“Afraid?” Cullen asked.
His voice was deep; his chest probably measured fifty inches.
Claire didn’t answer.
Cullen flipped over three of his cards. His eyes roamed across his piles.
“What you should be is impressed,” he said. “I’m a trusted guy around here. They trust me to do all kinds of things.”
“What things?” Claire asked. It was something to say.
“Killing people.”
Another three cards. Another search for moves.
“Who do you kill?” Claire asked. She could hear the drug in her voice. A matter-of-fact tone that might have been humorous on a different day.
“Anyone they tell me to,” Cullen said.
“Like who?”
“I killed a nineteen-year-old boy in Portland yesterday.”
“Who was he?”
“How should I know?”
“They tell you to murder some random kid, and you do it?”
“Who says it was random? They always have their reasons.”
“What reason could there be for that?”
Cullen shrugged and said nothing more. His attention stayed mostly on his cards.
Then he said, “It gets you a little hot, doesn’t it. Knowing what I do.”
He looked up again, and Claire met his eyes, and she thought, He knows all about how the drug works. He knows about the side effects. The shimmers, and—
And the other one.
The second side effect.
The technical term for it, in the interrogation manual, had been arousal, but that did it no justice at all.
As one of the docs had put it, way back, It makes you horny like a high school boy feeling a pair of tits for the first time.
She stared at Cullen and understood: He knew about that effect, and didn’t realize she knew.
He was playing with her.
“It does, doesn’t it,” he said. He laughed softly to himself. “Makes you a little hot. Just a little bit.”
Claire looked down at her knees and didn’t reply. She felt her cheeks flushing, which she supposed looked like embarrassment, though it wasn’t.
She thought, The technology is a month old, and these are the hands it’s in.
Not really a coincidence, she supposed. Life was just like that. The world was just like that. There was a kind of gravity to the way bad tended to win out. Like the world was an ant-lion’s funnel, everyone sliding down toward some clicking, mandibled nightmare at the bottom.
She thought those things, and hated herself for thinking them, and hated Cullen for making her think them.
“It gets you wet,” Cullen said. “I can tell. I can smell it.”
The fact that the last statement might be true, strictly speaking, sharpened her anger to a straight-razor’s edge.
Cullen laughed quietly to his cards, and Claire clenched her fists behind her, and after a moment she felt the light-headedness taking her down again. Down and down and down.
*
“What if I am?” she asked.
Some amount of time had passed—a few minutes, she guessed. She was in the clear again, her wits more or less intact.
Cullen, still alone with her, looked up from his cards. For all his cold smugness, he looked surprised.
“What?” he said.
Claire glanced at him for only a second and then looked down at her lap. She let as much fear into her voice as she could.
“Turned on,” she whispered. “What if I am?”
Even at the edge of her vision, she could see Cullen staring at her. She felt the dynamic of the room change. Felt Cullen suddenly transformed into something all too human: a man whose libido had suddenly perked up, like a dog to the sound of the treat drawer sliding open.
While she waited for him to say something, she took in the silence of the cabin. The other two men were still upstairs somewhere. To her right—she compelled herself not to turn her head—was the window. The deep forest outside. The thin pane of glass separating her from it.
“Nobody’s around,” she said softly. “I can be quiet.”
She felt his stare even as she kept her eyes cast down. Another long stretch of time went by. Ten or fifteen seconds. Then Cullen stood and slid back his chair—quietly. He crossed to her and knelt to her eye level. He looked cold again. A taxidermied human face brought to life.
She watched him take stock of the chair and her bonds. Watched him mentally working out the mechanics of trying to have sex with her while she was tied up this way. It wasn’t going to work. It was obvious he could see it for himself.
Claire kept her eyes down and waited for him to give up on it. To shake his head and go back to his card game.
Instead he took a knife from his pocket and clicked it open. “You want to remember something,” he said. “I weigh three of you, and I’m meaner than three of you, too. Understand?”
She bit her lower lip, allowed herself to shudder. “Yeah.”