Page 33 of The Other World

I raised my eyebrows. Just because she said so, didn’t mean I had to believe her. And I had other powers that she didn’t know about. Heck, I had powersIdidn’t even know about. Powers that could knock her socks off, hopefully literally.

I’m in a bit of a pickle, I said to Tennyson. To both Tennysons, if they could hear me.Don’t respond, but Other-me has me prisoner, and is about to start experimenting on me. We’re in some sort of lab, I think under the dungeons but I’m not sure. Don’t come for me unless everyone else is safe, I can handle her.

Probably. I could probably handle her.

“And so what,” I said to her, figuring if I kept her distracted long enough, she wouldn’t get around to injecting me with that swamp sludge. “You’ve discovered the human soul and now you plan to steal mine?”

She scoffed. “What would I want with that?”

She was infuriatingly hard to bait. Sure, she was talking but she wasn’t saying anything useful.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

She snorted. “What a surprise.”

I really wanted to do violence to her, but that wouldn’t help me in the big picture. I had to keep on task. All I had to dowas get away from her, then get back to the portal. I had the lodestone; I’d done everything I came here to do. Assuming the others had got Sam there safely, we could just step through to the real world and close the door to this world back up and never have to deal with it again.

I kicked at the shackles, testing their strength. Rather than spiriting out of them, it might be easier to break them, or break the bench I was chained to.

“Settle down,” she said. “Even if you do get free of me, you’ll never escape. There’s no way back to your world. That door you opened; it’s gone. That was the first thing I did when I realized what our connection meant. I don’t know how long it will take to complete my work, but obviously I need you here to do that. Didn’t you realize after I knocked you out but you stayed right here?”

I bit back a swear. “If you hurt any of my friends, I will kill you.”

She laughed. “Of course not. They’re valuable assets. I don’t want to risk harming the connection between us, I’ll need to test the boundaries of it on them first. But I think we’ll be safe enough for today’s preliminary experiments.” She made some notes in a folder then turned back to me. “Should we begin?”

“I’d really rather not,” I told her. “Let’s go back to what you were saying about my friends. Tell me more about that. Starting with where you’re keeping them.”

She smiled sarcastically. “Funny.” She picked something up from her workbench. “Hold still. I don’t want to damage you more than necessary but I will use maximum force if you make this difficult.”

“Fine,” I said. I fully intended to make it as difficult as possible. I waited for her to get closer, then struck out.

It was obviously what she’d been expecting me to do, and she quickly jabbed me in the ribs with the thing in her hand.Her taser. Of course. It gave me a sharp electric shock, strong enough to incapacitate me for a moment. While I was unable to move, she strapped a leather band around my head and another around my throat. There were wires coming out of them, which were connected to the laptop on her desk.

When I could move again, I began thrashing around, trying to rip the band off my head. She turned back to her workbench and typed something on her laptop. Within seconds, I began to feel weak.

She turned back to me with a clipboard and pen in hand, furiously writing notes.

I was too weak to fight anymore. I was too weak to speak. I slumped over on the bench, barely able to keep my eyes open. She wasn’t just stealing my soul or my powers, she was stealing all of it. Within moments, I was just a shell, unable to think, barely able to breathe.

Then she turned back to her desk and hit a few keys, turning it off. Whateveritwas.

“That’s enough for the first session,” she said.

I could breathe again, but that was about the extent of it. Other-me seemed to be phasing in and out, but I couldn’t tell if that was because my brain wasn’t working or because of something she’d done. But then she turned around and walked directly through the wall behind her.

She’d taken my powers. She’d taken everything.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I don’t knowhow long she kept me there. I had no concept of the passage of time. I could barely even register my own existence. As soon as I started to regain a sense of self, of the world around me, she’d come back and drain it away.

At one point, I became aware of a sound, a dull thudding, though I was in no state to pay it any mind. The thudding became crashing, which then turned into voices. A woman’s voice, mainly. I knew it sounded familiar but past that, everything was blank.

“She’s in here,” the voice said.

The noises got louder but I couldn’t lift my head to see, and even if I could, I didn’t have any sense of curiosity.

“Can you free her?” the voice said. “I’ll…”

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