Life wasn't fair.
Nick's mother had been fond of telling him that. Not unkindly, the way that some parents might when they wanted their kit to stop whining. It had been more of an observation with a certain amount of resignation to it, that in three simple words summed up a wealth of life's unfairness. The way it was unfair that, after a lifetime spent building a business, everything could come falling apart due to something outside their control. The way it was unfair that Nick's father had gotten sick. The way it was unfair that mammals could be cruel to them just because they were foxes, and any earnest plea for help just sounded like a trick to their ears.
Maybe it had helped Nick's mother, thinking of life like that. That if she didn't expect things to always work out, she wouldn't be disappointed. Bad things happened to good mammals and good things happened to bad ones, and if there was any reward for a lifetime of suffering or a punishment for a life of unearned gains only the gods knew it. Life wasn't fair. It was cynical and perhaps a touch pessimistic, but it helped remembering what she had said.
But she wasn't his mother.
Nicholas couldn't help but be a touch envious of Nick. If he was honest with himself, a lot envious of him. So far as he could tell, it was like a flip of a coin, which one of them was real and which one of them was not. He had all of Nick's memories, after all. Everything that made him who he was, everything that defined him as a mammal, was a part of him. It felt as though there had been a transition, as if in that terrible instant when Judy had been dying and he had been desperate to save her, that he had somehow ended up in her head.
But that wasn't true, was it? Nick had saved her. Nick was still out there, a living, breathing mammal with his own identity. Whereas Nicholas had become something even less than a ghost. He had done his best to accept it with good grace, though. He had spared Judy his panic as the enormity of what he was, of what he had become, occurred to him. For her sake, he had even acted as though he was fine with being a ghostly presence.
Nicholas was a pretty good actor.
But there were some things that hadn't been an act. He did care about Judy, and he told himself that he cared no less than Nick did. Maybe even more; Nick would never know the things that he did. Being inside Judy's head had been to know her in a way that was surely impossible for Nick. It was as though the inside of her head was a vast building, a castle with an infinite number of rooms and twice as many doors. That seemed vaguely impossible, but that was the way it felt, and as a being entirely without a body how things felt was also their reality. Nicholas had done his best not to peek—he was aware, in some dim way, that there were doors it was best not to look behind—but he had still gotten what seemed like a truer sense of Judy than Nick ever had.
It wasn't that he could read her thoughts the way he could read words on a page; that would have been as impossible to see as the individual components that made up a river. But he could see the shape of them in a way that didn't have anything to do with vision. The character of them, the content of them, had all been Judy in a way Nicholas couldn't describe. Her sort of essential goodness had been there for him to experience, and it had warmed him like the sun on his face.
Or at least, like the memory of the sun on Nick's face. But the memory was just as much his as it was Nick's, and it felt like the right way to think of it. Judy wasn't perfect inside her head any more than she was outside it looking in. She was no less lovely for it, though, and it had broken the heart that Nicholas didn't have when Cerdo had changed her.
The castle that was her mind had seemed to shift and twist around him as Cerdo's commands took hold, some doors turning into blank walls as rooms and corridors fought with themselves. Passages had closed as new ones opened, and there had been an unnatural wrongness to it. Were Judy's mind really a castle, Nicholas supposed that it would have been impossible to see the change all at once from any point inside it, but that was the power of a metaphor, wasn't it? It wasn't as though anyone else would ever understand what he knew.
To him, from his perspective, the changes Cerdo had made were appalling in their crudeness, as though an untrained but enthusiastic stonemason had taken over from a master. There was a coarseness and roughness to how her love for Nick had been turned into hatred, and it was filled with gaps. After all, her feelings for him had been completely unaffected.
That had been something of a comfort, and he had done what he could for her even as she carried out her task of hunting Nick down. He had tried warning her when he saw Nick's trap, but there had been something selfish to that too, if he was honest with himself. He had been afraid that an anti-alchemy array really would kill him, and as pathetic as his version of life was, he hadn't wanted it to end.
Not before freeing Judy.
But then, as the array turned on, Nicholas had felt her mind change again. But it hadn't been like the clumsy changes Cerdo had done. Those had been like bricking over hallways and knocking new doorways into walls. What Nick had done was as though a cataclysmic earthquake had struck a building and split it in half, tearing apart its foundation and tearing walls asunder with no care for what happened. It was a small wonder that Judy had been completely unresponsive ever since, considering the crumbling ruins that her mind had become. And for Nicholas, it seemed as though the gods had answered his most selfish desire. He had a body, one that gave him everything he had lacked ever since his peculiar existence had started.
Of course, the fact that it was Judy's body made him think the gods were having a joke at his expense.
Everything felt dreadfully wrong; there were just too many things that were too different from how Nick's memories told him they should be. Her eyes were surprisingly weak, as was her nose. Nicholas had to draw on Nick's memories of being much younger to recall being as short as Judy stood as a fully-grown adult, and her long ears were almost painfully sensitive. One paw, at least, felt almost exactly the way that it should, but the other was much too soft and completely lacked paw pads.
And those were just the differences between a fox and a rabbit; Nicholas had deliberately avoided considering the other major way in which he and her differed. The temptation to take her body as his own simply wasn't there; he thought of himself as more of a short-term tenant. Would Nick have been so noble in his place?
Well, probably. Nicholas had to admit that to himself. The very fact that they had an uncanny knack for saying the exact same thing at the exact same time meant they were probably more alike than they were different. But they clearly didn't always think the same thing, because even though they had both spoken up about having an idea, those ideas couldn't have been more different.
They had both arrived at the same conclusion: they needed to first fix Judys's sundered mind and free her from Cerdo's control before they tried to stop him. Otherwise, they'd probably break the minds of many more mammals. From there, though, they had gone in entirely different directions.
