“Tell me about your life,” said the deep voice.

Kalo flung her head back and closed her eyes, expecting another flying web to appear, this time crushing her out of existence.

“You don’t have to be afraid of that any longer. Now, about your life.”

Kalo released the muscles in her eyes enough for a squint. “I don’t remember.” Really, she couldn’t remember. She remembered the web. And the darkness that followed.

“I said forget about that. Here. I’ll help you remember.”

Perceiver1’s leathery giant index finger pressed a button and the room exploded with light. A low hum melded into a loud prolonged braying noise that echoed from the glass-like acoustic material specially designed for the holding cell.

The ricocheting blasts of noise smothered Kalo’s frantic scream. Reduced to a maniac in her sweat-drenched undergarments that resembled a second skin, she smashed her palms to her ears.

“Now don’t do that.” The chair under the massive man gave an unforgiving creak as he reached for the dial. When he turned it, the deep crushing call escalated and the vibrating acoustic material pushed the limits of the fasteners that held it in place. His prisoner’s hands fell limply to her sides.

Kalo, her eyelids now convulsing, drifted in and out of consciousness. When her head fell forward, she glimpsed the blurry puddle below her and somehow felt shame. Her midsection tightened to try to hold in the contents of her lower intestine. Slobber ran down her chin. Her head weaved and fell back against the table when the noise abruptly stopped.

Perceiver1 said, “So you did hear that.”

Kalo opened her mouth to suck in a minute’s worth of lost air. Her eyes begged.

“Here.” Perceiver1 pushed a button and a blast of air hit her in the face. “Now, let us go back to my first question.”

She choked down the cool offering. When she stopped coughing, she whimpered.

“Kalo, only one time will I ask a particular question. Would you like me to repeat the question?”

“No.”

“Alright then. I need your answer. You’re not stupid. You know what I want from you.”

Kalo did know. Could she skip the humiliating part without him knowing? No. He also knew.

She screamed, “No!” Like a cornered animal striking out at the last moment, she attempted to kick off the straps holding her body to the upright metal table. She used every bit of her strength to show her defiance to the devil she couldn’t see until her muscles gave out. Her legs clanged against the upright table and she hissed in pain. “I will never tell you.”

Perceiver1’s eyes glowed red at his pathetic prisoner behind the mirrored glass. “You’re not special. Every few subdomains has at least one like you.” He pressed the button and the sound began where it had ended.

This time, the ever-weakening Kalo crushed one ear against the metal to shield it from the awful sound. She let out a silent scream.

Perceiver1 released the button when his captive’s eyes flickered and rolled into the back of her head.

No blast of air this time. Kalo’s chest heaved in what she needed.

“Kalo, tell me about your life.”

Kalo raised her hands a few inches and they fell. She blew at the tickling drool around her mouth and chin. Her body trembled and she feared she might not catch her breath next time. With a cracking voice, she said, “I will, but please tell me why I’m cursed like this. Please help me.”

“I can only help you if you tell me about your life.”

“I will. What do you want to know?” She knew.

“Good. Now tell me when you first heard the call from the drone.”

“It was two thousand four hundred and seventy-two days ago.” She spat a heavy drool as she spoke. She shook her head. “No, seventy-three.”

Perceiver1 sat back. They all remembered exactly how many days. Some even remembered to the exact hour, but none so far had come close to this many days. “What age do you believe yourself to be?”

The young captive shook her head. “I don’t know.” Her chin fell to her chest and she blew a large amount of drool onto her soaked chest. “Maybe twenty-three years.”

Perceiver1 checked his records. “Very good. Now tell me about the exact moment you remembered.”

Kalo’s mind wrestled with itself over how to tell her story. He would surely punish her for lying. Maybe it wasn’t technically lying if she left out the humiliating part, but the story didn’t exist without it.

“Don’t leave anything out. Tell me everything, but first, I need you to look at me.”

Kalo lifted her bobbing head, struggling to look past the broken young woman in the mirror while gathering the strength to show some sort of defiance to the dark devil on the other side.

Perceiver1 cracked an amused smile at this citizen’s feeble show of resistance. “Excellent. Now you may begin.”

“I remember seeing the ceiling.”

“You were in bed?”

“Yes.”

“Was it dark?”

“No.”

Perceiver1 closed his eyes. The light of that early morning filtered through the thin curtains of his mind. “Continue.”

“I was in bed.”

“We’ve already addressed that. Something woke you.”

She nodded.

“What woke you?”

Kalo’s eyes popped open and widened. “You already know.”

“Would you like me to press the button again?”

“No.”

“Then tell me what woke you.”

