Feverish Morality

FOURTH CHAPTER: FEVERISH MORALITY

Two days had passed in a strange, heavy neutrality. Daniel didn't connect to anyone. He didn't launch the tether, didn't seek the violet heat, and didn't indulge the passenger. He simply worked, his hands moving through the mundane motions of a handyman's life, but his eyes were a curse. Every person he interacted with, be the clerk at the hardware store or the neighbor checking his mail, bore that pulsing, violet socket at the base of their skull. He saw them not as people, but as invitations he was choosing to decline. That needed to decline. 

He spent his nights in the cabin, haunted by the memory of Mara. The way her mind had charred under his touch, turning her into a hollowed-out thrall, made his stomach churn. And then there was Sarah. The image of his own mind-clone defiling a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy, treating her sacred biology as a mere playground for sensory gluttony, felt like a stain on his soul. He wondered if he could ever truly live with what he had become, or if the "gift" was simply a slow-acting poison for his humanity.

On the third afternoon, the silence became too loud. He picked up his phone and dialed Mara’s shop, intending only to hear her voice, perhaps to offer a clumsy apology for what he had done to her.

"My Lord," Mara answered on the first ring, her voice breathless and filled with that terrifying, automatic adoration.

"Mara, I... I'm calling to ask for your forgiveness," Daniel confessed, his voice low. "For what happened in the back room. For the way I changed you."

He heard her soft, mechanical chuckle through the receiver. "You do not need forgiveness from your servant, Daniel. You are my master. Everything I am is yours to command. There is no guilt in the sun for shining."

Daniel cringed, the absolute submission in her tone making his skin crawl. He wanted to hang up, to run back into the mountains, but the curiosity, the need to understand the beast inside him, held him steady. He kept talking, admitting his fear of the counterpart and the depravity it displayed.

***

"Perhaps, my Lord, you are looking at this through the wrong lens," Mara suggested, her voice shifting into a persuasive, soothing rasp. "You are fighting the power because you do not understand it. …