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The guard grinned. "For fun," he said. "You're my prisoner now, Little Dagger. And we're going to have a great deal of fun for as long as you can take it."

Her body was under her command again, and Jekri stood at her full petite height. She caught his gaze and held it. She did not say a word.

It was the guard who finally looked away, muttering. As he stalked off, Jekri realized that she had probably made a mistake. As he had said, he had used the lowest setting. Next time, she would be treated to something stronger. Jekri knew people, and she did not doubt that this was just the beginning of the barbaric games the guard planned to play with her.

She sat down and picked at the food, and actually laughed out loud. It would be just as simple to program something nourishing and tasty as what was set before her, yet someone had gone to a lot of effort to specify partially rotting meat, dry, stale bread, and raw, old vegetables.

Idly, Jekri picked up a slice of some sort of root and threw it at the forcefield. Her eyes widened when the small tidbit was vaporized almost instantly. Of course,

something larger, say the former head of the Tal Shiar, would not be so destroyed, but she would be incapacitated and perhaps injured. They had put the highest level forcefield on her door. Interesting. And good to know.

'That was ill done," came the disembodied voice.

"I like my vegetables cooked," Jekri snarled, searching for the source of the sound. She finally found it, hidden in a natural crevice of stone. She had just inserted a finger, thinking to retrieve the device and examine it, when a noise at the door made her turn.

Despite herself, she swallowed hard. Three doctors stood impassively outside her cell, and they had almost certainly not come to heal her.

One, a female, seemed to be in charge. With a graceful movement she tapped the controls and the forcefield was lowered. "Prisoner 8754, accompany us."

8754. At least the guard had named her. But she was in the "system" now, and that was no place for names, for identities, for individuals with emotions and families and talents and skills. She thought at first to fight, but she had only her hands, and there was no doubt hi her mind that the doctors had hypos at the ready to render her docile.

She stepped forward, head held high. This was it. They would begin the torture session now, and everything she knew would be revealed. Then they would throw her back in this awful place and there would be no more transported food, only the stench from the elimination hole and her own body as it decayed.

/ am a Romulan. I have lived like one, and now I die like one.

Bonds were snapped onto her hands at once. "Energize," the female doctor said.

They rematerialized in a room as far away from

Jekri's cell as could be imagined. Everything was bright and clean here, sharply so. Sterile. Metal gleamed, glass shone from instruments and containers with which Jekri was almost completely unfamiliar. It promised torture, but Jekri tasted relief. It was not the sort of mental torture session she had feared. That would have broken her. This, she could withstand.

Two of the doctors left. As Jekri watched them go, the remaining doctor, the female, said with a hint of amusement, "They have gone to watch the session, 8754. There are guards outside the door. Do not think of attempting to escape."

Jekri did not grace the woman with a reply. With as much interest as she might show toward a lab animal, the female doctor ordered Jekri to strip and step into a sonic shower. Jekri complied without argument. She had little interest in her body, save when she could use it physically for defense or sexually as a tool, and shed her filthy clothes without a qualm. The sonic shower felt good. They might be preparing her for agony, but they had given her a brief moment of feeling like a sentient being again.

"Lie on the table." Naked, Jekri clambered up. At once heavy metal