This had been an important discovery, that Danny’s body still remained at least a little bit under his control or, at least, responsive to his feelings and thoughts. Since then, he had tried to think of other indirect ways that he could frustrate the Belgod and perhaps encourage him to lose interest in continuing to dwell inside him and overmaster him. But no ideas occurred to him, or if they did, a quick trial showed that Set was able to overwhelm his resistance.

My control remains in the most basic, least volitional parts of the brain, Danny told himself, and then tried to remember what it was that the limbic system controlled. It involved the formation of memory, but Danny hardly wanted to shut that down, since if he ever won back his freedom, he would have to deal with the consequences of whatever Set had made his body do; therefore it was essential that he know exactly where he would have to make amends.

It was, if Danny remembered right, the nucleus accumbens that controlled pleasure and sexual arousal in the brain. Was it possible that this was the only part of his own brain that responded to Danny’s will in any way?

He hadn’t actually controlled it, anyway; he had tricked his own pleasure center into thinking that its sexual arousal was being directed toward the females against whom every instinctive taboo protected him from mating with.

If Danny tried to do anything, Set seemed to notice the attempt at once, and blocked him; if they were alone, he’d make Danny’s lips say, “Tut tut tut, naughty North boy,” or “When will you learn, you poor ignorant gateslave?” or “None of your tricks, Loki.”

But Set seemed incapable of interfering with Danny’s private thoughts or plans, or even sensing them until Danny tried to put any of them into motion. And because Danny still had access to memory formation, especially kinetic memory, he was able to get his way now and then—through indirection and trickery, but it worked.

For instance, if he had tried to go to his cell phone and check his email and text messages, Set would have blocked him—and would have started making guesses and assumptions about Danny’s motives.

But if Danny lightly stirred up memories of emails—especially the seemingly endless solicitations from porn sites—Set often responded. Usually responded.

It meant that Set would spend way too much time searching through anatomically complete but soulless pictures of women behaving in ways that Danny had never found particularly alluring; but it also meant that Danny could at least notice the subject lines of emails as Set used his eyes to glance through them.