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Tears burned and her chest got tight as though all the air in the room had been sucked out and there was nothing left to breathe. She gripped the edge of the table with both hands, prepared to hold on for dear life, eyes squeezed shut to keep out the sight of Brennus’ impatient expression.

  “Jarek.” Brennus stood, tucking his phone into a pocket, and tapped his foot while the bond-servant pried Arien’s white-knuckled hands off the table. Jarek pulled her to her feet, his own expression set with distant distaste at having to do this. Brennus held his bond, and so he had no choice except to obey the orders given. But he didn’t have to like it.

  Arien opened her eyes then, meeting Brennus’ irritated gaze. “Better you had never been born,” she whispered, and collapsed in Jarek’s arms.

  Brennus exhaled loudly through flared nostrils, gazing with cool hostility at the unconscious woman. “Take her down to the lab. It’s time to get started.”

  ***

  The disease was a strain of flu brought home from the hospital, and passed around the Doyle family from member to member with little more than slight fevers and aching joints. Arien’s immune system appeared to collapse under the onslaught, and in short order she was very ill and soon admitted to the fine hospital where her father worked. Anguished and remorseful for having exposed her to it, Dr. Doyle did everything he could to cure her. When conventional treatments didn’t work, he moved to experimental. In fear of losing his little girl, he injected her with a series of compounds that had yet to be authorized for human trials.

  Arien remembered this only as a series of strangely disjointed vignettes. She remembered burning hot, teeth chattering with cold, and the world reduced to taffy-stretched watercolors and far-off droning voices. When it became clear that she was losing the battle with the virus, her parents put her into stasis while the search for a cure continued. It was during this enforced sleep that she first gained full access to her own memories. These weren’t just faded snapshots; she learned to go back to any point in her life, from her first conscious memory when she was about eighteen months old, and actually relive it. She experienced again the first time she’d smelled a blossoming rose, her first solo ride on a bicycle. She spent hours cuddled with her father watching holovids of old cartoons, and played dress-up over and over again with Camryn. She learned to pick and choose her favorite memories, savored them as often as she liked, and basked in the never-ending love of her family. She danced in recitals, practiced playing her favorite piano pieces, read her favorite books again and again for the first time. She did not age, and did not change; grew only richer in her own experiences and her blissful gratitude for each shining moment.

  When she was finally awakened out of her deep abiding sleep, it was not by her doting father or loving mother. The cure for her immune disorder had come after years of trials, paid for by a strange byproduct of her mind’s capacity for joy. She awoke that day to meet for the first time her nephew, Camryn’s only son. Brennus Caul, sole heir to the wealth built from the research that had cured her, was handsome and charming. He was also thirty-five years old, her elder by twenty years due to her stasis, and her legal guardian.

  ***

  The chair was well padded and covered in soft fabric. It reclined slightly, and came with adjustable arm and headrests. The room was all white and completely sterile. Arien had many memories of this place, but she never relived them.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she said, speaking to the room. She couldn’t see anyone else, but knew that Brennus was listening. He habitually skulked on the other side of the tinted window where he could watch her without being seen. Straps held her securely to the chair, and an IV had already been placed in her arm.

  There was no response. The IV had begun its drip into her vein, feeding her the chemicals that would send her back to a much shallower version of full stasis. Arien could experience her memories at will; but to access them for his own purposes, Brennus had learned to sedate her. As she dropped into her own beautiful memories, a line implanted behind her ear and directly into the hippocampus and dentate gyrus collected an almost infinitesimal sample of neurons.

  “She’ll be out for a while,” Brennus said, going over the readings on the monitors before him. On the other side of the dark glass, his unconscious aunt dreamed her valuable dreams. “Keep an eye on her. Call me if there’s any change.”

  Jarek nodded without meeting Brennus’ cold eyes.

  ***

  “I know this is a lot to take in.” The man who had not been born when last she was awake sat beside her bed in the private ward where she recovered from stasis. “My mother talked about you all the time. I grew up with stories of “the old days” before the dome, and how close you two were.”

  “So you—you’re Camryn’s son?” Arien had been nonplussed to find she had slept through the deaths of her parents and sister, all decades after she had fallen ill. Since that time, almost everything had changed. The dome over Apex had been completed, and the caste separation had widened drastically. Pollution and crime were things that happened outside the city walls in low side. Inside the dome citizens continued to live in a kind of pretend utopia, untouched by the death and destruction outside.

  “I need your help, Arien,” Brennus said, leaning forward to take her hands in his own, projecting his own brand of sincerity in every word and expression. “One of the side effects of your illness and long sleep is the over-stimulation of part of your brain. Waking you has only strengthened that area. We have found that we can collect the excess neurons and synthesize them for use by other people. There have been many breakthroughs in regards to brain trauma, coma victims, and even some mental illness, all because of you. You can help thousands, my dear. Will you help me help them?”

  “I do want to help,” she said hesitantly. And that was true, but she was confused by his put-on earnestness and the glacial light in his eyes. He was the only family she had left, so she had to trust him. Didn’t she?

