Housebound Ch. 09

She hung there for a moment, catching her breath, allowing her heart to slow until she could hear anything besides herself in her own ears. The room was still. There was still the quiet hum of a computer fan, somewhere tucked away and powering the monstrous apparatus, and the occasional plop of a drip of water, running down her shoulder, neck and ear to fall back into the pool below. Just breathing, she was the loudest thing there.

She tested her bonds one more time: slowly, now, without James to distract her or her own overwhelming panic to make her wild. She couldn't budge them any more than before. But trying to pull at each individual tie, one at a time, made them seem less impossible. They were tough, but they were just plastic, not magic.

Katie thought about it. For all his preternatural abilities, James still walked the same speed as a normal human. She knew about how big the house was; she knew he probably had to climb some stairs to check whatever he'd gone to check. Five minutes. Maybe six. She felt an odd bubble of clarity inside her, suspended by a thread over the foaming sea of rage and fear in which he'd tried to drown her.

She tested the ties on her legs again. This time, flexing her foot, she touched something. Plastic, she thought. A cable? She twisted her head to one side, but even though she was forced to look upward, the arm shoving its gag into her mouth blocked her view.

Katie pulled her head back, shoving with her tongue, and just managed to slide her mouth out from around the gag. She grunted and worked her aching jaw, then immediately went to work with her tongue. It took time—precious fucking time—but she found it: the sharp straight edge of the despicable plastic square stuck to the roof of her mouth.

It hurt to pry free; it didn't want to let go of her. She knew there would be consequences for it. But when Katie spat the stupid little piece of shit out and watched it flutter down into the water, she was filled with a furious satisfaction that made it feel absolutely worthwhile.

"Okay," she muttered to herself, "plastic." She could move her head farther to one side now and just see, between her wet and trembling thighs, the little loop of wire that she'd brushed with her toe. It was taut but bent, something intended to coil and uncoil as the tool penetrating her—still there, to her intense dislike—shifted or thrust.

James had taunted her about control and choice ever since he'd taken her, but this was the first time she'd ever actually had the opportunity to make a real decision, outside his engineered lessons and tests. She could wait here, submissive, and hope for mercy when James inevitably returned. Or she could try to catch the cable, pull it, and see what happened. See if something besides her broke.

It took her five tries before she got it, just barely hooked under her third toe, a breath away from slipping back.

Katie's teeth were clenched, and there was more sweat on her forehead now than there had been during the active portion of her torment. How long had it been so far? Was James about to burst back in and ruin everything? He'd moved the live-feed monitor out of her view when he'd left; she couldn't see, on its corner clock, how long it had been. Was he watching it, somewhere? Was this another test after all?

"One way to find out," she muttered to herself, stretched her foot a bit farther, and pulled down.

The tool rammed down into her, and Katie let out a ragged scream just before she plunged into the water again.

It wasn't fucking her this time. It was just pushing, only pushing, and she sank head-first into the icy cold past her shoulders to her breasts, her ribs, her belly. Her poor cervix was a shrieking bruise and she had little air in her lungs at all. She looked up through the rippling surface, wild-eyed, expecting to see James looking down with a smirk.

He wasn't there. No one was. The tool gave a renewed push, so that the water lapped at the tops of her thighs, and then stopped.

It was going to leave here there. It was broken. She was going to drown.

Katie felt curses boil through her at the thought that she could have been breathing through the goddamn cock-snorkel right now if she hadn't pushed it out. Motherfucker. She felt pressure building behind her eyes, and her throat burned.

She could do it. Suck in water. Choke on it. Let James choke on it, too, and see that he didn't control everything after all. No more torture. No more training or victimization. No more satisfaction for him.

Or, she thought bitterly, he'd just fuck her corpse before he disposed of her and grabbed some other girl.

Her view up through the water had narrowed to a tunnel. Blackness danced around her. She lost control of her body, which was bent on one last thrashing seizure, still trying to escape the inescapable. The sea rose inside her, fear and rage still fighting to sink her brief clarity.

