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agonizing pain escalated. Images faded. New,
foreign ones took their place. Not memories. Mechanical parts, spinning in 3-D.
A complicated model of a machine rotated and reversed back. Formulas, but not
ones she’d studied. Kryptonite.
    Wait, what?
    Glowing green tubes flashed again, stacked into a pyramid on a
floating pallet. Oh, they were supposed to be stuck into the machine, on the
underside. But how did she know that? The concept just appeared, almost as a
memory, but she knew it was right.
    How? Why?
    Just stop , already .
    Whatever the aliens’ goal, they were going about it the wrong
way. Blinding pain made it impossible to think. Ashley had plainly never given
her mom’s migraines enough sympathy.
    Groaning, she shut her eyes, but it didn’t help. Being trapped
on the table wasn’t nearly as bad as being trapped in her own mind. Even on an
alien planet, she couldn’t escape her past. And she’d managed to run away to the
one place she couldn’t escape from herself either. No escape—a punishment for
not belonging.
    The probe clicked a couple more times. Images from her real
memory began flashing again. Of her in costume on the set. Reading through a
revised script. Driving, dancing, taking a shower. Other mundane things. She
tried to think about purple cows to prove she could. The image appeared and was
promptly swept away.
    But not by her. The octopus.
    It was almost...rifling through her brain, like its slippery
tentacles selected and then discarded images. Every passing second, she became
more aware of the separation between her own conscious thoughts and the foreign
presence.
    The probe retreated into the ceiling. The pain lessened to an
almost bearable level. Shuddering, she fixed her pupils on the closest alien.
“Let me go.”
    Great, racking coughs followed her terse command, grinding her
ribs against the restraints. This alien planet was destroying her skin, and
David Renner would have a conniption when he saw the condition of his lead
actress. How long would it take for the bruises to fade? No makeup artist in the
world could cover all of them.
    The alien’s mouth stretched into a thin, unhappy line as he
consulted the thingamajig in his hand. He loomed over her and his breath
whooshed across her face, warm and icky. Mating ritual? Dining ritual? She spit
at him, but missed. What she wouldn’t give for a tire iron to smash in his alien
head.
    How dare he shove a jacked-up corkscrew into her nose and slice
up her brain like an amuse-bouche? Or put weird alien formulas in her mind. Or
whatever they’d done. Her memories belonged to her ,
and only by not thinking about all the bad stuff in there could she get through
the day.
    The cosmos had conspired to teach her a lesson and she got
it—she could run a kajillion miles but she could never truly be rid of the past,
no matter what, because the ugliness lived deep inside and was a part of
her.
    The alien tapped some more on his device and spoke in a low
voice to the other one in an unrecognizable language. More tapping. The clamps
holding her hostage vanished.
    Now was her chance. Someone around here was going to pay for
this. She poised to spring up, desperate to escape her captors. With or without
clothes.
    Her vision went black.

Chapter Three
    From the sanctuary of his office, One frowned over the reports streaming in from the various teams.
Little of it satisfied him. He tapped through the text and ignored the
escalating thump of his heart.
    Not one team had produced results. The team processing the
expert in theology noted experiencing a rare issue with the implantation. He’d
never seen it happen during his tenure but a predecessor had documented a
similar incident where the implant fused incorrectly due to the Mora Tuwa’s
enlarged corpus callosum.
    One bit back an unprofessional
word. The king would not be pleased to hear they’d lost a subject before
harvesting the anticipated knowledge, especially on the heels of the first
issue. A