Nicholas listened politely as Nick laid out his idea, which was rather strange to listen to. He knew he was—or at least he remembered he was—capable of being quite persuasive, but hearing his own methods used against him was oddly unsettling. Nick's idea was, Nicholas had to admit, a sure sign of how much the fox cared about Judy. He didn't dare try anything that might try tinkering with her mind until he knew more about what Cerdo had done, so he proposed sending Nicholas back to Cerdo with one of the fake bits of corpse he had created. From there, Nicholas, who of course looked exactly like Judy, would be able to gather more information as Nick and the princess stayed hidden in the ruins under Phoenix, preparing more anti-alchemy arrays that could be activated once they had the additional knowledge of how to tweak them to prevent mental damage.
Nicholas could see that the princess was strongly considering Nick's idea, and he repressed a sigh. It was far from a terrible plan, but for Judy's sake he needed to be more convincing.
"It won't work," Nicholas said bluntly.
That was a trick he had a lot of memories of. Rightly or wrongly—well, perhaps mostly wrongly—what mammals responded most strongly to wasn't the logic of an idea but the confidence with which it was spoken. Nick had been confident indeed, and now Nicholas was going to have to tear it all down. Before Nick could respond, Nicholas continued, "We could make a fake torc for me to wear, but it won't fool Cerdo. The instant he tries to give Judy a command, he'll know it's not working."
Nick deflated ever so slightly, the change so imperceptible that Nicholas doubted anyone else could have noticed it. The princess's reaction was much more apparent, a frown creasing her features. "Are you sure?" she asked, and Nicholas found himself profoundly grateful for the opening she had given him.
"Yes," he said, doing his best to fill the word with as much confidence as possible.
It was very weird to do so in Judy's voice, but he did his best all the same. "There's a sort of response whenever he gives a command. I could feel it when he was giving Judy orders, and it's not going to be there."
"You don't know that," Nick protested, "Judy's mind might not be—"
"You're not in Judy's head," Nicholas said, cutting him off, "I am. Believe me, your majesty. It won't work."
Turning from Nick to the princess to make his plea was something of a low blow, but she was the one he had to convince. Nicholas hesitated a moment before continuing. The mistake a lot of mammals made, when they tried to convince someone else, was over-committing to their attempts at persuasion. Coming off as being too aggressive was off-putting, and as a fox Nick had always needed to be careful. Of course, for the moment Nicholas was a rabbit, but he hoped his appearance wouldn't change too much. "Yes," Nicholas said, making his voice gentler—that, at least, was easier in Judy's body—"It's possible that Cerdo won't issue any more orders if I give him some convincing evidence that Nick is dead. But those aren't good odds. We don't know how many mammals he completely controls. Maybe it's just Bogo and a few others. And if Commandant Totchli is one of the only mammals he controls, he's going to have more for her to do."
That was almost complete conjecture, and while it sounded good it wasn't on the firmest of grounds. Still, by the way that the princess nodded slowly Nicholas could see that she wastaking the point seriously. "Then what do you want us to do?" Nick asked, "Hide down here forever?"
He was very good, Nicholas had to admit. He hadn't allowed any of his frustration seep into his voice; he had given the words the perfect half-joking tinge to make them cut more sharply. The princess was going to want to take action, any action, and if Nicholas couldn't sell his idea well enough he knew she'd go with Nick's gamble. "As charming as these tunnels are, no," Nicholas said, putting in what he hoped was just the right touch of levity, "Especially because it's only a matter of time before the City Guard comes down here looking for the princess. Now, maybe they won't be under Cerdo's control and she can convince them not to drag her back to him. Maybe they will. For all we know, they'll kill her on sight."
Nicholas resisted the urge to glance at the princess to see if his words were having the desired effect. He wanted her to be a little afraid, but not so afraid that she'd do something reckless to prove that she wasn't. That was the mistake too many mammals Nick had dealt with over the years had made; when their idea of who they were was challenged they couldn't resist the compulsion to prove themselves. "So we do have to move, and we need to move fast. All three of us need to go back up to the surface together."
"But you said it was too dangerous for you to go to Cerdo," the princess protested.
Nick had resisted taking the bait, but the princess hadn't. Nicholas felt a rather pleasant wave of satisfaction as he drove his point home. "It's too dangerous to go to him when we're still trying to figure things out," he said, "We need to go to him ready to stop him once and for all."
The effect of his words might have been ruined a bit, considering that he was currently a bunny shorter than the princess, but he knew that they had to have some appeal. "I'm exactly as good at alchemy as you are," Nick said, folding his arms across his chest, "And if I have no idea how to fix Judy's mind, neither do you."
"That's not actually true," Nicholas said, "Cerdo did say something after you jumped off the cliff. I didn't realize what it meant at the time, but now..."
Nicholas had reached the most dangerous part of his idea, and for one simple reason that had nothing to do with how persuasive he made himself. It wasn't a matter of couching the truth in the most effective manner anymore. "Now I know what I have to do," he finished simply.
He was lying.
Nick was very good at lying, though, and Nicholas thought he had to be at least his originator's equal. Nicholas had nothing more than a vague idea, but neither Nick nor the princess could possibly feel the urgency of the need to address Judy's broken mind in the way that he did. "What's that?" the princess asked, her voice betraying her eagerness.
"The torc Commandant Totchli was wearing," Nicholas said, "I can use it to reach into her mind and pull it back together. Then we'll all be ready to go back and confront Cerdo."
That, too, was a lie. Or at least, it felt like one. Nicholas meant to repair Judy's mind, and he even thought that he knew how to do it before it crumbled too much for anyone to do anything about it.
But he didn't think that he'd survive the attempt.