Rhodes opened his eyes and whimpered in agony. He couldn’t move. The pain almost knocked him out again.

  He felt himself locked into another upright conversion station and everything hurt. He wavered on the verge of flying into insanity and breaking down in tears.

  Masks worked all around him. Wires and tubes went into every part of his implants.

  The minute he opened his eyes, he interfaced with the rest of his subordinates. They were all alive and locked into conversion stations alongside him.

  Their stations covered one wall of the Masks’ lab. It was the same lab where the Masks kept the battalion when they first captured Rhodes and his subordinates.

  All seven of Rhodes’s subordinates moaned, grimaced, and howled in agony just as bad as the torture Rhodes was going through right now.

  The eight SAMs interfaced with the battalion at the same time. The SAMs were the only members of the battalion who looked even remotely calm right now.

  Thackery sobbed outright and even Dietz bit his lip. His eyes darted around all over the place looking for some way out of this.

  Lauer bellowed in torment at the end of the line. Rhinehart kept his head turned to one side, but he couldn’t hide from the interface. His face contorted in terrible shapes and he had to clamp his lips shut tight to hold back misery.

  “Good morning, Captain,” Fisher murmured. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid it isn’t such a good morning—as you can see.”

  “Fisher….” Rhodes choked and broke off.

  He wanted to say so many things, but he couldn’t say any of them without completely losing his mind.

  He wanted to beg Fisher to help him—to do anything to end this nightmare.

  At the same time, Rhodes wanted to ask Fisher to just take him offline—to take both of them offline. Rhodes couldn’t handle this anymore.

  Fisher’s features pinched. It was the most genuine expression of sympathy and compassion Rhodes had ever seen from anyone.

  “The effects of the drugs are wearing off,” Fisher went on in that hushed undertone. “Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that your systems are developing a resistance to the drugs. The Masks have been increasing your dosages for days now. You may have noticed that the illusion has been cracking more easily lately. Your system is acclimating to the drug. They don’t produce the same effect, not even at higher dosages. In fact, it seems to produce less of an effect the more the Masks give you.”

  Rhodes gulped down despair. He’d begun to suspect something like that.

  Knowing it did nothing to ease this agony. The physical pain barely overshadowed the mental anguish and emotional upheaval tearing him apart piece by piece.

  Rhodes tried to distract himself by checking his subordinates again. Oakes locked his mouth shut and outright glared at the Masks working across the lab. He drilled them with narrowed eyes and he kept gritting his teeth in fury.

  Coulter stared blankly into the distance, but his lips trembled with unspoken words. His cheeks kept twitching and his eyebrow jumped all over the place.

  Rhodes cast a glance at Fuentes. He kept his eyes closed and his body rigid in his station.

  He was definitely awake. His features moved just enough to tell Rhodes that much. Fuentes worked hard to keep his face passive, but he failed in the end.

  Fisher read Rhodes’s mind again. “Fuentes refuses to interact with anyone from the battalion—including Van.”

  “He’s trying to return to Stonebridge,” Van added.

  “How can he return there if the Masks don’t send us there?” Murphy asked.

  “He’s trying to pretend,” Van replied.

  Wild snorted. “Good luck with that, kid.”

  “You don’t have to be unkind,” Koenig countered. “We all miss Stonebridge.”

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “I don’t,” Wild snapped. “That place was a stinking cesspit from hell.”

  “We all enjoyed it while it lasted,” Dash chimed in.

  “Did you see me enjoying it?” Wild fired back. “Not all of us had our heads five feet up some whore the whole time. You go back there and enjoy it, you worthless piece of ….”

  “Wild!” Fisher snapped. “That isn’t necessary. Each of us has our own way of dealing with the circumstances.”

  “I swear, if that little shit messes with us one more time….” Wild snarled.

  “Why don’t you talk to Lauer about that?” Murphy interjected. “He fired on those buildings, too—or he tried to.”

  “You better not say a goddamn word against Lauer,” Wild spat. “The Masks controlled him. You all saw that.” He turned on Van. “You look me in the eye and tell me Fuentes was under the Masks’ control when he attacked the captain—or when he tried to destroy those buildings and hit Rhinehart instead—or when Fuentes fired on those Ravagers. You can’t tell me that because he wasn’t under the Masks’ control. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

  “Stop…..” Rhodes husked. He could barely make himself heard. “Please….. stop……”

  All the SAMs jolted and stared at him, but they all fell silent. Rhodes couldn’t cope with this. He couldn’t handle listening to the SAMs argue amongst themselves—not now when the battalion was at its lowest point.

