"Val?" The pretty little brown-haired woman smiled nervously. "Mister Grey will see you now."
The party was in full swing. Angel-headed scenesters were dancing to the DJ beat in the halls, lounging on the sinuous couches, feeding each other strawberries and pills. Grey's newest conquest wore her collar as though she were not acclimated to it. Like all the others, she had been his type — images, more or less faithful, of the crack whore who had been his birth mother.
"Thank you," said Val, who rose from her barstool and began to high-heel-clack towards the main corridor.
The sub followed her. What was this one, number eleven? Twelve? As though pressured to speak, she said to Val, "I just wanted to take this opportunity to say that I love your magazine."
"You and me both."
"Is it really true? About Jared and Jennifer?"
"Babe, it's all true."
In the next moment, she would have been asking Val for anything from an autograph to an introduction, but they were at the double doors. Grey himself swung them open from inside. He must have been watching on a camera.
The sub bowed her head and scuttled off.
"Which one is she, your twelfth?" The rotunda was empty except for the two of them.
"Fourteenth," Grey said airily. "Come, I would like to show you something."
He had showed her many things since she had profiled him as Seattle's Most Eligible Bachelor. She was not to his taste — too blonde, too far out of college — but they had given each other a good time in other ways.
He waved her over to a pedestal, atop which rested a device of some kind, made from what looked like very old wood. Metal designs had been pressed into its surface.
"This is new," she said. And not, she thought to herself, like any of the art objects that Grey purchased for public or private consumption. Not sleek and showy enough for the office, not starkly functional enough for the playroom.
"It's a puzzle box," he told her. "Go ahead, give it a try. You won't break it."
It was wide at the ends, tapering towards the middle, like the suggestion of an hourglass. She noticed a strip of wood that looked like it might turn, and she gave it an experimental twist. The click was deep and satisfying.
Grey said, "And you would not believe the package who delivered it. The kind who just needs to lose her librarian glasses, if you get my meaning."
Soon Val was holding the device in one hand and adjusting its contrivances with the other. "Harvey sent me the most lovely gift basket the other day," she said. "Wanted to thank me for that story about how that girl had a breakdown and needed to move back to Dallas. Poor things, getting discovered is just too much for some of them, you know?" She noticed two thin lines of metal and twisted the two halves of the device to align them. The two ends popped out like mushroom caps on springs. Val jumped a little. "I think I got it," she said. "Do I win a prize?"
Grey smiled. "You and me both." He inclined his head and gave a little wave with his fingers.
Val moved her right hand to one of the protuding end-caps and squeezed it back together. Then she turned the puzzle box over, took hold of the other cap, and gave it a solid push.
The blade shot through her palm. Her body convulsed in a spasm of pain that progressed into shivers and tremors as the blood pooled around the wound.
"Motherfucker," she spat.
She tried pulling her hand off the blade. That made the pain worse. Now the room was beginning to spin.
Bells, she thought. I hear bells.
Grey stepped backwards. Val tumbled to the floor. "Motherfucker," she said again, much more weakly.
Then another pain, slicing into her thigh. Val screamed, a long, sobbing noise. More agony, in her other thigh, in her shoulders, in her wrists. And now she was above the floor somehow, hanging in midair.
She could just barely see Grey, through the fog and the stabbing flares of white light. He was standing in the middle of the rotunda. His arms were spread wide. "Grant me audience! Grant me your boon!"
The voice came from everywhere. "What gift do you seek?"
I'm a god-damned sacrifice, Val realized.
The voice was insistent. "What gift do you seek, Christian Grey? Lament? Lore? Lauderant? Liminal? Lazarus? Leviathan?"
Grey called to the skies. "I want sensation! I have tasted all the pleasures of this world, all the pleasures of the flesh. I want more! I deserve more!"
"You choose... the Liminal configuration, Christian Grey? Once given, our benevolence cannot be returned."
"I choose the Liminal configuration!"
"So noted," said another voice. A woman's voice, flat and dry.
Christian spun about and stared at the new arrival.
"Hi there," said the petite woman with long brown hair. She turned from Christian and looked up at Val. "I have to say, your social circles don't include very many nice people, Grey."
Someone else had entered the room. Tall, thin, graceful, modified. They glided to the petite woman and briefly grasped her hand. They lifted a pair of fingers, as though in a salute, and turned them as though issuing a command by gesture. The chains hooked into Val's flesh lifted her higher into the air. The pain was beyond endurance, but Val had no choice but to endure. Then they faced Christian Grey. Their voice filled the rotunda once more. "The Liminal configuration. Your wish is my command."
* * *
"Honestly," Daria Morgendorffer said to Jessica Rosenthal, formerly submissive number fourteen, handing her a cup of tea. "You can do better."