One of the hackers held his cellphone up to Kat, taking video footage of her. He looked over at Tasha. “Brand is on Facetime.”
“Let me see him.”
The young guy showed her the phone. She saw Brand’s true face for the first time, young and bearded, a bit plump. Glasses. Tear-filled eyes behind the glasses. “Thank you, Tasha,” he said, his voice catching. “Let me see her again.” The guy pointed the phone back at Kat’s body as she was carefully settled onto a bed. “Oh baby…my poor baby…you’re safe now…my dear girl…”
. “Okay Tash,” Misha said. “Let’s get you offloaded now, and get those drones back to the warehouse.”
She hopped to it, carrying her own body off Orlando’s transport craft, trying to treat her own body as though it were a bit of goods, a delivery she was making to those who would properly care for it. Precious cargo, she thought. Misha repeated her words.
“Truly precious cargo,” Orlando added.
Epilogue
Three weeks later.
They got away with it, at least as far as they knew. All the logs seemed in order for the drones, thanks to Misha’s insider connections and Brand’s hackwork. Misha knew that his superiors might find out about it someday, and might come for him in the night, but he tried to remain fatalistic about it. And on some level he didn’t care. The deed was done, and the girls had been saved. One of whom he had once loved, and always would, really.
Kat’s body in the real world was still a wreck. She could barely communicate. But in the world of Brutalia she was a beautiful bard, a glorious warrior woman who adventured with Brand the Dark Knight whenever he could find time to enter that world. During the day he cared for her, having moved her to Sydney, Australia, with Kat’s mother’s permission, and having arranged with a local care facility to monitor her well-being as he watched over her in his smallish townhouse. They had what they had, love in a dangerous, exotic world, and a mundane togetherness in the real world. And she would improve in this real world, with time, the doctors assured him.
Tasha hadn’t seen Orlando in weeks. She lived in St. Petersburg, with her mother. She had found a job in a women’s clothing store and saved what money she could. The equipment to enter Brutalia was expensive, and the machine she had been using while Ýuri’s prisoner had been shut down by its owners after Yuri’s death, now a worthless piece of hardware. In another two months though, she figured, she would be able to afford the Brutalia download and immersion connection, as long as she remained frugal. She sent messages to Orlando through Misha and Brand, asking him to wait for her. She would see him again, she told him, outside the grand entrance to the dwarven halls. “Tell him I’ll be the one in the metal lingerie,” she had texted Brand. Brand had written back within the hour and said Orlando would meet her whenever she asked, wherever she asked, and always would.
The End
Bounty Harlot Page 13