The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

TRINKETS

(Another interjection: some flavoring here from Simon bar Sinister’s “Spa” and “Emotional Bonds”, and Voyer’s “Promotion”)

26.

Tweet stood quietly, chilled in the air conditioning but too aroused to notice.

Too hypnotized by the spiral that wasn’t really there.

She knew, dimly, that she was in the Buildings on the headland, and the knowledge that they weren’t a city but just a large hotel complex didn’t disturb her awe. Her mind was in pieces, drastically different thoughts coexisting because she couldn’t connect them, and the absurdity numbed her into acceptance.

The spiral took her so much deeper than numb, and it also made her willing to accept what she was told. Even when she wasn’t in the training space in the corridors that wormed through the hill beneath her, worshipping the spiral, it was in her mind.

She was a drone.

She blinked. Someone came up to her: a very pretty woman in a thong bikini and a collar, staring at her with a stunned calmness. The woman’s high heels clicked on the marble floor that cooled Tweet’s bare feet. Tweet knew the simple things: this was one of the slaves who served Guests here in the Buildings.

The slave held up a metal cup. “Your Mistress told me to hydrate you.”

Tweet understood the command and opened her lips as the slave let her drink, without a thought to take it herself. The liquid was warm and she didn’t care what it was. The slave kept her from taking too much but made sure she drank it all, and Tweet obeyed her soft instructions as though they came from Mistress.

Tweet obeyed everyone.

She was learning that deep inside, her greatest want and highest need was to obey and to be told what to think and do. The spiral knew that, and it taught her patiently, gently, inexorably to know it too.

Each stretch of wakefulness, which happened whenever she was aware of something other than the spiral and its slow exciting motion, gave her simple chances to obey, to show how obedient she was. Mistress, other Owners, even slaves who had rudimentary but stronger minds able to direct hers—many people gave the commands Tweet happily obeyed. It was nothing more than she could handle. Fetching. Holding. Rubbing. Licking.

Sometimes they stroked her or let her masturbate for them, as a reward. A few knew that obedience could thrill Tweet just by itself, and let it, watching her. She always performed well, regardless.

Once she was told to move a set of glasses from one table to another, one at a time, in a room she paid no attention to. She tried to count them, although she had no idea why she wanted to. She was happy to give up trying when the numbers blurred behind her eyes.

When she was done, the woman controlling her had ordered her to start putting them back.

Tweet had climaxed so hard and so suddenly then that they had to pick her up off the floor, taking care of the glass she’d dropped. They’d thought she was crying at the pleasure, and she was. But part of her missed a happier time, with sisters she could no longer remember.

Right now, she was intermittently aware that Mistress and two Guests were taking their ease at a table a few steps from her. But she remembered clearly that Mistress had touched her forehead just below the line or her slicked-back hair and told her sternly to stop thinking, and while she recalled thinking just a while before, it meant nothing to her now.

Since knowing that felt like a warm breeze tonguing her clit, Tweet focused on not thinking and on obeying, deeper and deeper.

Mindless. Her breathing hitched with the intensity of her arousal as the un-thought pushed through the slick pieces of her consciousness.

Words flowed past her.

“This one? The runaway?”

“The one that lived,” said Mistress’ voice. Each time Tweet heard it her whole head buzzed with more pleasure, and like static it blotted out the other women’s voices for a bit.

“. . . pity she can’t play chambermaid. Think about how those thighs would look under that little apron.”

“Mystery Queen’s in port. It’s the usual fixed schedule.” Mistress’ tone sounded apologetic, but Tweet remembered that tone caressing the inside of her brain as Mistress regretted not having a wider dildo—and raped Tweet ‘s asshole with a quick savagery almost painful enough to make Tweet forget how much she wanted the buttfucking.

Tweet wondered if the women sensed what Mistress was thinking about them.

Maybe they wanted her to use them as badly as Tweet did. She shivered.

Her mind obeyed the stop-thinking command again before she got turned-on enough to moan. She waited.

“. . . not supposed to be here?” The other Guest spoke, neither afraid nor aroused. Not alive to Mistress’ threat.

“The naked-savage program is something like a marinade, you might say. We usually don’t . . . throw them on the grill before they’ve soaked up more of it.

“Shrimp on the barbie.” They laughed. Tweet’s anus clenched. “It makes them that much more malleable when they’re finally captured and enslaved.”

“. . . think they’re the resort?”

“Well,” said Mistress, “they are. Just not the one they think.”

“. . . then they stop thinking.” More laughter, though it sounded as dutiful as the joke did old. The comfortable tone, more than the confusing words, pressed into Tweet’s awareness. “Sometimes, Cass, I wonder whether you people really run this place for us to play, or if you’re just using us, too.”

