Birdsong filled the air, and the warm, white light of the sun filled Lilith's vision. She flapped lazily, feeling the wind rise under her wings. She floated over the earth, the warm air enveloping her in its sweet, soft heat, and letting her set her wings and glide.

Time stretched on, broken only by Lilith's silent wingbeats and the sound of birds. She could see only the white sun and the blue sky and the gauzy clouds that rolled beneath her. There was no ground below, only the wind that took her higher and higher.

She felt herself drifting, and the sun grew brighter, brighter, brighter, until all she could see was a white light. Ringing sang in her ear, overcoming the birdsong and then receded to a soft, regular hum. She blinked, and the white began to give way to shapes, figures, that appeared out of a misty light.

She wanted the dream back, but it was not real. As she opened her eyes, she could not deny the reality of where she was. Lilith stretched, expecting to feel the scabs on her back flex and crack, expecting pain. There was nothing. She was in no pain. She was warm and dry and swaddled in something that was only a little less soft than the coat of feathers she'd had a moment before.

A turn of her head revealed that she was no longer in Visage's grasp. She was lying on her back in a bright, white room. A hospital room, she imagined. Though she was a stranger to them, she knew how to identify a hospital by its white furnishings, its well-concealed holoscreens and monitors, its astringent scent.

Christopher was sitting beside her, looking smug. Lilith had not imagined that he could look so impossibly flawless again - but there was not a single mark on his ivory beauty as a testament to his ordeal. The marks of the guards' hands, of Visage's fury, had vanished. His eyes shone, his hair gleamed, and his skin seemed to very nearly glow.

Lilith wondered how long she had been unconscious - a few days, perhaps? A week?

"Precisely the person I didn't want to see," she said to him. Her voice was soft and even, which she had not expected it to be. She remembered her throat burning as she had gasped for air on that table, yet her voice gave no testament to that torture.

"Don't be cruel, Lilith," he retorted. Her jibe had not injured him in the slightest. It seemed to have pleased him - she always did, whenever she rose to his teasing - and he pulled his chair closer to the bed.

Lilith ignored him, experimenting with sitting up. She ached all over, but there was hardy the burning, tearing pain of the ripping of flesh. Her head spun and she had barely the strength to move. Cursing her weakness, she struggled into a sitting position and assessed the situation.

"Where am I? What day is it?" she asked Christopher when she could not deduce either from her surroundings.

"The York Health Complex," said Christopher. "Fifty-seventh floor. East wing. You were upstairs a few days ago - ICU, apparently - but they moved you here yesterday."

"How long have I been here?" asked Lilith.

"Five days," said Christopher.

Lilith started at the information. She had been dead to the world for five days, in the care of strangers. No matter how benevolent the hands that had been laid upon her were, no matter how gentle the guardian of her delicate health, or kind the steward of her care, she despised the thought ot it.

"Why so long?" she asked. She had kept a careful inventory of her injuries - surely none was severe as to warrant five days under anaesthesia. Visage had made it clear that it was not his intention to kill, but to make suffer. Her lovely flesh was too beautiful to mar, he had said.

"When they came in to get us I thought you had only fainted. Your heart stopped four times, apparently," said Christopher. He waved his hand as though it was hardly worth noting, but Lilith watched how his eyes flickered to her face. The way his face momentarily tightened was either such a brilliant counterfeit of sympathy the like of which Lilith had not yet seen even from him, or a genuine expression of heartfelt concern. The first Lilith would have admired, the second she would not have understood.

"And why was that?" asked Lilith.

"You were drugged, they said. Some nasty chemical - I can't remember the name - meant to cause disorientation and increase fearfulness. The were very surprised that with the dosage you hadn't killed you two days before they found us," explained Christopher. His tone bordered on condescenion, but had an edge of admiration that prevented it from being an outright mockery. "They kept you under while they had you on dialysis and while they treated your injuries."

Lilith nodded. She was pleased to have an explanation, it made her unease sit more lightly on her mind. "Then I take it the people who rescued us weren't kidnappers, then," she said after a moment.

"Government agents. Four of them, including a very beautiful-" began Christopher, a mischevious smirk finding its way onto his face.

