“Whoa!” Bronte said, holding his hands up. “Something wrong here?”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “You think we’re dumb enough to take three cops to our secret club? Meet Ellis.”
Salvi and Kara were shoved toward Bronte as the men surrounded them. Salvi stared at the man with the gun. There was something about him…
The pieces fell into place and recognition washed over her.
It was the man who had been erased from Barker’s photo of the women. The half-face. It had to be.
“You’re the ghost,” she said to him.
Ellis looked at her. “I’m the what?”
“You’re the ghost,” she said. “You’re the one everyone’s so afraid of.”
His face crumpled with laughter. “The ghost?” The others joined him in their laughter. Salvi turned around and looked at each of the men in turn. All laughing, all encircling them, their voices echoing around the tunnel walls.
And then she heard Myki Natashi’s voice echo in her mind.
They’re everywhere…
Salvi’s heart leapt into her throat as the realization hit her.
“You’re all the ghost!”
“What?” Kara said as she and Bronte looked nervously around at them.
“They’re the ghost. Every single one of them. That’s why people are scared, because it’s not just one man. It’s many.” She turned to Tom again. “Your sick little billionaire boys club wields this much power?”
He gave her that smug smile. “Money and blackmail wield limitless power, sweetheart. Empires aren’t built on just one man, they’re built on the backs of many. Clubs, institutions, favors.” His eyes turned dark. “Generations.”
“So you are a trust fund boy,” she said acidly. “I knew it.”
His eyes turned darker for a moment, before his face lightened with smugness. “We owned Chaney, and we owned his lawyer.” He laughed. “So, meet your ghosts,” he motioned to Kelvin. “Kelvin’s the money man. Edward, he’s our tech guy. Travis, he takes care of our security needs. Ellis, there, well, he does whatever is required of him. And me? Well, I’m the people person. I handle client negotiations.”
“You think you can make three cops disappear like you did Caine?” She said, her face and body hardening. “They know you were our target here tonight, Tom. They’ll know who to come looking for.”
“So let them come.” He held his arms up, righteous. “You think it’s just us five? We started this, sure, but we have a lot of important backers, honey. Any judge you try and put me in front of, we’ll buy or they’ll die.”
Salvi nodded. “Bored little rich kids, used to getting what they want.”
“And we’ve just found three new recruits,” Travis said, spreading his shoulders.
“Recruits?” Kara said.
“Yeah,” Kelvin said, looking at the three of them. “We’re always looking for fresh product in our club, and we’ll find good work for each of you. You’ll earn your keep.”
“What?” Salvi said. “You think you can buy us?”
“Oh, we’ve already bought you,” Kelvin said. “You’re not going back to the streets, you’re going to stay underground and work for us now.”
“You can’t make three cops disappear,” Bronte said. “Ain’t gonna happen, man.”
“Tell that to the Chief of Police,” Tom said. “If he can’t stop us taking his daughter, no one can.”
Ellis suddenly lunged and slammed something into the side of Bronte’s neck. Bronte didn’t have a chance to react. He gave a sharp yell of pain, his body locked up and he swiftly collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
“No!” Kara tried to fight her way through Kelvin and Travis, but they grabbed her and drove something against her neck as well. Salvi quickly assessed her options but paused when Tom pulled a taser from his pocket too. He walked toward her as Kara’s unconscious body was placed on the ground.
“Why so worried, cop?” he said. “This is what you wanted, right? So, welcome to the big leagues, honey. It’s time to introduce you to MasterSlave.”
“MasterSlave?” she asked, still glancing around at her options.
“Yeah,” he smiled a toothy white smile. “That’s the name of our club, where you will never see the light of day again.”
Edward plunged something sharp into Salvi’s neck and an intense pain shot through her into every fiber of muscle. She stiffened, her body paralyzed, and then everything went black.
15: MASTERSLAVE
Salvi’s aching body brought her to the surface of consciousness. She heard a digital beeping, a humming in the background. Air conditioning? A generator?
