A fist grabbed her cammie blouse and yanked her up, impelling her forward before she could get her feet under her. She fell over some sort of soft edge and tumbled down an incline, followed shortly by a thud and a groan announcing the arrival of someone in the s.p.a.ce next to her. Just training, just training...

"That you, Moss?" she whispered after a moment.

"Unnh," Moss's unhappy baritone answered.

Jamie knew they were about to pay for the six who'd been counted.

* 47 *

Chapter Five.

CravinG Under the stinking black hood, Jamie tried to suck in air without gagging and hoped the Pirates wouldn't tape the d.a.m.n thing tight around her neck.

She'd been stungunned again and hogtied again, too-this time with metal cuffs-and had lost any sense of how much time had pa.s.sed or where they'd taken her. Shivering intermittently from cold in spite of the humidity under the hood, she listened for Moss but heard only a low-pitched, monotonous buzzing.

And then somebody unlocked the restraints on her hands and her now-bare feet. "Get up, a.s.shole," a chilling male voice said, "and strip off those filthy f.u.c.king cammies."

She responded slowly, reluctantly, first moving a hand to pull off the hood. "Leave it!" Her hand was stilled by a solid kick too close to her kidney. The kick coerced a ragged, helpless grunt; she imagined they wanted to see that helplessness before- Before what?

Several hands yanked Jamie to her feet, then ripped off her uniform, her T-shirt, her underwear. If the sound of her clothes shredding was meant to scare her, it succeeded.

Before upping the ante.

Just as she started worrying about what else was in store, the Pirates spread-eagled her against a cold, rough wall. Concrete block, gotta be. Her hands were pulled wide apart. Her feet, too, got shoved away from each other and kicked so far from the wall that she strained to stay upright.

* 48 *

But no stungunning. Which gave her a little time to think. Inside, I'm inside somewhere.

The intermission was brief. With slaps, shoves, and insults, they insisted she hold her position against the wall while they forced her to lift her weight onto her toes and the tips of her fingers. They made her keep her back, arms, and legs straight, her head held up. If she moved or tried to relax, she got smacked back into the same position.

And there she stayed, tense and freaked out that no one asked any questions. Am I the only one in here? She tried to hear beyond the buzzing for hints about who might be around her. Was that a moan?

"Moss?" Jamie whispered toward the apparent sound on her left and in return got a slap so hard against her backside that pinp.r.i.c.ks of light whirled under the hood. Her body arched away from the blow, but she persevered against an instinct to cry out. What the h.e.l.l'd they use to do that ?

"Shut the f.u.c.k up, a.s.shole. No talking."

Her hands cramped up first. Then her neck and shoulders. Then blades of fire sliced down her back, into her legs. When her hands began to go numb, she closed them into fists for relief. They were pounded until she opened them again, until the tips of her fingers held her weight again.

Unable to see, knowing only that her captors had complete sovereignty over her imploding world, Jamie began to hear something else in the incessant buzzing-a ba.s.s fiddle playing rumbly Irish reels.

Eventually- How long? -she could no longer hold up her trembling arms. She didn't realize she'd collapsed until kicks and slaps roused her and she was again forced into position against the wall.

Later- How long? -the hood over her head was pulled up slightly and a hand pushed a bit of bread into her mouth, then some more, then maybe half a cup of water. But she wasn't allowed to move.

Sometime after that, Alby showed up, naked, all strung out, whining and s...o...b..ring, "Please, Jamie, I need to tell you something." Behind Alby stood a naked man, laughing contemptuously.

Jamie wanted to help her mother, but all she could do was tremble.

And vomit. She didn't know how she ended up on the floor. She could have sworn she'd been on her feet, trying to stave off dizziness, and...

And now some a.s.shole was whacking on her again.

* 49 *

A burst of white light preceded a soft, whooshing pop! of clarity and adrenaline. f.u.c.king a.s.shole! Jamie clawed the hood off her head and rose toward a subliminal sense of enemy to land a savage punch on one of the Pirates. "f.u.c.k you!" she croaked and tried to hit him again.

But she was drubbed to the floor, stungunned into stupor.

v Jamie discovered the hard way how her hands were bound behind her, how a rope tied them to a ceiling hook. Before she understood about the rope, it was pulled taut, angling her shoulders toward dislocation.

