The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [23]
“Blood.”
Something begins to drip from the box, sizzling where it touches a wired junction on the circuit, which suddenly flares with silver light. I try to look away but it sucks my eyes in, like a bubble of boiling mercury that expands to fill the entire world. Then it’s like my blind spot is expanding, creeping up on the back of my head.
“Symbolic link established.”
There’s an incredibly strong stink of violets, and a horde of ants crawl the length of my spine before holing up in the pit of my stomach to build a nest.
★★Hello, Bob.★★ The voice caresses my ears like the velvet fuzz on a week-dead aubergine, sultry and somehow rotten to the core. It’s Ramona’s voice. My stomach heaves. I can’t see anything but the swirling pit of light, and the violets are decaying into something unspeakable. ★★Can you hear me?★★
★★I hear you.★★ I bite my tongue, tasting the sound of steel guitars. Synesthesia, I note distantly. I’ve read about this sort of thing: if the situation wasn’t so dangerous it would be fascinating. Meanwhile my right arm is straining against the duct tape without me willing it to move. I try to make it stop and it won’t. ★★Leave my arm alone, damn you!★★
★★I’m already damned,★★ she says flippantly, but the muscles in my arm stop twitching and jumping.
Then I realize I haven’t been moving my lips, and more importantly, Ramona hasn’t been speaking aloud. ★★How do we control this?★★ I ask.
★★The will becomes the act: if you want me to hear, I hear you.★★
★★Oh.★★ The light show is beginning to slow down, with reality bleeding back in through the edges, and my head feels like someone’s rammed a railroad spike through my skull right behind my left eye. ★★I feel sick.★★
★★Don’t do that, Bob!★★ She sounds—feels?—disturbed.
★★Okay.★★ Try not to think of invisible pink elephants, I think grimly, my skin crawling as the implications set in. I’ve just been rendered uncontrollably telepathic with a woman—or something woman-shaped—from the Black Chamber, and I’m such a dork my first reaction wasn’t to run like fuck. Why’d Angleton do a thing like that? Hey, isn’t this asking for a really gigantic security breach—at least, if both of us survive the experience? How am I going to keep Ramona out of my head—?
★★Hey, stop blaming me!★★ Somehow I can tell she’s irritated by my line of thought. ★★My head hurts, too.★★
★★So why didn’t you run away?★★ I let slip before I manage to clamp a lid down on the thought.
★★They didn’t give me the option.★★ A metallic, bitter taste fills my mouth. ★★I’m not entirely human. Constitutional rights don’t apply to non-humans. All I can say is, those bastards better hope I never get loose from this geas . . . ★★ I feel like spitting, then I realize the glands full of warmth at the back of her throat aren’t salivary ducts.
“Bob.”
I blink in confusion. It’s Brains. He looms over me, out of his grounded pentacle. “Can you hear me?”
“Yuh, yeah.” I try to swallow, feeling the sensation of venom sacs throbbing urgently inside my cheeks begin to fade. I shudder. There’s a trailing wisp of wistfulness from Ramona, and a malicious giggle: she doesn’t have fangs, she just has a really good somatic imagination. ★★Let me get my head together,★★ I tell her, and then try to do the invisible pink elephant thing in her general direction.
“How do you feel?” asks Brains. He sounds curious.
“How the fuck do you think you’d feel?” I snarl. “Jesus fuck, give me ibuprofen or give me a straight razor. My head is killing me.” Then I realize something else. “And cut me loose from here. Someone’s got to go next door and release Ramona, and I don’t think any of you guys want to get within spitting range of her without a chair, a whip, and a can of pepper spray.”
I remember the shape of her anger at her employers and shiver again. Working with Ramona is going to be like riding sidesaddle on a black mamba. And that’s before I get to tell Mo, “Honey, they partnered me with