by Rune Skelley
Bramble’s hot fingers wrapped around Rook’s throat and squeezed, trapping a gasp in her voice box. Sharp nails bit her neck.
Rook jabbed back with an elbow, smashing Bramble’s ribs.
“You bitch!” Bramble squeezed tighter and threw her weight into Rook, knocking her to the floor. She landed on Rook’s back, still squeezing.
Rook’s eyes bulged. A terrifying ache built in her chest. Bramble’s fingers sank into her flesh. Rook couldn’t pry them loose. She got her knees under herself and thrust, slamming backwards onto Bramble. The grip on her throat released. Rook gasped and coughed.
Shrieking, Bramble raked at Rook’s hair.
Fear igniting into fury, Rook scrambled to her feet. Bramble leapt up and came at Rook’s face with her fingernails.
Rook lunged and tore Bramble’s hair. Both of them screamed, fists and claws flying.
Brook pounced from behind and pulled Rook off Bramble. Working together, her evil twins subdued the kicking, flailing, cursing Rook and shackled her to the wall. There had been no shackles before, but that made them no easier to escape.
“We can’t kill her,” Brook told Bramble. “That would kill us, too.”
Bramble pouted.
“You can’t keep me here,” Rook said.
“Someone does need to be in charge,” Brook agreed.
“I’ll do it,” said Bramble. She picked up the clothes Rook discarded when she put on her princess gown.
“No!”
Bramble removed her bustier and pulled the thermal shirt over her head. “How do I look?”
“Like Rook,” Brook conceded.
Bramble donned Rook’s miniskirt, ruined tights, and saddle shoes. “Something’s missing.”
Both women looked at Rook.
“She’s wearing a necklace,” Bramble said.
“No!” Rook said. “It’s mine. I made it!” What would happen to her if they took away the chain?
Bramble snickered and grabbed the necklace. “Ouch!” She let go and yanked her hand back.
Simultaneously, Rook’s left shackle weakened. She strained against it before Bramble could regain herself. The cuff crumbled. Rook snatched the rhinestone tiara from Bramble’s head, along with some hair.
Bramble screeched and fell to her knees.
Rook slapped the tiara on her own head and felt an infusion of power. Now she was the princess of the tower. She snapped the chain of her right shackle and lunged at Brook. They crashed to the floor. Rook punched Brook in the nose and grabbed her tiara too.
Brook lay whimpering in a ball, tangled in her ridiculous fluffy dress. Bramble howled and clutched her head.
Panting, Rook added Brook’s tiara to her own head.
On the TV, Kyle grunted his orgasm and the video looped back to the beginning with them going at it doggy-style in front of the bathroom’s full-length mirror.
With a roar of fury and disgust, Rook kicked the TV. This time it erupted in the most satisfying plume of smoke and sparks. On the table the laptop screen was blank.
Rook was in charge again. She felt a glow in her chest and clarity in her thoughts.
Before the twins could regroup, Rook bound them together with the chain she’d spun from rook feathers, the chain that was purely her. They sat together on the floor, weeping like children.
What to do with them? They were probably right that killing them would be bad for herself, if not outright suicide. Now that she had reclaimed control, that option held no appeal. She wanted to live happily ever after with the prince of her choosing, Fin.
Wymbol would tell her she should absorb these aspects of her personality. Looking at them, pathetic yet dangerous, Rook knew she was better off without them.
If she procrastinated for too long her tower might seal itself up again, trapping her with her nemeses.
It had been so fucking hard to make that opening in the first place. She’d done it to aid Fin, so he could use her blocks to rebuild himself.
Rook had transported material out of her mind once. She should be able to do it again.
“What are you looking at?” Bramble sneered, then sniffled.
“I think I know how to get rid of you,” Rook said. “Both of you.”
Excitement brought a smile, until she realized she had no place to transport them to. What would happen if she ported them out, with no destination? Would they be free in the real world?
“You wouldn’t dare get rid of us,” said Brook.
“I would,” said Rook. “I just need a place to send you.”
I could help.
The voice from the shame tower, the one who helped spin the chain. Rook trusted that voice.
“How?”
You could give them to me.
“No!” cried Brook and Bramble, struggling against their bonds.
“They’re dangerous.”
I am vast. They would have no power here.
“Are you sure?”
They will be lost in the immensity of me.
Rook had an inkling her new friend might be the colossal mind Willow spoke of. If so, it might make a good repository for her wayward imaginary friends.
“Okay. You can have them.”
Bramble wailed.
Brook spoke quickly. “If you get rid of us, you’ll be responsible for all your own decisions. We won’t be your scapegoats anymore.”
“That’s what I’m hoping for.” She waited for them to disappear.
Nothing happened except their continued histrionics.
“Well?”
You must give them to me.
Previously her rooks did the ferrying, but they were all sleeping. Looking through the single window, Rook confirmed the exhaustion fog still shrouded her forest. The birds could not help this time. She would have to do it herself.
“I don’t know how,” she admitted.
The voice sighed. Open a doorway in your psyche. It might hurt.
Rook settled herself on the floor and tried to relax, slowing her breath and her heartbeat. Recalling the vision quests Marcus coached her through, Rook tried to experience their sensations without benefit of the actual psychotropic compounds.