She blinked her eyes open and saw she was in a room she didn’t recognize. Facing her was a wall of glass looking into a plain white corridor. The room around her also glowed white. She closed her eyes again. Her head was aching badly, like the sides of her head had been placed into a vice. She groaned.
A noise to her left made her open her eyes again. She turned her pained head and saw a figure moving around beside her. A woman, with her back turned, clothed in a uniform akin to a nurse’s, albeit in a dark shade of red. Was she in a
hospital?
She tried to sit up, but realized her wrists were strapped to the bed, her ankles too.
Then she remembered the tunnel, and Tom, and someone driving a sharp object into her neck.
Panic rose within and she tugged at her bindings, before she realized that beneath the sheet covering her, she was naked.
Her eyes darted around the room for her clothes, but she saw nothing. She flexed her hands again and caught sight of her fingernails. They were clean. The mirror ball nail polish, gone. Her tracking devices, gone. Her emergency beacon, gone. She felt the air escape her lungs.
How long had she been in this room? How many hours had passed? How many days? Was the Trident Taskforce looking for her? Where were Bronte and Kara?
She pictured Mitch’s face. Pictured Ford’s. Pictured Hernandez’s. They would be beside themselves, but if she knew them like she thought she knew them, they would be looking for her. She believed it in the bottom of her heart. No matter how long it had been, they would keep looking. But how long had it been?
Salvi pulled on her restraints again. The woman in the red uniform turned to looked at her.
Erica.
“There’s no use fighting it,” Erica said, stepping toward her as Salvi continued to tug at her strapped wrists. “You’re here now. Might as well make the best of it.”
“The best of what?” Salvi spat, head throbbing.
Erica stared at her emotionless. “Your new life.”
“I already have a life.”
“Not anymore. That one is gone. Your new life is here at MasterSlave.”
Salvi’s eyes trailed around the relatively bare room. She saw a control panel by the door, but other than a bench and drawers along the wall beside Erica, a built-in console and the data pane in her hands, the rest was featureless.
“I’m a cop!” breathed through the pain. “My unit will be looking for me. They’ll be here any minute.”
“No, they won’t. Because you’ve disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“No, I disappeared inside Floor to Ceiling.”
“And that’s back in San Francisco,” she said bluntly. “You’re not there anymore.”
Salvi paused, not sure if she’d heard right, her head still throbbing. “What?”
Erica exhaled slowly as though explaining something to a child. “I’ll say this once. Your old life is gone. You’ve disappeared. They took measures to ensure no one could track you to our location. They found the tracking devices and they’re gone. No one knows where you are. Now, we’ve lined up a little plastic surgery and we’ll erase your tattoos, nice scorpion on your hip, by the way, and before you know it, Salvi Brentt will be dead and MasterSlave-24 will be born.”
“MasterSlave-24?”
“Yes. It’s been decided that you would be
best suited to the Slave subsection. It’s the only way to beat the fight out of the feisty ones. Don’t worry you won’t know the difference. You’ll be high as a kite on Flyte the whole time.”
She felt more awake now, despite the throbbing in her head. Although she felt sick too, thinking back to when she awoke with Mitch after her night on Flyte; the gaping holes in her memory. “Fuck you!” Salvi spat.
“No,” Erica smiled. “That’s gonna be your job, honey.” She turned her back and moved toward a console, placing the data pane down on the bench. “You should be grateful they didn’t feed you to that monster that cut up your pals Caine and Chaney.” She glanced back at Salvi. “They chose to keep you alive, not kill you. Be thankful for that.”
“You betrayed Chaney,” Salvi said.
Erica shot her a dark look. “I chose the stronger team.” She turned back to her data pane.
Salvi’s breathing had picked up speed. She was trying not to panic. Trying to think straight through the pain in her head.
“How can you do this?” Salvi asked. “How can you help them do this to other women?”
