“Probably, but it’s unlikely they can do anything about it.”
“So why have they been drugging me?”
“Huh?” muttered Mouse.
“They’ve been drugging me,” I repeated. I then gave him a quick overview of how Electra had been drugging my food. In fact, I brought him up to speed on everything that had happened thus far.
“Well, I’m glad you figured it out,” Mouse stated. “My guess is that they drugged you so that I couldn’t contact you.”
“That brings up another point,” I said. “Why didn’t you just come up to me or leave me a note or something?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Mouse asked. “You have a Busuigno on you. I didn’t know if you were still you or one of them.”
“So you left the clues,” I concluded.
“Yes,” Mouse admitted. “Although the Busuigno can access a person’s thoughts and memories, there are certain things that it can’t mimic. Your instincts, intuition, gut feeling… those are things that are unique to you and can’t be emulated.”
“In short, you figured only the real Jim – as opposed to one with his strings being pulled – would figure out the hints you left.”
“Exactly.”
I frowned. “But you said you came up with the clues while still in the temporal bubble.”
Mouse sighed. “I always assumed that at some point the Busuigno would try to control you. I didn’t know if you’d be unaffected, as the older Jim hinted, but I decided early on that it would be too risky to approach you directly. So no notes, no face-to-face, no nothing. Plus, based on what you said, they never left you alone. If you were awake, someone was always with you for the most part, and if you weren’t awake, you were drugged into complete unconsciousness.”
I shook my head in disdain. “I can’t believe how long that went on.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Mouse said. “These were all people you trusted. You can’t be faulted for believing them.”
“Maybe,” I muttered unconvincingly, “but I should have trusted you. All my instincts told me that you’d never do what they were accusing you of without a reason, but I pretty much let them convince me.”
“Again, you can’t blame yourself for any of that. I mean, you had the rest of the League telling you I’d gone rogue and offering proof of it. And of course, I wasn’t telling you anything – at least not directly.”
“It’s just weird to think that they put on that entire dog-and-pony show just to convince me that you had to be stopped.”
“Well, they desperately needed to get you on their side.”
“Why? Just to hunt you down?”
“That’s part of it,” Mouse admitted. “But the primary reason is because they know that, with you helping me, they might as well just march themselves back into that prison.”
Chapter 58
“The people who built the Construct always assumed that the Busuigno might escape one day,” Mouse said, “so they prepared for it.”
“How?” I asked.
“Any Busuigno who leaves the Construct is marked with an interdimensional tag.”
“Don’t you mean a mid-dimensional tag?”
“No, professor,” Mouse shot back, “because it tracks them even if they move across dimensions.”
“Oh – kind of like a cosmic ankle bracelet.”
“It’s even better, because it can be used to pull them back into the Construct.”
“So it’ll just claw them back like a giant magnet?” I muttered incredulously. “That’s great!”
“It would be, but the ‘magnet,’ as you put it, seems to be offline.”
“Can’t you fix it?” I asked.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Mouse insisted. “Every time you’ve seen me battling the League the past few days, it’s because I was trying to get components to repair that system.”
“Wait a minute,” I blurted out. “They told me you were taking pieces of a doomsday device to take over the world.”
“And you believed them?”
“I had no reason not to,” I admitted. “But if you were only taking parts to fix the Construct, why’d you attack them in the Combat Arena?”
Mouse gave me an odd look. “Excuse me?”
“You attacked a couple of League members, including Luna, in the Combat Arena.”
“Not me,” Mouse said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, you,” I countered. “Luna said you…” I trailed off, suddenly feeling foolish. “They lied, didn’t they?”
Rather than answer directly, Mouse said, “Are you sure you’re not under the Busuigno’s control? Because you seem to buy everything they’re selling.”
Ignoring his jape, I sighed and stated, “Again, it seems like a lot of effort to go through just for me.”
“They needed to convince you I was an enemy – make you wary in case I approached you. Faking an attack is as good a method as any.”
“Still, I can’t believe I fell for that.”
“Okay, before you start getting down on yourself, let’s just put it out there: the Busuigno are good at this stuff. They’ve probably had eons to practice how to manipulate others. That being the case, even I was wary when I met you in the lab, because I thought it could be a trick.”
“Until my ignorance in saying you were infected revealed that I was the real Jim. Or at least showed I wasn’t being controlled.”
Mouse chuckled. “Why don’t we just focus on the task at hand?”
“Fine by me,” I replied.
“Good,” Mouse said. “Here’s the plan…”
***
Mouse’s plan for bringing the Busuigno Magnet (as I called it) back online was fairly simple.
“I’ve got three of the requisite components,” he stated. “There are another four we need, but it should be a piece of cake for you.”
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“You can teleport in and out in a flash, and with your phasing ability, you won’t have to waste time fighting anyone.”
“That raises a point I meant to bring up earlier,” I said. “When you zoomed away from the helipad and I took off after you, you hit me with some kind of weapon. What was it?”
Mouse looked uncomfortable for a second, like this was a subject he didn’t care for.
“Just to be clear,” he began, “I haven’t made a habit of studying you or trying to figure