Being inside her own head made such mental gymnastics easier, and Rook soon felt the rushing flood of insight. She directed it outward in a beam, battering a hole through her mental defenses in much the same way she’d punched the hole in her tower.
The pain was excruciating, more like tearing than cutting. Rook panted, her control slipping as the portal dilated.
Through this ragged doorway in her soul, Rook glimpsed roiling seas of green fire.
“Is that you?” she gasped.
Yes. Give them to me now.
Rook grasped the silver chain that bound Brook to Bramble, ignoring their panicked screams. Closing her eyes, Rook tightened the chain, binding and compressing the princesses into a single composite entity and shoving it through the portal. The searing pain doubled, trebled, as the opening stretched to accommodate their passage.
The agony built in waves until it burst, showering Rook in a nigh-orgasmic rush of catharsis.
Don’t forget our deal.
*** *** ***
Excitement permeates the bubbles of light in electric yellow-green pulsations.
Someone new has arrived.
Kyle can sense it, a low purple vibration. He is drawn toward the source. The granules of his psyche feel its erotic, magnetic pull. Slowly, so slowly, his aimless direction through the dense atmosphere begins to reverse.
The first molecule of him encounters the source and he knows it is Rook. His bitch-goddess has come to him. Where he touches her they fuse in an act more intimate than sex. Shivers of pleasure roil the bubbles of light, sending shock-waves of lust throughout this place.
Rook’s need for him elicits its own gravity.
She is insoluble among the bubbles of light. They are drawn to her, caress her.
Another molecule of Kyle electroplates onto his wife’s ess
ence and he begins to know the truth. This is not Rook. It is an imitation made of cast-off aspects of her personality, but it is bound together with a chain of pure Rookness, and somewhere in its heart it contains fragments of Kyle’s own being.
It will do.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THRESHOLD HOUSE INFIRMARY
Progress toward useful deployment of the microtransceivers is stalled owing to the unavailability of staff having prior contact with the technology. Based on intel collected at the Shaw compound, we know of an organization called TEF whose personnel would fill the gap. They’ve worked with the devices before. Recruitment is an absolute priority. Irregularities are anticipated with background checks, so maximal leeway will be necessary in granting clearances.
Operation Lullaby internal communication, 2-5-2001
Melissa lay gasping on the table beside Severin’s sweaty bulk. Her uncle was drifting off to sleep, which he never did after a lesson. She kept all the energies for herself this time, not letting him steal a drop. She had in fact siphoned vitality from him. For the first time her control was total.
Over the past week, she’d been encouraging him to use the stump. The change in her attitude pleased him, and he showed no suspicion about it.
The first few times, she was helpless. The energies flowed so differently in that kind of lesson, none of what she’d learned about their manipulation applied. She worried this ploy would backfire, that it would rebuild Severin’s power at her own expense.
She worried she might surrender to that fate. The abhorrent touch of Severin’s unnatural arm, and the debilitating intensity of the climax such violation produced, threatened to drown her will.
On the third day she found her metaphysical footing. What felt like a sea-change was something much subtler. Once she tuned to this wavelength, everything fit what she had already taught herself about shaping and guiding the power.
Then, it was just a matter of practice.
She practiced with the table, too. Usually she did it after he left the room. This time that didn’t seem necessary.
While Severin snored, Melissa lifted a corner of the sheet and reached under him with her left hand. It was as if he wasn’t there. She ran her palm over the wooden surface, trying again to decode the strange hum on her skin.
As she groped under the sheet, she asked herself if this life was the ‘normal’ existence she thought she’d been yearning for her whole life. Maybe she’d only ever felt like a freak because she hadn’t been surrounded by them. Is this where I belong?
Her hand bumped into an object, something resting on the table’s surface, brazenly occupying nonexistent space.
The buzzing in her fingers was gone. Melissa laughed. She had deciphered the message. A shape, squarish, cool to the touch.
Melissa pulled her hand free and saw the tiny house resting on her palm for only a second before it faded and vanished. A Christmas ornament, detailed down to the white picket fence and the shutters flanking its glistening windows. All the imitation comforts of home.
Her face brightened into a mischievous smirk at her unconscious uncle. Now she could do what he could do. Plus, she had Kyle stowed on the third floor.
She didn’t need Severin for anything.
*** *** ***
Marsh wheeled a cart into the former storeroom on the third floor, where they had set up a bed for their guest. It was a nice enough space, the same size as the other singles, with a view of the neighbor’s property line pines. Marsh ducked under the attic stairs impinging on the doorway, which were why no one normally used this room. Kyle didn’t object.
Kyle had been in a coma for four months. When he’d first arrived three weeks ago his body exhibited considerable atrophy. Melissa approved nearly any form of experimental therapy, so Kyle received daily skeletomuscular electrostimulation treatments through a rig Wind designed, along with simulated load and range-of-motion exercises for his surgically repaired knee. His intravenous nutrition underwent fine tuning based on Horn’s biochemical assay. Consequently, he regained twenty pounds and his complexion lost its pasty pallor.