Katie thought about the little metal box she'd hated. She thought about how she could never possibly hate anyone else the way she hated James. She thought about hating herself, her weakness and her failure, after all that time and effort spent—

Spent what, she thought dizzily. Spent what?

She thought about how much she hated the tests. The people who told her what to do next. The people who told her what she was going to do, and what she wasn't going to remember.

Remember what?

Katie hated their little catch phrase.

what

catch phrase

She opened her mouth to inhale water, and she hated that she couldn't hear as they forced their way out of her mouth, three words, bubbling up to the surface with the last of her air.

Katie felt the ties around her right forearm strain and snap.

She tore her arm loose, clenched her fist, and broke all the little ties holding her fingers too. She was losing her vision. Her left arm was harder. Part of the bench came off, still bound to her, with a wrenching crack.

She exploded up out of the water and sucked in huge gulps of air, choking and coughing, her seasick lungs struggling to force themselves clear. She caught the shaft of the fuck-tool with her elbow and dug her fingers into the straps around her left leg. They were thicker, but less secure; all she had to do was work them up over her knee, one at a time. One leg came free. Then the other.

Katie gritted out a harsh sound of pain and pure will as she finally pulled herself off the machine and collapsed, heaving, on the cold hard floor. Her muscles had locked in cramp, but she had no time for that. She got one foot under herself, then a hand, and pushed until she could stand.

Trembling, dripping wet, naked, she stood straight and unbound for the first time since the night he'd taken her. This was not possible, she noted to herself. She could not have done what she'd just done. The most likely scenario was that she was hallucinating as she drowned, or that she was drugged, imagining all of this while her distant body was subject to further violation.

"Oh," said James, standing in the door of the room, looking surprised, but less surprised than he should have. Katie's gaze hit him.

He ran.

Katie stood there for a moment. That didn't seem very likely either. James had a foot of height on her, and easily fifty pounds, and he'd never had any difficulty handling her like a toy. She wasn't armed; she wasn't even clothed. Things shuffled and rearranged themselves in her mind. There was something extraordinary crackling through her, and, she thought, James had seen it. Seen it and fled.

Katie walked after him, bare feet splashing in the skim of water that had pooled on the floor as she stood. She was thinking very hard. She intended to find her captor, and to make him pay for everything when she caught him. But she wasn't in a hurry. He wasn't going to leave the house, she was certain, and that meant that she had time to consider three things that had been bothering her.

First: when James threatened her or the other girls, he used force, leverage or their control collars. He never held a gun on any of them, which she took to mean that there were no such weapons here. It was a good idea: a gun can be taken away and turned against one's captor, but strength and size cannot. Her body felt strong. Too strong. It was an impossible, feverish strength, but James was afraid of it, and the evidence said he could not shoot her to stop her.

Second: James had said she'd been betrayed, sold out to him. But for all his violence and sadism, he didn't actually seem to have anything personal against her. She hadn't been made to read ransom demands on camera or provide anyone proof of life. She wasn't the target, not really. She was being used for some other purpose. She was as much a tool as any of his machines, so the only way to know why she'd been sold was to find out who was buying.

Katie had walked down the basement hallway to the base of the switchback stairs and, ignoring the elevator, climbed them. She stopped at the ground floor, where the stairs opened up into the big open entertainment room, with its sunken floor, furniture and meticulously polished lamps. To her right was the kitchen. To her left was the stupidly large, glossy TV screen. Deactivated, it stood like a monolithic black mirror.

Katie studied herself in reflection. She was still damp, her brown hair a wet tangle stuck to her neck and shoulders. Her eyes were bloodshot and very cold. The shape of her body was... subtly different than the last time she'd looked in a mirror. She'd seen herself on video many times in the last week, of course, but that was James's gaze, not her own. She could see subtle planes of muscle in her arms and flanks now as she walked, and blunt angles like chisel marks to delineate her belly from her hipbones. She'd been worked past the point of exhaustion for days on end, and her body had tried to build against that, burning through its soft reserves.

