sleepy scream

Compared to Donna's pretty prison, Peg's incarceration over at PharmSupply had been much more futuristic and steely unyielding 'cause of both the interior architectural elements of the space and the officious register of her jailers. They were at work, bottom-lit, ghoulish, suited up; the rooms and interfaces boldly angled out of indestructible polyfab. The optimistic, gothic high-ceilingedness suggested a society of builders that would see their curving hallways with concave base molding tunnel through a millennium.

Once as she was taking in a breath between screams, Peg heard a guardian yawning. More splendid a range of emotions could not have dropped from Mthyuh's craw just then. Peg was grateful as if to a nightingale through her cell bars, but also miffed. Was the hard young mercenary jaded, bored. Did his employer weigh that sound down on him with labor, true as her gasps in chains? Did he intentionally hurl a sucking insult.

Then they went back to turning the big wheel of the rack. The basic mechanics had not been altered for centuries, though this was a modernist rethinking. Someone obliged by pulling her hair back so hard as to lift her head, and she could see the level of industrial streamlining possible in cast iron, the high-gloss cleanability of an aquamarine Dyemenkote dip.

Phyllis, embedded