Crystal Heat

day 15

At measured-intervals her awareness left her for about a day. It wasn’t sleep, it was as if someone had touched a button and turned her off. The timer on the sensor panel told her how long she was gone, but she had no internal sense of time passing and that bothered her a lot-all the more because she could do nothing about it.

Interval by interval she pieced together what this was about.

Through his techs and their reports, Digby knew her body and her consciousness-at least as much of them as could be measured from the outside. And he could do anything he wanted to her because he had a fine and frisky scapegoat to blame it on. The Kliu.

He wanted everything she knew. Her history. Aleytys. Vrithian. The Diadem. Everything. He’d been after her from the beginning to tell him things, pressing as hard as he could without driving her away. He’d accepted her evasions because he had no choice about that. When she quit,, though… that ultimate evasion was something he must have decided he couldn’t allow. And with the Mu hanging about, he didn’t even have to kill her when he was finished; all he had to do was brainwipe her and turn her loose. He could even get her back to University and let her be found wandering mindless, traces of drugs in her that might be linked to the Kliu. He didn’t like them; it would appeal to his peculiar humor to get them barred from University as they’d gotten themselves barred from Marrat’s Market.

Information. Miser of knowledge, sitting in his electronic parlor turning over the golden rounds of his secrets.

As the days passed, her thinking became measurably quicker, the alternate pathways strengthening and growing more complex with exercise.