Free The Demi-Monde: Winter by Rod Rees

dragged them outside and thrown them into the black, windowless steamers.
    She remembered going to the Academy the next day and no one having the courage to ask where Lillibeth Marlborough was. Lillibeth Marlborough: Trixie’s best friend. Overnight Lillibeth became a nonNix: someone never to be mentioned again, someone it was better never to think of again. Even the daguerreotypes showing the school teams that Lillibeth had captained had been removed. And when Trixie had protested they had Censured her.
    ‘I haven’t forgotten, father, I’ll never forget.’ A tear trickled down Trixie’s cheek.
    ‘Don’t cry, Trixie. Crying isn’t going to bring Lillibeth or any of them back. What we’ve got to concentrate on is surviving in this crazed world.’
    ‘So what does Beria want of me?’
    ‘Apparently Crowley is unwilling to hand the Daemon over to the Checkya for interrogation, which I think is quite sensible of the chap. Crowley might be as mad as a bag of bolts but even he knows that once inside the Lubyanka the chances of getting anything sensible out of the creature, Daemon or not, are negligible. Under torture, people … Daemons are liable to say anything. So Beria has suggested a more softly-softly approach: seduction rather than rape, so to speak.’
    ‘That must be a novelty for Beria,’ observed Trixie wryly.
    ‘Indeed. Beria’s suggestion is that the creature is held under house arrest where it is given an opportunity to commune with a like spirit … that’s “spirit” with a small “s”.’
    ‘Here?’
    A nod from Trixie’s father.
    ‘Me?’
    Another nod.
    ‘But why me?’
    ‘Beria has cast his eye over all the daughters of senior Party officials …’
    I bet he has.
    ‘… who are roughly the same age as the form taken by this Daemon. He was, so he says, looking for someone of high intelligence, strong character and who is loyal to the Party. Apparently you scored two out of three. He had you evaluated at Mrs Albemarle’s last social by an odious man named Captain Dabrowski.’
    That slimy Polish bastard.
    ‘Was he the man you hit, Trixie?’
    ‘Yes, father. He was overly familiar with me.’
    ‘Bravo. Perhaps you should have hit him harder. Next time perhaps. Well, beaten or not, Dabrowski has recommended you to Beria. It seems the Captain was quite taken by my little Trixie.’
    ‘So what do I have to do?’
    ‘This Daemon, who calls itself Norma Williams, will be brought here to live with us. The house will be guarded, of course, but every effort will be made to make this guarding as unobtrusive as possible. The idea is that you and the Daemon will … bond, and gradually over a couple of weeks you will find out the truth about it and the Spirit World.’
    ‘I don’t know if I like the idea of bonding with a Daemon,’ admitted Trixie. ‘What does this thing look like? Does it have horns and a tail? They always draw Daemons with horns and a tail on the covers of penny dreadfuls.’
    ‘No horns and no tail, or so I am told. Apparently it looks and acts just like a normal young woman.’
    ‘Very well: I don’t suppose I have any option in the matter, do I?’
    ‘ None whatsoever,’ was her father’s bleak answer.

7
The Real World: 12 June 2018
     
The Memories of Dupes: each Dupe is provided with an appropriate and fully functional memory of his or her life as a Demi-Mondian prior to the OutSet of the Demi-Monde plus a realistically flawed ancestral memory.
    – The Demi-Monde® Product Description Manual: 14 June 2013
     
    Ella was back in the General’s office in the company of the Captain, the Professor and, of course, the General. She was glad of the company: the meeting with Heydrich had shaken her, had frightened her. More … it had scared the shit out of her. Heydrich might have been just a virtually rendered Dupe but there had been something disturbingly real about him. No computer-programmed entity could walk into a room and dominate it like that: it wasn’t