Magnus stomped into the demon's sanctum. He half expected her to be playing with herself in her slime pool again, but that didn't matter at this point. The last of her enemies had fallen, and it was time for her to pay up on her end of the deal.

"You have done well, my good and faithful servant. You are to be commended and rewarded."

Magnus had been so wrapped up in his own hatred and pain that he hadn't noticed the changes to the room. Where the slime pool used to sit was a square banquet table. Two chairs sat across from one another. A pair of beaten, terrified human servants watched as De'Shak pulled the skin of a third around herself. Her left side no longer bore the hideous scarring he'd given her, but the scales on that part of her body puckered, obviously thinner than elsewhere.

Even through the whip of pain that De'Shak had never lifted, Magnus smiled at the thought. He looked across the spread on the table. Savory smells filled what remained of his nostrils, the smell of bacon, sausage, and whole roast pig filling the room. It had been days since his last feeding; he'd supplemented with internal stores since then. His mouth watered at the thought of freshly cooked meat, and he took an involuntary step toward the table.

"My monster, have your manners left you entirely?" The demon waved a hand at him, but nothing happened. De'Shak's brow furrowed, and her eyes glazed with the look he recognized as someone checking data via an implant of some kind. After a few moments, a disconcertingly girlish giggle escaped the demon's tusks.

"Oh, my. I never turned your lash off, did I? Well, I suppose you've earned a reprieve."

The pain that had been Magnus' constant companion since he last met with De'Shak disappeared in that instant. He struggles to stay on his feet from the sudden surcease of agony. Moreover, he found himself clinging to his hatred of his host. She and her sister demons had destroyed his world, taken everything he had ever loved. They were his enemies, and he could not forget that, even for an instant.

De'Shak waved her hand, the idle gesture wafting the smell of fresh cooked meat to Magnus once more. "Eat, my monster, my general, my champion. You have earned your reward."

Before he could think to resist, his implants took over. The moment the pork hit his mouth; he stopped fighting. The meat was tender and succulent, the fat crisp and sweet. Even the bones were no match for his augmented jaw, and he snapped them and sucked forth the rich marrow. All the while his demonic mistress looked on with a small, pleased smile. As he stuffed himself, she took small, almost dainty bites, tasting each tray. The only thing she ate more than a token of was a bowl in the center of the table, which held some kind of strange, thick pudding. With all the meat on the table, he wasn't even tempted to try whatever delicacy his mistress consumed.

Long before he'd cleared the table, his gut was full. Replete, yet disgusted with himself for taking her bribe without thinking, Magnus pushed himself back from the feast and turned his eyes to the Imperiatrix.

"I destroyed your enemies, Demon."

"Yes, you did. I am pleased with you."

"I care nothing for your pleasure. I want my children back."

Magnus hated the way the demon's face twisted into a parody of thoughtful consideration before she spoke. "I just realized; I said nothing about your wife."

"She was..."

Memory swept over him, leaving him staring blankly as images of the final battle against the demons flashed before his eyes. The huge biomechanical Guards, each with more armor than a tank, the force of their weapons shattering his vehicles and turning the men within to so much carbonized char. The horrific Researchers, few in number, huddling out of weapon range, piloting the huge sledges loaded with stolen booty. Leading them all, the beautiful, terrible demon that drove them all, armored and armed beyond even the Guards that surrounded her.

Worst of all was her voice. Somehow her voice could command men to drop their weapons, climb from their vehicles, and abase themselves before her. She killed the lucky ones there and then. The unlucky ones she played with, leaving them broken and abused. In the final battle, the medics puzzled out how that worked. They discovered the pheromones she emitted, mimicked the frequencies of her voice, and entered the field of battle.

They hadn't informed Magnus. The reason became obvious as they advanced, unarmored, unarmed, undressed except for the pheromone sprayers and speakers each carried with them. As the sounds reached them, the Guards stopped firing. When the pheromones rolled over them, they advanced, their weapons still silent, their intent changed in an instant from murder to rape.