  Some of the Masks came over to check something or other on the battalion’s stations. Rhodes tried not to look at them. Was one of them B?

  None of them was B. B wasn’t a person. It was just a computer program—like Fisher.

  Rhodes tried to shake that thought out of his head. B was not like Fisher. Rhodes trusted Fisher. Fisher was in this with Rhodes. B was Rhodes’s enemy.

  Rhodes turned to look at Fisher in The Grid. Fisher studied Rhodes’s spasming face. Fisher understood better than anyone.

  The other SAMs kept a close watch on each member of the battalion. Even Van looked concerned.

  She had a right to be. Fuentes obviously didn’t trust her. She was the only SAM in the battalion who didn’t have her host’s unconditional trust.

  Rhodes felt sorry for her. Being Fuentes’s SAM would have been a catastrophe.

  She tried her hardest to restrain him and get him to do the right thing, but she couldn’t control him. He’d overcome her too many times.

  She just kept trying, though. Rhodes had to respect her for that.

  The Masks tinkered with Rhodes’s station. Two of them left to go mess with Rhinehart’s station.

  He didn’t look any worse for getting hit by four Vipers. The guy was a beast. That was for certain.

  One of the Masks stayed behind and kept fiddling with Rhodes’s station. He looked away and waited for that Mask to leave, too.

  Just when he thought his life couldn’t get any worse, an even more brutal wave of torturous pain hit him in the head.

  He writhed in his station and almost tore himself out of the prongs. “Captain!” Fisher yelled. “Captain—stay with me! Hold on!”

  Rhodes barely heard him. He bellowed in agony. The Mask at his side frantically pushed every button on the controls in front of him, but instead of making the pain go away, it spiked off the charts……and then Rhodes woke up in the Fort Bastion barracks.

  He sat up on the edge of his capsule. The rest of the battalion sat at the table eating dinner.

  Coulter and Dietz both glanced over when Rhodes sat up. “Captain?” Coulter asked. “You okay?”

  “I…uh….” Rhodes ran his fingers through his hair. “I guess so. What happened?”

  “We got out of the hospital and you were still in your conversion cycle,” Oakes replied over his shoulder before he forked a load of carrots into his already over-stuffed mouth. “Dr. Littlejohn said you would be out for another twelve hours. You shouldn’t be up.”

  “Why did my cycle end, then?” Rhodes stood up. “I feel okay.”

  “You took it pretty hard when those Ravagers blew up,” Lauer added. “We didn’t think you’d make it.”

  Rhodes sat down at the table and checked each of his subordinates. The SAMs all occupied the interface in their usual way.

  None of Rhodes’s subordinates appeared to have suffered any damage from the battle, either.

  Fuentes sat at the table eating with the others. No one indicated by word or action that he’d ever done anything to cause any concern.

  Thackery smiled at Rhodes when he looked at her. All the SAMs seemed to be behaving normally, too.

  Coulter handed Rhodes a plate loaded with food. “You must be hungry, Sir. You need to build yourself up.”

  Rhodes put the plate down on the table in front of him, picked up his fork, spiked a piece of honey-glazed chicken, and lifted it to his mouth.

  Before he could eat it, he slammed back into the lab with wave upon wave of pain sweeping through him. He jerked against his prongs.

  Five Masks rushed over to him all working around him at once. He didn’t even try to find out what was happening.

  “The effects of the drugs are breaking down!” Fisher told him again over the noise of his own tortured howls. “You’re hallucinating! The Masks are trying to send you back into The Grid, but it isn’t working!”

  “The same thing is happening to Lauer!” Wild interjected from a different part of The Grid. “His pain response is approaching the danger zone. I don’t know what will happen if the Masks don’t get it under control.”

  Rhodes couldn’t answer. He fought to break free from the prongs even though he knew he couldn’t.

  He didn’t even want to. He just had to struggle against something—anything to get away from this feeling that his body and mind were flying apart at the seams.

  The Masks rushed all around him. They didn’t make such a fuss over Lauer even though he’d been yelling his head off ever since Rhodes regained consciousness.

  Rhodes gritted his teeth and felt them grinding in brutal agony. He had to do something—something desperate. He had to stop this. He had to find a way to kill himself. It was the only way to end this nightmare.

  He heard Fisher and the other SAMs trying to talk to him and each other over the noise.

  Thackery broke down crying even harder when she saw Rhodes in trouble—or maybe those sobs were her way of dealing with the same pain driving her out of her mind.

  He jerked against the prongs one more time, and in a flash, he switched again. He found himself lying on his bed in his house in Stonebridge.

  End of Chapter 27

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

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