put the knife down

Styles has made herself very powerful and can force her mind into yours. She plunges you into her memories of the festival. The CIA told her to turn on three devices when the main stage was full and the loudest band playing. Device one made the hairs on her arms stand on end. The second device needed to be turned on within six minutes. Get running.

Styles activated the second device, and there's a third on the other side of the stage. You'll have to push through the crowd.

Everyone is on a need-to-know basis. The CIA agent instructing Styles said that they believed there are hidden powers on Earth that could be used by the enemy. All of the people who were sent free tickets are sensitive, and will be powered up by the music. They theorised that it's a sense that evolved in humans to know when they are being hunted, or for predicting how prey will behave. But the CIA imagined people who can read minds and they couldn't let that fall into enemy hands. They got Styles to put on a neck brace to block out the signal. Hurry – the band is going to start soon.

Styles looked at the transmitter and saw a weird crystal box containing another Tarxien mask, this one red. If there was something to be felt here, Styles wanted to feel it, like her mother talked about. She took the neck brace off and then pulled the lever. It was like synesthesia dialled way up; the music was colour and thoughts smelled like raspberries. Most of the people were humming a low note and weren't part of it. But here and there were people who were. She relived memories like something is flipping through them. It's too much, and she ran!

When Styles came back to herself, she was in a low stone building she knew was a temple. Alexander says that he was in a cave with buffalos painted on the walls. Natalie was on a hill beneath a moon, and could smell the blood of sacrifices. Marigold was on a lake surrounded by lotuses and singing priests. Styles saw people dancing ecstatically, and in the centre of the dance was a powerful being she couldn't bear to look at because it would have consumed her. Styles realised that the feeling was wonderful and there was nothing to do but dance.

Just 12 minutes and the bliss was over and Styles still had a job to do. Her CIA controller promoted her to a higher clearance level, but warned that no one knew that much, perhaps not even the entity, but any alien incursion was assumed to be part of an invasion force. Styles was told to clean up the site before being debriefed. She and James hid the files in the underground shooting range, and everything seemed fine until Styles was woken the next morning with an order to attend a situation.

In the restricted area behind the trailers, Styles saw James with a knife. He'd killed someone. James says that the person he killed was one of the strongest. He took his neck brace off too and saw that all of the minds were really just one, split into a thousand pieces. He thought they'd all been contaminated. Styles tranquillised him, and James was taken away, the murder covered up. She doesn't know what happened to him during the apocalypse, and Styles never got a decent commission again. She wants to reclaim what was taken from her, and she is going alone. Go to sleep.