Mistress was smooth. “You’re not the usable type. But we do appreciate the help.”

“. . . zoned out, Cass?”

“Not just that, Miss Kkh—htt.” Tweet contentedly heard the name turn to noise between her ears. “It’s not just that their resistance and wills are neutralized. All the indoctrination they receive—the deepened obedience, the lesbian imprinting, the groupthink, and the Tribal ‘weaknesses’—opens them to what happens when the higher culture—”

“Us?”

“You, yes. This week, anyway. When you go out and round them up.” They talked about a hunt, and Tweet’s imagination called up an naked woman writhing in a net trap above a jungle path. She thought about being that helpless.

But something bothered her. Protection—someone trying to help despite great fear. Her fault. She was too weak to hold on. She was suddenly aware again of the spiral in her mind, pulling the bits of memory from her, and its pulsing made her enjoy giving them up.

“Tweet.”

She snapped taut, mind blank, feeling the heat of Mistress’ attention. “I obey!”

“Turn to your left until you see the end of the balcony rail.”

“I obey!” Her body hummed with the joy of complying.

There was silence. “Look at that profile,” said the first Guest. “I told you—the tits are just right for her frame.”

“No drooling. She’s not for sale, anyway—is she, Cass?”

Mistress laughed. Tweet felt it under her nipples and whined softly. “No. Tweet here hasn’t graduated first-phase, yet. You can’t buy her, and you can’t hunt her down with nets and darts and hypno-baubles tomorrow.

“Our sweet little Tweet has—I just have to say this, dammit—’promises to keep, and miles to go before she—’” The others’ laughter stopped her.

“You can fuck her, though, if you’d like. She’s very good, in or out of trance, but trance can make her more—flexible.”

One of the guests breathed deeply. “Just fuck her?”

Mistress spoke seriously. “Miss Kkh—htt, I respect you. You have a fine sense for slave handling, so much more than the usual Guest here. But unless you’ve been certified, I can’t let you play with someone we have to throw back for now.”

Tweet shivered again, knowing Mistress was staring at her body.

Mistress was certified.

“In any case, you’ll have to let Squeal or Silken stand in for her, I’m afraid. Tweet has some chores she needs to do now, like a good girl.

“Tweet.”

“I obey!” she said, excited at the thought of more ways to obey.

“Go to Jessamyne. She’ll have some things for you to take around.”

“Yes, Mistress!” Suddenly Tweet could move, and she felt the thrill as she made her way out into the bright humid day.

Jessamyne worked on one of the many terraces, this one inland, its structures small and utilitarian. It was a place for slaves to work, away from desirable ocean views. A few drones methodically swept the open space in the middle, utterly absorbed in the task. Tweet enjoyed how the sight made her feel but moved on to where the other Owner would give her some tasks.

A few moments after that, she had Jessamyne’s crisply-enunciated commands circling around inside her head, the things she was to fetch and retrieve from the supply area a few levels down, under the pavement of the open space.

It wasn’t air-conditioned down here, either, but it was still cooler in the dark corridors under the fluorescent lights. Tweet was happy to be able to obey Jessamyne in such a pleasant place, enjoying the way her mind kept clicking from item to item, each one wiping itself from her mind as she put it in the basket she’d been given.

This wasn’t the usual supply area. Some of Mistress’ colleagues found it easier to maintain their own, rather that wait for a drone like Tweet to go all the way to the main depot across the span of the Buildings. The items were neatly stocked in the cavernous room but not sorted, so Tweet just drifted swiftly down the rows, triggered to reach and take whenever she saw something she’d been programmed for.

When she took the second water bottle, the sudden quiet in her head told her she was done and could bring her finds back to Jessamyne and be reinstructed.

But she stared at the water bottle.

Saw it in her hand, and in the hand of someone lying under a tree somewhere out—there. She remembered someone wanting to give her a water bottle.

Tweet blinked. She hadn’t wanted it. Why not? She could have had it ready to give to Miss—no.

She thought about a treat, being allowed to kneel between Jessamyne’s legs if she finished quickly, but there was a different spice suddenly in her nostrils. Someone else’s honey on her tongue.

It was always like nighttime here. Why were her eyes burning as though she ‘d been staring at the sun? She blinked again, and wiped at them.

Tweet wondered why she was crying.

She was an obedient hypnotized slave and she was going deeper every moment her Owners allowed her breath. She’d given them everything, even the memory of what she’d given.

It was perfect happiness. Why was it making her sad?

And why didn’t that feel wrong?

It just didn’t make . . . sense.

Tweet felt the compulsion to complete her task start to move her away from this spot, toward the stairs. She was going to forget, to go to sleep with her eyes open . . .

