Children of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy

Edie willed him to stay down. Perhaps they’d stop if they thought they’d injured him. Perhaps they had injured him.
    “Tell me what you did, Edie, and this will end.”
    “Why are you doing this?” she yelled. “The deal was you wouldn’t harm him.”
    “I’ve made no deals with you. And he’s just a serf.”
    Edie kicked out again, repeatedly. This time Theron backed away until he was out of reach.
    Finn had pulled himself upright again. For a brief moment he looked directly at the camera in the upper corner of his cell, his face creased in pain and confusion. Blood trickled from his nostrils. Edie wept, ashamed of herself for doing so in front of Theron, even more ashamed that crying took her concentration away from what the cypherteck was doing.
    “Stop it!” She screamed it over and over until her throat was raw and all she could do was whisper. “Please…” She hated how pathetic she sounded. Pleading for mercy wouldn’t have any impact on Theron.
    The trigger fired again. Finn crashed against the bulkhead, his mouth open in an unheard scream of pain, and he crumpled into a heap.
    Theron’s relentlessly calm voice broke through Edie’s misery and helplessness. “We can keep doing this for as long as it takes. The doc informs me it will knock him out eventually, but there’s always tomorrow. Now, you meddled with Scarabaeus all those years ago. Tell me what you did to that planet. And tell me how I can control it.”
    Edie sank back in the chair as defeat rolled over her. She’d spent her life coming to the slow realization that the Crib was using her. She’d prepared herself, over the past two weeks, to return to that life. But that had nothing to do with Finn. He’d been illegally and unfairly incarcerated by the Crib, and now it was torturing him because of her .
    She closed her ears to Theron’s continued cajoling and increasingly demanding questions. Breathing hard, she stopped screaming and stopped struggling. Instead, she concentrated on the cypherteck. Blocking the next attack wouldn’t be enough. She had to stop him . Wipe him out.
    He scuttled around her barriers, nudged between the tiers that she’d riveted together, and ripped them apart. Edie had to jump all over the place to fix the gaps. Her brain felt raw, ready to split open as it pounded with every rapid heartbeat. The cypherteck searched for another way in. He’d find it soon enough. Edie had never battled a cypherteck in her head before, but she recognized this as one of the best—as good asshe was, if less rigorously trained. She got the impression he ran more on instinct, which made him unpredictable. Where had Theron found such a naturally skilled teck?
    Where had Natesa found him? Perhaps the cypherteck was on the Learo Dochais , someone working with Natesa on Project Ardra.
    Edie sent a trace down the link to assess the box at her side. It had storage capacity she could use. As she formed a plan, her body shivered uncontrollably with the effort. She cut off that awareness. Only two things mattered: stopping the cypherteck from triggering the jolt, and cutting the connection altogether.
    There was only one way to do the latter. She needed to catch him off guard, and that meant letting him do it one more time. For a few seconds after each jolt, he’d eased back a little.
    Edie sorted through her splinter and gathered together the biggest, fattest chunks of random data she could find. She tagged them and lined them up—and then, with a concerted effort that tore out her soul, she dropped her guard and let the cypherteck have the trigger. He slammed a shrill cacophony into Edie’s splinter that seemed to set it vibrating at a high frequency. Disoriented, she could have done nothing to stop the next jolt even if she’d tried. The cypherteck triggered it.
    She didn’t watch the screen. She couldn’t bear to see Finn stumble and fall again.
    With the cypherteck off guard, she let the data chunks flow down the link and