“Show me the good part again.  The bit where the guy kicks my guy in the face.”

To the degree that I was able, I nodded.

That wasn’t much.  I had precious little motor control, these days.  Her Company Men had been aiming to leave me unable to move my legs, but spinal destruction wasn’t exactly a precise science.  I’d been losing functionality by degrees ever since, and now I was nearly a statue.

I reached into my gift, took the feed from Dale and rolled it back up again, looping it around the moment when the Union man had kicked him in the teeth.

She grunted, a dull, masturbatory sound.  She ground the broken pool cue that She was using around, issuing a longer grunt.

I kept still, leaving her senses linked to Indulger’s past.  I knew what would come next.  Prevailer would want to hit someone, to watch them hurt, and there was no one else in the room.

Sure enough, I felt Her fingers in my hair a moment later, pulling my head back.  She loomed above me.

“Show me something good”, She said, eyes thick with desire.

I’d been through this before.  I couldn’t save myself what was coming, not the ever escalating search for her particular brand of imagery.  Not the sympathetic assaults on my person.  Not Her perpetually startled fury when the nerve damage that she’d inflicted on my kept me from responding to her torments.  Knowing it was coming didn’t make it any better.  The possibility of Torturer floated before me, before I turned my mind aside.

I tried to cast my mind away, as She began to grind again.  I filled Her senses with every scene I’d ever recorded that had satisfied Her in the past.  It was immensely difficult, keeping the ‘good parts’ coming without distracting Her by switching things up too quickly, or annoying Her by lingering too long.  It required immense concentration.  But I had something now that I’d never had before.

Hope.

Greatly daring, as She began to grunt in sympathy to the blows that were being dished out in the visions that I showed Her, I used my gift on myself.  I took my sight, took my sound, away.

I took myself to an earlier part of the conversation, that I’d carefully distracted Her from paying attention to.  To where I’d been outed, where the Union learned that I was Linker.  To my only hope of salvation.

If that knowledge had left the room, and I had every reason to believe that it had, then very soon I would escape from Her clutches.

Presuming, of course, that the dead were beyond Her reach.