Aberrant

Chapter 60

Piercing pain. Claws inside her skull.

Jinx wanted to scream, but her breath wouldn't come. Worse than the pain was the feeling of something digging inside her, peeling back some inner skin to expose raw nerves and—

Memories. They replayed on fast forward, each torn from her, just as they had been in the holding cell on the Silver Dawn. No recall cascade. A psychic vivisection. And she was helpless to stop it.

She couldn't move, couldn't even open her eyes—not an effect of the Xykeree's paralytic. The hulking, armoured exskel that had emerged from the roach army outside hadn't needed drugs or physical tech to restrain her.

Just her mind.

Fresh pain shrieked through her as the thing clawed out more memories: Channing finding the dosing implant; Cryver's taunting message about family secrets; his claims about Loni Koel and Ollyus Drune not being her parents. Early childhood memories haemorrhaged next.

It felt like her brain was being torn out.

Just as she was about to pass out, the excruciating pain ceased, her inquisitor pausing to chew over something it had found.

She gagged, tried to draw breath while she could. Tears burned her eyes. God. If this was what Cal Tarak had gone through, she understood why he'd screamed across light years. She'd rather the thing just kill her. The feel of it gripping her mind, digging inside—

Note for subject file. A low, buzzing 'voice' cut through her thoughts—a sense of meaning that coalesced into words, like a backwards translation. Locate Selona Corellen, a.k.a. Loni Koel. Interrogate regarding initial loss of unregulated subject. Terminate post memory extraction.

Jinx froze, horror strangling her. The thing in her brain; she could hear it now. It was talking to itself, calmly plotting murder and taking notes about a "subject"—her. It considered her its experiment. It wanted to track down her mother so it could question her about—

A cargo container. An unconscious human female, bleeding internally after childbirth. The infant taken.

Jinx's pulse turned ragged. That memory—vivid but devoid of emotion—had been its. It had been tracking her mother. Her real mother. The woman who'd raised her, Loni Koel, had what? Taken her sister's child? Left her sister to die? What the fu—?

Dizzying knowledge flooded her mind. Her biological father had been Rha Si. Contraceptive controls had failed because of a medical trial he'd been involved in. She'd been allowed to be born as a test, to see if Rha Si altered genetics could be passed on through natural reproduction. She was a unique specimen.

One requiring study.

Visions of endless pain—Cal's and other Rha Si's.

Terror clamped her chest. The need to claw away from the thing inside her, to climb out of her own skull, rose on a wave of blind panic. She tried to 'shove' against the thing gripping her mind, block it—get it out. It was going to rip her apart, mind and body—

A warning thrill raced through her, derailing her mental rebellion. But before she could understand that inner alarm, an eerie sense of calm flowed through her, stealing the urge to fight, to scream ... to care.

She was nothing, just an inferior life form struggling for air. All she needed to do was breathe, not resist the thing in her mind or the knowledge coming to her.

Subject self-regulates psionic load. Another note for her file. Substantial unconscious filtering. Actively blocks signals; perceives them as symptoms of neurodegenerative illness. Telepathy negatively affected. Conclusion: subject self-limiting. Able to link via nexus, but connection is involuntary, transitory, and unstable. Minimal containment required.