I'm the governor, right?

Blaise sent Peanut back with Polaroids: Kelly's-Tachyon's- body, naked and spread-eagled, her eyes wide, haunted and hopelessly defiant. Tachyon exposed helplessly, the picture snapped between her spread legs. Tachyon covered by Blaise's body. Tachyon afterward, weeping.

I… well, I didn't do anything.

I mean, what could I do, really? Was I going to send a squad of armed jokers to the jumper side of the Rox? I could've done that, but Blaise'd just mind-control them, or his followers would jump them. It'd start a civil war here. There are things I have to consider, after all. It's not just a simple thing.

The jumpers bring in money, they bring in the rapture and other drugs that half the jokers here are addicted to. The fear of them is at least part of what keeps the authorities away. I need the jumpers as much as they need me.

There are things I can't do. Really. I just… I just wish I didn't feel so bad about it. So dirty. I keep hearing myself, and I sound like fucking George Bush making excuses about how all his promises about `no new exotic laws' have had to be forgotten.

Do you understand?

… please help rne… I still hear her, and she's calling for me.

It hurts. It really does.

I had Peanut burn the pictures, but I kept seeing them. Kelly, poor Kelly. My Kelly. This isn't the way a romance is supposed to go.

Lovers

A lifetime ago, Tachyon had been thrown into the Tombs. He had thought he knew despair when the heavy barred door slammed shut behind him. Now he realized that had been only a pale shadow of true wretchedness.

His head pounded in time to the beating of his heart. Breath seemed to rip like shattered glass across a throat made raw from screaming. Blood still trickled sluggishly from his vagina, and he wondered what internal damage had been done.

The incongruity struck him. One should not use male pronouns with female anatomy. But he was a man. Wasn't he? He was suddenly aware of a painfully full bladder. He reached down, touched blood matted hair, and smoothness. No, he was no longer a man.

It seemed the final straw. As she stared with dry, aching eyes into the darkness, Tach longed to cry, to bathe her burning eyes with warm tears, to release the anguish filling her chest like crushing weight. But she could not cry. It was as if her emotions had been carefully gathered, and packed away in some deep and secret part of her soul. She was suffering, but she couldn't express the pain.

The darkness seemed to have substance. Hands stretched out before her, Tach made a circuit of her prison. Six feet by five feet. Bare concrete underfoot. Brick walls that oozed damp like a sweating fat man. As she made her journey of discovery, her bruised toes tried to cringe from any possible obstacles. They needn't have worried. The room was utterly, totally barren.

Tachyon was discovering that it was much harder to hold urine in a female body than in a male one. She found the door again. Beating desperately on it with her palms, she gathered a breath and shouted, "Hey! Help! Listen to mel HEY!"

There was no response.

As she squatted in a corner and relieved herself, Tachyon realized that in addition to being the most desperate moment of her life, it had become the most humiliating.

Eventually she slept. What woke her was a raging thirst, the clammy cold, and the sound of the door closing.

"No! Wait! Don't go! Don't leave me!"

Her toes struck something. There was a flat tinny sound as metal skittered across the floor. The aroma of oatmeal wafted to her nostrils. Shaking with hunger, Tach dropped her knees and groped blindly for the scattered silverware.

Minutes passed without success. Finally, with a faint mew of fury, Tach gathered the bowl in her hands and lapped down the cereal like a starving dog. It dented but did not banish the hunger. With her index finger, Tachyon scraped the sides and bottom of the bowl and sucked off the last bits of oatmeal.

A little more reconnaissance, and she discovered a pitcher of water and an empty bucket. She instantly availed herself of the bucket.

She had lost track of time. One day, three days, a week? How much time had elapsed in the world of light, in a world where people didn't go hungry or live with the stench of bowel movements or strain for even the faintest sound of another living creature?

At first Tachyon had been terrified that Blaise had taken Cody too. After all, the boy had been fascinated with the woman. It was his jealousy of Tach and Cody's relationship that had led him to run away in the first place and set him on this course of vengeance. But Blaise was as unsubtle as he was unstable. If he had held Cody, he would have tortured her before Tachyon's eyes. Thank the Ideal that he did not yet understand the power of suggestion, the agony of not knowing.

At least he's transferred his obsession with Cody to me, thought Tach. Now she will be safe. And though the thought comforted, Tachyon still had to clamp her teeth together to stop their chattering.

And Cody would be able to identify Blaise as Tachyon's kidnapper. The brief comfort afforded by that thought took a sudden plummet. She was on the Rox-and nobody sane came to the Rox.

Then the final crushing realization: Blaise could not allow Cody to reveal her jump and Tachyon's kidnapping. Had he killed her? Or simply removed that section of her memory with his mind powers? Fear gripped her, for while Blaise possessed the most awesome mind-control power Tach had ever faced, it was like a bludgeon. There was no mentatic subtlety. His clumsy mental surgery might have destroyed Cody's mind. Desperately, Tach prowled the darkness, but it could not match the stygian blackness within her mind and soul. From their first meeting, he and Cody had formed a telepathic bond that Tachyon had shared with only one other human woman. Surely that power would tell her if Cody lived. But the power was gone. So the darkness was filled only with silence and her grim fears.

Six times they had fed her. Did that mean three days had elapsed? Impossible to tell. At times her hunger was so great that it felt as if a small animal were chewing at the walls of her stomach. So perhaps they weren't feeding her every day. It was a blow to discover that her method of telling time proved to be as useless as everything else she had tried. This final loss of control over even the most meager part of her environment had, her blinking back tears.

More time elapsed, and eventually the silence became too much. One day she found herself talking to herself. Silverware was the catalyst for this latest bizarre behavior. She had been hoarding it, and she now possessed three spoons and a fork, which she obsessively counted and rearranged a hundred times in the hours between each sleep period.

"In an adventure novel or a cheap spy movie, our hero always constructs some devilishly clever device from ordinary household utensils," said Tach aloud. "But our hero's been reduced to a heroine, and she doesn't have a clue." The laughter hit the low ceiling and fell dully back on her ears.

Tach clapped a hand over her mouth to still the hysterical sound. Exhaustion dragged at her limbs.

Forcing herself to her feet, she made six quick circuits of her prison, and in time to her steps she recited: "A constant and overwhelming desire for sleep. Unspecified attacks of anxiety. Mind-numbing exhaustion. Bouts of hysterical laughter. All classic symptoms of acute depression." She paused for a moment, conceding that this rambling oration was also abnormal behavior. Then, with a shrug, she shouted at the invisible ceiling. "But you won't drive me crazy, Blaise. You may imprison me, starve me, destroy my eyesight with constant darkness, but you will not drive me crazy."