Erica looked back at her. “It’s kill or be killed in this life, honey. You can be the hunter, or you can be the prey. They’re too powerful for me. It’s not a fight I can win, so,” she shrugged, “I choose to join them. And survive.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Salvi calmed her voice. “If you help me, I can protect you.”
“No. You can’t,” she said, twisting a knob on the console.
Salvi’s head fell back as the world seemed to spin and turn sideways.
“Feeling dizzy?” Erica asked. “Good… How about now?”
Salvi’s eyes closed as a wave of warmth rolled through her body. She exhaled heavily, unable to stop herself rolling with it.
“Wh-what are you doing?” she managed, panting and blinking heavily as she fought to remain alert.
“Testing your neural implants.”
Salvi’s body stilled. In fact, she was sure the whole world stilled.
She felt the throbbing at the sides of her skull and her eyes opened wide with fear. She turned to look back at Erica.
“M-my what?”
Erica looked at her and smiled. She pressed another button and the glass wall into the corridor clouded over into a mirror.
Salvi felt the blood rush out of her as she stared at her reflection.
The sides of her head had been shaved. Perched around her ears and spread out along her skull to her temple were neural devices. And where the devices connected with her skull, she saw dried blood. The devices weren’t pressed against her skin, they went through her skin, maybe even right through her skull and into her brain.
Subjugate-52 flashed into her mind.
“No…” Salvi breathed before her mouth formed a growl. “Get them off me!”
“No can do I’m afraid,” Erica said. “They’re permanent.”
Salvi looked back at her. “You’re lying!”
“Am I?” she said. “Neuricle Corporation don’t mess around, honey. They’re the best there is. That’s why we stole their tech. If they can keep those Subjugates in line, then we can keep our slaves in line too.”
“No, no, no…” Salvi felt a tidal wave of panic build, suffocating her lungs, as she pictured Attis Solme’s face, his smile, then Subjugate-52’s face and his killer blue eyes. Frankenstein and his monster. Now she too was a monster. She too had been subjugated.
“No, no, no…” she breathed.
“Of course,” Erica said approaching her again, “we’ve reverse-engineered the devices. They won’t stop you from feeling things, honey, they’ll make you feel them twice as much. And our clients tend to like responsive slaves.”
“No, no…” Salvi shook her throbbing head as tears stung her eyes and she fought to draw breath. “Get them out of me. Get them out of me–”
“I told you, I can’t. If we try to remove them now, there will be brain damage. The electrodes are wired into biological components that fuse into the brain. We take it out, we’ll have to cut away brain tissue to do it. The surgery took hours to perform. We can’t just undo it.”
Salvi felt a rush of heat as her stomach threatened to make her vomit. She started to breathe heavily to try and control it.
“No, no, no, no...” she chanted weakly, tugging uselessly on her restraints as she stared into the mirror at her neural implant devices. She turned her face away and saw drops of dried blood on her pillow.
“Are you ready for a test run?” Erica said. “They’re keen to put you to work.”
Salvi looked at her through blurred tears.
“She’s ready,” Erica spoke into a microphone stem that protruded from the console she worked at.
Salvi’s head pressed back onto the pillow, as a tear rolled down the side of her face. She felt the sting of it as the tear hit the healing wound where the neural device was latched onto her skull.
“Not everyone gets such a high-profile guest for their test run, you know,” Erica whispered to her. Salvi blinked her tears away as the mirror cleared, and she saw a figure standing on the other side of the glass wall. It was Tom. Dark blonde hair, blue eyes, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He smiled at her.
Salvi was going to fucking destroy him.
He moved to the door, swiped his hand over a panel and it opened. She saw no tech adorning his hand or wrist, which meant the tech was inside his hand.
He entered slowly, casually, as though he were walking around a showroom perusing which car to buy.
“How’s the patient?” he asked.
“Disillusioned,” Erica said. “She’s having trouble accepting her new reality.”
Tom turned his smile to Salvi. “She will soon enough.”
Salvi glared at him, her eyes pooling with venom.
