Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder) (30 page)

He shivered when she said the
phrase, but he had to stall. “Six minutes doesn’t give enough time for you to
participate. I’d want to remember the joy on your face.”

“So sweet! Mother was right about
you. In all the times I’ve done this, you’re the first one to consider me.
Don’t worry; as an empath, I can fully participate in your experience.
This
recording is for you. We can discuss variations later. Every time I want to
reward you and can’t be there in person, you just have to see my picture and
hear my voice saying those words.” She slid his pants off. “You’ll do
anything
for me.”

“Please, not like this!” he whimpered.
“You haven’t hurt anyone. They’ll be lenient.”

“Shh,” she put a finger on his navel
and he felt the exquisite tingling. “The recording is going to happen; even I
can’t stop it now. All I can do is let you choose what you want me to do to
you. If you refuse to bond with me, I’ll call a few of my boyfriends and
they’ll break every bone in your body. You’ll remember that sensation every
time I want to punish you. Most people end up in Ward Seven after the first day
of pain treatment. The effect is the same. You will obey me. It’s just a matter
of whether you get a fantasy or a nightmare.”

Kaguya put her arms over her head
and slid out of her top, revealing the shining glory of her body. “Choose.”

Concentrating on her face, he said,
“You’re going to need to get a damp towel for what I have in mind.”

She smiled knowingly, rose, and
walked to get a towel from the shower area. When she turned back around, Zeiss
had limped away.

****

Red waved to Sojiro as she bounced
into the cafeteria. “I just have to tell Z something. Control said he was
here.”

The artist dropped his pad as he
leapt up. His windbreaker filled like a sail as he intercepted her. “Wait! He
just got over your last meeting.”

She opened the kitchen door and
asked, “Where is he?”

“He didn’t go past me.”

Shifting into combat mode, the girl
tapped her goggles. “Taggart, where does Z’s monitor say he is?”

“It’s quiet. He’s sleeping.”

“No, he’s not,” she said, her voice
cracking. “Where’s the badge?”

“No reading. We’ll power cycle.
It’s probably just a glitch. Sometimes if it’s in one place too long, tracking
will freeze up.”

“Find him!” Red ordered Sojiro.

The Japanese man defocused,
visualizing connections her eyes couldn’t see. “The cameras are being upgraded
along half the main loop. I’ve got nothing on the whole forward section of the
island. He walked out the back door like a zombie and off my scopes. I only know
he
didn’t
go in the women’s dorm, or airport.”

“And he can hide from me. How are
we going to find him?” Red extended her special senses on the off chance his
concentration was disrupted by pain. “Holy Cow!” She ran out the door of the
cafeteria with Sojiro following close behind. Calling Trina, Red stammered, “We
have page flare! It’s got to be Z. Help me find him.”

“Slow down,” Trina said, closing
her eyes. “Daniel and I can triangulate. It’s not a bright light like normal.
We feel almost a heat . . . coming from the faculty meta. I’ll get a medical
team and meet you.”

The faculty meta-pod was directly
opposite the cafeteria on the circle. Red raced across the campus, around the
pool, slamming the door open to the main building. The artist passed her by as
they shot past the dojo on the newly waxed tiles. Her sneakers squeaked but Sojioro
kept her upright and dragged her with him to the exit. Hurdling the bushes and
the steps, they reached the faculty meta-pod. She opened her special senses and
felt the blaze originating from the underground gym area. Then something cut
off the flare.

****

Zeiss glimpsed some sort of
medicine patch on his shoulder, but his arms refused to work from Kaguya’s numbing
touch. He would’ve scraped the patch off onto the cement column, but his back
muscles didn’t want to obey him either. A treadmill under repair had been
turned on its side and he practically fell behind it to hide.

His heart raced like a locomotive
out of control as Kaguya clicked her phone into the central music system of the
gym. Zeiss wrestled with his own breathing to force it into silence. He tried
to meditate and let her mental probes pass him by.