Moaning, she shivered and twitched to her feet. The hood had disappeared; she was alone in a buzzing, gloomy concrete chamber.

A cruel, unseen G.o.d had pulled the rope just so. If she bent forward, the b.a.l.l.s of her feet reached the inclined ramp beneath them just enough to ease the pressure on her wrists and shoulders.

It was a balancing act. With the wrong move, she lost her footing and her shoulders suffered again, and each wrong move exacted more than the one before, became tougher to recover from. That's the point, she thought, and knew the Pirates intended to drag her past any capacity for thought, any ability to hold on to herself.

When she felt warm liquid running down the insides of her legs, she grasped that she was peeing and unable to stop it. Her body was their body now. Perhaps minutes, perhaps hours later, disembodied hands put the hood back on her head and she was hosed down with frigid water. The hood drenched and for a while, perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, she believed she was drowning.

Next they hit her with something hard-a strap? a paddle?-and each time her feet slipped, her c.l.i.t trilled feverishly until she found the ramp once more. She found something else, too. What's pain without fear? If you can get yourself not to be scared of what the pain means- if you don't care about the damage-then the pain is just another feeling.

Just another feeling. She tried to say it aloud. But it didn't sound right. And then she was sinking to the bottom of an engulfing black whirlpool, getting smaller and smaller.

v * 50 *

"How'd you do it?"

The hood was still in place, but it was dry and more light showed at the bottom of it as Jamie roused back to consciousness.

Where? Buzz is softer... Sitting... In a chair. Her arms were manacled to the chair back and all of her ached. But the burning in every nerve in her body had become distant, almost like it was someone else's problem.

A male voice at her left ear repeated the question. "How'd you do it?"

Jamie was thoroughly lucid and murderously angry. This is inoculation? That means a real enemy'll kill me, no question. So let's inoculate for that , shall we? Eventually she found her voice. "f.u.c.k you."

That ended the interrogation.

Within seconds, she'd been dragged by the ankles back to the buzzing room and soon hung from the ceiling again. But it didn't hurt the same way. She began to feel light, increasingly disembodied. When she checked out, it was to immerse in a hallucination that had her flying high above treetops.

But over and over, the Pirates brought her back to face their question. "How'd you do it?"

"f.u.c.k you!" remained Jamie's sole response. She had crossed some threshold into raw, feral hostility and had come to crave the pain-proof to her of her continuing resistance.

The Pirates fulfilled her craving. Between each interrogation, she endured a long bout of hanging from the ceiling hook followed by a beating made more severe whenever she sacrificed her wrists and shoulders for an opportunity to kick a Pirate.

There were plenty of opportunities and Jamie took every one of them.

* 51 *

Chapter six.

Fear up harsh Yep. This is it. The glare on the other side of her eyelids, the throbbing pangs of fretting flesh and muscle and joints meant just one thing. This is awake. Jamie knew she'd have to open her eyes.

Any minute now. f.u.c.king A.

Awake had taken a while, amalgamating slowly from a jumble of sensations that approached, then receded, then approached again until they connected up into dreams maybe, or memories. Of people pulling on her arms, lifting her by her arms, but her legs wouldn't stay beneath her and she couldn't raise her lolling head and around her sounded voices and clanging metal.

Jamie realized she lay on her back, her arms stretched above her head. More than anything, she wanted to curl into a tight little ball and- G.o.dd.a.m.n. Shackles on her wrists and ankles immobilized her.

G.o.dd.a.m.n.

She had to move something, anything-had to move now. This was what made her eyes open at last, made them squint into the glare that wouldn't go away and see a single, bare light bulb in a wire-meshed cavity in the ceiling. She would have looked around to confirm the sense she had of being engulfed by concrete walls, but before she could do anything, the light bulb started to spin.

Suddenly her head filled with a rush of white noise. She closed her eyes against the dazzle, against a tide of nausea rising from her belly into her throat. Maybe a few seconds later, maybe hours, the noise in her head abated. That's when she noticed the other sound. Could it really be that someone was snoring?

* 52 *

Ha! Not just anyone. Arnoldt snored distinctively. Jamie had always hated Arnoldt's snoring-until this moment. Gingerly, she turned her head and slivered open her eyes once more.

She saw Moss first. He was closer, between her and Arnoldt, and all three of them were handcuffed naked to bare metal bed frames. In a cell. Moss's eyes were shut.

