When the Villian Comes Home Page 7

  Sabin unspooled the I/O cord with a sharp tug and crossed to the other man where he sat on his bunk. Finding the port with practiced fingers, he jammed the metal contact home.

  It was not the tender bond he and Khloii shared, more intimate than lovemaking, more revealing than any simple communication could be. It was a rape. Sabin tore the memory of what Derik had experienced with his sister and dissected it. He felt the brush of her hair across his arms, tasted the salt and citrus of her skin, and swam in the richness of her body as it embraced him. Her mouth to his, their bodies moving together in a timeless, primal rhythm. Khloii holding him so tight, feeling her body rise to his, the echoes of her pleasure sending him shuddering after his own release. For a moment, the sensory delight shook him. This was everything he craved, the yearning buried deep within his psyche.

  Except this was not his memory.

  But it would be now and forevermore. He ripped it from Derik’s mind, through the thin I/O wire that connected them, and wiped what had been clean from the raw wetware. Bleak and hating, he used his knowledge of programming and engineering—a privileged education—and crafted a harsh replacement. If Derik tried to touch Khloii again, he would be wracked by surges of crippling agony.

  He left Derik unconscious on his bunk.

  The next day, Sabin left, burning with shame and despair, half-hoping he would find his death in the war that raged with no apparent end. Khloii sent vids to him every day, begging him to return. And when it became clear he would not, she begged him to take care, to live through the war, to come back home to her.

  So he had, with a soldier’s education to layer the final veneer over his aristocrat’s learning. The war taught that what a civilian ought not do, a soldier must. A soldier must kill; he must burn and raze fertile land, wield weapons of terrible chaos, and sometimes, he must invade other soldiers’ minds and steal their thoughts, their memories, their secrets.

  Sabin appreciated the irony of it when the military assigned him, because of his skills, to intelligence retrieval duties. They appointed him captain of a specialized troop of data harvesters. He knew other soldiers, behind his back, called his unit Mind Reapers, soldiers that did the taboo. They invaded the neural interfaces of others without invitation or welcome, taking what was withheld, and leaving drooling husks in their wake.

  5

  Now Sabin sampled Derik’s fear, rolled the flavor of his quickening breath and the gallop of his pulse in his mind. He was adept at this, able to prolong the helpless terror in his victims to better savor their capitulation. He probed for memories of Khloii, saw flashes of her sleepy, angry, worried—scenes he had missed while he fought across foreign landscapes. But Derik hadn’t broken his lock. He had not touched Khloii, and when questioned by her, had remained tangibly mute.

  Sabin was reassured. He should have pulled out, but instead he lingered. First he triggered the bondservant’s anxiety center, drew himself as the sole phobic terror of his existence. A gentle smile crossed Sabin’s features when he felt the man’s trembling quicken beneath him. With a practiced touch, he drew outlines of obsession over pathways of pleasure and humor, felt Derik’s mind warp and buckle beneath his.

  It would be so easy to send the other man spinning into mania or fractured catatonia. But Sabin was meticulous with his ministrations. He was a master at this, an expert, and oh-so-careful.

  This was a release as engulfing and terrible as orgasm—the electric jolt of the conqueror, the primal ecstasy of power over another. It was one he relished in lieu of carnal voluptuaries. But it was as addictive as less esoteric vices.

  The soldiers had a name for that as well. Serk. There was a special ward that housed the Serkers in the medical bases, data harvesters that had gone mad from too many links, too many minds. He had seen men in his unit dragged away screaming and crazed, and once, a lieutenant borne off glassy-eyed catatonic, as though his spirit had eluded the MPs, leaving only an empty shell for them to seize. By all rights, Sabin knew he should be caged there, caught in a stasis web and bound by tranqs and psychotropics. But he had been talented at concealing his sickness, and the war had needed his skills and ruthlessness.

  He had not told Khloii, of course. And now she wanted to link with him. Would he be tempted to ransack her mind, to extract from her the faces of lovers she had taken while he was away? Of course he would.

