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Maybe I wanted to pretend we still had time to stop any of it.

In the end, full consciousness came with a full-body jerk. I don’t know if I felt something in those last few seconds that made me jerk like that.

I do know I hurt my arm.

Squinting up at the ceiling, I fought to see in a room lit only by a dim, blue-green glow around the baseboards. It occurred to me that our new “quarters” on the carrier were barely larger than the bathroom in our shared suite in New York.

That kind of thing didn’t bother me.

I wondered if it bothered Revik.

Given how he’d grown up, he’d always been significantly more poverty-conscious than I was, in ways that sometimes baffled me until I untangled their sources. He also suffered from pretty severe claustrophobia.

Sighing, I started to pull in my hand.

I think I meant to brush the hair out of my face.

My arm jerked, stopped.

I looked up.

Someone had cuffed my wrist to the wall.

I stared at it. More cautiously, I tested the restraint.

I tugged on the organic cuff. One end closed around an eyebolt programmed directly into the wall. When the loop of green metal didn’t alter on its own, I tried a few passwords.

When that didn’t work, I tried hacking the organism itself, using my light.

Something shocked me.

It actually…shockedmy light.

It didn’t hurt really, but it forced me out of that part of myaleimi.

I stared at the cuff, frowning.

My half-awake mind felt sure I must be mistaken.

The truth behind that was already pooling somewhere in the back of my mind. The bare facts of my situation raised conclusions I both doubted and began to winnow down in terms of what this was?what it had to be, given the extremely small number of people who could have done this to me.

I stared at the eyebolt again.

I looked at it harder with my sight, meaning myaleimicsight, my seer sight, not just my eyes.

Again, I got shocked.

Muttering to myself, I finally said, fuck this, and tried to use the telekinesis.

The shock was stronger that time.

I lay there, panting, staring up at the damned thing. It still hadn’t really hurt, but I hadn’t been able to work the telekinesis through that shock, either.

Two more things occurred to me.

One, I was completely naked.

Two, I was alone in our smallish compartment.