Hostage to Pleasure

He haunts me. The sniper. In my dreams, he is a black shadow with his eye focused on the scope of a rifle. Sometimes, he puts down the weapon and walks toward me. Sometimes, he even touches me. But most times, he presses the trigger. And kills me.

– From the encrypted personal files of Ashaya Aleine

Ashaya returned to consciousness with the realization that something had gone very wrong. Her mind was functioning, but her body wasn’t. She was paralyzed. A human or changeling, creatures of emotion, might have panicked. Ashaya lay in silence and thought through the situation.

Unless she had gone blind, her eyes were closed, possibly taped shut, though she didn’t have the senses to verify that. Closed eyes meant a medical facility of some kind, either a clinic room or the morgue.

Her body wasn’t picking up the sensation of cold or warmth, so she couldn’t verify that either.

Her hearing wasn’t working.

Her nose wasn’t working.

Her mouth wasn’t working.

That was when claustrophobia nibbled at the edges of her consciousness. She was buried in the most final way-inside her own body. Her limbs were all completely useless, making escape impossible. No, she thought, dragging her thoughts back under control before they eroded the cold Silence that had kept her alive this long. She wasn’t human or changeling. She had another world open to her. Inside her mind, she felt for the link to the PsyNet. There it was, strong and unwavering. Whatever had gone wrong, it hadn’t affected her psychic abilities.

Following the link, she cautiously lowered her shields and swept her psychic eye across the area she now occupied. Familiar minds began to appear within seconds. She withdrew at once. That was the problem with the PsyNet. Though her initial position was based upon her physical location, because the PsyNet was a psychic construct, the instant she lowered her shields, it began to shift to accommodate her-as if each version of the Net was unique to the individual.

It made no logical sense because the PsyNet followed no laws of physics or math. No one had yet found out what rules it did follow, but one thing was clear-Ashaya couldn’t venture into the Net again without taking precautions to ensure none of her “knowledge” of others leaked out. She knew it could be done, even knew some of the mechanics of how-Amara had taught her.

She began moving and shifting her mental shields, devising fail-safe upon fail-safe. The next time she opened her psychic eye, she saw everything through a dull haze. Her shields were so bulky as to hinder any attempt to actively surf the Net, but that was fine. Right now, it meant she was an invisible dot among millions of other dots. If she “knew” no one, no one knew her.

Taking a chance, she slit a tiny gap in her shields and listened to the chatter of the Net. Thousands of pieces of information filtered through, but as none of it was relevant, she forced herself to return to the shell of her mind, the claustrophobic prison of her body, wondering how much it would hurt when she ripped the tape off her eyes. Pain was a relative concept. Losing Keenan had taught her that more clearly than even Amara’s cruelty.

Tape.

She could feel it now, sticky and abrasive on her lids. Focusing, she began a step-by-step checklist of her body. On the first pass, she found her feet dead but her calves waking up, while her torso remained numb. By the second pass, both her legs were cramping excruciatingly and her stomach felt as if it was trying to crawl out through her throat.

The third pass-her entire body a mass of searing pain.

Agony sloughed away the lining of her gut, flayed the skin from her flesh. And still she forced herself to lie unmoving. She wasn’t a trained soldier, hadn’t been tortured so she could learn to withstand pain. She lay frozen for one single reason-she wanted to see her son again.

Because if she was alive, then there was a chance that Keenan, too, had made it out alive.

A psychic brush.

Amara.

Ashaya withdrew deep into Silence, fortifying her mind behind another wall of ice, even as her body punished her for the sting of death. The speed with which Amara had tracked her was no surprise, but the connection between them was the weakest it had ever been. Ashaya intended to keep it that way.

She didn’t know how long the pain lasted.

When it was over, she lay stock-still and let the world filter in through her senses. She was on a cold steel table. So not an examining or a patient room. A morgue facility of some sort. Air whispered over her body.

Naked. She was naked.