"Yeah, well it's not just a word to all you fishheads."

"Sorry." Clarke says again. A distance seems to open between them, although neither has moved.

"Anyway," she says after a while, "I just wanted you to know I won't be inside for a while. We can still talk, of course, but—"

Movement from the hatchway. A large stocky man steps into the compartment, dark hair combed back, eyebrows knotted together, his whole body a telegraph of leashed hostility. Kelly's father.

"Ms. Clarke," he says evenly.

Her guts tighten into a hard, angry knot. She knows that look. She knows that stance, she saw it herself more times than she could count when she was Kelly's age. She knows what fathers do, she knows what hers did, but she's not a little girl any more and Kelly's dad looks very much in need of a lesson...

But she has to keep reminding herself. None of it happened.

Portrait of the Sadist as an Adolescent

Achilles Desjardins learned to spoof the skeeters eventually, of course. Even as a child he knew the score. In a world kept under constant surveillance for its own protection there were only watched and watchers, and he knew which side of the lens he wanted to be on. Beating off was not the kind of thing he could do in front of an audience.

It was barely even the kind of thing he could do in private, for that matter. He had, after all, been raised with certain religious beliefs; clinging to the coattails of the Nouveaux Séparatistes, the Catholic miasma had persisted in Quebec long after it had faded into kitschy irrelevance everywhere else. Those beliefs haunted Achilles every night as he milked himself, as the sick hateful images flickered through his mind and hardened his penis. It barely mattered that the skeeters were offline, wobbling drunkenly under the influence of the magnetic mobiles he'd hung over his bed and desk and drawers. It barely mattered that he was already going to hell, even if he never touched himself again for the rest of his life—for hadn't Jesus said if you do these things even in your heart, then you have committed them in eyes of God? Achilles was already damned by his own unbidden thoughts. What more could he lose by acting on them?