Virtual Virgin

Chapter Nine




A DRY MIST curled up from my body, like steam rising. Breath came back with a cough. I scrambled upright, my barefoot soles burning. Support. I needed something to grab onto. My searching hands found slick cool walls circling me along with a multitude of my reflections.

I turned in a slow circle. My image turned with me, not Lilith this time, but distorted Easter Island heads of myself, familiar but . . . different.

This glassy cool chamber felt like the inside of a bullet. Recognition made me forget my burning feet and freezing fingertips. Was this was some . . . upright cryogenic preservation chamber?

No seam in the surface betrayed a door. I hadn’t “gone” anywhere. I was trapped in the slick steel heart of the mirror-world diamond pendant. And, for sure, I hadn’t reached my heart’s desire and wherever Ric was a target for the wrath of whatever Loretta Cicereau had become.

I was more of a prisoner than ever.

At first I just threw myself against every curved slick reflective surface.

Reflective surfaces had been my friend since I’d come to Las Vegas in search of my roots. If it shone, glittered, and reflected, I’d always been able to pass through, even if I’d reach the other side bleary and confused. And Vegas had been built on shine, glitter, and glitz.

I’d grabbed my new talent and run with it, expecting it always to be there, like my shadow.

Not now.

Now my efforts to escape stainless-steel custody were just bruising my pale skin until my blurred reflection looked like King Kong had impressed his fingerprints all over me. I wasn’t used to being simply human. I thought of Loretta Cicereau first sensing the fey twins’ webs all over her ghostly image.

Someone . . . something . . . had made Loretta take physical form again.

Someone . . . something . . . had wanted to undo my clever method to freeze a girl gone wild. That same force was bottling me on the inside of a giant . . . bullet.

I would not go gently into that shining metal night, like Metropolis’s human heroine Maria went from lying comatose in a glass coffin in a mad scientist’s laboratory into the instant mummy case of a robot suit, no matter how glamorous. I pounded my fists against their distorted fuzzy reflections.

I stopped, feeling like Superman confronting Kryptonite for the first time.

Stainless steel was somewhat reflective and had a reflective chrome component, but contained not a bit of sterling silver or silver nitrate. It was not a friend of mine, and it had been chosen to entomb me, to torture me with what might be happening to Ric beyond my power to prevent it.

Panting, I pushed my face and body tight against the curved side of my personal mummy case. I’d have to rely on Ric to save himself, and maybe me.

Oops. I was kissing myself. I was so close to my blurry reflection that I couldn’t focus. My palms felt the metal warming against my touch. Was I sensing just a reflection, or was I contacting Lilith?

Whatever I saw was just my height, and just my coloring, a pale face with a halo of cloudy dark hair.

I brought the spread fingers of both hands up to my face, trying to push the image away. The silver familiar streaked across my shoulders and down my arms to my wrists, like a mitten string inside your heavy coat. Only kids who’d grown up in a climate with cold winters, as I had in Kansas, knew that feeling. Instead of mittens, though, the familiar encased my wrists and first knuckles in chain-mail workout gloves. Cool but . . . impractical.

I spread my hands apart to study the effect, and the stainless steel wall in front of me split. The two halves of my reflection slid to the edges of my vision, and a 3-D version in living black-and-white, a knockout brunet Cinema Simulacrum, stood barring my way out.

I was eager enough to escape to push right into her, which might feel bizarre. Humans up top avoided contact with the CinSims, very aware of the zombie body in possibly questionable condition beneath the attractive monotone surface.

Dreading first contact was not necessary. Two hands in glorious living color grasped her off-white upper arms and shuffled her aside.

“Get lost, chica de cine,” someone said.