Their demonic leader resisted, blasting at her own forces, until the leader of the medics, Magnus' wife Andrea, swayed forward into her line of sight. The demon stopped firing long enough to grab Andrea up, pull aside the lower portion of her own armor, and thrust herself inside the medic. A single scream escaped her before her mouth started to spew blood, but that didn't slow the demon's frenzied thrusting.

Enraged, Magnus rammed his fighting vehicle into the madly coupling demon, firing his plasma cannon the moment he rammed her. The backblast dismounted the weapon and flash fried his driver, but all Magnus saw was the image of his enemy defiling his love. He grabbed at his sidearm and leapt from the commander's cupola.

He tried to leap. Something snagged on the damaged coaming of his cupola hatch, and his leap turned into a tumbling roll. He landed at the demon's feet, staring up and back at his fighting vehicle. Blood streaked the side of the light tank; it ran down the side, washing away the plasma burn. The last thing Magnus saw before blood loss stole consciousness away was his wife's still face as her body landed in the mud beside him. The last thing he heard was the demon's laugh as she strode away.

"My monster, did your meal disagree with you?"

Magnus came back to himself staring into the eyes of the demon that had killed his wife and destroyed his world. "You killed her."

The demon's square pupils slid open, her brow ridges rising as they did. "How did you know?"

"I watched you kill her," he nodded at the demon's still healing wound, "just before I did that."

If she took offense at the mention of her injury, it didn't show. "Oh, no. She lived through that battle." De'Shak ran a finger through the bowl of pudding, and then licked it clean. After savoring, she continued. "She was harvested." Another pause, another taste of pudding. "She became my Prime Researcher." She ran a fingertip through the pudding again, this time painting Magnus' still lips with it. He licked them clean reflexively; they tasted salty, the texture of the pudding a little slimy. "She created you, my monster."

The demon stood and walked back around the table, idly picking up a thin haunch as she did. She pulled it through the pudding then ate it, sucking bone, meat, and marrow down with a single gulp.

"She complements your children well."

Magnus stared at the demon, perplexed. She smiled back, clearly pleased with herself. "Well, my monster? Do you like your reward?"

"You promised me my children, demon."

The demon's hands swept out, her gesture encompassing the table. "And I have given them to you."

The truth struck Magnus like a hammer, driving him to his knees. He wanted to vomit, but his implants would not allow him to lose precious food. He wanted to attack the demon in front of him, but his implants would not allow him to. He wanted to die, but the implants would keep him alive no matter what he did to himself.

"You... monster." The word was inadequate, but nothing in his life had prepared him for the depravity that stood before him now, laughing.

"You are so precious, my general. My people have the excuse of our shattered world for our behavior, but you... what excuse do you bring?"

"I didn't know. You know I didn't know, demon!"

"Ah, youth. So much you didn't know. Yet, had you been starving, you would have eaten anyway."

"I was starving, Demon!"

"Hold still." Bound motionless by nothing more than De'Shak's word, Magnus could only watch and listen as she walked behind him, pausing briefly to flip open a panel and examine something. "You were. How precious and perfect. Now, I tire of you thinking that I am some broken remnant of your superstitious past. I am anything but. I am an Imperiatrix of Terra, and I am, or rather, would have been, your future."

"Lies!"

"Finish your food while I tell you a story."

Despite all he could do, Magnus' traitorous body moved to the table and began shoving food into his mouth, working through it one sickening bite at a time.

"You see, Magnus, my people are not demons. We were, long ago, like you. Mortal. Vulnerable. Weak. Human. Then, in a time that is lost to antiquity, we discovered how to tap into the very stuff of atoms for power."

"Atomics?" scoffed Magnus through a mouthful of food.

"No, you ignorant ape. We discovered how to break down the very subatomic particles themselves. We gained power beyond our wildest dreams. With that much power, we learned ways of converting energy back to matter. We reshaped our world and we reshaped ourselves. We, the Imperiatrices, made of Terra a perfect garden.”

"But we did not know, or did not care, or forgot that the very reaction that enabled us was our death knell. It was a chain reaction; one we could tap but could not control. Even now it tears at the constraints we put on it, trying to consume our world. If we do not feed our beast, it will consume us.”