  Khloii was his touchstone, his beloved. To see revulsion in her eyes, to feel it along the I/O wire as their emotions melded, it would destroy him more surely than a plasma bolt to the heart.

  But Derik’s mind was fertile ground. He was meat to be rent and used.

  When Sabin was finished, the other man lay shuddering beneath him. His eyes flickered beneath closed lids in a limping dream state. He would wake, not clearly recalling his abuse, but remembering it as a misty terrorscape.

  Sabin lifted the other man in his arms and carried him, gentle as a lover, to the servant’s quarters. He removed the other man’s clothing and laid him in his slender bed, pulling the covers around him.

  That night, Sabin slept the dreamless rest that the military psychologists had trained him to achieve, at peace and brimful of tranquility.

  5

  The red-gold light of the sun washed over Sabin through the eclipsed glass. For a quick breath, he forgot where he was, expecting to open his eyes to plasteel walls and the luminous glow of fluorods. But the bed was too soft, not the rough edges and harsh touch of a military cot and blanket. And the clean perfume of orange blossoms filled his senses, not the burnt tang of charred flesh or the chemical taste of recycled air.

  His door swung open, and Khloii burst into his room. It was her footsteps that had roused him.

  “Still asleep?” She looked like a butterfly in her pale blue house gown. The material was lightly translucent; it billowed around her as she bounced at the edge of his bed. “You used to wake up before me and bring a cup of kafee to rouse me. Then we’d go lionin hunting, remember?”

  “Of course I remember.” He sat up to return her embrace. She clung to his hand when he pulled away. “You didn’t bring me kafee, though,” he said.

  “Marissa has a grand breakfast waiting for you in the dining room.”

  “Ah. Then I should get up before she gets impatient.”

  “Wait.” Khloii reached for the I/O wire coiled at the base of his neural implant. “Share with me. I remember how I loved waking up to you with that mug of steaming kafee. I thought I’d never be able to show my joy to you again when you were gone. And we never got a chance to talk about what happened, maybe now—?”

  “No.” Sabin shook her hand away. The hurt look on her face distressed him, but he put that aside as well. “It’s still too soon.”

  “How long do you need?” Khloii brought her fingertips to Sabin’s face. “Why are you avoiding this? Surely you can share anything with me.”

  He turned his head so his lips brushed her hand. “The war...was bad. Worse than you could imagine.”

  Khloii scowled and flung herself away from him. “I’m not a paper flower! You think I’ve just sat, watching holotapes while you were gone? Since when have I needed protecting?”

  Sabin reached for her. “You know I don’t think of you as a fragile, wilting thing. You couldn’t be, having to deal with me, growing up.” As children, he had always urged her to match him in his recklessness, leaping wide chasms and climbing onto thin branches. And she, proudly defiant, had always flouted peril, never retreating from his challenges.

  She threaded her fingers through his. “Then, why?”

  Sabin allowed a glimpse of the desolation he felt to leak from his eyes for a moment, long enough for her to see. “I can’t!”

  “For now,” she replied. “But I will know what you’re hiding from me.”

  5

  Khloii did not bring it up again that day. And riding with her around
the estate in a hover and chasing after the prides of wild lionins that roamed the acres of their estate made him feel young, as though they were as they had always been—he the tender youth, and she the light of his heart.

  But as the sun paced across the sky, they grew awkward and then silent. Dinner was a mournful meal with conversation that stuttered and tripped over itself. It was with relief that Sabin excused himself to retreat to his chambers.

  How long could he hold this barrier between them? She sensed it, and it hurt her. That was more painful than any of the wounds he had suffered on the battlefield.

  But for now he wanted sleep—blissful, dreamless oblivion. With practiced ease, he forced his restive body into a restorative trance. No dreams, no nightmares, just the void of unconsciousness.

  5

  Sabin rested on a bed of frothy cotton. Around him, fluffs of white clouds billowed and flowed. The zest of oranges pricked his nose. It was a tangible sensation—cool as a sluice of ice water, sweet as a kiss. But it was wrong. This was a dream state, and he should not be dreaming of anything—not cloud-mist and certainly not oranges.

