Numbness.

It cascaded over Solana in sheets, trickling through and over her mind like the water from her baths in Corezo had over her body. She went to sleep, she woke up, she relieved herself, she ate. The world moved around her, and she trailed around its edges. She was a ghost, a phantom that ...

Disgusting. Deplorable! How many times in Solana's life had a peon in such a lesser position dismissed --

the thought stopped cold.

Right. Of course. They were equals now, or something similar and not worth thinking about. Mouth open to protest, hand creeping close to perch on her hip: Solana ...

"Solana," she snapped. The whiplash between the place she'd recently made for herself as ant beneath the boot of Kamesh and the person she'd been for so many years of her life was extreme. It made her dizzy, and her face went lax as she struggled between the reaction the brat provoked and that which ...

That was the question, wasn't it? From the mouth of a prostitute. Solana's ears rang with the question, and for a moment the pert way it'd been asked made her spine stiffen. Who was she? She was Querida Solana Beraza de Morua, assistant to the Spymistress of the Morua Duchy of Corezo! She was an ...

"Will you do it, or won't you?" Solana's expression was a tizzy of browbeaten stress, not an uncommon one for a slave. Her tone, however, was almost entirely irritation.

It was almost as if she was a passenger in her own mind, watching the scene unfold with a curious sense of dread and horror.

Wrenched away from the drudgery her life had become, Solana was forced to look at Stella. Really look at her. What she saw wasn't reassuring. It was a necessary thing for spies to be focused, and able to seek out the answers their Spymistress needed. Those questions roared out of the pit she had ...

Where will had ceased to function, training took over. The choices of words that fluttered around 'vampire' were not something Solana even bothered to notice. "Are you sure ?" Her voice dropped to match Stella's. "I need you to be sure."

The days spent tallying numbers and reading through the villa ...

Instinct made Solana look to the threat, to Stella, as she stumbled sideways.

You're fine.

That had been what Stella had said. You're fine? You're fine. What was fine? The laugh started in her throat, and she didn't hear what Stella had said at first. Because no, everything was not fine and had ...

Solana flinched. Her eyes darted back and forth: towards Stella and away. "R-report," she said. Anything to get the girl to go away.

There was a strangeness to how easy it was to let Hameh decide everything. There had been a time when Solana had felt only derision for the slaves who kept their eyes down, for the servants whose worth was measured in their ability to remain unnoticed. Had she thought them so alien? Perhaps it wasn ...

If it was not for the nerves that hummed and fluttered within Solana's mind, she might have found the work to be soothing in its repetitive certainty. Math always had been one of the staples of her job, balancing reports and overlooking expenditures. As time had passed, she had relegated much of it ...

The slave girl was gone, and there was nothing more for Solana to do but return to the place of her imprisonment. To return, and receive her lashing.

As she walked to her cage the sensations of her body became all the more real. The prickle of sand underfoot became individual pinpoints of ...

Solana immediately turned her head towards the noise, though the source was out of her sight. She'd been staring at Stella coldly. Though she had not reacted too badly to the punch, it would remain a black mark upon her use of Stella, affecting how she would treat the girl when she no longer had use ...

Solana wasn't smiling now. "Information," she said heavily, "is the key to the success of any assassination. I will need to know the routine of your master as well as my own. What substances do they abuse, if any. Who they talk to. What their habits are. Anything that can be exploited. We must look ...

Solana reeled back, her arm coming up in a defensive block for a follow up strike that didn't occur. Her mouth opened in a snarl, and the pain prevented her from immediately hearing what Stella said. Not that it mattered, at this point. What did Stella have to say that would be useful? She was raw ...