"And that we cannot allow. We never found a way to travel to other stars, but we learned to travel to other Earths. With the awesome power under our tenuous control, we ripped open a portal to another world, leaving our own Earth for that new one. The primitives living there looked on us as gods. We lived as gods until we realized that the very gate that had been our salvation was our doom. The reaction had spread to this new world.”

"So now, instead of running, we feed it. We harvest world after world, carrying off everything we can to dump into our well of power. Yours was just the next in line. I feared that next time, I would not have the power to join my sisters, and I would be sacrificed.”

"But now, thanks to you, my faithful general, I am the most powerful Imperiatrix on this planet, and my Researchers even now work on a way I shall free myself from this endless cycle.”

She stepped back around the table to where he knelt, stuffing meat into his maw mechanically, clinging to her words as a distraction from the horror on the table before him. As she passed, she ruffled what remained of his hair.

"Eat up, my monster. My remaining sisters conspire against me. I suspect I will need your strength soon."

***

Karin blinked herself awake. The icons on her virtual desktop floated before her, a few of them clamoring for her attention.

The first one was an alert from her VR Rig. The rig shipped in with a supply of consumables, like glucose for the feeding drip, but like most such included supplies, she’d only received a starter pack with the rig. She'd gone through half of the available materials in one Cat's Paw session. Another session like this one and she'd wind up starving again.

She could take care of that easily. The consumables for the rig weren't cheap, but they were designer name brands. Karin knew the same materials were used to feed research animals, so she put in a bulk order from a supplier she'd worked with in college. That done, she decided to fill her stomach. It wouldn't solve the problem entirely, but it would buy her time until she started starving again.

She keyed the disconnect from the rig and tried to sit up. Cold dread grabbed at her gut when her body didn't respond. She tried again, pushing herself to leap from the couch. A small virtual window appeared in front of her.

"Disconnecting support apparatus. Please wait before exiting the Virtual Reality Cradle."

A small hourglass popped into being below the message. Sand poured rapidly from the top of the glass to the bottom. After a moment watching it, Karin guessed she had about ten minutes until her couch released her. Taking a deep breath, she tried to banish her fear. It didn't work. She looked to the other flashing icons for a distraction.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

She noticed she had an audio message from Harry.

"You got some huge stones, Kitty Cat! You got me dead to rights; I joined the Pax Pack to eventually take a run at the Agency, and now you go taking a solo stealth run. Man, wait till I tell the guys!”

"Don't worry, I'm not going to clue them to your real-life secret identity, but if you pull this off, you're going to be a legend. You'll be famouser for this than for your acting if people find out about it. People have been trying to crack the Agency for... forever now, but nobody's been stupid enough to try it solo for a long time, and nobody's ever been crazy stupid enough to try it solo with a Neko. Hell, nobody I know would let a Neko along on a raid."

Harry's diatribe ran down for a bit, as if he'd said everything so far on one huge lungful of air and was trying to catch his breath. She listened to him wheeze for a few moments, unwanted panic and hope warring within her. Harry's voice shook her out of her fugue.

"Anyhow, Kitty Cat, I'll be popping out of Cat's Paw every half hour or so. If you get in, message me. The Pax Pack and I might be able to help you get out. Be hella fun trying, anyhow.

"Later, Kitty Cat."

With that, the message ended. Karin lay there, staring at the pouring virtual sand and thinking about the sudden surges of hope and fear she'd felt.

The source of the fear was obvious. If she let Harry know where she was, she would be famous again. People would remember her. New people would find out about her. All of them would want a part of her. They would pick and pick and pick until nothing remained. This time it would have nothing to do with her work, and her mentor wouldn't come for her. Neither would Vi. She'd be all alone against the piranha, and they would each tear a tiny shred from her until she died.

The hope was harder to figure out. She sat there poking at it for a while, but she made no headway, and after a few more minutes the sand ran out. A small chime sounded in her ear and the virtual desktop cleared from her eyes.

She stood carefully from the chair, expecting the weakness that plagued her last time she stopped gaming for food. Her head didn't spin. Her knees didn't buckle. She felt strong, rested, and healthy. The only vestige of complaint from her body was a mild hunger, as if she’d skipped a meal.