“Let the recording begin,” she
announced. The music pounded from the very walls, impossible to ignore. When
the singer’s voice said the magic words, his body responded like Pavlov’s dog.
Her aura filled the room and threatened to subsume him.

Zeiss had to hide from Kaguya and
not bond. He searched for some other presence other than her arc light. The
walls in his niche were shielded and prevented him from reaching backward with
his new senses. Therefore, he reached down to the other collective pod—the whales.
They were huge and alien, but he could feel their warmth and welcome. They were
a family and would help him hide from the rampaging goddess. The deep was
strange but good.

The second time the song chanted
the phrase, he gasped involuntarily. That was enough of a clue for her to track
him to his niche. When he felt the hands on his ankles he tried to escape
again, but tripped over the treadmill, landing on his back. His feet were
tingling and unresponsive.

Kaguya wore nothing now but her
underwear as she sat on his chest to pin him. First she stroked his eyes so he
couldn’t blink! Facing his feet, she teased every nerve ending from his toes to
his midsection, like a slow-burning fuse. Knowing where this was going, he
faced away from her, looking for anything to focus on to avoid her body.
Turning his face to the wall, he was presented with a mirror and a full-body
view of his attacker.

Flipping his head to the other
side, he saw her rabbit tattoo. He reached for the whale community, as the
refrain repeated. The fires of pleasure burned the image of the rabbit into his
retinas.

She chuckled. “That was close, but
you held back. You want to pet the bunny?” Her softness was agonizing to
resist. “Once you physically enter the gates of my heaven, you’ll never want to
leave.”

“Help!” he screamed and then
gurgled as Kaguya paralyzed his vocal cords.

Suddenly, Sojiro kicked the front
door open, and Mira ran inside.

Lying on top of Zeiss, Kaguya said
in a husky voice, “This is private—adults only, little girl.”

Mira froze, shocked by the scene
before her. Almost nauseated, she was about to depart when he mouthed the
letters, “OOB.”

“You’re right,” Mira said, narrowing
her eyes at the nearly naked Kaguya and reaching out with her discriminatory page
sense. “You’re right, she’s an unregistered Oobie. Horvath’s on the way.” She
circled to block the door as Mori tried to flee.

When the final verse started, Zeiss
panicked, eyes locked on Mira’s face. His emotions swirled with need,
distracting the girl. Kaguya connected with Mira’s right arm, causing it to go
numb and unresponsive. Red spun away from the next blow. The taller woman
smiled wolfishly as they danced in a circle. “You’ve been asking for this for
years, bit—”

Sojiro fired his Taser from
outside, stunning the Japanese woman. Then he pounced on her with cuffs from
the other pocket of his jacket.

Mira ran over to Zeiss’s side. He
mouthed the word “closer”, as if to whisper something in the young woman’s ear.
As her body pressed against his, he breathed in her scent of cherry and sweat,
and scanned her face as if etching it into steel. When she opened her mouth to
ask if he’d been tortured, he took it and held his lips against hers until the
next refrain.

They both tasted candy canes at
Christmas.

His breath came in rapid, short
bursts. He pulled back to admire her eyes one last time and yielded to the
tsunami. The wash of echoed pleasure left her stupefied as he slumped
unconscious.

Mira fell asleep by Zeiss’s hospital bed. Daniel woke her by
rubbing her back. The young woman snapped awake. “I just drooled on his pillow.
I guess it’s a day for gross things.”

“Are you ready to talk about it
yet?” her uncle asked.

“No. Where’s the thieving whore?”

“In the brig, dressed in the neoprene
and psi-shield suit they made for me to travel in. We had to gag her because
one of the guards opened the door when she asked. She targeted Quantum
Computing candidates because they could see her while she was spying Out of
Body and blow the whistle.”

“That explains our run of bad
luck.”

Daniel whispered, “Nobody else
knows we’ve caught her, especially not her father. Her phone had a lot of
interesting numbers in it. We’re rolling up others in her ring as they attempt
contact.”

