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Doomsday protocols.
Skyhall nuclear launch codes.
Relevant faces and words speed in the air in front of me. It is a linear assault meant to bypass my brain’s security conditioning. The words are an attempt to stimulate the visual word-form area; the faces, to stimulate the fusiform face area. This causes neuro
n activity in the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes, which Octavia’s Pandemonium Chair then converts to visual and auditory replications.
I am no easy victim.
As part of the conditioning designed by Daxo’s psychotechs, every night I digested false memories, which I signified by populating the scenes with private totems—Spanish Renaissance paintings, off-colored birds, certain songs or low-frequency hums, the smell of a gauche perfume—so that I can distinguish the false from the real. The information they are gathering is a soup of false positives, incorrect data, passwords that trigger auto-destruct and locking mechanisms, and general incoherence that would take a thousand psychotechs ten years to sort. Fortunately there are not a thousand psychotechs in existence. And those my enemies use are no match for me.
At times they try to use my own technology against me; they embed small silver psychoSpikes in my forehead in an attempt to force-hack their way through. This is much more painful.
Time dilates, distends, slows, stops, disappears.
I may be in Publius’s clutches, but it is Lilath who did this.
Lilath went after my child.
Lilath butchered Daxo.
Lilath toyed with me.
The Lion of Mars was shot down over Hyperion ten years ago to stop her from fulfilling my brother’s last wish: for Luna to burn. But somehow, some way, she survived. I don’t understand. Lilath isn’t clever enough to do all this. She is a killer, not an architect. Did Atalantia plan it? Atlas?
When I am not in the chair, my senses are robbed from me by the psychoSpike. I cannot tell where I am imprisoned. If I even ever leave the chair.
I float in nothingness. No sight. No smell. No taste. No hearing. I am only consciousness in a void. It is my fear of what the afterlife truly holds for us.
In that void, I float alone with my private fears. What my husband will do when he discovers my fate. What devious designs my enemies have for my child. What evil has befallen Sevro and our Republic.
The despair is total and unyielding.
I continue to exist, only because with existence there is still hope.
Though it feels so very far away. Daxo is dead.
Twice they try to link psychotechs directly to my brain as I did with the Duke of Hands. My security packet activates. I unleash neurological attacks. The first man dies of a seizure. The second blocks that attack but suffers a headache and then kills himself the next day because of the insidious memories of trauma I planted in his head.
What does Lilath want? To rule behind Publius? To avenge my dead brother? To atomize Luna and fulfill his dying wish after all these years?
Whatever she wants, I cannot open my mind to her.
In time they will break through, and my self-destruct protocol will go into effect, leading to a medulla cataclysm that will deactivate my breathing and turn off my heart.
It is only a matter of time.
Then one day, I appear out of the void in the center of an empty Moonhall court.
I am delighted, but do not know why.
I sit in the accursed chair dead center before a plinth upon which Adjudicators once heard cases from behind an emblem of the Society. The emblem is gone. Instead of the Adjudicator’s single chair, there are now seven. A rotating moon hangs over my head. Wardens comprise my only company.
I smile, realizing I am physically unbound, yet I cannot move more than my head. The psychoSpike has disabled the nerve reflexes of my body beneath my sixth vertebra. Quadriplegic then. How amusing and clever of Lilath. I never thought to use the spike quite like this.
A sudden feeling of amazement fills me.
Let’s analyze.