The kitchen and living room lay in the same state she'd left them, the dishes of her meal with Valerie still sitting on the stove and table. Without stopping to get wrapped up in her fear of and pity for the other woman, she gathered up the dishes and pots and started them soaking in the sink. While they did, she went back to the living room and tidied up the disheveled couch, turned the chair back upright, and cleaned up the remains of food that had fallen to the floor.

Karin returned to the kitchen and washed the last remains of her time with Valerie down the drain. With those gone, only a faint smell of sweat remained, almost but not entirely masking the smell of decaying roses coming from the compacter. She surprised herself when, without thinking about it, she inhaled deeply, savoring the good and bad of both smells without getting caught up in the memories associated with either.

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she could heal. Maybe in time she could come to like the smell of roses again. Maybe, in some far distant, unimaginable future, she could trust someone enough to believe they could have sex with her and still love her, rather than being enthralled by her mods.

Of course, it was also possible she was having delusions from too long without solid food.

She threw a meal together with what she had in the kitchen. Ramen, chicken stock, and a touch of cooking oil infused with Thai peppers was good enough to fill her stomach, and the remains of the bottle of orange drink did for a beverage. Karin ate standing in the kitchen, scooping warm broth straight from the pot with a small ladle, sucking up the noodles that came with it.

"Yeah, if all those guys who did me could see me now, they'd kick themselves for letting such an incredible homemaker get away."

Karin snorted at her own humor. After a moment, she chuckled at the mental image of men queuing up for her cooking. The chuckle turned into a laugh, and before she knew it, she leaned against the counter, clutching at her stomach as peals of laughter wracked her frame. She slid down the counter, frantic glee echoing through her tiny apartment. Her laughter faded into giggles, which slipped seamlessly into quiet sobs. She sat there weeping quietly as her food went cold.

Eventually she had no tears left to cry. She was who she was. She might heal someday, she might not. If she cut herself off from life, she would never make progress, but if she pushed herself too hard, she could reopen her old wounds. There was nothing left to do except live the life she had as well as she could live it.

Her face sticky with syrupy tears, Karin pulled herself to her feet and found a damp cloth. She expected her hands to shake, but they remained rock steady as she wiped her face. The ramen had gone cold while she wept, but she choked it down anyway. She washed it down with the remains of her orange drink. By the time she finished she had stuffed herself to bursting with noodles and peppery fire. Replete, she dropped her dishes into the sink and staggered back to her rig. She slipped into it and started up Cat's Paw. Before she logged in fully, she checked the options available on the login screen. She had work to finish, but she didn't want to leave Kittul in the drop ceiling of the Agency until she was done. She also didn't want to spend an unknown amount of time crouched in a drop ceiling herself.

A setting labeled 'immersion' proved to be what she sought. At the lowest setting, she would have ghost images of what Kittul experienced. The default was the highest setting, where she could barely tell what her real body felt. She slid the control down to the bottom and logged in. Ghostly dust motes floated in her vision, and she saw a faint rectangular glow where her tablet PC flickered as it wormed its way into the Agency's network.

Satisfied, she cocked Kittul's ear, closed her eyes, and opened up Karin's work. It was all there waiting for her, but something nagged at her, kept her from getting into that Zen state where things flowed from her subconscious directly into the code without conscious intervention. After a few minutes, she pushed her coding tools away in disgust. She let her gaze drift across the constellations of icons floating before her, deliberately refusing to focus on any single one.

Her gaze kept wandering back to her email. She flicked it open, and the message from Harry blinked at her. He'd bumped the message once while she ate. He seemed serious about his offer to help, as well as his commitment to waiting for her response. Karin brought up her email editor and started typing a reply. She didn't trust her voice after her extended crying jag.

Harry,

Kittul is in the Agency now. I'm downloading some files from their computer network. I'll let you know if I need help getting out.

She stopped, a wicked grin stretching muscles unaccustomed to the expression. She accessed the storage in her head. Kittul's sensory memories waited there, crisp as any of romps Kent had convinced Karin to record. This time, though, her audience wouldn't be sniggering about her behind her back. This time they would want to talk to her, not touch her. This time they would smile at her, not leer at her. This time would wash away the taint Kent had smeared across all her previous accomplishments.