  “Can I have your word, Arien? I know you would never break a promise.”

  So she had given it to him, not understanding what that would mean. She had been innocent, even then. That, of course, would change.

  ***

  Arien awoke from her inner dreamscape, memories of flying kites on a windy day and splashing barefoot in the creek that ran through the park. Daddy was laughing, his blond hair ruffled in the breeze and shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. In the distance, Mama set out a picnic lunch on a red checked blanket, and Camryn wrote secrets into her diary.

  Beside her, Jarek removed the IV from her arm. The line behind her ear had already been pulled. Lights had been dimmed, and the glass wall was black and inscrutable.

  Enervated and listless, Arien looked at Jarek directly and without guile. He was a spare man with strong features and dark eyes, a line between his brows the only indication of his thoughts. “How did you end up bonded to him?”

  Her voice was soft and breathy, but it startled him. He paused for a moment, holding gentle pressure on her arm with a piece of cotton to stop any bleeding. “I made a mistake.”

  Arien nodded. “We all do.”

  “I was born in low side,” he said after a while when it was obvious she was waiting. “Orphaned young. Brought up in one of the gangs, learning to steal and squatting in the ruins to survive. Never had any hope for anything better. Didn’t know there was anything better.”

  She bent her arm when he gestured, holding the cotton in the crook where it pressed against the tiny hole in her skin. But she never looked away from him. She had seen him enough times now, that he was part of her memories.

  “Then one night, I got hold of the new drug going around. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone who could afford it was doing it. So I tried it.” Jarek looked at the small box beside the head of the chair. It held the tiny amount of neurons siphoned from Arien’s brain. The neurons that could not be created synthetically; could only be stretched, the basis for a chemical compound that wa
s worth more than its weight in gold.

  Arien thought back to other times, when this man had confined her to her room. When he’d ministered to her in this very lab. For a very long time he’d only been a shadowed figure in the background of her life. But something about him had changed. She couldn’t help but notice him now.

  “It was called Bliss. And it couldn’t have been more aptly named.” Jarek stood, tossing used tape and IV needles into the trash. He saw her sit up, swinging bare feet to the cold floor in the reflection of the glass wall. “One hit, and I was hooked. Happened that way with a lot of people, especially those in low side. I would have done anything to get more. And I did.”

  “My father should have let me die,” she said, standing so that she could see his face as well as her own in the reflection.

  Jarek shook his head. “No. You’ve done nothing wrong. And the drug has helped many people, when it was used the way it was intended.” Her face, beside his in the reflection, was small and perfect like it was in his Bliss-induced trips. She was a goddess, a fallen angel shivering in the cold lab with bruised arms and no one to protect her. “He’s made his fortune off of you. He charges whatever he wants for the extract as he calls it, and no one argues. No one knows where he gets it. No one can duplicate it. But everyone who has Blissed out would recognize your face. We have all dreamed your dreams.”

  She met his eyes when he finally turned to face her, wanting to see her as she really was and not as he remembered her from the dreams. In the cold white light she looked tired, dark smudges beneath her frost-grey eyes. She was too thin, and the sharp edges of collarbones and ribs were evident beneath her skin. Even with this, she appeared so young. By her date of birth, she was over sixty years old; because of the stasis, she had aged only thirty-five. But she looked like a girl in her early twenties, exhausted and reconciled to an uneasy fate.

  “I’m off the Bliss now,” he said, as though apologizing to her. “I’ve been off it for almost a year.”

  “That’s why,” she said, understanding. He had changed. He was no longer connected to her.

  He didn’t perceive her meaning, and said only, “I wish I could help you.” He was trained as a body guard, physically fit and prepared to use weapons or any of half a dozen kinds of martial arts. But he was helpless, confessing his guilt to her.

  Arien nodded. “Maybe you can,” she said.

  He did not hesitate. “How?”

  She looked down, at where her hands clasped tightly together, bloodless fingers taut with the beginning of hope. “Were you Bliss-addicted when you were bonded?”

  He nodded, dropping his gaze. He knew she would see the shame he held there.

  “Does my uncle know that you’re clean?”

  Jarek had to consider. He had never hidden his addiction from Brennus; there had been no need, as his employer considered it just one more way of ensuring Jarek’s loyalty. He had bought his supply from a dealer in low side, so as not to bring attention back to the mansion. Brennus Caul had no compunction against living well on the manufacture and distribution of an illegal substance, but certainly would never stand for the fine citizens of Apex finding out about it. “It’s not something we’ve ever discussed,” Jarek finally said.

  Arien stepped closer, waiting until the big man looked up to meet her eyes. “If you were bonded under the influence of Bliss, now that you’re free of it the bond will not hold.”

  He was frozen by her soft words. He had been bonded for fifteen years, and the constraints of habit had kept him from even testing the limits of his bond.

  “You said you wanted to help me,” she said, taking one more step, now close enough she could have reached out to touch him. “How far are you willing to go?”