It didn't explain the way she'd snapped through the zip-ties. Nothing could. But she was arrested all the same by the sight of her slender, strong form, still bare and gleaming, banded red in an almost decorative way by the marks of her bondage.

The third thing that bothered her was the nature of this building. It looked like a house. It was appointed like a house, and furnished like a house, at least in part. But it wasn't a house. It was a hellhole, a nightmare, an edifice of torture. It was a prison.

A prison in the modern paradigm, she remembered from her philosophy textbook, was a panopticon: a place where every inmate was subject to the all-seeing eye. James had certainly made them all believe he could see their every move at any time. But he was only one man. He had limits. He couldn't be doing all of this without help.

Katie stepped to one side of the massive screen and pushed experimentally. It slid, heavy but smooth, to the side, revealing a plain steel door flush with the wall behind it.

"Very good, Katie," James murmured.

Her shoulders tensed in reaction, but she already knew he wasn't there: his voice was coming from all around, through the blithely tasteless surround-sound speakers that matched the fake TV. She was sure he'd be able to hear her, though.

"I'm going to tear my name out of your throat," she said.

"Now, now. How are you going to get any answers if you mutilate me?" he said.

"What makes you think I want answers?"

"You want them more than you want to live," he said, "or you wouldn't have pulled that stunt in the basement. A neat trick, by the way. Did you know you were doing it, or was it pure chance?"

"It doesn't matter," she said.

"No," he agreed. "It doesn't. But answers do, I think, to you. Go ahead. Keep looking."

Katie walked to to the steel door, aware of the outside chance that it was a trap, but unafraid of it if it was. She pushed, and it swung inward and open.

The room was circular. Stairs spiraled around its edge, up and down through a floor and ceiling that seemed to be made of luminous, milky glass. The walls were lined with featureless metal cabinets. She touched one, and it popped open. Stacked neatly inside were bundles of currency: American, Canadian, Euro, pounds and yen, more she didn't recognize. She touched another: dozens of gleaming license plates with current tags. A third: cell phone SIM cards by the hundred, loose in a box.

"You don't have the resources for this kind of stuff," she said quietly. "No one person does. And definitely not the kind of person who does his own dirty work."

"Very good again," he said, and his tone was warm, congratulatory. "But what if I'm the kind of man who just likes to get his hands dirty?"

"That's not a real question," she said.

"So you think I'm working for someone else. Are you going to demand to speak to my manager next?"

"I said you were working with someone else, not for someone else," she said. "But maybe you are just a little bitch who lets the bigger monsters tell you what to do. Is that how you sleep at night? Telling your victims you were just following orders?"

Silence. Katie allowed herself a little smile, flexing her hands. She walked to the spiral stairs and went down, bare feet leaving damp prints on the glass.

"Victims," he said at last, and if her point had struck him then his voice was still steady. "That's an interesting choice of word. Do you feel like a victim right now?"

Katie ducked her head to look around the room. Here was what she'd expected: video screens, every surface covered with them, multiple angles on every room she knew in the house and more she'd never seen. There were even feeds of the outside of the building, like security cameras, though she couldn't quite glean an understanding of its exterior from them. A confusion of stone, gravel and gleaming windows, and somewhere, trees. She did see a curving wall and realized that from outside, this part of the house must be a cylindrical tower.

"I feel like a survivor," she said, looking around at the video. "Do you?"

Katie saw Emma and Jen on one of the screens—the round room with the floor pads where she had been told, once, to kneel and wait for her control accessories to recharge. They were side by side, wearing the collars and plug-belts she expected, heads bowed and still. Emma had a length of red rope bound around her in a thick, glossy braided harness. Jen was naked but for a heavy, opaque black helmet that completely obscured her face. Katie only knew it was her by the length of glossy black hair that spilled down from under it. She did not see Amber, oddly, or James.

That narrowed the scope of her search. James was surely aware of the blind spots of his own cameras, but it seemed unlikely he could broadcast and taunt her while squeezing himself into a corner. The only place he wouldn't need to surveil would be his own surveillance rooms. This tower.