And fairies would finish all her work and spin gold into straw.

Still, it would be nice to have someone admiring her for something she did, rather than something she was. She offloaded the sensory recording onto her local rig, simultaneously clearing the space for the genetic data she planned to steal from the Agency. With the recording on her local drives, she pulled up a stream editor and clipped the relevant portions into a discrete file. That done, she returned to her email to Harry.

Oh, since I know the rule is 'pics or it didn't happen'...

At that point, she attached the file with her memory of sneaking straight up the Agency's driveway, stealing the Agents' cars, and using them to smash through the physical security of the building.

I'll ping you if I need you for an extract,

Karin

She paused a moment, savoring her triumph. Before she could give her rig the command to send the message, Karin reconsidered. She'd been famous before. It had almost destroyed her. This time the fame wasn't something manufactured by a manipulative bastard, intended to make as much money as possible from her exploitation, but remembered fear still lurked. Her virtual hand hovered over the send command. If she sent that, Harry would contact her the moment he got the message. Hell, he might wind up cutting in with a priority message like Vi had done. It wasn't every day someone cracked open a new area in a game as big as Cat's Paw.

Karin sighed and moved her hand away from the send command. She had work to do. She could fire off her message when she finished Kent's job. Maybe she'd do it if she got stuck again; Harry's enthusiasm might give her a boost if she got tired. At worst, Karin promised herself she would send it once she got out of the Agency.

Leaving the message open and ready to send, Karin dove back into the genetics of her new creation. Freed of distraction, she lost herself readily in a universe of proteins and enzymes, conjugate bases and histones, and shapes and charges and molecular moving parts. She lost herself so completely she almost forgot the image hovering in the back of her mind; the image of a face both beautiful and terrifying, a form both elegant and fearsome, a voice to make poets weep and madmen laugh with joy.

Kent had taught her one lesson so well she would never escape it. She was very good at ignoring unpleasant things while doing something she enjoyed.

***

Karin heard the ping of Kittul's tablet and, without thinking about it, dropped back into Cat's Paw, shifting to full immersion as she did so. After making sure she remained undiscovered in her hideaway above the ceiling, she checked the progress of her hacking tool. To her surprise, she now had full access to the Agency's system. Her tools reported no passive alarms triggered; no active scans alerted to her virtual presence. Secure in her hidden nest, Kittul surfed through the Agency's network, looking for genetic data.

Her electronic minion found the data she sought seconds later. Suspicious about how quickly she'd found it, she started surfing through. Before she'd done more than a cursory scan her automated network search turned up three more sets of data. She kept reading, analyzing the data she'd found first. Before she finished with the first set of genetic data, she had one more set, as well as some idea of why the data was fragmented.

Politics. She hated politics. The data was broken into five different sets because there were four different groups within the Agency collecting data. The 'official' data set was the most comprehensive, but double checking it against the other four showed her where the groups doing the gathering had, either deliberately or by accident, put incorrect or incomplete data into the main database.

She didn't have time right now to do a full analysis, but even her cursory scan told her she’d found some good information here. Some bits and pieces, especially the Neko genes, looked remarkably like the codes Kent provided for her new contract. That made her incredibly suspicious, but the data was exactly what she'd been looking for when she first built her data storage. First, she pulled the data into her tablet. With that in progress, she checked that her perch was secure, shifted to Neko, slipped the tablet's ear bud in, and started running the data across the screen, four crammed pages each second. While the pages flashed across the screen, a mechanical voice read out data faster than her conscious mind could process it.

As Kittul stared at the screen, her mind started to wander. Vi kept telling her she spent too much time working, too much time playing games, and not enough time out in the real world interacting with real people. Staring at the data as it flashed through her senses into the data storage in her head, she realized Vi could be right. The last time she remembered interacting with someone for something other than work or gaming was when Harry talked to her on the bus. Of course, she'd talked to him about work and gaming.

