Gynestar hadn't established a connection to me through our dreams since the morning I'd sent her my message through her handsome emissary. I had decided that whatever had been troubling her must have passed, and was actually beginning to doubt that there'd actually been some sort of dream link between us at all, until one night I found myself in the apartment corridor again. The bedroom end was illuminated, so I walked in there to find her sitting on an ottoman near the glass wall, looking out on the city.
"Hello, Linzi." she said without turning around, obviously having seen my reflection in the glass.
"You're mistaken. This girl is Master Zhang's slave sixty-eight." I replied "There is no 'Linzi'."
'You are Linzi, the slave girl I created from the young man you were all those months ago. The slave girl I have bitterly regretted selling to Zhang ever since." she answered.
"And why would that be?" I inquired, a little coldly.
"You might recall me mentioning at the time that I worked my 'art' on your transformation," the sad eyed She-demon replied "but I did more than that, much more. I didn't understand how much more until after I watched your assessment, but by then it was too late, or so I told myself at the time."
"Too late for what?" I asked.
Gynestar began to cry. A bubble of pain began to expand in my breast, an urge to put my arms round her and comfort her that I struggled to control.
"I decided to infuse you with a little of my own nature, to make you a more sexual creature than you already were, a more valuable slave. But to do that, I needed to temporarily join our 'natures' together." she explained.
"You're saying that you joined our souls together?" I shouted.
"Not exactly." she answered. "Demons don't have souls, what with the whole 'demonic' aspect of our natures and all. But you do, and the 'transfer' wasn't just one way. That shouldn't have happened."
"So you're saying that I'm part of you now?" I asked. "That you messed up my transformation and made yourself part-human, or something?"
"No, I'm saying that our 'natures' are so complementary, they have remained fused." she was beginning to sound a little desperate, needing me to understand. "I'm saying that I love you, Linzi."
"I'm slave sixty-eight, NOT 'Linzi'!" I screeched, "and I DON'T love YOU."
I woke up, heart hammering, mind reeling from a dream memory of Gynestar bursting into tears, her moan of pain one of the most truly heart-rending sounds I have ever heard another creature make. I lay awake, struggling to process what she had told me, examining my true feelings for her, or if I even had any at all, since I had experienced very little emotional response to anything since the night she sold me to Master Zhang. I was still considering this lack of feelings in me when Handler switched on the lights in my room to begin my morning routine.
As with Trainer, the day began with exercise before breakfast, the exercise equally intense, the breakfast equally small. As I pushed my petite body through my fitness routine, I reflected on my current internal numbness. As a child, I'd often been told that I was 'too emotional' for a boy, even by my own mother. This wasn't because I cried easily, had tantrums or even because I was easily intimidated by bigger boys; none of those applied to me. It was because I was, apparently, 'overly sensitive'; the implication being that I expressed emotion too easily, too like a girl for my own good. As I grew up, I learned to mask my emotions in a similar way to how I disguised just how much I felt like I was the wrong gender a lot of the time. It was therefore, deeply puzzling to me that now that I was a slave girl, expected to have deep emotional as well as sexual feelings, I was instead almost completely emotionless, almost like a robot. My ruminations were abruptly terminated when Handler decided I'd spent enough time running to nowhere on a treadmill for the day and ordered me to the shower. Not that they'd helped in any case. I put the matter out of my mind and pulled on the short housecoat that had been hung on the peg with my number over it, naked beneath except for my tightly clinging harness, and got busy with the household duties I'd been assigned for the day.