He still hadn't answered her question. Two points for Katie. She descended another set of stairs, but the lowest room was less interesting: just racks of servers and switches, blinking in silence, coils of fiber cable running off through the walls in every direction. There was a door here, and she was pretty sure she'd be able to push it and walk through into the basement from an apparently solid wall, if she chose. She didn't need to, but it did help establish James's movements.

No more stairs down. She climbed back up to the monitor room, then the cabinet room, and up to the floor above. It was empty, but for a single kneeling pad set in the center of the floor.

Katie took it in for a moment. This was a clue, but she wasn't sure of its nature yet. The room was aglow all around her, blue-white light filtering through the translucent floor and ceiling. Some kind of twisted little ceremony room? Or a personal meditation chamber? There was one more floor above her. She didn't want to leave this room until she understood it, but she couldn't get it. Not yet. And she wasn't sure how long the fury and power coursing through her body right now would last.

"I'm going to warn you, Katie," said James, his voice soft. "There are some things you can't un-know. I can't stop you from walking up those stairs. But you may wish you hadn't."

"Someone already made me un-know things once," she said. Would he be able to hear her? She wondered if she would ever have discovered this emergency override within herself if she hadn't skated so close to death. She wondered again if he'd engineered it somehow. But James, though twisted, didn't seem that kind of tricky.

Katie climbed the steps to the top floor and looked at them.

Three girls, seated in an outward-facing triangle around a central pillar. Physically, they weren't so different from Katie herself, though she thought they might be a few years older. They were all slender, on the short side, with small breasts, supple skin, and little hints of muscle tension here and there as they twitched or shifted. They wore only equipment: half a dozen electrodes, control collars, and large helmets that reminded her of VR visors, but extending down to cover their mouths and noses as well. Their ankles were chained to the floor, their hands locked palm-down at their sides under some kind of metal-and-plastic housing. Their genitals were covered by a more baroque version of the plug-belt she'd been made to wear, with tubes and wires running down from them through slots on their chairs. The whole room smelled like female arousal.

They didn't move or turn their heads as Katie entered. They just trembled and breathed shallowly, and the monitors attached to the column above them showed peaks and waveforms, steady scrolling data. They didn't know she was there. Katie wasn't sure they knew much of anything at all.

"I did tell you," said James's voice, all around her. "All gas, no brakes, burnout."

"What are you doing to them?" Katie whispered.

"Actually, they're doing it to themselves," said James. "They're a very powerful computer, linked together, one with subtle abilities that can't be duplicated by silicon yet. The system is excellent at parsing hidden meaning when I speak commands, for instance, and at recognizing only authorized voices. And at analyzing vast amounts of biometric data in real time."

"All your little tricks." Her voice was trembling. "The way you pretend to read minds. Read bodies. The way you always know everything that's going on..."

"Oh, give me some credit." He actually laughed. "I am pretty good at all this. But the system enhances things, like one of those... digital assistants. Only useful."

"Where did you find them?" She hated his laugh so much; her strength surged in her again. "Human trafficking? Do you just bulk-order girls who fit your type?"

"Your type," he corrected. "A particular shape with a useful body fat ratio and specific metabolic requirements. And female, of course; can't do this kind of thing to a body with a prostate. Orgasm suppresses higher brain activity in girls—do you remember that from our lessons? One of the interesting parts of the system is that it can monitor its own stimulus cycle, maintaining the suborgasmic state to suppress executive function. Then it runs its code where that would normally go..."

"It," said Katie, quoting him.

"That really is the best pronoun for their gestalt collective," he said, voice mild. "Not human, but able to take advantage of human wetware. The girls you're looking at were once named Ashley, Rika, and Erin. The sum structure of their connection is just... the house."

"That's your big fucking magic secret," Katie said. "That's how you run this place. Brainwashed slaves."

"Yes," James agreed.

"This is evil."

"I wouldn't try unplugging them, or any other misguided attempts at heroism," he said. "They're heavily interlinked. It takes a very careful shutdown process to extract a component. Removing any one of them without it would leave all three badly damaged."