Kalo lowered her head, gathering the events of that morning in her mind. She muttered something unintelligible. The man in black behind the mirror already knew. In fact, she had already felt the devil’s grasp tugging away at her memory. His eyes could see her in bed that morning. “My-”

“Louder!”

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“My shorts felt strange.”

“In what way?”

“They were wet.”

“They were tight?”

She shook her head. “Just wet.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know. Tell me.”

“I don’t know. I just woke up that way.” She took a deep breath and gritted her teeth. “You tell me.”

Perceiver1 ignored her demand. “What else felt strange?”

Kalo’s heart raced. Inside her head the man in black’s voice said, “You had better tell me.”

She lifted her head and stared blankly into the mirror again. “You already know. Why are you doing this?”

“The bed was also wet.”

Kalo closed her eyes in anguish and shook her head.

“Don’t lie to me,” echoed inside her head. She nodded.

“But it wasn’t water.”

She shook her head.

Much of her story sounded familiar to Perceiver1, although this citizen was the first to describe the situation in bed. He checked his notes. The common age factor between citizens that could remember, the age at which they began remembering, predominantly began during their passage to adulthood. He felt it a waste of his time to delve into the details of her cursed life as she had put it earlier or how she had the wherewithal to build a device that could paralyze a drone. No, those things didn’t satisfy his hunger. The shadow of his Feeler crept toward her.

“You were confused but not yet afraid.”

“Yes.”

“When did you become afraid?”

“When I saw the first drone.”

“You’re lying.”

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t the appearance of the drone that frightened you.”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“You are in no position to demand anything. If you want to leave here, you have to tell me what exactly frightened you.”

Kalo heard the strange buzzing sound of that first drone rising over the corn. Her trek through the corn. When it hovered over the field where it had stopped every day since. It was so…

“Majestic?” Perceiver1 laughed.

Kalo slammed her head back against the metal far away from this monster, this memory thief.

He said, “Don’t be frightened by my ability. I don’t find it particularly special.”

“How?”

“There is no how. There is no why. There just is. You see, we share at least one thing. Or should I say you and others like you share at least one ability with me. Would you care to guess what yours is?”

Others? There are others?

“Yes, there are. Now tell me what frightened you.”

As the shadow passed over her, Kalo felt the prodding from the dark man not in her mind, but in her midsection. “The call from the drone.”

“Correct. Although in other subdomains, the calls come from towers.”

She flinched. “Towers? What?” The shadow quickly swallowed the surprise and curiosity from her. Her skin tingled.

“You are immune like me. But that’s not entirely what’s different about you. You have another special ability that you know nothing about. That’s why I sent one of my underlings to collect you.”

Kalo thought for a moment. Maybe.

“Maybe, if you found out how to use that ability, you could destroy me and others like me? You could destroy everything the Syndicate has built? No. We can’t allow that. We won’t allow that.”

Kalo gritted her teeth and raised her head. Her eyes knew where to focus on the mirror, where to make eye contact with her captor. “I would if I could.”

Perceiver1 grinned as streams of light ignited inside the shadow as it devoured the anger and revenge from her center. “I know. I don’t blame you. Now let’s go back to that sound. What does it do to someone who can remember?”

With her last spark of defiance snaking away into the darkness of the shadow, she said, “I’m through talking to you.”

Perceiver1 held the button for less than a second. The piercing shot of noise threw her against the table and she mouthed a few meaningless phrases. All signs of resistance disappeared.

“Tell me what it did to you knowing you would hear that sound six times each day. A reminder that you would have to endure. A reminder telling you that you were alone.”

“But I fixed it so I wasn’t alone. Bish, the others.”

“For a time you weren’t alone. I’ll give you that. You did a fine job, but it wasn’t fine enough. In your mind, you still heard the call from the drone reminding you that any minute you could be alone again. What did that do to you?” He tapped the button.

Kalo threw her head sideways and her lungs emptied. She caught her breath. “I, I don’t know. Stop.”

Perceiver1 withdrew the shadow of his Feeler and plunged it like a dagger deep into his center. He held it there letting the pressure build. “I have a button. Would you like me to press it again and remind you of that sound?”

Kalo shook her head, her hair spraying sweat onto the floor. “Please.”

Perceiver1 sat forward. “I want to help you. I thought you could remember. Have you forgotten your pathetic life already?” His voice grew sharper as he spoke. “What is it like being surrounded by citizens with the personalities of the corn they grow and the dirt they till? And you, with nothing to turn to, nobody to reveal your secret to, nobody to ease your fears.” He bared his teeth. “There is no shame in being afraid. You were afraid. Were you not?”

Kalo bit her parched tongue and nodded.

