Then even the sound faded to black.

Zoe awakened in an old industrial storage room, which became her cell. First, there was no food and plenty of cold. Then plenty of warm food and blankets. Days of deprivation alternated with comfort, desperation followed hope, her moods and fortune rotating with the interrogators. She told them all she knew but they still thought she knew about the painting. That’s when they vandalized her mind. The drugs turned time into a crazy taffy dream of half-lit, half-sentient, half-remembered unreality.

Zoe’s brow furrowed as she struggled to recover the days they had stolen, but they remained tantalizingly out of reach. She felt the misty emotional gravity of the memories pulling at her, but in her mind’s eye the scenes remained unfocused.

“Damn.” She muttered under her breath. Nothing came into focus until the vague first memories of Thalia’s voice telling them that she could use experienced help organizing, cataloging, assessing the art they had taken from Willi Max’s estate.

“Give her a chance.” Thalia’s low, soothing voice sounded in that gray dimness of first awakening. “Look—if she doesn’t work out, you can still ship her off to Riga in an oil drum. But for right now, her hands and her head are more use to me still attached to her torso.”

Dear Thalia.

Alone now in her improvised silence, Zoe rocked on the bed as she worked again at the lost memories.

But she got Seth’s face instead. Already her mind’s portrait of him had started to fade like a photo left in the sun. The months had washed away his details. She had cried about it the first time she realized his image was fading from her memory. But then an odd thing happened. As quickly as the image of Seth’s face faded, her vision of his eyes grew more vivid. Now she could see in his eyes the tiniest threads of color and structure, but only the vaguest outlines of his face. It was as if an artist had sketched out a face on the canvas but had painted only the eyes.

The eyes were enough, though. As she sat there thinking about him, she realized they had always been enough, for they truly mirrored the man behind them. She had learned to watch Seth’s eyes as others watch the sky to predict the weather. His eyes had as many moods as the sky. They were deep blue when he was lost in thought, gray when he had worked himself to the dropping point, turquoise when he was sad or melancholy, and a deep, almost pure green after they made love.

The memories came flooding back now, carrying with them a sense of loss that very nearly equaled the pain of the past months. She tried to remember his voice or the feel of his hands against her breasts, but he had disappeared, all but his eyes. She fought against the tears swelling in her own eyes. She wanted him so.