Psy & Changelings 05 - Hostage to Pleasure

but that she relived every night with clockwork precision.
    She was in a hole, hard-packed soil all around her.
    A grave, her mind whispered.
    Like before.
    No, she told herself, reaching for Silent calm. She was seventeen years old, had basically completed her progress through the Protocol and graduated with honors in her chosen specialty. The Council was planning to offer her a training position in one of its top labs. She was going to accept. She couldn’t be in a grave. There was wood above her—planks, they were planks.
    See, not a grave. But the air was growing heavy, dirty, harder to breathe.
    “Amara,” she said, asking for help, for an explanation.
    Only the rumble of earth and rock greeted her. Dust whispered through the planks. One of the pieces of wood fell in, crushing her leg. She didn’t notice, knowing only that her resting place had been covered with earth, that no one would hear her. She could’ve gone into the PsyNet, could’ve screamed for help that way.
    But she couldn’t. Because in that moment of understanding, of knowing that she’d been entombed again, something snapped inside of her. She lost her sense of humanity, of logic, and became a creature of pure primitive chaos. She screamed until her throat was raw, until her hands were bloodied and her cheeks wet with tears.
    She screamed until Amara decided to dig her up again.
     
Ashaya came awake with sudden, quiet alertness. It could be no other way. If she’d woken up screaming in the lab, it would’ve alerted others to her aberrant mental state. And Ashaya had no wish to end up in the Center, her personality erased, her mind reduced to the level of a blithering idiot’s.
    Conscious that sleep would elude her now, she got up and walked out of the bedroom, judging her dark red pajama bottoms and black T-shirt reasonable enough should Dorian prove to be awake. Her hand stilled on the doorknob as she considered whether or not she wanted to venture out and chance speaking to him.
    He would call it cowardice.
    She called it self-preservation.
    Because Dorian was creating giant chinks in her armor, making her question everything, even her decision to keep her distance from Keenan. Her hand tightened on the knob. He didn’t understand. Everything she’d done, every single act in the years since his conception, had been to ensure Keenan’s safety.
    Choking dirt in her throat, grit in her teeth.
    Shaking off the flashback, she opened the door. There was no one in the living area of the apartment—the safe house—but a wall sconce had been left burning. It gave her just enough illumination to make it to the kitchenette. Once there, she turned on the light using manual rather than voice activation and, since it was five a.m., began to prepare breakfast.
    Psy lived on nutrition bars and she found them perfectly acceptable—they provided everything a body needed to survive. However, she was also fully capable of making do. That thought in mind, she found milk and a sealed container of some kind of wheat cereal, as well as a banana.
    Food prepared, she stood at the counter and ate it in measured bites. Taste was nothing that could be bred out, but those of her race were conditioned to consider it a danger. To prefer one taste over another was a slippery slope, one that could easily lead to sensuality in other areas of life. Considering how precariously she was balanced on that slope, Ashaya ate with a deliberate lack of attention to the tastes.
    Amara was asleep now; Ashaya could feel it. It gave her a chance to fix the fissures in her shields that had allowed her twin to slip through and find her. She filled her mind with the patterns she knew best—the twining strands of DNA, the proteins glittering like gemstones on a twisted wire of bronze. White noise. A shield.
    Hiding from Amara.
    Protecting Amara.
    She finished the meal in five minutes, and only then realized that her injured leg hadn’t so much as twinged. Excellent. Cleaning up after herself took only another three minutes. Rather than go back into the bedroom, she walked to the large French doors that led out to a small balcony overlooking the bay—the glass was clear, the balcony railing formed of iron bars that sliced the view into rectangular pieces. She took a cross-legged position on the soft carpet, her back straight, her eyes on the dark swell of water in the distance.
    It was cool where she sat, as if the chill of the outside air had stained the warmth inside. She