Division Zero: Thrall (54 page)

Kirsten couldn’t move. All her attempts to scream happened in her mind. Vision faded to darkness, and sound swirled as if she went underwater.

Konstantin crouched and patted her cheek. “I promise you, he won’t feel a thing.”

van crossed his arms over his face and screamed as the enormous fanged, pink rabbit engulfed him. He pulled the gaming goggles off his head and pouted at the giggling girl on the other side of the sectional. The cartoon bunny on her nightgown mocked him more than her pointing finger. He sulked. The hand-to-hand fighting game was too simple. Evan had spent an hour searching for effective combos of moves, but his efforts at strategy continued to succumb to Shani’s random button-mashing.

“You’re not even playing. You’re just squishing buttons as fast as you can.”

She pulled her goggles off and set them on the couch next to her. “That’s playing. If I wasn’t playing, I wouldn’t push any buttons.”

“That’s not how you play! You’re s’posed ta use moves an’ combos and tactics. Countermoves and attacks.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “I’m winning, aren’t I?”

Evan frowned. “Wanna play
Colony Commando 9
? We can be on the same team there.”

Shani scrunched her face. “Are there bunnies?”

“No.”

“Cats?” She tilted her head left.

“No.”

“Puppies?” She tilted her head right.

“No, it doesn’t have cute stuff. It’s about soldiers and aliens.”

A series of contortions worked their way through her lips as she ground the gears of her little seven-year-old mind. “Do the soldiers shoot bunnies?”

“No!” Evan threw his hands up in the air.

“Okay. As long as they don’t kill bunnies.”

He glared. “‘Kay, lemme put in my EGM username. We can play co-op on this one.”

“You’re just tired of losing to me.”

Evan’s eyebrows formed a flat line across his brow. “Yeah, I’m just tired of losing a fuzzy bunny fighting game to a button masher.”

She gave him a raspberry.

He punched in his PID, logged into Electronic Game Megaverse, and connected Shani’s Neurocaster IV to his account. Nila’s apartment filled with the sound of a dropship overflight, knocking small objects off shelves in the rumble of starship-sized ion thrusters. A chill washed over him, a sensation which manifested as sharp nausea spreading to a rapid full-body numbness and a cold sweat. He crossed his hands over his belly, shivering.

“Turn that down! What the hell are you doing?” yelled Nila from the back.

“Volume twenty percent,” chirped Shani.

A green line appeared on the holographic display, which then shrank to the left.

“Okay, Mom.” Shani shoved her feet into the couch hard enough to lean her up and over the back to yell. When she flopped back down, she stared at Evan. “What’s wrong?”

Evan looked at her, searching for words he could not find. His hands shook, sweat ran down the back of his neck.

Fear.

Just as soon as it had come on, it faded. He looked around, fixating on the cartoonish huge-chinned soldier grimacing at him from the screen. Giant machine guns sprouted from both hands and little mini-turrets dotted his powered armor in ridiculous amounts. Letters resembling cut steel spelled out
Colony Commando: The Last Hope
on the right half of the screen. Nine large bullet holes underlined it―the ninth in the series.

She made a face at the image in the goggles. “The first one and the ninth one are the same game with little bit better graphics. His armor is silly. If he fired all those guns at once, he’d fall over, and where does he keep all the bullets? This is the ninth one? Why do they keep making these games?”

New maps, new weapons, new aliens.
Evan answered in his own head; the impulse to speak got lost trying to wander from brain to tongue. “S-something’s wrong.”

“This was
your
idea, Evvie.” Shani grabbed her goggles and popped them on. “You’re not afraid of some slimy aliens are you?”

The doorbell chimed, a series of bell noises. Nila had said the music was from some big guy named Ben, in England. Evan whipped around to stare at the door. The pealing vibrated through his bones. Shani tossed the goggles, leaping to her feet and cheering “I got it! I got it!”

“Shani, no! Don’t open the door!” Evan screamed and started to climb over the couch to get away, stopping when he saw Shani’s hand on the knob. “Nila!”

old grit ground into Kirsten’s skin with every breath. Her head felt as though someone inflated it to many times its size. Numbness manifested in patches over a body she could not move. The taste of dust made her sputter, and she gathered every ounce of conscious willpower into the task of getting her lips away from the floor. Air washed over her belly as her weight shifted. Freezing metal spots found the small of her back―rigid bands locked about her wrists. Her eyes snapped open.

She was in the cell.

Short-chain binders pinned her ankles together and kept her hands behind her back. Some manner of rubbery cord linked the two restraints, allowing her little range of motion. Devoid of reason, Kirsten thrashed in an effort to break free. Her struggle ground more painful sand into her hips. She knew she was not strong enough to crack plastisteel, but some primal instinct urged her to try. Lying still would be to accept her captivity.

“You fucking bastard!” she screamed. “Don’t you dare touch him!”

Her voice echoed back from the basement until the only sound was her own breathing. Muscles exhausted, the elastic strap drew her hands and feet close once more. The memory of Konstantin’s touch between her legs brought hot anger to her face; her attempt to cover herself came to a halt with a metallic click. Kirsten wobbled into a kneeling position, wringing her arms in an ineffectual attempt to slip loose.

“Lay off the yelling or they’ll gag you,” a voice whispered. Now awake, the woman who had been in the cell before was sitting up, leaning against the far wall.

Kirsten’s face burned red. She twisted around to examine the cuffs locked on her legs. Like the door, they were mechanical, and almost a half-inch thick. The logo of an online kink store was etched along the hasp. Whoever put them on her tightened them too much, enough to break bones if she twisted wrong.
At least the only person who can see me is another woman.
Her head sagged forward. She remembered her mother dragging her into the kitchen by her hair. She felt helpless then. She thought about waking up in her own cuffs when Templeton found her. That had been scary, but it had not topped Mother. Hiding under an SUV in a parking garage to elude a man with vibro claws―that made her feel more vulnerable than Mother ever had. When there was nothing between her and an assassin but a fast-disintegrating concrete support pylon, that surpassed the SUV.

Kirsten stared at herself. Naked, hogtied, and trapped in the basement dungeon of a manor house where no one knew she had gone.
I’ve gotta stop trying to one up myself.
She squirmed, brushing hard grainy bits from her back as best she could.
Crushed soy hull.
A glance at the cat box sent her into another fit of struggling.
The bodies had soy hull and cat litter in their skin.
She dry heaved twice before working up a sweat from trying to pull her hands through the cuffs.

“You’re wasting your strength,” said the other woman. “The guy they had here before you was huge, and he couldn’t break them.”

That must’ve been Arris.

“I gotta get out of here. That piece of shit is going after my son.” Kirsten stared at the ceiling, thinking about what the Seraphim told her, something about being out there to protect her. She curled into a ball, shivering from shame as well as the cold. Where were they now? Her mind began down the path of ‘where are they when I need their help,’ but she put the brakes on.
They’re not here. They gave me a boost off the parking deck. I must not
need
their help now.
“There’s a way out.”

“Good fucking luck finding it.” The woman puffed at a stray bit of hair over her eyes.

Kirsten wobbled onto the balls of her feet and hopped twice toward the door before the elastic pulled her off balance. She fell forward, whimpering from the strike of her knees on concrete.

The other woman shook her head. “What ‘chu gonna do? Bite the bars out? You can’t even stand up to see the lock.”