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Shift.
Heather struggled to make sense of the sudden change of surroundings although she had no doubt what had happened. A fugue. It wasn’t quite right, but it was the word she had come to call the eerie dream state into which her conscious mind was sometimes summoned.
The place where she now found herself was like nothing she had ever imagined. In the gray light, it was hard to focus her vision, almost as if she drifted in a fog. All around her strange machinery filled the room, odd conduits snaking between them in a jumble of chaotic connections.
She heard something, a skittering noise, but when she tried to turn toward it she found herself unable to move, draped with some sort of invisible force that held her suspended above the floor.
Heather gasped. She hung in the air, face upward, completely naked.
Concentrating her efforts, Heather struggled, her renewed efforts having no more effect than her first. Something was with her here in the room, something that moved along the walls just outside her vision, something that was getting steadily closer.
A deep-seated dread consumed her, rising in intensity with each passing second. Heather increased her concentration, casting away the self-image-imposed limitations that usually blocked her from using all of her neurally enhanced strength. Straining until it seemed that she would tear every muscle in her body, Heather failed to produce the slightest change in position. She couldn't wiggle so much as a finger or a toe.
As a small child, she had once tried to crawl through a drainage pipe and had gotten stuck, her arms pinned to her sides. It had taken the fire department two hours to get her out. The sense of claustrophobic panic Heather had felt in that pipe washed her once again, hyperventilation further constricting her chest.
The other thing in the room was close now, so close she could feel the subtle current in the air from its excited breathing. In that air, Heather could feel a sick desire radiating toward her.
A hand caressed her cheek from behind, slowly making its way along her throat, the fingers quivering as they moved down along her chest. Heather braced herself against a growing revulsion, accompanied by a vague sense of familiarity, as a new purpose formed in her mind. She needed to see the face connected to that hand.
Shift.
Gasping for breath, Heather struggled to reorient herself. She was lying on a couch. As she looked up, she found herself staring directly into the intense blue eyes of Dr. Gertrude Sigmund.