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She can’t move. Her limbs are bound by something supple, strong, and oddly, warm. She’s lying on her back, the surface below her soft but not yielding. It too carries a strange current of warmth, like she’s held and supported by something living.

It takes a moment of trying to open her eyes before she realizes they already are, wide and staring into darkness so complete, she wonders if she’s gone blind.

“Where on earth am I?” The words rasp from a dry mouth and aching throat. A flash of her dream returns—something thick and hard stretching her lips wide and pushing deep into her esophagus.

Was it only a thirsty dream?

She licks cracked lips. Thirsty indeed. “Hello?”

Her voice cracks. That’s embarrassing, assuming there is anyone here to listen. But someone must have brought her here, bound her here, left her in this lightless place.

The air here smells fresh, faintly sweet, almost heady. It’s not cold—it’s almost perfectly matched to her body temperature—but there’s no draft or movement across her exposed skin. None of that is much comfort, though.

The last hazy dregs of arousal drain away. Fear builds in its wake. Her heart hammers in her ears. She’s in the dark, bound hand and foot, with no idea where she is.

Before her dream of dark and endless pleasure, before the voice that thrilled and threatened her, she’d been at home, alone, with a filthy book and her favorite toy. The lights had all gone out, and then?—

She doesn’t believe in out-of-body experiences. The bright spotlight falling over her, how she floated up into it, limbs frozen and mind awake, the hum in the air—it’s all too much like something from that old show her mom has obsessed over for twenty years.The X-Files, or whatever.

That’s silly. Of course she hasn’t beenabducted by aliens.

Maybe that was all part of the dream. Maybe whoever kidnapped her drugged her first. That makes more sense. She would have screamed her head off and fought back, otherwise. But she couldn’t kick anyone in the balls if they shot her full of sedatives and hallucinogens.

More likely, it has to do with the fusion lab. They don’t have a working reactor yet, but they might someday, if Kat’s wildest theories on quantum energy fields prove correct. If she can get her dissertation through the committee. If she can get her faculty mentor on board. She’d pitched the most hinged part of it at office hours the other day, while he stared at her as if she were speaking another language.

Focus, Kaitlyn. Now’s not the time to engage in postgraduate angst. Her universal resonance theorem can wait until she gets out of this fix. Whatever it is.

Who knows? Maybe her unknown kidnappers will accept her untested equations in exchange for getting back to her boring little lab rat life. It’s probably the best chance for her ideas to see the light of day, if she’s honest with herself.

She opens her mouth, then pauses at a soft sound in the dark, a furtive footstep. The faintest breeze brushes her skin. Her heart thumps unevenly.

“Who’s there?” she calls, as loudly as her wrecked vocal cords will allow.

“You’re awake. Good.” The voice that answers her is deep, velvet, resonant, and impossibly familiar. It makes her belly flip, but a chill creeps upward from the base of her spine and settles at the back of her neck.

“Do I know you?”

“Not yet. All in good time, my dear.” A pause, as if thinking better of this. “I’ve waited for you for so long, you see. You must forgive my familiarity.”

“The hell I do,” she spits, struggling against the bonds to no avail. “What is this place? Who are you?What do you want from me?Show yourself!”

“Of course, you have a lot of questions.” A faint light flares in the darkness—no,twolights. Twin stars, glinting red, trained on her with a predator’s intensity. “We should talk, before?—”

Katshrieks.“I’m not going to talk to you until youlet me go,you FREAK!”

The two red lights in the distance switch off abruptly, leaving her in total darkness once more. When she lifts her head, something tugs at her hair and scalp—multiple points of contact with a sticky, tacky sensation that makes her shudder.Blood? Or worse?

“Please.” The voice sounds taken aback.

“What the fuck did youdoto me?”

“You must lie still. You’ll injure yourself.”

With that, real light creeps back in around the edges of her vision, a warm yellow glow that comes up slowly as if on a dimmer switch. Kat squints, eyes watering.

The light sources blooming in midair look for all the world likechandeliers.They hang from an unseen ceiling, but the space beyond the small circle of light remains lost in deep shadow. She’s lying on a table—an exam bed, maybe. The black, flexible restraints on her wrists and legs look like thick PVC tubing or rubber cords, but they reflect the soft lamplight with a faint oily sheen that seems to shift and flow when she doesn’t look at it directly.

There’s no sign of whoever had spoken. Maybe she scared him away. That deep voice was certainly ahim, whatever else he might prove to be.