Shock tore through her, redoubling when she found she couldn’t even move her eyes. She fought, and failed, to click her teeth together to make Barney’s device play the words that would free her.
Instead she sat like a carved statue, scarcely breathing.
But one thing had changed. This time, she could feel the bonds in her mind, could sense the shape of what he’d done. Because this time she’d not given her consent? Because that consent was old, tricked from a trusting child?
Her eyes locked, unmoving, she sensed more than saw his fingers twitch in the hated pattern, and moments later felt his mind slide inside hers. Her reflexive defenses failed her, suppressed by his order to ‘open her thoughts’.
Hatred flared, and she felt him flinch from it. Good.
“How does the device work? Don’t speak aloud, think your answers.”
But years of automatic evasion kicked in. ‘The device’ must mean the thing Omega had put inside her head. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t make it.’
“But you ordered its construction. You must know.”
“What’s going on?” Marcie demanded. “Why’s she sitting so still? Sleena, are you alright?”
Harmon quashed a surge of anger at the attempted interference. “Do nothing to break my control,” he whispered, covering his mouth. “But otherwise pretend everything is fine.”
She tried not to speak, then blinked, determined to pretend everything was fine. She could at least do that much. “I’m all right. It’s just a lot to take in.” Able to move once more thanks to the new order, she tried again to bite down twice.
Her jaw locked the moment she tried.
Marcie stared at the doctor, her eyes narrowed. “Right. Thanks for the healing, but we’ll take it from here.” She bent to untie the ropes at her friend’s wrists. “What the hell’s going on, anyway? What’s this about a sentient AI and your memories being erased? Sounds like a pitch for an Underworld episode,” she joked. “Damn, these knots are like wood. We’re gonna need a knife.”
Harmon turned away. “Tell your friends it is too dangerous to involve them any further, that you and I-”
“Hey,” Marcie interrupted him. “Are you whispering? You are, aren’t you? You felch-head, you’re doing it again!” She drew her taser.
“It is too dangerous to involve you any further, friends,” Leeth said. “He and I.”
“‘Friends’?” said Marcie. “And ‘he and I’ what?” She took aim, finger tightening on the trigger. “He’s done it ag-”
Harmon shaped the pattern of the spell in his mind as he turned to face them all. Desperation fueling him, he hurled all the mental energy of his will through the arcane pattern, holding nothing back.
The Sleep spell crashed through the room.
Taken unawares, Maeve grunted, slumping in her chair, her eyes falling shut. Beside them the two elders’ heads also lolled forward. Marcie collapsed in a boneless heap, the beginnings of her desperate resistance crushed. Mason, partially protected by his machine augmentations, struggled before he too succumbed, overwhelmed.
Leeth, as stubborn and suspicious as ever, swayed but fought through it. Though her head bobbed forward, her neck stiffened. Her angry gaze swept the room, taking in the sight of all her allies neutralized, settling finally on the doctor, and his superior little smile.
“As usual Marcie Dunkirk has merely complicated the situation.” With a tired breath he fell back into his chair, collecting his reserves.
“That was stupid. Now what’re you going to do?” She could tell he wasn’t mind probing her now – she’d felt him drop the spell a moment before casting his knockout blow.
At least he looked exhausted.
“Invisibility,” he said at last, smiling, “cast on you. I will simply leave, saying that although my part is done the others are still in discussion and not to be disturbed. You will follow me, invisible, hiding your presence. Once we are a safe distance away, you can explain how the device your young Mutie friend built for you works.”
Young Mutie friend? Who… did he mean Barney? She filed the slur away: one more reason he needed to die. But his idea would work. She had to break free before that, at any cost. She tried again to click her teeth together to activate it. Once again, her jaws locked.
Harmon rose and stepped forward, bending over the ropes at her wrist as Marcie had. His smile fell as his fingers worked futilely on the insanely compressed rope of the knot. Impossible to untie.
He huffed.
With a strange feeling of relief, she let the desire to kill flow into her fingers and felt her spirit blades slide out. My invisible claws, she thought at them. I can’t believe I forgot you! “Sorry, I can’t help,” she smirked, wriggling her fingers upward in the empty air above the armrests, unable to reach the ropes.
She watched him searching for a knife, taking delight as his quiet hunt failed.
He found Maeve’s gun, but re-holstered it. He couldn’t shoot the rope off her – not and pretend everything was still okay inside. She giggled. It was kind of poetic, that her thrashing attempts to free herself before, stopped him from sneaking away with her now.
“It called itself Aiyami,” she said, to distract him from using the time to make her explain how Barney’s device worked.
“What? What did?”
“The sentient AI thing.”
“Nonsense. No doubt they believe-”
“It spoke through my mouth, even when I was unconscious. They have recordings.”
She hurried on before he could interrupt. “It also said it was a shard, and I’d kind of killed its earlier form. And that it scared off Tezsh Catlick what’s-his-name to get to me.”
That snared his attention. “We need to get you back-”
“No we don’t.” She looked from him, to Marcie slumped asleep in the chair beside hers, to the four others unconscious in theirs, making sure no one was listening. “Have you forgotten? I’m on a-” mission.
Her mouth stopped working. She frowned at him. “I’m on a-” mission, she tried to say again, but once again couldn’t get the word out. Then she realized what was wrong: his very first command, the one he’d used originally to justify implanting those final mental bonds. Orders against revealing anything about the Department to anyone outside it.
“What?” he demanded at her expression.
She angled her chin toward Mason. “He records conversations. Probably even when he’s asleep. So….”
She watched him put two and two together.
It was kind of funny, seeing him struggle to drag her chair backward to get her as far from Mason as he could, being the one to make him do that. But she didn’t dare formulate any conscious plans to escape his disgusting Mode One control. Since at any moment he might order her to explain Barney’s device, or mind probe her like he had before.
