Chapter 1
Razputin Aquato had been trained out of stage fright at an early age. An Aquato couldn't hesitate during a show, not when so many of their tricks relied on every member of the family (save his elderly Nona) to hold steady, lest their latest feat of human architecture come tumbling down. Still, the boy felt an unfamiliar, uncomfortable thrill as he stood before Whispering Rock's bewildered campers and counselors. This was an audience unlike any other he'd faced, and a performance more personal and more dangerous than even the most death-defying acrobatic act.
He was alone, for one. The Aquatos did not do solo acts. Their family dynamic was part of the appeal. This audience's myriad eyes ignored the adults surrounding him to fix on Raz and only Raz. He was ashamed to find himself wishing he had at least one of his four siblings beside him to share the spotlight.
No. He'd chosen to run away. That meant leaving the good parts behind with the bad. He couldn’t keep his brothers and sisters without accepting the accompanying parental panopticon, and that was something he had to escape for the sake of his mental health.
Given his father’s increasingly demanding acrobatics lessons, his physical health might also be in danger. Basically, the situation had become untenable from every angle. Sorry Frazie, Queepie, Mirtala, Dion. If you’ve got complaints, take it up with the boss(es).
Compounding his nerves was the knowledge that this audience could not be thrown into the post-performance mental garbage dump he'd filled with scores of one-time-only faces glimpsed in the transitions between various acrobatic feats. These were people he planned to know. People he wanted to know. Potential friends and allies in his quest for psychic enlightenment. He'd never had friends, and most of the family he'd thought were his allies had, in recent years, proven not to be. Among his goals in running away had been fixing those omissions. He needed at least some of them to be, if not impressed, then at the very least not repulsed, by his brief time on the stage.
Most imposing of all were the eyes he couldn't see. Behind him stood Sasha Nein, Milla Vodello, and Morceau Oleander, accomplished Psychonauts whose extensive accomplishments he'd memorized from the issues of his favorite comic series, True Psychic Tales. They were his idols, and their esteem could make or break his dream of becoming a Psychonaut himself.
As he opened his mouth to recite his first line, he quieted the nervous clamor inside his head by repeating a few simple facts.
No one here knows who you were.
They have no reason to question who you are.
Milla Vodello—yes, that Milla Vodello—had called him a little boy.
He summoned the voice he'd practiced—not a huge shift, just a little more gravelly than what tended to come out when he wasn't thinking about it—and said, "My name is Razputin."
That was true, no matter what his parents said.
"But everybody calls me Raz."
Not true, but it would be pretty soon, if he could get the nickname to stick. That made it like, an honorary truth, right? A retroactive truth?
Probably not worth worrying about.
Nobody objected. Nobody tried to correct him. One kid did call him a "lake monster," but even that was preferable to what his parents had called him the few times he'd tried that first line on them. He'd rather be a "lake monster" than a "daughter" any day.
"Compelling,” said Sasha Nein at Raz’s back.
Beside him, Oleander said, “Armored like a tank.” Raz could feel the agent prodding at the defenses he’d learned to construct back when he’d begun to suspect that his father might be psychic, too. His father would never admit it, of course. The Aquatos hated psychics, and Augustus Aquato seemed determined to toe the family line, even if it meant hating himself and his middle child. Still, if he was psychic, it wasn’t safe for Raz to leave his private thoughts unprotected.
He had cobbled together a few theoretical techniques for mental fortification from the dry but informative “Did You Know?” sections found on the last few pages of most issues of True Psychic Tales and tested them against the one psychic he could trust to bash her way into his thoughts any time she thought she might find something funny, embarrassing, or both: his sister, Frazie.
To tempt her into pouncing, he’d wave the hint of a thought—something she could use to make fun of him for a few days, but not so consequential that he might end up actually bothered—at the edge of her consciousness like a cat’s feather toy. She’d attack, drag the thought out of its hidey hole, tease him with it for a while, then, once she’d drained it of all entertainment value, start sniffing around for something new. She was, to put it bluntly, an easily exploitable source of nonfatal aggression to pit against each new shield he built. The first few she punctured easily, but with each failure, Raz refined his methods, until one day Frazie grabbed him by the shoulders, dragged him into the wooded area beside their current campsite, and growled, “What are you doing?”
