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But what skeeved me out even more was that she let him do it. Jana was not free to tell him to shove it and go try her luck elsewhere. Which made no sense to me at all. A woman like her, with everything going for her.
It scared me to death. Since I wasn’t free, either. Not with my Reggie under his thumb.
That was the guy’s MO. To pin people down with whatever their unique weakness was, and then break them. Slowly. At his leisure. He’d done it to my mom. She’d fought back, run away, saved me, and I would always be grateful for that.
But the darkness had overcome her in the end.
Resisting Halliwell wasn’t an option, evidently. At least, not for Jana or any of the other people working here, whom I had learned were my half-brothers and sisters. My Halliwell hell-siblings. That was how I thought of them. Poor, wrecked bastards.
The hell-siblings had been a real jolt. Whoever would have dreamed that creepy guy could manage to persuade that many women to have sex with him? It must be all of his billions. Brrr.
The base-jumping party had made me intensely anxious. I was not a fan of extreme sports to start with, and the whole thing seemed like a gratuitous mind-fuck. Halliwell enjoyed pressuring his business rivals into doing dangerous things. Base-jumping was basically sky-diving on steroids, this cliff being only five-hundred feet high. There were just a handful of counted seconds for the parachute to open. No margin for error. No second chances.
The air currents could mostly be counted on to waft base-jumpers safely to the sandy beach to the south, but an unlucky jumper could easily land on the jagged rocks slightly to the north, or in the heaving ocean itself. Halliwell feared nothing, even death, but I’d been glad no one had gotten killed yesterday. Things were weird enough around here as it was. Watching someone fall to their death would not have helped my mood.
I rubbed my eyes, which stung and itched unpleasantly. I didn’t sleep very well here to begin with, much less when I organized nighttime visits to the mysterious prisoner in the Level Eight dungeon. I had poked around for more information about him, and I now knew that his name was Shane Masters, and that he had been declared missing for over a year by his siblings, Ethan and Freya Masters.
Of course, I was not supposed to know any of this.
After Shane Masters had kicked me out last night, he had proceeded to haunt my dreams. What few dreams I still had time for, in my admittedly short night.
I’d only learned about his existence because one day Haley, another hell-sister, happened to be watching a video of him taking a shower. Probably a compilation video, involving many recorded showers. Six of my hell-sisters and two of my hell-brothers had been crowded around her computer, avidly watching him soap up, rinse off, towel dry. I’d peeked over their shoulder to see what held their attention, and bam, I was hooked. He was so big, so strong. Every muscle defined, gleaming with water. That ass. That face. Grimly, intensely beautiful. Those eyes.
In spite of the hideous electronic shock collar fitted around his neck.
The size of his dick also made them giggle and coo, the silly cat bitches. It seemed sick and dirty, to lust over a man who was locked in a cage.
But I could hardly criticize. I’d fixated on him, too, so how was I any better?
I’d been asking myself that question ever since. And needing to know more like I needed to eat, to breathe. Particularly when they told me that he was the key to that fucking algorithm that Halliwell was so obsessed with. I was getting a clue that working for Halliwell made me complicit in something that was more than just wildly illegal. It was flat-out evil. That miserable guy, locked in a cage. That collar. There was nothing he could have done to deserve that kind of treatment. It was perverse. Wrong.
But in spite of all the abuse, he seemed unbroken. He performed his meditations and his exercise routines with fierce concentration, and somehow, he had resisted all of Halliwell’s efforts to interrogate him. I’d unearthed videos of those interrogations, and they chilled my blood. Haley had a vast collection of prisoner-vids. Watching him do his martial arts forms was like watching an incredible dancer, but more lethal.
I was hooked on those visits now. He totally rattled me in person, but even if I weren’t rattled by Shane Masters, it was so hard to think a straight thought around here.
I was constantly watched. Not in the shower, like Masters, I hoped, but every word I said was archived, every keystroke logged, every drink I chose from the cafeteria or the beverage machine recorded. My excessive coffee use had been remarked on by the doctor in residence. My insufficient calorie intake as well. Even my menstrual cycle was on their radar. It would have creeped me out completely if I hadn’t had much bigger things to worry about. Like Reggie, sick and alone in that clinic.
The suffocating surveillance in this place was what spurred me to write Invisibility Cloak. I’d needed to create a moving pocket of privacy around myself, or my head would explode. I’d coded Invisibility Cloak directly into a phone that I’d sneaked in when I first came here, one of several that I had cleverly secreted in a false bottom in one of my suitcases. I’d created it under the covers, in bed, in complete darkness, to avoid being seen by the cameras mounted in my apartment.
It had been running in their system for a few weeks now, and so far it had not been detected. It was working beautifully. After having sneaked myself a clone of Halliwell’s passkey, I’d been moving through the place freely at night. So far.
They would ding me eventually, but I’d push it to the absolute limit until then.
I grimly attempted to concentrate on Glow-worm, my almost-finished malware, and stop thinking about the man I’d visited last night. Up until a couple of weeks ago, his hair had been a thick, snarled mane that hung past his shoulders, and his beard was past his collar bone. But Halliwell had grown sick of the desert-island-castaway look, so they’d switched out the poison gas canister for one loaded with a powerful sedative. They fogged the cell, knocked him out, and sent in a gas-masked team to barber the guy while he was unconscious. All for the sake of Halliwell’s esthetic sensibilities.
Haley had a video of the barbering episode, too. I bet she would have come up with a way to tie the poor guy down and fuck him but for the camera surveillance.
Masters was even more starkly beautiful with the excess hair trimmed away. He’d been gorgeous before, but now I could see every detail. His beard was growing out, but every stunning feature was still on display. The chiseled jaw, the cheekbones. The grooves around his flat mouth. That look of grim, sullen endurance in his dark eyes. Brackets in his cheek that could actually be dimples, if he ever had reason to smile.
I’d never seen him smile, but I’d dreamed it. Wild, wishful fantasies.
Just look at me, crushing out on the one person here who was worse off than me, with the possible exception of Jana. But Masters gave me a buzz that was something different than the nervous static of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, anger. I craved it. I’d so much rather think about Masters and clench my toes and shiver in lustful fascination than focus on how messed up this place was.
And ponder the actual depth of the shit I was in.
The overwhelming security layered around Masters suggested that Halliwell was wary of him. That suggested power, danger. If this man were powerless, Halliwell would have flushed him and forgotten him. But he hadn’t. He kept trying to grind Masters down. Show him who was boss.
Masters’ stubborn ‘fuck-you-bitches’ attitude made me want to cheer.