He chuckled. “I know, I know,” he said. “It’s brilliant, right? Who would ever suspect me as being behind all this? But that’s why this was so perfect, isn’t it? I’m just out of college. Everything thinks I’m young and dumb, right? Wrong! Oh, I play young and dumb. And rich and handsome, but no one can believe that I have brains too. I’ll tell you this, my IQ is through the roof. Yeah, that’s right. I got it all. Money, looks, brains, and friends in high places.”
“And all it cost you was your personality,” Salvi said through gritted teeth.
He laughed again. “Ouch. Well, I’m not alone. Me and the guys, we all felt the same way. Nobody would treat us with the respect we deserve, so… we took it. We pooled our fortunes, gathered our resources, and we grew our empire on the back of unfulfilled desire.” He looked around, holding his arms up, motioning to the complex around him. “And here we are. Kings! Here, we are treated with the respect we deserve.”
“So is it mummy issues or daddy issues that brought you to this?” Salvi asked.
He laughed again. “I’d say it was societal issues, actually. The generations before us fucked things up. First, they felt sorry for the underprivileged, tried to give them what was rightfully ours, then they tried to take away our freedoms. Our money, our tech, our power, our desires, our respect. So, we decided to take them back.”
“Putting people into slavery is taking back freedoms?”
“Yeah,” he said as though it were obvious. “The people who threaten our freedoms, who threaten our power, must be stamped out or controlled.”
“Did John Dorant put you up to this?”
“Dorant?” he chuckled. “You think we’re his bitch? Hell no! We own Dorant. He’s our bitch. Just like everyone else around here, he never saw us coming.”
“Where are the others?” she asked, as Bronte and Kara flashed into her mind.
“Don’t you worry about that now–”
“Where are they?” she yelled viciously, but instantly regretted it as a wave of throbbing rolled through her brain.
“I said don’t worry about that now.” His voice and eyes grew dark. “They’re paying their d
ues, just like you will.” He looked to Erica, his face now devoid of emotion. “Let me know how the test run goes.” He looked back at Salvi. “Travis won the trial run. Bastard. So good luck, MasterSlave-24. You’re going to need it with him. Did I mention he handles all our security? He’s always liked a good fight.” Tom gave another smile and left the room laughing.
She looked over to Erica. “Please!”
Erica turned back to the console, ignoring her. Salvi tugged and tugged on her restraints, but it was no good.
“Please, Erica!”
Erica tapped at her console and Salvi felt the world turn again. She gasped.
“That’s your last warning,” Erica said. “Every time you disobey or annoy me, there will be repercussions. So, you do as I say, or you will be hurt. Now, we need to move you to a more comfortable room and get you ready for the test. So, are you going to comply, or must I knock you out again?” Erica picked up the data pane and poised her finger over the screen.
Salvi stared at her, chest rising and falling with fear and exertion. She did not want to be knocked out again. She needed to stay awake, to keep her wits about her. It was the only way she would find Bronte and Kara. It was the only way they were going to make it out of there alive.
“So?” Erica asked, eyebrows raised in question, finger still hovering. “Are you going to behave, or am I going to have to use your new neural implants against you?”
Salvi looked away from her. Tears stung her eyes once more as she felt the neural devices either side of her skull, thought of the dried blood. The violation. Her eyes turned hard with anger, but she quickly closed them to hide the truth. She needed to seem docile, submissive. She had to play MasterSlave-24 in order to get Salvi Brentt out of there alive.
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes again, softening them.
“I’ll do as you say,” she said quietly. “Please… just don’t hurt me again.”
Erica smiled. “Good.”
Salvi watched as Erica waved her hand over the door console; she too had her access tech inside her hand. Erica had given Salvi a light dose of painkillers for her throbbing head, had bathed her, adorned her in a bath robe and was now escorting her to more ‘comfortable lodgings’ to wait for Travis and her ‘trial run’. Salvi had done everything Erica had ordered her to do. Her compliance was a means to an end, as she was now able to walk the facility where she was being kept, able to seek a means of escape.
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