Disappointed, Mira said, “You
could’ve lied and told me you beat the information out of her.”

“The whole security team will be
working double shifts for a week. Trina will visit when she can. This web is
huge, worse than dandelion seeds in the wind. Sojiro cracked Kaguya’s videogame
machine. That was the quantum crypto machine Mori built from Z’s design.
Sojiro’s using her toy to translate everything Z collected before the fire. We’re
finding more of Kaguya’s puppets all over. If Mori corporate is involved, we
have to insulate ourselves before we can tell the UN. Hell, I might have to
broker a deal with old man Mori myself. But we need all the information first.”

“They don’t get rewarded for this!”

“You have to let the anger out or
it’ll poison you.”

“The one person who finally loves
me and she takes him, too!” the young woman shouted. She pointed to the smile
on Zeiss’s face.

“We don’t know what happened inside
him yet. Doc Marsh found the same hallucinogens as in Green, but in much higher
dosages. He could be unconscious for a while from that alone. If he really did
become an Active, it could be days.”

“He is Active; I felt it. He’s just
hiding.”

Daniel shook his head. “I can’t
sense any trace of talent. We don’t know how the Mori conditioning process
works. He might’ve already bonded to her.”

“Or?”

Her uncle bit his lower lip. “We
have to face the possibility that Conrad’s stuck in navel-staring mode like
Lazlo. We won’t know until he wakes, if he ever does,” Daniel whispered.

Tears welled up in the young woman’s
eyes. “It happens every time I care about someone.”

“It’s not you, Kitten. Get some
food and rest. I’ll stay with Z. Herk will take the shift after me.”

After yawning in mid-protest, the
young woman decided to obey her uncle just this once and went back to her pod.
Microwaving a random package from her freezer, she ate without looking or
tasting. Still clothed, she curled up on her bunk and cried herself to sleep.

****

Trina woke Mira.

The young woman’s first frantic
words were, “Who’s dead this time?”

Her aunt wore a quirky smile. “Not
that, Mira. Something good and weird. Change your clothes, brush your hair, and
then I’ll show you.”

“What?”

“You’ll have to see it to believe
it.”

Mira followed her to the escape ladder
and onto the roof of the pod. Zeiss was curled directly over her bedroom, still
wearing his hospital gown. An orderly stood on each side of him, but they were
watching the ocean, not their patient. “How?” asked the young woman.

Trina’s smile grew wider. “He
walked in his sleep. Daniel couldn’t catch him.”

“Why?”

“When two people are pair-bonded,
sweetie, they have to be together, as close as humanly possible,” Trina
explained. Mira burst out into a grin and put her hands over her face. “Conrad
chose
you, baby. He managed to hold her off till you arrived. I spoke to Dr. Marsh
and he’s agreed to let you sleep in the clinic so this doesn’t happen again.”

“Then why are the hospital people
still here?”

An orderly pointed to the ocean.
Mira saw a whale breaching the water, then another, and a third. “I’ve never
seen so many whales in one place!” She glanced down at Zeiss. “You don’t think
he has anything to do with this gathering do you?”

“Welcome to weird. The island is at
a dead stop and we’re flying in cetacean experts.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Honey, every talent manifests a
little different, depending on the person. Conrad was a lot different to start
with.”

“Meaning?”

“Daniel suspects he’s Active, but
on their frequency instead of ours.”

“Ultra-low-frequency talent? Could
be,” Mira said, her voice tinged with doubt.

“Do you have a better theory?”

“It’s far-fetched,” the young woman
warned.

Her aunt snickered and pointed to
the circle of whales around them. “And this isn’t?”

Mira pulled her aunt aside. “His
flare was the longest I’ve ever seen, and he was still conscious until that
song pushed him over the edge. Most people only read a line or two of the
Collective Unconscious page. I think that between Kaguya, Sojiro, the whales,
and I, Z may have learned the entire page. Maybe other people are seen as Active
because they’re still in progress.”

“He’d be the first human to finish
it,” Trina stated. “If that’s the case, we have nothing to compare him to.”