  Jarek closed his eyes, and imagined assaulting Brennus Caul, crushing the cold-blooded leech’s throat beneath his own bare hands. The bond, made up of chemical links and nanotech implants, was fashioned to keep a bond-servant completely under control and unable to cause harm to the bond-holder. Before this moment, Jarek had been unable to even think of endangering his employer. The knowledge that his shackles were finally unlocked was like an epiphany. He stood straighter, feeling a weight of anger and resignation falling away from him. “What can I do?”

  ***

  Brennus went to fetch Arien the next morning. After unlocking the doors, he went inside and found the bed untouched, the shutters latched and windows closed. Jaw clenched, he called for Jarek but got no reply.

  “Jarek!” He used his phone, his computer link, and even the house system. According to the system, the bond-servant was nowhere on the grounds. A check of the surveillance recordings showed him escorting Arien to her room, locking her in, and then retiring to his own quarters. There was no indication of how he or Arien had left the house, or when. They both seemed to have vanished into thin air.

  In a fury, Brennus searched the house from top to bottom, starting in his own huge suite of rooms and working his way all the way down to the smallest out of the way broom closet in the laboratory complex beneath the foundations. He found no one, not his aunt or his bond-servant, nor any of the domestic staff.

  “Arien!” he screamed, racing back up to her room once more to search for any clues of her whereabouts. He could not lose her, she was too important. Nothing mattered, except bringing her back under his control. The sky grew dark, and low clouds sheathed the dome turning it into a convex crystal ball, but Brennus never stopped to look into it.

  ***

  “What is it?” Jarek asked the doctor, who was going over the readouts on the monitor attached to Brennus Caul’s head.

  The doctor shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s quite similar to Bliss overdose, but instead of calming and slowing his metabolism, this has put him into a heightened state of agitation. We can’t give him any more tranquilizers. If we can’t get his heart rate and brain activity to slow, we may have to put him into stasis.”

  “Of course, Doctor. If you think that is best,” Arien said. She stood beside her uncle’s bed, the picture of familial concern. Long sleeves hid the bruises on her arms.

  Jarek nodded his agreement, but said nothing. In his role as trusted bond-servant, he stood guard as he always had. His face was perfectly expressionless, and the tiny wound behind his ear nearly invisible. He hoped whatever hidden nightmare the man was caught in would last forever. It was a promise he and Arien had made to each other. She had extracted his neurons, and he carefully mixed them with hers. Jarek then administered the full dose to Mr. Caul while he slept. It should be enough to ensure the man would never hurt anyone again.

  As Brennus’ only heir, Arien would have access to the fortune that had been bought with her soul. The manufacture of Bliss would end, and she could finally live the life that had been for so long interrupted. She looked across the bed, meeting Jarek’s level gaze. She did not smile, not now. There would be time enough to smile once her uncle had been relegated to stasis. There, he could dream on in the everlasting nightmare he had built.

  As for Arien, she had new memories to make.

  Rose Blackthorn lives in the high mountain desert with her boyfriend and two dogs, Boo and Shadow. She spends her free time writing, reading, being crafty, and photographing the surrounding wilderness.

  She is a member of the HWA and her short fiction and poetry has appeared online and in print with a varied list of anthologies and magazines. Her first poetry collection Thorns, Hearts and Thistles was published in February 2015, and is available through Amazon.

  More information can be found at the following links:

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  DEAD MESSENGERS

  by

  LUCY
TAYLOR

  Raimundo took aim at the coyote, a barely discernable outline of gray-brown fur bellying through the scrub against the bleached blue of the horizon.

  He curled large, calloused hands around the Ruger, taking comfort in its heft and solidity. Cock the trigger. Line up the sights. Exhale slowly, like in that sweet space just before orgasm when he’d either let go then and there or hold back to pump out another hard round.

  Behind him, the porch door wheezed softly, as Esme tiptoed from the kitchen, bringing with her an exotic babble of scents: cilantro and red onions and chile. Her whisper, fervent as a prayer, was hot in his ear, “Kill it, Raimundo!”

  The coyote froze, sniffing the desert air as though for dark premonitions. Feeling the power of the woman’s intent. Tasting its own death, perhaps.

  Raimundo’s finger teased the trigger--gently, gently, now—the bullet ripping through the witchy limbs of a cholla, passing two feet above the animal’s head. Behind him, Esme uttered an oath, but as the cowboys sometimes opined in the old westerns Raimundo favored, he had ‘sent the varmint skedaddling.’

  “Papi, you missed him on purpose!”

  Raimundo holstered the gun. “Got that wrong, Esme. Aimed right for the eyes.”

  “Como estupida you think I am? That pinche coyote may have eaten my Popo.”

  “Too late to help the dog then.”

  Popo was Esme’s mutt terrier, a pound rescue, his shaggy, cocoa-colored curls beribboned, nails carefully frosted and trimmed. He’d run off two days before, when a UPS delivery man brought a package of spices and herbs from Esme’s beloved Tia Lupe and left the gate open, despite the signs in Spanish and English saying to please keep it shut. Esme had been inconsolable ever since, vowing terrible revenge on all UPS delivery people everywhere, sobbing bitterly “Without Popo, what will I do?”