"Yo," said Jamie. "Yo, Moss."

He didn't move, but Arnoldt burbled an especially long, loud snore.

"Fear up harsh."

The whisper, a woman's, came from Jamie's left. She turned too fast toward it, and for a half-second her eyes refused to focus. Then she saw Martina Rhys.

"How you doing?" Jamie whispered back, squinching her eyes to make sure what they saw was real. Rhys, too, lay naked and cuffed.

Jamie's c.l.i.t punched a double flip, and for a time-stretched heartbeat, then two, she let the churning surprise of Rhys's robust tawniness, Rhys's exquisite bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s, eclipse everything.

"Got waterboarded today," Rhys said wearily. "Moss took the worst of it. Light for Arnoldt and me." Beneath velvet-smooth skin, Rhys's abs tightened and rippled as she strained against the cuffs to turn toward Jamie. "What the h.e.l.l happened to you? You look like my mother's mincemeat."

"Yeah. Well. It's what I get for playing with boys." Jamie yanked hard on the single pair of cuffs that shackled her hands above her head to the bed frame, twisting to get a better view of the thick wire netting on which she lay. The bed frame groaned metallic protest.

"Don't do that." Rhys's dark eyes flitted toward the cell door and the dank hallway beyond the bars. "Noise attracts them. Not a good idea."

"How long've you been in here?" asked Jamie, shifting leftward again, determined to keep her eyes from leaving Rhys's face.

"Couple days. This'll be the third night. I think. Hard to tell exactly.

They never turn off the lights. Put hoods on us when they take us outta here to be interrogated. Tough really knowing what time it is."

"They come around a lot?"

"It'll be a while now, a.s.suming the pattern holds. They're done with us for the day. You just missed the swill they call chow and the * 53 *

second trip to the head, so you'll need to hold it 'til the end of the next watch, which I figure means it's morning. You'll hear 'em playing poker any minute now, after their chow, which we get to smell just to make us a little more crazy. Last night, Arnoldt swore he could smell beer. They won't check us again 'til right after the next watch starts."

"When?"

Rhys shrugged in her cuffs. Her eyes-dejected eyes, Jamie thought-seemed to be pulled unwillingly to the ceiling light. "I'm guessing maybe four hours. Dunno. Hard to tell exactly."

"You get a look around? You know-layout, gates, guard movement?"

"Yeah." Rhys said it slowly, a question-Didn't you?-and turned her head to look at Jamie, who encouraged her with a quick, tell-me-more nod. "Uh," Rhys continued, nodding back, "when they had us digging holes and moving rocks all day."

"When'd they grab you?"

"Same time as your squad." Rhys sounded glum. "I was bringing a message to Fontana, since we were under commo silence. It's been nine G.o.d-awful days by my count. I think. Which means they should've let us outta here last night. But when Arnoldt said something about it, they just laughed and gut-punched him. So much for the rules of engagement."

Jeezus. Nine days. The Pirates would have to release them by the end of day ten no matter what. So just one more day of the c.o.c.k.

No matter what. s.h.i.t. One more day. Inside Jamie's head, way inside, someone started screaming.

"Cameras and microphones?" Jamie hoped she sounded calm.

Rhys shook her head. "Maybe in the light bulb. Or a pinhole setup in the fixture or the walls somewhere. Couldn't find anything obvious from here."

Jamie squinted again at the ceiling light. If they're playing poker, they're probably not doing surveillance, so what if- Not likely to work, but even the thought of it eased the screaming in her head. She stretched herself out, pushing with her feet, pulling with her fingers, trying to give her shackled hands more reach as she strained to touch the edge of the bed frame, which creaked and clanked.

"Shh!" Rhys's expression shifted from disapproving frown to * 54 *

confused dismay when she saw Jamie's fingers continue their scramble along the top edge of the bed's wire netting. "What're you doing?"

"Sorry." Jamie eased her movement, which ended the bed's complaint, but she didn't stop stretching, didn't stop reaching. Because maybe, just maybe... Yeah, yeah, feels like baling wire.

"What the h.e.l.l're you doing?"

I'm trying , dammit! But Jamie decided not to say it aloud, decided not to look back at Rhys. Instead, she sent her fingers back and forth, back and forth along the top of the bed frame, which now emitted tiny irregular squeaks.