Where had they gotten the book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was being read while they shivered with cold and hunger? Player couldn’t remember, but he knew it was important.
Alena had managed to slip outside and make her way into the woods, where she gathered roots, nuts and mushrooms. She brought leaves, berries and cone nodules. She also brought bark and other supplies for their “medicine well.” They had dug a hole and put in it the precious herbs, powders and barks she stole from the instructors or managed to get when she escaped through the narrow crack they’d widened just enough for her to slide through.
She was very small. They weren’t given clothes down in the dungeon, because to their captors, they weren’t human, so they greased her body as best they could, and she slid through the narrow crack and out into the forest in the dead of night to gather what she could to feed them and help Steele treat their wounds.
Alena knew plants, the ones they could eat and the ones that could be used for medicinal purposes. She had a natural instinct for them. Until the mushrooms. She was affectionately called Torch because she could start little fires when she concentrated. Czar had them all working to enhance and perfect their psychic skills—all but Player. Player didn’t seem to have any psychic skills—at least any he’d admitted to the others yet. His was more of a parlor trick.
The pain pounded in his head, mixing with the sound of Absinthe’s voice as he read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Player tried to concentrate on the story. It was wonderful, and he let the images build in his head, the caterpillar floating in the air, smoking, blowing those wonderful rings of smoke. He thought they would be a good thing to have if he could break through the walls of reality and drop those rings of smoke around the necks of the men who had flayed the skin from his body. The men who had beat some poor hapless girl because Player had controlled his body when she had tried so hard to arouse him. He’d been flayed while he aroused her and made her scream when she came. He hadn’t made a sound when the fuckers beat him. But damn. His head was exploding.
Building the nooses from smoke, he crafted them carefully, sent them floating through the air, let them become smaller and smaller. The walls were faded enough so that there was nothing to stop his weapons from seeking their target. The smiling blue caterpillar floated on his little cloud pillow, blowing the rings, his smirk indicating he knew that each ring contained a thin little garrote that would slice through the neck of the men who had so savagely raped and beaten him.
His head was coming apart. Every time he moved, the smoke whirled around him faster and faster and the pounding in his skull got so much worse. He could see pieces of his brain flying out of him as he spun around like the Mad Hatter. The mushrooms. Alena’s mushrooms were making him hallucinate.
Player tried to sit up, but that made things worse, his brain exploding, taking him right out of the dungeon so that he was no longer in Wonderland following his caterpillar. He was at a table constructing a bomb unlike any he’d ever seen before. Sorbacov was standing over him, with his inevitable pocket watch, the White Rabbit racing away as if late. Sorbacov peered over his shoulder, watching closely, as Player began to build the bomb with meticulous care.
“Player. Player, stop.” Sorbacov caught at his arm and shook him hard. “Open your eyes and look at me. You have to stop.”
He couldn’t just stop. Not in the middle of putting together such an intricate piece of hardware. He was certain Sorbacov was shaking his arm. And his arm hurt nearly as bad as his head, which was really going to explode the moment the bomb was finished.
“Let go.” He managed to get that out through clenched teeth. The sound of his own voice shocked him. He was hallucinating, sending out his silent smoky nooses to kill the enemy, taking down walls and building intricate bombs he’d never seen before. “Let go, Sorbacov.” He tried his voice again, making it stronger.
“Maestro,” his Torpedo Ink brother corrected. “You’re having a dream.”
The fog cleared. The walls shimmered and disappeared. The table he’d been bent over wavered and vanished along with Sorbacov. Had it really all been an illusion he was building in his head? Making a reality? His fucking head pounded so bad he was afraid he was going to vomit, and it wasn’t his bed or his covers.
Player smelled her, his private dancer. So impossibly beautiful with her dark eyes and long flowing hair and that body of hers built for sin and pleasure. He was in her bedroom. In her home. Her grandmother was close by. Just downstairs. They were both close. Was she real or another one of his fucking illusions he’d made real? He just didn’t know anymore, but he couldn’t take any chances with her life.