Excerpt

Emily Jones, her shoulders slumped and eyes bloodshot, swiped her badge at the entrance of the crumbling, three-story, red brick building. Located on the banks of the Merrimack River in an impoverished, old mill town north of Boston, the building stood as tall as it was wide and deep, a hundred fifty feet of grime in each direction. A black smokestack on the far left near the back fouled the air with a dank, musky odor.

Outside, no sign announced the business's name, though cars filled the side parking lot. Inside the windowless, antiseptic foyer that ran the full width of the building but extended only fifteen feet deep, a sign in old English script with exaggerated curlicues read, La fabrique d'amour.

The Love Factory.

As if spelling it out in French made what Emily and all the others did in this dungeon suddenly romantic and exciting. A sour taste filled Emily's mouth. She swiped her credit card-sized badge across the scanner beside the middle of five heavy metal doors, and after the beep, pulled it open. As she walked past the side stairwell and its surveillance camera, then down the cavernous, concrete-walled corridor, the door clanged shut behind her, sounding like the closing of a door to a prison cell.

Another day of her sentence.

Twenty-nine years old, she felt like seventy-nine. No beauty, but not physically repulsive either, Emily had limp, shoulder-length, auburn hair, a pug nose that she knew cried out for cosmetic surgery, a flat chest that cried out even more, and an extra twenty-five pounds she'd been trying unsuccessfully to rid herself of for all her adult life. Most noticeable of all, though, she looked worn out and used up, her brown eyes vacant and downcast, her lips grim and never smiling.

No wonder Mark was thinking of leaving her. Probably more than just thinking, too. It had to be a lead-pipe certainty.

But he was supposed to be the one. They were supposed to be soul mates. Like John and Kevin and Jason and Tom and Jared and Ryan before Mark. Now, like all those before him, Mark was growing distant. Cold.

Even though she'd crossed the line she swore she'd never cross. Emily had become not just an employee, but a customer.

Her footfalls echoed down the corridor, as did those of five or six other faceless employees, until she stopped in front of the door to unit 349A. She swiped her badge across yet another scanner, and stepped inside what she'd come to think of as her tomb. It was a thin sliver of a room, the air heavy and humid. More closet than room, really. Though barely more than five feet tall, Emily could hold out her arms and simultaneously touch both side walls. The far wall stood less than ten feet from the door. The ceiling only seven feet high. Its barren walls painted industrial green, "the tomb" smelled faintly of mildew and Lysol at the same.

It held only one thing: the chamber. When she had first come to work there, she had thought it looked like a tanning bed. Slide in and pull down the lid, though she did so fully clothed. Now, though, she thought of it as a coffin.

Emily slid into the chamber, pushed her badge into the slot in the lid above her, and pulled the lid down. Her balance glowed on the screen above her.

0.00

And that was after the emergency withdrawal from her bank account to rectify yesterday's negative balance after too many purchases of the company's products. A bank account that was now as dry and empty as she was, with no more funds to cover any emergency, no matter how dire.

Even if it was the difference between Mark leaving her or not.

So it was time to get to work. Again. Too many hours because of too many purchases. Emily's fingers itched and her mouth felt dry. Deep inside her chest, her heart ached. She wanted to cry even though it wasn't yet time for that.

Swallowing hard, Emily touched her fingertips to the recessed sensors on both sides of her. She began to read from the built-in screen on the lid. In no time, her fingertips tingled, and the air smelled of ozone. Tears streamed down the sides of her face, blurring the words on the screen until she blinked the tears away. Emily devoured the words and emitted her premium-cut emotions into the fingertip sensors.

She began to cry. Her sobs grew louder and more forceful until her entire body shook, wracked with their pain. Even so, she held her fingertips to the sensors, never losing contact.

The consummate professional.

At the beginning, it had been her dream job. Get paid to read romance novels. She already did that for free! What was the catch? Compared to her previous position as a social worker—having her heart ripped out on a daily basis and then having to come back the next day to do it all over again—the position of Senior Emotopath felt like stealing the company's money.

It was so easy. Like the proverbial taking candy from babies. During her job interview she scored highly—off the charts, actually—in the company's "emotion emission" scores.

Emily oozed emotion. It poured out of her like sweat from a fat man in a sauna. She was hired on the spot as a Senior Emotopath. No junior designation. No probationary period. No references. Can you start now?

"Today?" she had asked.

"Now!"

She needed no mentor or training. Emily was a natural.

She hit all her quotas and then kept going, accumulating bonus after bonus. The company drew off her "premium-level" emotion emissions, distilled and matured them in the emoto-vats that filled the entire basement floor below, then added them to its products. Emily's exported emotions, as well as those of the other Emotopaths, were the key ingredient in the company's Soul Mates Series of couple's jewelry, guaranteed to draw both partners closer together than ever—make them true soul mates, the one and only for each other—as well as the potent essence in the Soul Mates perfume and cologne lines, designed to attract a soul mate to the lonely wearer of the scent.

According to the company-sponsored research, the products worked. They were no late-night infomercial gimmicks. There was no placebo effect. They worked!

Not all the time, of course. There had to be some element of destiny involved. Otherwise, what was the point? One couldn't totally manufacture the pure joy of being soul mates. No Emotopath emissions—even Emily's supercharged ones, no matter how distilled and matured—could turn Joan of Arc and Attila the Hun into soul mates.

You couldn't just bathe in Soul Mates bubble bath or splash on Soul Mates perfume or cologne and then automatically ensnare the object of your desire. Gotcha! Never going to let you go.

There was always free will and the element of chance. But the jewelry, perfumes, colognes, and the rest of the product line could help when that little something extra was needed.

Like with Mark.

And so Emily had bought them matching Soul Mates watchbands. And they had become immediately closer. More intimate in every way.

When that began to wear off, she'd bought them the special couple's version of Soul Mates perfume and cologne, designed not to attract someone new but to maintain and strengthen a pre-existing bond.

And that at least seemed to work. For a while.

But when even that effect flickered, when she'd eventually gone through the entire company catalog, working countless overtime hours to pay for it all, she resorted to a secret benefit available only to employees, though not one that would ever appear in a corporate Human Resources handbook.

Who, Emily asked herself, could ever put a price on true love?

After pouring all of her emotions into the fingertip sensors, she checked on her balance, entered the secret code, and withdrew the entire balance on as much of the pure stuff as her money could buy.

The purest of the pure. Uncut. As far from the watered down, commercially available Soul Mate products as the purest heroin in Afghanistan was to the stomped-on, diluted imitator being sold four blocks away from the factory.

Emily let it pour over her. It would make her irresistibly attractive to Mark, bind them together like never before. Forever and ever.

Soul Mates at last.

She could feel his presence atop her in the chamber. He wasn't actually there, of course; there wasn't enough room for a couple inside the chamber no matter how petite they might both be, and Mark was almost six feet tall and two hundred pounds.

But she felt his presence nonetheless. Smelled the spicy cinnamon fragrance of his Soul Mates cologne. Tasted the minty taste of Soul Mates mouthwash on his lips. Felt his facial hair brush pleasantly against her cheeks.

In her mind, Emily wrapped her arms around him. Held him close. Closer. And closer still. She felt his weight pressing upon her in the most pleasurable of places.

They were meant for each other. Nothing could tear them asunder.

Soul Mates forever.