Then again, she'd never been much of a people person. As a kid, she loved science more than dolls. When she first learned about biochemistry, particularly molecular genetics, it was like coming home. She'd focused on learning everything she could about chemistry, biology, and genetics. By the time she was thirteen she'd gone looking for a mentor. It had taken her months to find him, weeks to convince him to take her on as an apprentice.

She still remembered how he'd worked with her to create her signature. Most artists could sign their creations. Even AI programmers could hide remarks in their source code. With genes, the medium was the message. So called 'junk' DNA was used to control epigenetic activity, or to help keep the structure of the chromosome properly configured. Creating a signature was really what separated an artist like Karin from a run of the mill genetic engineer working for a big pharmaceutical or agricultural corporation.

There were other differences, of course. An engineer could give a woman pink hair. It took an artist to make a woman's hairdo look so much like cotton candy that random passerby wanted to take a bite. It took an artist who was also a top-notch engineer to make sure the hair tasted of spun sugar while remaining strong enough to survive people nibbling on it.

Something in the data flashing in front of her eyes snagged her attention. She stopped the playback and paged back. One page back and she spotted what she thought were some energy-manipulating pigments. The second page contained epigenetic factors for the first. The third she wasn't sure, which meant it was either mocked up trash or something really cool. None of them had anything that should have caught her attention. She reached to start the playback, but her fur brushed the screen, flipping back another page.

Her own signature stared at her from the screen.

Before she could react, her hand completed the motion to restart the playback. Her eyes watched the screen, but her mind frantically tried to find a way to explain how her signature made it into a game. A few moments thought and she latched onto the only explanation.

Kent.

She stared unseeing as screens of data flashed past her eyes. Karin's anger overwhelmed her, and she felt the kill switch under her thumb. She wanted this data. Even if it was mocked up, it had already given her ideas. One of them might pan out, and she needed the money Kent's new client would bring in. Even if that didn't work out, the patent on macro level energy manipulation would pay her rent for as long as she needed it to.

So, she stared. Fury gave her an intensity of focus that startled her, the pages seeming to crawl past. She increased the cycle rate. Somewhere in the background, she felt the subsonic buzz that meant the data had finished loading to her tablet. With the grace only a Neko could take for granted, she slipped the tablet's network cable free and started crawling through the ceiling on her knees and one hand.

She didn't bother looking where she was going. Her extraction plan was simple; after she had all the data in her head, she would find a garbage bin in a rest room or break room, change into a cat, and get carried out with the garbage. It wasn't the classiest or cleanest getaway in the world, but it had a simplistic elegance she couldn't resist. The way Kittul had hid above a bathroom even gave her a head start.

She backtracked to the bathroom; her knees noiseless on the ceiling supports. Hidden above the tiles, she listened for a few minutes to make certain the bathroom was empty. She slipped a single ceiling tile free without looking up from the constantly flashing data and lowered herself into a stall. Halfway down, hanging from the ceiling with one hand, a voice filled the room.

"Freeze! One move and I see if enough lead can poison you, Shifter!"

A statuesque brunette shouted at her; angry face framed by a cascade of curls. Other than those basic features, Kittul noticed only two things about her; the revolver in her right hand, which pointed unwaveringly at Kittul's body; and the purple energy in her right hand, which coruscated menacingly. The Neko didn’t think, she just reacted. Her tablet flew in one direction, she flew in the other, shifting to cat as she did. The gun fired, and an electronic squawk announced her tablet dying a hero's death. Her claws grabbed at the ceiling, pulling her up. She saw the warm, safe darkness of the ceiling, and knew she was home free.

Something dark and cold slammed into her spine. Her muscles spasmed, and she fell to the ground. She bounced off the top of the stall walls, unable to catch herself. Her feet hit the floor, claws scraping at the tile. She had returned to her Neko form, but her increased speed and strength meant nothing when her muscles wouldn't obey. The spell had completely paralyzed her; she couldn't even move her eyes.

Karin heard the hammer on the revolver pull back. She had no intention of learning out what it felt like to be shot. She flicked at the switch under her thumb.

She tried to flick the switch. The spell held Karin's body as motionless as Kittul's.