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seemed to speed up again. Before I could do anything, I was blindfolded. And tied. To a chair.
    Right. He was going to die. He was going to die a slow and excruciatingly painful death.
     

Five
    My captor didn't know how to tie up women. I wasn't sure what that meant precisely, but right then I was grateful for his ineptitude.
    His first mistake was in tying my hands in front of me. I suspect he thought he was perfectly safe, because he had tied my hands together and then tied me to the chair with my hands bound, so that two strips of what felt like fabric ran over my secured together arms, one at chest height and one at waist level. Another strip of fabric tied my ankles together.
    The second mistake, of course was that chest height thing. Either the man hadn't been around many females, or he simply didn't think. Then again, didn't they say the Mules had no females? All male, all sterile with human females. Yes. That had to be it. He had no idea of the . . . ah . . . springiness of the female breast.
    I'd held my breath as he tied that bind across my chest, so it was already loose. Deep breathing and cautious wiggling made it fall past the fullest part of my breast to hang loosely around my waist. This left me free to shrug, and pull, and shrug again, till I freed my hands from the tie, now looser, around my waist. And this allowed me to bring my hands up to my mouth and gnaw through the fabric—scarf? Belt? Whatever it was, it felt like fine silk against my teeth and lips—that held them.
    Silk tears easily, once it's started to tear, and once I had the first hole in, I pulled my hands apart, till at last it tore across, with a ripping sound. The fabric fell loose, and I massaged my wrists, then removed my blindfold and untied the two binds at my waist and chest, and bent to untie the one at my ankles.
    That last one felt elastic and beaded. Having untied it completely, I brought it up near my face to see it in the dim light. It was red fabric embroidered in every possible color of the rainbow. It was either a belt or a headband, and in either case it meant the cat-critter had atrocious taste. However . . . I tested the tensile strength of the thing and it would make an ideal garotte. I tied it around my slip, to hold the halves together, as I got up to investigate my surroundings.
    I really didn't want to waste more time than I needed to, but I had learned through going off on half-setting more than once that it paid to reconnoiter and to know what I was up against. Particularly—I thought as I stretched—since I had no idea at all if the creature was human. Or quasi human. Or . . . a Mule. It was said, and it fell in the realm of legend more than anything else, that when the Mules escaped Earth in the spaceship they'd secretly built, they'd taken with them the most grossly bioengineered of their servants.
    Perhaps it was true, though enough had stayed behind to be chased down all over the Earth—hanged and burned and—for those that fell to exceptionally creative mobs—crucified publically all over the globe. The vids of the time were supposed not to be accessible unless there was need to know, but I'd defeated the security in my education computer and seen them all. And hadn't been able to forget them since. And there had been people left behind to be killed who could only vaguely be called human, such their bio-modifications. So if the Mules had taken their more bioed servants with them, exactly what were we talking about?
    If I didn't know what this . . . person/male/creature, was, then I'd worry about things that might not be within his capabilities. So far, I knew he was human-shaped, save for eyes. His hair could be some odd fashion. Humans had been dying hair presumably since they'd had hair, and I'd seen weirder affectations in the stranger parts of Syracuse Seacity. But those eyes seemed real, and he could see very well in the dark, which probably meant they weren't contact lenses or some