Neuromancer

Bev took a long, deep, desperate, shuddering breath, trying to remind herself that she was still alive. "I, what, oh fuck, what was that?" she sobbed, clutching the bar in white-knuckle terror that no amount of brainwashing could block. Her legs went rubbery, and she sank down to the floor before she fell down. "Twenty years, twenty fucking years, I..."

"Perception and memory, remember?" Rob said. "You just had one fucker of a nightmare, basically. The kind of shit that leaves you staring at the ceiling for a few hours at 3 AM afraid to go back to sleep."

"But, but why...why did, why?" Bev couldn't get the words out. She wasn't even sure what she was asking. She tried to remind herself that none of it had been real, that she was still on the plane and still twenty-five and she hadn't done any of those awful things and everything was perfectly normal, but it was all still so vivid. It felt like she had really lived those twenty years.

"Why didn't I really do it, you mean?" Rob asked. "Because you were right. Jamie was a fucking sleazebag who spent the whole time he was with your mom thinking about all the things he wanted to do with you. He spent the whole time in prison telling himself he never really would have, but...you can lie to yourself, but you can't lie to me."

He frowned. "I mean, it was more blind luck that you were right than any kind of good judgment on your part, and you still shouldn't feel proud of wrecking a person's life by framing them for a crime they didn't commit just because they happened to be a genuinely terrible human being, but yeah, he was a vicious little shit. So fuck it. I'd probably have done the same thing if I was there."

Bev sprang to her feet and...utterly failed to pound on him in fury, because he froze her in place with a gesture. But she really, really wanted to. "Then why did you do it at all?" she shouted, glad that she could at least yell at him. "Why the fuck did you do that to me?"

"Besides being a capricious asshole, you mean?" Rob took a nonchalant swig of his gin and tonic. Then he looked down at it through narrowed eyes, and very carefully set it on the bar as far away as he could. "Well, that's actually another thing you were right about. See, this magic? This is some serious shit. Necromancy, pyromancy, even geomancy has nothing on us when it comes to leaving a human being fucked up beyond all recognition. If you're really serious about learning to do what I do, you need to understand-really understand-how much pain you can cause if you're not careful. That was your first lesson."

Rob looked her in the eyes, his smile completely gone. "Do you still want to come back for Lesson Two?" he asked.

Bev felt his control over her muscles relax. She slowly lowered her hands. "If I say no?"

"You don't remember any of this. Not our conversation, not the nightmare I put you through, not the flight attendant. This whole flight gets replaced with a re-read of an old William Gibson novel you accidentally left on the plane."

Bev almost said no right away. The promise of washing away twenty years of degradation in an instant was almost unbearably tempting. But something in her made her ask anyway. "And if I say yes?"

Rob smiled a crooked smile. "You won't know until you say yes."

Bev thought about all those fantasy novels, all those reluctant heroes she wanted to smack for turning down the chance of a lifetime. They all got in the Seekrit Majik Club anyway, of course. The Chosen One got as many chances as the writer wanted to give them. But this was real, and Bev only had one chance at it. (And yes, she admitted it, to herself-and probably to Rob-if no one else. She thought about the flight attendant, too.)

Bev took a deep breath and said, "Yes."

THE END