"Fine," she snapped. Then, amending her tone, she continued. "Are you hurt?"

"Oh, wifely concern, is it? I'm touched," he said, and smiled. His long-fingered hand, which had been resting folded in his lap, he now pressed to his heart in a mocking display of having been flattered. When he bowed his head in false deference to her concern, she spoke to dissuade the batting eyelashes that she had any affection for him further than her job.

"The inquireries of an employee," she corrected.

Christopher pouted and when he spoke his eyes sparkled with pleasure at having goaded her. "Nothing major, apparently. A few scratches, which they healed as well as could be hoped," he said. He ran a finger across his jaw, where Lilith remembered a bruise had blossomed at the hands of one of their androids.

"Not a mark on your spotless beauty, then," she observed.

Christopher started instantly, laughing in his mockingbird trill. "My God, Lilith, I'm astonished - did you just call me beautiful?"

"Only a fool could say you are anything but," she replied, hoping to take the sumg pleasure out of him with eveneness of tone and stark honesty. "And I pride myself on my sensibility in that regard."

"Sensible, sensible Lilith," he quipped.

Lilith was silent for a moment.  

"You knew what Visage wanted, didn't you?" she said.

Now it was Christopher's turn to be silent. It had not necessarily been her intention to hurt Christopher with her words, but it was not her desire to soothe him, either. Her weapon was nothing other than truth and if it wounded him, the fault was with him, not her. He flinched as though she had struck him and she, to clarify her words, went on:

"You knew what he wanted, and you let them torture me." It was not an accusation. It was nothing other than blatant honesty, a cold statement of fact. It had no anger - anger would have been hot fury, a vivid emotion. Lilith despised the idea of giving Christopher any emotion at all.

"We're not all brave like you, Lilith," he replied. He sounded as ashamed as he was capable of. "I'm a coward by nature."

They were quiet again. The hum of the machinery and the soft sound of conversation outside the room - barely audible through the glass - smoothed over the hard bitterness of their silence.

"Do you want to know what it is?" Christopher asked after a pause that seemed to stretch vaster than the eternity of clouds and sun that Lilith had been pulled from.

"No." The word was short, and sharp only in an attempt to make its meaning clear. Lilith did not want to know.

"I don't want to have secrets from you, Lilith. I want to tell you," he said, the half-whine of persuasion thick in his voice. As always, his attempts at wheedling were never successful; they irritated where they meant to coax.

"I don't want to know," she replied. She was surprised when he didn't tell her it was her job to know - she kept his secrets, shouldn't she know all of them? She knew every other inch of his depraved being, why shouldn't she know this?

He left her in silence, for which she was grateful. There was another long pause during which Christopher kept his head bowed.

"You have visitors. Are you going to see them?" he asked eventually. He lifted his eyes to meet hers and their colour reminded Lilith of the colour of the azure sky. 

"Yes," said Lilith, after a moment. She would need to seem resilient, she supposed, and would need to play the grateful, rescued woman that was happy to be alive. "I'll need Mary."

"What for?" snapped Christopher, his clear eyes suddenly clouding. His brow furrowed and he glared, though not right at her.

"For a set of decent clothes and for some help making myself look even vaguely presentable. I am not, in case you hadn't noticed, in any state for anyone to see me," retorted Lilith. She had caught her own face reflected in the smooth chrome of various surfaces and had seen the face of a frightened, worn girl, not of Lilith Farrar.

"Then I'll have someone else get what you need," said Christopher. "I'm having all the androids sold for scrap. I'm not going to have those fucking things in my house."

"Christopher, they cost a fortune," she countered. Her tone was not so stoic as it usually was.

"They also kidnapped us," he retorted.

"They're very useful. They're valuable assistants." She crossed her hands and dared him to challenge her, which he did.

"They were hijacked and we could have died because of them!" cried Christopher as he leaped to his feet. Lilith watched his hot, fierce panic flare in his eyes as his expression flashed from anger to fear in a heartbeat. He clenched his fists and quivered all over and Lilith was instantly but only momentarily transported back in time, to holding a shuddering, panicked Christopher before Visage tore her away to torment her. "I'm going to smash them all into little pieces myself!"

