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Manik appears in my field of vision. “I did tell you not to go past the red lines, didn’t I? I’m sure I mentioned that.”
“NO! You didn’t say the red lines,” I manage to chatter out between clenched teeth.
“Oh. Well,” he says. “Now you know.”
The asshole let me find my limits by myself. I don’t even know what the fuck he’s talking about, red lines.
“What red lines?”
“Use your eyes,” he says.
I look around, and for the first time in this techno-hellscape, I notice that there are very thin red wires running the perimeter of the room. They’re easy to miss, even when you know what they’re for.
“Yes,” he says. “There they are. Things that matter, things you need to start noticing if you are going to survive out here.”
I look back up at him, wanting to curse and scream, but I can still feel the ache from whatever great bolt caught me when I crossed the line, not to mention the spanking he gave me, that absolutely ruthless punishment that would have been more than enough on its own.
“You’re cruel.”
“This is for your own good. You have bad judgement. It is clouded by emotion and ego, and it is useless to you. Not to mention dangerous to us both. You need to learn to survive, and that means learning to pay attention.”
He’s lecturing me as if he has some right to, as if he’s in charge of me and disappointed in me. He’s crazy. We barely know each other, and he took me captive from the fucking outset. Now he is subjecting me to a device that tortures me if I disobey him and he has the absolute fucking nerve to act as though he is doing it for me.
“Such a stormy little face,” he says. “You will thank me for this one day.”
I stay silent, feeling true loathing.
“I hate you.”
Maybe I didn’t stay silent after all. Maybe that slipped out, another dangerous and ill-advised impetuous act. I brace myself for what comes next.
Manik
She’s adorable. I find it intensely amusing the way she lets her impulses get the better of her and then immediately regrets it. Even now, she has gone several shades paler because she knows what she said was stupid and possibly incendiary.
“You can hate me all you like,” I tell her. “I didn’t take you because you loved me. I have taken you because I want you. I know your emotions rule your little life, but they will not rule mine. Hate me. Love me. It makes no difference. You belong to me.”
The color returns, as does her temper.
“You don’t own me!”
“Of course I do. In every meaningful sense. You don’t own yourself. You’ve attempted to throw your life away many times and in many ways. I seem to be the only one remotely interested in preserving it.”
“I’m trying to escape you.”
“Which is ironic, given you came here to capture me.”
That deflates her. The truth of this sorry matter is that Lyssa, for all her human softness, is the villain of this piece. She came to capture and became captured herself, and now she has the nerve to be upset and offended, though she was perfectly happy to deliver me into a much harsher captivity.
“Is it difficult for you…”
“Is what difficult,” she snaps, interrupting me. Pain makes her very ill-tempered.
“To have close to no self-awareness?”
“Fuck you.”
I have to admit to myself that I am very much enjoying this conversation. Physically hurting her is too easy and frankly, dangerous. The reason I let her test the boundaries of her confinement was not just to teach her a lesson. It was also to ensure that the collar was calibrated correctly. I had to tune it very finely until it almost had no effect on me at all. It seems to be working well on her.
Even though I have thrashed her and put a device of torment on her, she is not too afraid of me to speak to me rudely. So, either she trusts me, or she is so incredibly reckless that she has no way to stop herself in spite of her fear. An interesting point of difference I am yet to tease out.
Lyssa is a source of ongoing intrigue and entertainment I very much need in this cold wasteland. I was in real danger of going mad from solitude before she arrived. Now I am never bored. I must constantly moderate her behavior and her attitude. With this human in my possession, I will be able to withstand many more years of being outcast. She will entertain me every day with her randomly generated bullshit drawn from the depths of her woefully unexamined psyche.
