Page 147 of Tapeworld Induction

“Astrid became my everything. Our days spent harassing R&D at the office, pushing forward our simulation project, eventually turned into nights of lovemaking.” She grinned, relishing these memories, a flush in her cheeks.

“Mum! Please.” Disgust fought with pain inside him. Astrid was sick, seducing both his mum and him. He felt nauseous. But pain won out in the end. “I can understand why you left dad,” Isaak said, “but what about me? Why did you leave me?”

“Oh, Isaak… I couldn’t bear it.”

He wanted to get up and walk away, but the tape tendrils around his arms and legs kept him seated forcibly.

“Couldn’t bear what?” He could barely get the words out.

“To see you suffer at his hands. I knew how much it pained you. His meat-eating, his drinking, his cheating.”

“His cheating? You just admitted you were spending your nights with that bitch.” He tried to say more, to express all his anger at his mum for leaving him alone with his dad, who had proven incapable of raising him, but no further words came out of his mouth. Every sound was born dead in his throat.

Maria Powers shifted, hovering above the chair.

“Mum!” He struggled against the tendrils of tape, trying to escape their grasp.

She left a trail of floating dust as she rose into the dark sky. “This world was meant to be something so much more…” Her voice was like a out-of-tune piano, discordant, grating. “We wanted it to be a balm for the soul—”

As his mother uttered those words, the darkness folded around him until everything was pitch black.

Isaak screamed, hands tightened into fists, everything about him shaking. “What the fuck is going on?”

Talia materialised in a burst of light particles, still wrapped inside the glass pod. Her eyes were closed and she was unconscious, exhausted.

“Stop talking, Ike.” Astrid leaned in from behind him, making him jump. “We’re done, you and I.”

“Let my mother go—”

“Shhhh. Not another word!” Astrid ordered. “Maria is fine where she is.” She looked up to the sky, where his mum had vanished into thin air. “Truth is, she was so keen to forget you. Oh, how I tried to make her reconsider. ‘Please, no, think of your husband and son!’”

At the mention of his father, Isaak once again struggled, attempting to escape.

But the tape held him tight.

“She didn’t love you anymore,” Astrid said, then made a shocked face, her mouth in an O shape, as though she couldn’t believe what she’d said. “I was shocked too. Maria wrapped herself into her work, poor thing. And without a man to take care of her… Let’s just say I filled in the void.” She burst into laughter, and pressed her hand to her mouth, wagging her tongue between her index and middle fingers.

Isaak’s grunts of protest simply got her going even more.

“Oh, my poor baby…” She caressed his face, wiping his tear-stained cheeks, taking sick pleasure from his suffering.

Isaak moved away from her hand. He fought to contain his emotions.

“But I digress,” she said. “Maria is perfectly happy here with me. I suggest you worry about someone else…” She waved a hand at Talia.

“You bitch. Don’t you dare!”

Astrid walked closer to Talia’s cage, and then looked at Isaak, a devious grin plastered on her face. “What shall we do to her, Ike?”

“Stop!”

“She’s been resisting my mindwork. Not like that Nicholas, poor bastard. He turned into a sleptigrade in an instant. This one… She’s proving a little harder to break.” Astrid tapped her finger on the glass of the pod. “Shall I bring about her induction? By force?”

Astrid closed her hands into fists, and immediately Talia started moaning in pain, reflexively fighting off an unseen danger with her arms. Then, more pain. She screamed, eyes still shut.

The sight was too much for Isaak. But he was numb. He stopped grunting, giving up his attempts to escape, and simply stood there, unable to do anything but watch as Astrid tortured Dylan’s best friend.

Talia became further and further constricted by new bindings, black, oily ropes of tape that bit into her limbs, materialising from nothing.