EVERYTHING CONTRACTED

1563 4D

His eyes opened in a narrow bed. A soft gray light showed him a stone ceiling, slightly moist and cracked, and three nearby walls. Heat, a near-fever, made the thin blanket covering him weigh like stone. His coverall and carapiece were gone. “Water,” he said. Nothing. He turned his head. A young woman, dark, with intense eyes and long braided hair, sat on a bare smooth floor, her back against the fourth wall, watching him. “Water,” he said again. The Corsang music pumped in the distance.

“Engel,” she called, her eyes still on Frei, “He wants water.” She didn’t move. A door closed, and Frei turned his head; Engel came into the room with a jug. Frei, groaning with pain, sat up slowly.

“Something’s wrong with you,” Engel said, handing the jug to Frei. “You had a fit, like a seizure, like the ones the reps have when their brainjuice doesn’t take right. You on something?”

Frei choked down water for a long time, finishing the jug. “Just ‘thellin.” Odd images flashed like remembered dreams through his mind: hunting silently, seizing a head and biting through it, gorging back into sleep. Metathellin didn’t do this. It didn’t cause seizures, either. “More?” He held out the empty jug to Engel.

“Maybe he’s been drinking brainjuice,” the young woman said. She laughed softly. “He’s from Arlen, right? Remember Serreth?” Her long thick braid slithered over her shoulder and fell against her gray coverall. She said to Frei, “I’m Madhvi.”

Frei asked her, “Who’s Serreth?”

Engel brought a fresh jug of water. As Frei drank, more slowly now, Engel said, “He was Arlen‘s big cat friend. One of Arlen‘s homemade aliens. I thought he was from someone else, working with me, until he nearly killed us both.” Engel nodded toward Madhvi, then stared in Frei‘s face. “So. Did you see Arlen? Or did he just send orders to you?”

“I saw him. In a room with changing walls.” Frei described the shifting landscape images of the great chamber.

“How do you get there?” Engel asked.

Frei explained. Then he said, “He keeps a sentry there, with these long metallic tentacles, and spikes on it. It hums.”

Madhvi said, “That’s a trenzil. They paralyze with electricity.”

“And he asked me to tell him if I heard your name,” said Frei. “He sent for Mentrius and two bugboys — something about a debt you owe him.” As he spoke, the room began to shrink around him, then expand, then shrink again. As everything contracted to a tiny point of red light, Engel‘s voice came close in his ear.

“He’s going down again, Madh. Get help.”