She climbed into the cockpit and collapsed into the pilot's station. The viewports around her glowed with a dim green light, fading to gray. She'd left the cabin lights off; Phocoena was a submerged cave in the dying light, its recesses already hidden in shadow. By now she was almost fond of the blindness afforded her naked eyes.

So often now, darkness seemed the better choice.

Basement Wiring

First he blinded her, put stinging drops into her eyes that reduced the whole world to a vague gray abstraction. He wheeled her out of the cell down corridors and elevators whose presence she could only infer only through ambient acoustics and a sense of forward motion. Those were what she focused on: momentum, and sound, and the blurry photosensitivity that one might get by looking at the world through a thick sheet of waxed paper. She tried to ignore the smell of her own shit pooling beneath her on the gurney. She tried to ignore the pain, not so raw and electric now, but spread across her whole thorax like a great stinging bruise.

It was impossible, of course. But she tried.

Her vision was beginning to clear when the gurney rolled to a stop. She could see blurry shapes in the fog by the time the induction field cut back in and reduced her once more to a rag doll, unable even to struggle within restraint. The view sharpened in small increments as her tormentor installed her in some kind of rigid exoskeleton that would have posed her on all fours, if any part of her had been touching the ground. It was gimbaled; a gentle push from the side and the fuzzy outlines of the room rotated lazily past her eyes, as if she were affixed to a merry-go-round.

By the time she got her motor nerves back, she could see clearly again. She was in a dungeon. There was nothing medieval about it, no torches on the walls. Indirect light glowed from recessed grooves that ran along the edges of the ceiling. The loops and restraints hanging from the wall in front of her were made of memetic polymers. The blades and coils and alligator clips on the bench to her left were stainless gleaming alloy. The floor was a spotless mosaic of Escher tiles, cerulean fish segueing into jade waterfowl. Even the cleansers and stain removers on the cart by the door were, she had no doubt, filled with the latest synthetics. The only anachronistic touch was a pile of rough wooden poles leaning up against one corner of the room. Their tips had been hand-whittled to points.

There was a collar—a pillory, actually—around her neck. It blinded her to anything behind. Perhaps realizing this, Achilles Desjardins stepped accommodatingly into view at her left side, holding a handpad.