Queerpunk by Circlet Press

Author:Circlet Press
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: circlet, circlet press, cyberpunk, erotic cyberpunk, erotic romance, erotic science fiction, erotic short stories, erotica, erotica anthologies, erotica anthology, gay, gay romance, glbt, male male
Publisher: Circlet Press

* * * *

She came out of it slowly, pulling herself up from where she had slumped in her chair, reaching up with trembling fingers and pulling out the buds. Moving at all took almost more effort than she had strength to meet. The room was dark to her eyes. Even the shifting light seemed dimmed.

Nur had been taken away from her.

How had the connection been broken? What had it been? Had they been found? Would she hear a pounding on her door at any moment, and a gruff voice demanding that she open up and submit herself to the proper searches? If it came to that, she thought, she would take a dive out her one big window, and if she couldn't get to that in time, there was a gun in one of the drawers of her desk. She had never fired it, but she thought she could. If it came to that.

But the room was silent except for the hum of night traffic. Groundcars, aircars, after a while they all sounded the same.

Was Nur dead? Ajia closed her eyes and slid her fingers up into her tangled hair. She didn't know. She couldn't feel. She had always supposed that she might feel a thing like that, even at a distance, but...

Slowly, groaning, she pushed herself out of her chair and headed for the bathroom. It was tiny, a mid-size closet with a shower and a toilet and barely any room left over for a person. She splashed stale, lukewarm water onto her face and lifted it, dripping, to look at it in the cracked mirror.

Nur's face looked back at her.

She screamed, or she thought she did. She lifted her hands to her mouth, either to keep the scream in or to keep more like it from escaping, and in the mirror Nur did the same with her long, dark fingers. At the very same moment, Nur began to speak, not from the mirror but from what sounded like the center of Ajia's head.

Aji. Baby. Listen to me, because you're not going crazy. I promise, you're not.

"Really? How's that?" Ajia coughed out the words and hated the weak sound of them, hated how she didn't believe it, because she was talking to herself, talking to fucking voices in her head, and what else was this supposed to be? She had heard of people who went net-mad, people who just overloaded on it, people who tried to hack their way into where they shouldn't be and got their synapses fried beyond recovery, and maybe that's what this was.

But she felt something, something for which she had no word at all, but which felt like the very deep presence of No.

It's me. Pretty girl, you can let yourself believe it. It's me.

Ajia stared at the face in the mirror, the fingertips of one hand still ghosting against her cheek. She wanted to. God, she wanted to. "How?" she whispered, her voice so tiny that she barely heard it.

The card you got was more than a shield.

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