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were working for would have to try to contact me again.
When I finished he said, "It fits. The woman who is pretending to be Fedara
Contei is another representative."
"Pretending?"
"Fedara Contei is what she called herself, but that isn't who she is."
"Who is she?"
His lips pressed into a thin, hard line. "I can't find that out anywhere.
She's erased every record of her original self from every database I can find.
She's as invisible as the three men."
"If her cover is perfect," I said, "then maybe she's Fedara Contei." I didn't
trust her and I still wanted to like her. Dammit, that didn't make sense. I
didn't know why I had found her so compelling, and I
couldn't imagine what might have made me want to bare my soul to her, but I
couldn't deny that I
wanted to find out she wasn't lying to me. Maybe I was hungrier for a human
relationship, for human touch, than I'd realized.
"No. You'll have to see the doppler holo. You'll have to see what she did to
you." Badger stared into my eyes, his own more troubled than I had seen them
since we fled our homeworld.
My stomach knotted and ice crystallized in my blood. "She did something to
me?"
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Lisle, Holly - Hunting the Corrigan's Blood
He didn't say anything.
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We dropped through the grav-chute to Deck Two and took the first right off of
the central corridor.
Badger already had the dopplerchip set up, with action paused at the moment
where Fedara Contei and I
got ready to leave the Commissary. The holo-room projected a life-sized
tableau: me and the woman who was perhaps not Fedara Contei posed amid dozens
of non-players. In the glossy charcoal gray of the projected images, I didn't
look so tired, and she didn't look so beautiful. I perched on the edge of my
favorite chair and got ready to see myself turn and walk away.
That wasn't what my image did, though. It took a step forward and wrapped my
arms around Fedara's waist, and Fedara dragged her fingers down the line of my
spine and kissed me. I slammed my hand onto the chair console and the image
froze. I stood and turned to face Badger. "That isn't what happened."
"Sit down, Cady," he told me, his voice soothing. "It happened, and it isn't
the strangest or the worst or the most unlikely thing that did."
"No," I whispered. I probed and prodded at my memory, trying to bring the
scene before me to mind. I
might as well have been fishing in deep space; I wasn't going to get any
bites.
"Sit, love."
I sat.
"Come home with me," Fedara said, and I watched her fingers trailing tiny
circles around the small of my back.
My image smiled at her, and nodded, and leaned forward to kiss her. "I can
spend a little time with you,"
it said.
"I didn't do that," I told Badger. "Dammit, dammit, dammit! I went straight to
the cubicle where I was working, and then, because I was so exhausted, I came
home."
He shook his head, face grim. "Keep watching."
I kept watching. I watched myself follow the stranger home. I watched her sit
me on a chair, as if I were an automaton, and then I watched a slender,
graceful young man step out of another room. I sat in that chair, staring
zombielike at nothing, and the man said to Fedara, "You got her."
And Fedara said, "I told you I would," in tones so bitter and angry I expected
the man to recoil.
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Lisle, Holly - Hunting the Corrigan's Blood
Instead, he smiled. His smile was sweet and innocent, as beautiful as any I
had ever seen. "My beautiful love. You'll do anything for me, won't you?"
"Go to Hell."
"I am the Prince of Hell, my darling. I bring Hell with me."
"I brought her to you. Are you going to let me die now?" Fedara asked him.
He laughed. "Only when you're a good girl. You're going to do something else
for me, and when you have done that, if you do it exactly the way I tell you
to, I'll let you die." He leaned against a wall, ankles crossed, hands shoved
into pockets, unshakable smile on his handsome face. "She's going to fall in
love with you, and she's going to take you aboard her ship. You'll go with her
wherever she goes, and you'll do whatever she wants you to do, and when she
completes her task for Crane, you'll go back with her.
You'll kill Crane, and then you'll kill her. And then I'll set you free."
"Why make her fall in love with me, Danniz? She doesn't go that way and
neither do I. Why not find some man to do what you want? Or do it yourself?"
"This is much more amusing for me." He left the room and returned with a small
syringe.
Fedara hissed. "That isn't ?"
"Of course not." He cut her off, his expression disgusted. "I don't need to
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