  Out of the haze, Khloii emerged. The aroma of oranges was joined by the harsher nip of lemons. She wore a white house gown. It matched the foggy white of his dream setting so it seemed her face and hands floated in nothingness. He felt, even in his state of stupor, the tingle of the I/O linking him mind-to-mind.

  Khloii interfaced with him while he slept.

  His sleep self bolted up at the realization. “What are you doing? Get out!”

  She ignored his outburst and sat beside him, hovering on the thick, white nothing. “I’ve dosed us both with a sleepy-patch. We need to talk, and I can’t think of a better way to do it than this.”

  “You drugged me?” The dreamless state he had induced would be shattered by meds.

  “Don’t give me those shocked eyes, twin. Remember our thirteenth birthday when you slipped zippy pills in my drink? I drove the hover into town wearing only a lilac veil and a pair of stockings. Very droll.”

  “Khloii, this is different. It could be dangerous for you to be here.”

  She laughed. “You’re going to hurt me in your fantasies?”

  The laughter faded and died as she watched his face. “Sabin?”

  “I’m going to dream, twin. I know what I’ll dream. Please leave now, before you see.”

  “I-I can’t. I’ve got us heavily dosed, and our neural networks are doubly interfaced.”

  Doubly interfaced, a Möbius circuit, their minds separated by only a fragile border of perspective. Sabin plunged his face into his hands. “I didn’t want you to find out like this. Not like this!”

  5

  The first countenance that materialized from the dreamstuff was Derik’s. Sabin’s emotions—waves of heady desire, sensuous pleasure, spiky lust for Khloii—washed over the shared dreamers. It was what he had stolen from the bondservant, prized and locked away as his own. With it came guilt and horror, sharp-toothed nightmares ravening in the dark. Like a holotape, Sabin relived what he had done to Derik and the pleasure he had experienced in the act.

  He heard Khloii inhale as she shared the intense satisfaction, the glorious pleasure of feeling another man’s will ripped apart. He would have stopped this now, if he could, but the dreaming, when it came, was inexorable.

  Derik metamorphosed into the first Intelligentsia soldier Sabin had reaped. The man had been trained against interrogation, but Sabin’s will was stronger. In a tiny holding cell that reeked of urine and fear, Sabin had forced a link and thrust himself into the man’s mind. The feel of the man’s will, defiant and vital, had roused him, driving him, eager as a young lover, deep into the man’s base thoughts. The frantic beat of the Intelligentsia’s fear, so like Derik’s, brought Sabin’s stolen memories percolating up. Khloii beneath him, writhing in pleasure, her face a mask of ecstasy. To curb the reliving of his/Derik’s memory, Sabin trampled through the Intelligentsia’s cherished memories—a child’s tactile recollection of warm comfort at mother’s breast, a clear night sky with the stars bright as hope overhead. When the man tried to resist, Sabin punished him, teeth clenched in a joyful rictus of effort. He’d reveled in ripping through the quiet places of his mind and leaving behind lurid images of skin flayed from bone, acid burned sight, and the screaming violation of metal cleaving through flesh. It was with a rapacious touch, in truth a brutal, sexual act, that he had extracted the plans and codes for an enemy attack from that man.

  Sabin had saved many Alliance lives and earned a promotion from that deed. But also, the other man’s subjugation had been sweet as a ripe orange, bursting on his tongue, or tart lemonade swirled with ice. He had luxuriated in the sensation of breaking through the barriers of his mind, rolled like a besotted drunkard in the ins and outs of the other man’s thoughts, before finally reducing him to the base components of his wetware. His mission accomplished, instead of leaving the man with the remaining shreds of his sanity, Sabin lingered, rapt in his conquest. On a final climax of dark horror and gibbering dread, his plaything had broken. Reluctantly, Sabin disconnected from the wrecked Intelligentsia mind, deliciously sated and breathless.

