Oddly, it seemed to her that she was having the reaction because she hadn’t truly been clean in a very long time. Hadn’t she showered while in captivity? That was against UCN regulations for how to treat a prisoner. But Eric 754 said she had not been a prisoner… hadn’t he? And why couldn’t she clearly recall their conversations?
After lathering twice, she stood under the steady rush of warm water, her head bowed to watch the still fragrant suds running down the recycler drain. The scent of them mixed with her own specially created one. It was wholly pleasant and she let that thought exist without rebuke.
As she stared at her feet, which also bore some ugly scars around her ankles, the throbbing she’d been experiencing in her brain started growing stronger. In reaction, she leaned her forehead against the cool tile while the water ran soothingly down her back.
She flinched and called out as a series of strong electrical pulses suddenly began flashing through her mind. This situation reminded her of something… yes. It was like the current that had run through the metal bars of her cage. Who was instigating this change in her?
She barely bit back a louder groan of anguish before the pain worsened and turned into a raging fire inside her head. Now she felt like retching as well. Her mind was straining towards some goal and straining hard.
What kind of program was it trying to run? No one had ordered a processor switch. There was no one in the room but her. What was going on?
Then she heard footsteps rapidly approaching. Eric 754’s appearance caused a jagged interruption in whatever had been going on. He seemed so much larger as a male with that determined, concerned look on his face. She found him quite handsome, but then she found all men attractive in some way.
“Lucy? Are you okay? I heard you call out. Oh hell… you’re sick. Aren’t you?”
She was unable to push away and support herself, so her head weakly rolled against the cool tile as she turned it. She helplessly watched great alarm enter her newest contract’s gaze. A failure warning flashed across tortured brain synapses that were already hyper-sensitized from the earlier pain.
Reaching toward normal for his sake, she fumbled for the handle to turn off the still running shower. She ordered herself to answer the concern in his eyes with cheerful reassurances, but nothing like that emerged from her throat. She couldn’t even access her list of phrases. Her mind was going into some sort of shutdown. A sequence was running that she couldn’t identify.
Then suddenly Eric 754 was in the shower with her, wrapping a towel around her wet body, and lifting her into his arms. His action vaguely activated a memory of being carried by someone before. She couldn’t remember the exact details, but somehow she knew it had been just as pleasant then as it was now. Her human side must have supplied the memory. At least, that was the reasoning she always used for such leakages. She didn’t want to be destroyed just because Creator Omega believed she was damaged beyond his ability to mend her.
Forbidden to lie, except in dire cases, she nevertheless lied frequently and bore the mental punishment in order to convince those around her that she was functioning perfectly fine. She paid for them with headaches that never went away, but at least she remained alive.
“It’s okay… I’ve got you, Lucy. I’ll take care of you.”
It did not surprise her when Eric 754 carried her to the bed and lay her down on it. Appropriate phrases to express her willingness to service his needs lined up on her tongue automatically, but she couldn’t get her lungs or throat or mouth to put any air behind them. Her attempts to speak emerged as mumbles.
She must be malfunctioning on a more severe level than her diagnostics could determine.
She activated her diagnostic program again without her contract, prompting her to do so, but even that command seemed sluggish and slow to respond to her request. A complete cybernetic update was no doubt in her future. Anticipating the repairs did not make her happy. She was weary of the endless loop of starting over.
“He… ead… hu… urts… bad..ly,” she choked out finally, determined to provide him with at least some explanation.
“Shhh… I know. I can see the pain on your face. Don’t try to speak anymore. You’ve been through hell today. Just rest for now… and yes, that’s an order. I’m going to go look for something to help with your headache.”
She went instantly silent at his command not to talk, her body relaxing as the fire in her brain finally ceased burning so hotly. She hoped that sizzle she detected in her chips didn’t mean she would require being completely shut down.
What could she say to convince the male in charge of her that she would recover sufficiently without him taking such extreme measures?
Among her protocol phrases, she found no appropriate response. Determined to speak again, she did her best to latch on to something.
“Fuck you,” she said softly.
She noted he laughed at her words, but didn’t seem angry at her choices. Had she not phrased herself well?
“I know, Lucy. I hate this too,” he replied.
His answer didn’t seem right to her somehow, but at least there was no disgust in his tone.
She had meant to reassure him of her intentions where he was concerned. Instead of being irritated by her failure to do so, his hand lightly brushed back her dripping hair. He gently stroked her temples which further eased the pain in her head. She must have moaned or made some inappropriate noise because the man beside her laughed again.
“You just keep fighting your way out of every mental cage they put you in, Hellcat. I’m not worried about what you’ll become. You’ve been in my head so you know I’ve seen more scary shit than most people. Now I’m going to go find you a painkiller. Stay in this bed and rest.”
Lucy Hellcat.
It was not the softest of endearments, but she found it reassuring. His softly spoken words were accompanied by signs of caring.
Because no other action was physically possible, she lay immobile as her caretaker rose and disappeared into the hallway. She wanted to call him back to sit with her again. It was a strange response, and one she certainly hadn’t felt about any of her males before him… at least not that she could find in her memory storage.
Mostly she had always been glad when the others had elected to put her into hibernation. It activated a short term memory flush and allowed her to find oblivion for a while.
Her eyes closed wearily as all remaining past service data promptly flooded her mind with images and acts. Had she done something to call it forward from the flushing area? None of that was supposed to exist anymore.
Diagnostics took over to find the problem. Conclusion—All data indicated she was malfunctioning. Using the last of her fleeting energy, she managed to stop the rush forward of recordings that would not help her service the needs of Eric 754. Using the last of her mental strength, she forced the information ruthlessly back into storage.