“What?” Raz said, projecting as much wide-eyed innocence as he could muster.
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “I know you’re doing something weird. I used to be able to bust into your brain whenever I wanted. Now it’s like trying to punch through a wall.”
“I just learned how to defend myself. That's all,” Raz said.
Frazie frowned. “From what? Me?” Her grip on his shoulders loosened, and her next words were softer. “You know I’d never use anything I found to actually hurt you, right? We’re just messing around.”
“I know,” Raz said.
Frazie’s gaze shifted away from him, to the flickering campfire light just visible through the surrounding pine trees. “Dad?” she asked.
He nodded.
“I don’t think he’d really hurt you,” she said.
Raz said, “He already did. They both did.” He glared down at his tatty costume’s skirt. Donatella had bought it from a second-hand store, with great reluctance and a lot of shaming for wasting the family’s meager funds, after he’d thrown his old one into a campfire. When he told her she didn’t need to replace it, that he was fine with, say, borrowing one of Dion’s old costumes, his mother refused to consider it.
“There is a boys’ costume, and a girls’ costume. We don’t want to confuse anyone by mixing and matching,” she said.
“Who the heck’s gonna be confused by something like that?” Raz asked.
She poked him gently on the nose. “You, dear."
As always, she wrapped cruel words in affectionate gestures and addressed them to a pet name. Raz was left struggling for a way to say “I’m hurt” that wouldn’t be dismissed as an overreaction. She hadn’t been mean, after all. Not by any definition of “mean” that she’d accept. In the end, it took so long for him to come up with something sufficiently diplomatic that the moment to riposte had long passed, and he ended up saying nothing at all.
If his defenses were particularly strong, it was out of necessity. He needed a fortress to shield both his mind and his heart. It had mostly worked against his parents. If it happened to impress the counselors, that was a nice little bonus that served the double purpose of ingratiating him with the Psychonauts and sprucing up an otherwise ugly necessity.
Impress and ingratiate were just the first steps in his still evolving plan to secure a place at Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp. Next was to act like there was nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing weird at all about arriving at camp under the cover of night and lurking, out of sight, until a chance misstep led to his discovery.
In a professional tone usually reserved for the few direct interactions he had with the Aquato’s Family Circus patrons, he said, “Sorry I’m late. I don’t want to disrupt your briefing, Agent Oleander. Agents Nein, Vodello. Please, continue.”
He hopped off of the stage and made for the log benches where the rest of the children sat. He felt if he could just slip into place among the other campers, everyone would see that he belonged in that camp—in his chosen outfit, with his chosen name, wielding his passionately cultivated powers, far from the parents who denied him every one of those things—and should not be made to leave.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Oleander asked.
There was an aggressive rumble in his voice, but he didn’t try to stop Raz, nor did Raz stop himself. Despite his military attire and boot camp demeanor, Oleander was the least intimidating of the three agents. His exploits in True Psychic Tales had never quite matched the subtle flair of Agent Nein’s or the vibrant energy of Agent Vodello’s. He was a human club the Psychonauts wielded when the solution to a problem was simple, blunt force. Raz liked a good brawl in his comics occasionally, but even the coolest panel of Oleander slugging baddies in the face with a telekinetic fist didn’t ignite Raz’s imagination quite like the smart, classy solutions the other agents employed when the chips were down.
In Raz’s unspoken (because he’d yet to find anyone who’d sit through the preamble) ranking of Psychonauts agents, Morceau Oleander was probably a low B, while Sasha Nein and Milla Vodello were high As. Those two were above even a few members of the Psychic Six.
S-rank was, of course, reserved for the legendary founder of the Psychonauts, Ford Cruller, but poor Oleander could hardly be expected to measure up to that lofty standard.
In a tone Raz couldn’t quite get a read on, Sasha said, “You’ve broken into a highly classified remote government training facility.”
“I know, isn’t it great?” Raz said, unable to fully mask his pride at pulling off such a stunt. Sasha Nein had broken into hundreds of government facilities over the years. Surely he, of all people, could see that what Raz had done should be celebrated.
“Listen,” Raz said. He’d made it to the bench nearest the stage. He backed toward it as he continued. “Why don’t I just sit over here quietly with my fellow Psycadets.”
As he finally touched down, fitting easily into a gap between two of the other campers, he felt a wisp of relief. He’d made it.
