Mirrored Conflicts (a Sokeefe story)

Chapter 3: The Meeting

Sophie immediately rose to her feet. "What did you do with Magnate Leto?" she demanded.

"Relax," he drawled, waving off her urgency. "He's just dealing with a situation. And before you get all panicked on me," he said, waving the air, "by 'situation' I mean 'gremlins in the level three lockers.' He's totally okay and he's going to remain that way."

"You put gremlins in the level three lockers?" That probably wasn't the right question to be asking, but Sophie was stuck on it. Because... that wasn't a very "evil Neverseen plot" type distraction. It was more... teenage troublemaker.

"Yep—which isn't exactly a nefarious plot, is it? So how about you sit back down, relax, and we can talk."

Sophie had so many questions about what was going on, so she tried to sort through them one by one in her mind. The first one that fought its way out of her mouth was, "You sounded exactly like him."

"It's called mimicking," he said, making her really want to wipe the ever-present smirk off his face. "You're a polyglot, aren't you?"

Sophie didn't answer that, since he definitely already knew she was a polyglot and she didn't want to admit she struggled with mimicking. "So you're a polyglot."

"Yeah. And an empath. And my abilities are hybridized, so I have other talents too."

She'd noticed him fanning the air when he talked about her panic earlier, but... "I thought empaths had to make physical contact to read emotions."

"Yes, and telepaths have to consciously put up defenses to keep people from reading their mind," he countered. "But you're not most telepaths, are you?"

"And you're not most empaths," Sophie mumbled.

"Bingo! Give the Moonlark a point."

"So why are you here? And why are you..." Sophie trailed off.

"I'll answer that first question in a second, though I'm very interested in the ending to your second one."

"I was going to ask why you're familiar, but..." suddenly her eyes widened. "Wait! Right after I first came to the Lost Cities, you ran into me at Kesler's store, didn't you? You knocked my stuff out of my hands..." she blushed when she remembered his flirty comments and left that part out of her memory. However, his cocky smirk told her he'd already felt her emotions shift with the memory. "And you asked me if I knew why I had brown eyes. You were trying to find out how much I knew about the Black Swan, weren't you?"

"I must say, your memory is impressive. Let me guess: you have photographic memory too?"

"I... yeah," Sophie said, surprised that was where his mind went. "And... you have it too?"

"Yep. Guess it comes with the 'genetic experiment' deal, huh." He chuckled. "My name is Keefe Sencen, by the way. Just realized you don't know it."

"Okay. Nice to meet you, Keefe," Sophie said stiffly. "I'm–"

"I know who you are—which is part of why I called you here to talk. I'm curious. You're supposed to be my nemesis, and yet we've never had a civilized conversation—and my very sneaky questioning attempt in Atlantis didn't count," Keefe explained.

Keefe was... not her image of an anti-Moonlark. He didn't seem malicious or cold and calculating. Clearly he was very powerful, though, in a different way than her—reading emotions through the air, and whatever he meant by "hybridized" abilities.

Although... she remembered telling every adult she knew after she and Dex were back from their kidnapping that one of the people had been able to influence their emotions with a word. They said it didn't seem exactly like what a beguiler is able to do, yet hadn't ever heard of such an ability before. But if he had a language ability and an emotions ability... and they were hybridized...