“What I can’t understand is with all of those other things to fear, why you were so ravaged by the calls from the drone.”

“It reminded me to be afraid.”

“Right. So you built something that would stop that fear. I find it strange that citizens like you spend their time between the calls trying to forget the only constant in their lives that they have already overcome. If I were so lucky to be you, that very fact would be my reminder. That wasn’t enough for you, though. Instead, you chose to not let it go.” He pounded the table with each word. “You are a greedy coward!”

Kalo sank back against the table as best she could, bracing for another blast of the deafening sound. “I couldn’t control my fear at first. Then I had to find a way to take it away.”

Perceiver1 growled, “You didn’t have to control anything. You didn’t have to take it away. You only had to live. Can’t you understand it wasn’t your actions with the device that drew us to you? It was your constant fear. Fear that you might not stop the drone. Fear that your friends would be lost. Again, you have an ability and, I might add, a technical aptitude that not many others have, yet you still hurt yourself by throwing self-control by the wayside.”

“I’m sorry.”

Perceiver1 raked his fingernails across the table. “Sorry for what? Being one of the lucky ones? Would you rather have lived the life of those around you? Not knowing of your existence? The drone flushing you clean six times each day? Did you think about that drone every single moment of your time of remembrance?”

“Yes.”

Perceiver1 clamped his eyes shut. He swallowed his saliva and bared his teeth, digesting what his Feeler fed to him. “I can’t imagine being you. How during the last few moments each time, your heart would beat, your breathing would become shorter, and your entire body would brace itself for the inevitable. Then later on you decided to take it away not only for yourself, but for your neighbors. And then celebrating each time you disabled the drone. You selfish fool.” When he opened his eyes, the enormous pressure in his center exploded, thrusting his Feeler directly at her. This time, the shadow didn’t creep. No, its thin line of darkness stabbed into her midsection.

Kalo threw open her eyes. A strange force inside her fought against the stinging invader. For a moment, she believed it might win. She stretched her legs toward the floor, but her feet still dangled inches away. She glared at the mirror. “You and whoever else is with you will pay for what you have done.”

“Now the coward decides to fight?”

Kalo raised her hands and made two fists to fight the dark devil. The growing force inside her shielded her from his intrusion. When she finished with him, she would go after the one who controlled the birds. She would wrap her in her own giant life-squeezing web. She closed her eyes and willed her center to fight with everything she had.

The dark man’s voice boomed inside her head, “Why didn’t you fight when you were out there living? Think how if you had been stronger, if you hadn’t cowered in fear, you wouldn’t have thought about what you otherwise might have forgotten before it came back to you at the very moment when-”

Perceiver1 slammed his fist down on the button and Kalo’s center melted. The loud roar bored through her eardrums, the final wave rattling her teeth down to the roots. Her body rocked back against the metal, her arms driven backwards in an unnatural way. Her brain registered none of the pain caused by her overstretched shoulders because it was no longer her pain to feel.

In fact, as Perceiver1 looked into the girl’s eyes, he feasted, his ravenous Feeler gorging on two thousand four hundred and seventy-three days’ worth of her consciousness, fears, and pain. When he finished feeding on his collection of this citizen’s most private angst, he sat back, closed his eyes, and licked his chops. With a satisfied appetite, he released the button.

For Kalo, an inner peace replaced the pain and suffering. She would no longer be a prisoner to the drone’s call. Had the drone even been real? Drone? She looked around the room. Where was she? She started an incoherent conversation with herself in the mirror until her consciousness returned.

“Kalo, can you hear me?”

She twisted her head each way looking for the source of the voice. She found herself in the mirror. “Yes.”

“You are cured.”

“I am?”

“You are.”

“Cured of what?”

“It doesn’t matter. You will now be released back to the Farming Subdomain where you will become an asset.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“A simple thank you would suffice.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Perceiver1 disabled the microphone and pressed a button. He then stood as Vic, a young woman dressed in a white coat, entered carrying an electronic tablet in her trembling hands.

She said, “Quite a breakthrough. We’ll prepare her for a return to the Farming Subdomain.”

Perceiver1 placed his hand on Vic’s shoulder. “What breakthrough? We’re not even close to our objective.”

“But-”

“There is nothing else to do. Here.” He handed her Kalo’s remote control. “Take it to our labs. They will know what to do with it.”

“What about her?”

“Drain her and then burn her body.”

Perceiver1’s smart device buzzed inside his shirt pocket. He tapped open the messaging application. It read, “Perceiver2’s GPS unit malfunctioning. Standby for contingency.”

Vic examined the device. She then peered through the glass at the defeated young woman.