"Christopher," she snapped. And seeing that her tone had had no effect, she amended it to a gentler one, the kind she had used to calm his wild terrror. "Christopher."

He ignored her and so she let her voice become soft. Her tone was as kind as she could make it without disgusting herself. She appealed to both logic and empathy as she spoke very quietly:

"Please, Christopher. Please, let me keep them."

"Are you begging, Lilith? I never thought I'd see that day," said Christopher. His mood changed instantly and astonishingly swiftly, and surprised Lilith the way a the sun bursting out from behind sombre clouds sunshine could stun her momentarily. He smiled now, and his radiant beauty was now at its height. Lilith had not seen that smile for so very long that it felt as though she had forgotten it.

She had not forgotten her immunity to his charm, however, nor had she forgotten how much she disliked being mocked.

"I'm asking," she replied, voice as icy as she could make it. She did not want her appeal to emotion to be taken as sentimentality.

You've never asked for anything before," he mused, using one long finger to tap at his chin as he musingly stared off into the distance. After a short pause, his lively eyes came to rest on her again. "Never for any gift. But you're asking for them. Why them? I'll buy you diamonds, or houses on the Riviera, or a whole army of androids. Why these ones?"

"They're useful." It was true. A pragmatic turht.

Christopher smiled now, and it was the lazy expression at which he excelled. "Have I actually found something you're fond of?"

Lilith turned her face away and said nothing. She did not want to answer him. She did not want to admit how fond she was of her androids. She expected Christopher to go on, to tease and torment her about how, perhaps, those androids were her only friends, how perhaps if she were less like an android herself she might have others she could dote upon.

He astonished her with his next words. His voice was soft, and his hand, when he laid it upon hers, was even gentler.

"You don't need them, Lilith. Everyone loves you. You may be cold to me but you're sweet to everyone else and if you would just let someone else close to you maybe you wouldn't-"

Lilith was disgusted by his attempt at advice and weary of pacifying him, and so she turned back to him and gave him the full force of the most vicious glare she could muster. It must have been horrifying, for Christopher flinched back and looked astonished.

"Leave me alone, Christioher," she told him.

She could tell he was genuinely surprised by her outburst of the emotion she usually kept concealed, as he did not mock it but instead protested: "I was just trying to be kind!"

"Go back to being a narcissistic libertine," she snarled. "It suits you better."

"Keep your fucking androids, then," he growled back. His teeth champed as he spat the rest of the words at her. "Keep them - they're just like you, aren't they? Cold and unfeeling."

"Is that meant to insult me?" she replied, her voice as even as his was spiked with cruel anger.

Christopher stopped dead. He went still and then sagged, as if the air had gone out of him, as if Lilith's response had pricked at his sides and deflated him entirely. He sat limp in his chair, his eyes lowered. Lilith understood his surprise. To a creature of such sensual pleasure, to one who thrived on the delights of the flesh and of the spirit, surely to label another as unfeeling would be the greatest insult one could give.

She allowed herself satisfaction at having won, and to soothe her husband's ego and make him bearable, she left the subject.

She set about surveying the damage done to her in the process of her interrogation, of taking stock of her injuries. Her appearance was vital, and so she needed to assess any changes in her physical beauty. Lilith was vain only insofar as her handsomeness was an essential aspect of her job. Anyone, when they lived in such proximity to the unparalleled beauty of Christopher Farrar, could hardly admire themselves with any success, and Lilith was no exception.

But Lilith had little desire to examine her own body in the presence of any other person. Too much of the independence she loved, of being the only person to lay hands on her own flesh, demanded that she absent herself to the bathroom and take an inventory of her wounds away from prying eyes.

She pushed back the blankets and with some difficulty swung her legs out of the bed. Under the gown they were bare and she noted that the skin was as smooth and pale as ever.

"What are you doing?" asked Christopher.

She ignored him as she slid forward and landed on her feet. Lilith's head was foggy and her eyes swam with light-headed tears. But she was determined, and her strength had not failed her even in Visage's torment.

