Free Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus by Mira Grant

before his delight overwhelmed him and his tail started wagging. “You’re no good at sulking, Joe,” I scolded. “If you want me to really believe in your suffering, you need to suffer for at least thirty full seconds. I’d recommend trying for an entire minute. Just for realism.”
    His tail continued to wag as his head came up off his paws. I wasn’t just back in the room, I was back in the room and talking to him. Truly, this was a banner day. I sighed.
    “You’re a good dog, Joe, but you’re a terrible negotiator. You could have held out for anything you wanted, and instead I’ve been forgiven with a tail wag and a goofy smile. You need to learn to look out for your own interests.” I opened the top drawer of my desk, pulled out a dog biscuit, and tossed it to him. He caught it out of the air and began the ecstatic process of reducing it to so many gooey crumbs on the carpet.
    Crunching sounds accompanied me as I turned back to my computer, typed in my password, and sent Tessa a chat request. She was better about allowing those through normal channels when she was actively on a job: there was only so much cloak-and-dagger that either one of us could handle as a part of our daily lives. I had no way of knowing whether or not she was at her computer, so I opened one of the files Jill had e-mailed to me and began reading about the drug cocktails isolated from our guest.
    I was on page three, and was beginning to really agree with the “if you told me she was dead, I wouldn’t argue with you” diagnosis, when my chat client beeped to signal an incoming call. I minimized the file and opened the chat window, revealing Tessa’s face. She was wearing a surprising amount of glitter smeared around her eyes, and she wasn’t smiling.
    “Tell me you got me something to work with, because I still got nothing,” she said.
    “Nice to see you, too,” I said. “She woke up for a little bit. She didn’t tell us her name, but she talked, and I have video. Will that help?”
    “Speech patterns and accent might let me start narrowing in on an origin, and an origin would help me figure out her identity, so yes, that’ll help.” Tessa shook her head, curls bouncing. “This is starting to haunt my dreams . I’ve never had a missing person this determined to stay that way who hadn’t been intentionally scrubbed from the Internet.”
    “Sending the file over now.” I opened the drive where our feeds from the isolation room were stored, selecting the twenty-minute segment that included my conversation with the mystery woman and dropping it onto the chat box. A small status bar immediately appeared, displaying the status of the transfer. “She’s still not too lucid. Part of it’s probably the drugs, and part of it’s probably withdrawal from the drugs. I have Tom working on synthesizing something to help her through the next few days. That’ll give us something to bargain with, even if it doesn’t do anything else.”
    “What did she say?”
    “Well, she offered to kill people for me. And that ‘Kitty did a bad thing,’ but that she didn’t think Kitty had made it out of the house. I don’t know whether she was talking about a pet or a person, but—” I stopped talking. Tessa was sitting suddenly ramrod straight, her eyes gone wide in their circles of club makeup, her mouth gone suddenly slack with something that might be shock, or might be plain and simple fear. “Tessa? You want to tell me what you just figured out? Because honestly, I’m getting a little tired of not knowing what’s going on.”
    “You’re sure she said ‘Kitty.’ She didn’t use some other word, or a proper name.”
    “No, she said ‘Kitty.’ She said it multiple times, she was very clear.” The status bar turned blue and then disappeared. “See for yourself, you should have the file now.”
    “Hang on.” Tessa bent her head and started to type. I heard my own voice through her computer speakers, distorted by distance