Mira said, “There’s no one who
compares to him either way.”

Trina watched Mira gaze at Zeiss.
Both women sighed contentedly. To the orderlies, she said, “Ease him down, boys.”

****

A balding cetacean expert arrived
three hours later. He took hours of sound and video samples. But near dark,
when Mira spooned in Zeiss’s hospital bed, the whales dispersed.

The expert was astounded by both
events. He explained to a room full of faculty and Commander Taggart, “Most of
the new whales were young and female.”

“What drew them?” asked the dean.

“This sometimes happens when a new
male sings that he’s . . . lonely.”

Trina started giggling.

“What?” whispered Daniel.

“Massive Sperm Whale Buildup.” She
barely got the phrase out before Daniel burst out guffawing as well. They had
to leave the conference room.

“Is that a whale in your pocket or
are you just happy to see me,” Daniel said on the way out. They traded double
entendres the whole way to the clinic. By the time they arrived, they were
laughing so hard, tears were flowing.

When they explained the theory to
Mira, she seemed less amused. “So when I go anywhere, he’s going to tag along,
and the whales are going to follow him like some horny parade? I’m not ready
for this. Every time he wants . . . something, it’ll be like this elephant in
the room that no one talks about.”

Daniel tried to hold in the
laughter, but started crying again. “Stop!”

Mira made her uncle leave.

“Honey, we all know Conrad buries
his feelings,” Trina explained. “That’s something he’ll have to work on. But
he’s learning to communicate with women. Now we’ll just have to work on the
species.”

“Not funny,” Mira complained.

“All men need to be trained, dear
heart,” Trina lamented. “This isn’t so bad. You won’t mind his attention once
you’re glowing, too.”

“There’s another problem. I need
you to be serious for a moment,” Mira insisted.

“Is it about sex?” asked Trina,
eager to help with advice.

“Sort of. Right now, his body is
sort of . . . programmed,” Mira explained, whispering. “Whenever I kiss him on
the lips for a few minutes, he has a . . . thing.”

“Erection?”

“No . . . a gooey, epilepsy, almost
heart-attack thing. What do we give him for it?”

“Lip balm?” her aunt suggested.

“What?”

“It’s an old joke. Doctor, I have
an orgasm every time I sneeze. What can you give me for it? The doctor replies:
Pepper.”

“O.”

“Exactly,” Trina chuckled. “I like
to listen to Daniel’s excitement through our link. But he has
much
more
fun listening to mine.”

“Why?”

“Because women don’t really have a
limit to how many times they can
sneeze
,” Trina said. “I’ll give you
some books. The two of you will need to practice kissing so he can learn to
hold back.”

“Sounds . . .” Mira stopped when
she realized the implications. “Shouldn’t you be talking me
out
of sex?”

Trina grinned wickedly. “Once you make
love to your soul mate, you’ll be asking why I didn’t tell you to try it
sooner.”

“Well, why didn’t you?”

“You both have to be ready. You’re
not there yet, but oh, I can tell you’re going to have world-shaking fun even
before you go all the way.”

****

On the third day, Mira woke to find
Zeiss’s fingers interlaced with her own. He was awake, propped on his elbow, and
watching her. When he saw her stir, he recited, “Tyger, tyger, burning bright.”

“Z!” she said gleefully.

“I think you can call me Conrad
now,” he said with a deeper than normal voice.

The way he said it tickled her
insides. “Okay, Conrad.” After two years of constant conversation, she found
herself with nothing significant to say. His eyes kept roving over her like
gentle hands. She opened her special ears and listened to his emotions—steak on
the grill. She stammered, “Um . . . I read your dissertation.”

“What did you think of it,
beautiful?”

Without thinking, she kissed him
full on the mouth. Both of them were speechless from the aftershocks. A nurse
ran in to see what was causing the monitors to spike.

“Pepper,” Mira panted as he gripped
her tightly against him.

Nurse Betsy smiled, switched off
the alarm, and left.