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risked coming back to Com-Mine. Tell me why he kept you alive.”
    Fortunately the functions of the control recovered their poise almost immediately. Her scream evaporated as if it had never existed.
    “Because he needed crew,” she answered. True enough to be believed. “He was alone on Bright Beauty. And I was alone on Starmaster —I was the only survivor.” False enough to protect her. “There was nothing I could do to threaten him. So I made a deal with him. He could have left me to die.” She couldn’t think—but she’d made herself ready to answer him. “He kept me alive to crew for him.”
    Perhaps because she burned for him so hotly, she seemed to see Nick struggling with himself. His scars were black with blood; everything he looked at was underlined by primal and acquisitive passion. His fingers stroked her nipple as if to wipe away the hurt. She felt a tremor in his muscles as he bent over her and lightly kissed her breast.
    “That’s not good enough.” His voice seemed to stick far back in his throat; it came out in a rasp. “But it’s a start. Right now, I want you. You can tell us all the rest later.”
    When Morn heard him unfasten his shipsuit, what was left of her mind went blank with anticipation.
    Now at last she had a chance to learn what she needed most to know about him.
    She had no conception of the romantic way her escape from Angus Thermopyle to Nick Succorso was viewed back on Com-Mine. The idea that anything about her situation was romantic might have made her hysterical.

CHAPTER        2
 
    T he first thing she learned was that Nick Succorso had limits. He could be exhausted.
    During the hours they spent wrapped around each other in her berth, their roles were ones he set for them: artist and instrument. He played her nerves as though they were alive to his will, responsive to nothing except his private touch. In her turn, she replied with a kind of blind, willing ecstasy that bore no resemblance to anything she’d ever felt with Angus Thermopyle—an abandonment so complete that she seemed transported into a realm of pure sex.
    For a while that terrified her: in one of her locked compartments, she dreaded his effect on her. If he could do this to her, if he could make her feel this and this , then she was lost, useless; she had no hope.
    But then she discovered that “artist” and “instrument” were only roles. She and Nick were acting out an illusion. She was the one with the zone implant: she could have kept going no matter how absolutely she responded to his desires, how completely she abandoned herself. Until the moment when her brain or body burned out, and her synapses consumed themselves in an endorphin conflagration, she could do everything Nick required and more.
    He, on the other hand—
    In a final burst, his intensity expended itself. Groaning with pleasure, he collapsed suddenly into sleep.
    As his passion drained out of them, his scars lost their fierceness. Without hunger behind them, they became only pale and aging tissue, old wounds; the marks of defeat.
    The artist ended, but the instrument endured.
    A little while passed before she understood what had happened. When he slumped beside her, her first reaction wasn’t satisfaction or even triumph: it was disappointment. The need which drove her couldn’t be satisfied by anything less than a kind of neural apotheosis. She wanted to ride the zone implant’s emissions until she went nova.
    But short of suicide he was the one who had limits. She didn’t.
    Because of that, the entire experience was an illusion.
    And the illusion was aimed squarely at him. She performed it for his benefit: he was its victim. The appearance that she abandoned herself, that she was wholly his, was false.
    She had that much power.
    It might be enough to protect her. The thing she’d dreamed and prayed and suffered for when she accepted the zone implant control from Angus was starting to come true.
    Then she felt a touch of