'Symbolic link established.'
There's an incredibly strong stink of violets, and a horde of ants crawl the length of my spine before holing up in the pit of my stomach to build a nest.
**Hello, Bob.** The voice caresses my ears like the velvet fuzz on a week-dead aubergine, sultry and somehow rotten to the core. It's Ramona's voice. My stomach heaves. I can't see anything but the swirling pit of light, and the violets are decaying into something unspeakable. **Can you hear me?**
**I hear you.** I bite my tongue, tasting the sound of steel guitars. Synesthesia, I note distantly. I've read about this sort of thing: if the situation wasn't so dangerous it would be fascinating. Meanwhile my right arm is straining against the duct tape without me willing it to move. I try to make it stop and it won't. **Leave my arm alone, damn you!**
**I'm already damned,** she says flippantly, but the muscles in my arm stop twitching and jumping.
Then I realize I haven't been moving my lips, and more importantly, Ramona hasn't been speaking aloud. **How do we control this?** I ask.
**The will becomes the act: if you want me to hear, I hear you.**
**Oh.** The light show is beginning to slow down, with reality bleeding back in through the edges, and my head feels like someone's rammed a railroad spike through my skull right behind my left eye. **I feel sick.**
**Don't do that, Bob!** She sounds — feels? — disturbed.
**Okay.** Try not to think of invisible pink elephants, I think grimly, my skin crawling as the implications set in. I've just been rendered uncontrollably telepathic with a woman — or something woman-shaped — from the Black Chamber, and I'm such a dork my first reaction wasn't to run like fuck.
Why'd Angleton do a thing like that? Hey, isn't this asking for a really gigantic security breach — at least, if both of us survive the experience? How am I going to keep Ramona out of my head — ?
**Hey, stop blaming me!** Somehow I can tell she's irritated by my line of thought. **My head hurts, too.**
**So why didn't you run away?** I let slip before I manage to clamp a lid down on the thought.
**They didn't give me the option.** A metallic, bitter taste fills my mouth. **I'm not entirely human.
Constitutional rights don't apply to non-humans. All I can say is, those bastards better hope I never get loose from this geas ...** I feel like spitting, then I realize the glands full of warmth at the back of her throat aren't salivary ducts.
'Bob.'
I blink in confusion. It's Brains. He looms over me, out of his grounded pentacle. 'Can you hear me'
'Yuh, yeah.' I try to swallow, feeling the sensation of venom sacs throbbing urgently inside my cheeks begin to fade. I shudder. There's a trailing wisp of wistfulness from Ramona, and a malicious giggle: she doesn't have fangs, she just has a really good somatic imagination. **Let me get my head together,** I tell her, and then try to do the invisible v pink elephant thing in her general direction.
'How do you feel?' asks Brains. He sounds curious.
'How the fuck do you think you'd feel?' I snarl. 'Jesus fuck, give me ibuprofen or give me a straight razor. My head is killing me.' Then I realize something else. 'And cut me loose from here. Someone's got to go next door and release Ramona, and I don't think any of you guys want to get within spitting range of her without a chair, a whip, and a can of pepper spray.'
I remember the shape of her anger at her employers and shiver again. Working with Ramona is going to be like riding sidesaddle on a black mamba. And that's before I get to tell Mo, 'Honey, they partnered me with a demon.'
3: TANGLED UP IN GRUE
THEY WAIT FOR THE IBUPROFEN TO START WORKING before they untie me from the chair, which is extremely prudent of them.
'Right,' I say, leaning against the back of the chair and breathing deeply. 'Boris, what the fuck is this about'
'It is to be stopping her from killing you.' Boris glowers at me. He's annoyed about something, which makes two of us. 'And to be creating an untappable communication, for mission which you have not be briefed on because — ' He gestures at the laptop and I realize why he's so irritated: they weren't joking when they said the briefing would selfdestruct.
'Here are your ticket for flight, is open for next available seat. Will continue the briefing in Saint Martin.'
He shoves a booklet of flight vouchers at me.
'Where?' I nearly drop them.
'They're sending us to the Caribbean!' It's Pinky. He's almost turning handstands. 'Sun! Sand! And skullduggery!
And we've got great toys to play with!' Brains is methodically packing up the entanglement rig, which breaks down into a big rolling suitcase. He seems amused by something.
I try to catch Boris's eye: Boris is staring at Pinky in either deep fascination, pity, or something in between. 'Where in the Caribbean?' I ask.
Boris shakes himself. 'Is joint operation,' he explains. 'Is European territory, joint Franco-Dutch government — they ask us to operate in there. But Caribbean is American sea. So L Black Chamber send Ramona to be working with you.'
I wince. 'Tell me you're joking.'
Another voice interrupts, inaudible to everyone else: **Hey, Bob! I'm still stuck here. A girl could get bored waiting.** I have a feeling that a bored Ramona would be a very bad girl indeed, in a your-life-insurance-policy- just-expired kind of way.
'Am not joking. This is joint operation. Lots of shit to spread all round.' He carefully picks up his dead laptop and drops it into an open briefcase. 'Go to committee meeting tomorrow, take memos, then go to airport and fly out. Can file liaison report later, after save the universe.'
'Uh-huh. First I better go unlock Ramona from that containment you stuck her in.' **I'm coming,** I send her way.
'How trustworthy is she, really'
Boris smiles thinly. 'How trustworthy is rattlesnake'
I excuse myself and stagger out into the corridor, my head still throbbing and the world crinkling slightly at the edges. I guess I now know what that spike of entropy change was. I pause at the door to my room but the handle is no longer dewed with liquid nitrogen, and is merely cold to the touch.
Ramona is sitting in an armchair opposite the wall with the holes in it. She smiles at me, but the expression doesn't reach her eyes. **Bob. Get me out of this.** This is the pentacle someone has stenciled on the carpet around her chair and plugged into a compact, blue, noise generator. It's still running — Brains didn't hook it up to his remote. **Give me a moment.** I sit down on the bed opposite her, kick off my trainers, and rub my head. **If I let you go, what are you going to do?** Her smile broadens. **Well, personally — ** she glances at the door ** — nothing much.** I get a momentary flicker of unpleasantness involving extremely sharp knives and gouts of arterial blood, then she clamps down on it, with an almost regretful edge, and I realize she's just daydreaming about someone else, someone a very long way away. **Honest.**
**Second question. Who's your real target?**
**Are you going to let me go once we get through this game of twenty questions? Or do you have something else in mind?** She crosses her legs, watching me alertly. Every guy I've ever slept with died less than twenty-four hours later, I recall.
**I wasn't joking,** she adds, defensively.
**I didn't think you were. I just want to know who your real target is.** She sniffs. **Ellis Billington. What's your problem?**