But she did need to get free. She shut her eyes, feeling her way over the dimly-sensed shape of his controls in her mind, studying it. It was like a complicated knot, or series of knots. To start unraveling it she just needed to find the ends.
After puffing and dragging her in her chair far across the room, he went back to get a chair for himself. Staggering under its weight he carried it across to her. “Tell me how I can get you out of here unnoticed,” he whispered, facing her.
“I don’t know,” she whispered back. She had to repeat it, louder, until he could hear her. “What I was trying to say was, I’m on a mission, remember? Things went kind of sideways after Dr Yamamoto put me inside his machine, his ‘Writer’, but I’m myself again now, and ready to finish the job. I’ll just kill him. There’s no need to run home.”
She eyed him up and down, his strange appearance. “You look really weird with no eyebrows and shaved bald, you know.” Not to mention the beard. “Nice disguise. You should’ve gotten them to give you a gold earring, too. You’d look like a science-pirate.”
She could see his patience evaporating. “What I mean is, you’re on a mission too, obvi… ous… ly…” looking for me. Her words ran to a halt at a surge of hope. He came looking for me!
No. Don’t be stupid. That was a lie, the kind of childish hope she’d killed forever. You’re tied tight in a chair, locked in his foul Mode One obedience!
Harmon didn’t need his mind probe running to guess her thought, and considered playing up to it. But that deception would be too easily exposed.
Sometimes though, a light manipulation was best. So….
“I have been on a mission for the last two days, yes: trying to find you.” He shook his head, still whispering. “Your choker went dead.”
Leeth’s chin tucked in as she tried to feel it around her neck – the beautiful piece of spy gear made specially for her by Nelson. How did I lose my choker? It was supposed to self-destruct if removed! Had it fallen into Omega’s hands? She grimaced.
“Nelson couldn’t locate you,” Harmon said, letting some of his feelings show. “Nor could I, magically. I refused to believe you had been killed. I have been trying to find you, trying to learn what happened to you; fearing the worst.”
He saw his words strike home even as her expression hardened. “But I was here before that. I came here trying to understand why you cared about these people, this society. But we should return to the Department. From there, we can re-plan-”
She shook her head. “Sure, let’s fill them in. But you’d be stupid to waste the chance to show them you can be useful outside, too. Not a real agent, of course, but still useful.”
Her real motivations were clear – she hoped to break free – but he also saw she wasn’t lying. “What are you suggesting?”
“Free me. Team up with us to complete the mission. The Department’s okay with ‘outsourcing’.”
“You would put your friend Marcie in danger?”
“I don’t mean Marcie,” she snapped. “I meant Mason, mainly. And Gigi and Barney for the technical stuff.”
Settling back in his chair, he studied her. “It does make a certain sense. At least, to learn what you have discovered before reporting in.”
She nodded. “Exactly.”
“Since we have time, you will now let me probe your mind without resistance.”
Her eyes flew wide, her head shaking in denial as he cast the spell and slid inside. “Explain how your friend Barney’s device breaks my control over you.” He ignored her dismay as she revealed the stunning simplicity of her solution: his own voice, recorded speaking the words that released his control. A tiny speaker.
“Where is this apparatus?” he demanded.
At her helpless direction, he plucked the device from inside her ear, and the other part that told it to play the sound. And that was all. The rest had been simple misdirection.
He read her hope, that he would activate it by mistake. With her bound in her chair, he very nearly indulged her wish. After all, he only needed to speak three words to lock her back under his control.
Instead he ground the two devices under heel.
Her hatred scourged him. But hidden behind that… he pushed through her smokescreen, finding a new vantage point in her mind: one from which all the strands of his control lay exposed to her view. Even now she studied them, how to pick them apart.
“Seshoestus desstussten,” he whispered, and saw the joy at release he had expected – but followed by a frustration she immediately tried to conceal.
Digging, he found its cause: she could no longer sense his magically woven bonds. “Leeth, Mode One.” Instinctively she found her vantage point, then skated past it, hoping he hadn’t noticed.
Dammit.
He whispered the meaningless sounds that freed her.
Instantly, she flung up a barrage of imagery, fighting his mental probe, but it seemed too obvious a distraction. He shifted his perceptions to the Imaginal. Then lurched back in his chair as deadly planes of force flared from her fingertips, invisible wicked razors extended two full hand spans beyond their tips. Longer than he had ever Percepted before.
They slashed at but could not reach the ropes binding her wrists, then stretched for him before retracting, blocked by his other implanted orders, against injuring him.
And still she struggled.
Genuinely trapped in the chair. The irony of his situation struck him: he had her, could even control her – though at risk of her unraveling his mental bonds – and even had an easy way to spirit her away unseen.
If only he could release the physical bonds she’d set like stone from her struggles.
She stopped at last, panting, studying him in turn, hoarding her new hope and enjoying her apparent checkmate.
They stared at one another – her with fresh hatred, he in weary regret. “Truce?” he said at last.
She considered him through slitted eyes. Then slowly smiled. “I guess I can let you join my mission.”
Incredible. There she sat: trapped; aware he could take control of her at any moment; years of trauma a livid pain in her mind – yet her bearing remained that of a queen, her will as strong as ever.
Truly, she was unique. Infuriating and wild, but….
He pulled himself together. I seem more affected by the return of her memories than she does!
She leaned forward. “I should report in while everyone’s still asleep!” she whispered. “The Department must’ve been worried. You’d better call Eagle.”
Somewhat dazed, he considered rejecting her suggestion – even briefly considered taking her away, the two of them escaping the Department. Sighing, he quashed that pipe dream. Inserting the earbud, he made the call.