Her whispers were nearly silent as she sought to console herself.
“My name is Lucy. Lucy Hellcat. Lucy My Beloved. Lucy My Darling. Lucy My Love.”
She felt the security monitor’s presence, but could not tell if it was active. She hadn’t taken any special note of it before. Some men like to make recordings. This was allowed in her protocol. She had a special place to store them for later retrieval and downloading.
Eric 754 had ordered her to rest though, and for now she would comply with his request. Though he hadn’t spoken the proper commands, she would just have to trust he had meant she was to enter a restorative, human-like sleep.
Her body could not seem to do anything else anyway. Her organics were extremely stressed.
***
Eric came back to find Lucy exactly where he left her. The towel had come undone as she had settled in which had put her nude body on full display to his gaze. Every glorious inch was as well-shaped and perfect as any female could ever hope to be. Like all cyborgs, electrical pulses had kept Lucy fit and sculpted, and he’d seen for himself that her muscle tone was optimal.
But Lucy’s perfect body was also covered with telltale scars of torment and torture. They were something all too familiar to him because Marcus was covered with similar marks as well.
He’d watched helplessly as most of his friend’s wounds were being administered. The knife swipe across Marcus’s stomach, the one nearly gutting him, was the visual that had broken him. Eric had blindly turned away as Marcus hung from chains dying. He had wept and screamed over not being able to stop it from happening. Their captors eventually repaired Marcus and he’d always suspected it was because of his extreme emotional reaction. They might have repeated the near death torment later if Peyton and King hadn’t set them free before it could happen.
Despite his tormented past, he could have ignored Captain Lucille Pennington’s scars if they had been from atrocities committed during the war. But that explanation didn’t fly with him. There had been no wartime abductions listed in Lucy’s records. The injuries to Lucy had been inflicted in the decade since, and obviously repeated often enough that her cybernetics had ceased trying to heal the repetitive wounds.
Like in Marcus’s case, over time her cybernetics had simply adjusted to the scars as being part of her reality. It would take a lot of energy and a lot of will power to convince her cybernetics to heal them now.
“No wonder you want to kill Bradley Smith so badly. Personally, I think the bastard needs to be put through the same hell you’ve gone through. Nothing else is ever going to be true justice.”
Holding his breath so he wouldn’t breathe in her pheromones any more than he could help, Eric placed the painkiller plunger behind Lucy’s ear and depressed it. She sighed as the medicine hit her bloodstream. A few seconds later she stretched out her tense limbs and then relaxed. Satisfied that he’d managed to help her a little at least, Eric tossed the empty injector on the table beside the bed, glad it had acted so quickly.
Then sighing with dread over what he had to do next, he leaned down and pressed a second plunger against her human arm. Firming his mouth over the task, he forced himself to depress it. The sedative it contained would make Lucy sleep for a good long time and then keep her cybernetics groggy for a while after she woke.
The med was the same one used on all cyborgs after they had been apprehended. Nero said the sedative would make it harder for Lucy to think, and therefore less inclined to try to figure out what was happening in her brain. They didn’t want her reverting to the more violent Evelyn 489 before they figured out how to handle the shift.
Not wanting to disturb Lucy’s newly found relaxed state any more than necessary, Eric fetched an extra covering from a storage cylinder across the room. After removing most of her nakedness from his sight, he fastened an old wrist com of Rachel’s onto Lucy’s cybernetic arm.
He hoped Lucy would see it when she woke and believe it was there for tracking time. He hoped she would not figure out it contained a device to constantly track her location should she escape.
Enough invasive shit had been done to Lucy’s body. He couldn’t bring himself to install the internal tracers Nero had recommended. And if her cybernetics were like those of Peyton’s and the other officers he’d known, the internal tracers would be rendered useless anyway.
Lucy escaping was the least of his concerns. Judging from the level of devotion she consistently showed him, she wouldn’t be leaving his side unless her other processor took over again. The return of Lucy Hellcat would signal an end to many things, but he’d worry about all of that when it happened—if it happened.
Sighing at the enormous guilt he felt for what he’d done to her today, Eric swiped at the front of his pants and adjusted the constant erection he couldn’t seem to help having in Lucy’s presence. Being away from her made his arousal fade to a manageable level so he picked up the empty injectors and trekked back down the hall to the monitoring room.
He could safely watch over her from there and talk freely with those helping him.
Chapter 4
When Lucy woke up six hours later, Eric heard her call out his name through the monitor, or rather she called out his cyborg ID. He’d really prefer it if Lucy would just call him Eric because hearing her use his ID bugged the shit out of him. It was a loathing he secretly shared with Rachel.
Marcus had recently reported that his cyborg girlfriend was so damn cheerful these days he wasn’t ever allowed to be in a bad mood. From what Eric could tell, Marcus rarely was in a bad mood since Rachel had started warming his bed. The two of them were good for each other and had managed to carve a life out of the craziness. Eric thought it probably helped that Rachel wasn’t a cyborg in the truest sense… or at least she had never been a soldier. Not that her mental baggage wasn’t just as heavy.
Eric wasn’t sure how he’d survived what he had and remained mentally stable. Most days he didn’t even think of himself as a cyborg so hearing “Eric 754” from Lucy meant little to him. Sure, it was a bit like being slapped across the face with an ugly truth he wanted to deny, but it wasn’t like he wanted to kill people who called him that. He was unsure if Lucy’s new programming would let her be informal enough to just use his first name, and it was the safest course of action not to ask. Maybe one day… maybe one day they could be normal.