“We need to have this young man taken from here immediately,” Sasha said, and this time the stern authority in his tone was easy to read.
Raz realized that he had not, in fact, made it.
Milla said, “I’ll call his parents.”
“What?” Raz said. Her words were boulders hurled at Raz’s mental fortress. His carefully constructed wall of cool-guy composure cracked as they slammed into it. Call his parents? No. Not after he’d made it this far. He hadn’t run away just to be marched straight back by clueless adults who had no idea what he was running from.
He couldn’t tell them the truth. Not the entire truth. The psychic thing, sure. They knew how it was. Even in this era of increasing psychic acceptance, old prejudices still curdled in sour minds. The Psychonauts had even dealt with it in a few of the more pedagogical issues of True Psychic Tales.
He had to keep secret the other reason he’d run away. He had no reason to believe they’d treat his circumstance any more kindly than his parents had. Most likely, they’d start demanding to know his “real” name. They’d stop referring to him as “him” or “he.” They’d start criticizing the way he talked, and walked, and sat, and dressed, and did every other little action the world had declared “binary” despite existing in as many variations as there are, have been, and ever will be human beings.
His parents’ denial had sent him into a tailspin he only barely managed to pull out of. He was certain that if his idols joined them, there’d be no escaping the crash.
Focus on the psychic angle, he told himself.
Keep the walls up.
No one here knows who you were.
They have no reason to question who you are.
He said, “Don’t you train Psychonauts here?”
“Yes, darling, but—”
Raz cut her off. “To soar across the astral plane.” He had to keep talking. Distract them from any pesky delusions of being good, responsible adults by returning the poor lost child to his family. “To wage psychic warfare against the enemies of free thought.”
“That is what I wrote on the front of the pamphlet,” Oleander said. His natural growl had devolved from leonine to catlike.
And just like that, Raz had his out.
If he could get one of them on his side tonight, it might give him enough time to devise more effective ways of swaying the others. He could tell that Oleander was already close to buying it, and now Raz knew what pitch he needed to make the sale.
“Those words are why I’m here, Coach Oleander,” Raz said. “Do you remember what you wrote on the inside of that pamphlet?”
No one, not even the more skeptical agents, spoke up to interrupt him. Raz took heart. The war might be in question, but this battle was winnable.
Raz was suddenly glad the pamphlet had been the only bit of reading material he’d managed to smuggle out of the caravan. “You were born with a special gift,” he recited. “But the people around you treat it like a curse. Your mother is afraid of you, and your father looks at you with shame in his eyes.” Raz noticed that Oleander was mouthing the words as he spoke. “Come to Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, and you can show them all. Back home, your powers make you a loner. An outcast. A circus freak. But in this dojo—in this psychic dojo—they make you a hero.”
It was obvious before Oleander spoke that Raz’s gambit had worked. The man was practically in tears.
“Get that soldier a bunk.”
---
Milla pulled Raz aside as the campers were filing into the bunkhouses. The news wasn’t entirely good. They would let him stay for a few days, but he was prohibited from participating in psychic training without his parents’ consent. Worst of all, she would be contacting said parents as soon as possible.
A few details made the situation salvageable. First, Raz got the feeling that Oleander, at the very least, wouldn’t obey the mandate to keep him away from training. Second, it would probably take Milla significantly longer to contact the Aquatos than she was anticipating. One of the benefits of coming from a strictly mobile home was that the family had no landline and no address other than a P.O. box they checked around once a year for “fan mail.” She’d have to find out where they were performing, and Aquato advertising never seemed to make it very far beyond the surrounding neighborhoods of their current venue.
The Aquatos had probably put a search out. (He hoped so, at least. As angry as he was, he still hated to think his family might just let him disappear without a fuss.) But they’d be searching for a name and description he no longer fit. Hopefully that would add a healthy layer of confusion to the whole affair.
It was far from a perfect situation. He had a lot of work to do if he was going to get the training he needed and find a way to keep his family at bay.
He couldn’t feel too upset about it, though. Not when the bunkhouse they’d led him to was the boys’ bunkhouse. None of the other boys batted an eye as he climbed the ladder to an unclaimed top bunk. He grabbed the little slate hanging on the edge of his bunk and scratched “Raz” across it in white chalk. No one noticed. No one cared.
That, at least, was perfect.