But it seemed to have left her now. Her knees buckled under her and she swayed once before she collapsed. Christopher, springing lithely from the chair, caught her quite securely in his arms, holding her tightly in a firm embrace.

She was nearly overcome with disgust at her weakness. Her stomach rolled and threatened to make her purge herself of bile as she felt Christopher's arms about her, guiding her to her feet. She was too weak to move, too weak to stand on her own. She could hardly breathe for anger at herself, at her lack of strength, at her infirmity.

She was mistress of her flesh, she was the sovereign ruler of her body, she gave orders and they were obeyed - only now they weren't.

With a snarl, she used all her remaining strength to fight her way out of Christopher's arms and back onto the bed.

"Let me help you!" he cried when he lost hold of her. "Oh, Lilith, let me help you!"

She considered the proposition for a moment. It would be sensible, of course, to allow Christopher's assistance. And she needed to take stock of her injuries. So Lilith extended her hand and, taking it as an invitation, Christopher took it.

She leaned against his arm and half-limped, half-staggered towards the bathroom. She did not allow herself to fall, not even once, though she was trembling with exhaustion by the time she settled onto a seat across from the mirror.

She was about to reach back and untie her gown as far as the waist before Christopher spoke.

"Let me," he said. His fingers were nimble as he undid the ties on her gown. His touch was nearly as soft as Mary's, but warm and skillful. He had a nearly infinite amount of practice, Lilith knew, and it enabled him to unlace her gown while barely laying a finger upon her.

"Thank you," she said.

He grinned broadly. "Never thought I'd hear you thank me, Lilith." The mockery did not have the cruel edge he was often so wont to use. This was gentle, sweet, and - Lilith hardly dared to think it - affectionate.

She did not respond, but noted how his eyes shone and he smiled down at her. He was not looking at her face, but instead smiling as he helped her shake her hair forward over her shoulders. She could see how he retreated for a moment, quietly obeying her unspoken command for leeway.

She turned about, refusing to accept his help in that, and let her gown fall over her shoulders. She had been well prepared for what it might look like, and was hardly surprised. Christopher, on the other hand, gasped and then made a whine, low in his throat.

"Oh," he managed.

It was quite the sight. Her back, the smooth ivory of which had graced the lowest dresses, now lay marked with Visage's cruelty. The enhanced healing at the hands of the doctors had taken them from open sores to healed scars in a matter of days, but even the doctors' skill could not remove all evidence of torture. 

Lilith, had she had enough time, could have counted every lash she received and its corresponding profusion of marks from the bead-studded cat-o'-nine-tails. But as it was, all she could do was take in the magnitude of long, white scars that criscrossed in abundance from between her shoulderblades to the base of her spine. A few must have lain along her shoulders, she knew, and over her buttocks, but her back had taken the brunt of it.

It was not the assault on her beauty that made Lilith revulsed by the sight of it, but the fact that it indicated that someone else had been master of her body in order to give her the marks. Letting her fingers wander up over her back, she felt the distinct texture of the scars and in so doing, counted in her head the magnitude of her torment.

"Oh, Lilith, I'm so sorry," whispered Christopher.

"Yes, I suppose I am, too," replied Lilith. Her voice was serene, nearly bored. There was little she could do to modify her disfigurement and there was hardly any sense worrying about it. her beauty was mostly intact, with this blemish upon it. At any rate, she had never valued her considerable handsomeness any further than its value in maintaining her guise; since this would not reduce her station, she did not let it make her truly sad.

Turning her gaze from the mirror, she let it rest on Christopher. But he was not looking into her face. His eyes were fixed on her back and he, with a shyness she had never seen, one so starkly different from his brash swagger and his self-assured airs, laid the tip of his finger against her spine.

She glared at him until he removed it. Once he had done so, she went on.

"Now, you said you wanted to help - if you would, then, please get my comm. I shall need to ask Mary for a dress and cosmetics. And if you want me to have guests in a timely fashion, do it quickly," she said, assuming the tone she usually used with her androids.

"I'm starting to become very glad I didn't decide to get rid of those androids," he muttered.

It very nearly made Lilith smile.