Today, they were adding a new study to Kyle’s regimen. Rainbow joined Marsh and closed the door.
Ever since Leaf’s theft of the remaining jewelry specimens, work on the dream visualizer had stalled. While talking to Wind and Horn about their patient’s impressive progress it dawned on both Rainbow and Marsh they now had available a different angle for their research.
Kyle’s EEG was misread at both hospitals, which was not hard to understand. The doctors fixated on what was missing, and saw a brain that didn’t work. But those at the House who studied it saw brainwaves in slow motion, their frequencies deepened as they stretched over longer spans of time. Speeded up a hundredfold, Kyle’s EEG data looked perfectly normal.
There was something going on in there.
Kyle’s head was physically undamaged, giving every reason to expect cerebral activity. Something had altered it, resulting in his coma. Marsh leaned across Kyle to attach electrodes to his forehead and temples.
This latest version of the dream visualizer was theoretically capable of rudimentary video. Trials on himself disappointed Marsh, however. The imager, although fifty times as fast as the last one, was still too slow, producing a series of incomplete images overlaid and blended. If Kyle’s attenuated EEG trace meant his mental processes were slowed down, perhaps they were sluggish enough for the imager to keep up and produce intelligible video.
“All set?” Rainbow asked.
Marsh nodded, backing up to get a view of the monitor. Rainbow started the machine.
It took several seconds to obtain an image, and Marsh’s hopes withered when it appeared. A tangled, indistinct mess, worse than the previous trials.
Rainbow said, “Hang on, that’s with the autocalibration settings. Let me noodle around.”
“It won’t make any difference.”
Rainbow spoke while she made adjustments. “I know you’re frustrated, but this is the first run with a new subject. A subject whose condition could affect things in ways we didn’t anticipate. Don’t jump to conclusions. You’re a better scientist than that.”
Marsh sighed. “I agree completely. Thank you for not letting me fall apart.”
“We can’t afford to have that happen,” Rainbow muttered. Then she added, louder, “I’m starting the next imaging pass now.”
Marsh knew why she was trying to change the subject. Attrition had become a real issue at the House as Severin continued to abdicate responsibility. Although Rainbow told Marsh over and over it wasn’t his problem, even she came to think of him as the de facto leader.
The imager was barfing on the monitor again, so Marsh had something to distract him from the dilemma of being in charge with no authority.
Rainbow’s noodling made a difference. This tangled mess more clearly gave the impression of multiple, overlaid images than the first one.
“That’s looking better,” Marsh offered, but he felt they had seen enough. The same fundamental problem remained: multiple images smearing together.
Rainbow heard the defeatism in his voice and shot him a cagey look. “I don’t think this is the same overlay problem we saw on your trials.”
This project was instantly interesting to Marsh again. “What do you mean?”
Rainbow traced some vague forms on the screen, where the image had updated to the next frame, indistinguishable from the first.
“This shape is echoed all over the screen, but the scale and perspective are changed. It’s probably the same object. I don’t think the various overlays are chronologically organized. I think they’re views from different angles.”
Marsh brought his brows together. “What does that mean?”
“Maybe he’s trying to look at an issue from both sides. Maybe he has multiple personalities.” Rainbow shrugged. “Lemme tinker with the settings. We might get a clearer view of this object that has Kyle so preoccupied.”
; Marsh watched as Rainbow tweaked the machine’s configuration. He wondered if it was normal to find someone’s typing unendurably erotic.
The next frame came up, much more organized. “Dropped out a bunch of channels,” Rainbow explained. “Hoping to get it down to one point of view.”
Her modifications worked perfectly on the first try, which made Marsh envious. Over the next five minutes, the images on the screen shed more and more clutter, until Marsh and Rainbow agreed on what they were looking at.
“It’s a chain,” Marsh said. “Great big links.”
They viewed the chains in Kyle’s mind from ten different vantage points. The frame rate was fast enough to capture clear, sequential images from any one of them at one time. If they stayed with one view for a few minutes, they could perceive a gradual drifting motion. Always converging with the chains.
“Go back to seven,” Marsh suggested. Once Rainbow pressed the key, he said, “There’s something different about this one.”
At the extreme right side of the screen they could see a sliver of some other object.
“Is there any way to steer?” Marsh asked, knowing Rainbow would shake her head.
“There are a lot more viewpoints, though,” she offered. “One of them would probably show more of that thing. I could hack something together in a couple hours, to get around the limit of ten.”
The next frame loaded as she spoke, with a perfect circle of white in the lower-left quadrant.
They stared in silence. A few seconds later, the next frame contained a portion of the same circle, cropped by the upper edge of the screen.
Rainbow said, “What did we just see?”
“It moved vertically, whatever it was. Rising. We had it for one-and-a-half frames. If the imager was faster... but I need more than a couple of hours to hack that.”
“Well, let’s take this gear back to the shop and get to work!”
*** *** ***
Propped up on his elbow, Fin watched Rook sleeping in Vesuvius’s perpetual crimson twilight. Her eyes fluttered open.
“Morning,” she mumbled.
“That’s two nights in a row you slept right through,” Fin said with a smile. He kissed both eyelids and her nose.
