Crystal Heat

day 25

Huh! Omphalos had some use after all.

The work she’d done to slide around their mindwipe had set up so many subroutes and branches that even the most effective lock couldn’t cut all of them out of service.

Digby’s techs are the best around, but they’ve got the limitations that come from knowing too much. Blessings be for that. Let’s see what else they missed…

She couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t smell or taste the food she consumed, couldn’t turn her head, couldn’t even twitch an eyeball. She tried. Over and over she tried to wriggle around the bounds of the lock and tease out a way of getting her body back. Over and over she rammed against a wall there was no penetrating.

Hm. If I can’t go around, maybe I can pull my memories and shove them in a cyst like I did for the thing with Omphalos. Then he can probe all he wants and get nada for his pains.

But nada was what she got when she tried it. It was as if memory were marked Read Only. She could see but not touch. She crashed into the wall until her mind ached with the effort.

And in the trying she called up memories she didn’t want to view again, images that oozed through the mindlock and flared into brief existence in front of her eyes.

IMAGE flares of light, red and blinding white, long torturing squeal of landers as they came rushing through the night and dropped the catchnet on the Weaver’s house, her mother’s house. Dark figures pouring from the landers, it seemed as though there were thousands of them though later she knew it was only a dozen men. They came through the catchnet as if it didn’t exist; the web that paralyzed whatever it touched, they killed her mother and the breeding male who lived there, they took her sisters, her six shining sisters who danced dreams for the Shallana, they took her, too, but only because she was young enough there’d be a market for her.

IMAGE She bent over the narrow casket she dug from a wall in an ancient ruin, ran her three-fingered hands over the panels, brushing the dust away so she could see the patterns some long-dead artist had carved into the stone, white jade it was, the walls thin as fine porcelain. Amazing that it was intact so long after it was made. Her touch triggered it somehow and the lid rose upward. Inside she saw a pile of ash and something else, a necklet she thought at first, a delicate gold chain, complex and supple, draping heavily over her hand when she lifted it, fine wires spun into the petals of stylized blooms with jeweled hearts, jewels that sang single pure notes as she turned her hand and inspected them. She spread out the circle and fitted the Diadem onto her head.

IMAGE Darkness. Nothing. Struggle to be, to see, to do anything she could to break the intolerable tedium of existence inside the treasure tower of the RMoahl. Day upon day of wrestling with her limitations as she learned to ride the Curator’s mind so she could get beyond the boundaries of her patterned life. Then the gem that held her soul sounded its note as a hand snatched it from the case. Darkness again as the Diadem slid into a loot sack and the thief Stavvar began retracing his steps.