  A parade of faces marched past. Sabin relived the sensual joy of devastating them, one after another, and Khloii remembered them with him. And underneath each memory, like a hidden current in a deep river, was Khloii—the heat of her breath, the softness of her thighs parting, the silk of her hair tangled around him.

  He felt her mind-hand on his wrist and shivered at her touch. He did not brush her away. That she could stand to touch him at all was a miracle.

  The sequence of battered intellects concluded, and they were left alone in the blank whiteness of his mind.

  He could not look at her, and for a long moment they neither spoke nor thought.

  “What brought you to this?” she whispered.

  Sabin thought to lie to her then, to try to salvage the last secret, but even as he contemplated it, he knew he couldn’t. She would feel it.

  “Because I wanted you and could not have you,” he confessed. “Because I was jealous and desperate. If I could not have you, I wanted no other. And this is how my desires twisted.”

  Khloii astonished him with her laughter. “Because you could not have me?” The sound of her merriment rang out like a golden bell, but a flawed one, deeply cracked so the tone soured into something unmusical. “And here I was afraid you’d broken the conditioning I planted. Did you even think to look for it?”

  He stared at her.

  “You don’t remember, do you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Here, a little reminder, sweet brother.”

  Like a dam opening in her mind, she poured out their childhood years together into his consciousness. It was as though he saw their past out of a fractured lens.

  When they were young, it had been small, petty things: the burn of lemon spray to unguarded eyes, a dousing of pheromones to attract the stinging honeybees that guarded the orchard, wasabi powder in the morning kafee. Then it grew cleverer and more deadly: razor shards of glass strewn across the floor, humiliating secrets published on the public ‘net, a beloved lionin kitten eviscerated and staked out for the other to discover.

  Their childhood was a series of vicious pranks and cruel traps—the product of mutually fierce natures, doubled. Their entertainments had grown bloodier and more deadly, resulting in scars of the body and psyche, until one summer day, surrounded by the ripe zest of lemons, Sabin had pinioned Khloii to the warm earth. He injected a paralyzing agent through her veins and raped her as she lay in the dirt. It was a supreme act of domination. Her eyes, so like his own, had burned with impotent hate, even as her body shuddered in traitorous pleasure.

  And then her revenge.

  She showed him, the gloat in her thoughts cloying as her name: the master
stroke, when she had snuck into his chambers, maneuvering through a minefield of elegant traps and defensive snares, and forced a link.

  Khloii was his twin, body, heart, and mind. In all things she was a reflection of his desires, his perverted thrills. She implanted adoration, jealousy, fawning love, even fiery lust into his psyche—for her. And then set in motion the events by which he would discover Derik in her chambers.

  Sabin shivered, caught between fury and loathing. The last eight years of wartime and self-flagellation, all of it due to a cunning hoax. Every moment of it had been spent loving her, riddled by guilt for what he had done.

  Khloii laughed, and, strangely, Sabin felt his own lips curve in a helpless, marionette’s response.

  “And now you’re back and still mine.”

  Fury won out.

  “Bitch!” He howled his rage in both their minds. With the adroitness of much practice, he launched himself at the nexus of Khloii’s consciousness. He burrowed to the pivot upon which her mind revolved, what Freud had called id in his simple ignorance. But it was more; it was the frame of her personality and the pillars of her mind. He plucked at the pin, as he had done time and again with Intelligentsia, strangers whom he had felt nothing for. The minds of soldiers had been military-hardened, sometimes rigorously trained. Khloii only hated him.

  Startled, she fought back. Khloii was strong and also privy to an aristocrat’s education. She wrestled for dominion, but the battle was uneven from the start. Unversed in Reaper tactics, she did not strike at the axis of his will, but instead rushed at the mettle of his personality and identity, dashing herself upon the inconsequential elements of his intellect.

  Sabin plucked away the pin and felt her will cave to his. Plunged out of his dreamscape and back into the flesh of reality, he reached up, through the haze of sleepy-patch still clinging to his consciousness, and yanked free the I/O cords locking him to her.