a half. But on the other hand, most people don't have a lifetime of color-sight and 24 hours of the most intense crash course in magic he can imagine.

Chester takes a deep breath, feels the love in his hands, and pushes.

He doesn't know what he expects to happen. But the outcome is pretty clearly in that vast, muddy chasm between success and failure. There are no visible effects on Sunset, but he is getting some sort of feedback. A kind of return pressure—a resistance. And there's a weird wave of fatigue rippling through his body.

He closes his eyes and pushes harder.

(—oh gods, he has moved love out of his body before. When he barfed love into the planter. He hopes he doesn't have to vomit on Sunset to make this work—)

"Chess," Esau peach-says, then again, tone ratcheting up: "Chess."

Chester snaps his eyes open, fighting through sudden haze to refocus into the moment. Then surprise jolts him to full attention. Sunset's body has gone from colorless to the faintest of liminal cyans, and she's stirring as if disturbed from sleep.

"Chess," Esau orange-says, "she's moving—"

"I see that," Chester breathes, heart soaring. "Did I really just—"

Esau interrupts him, orange brightening, a vividness only matched by his fear on the drill sergeant day. "Chess she's moving she's moving behind you Chess—"

Chester whips his head around toward Holds-the-Fire. Glowing red eyes in the darkness.

He shrieks and scrambles back to the corner behind Esau.

Holds-the-Fire's colorless body is in a scuttling insectlike pose, torso barely off the ground, suspended from elbows and knees. She lurches a stumbling step in Chester's direction. Then the body seems to run out of energy, like a cell phone draining the last of its battery. The red wavers. Gutters out. She goes limp all at once, collapsing back to the floor.

"That settles it," Celestia calmly says into the terrified silence. "Something about you, specifically, is activating her bloodstone. How did you build a link with it, Chester?"

"I don't know!" Chester says, struggling for control. Behind Esau's cover, it's a bit easier to ratchet his panic back down—but Holds-the-Fire's transformation rattled him much harder this time, shattering the illusion that he had a handle on it. "I've never even seen the bloodstones everyone keeps talking about!"

"Impossible," Celestia says. "Her bloodstone wouldn't be reacting to you like that unless you had directly connected with it in a profound way. You don't pull emotional resonance like that out of a few telepathic conversations. By the way—breathe."

Chester gasps for air, focusing on his breathing for a bit. "We're safe," he repeats between inhalations. "We're safe."

"On the bright side," Celestia says, "that also affected Sunset."

Chester takes a few more breaths, then tears his eyes off Holds-the-Fire to look at her. It's true. Sunset's no longer cyan and no longer moving under her own power, but her sprawl on the floor is somewhat less awkwardly shaped, her limbs having come to rest at slightly different angles.

"Let me get this straight," Esau says, the last of his orange still bleeding off. "You've got siddhis now? And the friend of yours who isn't a demon assassin is…" His mouth opens and closes several times. "… Some kind of magically cursed zombie?"

"Did I mention it's been a crazy day?" Chester asks weakly.

"We're working on that last bit," Celestia says. "Speaking of which, I understand that strange encounters with magic can be scary, but I still feel like both of you have been reacting with unusual intensity to what you're seeing."

"I don't expect you to understand"—Esau shudders, orange and orange-red—"exactly how disturbing it is to see something that looks human moving around without any colors."

"What he said," Chester adds.

"Very well," Celestia says. "At any rate, Chester, it certainly looks like you just performed magic, which is impressive for a native of this dimension. How are you feeling?"

Hey, that's right, he did accomplish something pretty cool.

Chester takes a moment to take stock. "Pretty tired, honestly." Above and beyond both the adrenaline shock and the exhaustion of the day. Even giving Sunset that tiny little spark was a noticeable effort, both in the moment and in the aftermath.

"Mmm. Well, brute-forcing our way out of this was never Plan A, but please do be careful about feeding your love to others unless we can get you a good power source."

"Trust me, that's one I already know," Chester says, images of old Swamini-ji's multi-day exhaustion dancing unbidden in his brain.

"Ssst," Esau suddenly peach-says, dropping to a whisper. "Someone's coming."

Celestia closes her eyes again. Moments later, the crossbeam scrapes and then drops away. Chester takes stock of the room as their visitor fiddles with the deadbolt. Fortunately, nothing really substantial has changed this time—just Holds-the-Fire's position, and both Chester and Esau having cleaned up and moved around. He takes a deep breath and braces himself.

A moment after the door unlocks, there's a loud wham. The door bounces off its frame, then swings outward, vibrating from the impact. Anton waits for it to swing past him, then lowers his foot. He scans the room with a maroon scowl, his gun already leveled. There's another colorless form over his shoulder, this one small and furry.

Chester's heart sinks even before Anton levels the pistol at him. "You've developed a funny habit of screamin'," Anton maroon-says. "A fella might start to think you're up to something."

Chester's fumbling for a lie when Esau smoothly takes over the response. "The stupid creampuff thought he saw a rat," he grumbles, giving Chester a caramel glance. "You think it was bad out there, try getting woken up by it from five feet away."

Anton lowers the gun, maroon falling away into lilac. "Heh. Awful ironic considering the vermin doing the screaming." Pink briefly flares. "I'm gettin' to bed. And if you make me come back out here… Chryssy's plans or no, you're getting the fear beat out of you."

Without waiting for a reply, he grabs the furry form by its scruff and hucks Ember into the center of the floor, an arm's length from Holds-the-Fire. Then he grabs the door, slams it shut, and locks them back in.

Chester lets out a frustrated breath as the crossbar scrapes back into place. Anton's finally going to leave them alone, yes, but that's small consolation. There goes their last hope of rescue.

"Still not betraying Swamini-ji," Esau pink-says. "You're still on your own. But that guy's an ass."

"No arguments here," Chester says—then freezes up, swiveling his head. In the corner of his eye, Esau blossoms back into orange and peach.

In the center of the floor, Ember and Holds-the-Fire are rising to their feet, jerky and stilted. Their solid red eyes are locked on each other.

And both their forms are flooding with intense, sparkling red.

Author's Note

The mysteries deepen, along with Chester's problems. At least he's making some progress...

This is another reminder that I'm doing two weeks of three chapters per week, posted on Sun/Tues/Thurs. Join us on Thursday, Sept. 19 for "Grudge Matched"!