She pressed her lips to the bottle’s cool plastic.

Something.

Stars in the night sky that no one in this place had ever told her to look at. Ears cool and hot against her inner thighs. Lips on her clitoris, achingly delicate and caring.

Lips against hers.

“Meant that, too.”

Sue.

My Sue. I should never, ever have left you—

She was on her knees on the concrete floor sobbing, somehow remembering to be quiet even then. If she’d stayed she’d just have had to watch Sue die. Or wake one morning to find her still and gone.

But . . .

Sue would never touch her again, but just then she could remember how Sue ‘s touch felt. Sue would never touch a drone like that. Maybe—she wasn’t a drone.

The pain inside Kerry was the worst she’d ever felt.

She held it tightly.

27.

Kerry drifted inside the emptiness of her own mind.

It was scary seeing how thoroughly most of her thinking had been blunted, and the whirlpool of the spiral sucked ceaselessly at what was left. The only tether to something outside the hypnotic universe she was kept in was the open wound in her for Sue.

It was so tempting to turn from that and become happy, obedient, mindless Tweet again.

After she returned in a deeper daze than usual from the supply errand, she found she’d barked her shin sharply on the doorsill. By the time she realized she’d still been crying when she reported to Jessamyne, the Owner had already accounted for her tears and told her to wipe them.

Just before her mind submerged on the lesser spirals of polishing a vast stone-topped table in a luxurious suite of smaller rooms, she wondered how she’d managed to be so clumsy. So lucky, to excuse her weeping.

Then the drone-task mesmerized her and she slept again, the tether to Sue shrunken to an unobtrusive thread tied off in a quiet part of her.

Tweet worked hard, and soon her awareness had focused between her thighs, where it belonged. Jessamyne had promised that she could have her butt plugged if she finished early, all the way until sleeptime, and she had to go back and wipe her juice from the table once or twice when the need overcame her.

When she knelt outside Jessamyne’s office to report, she listened to Jessamyne instructing another drone, and the alternating sound of her firm commands and the girl’s gasping responses almost made Tweet forget her own need until her hand would find itself against her cleft and tense away.

Jessamyne let Tweet stand when her turn came, but instead of making her bend for the plug, the Owner just took the glass-bead puzzle she used to induce slaves and looked up at her. “You found things faster than the others, and I need . . . oh, right.” She smiled, and it seemed so much weaker than Mistress’ look when she leered at Tweet. “I keep forgetting there’s no point explaining. It’s just that you seem so human, still.

“And there I go again.” She sighed. “All right, Tweet. Look into the pretty toy and let it put you back into dreamland . . .”

It was the smell that woke Kerry, just at the spot where she’d gotten the bottle and remembered. She looked around, feeling the basket already heavy with the items Jessamyne had wanted. Reluctant to leave the place and the feeling, and believing she still had a few moments to stay, she went musingly down the rows, retracing her first trip there. More and more she felt there was something she had to find.

I just want to be me a little while longer. Before I go back and look into her eyes. Or sniff her crotch. Before I turn back into—Tweet. Just a little bit.

But she felt too eager for it just to be putting off the inevitable. So it worried her.

Then she saw it, what Tweet’s empty mind had looked full at, recognized as not what the owner wanted and moved on. But remembered. Kerry looked at the angular case of dark composite fiber, the multilingual label she was glad she still knew how to read. It was a poignant greeting from the outside world—the prominent items were a company logo she’d never seen and a model number that meant just as little. The actual descriptor was in a corner of the label.

Survival radios.

She guessed there might be less-explored sections of Dormignonne where they might need such links. Or maybe this less-official supply area was stocked more by opportunity and midnight requisitions than by plan, and someone had just gotten a good deal.

Kerry worked the latches and found several tiers of padded racks, with the cordless phone-sized items inside sealed plastic. Rows of them.

For a second she didn’t know what she was doing. She had no idea how to work them, and if she figured it out, the first and last to hear one start transmitting would be the Owners. Just to be caught with one would mean letting them know how far she’d slipped from the ideal drone girl. Then being brainwashed finally and completely, every trace of Kerry wiped forever from her mind.

Or, as she and Sue had discussed that one and only night, just killed.

But here they were.

Survival radios—meant to be used by downed pilots, people who’d just fallen out of the sky, wounded or injured, lost and terrified, perhaps fleeing imminent capture. Something like Kerry herself felt.

People in that fix—like her—had to have something very simple to work.

If she didn’t try, she’d lose nothing, really. She’d just drift back and forth from hypnotized Tweet to lonely Kerry, waiting for another, better chance than would never come. Eventually she’d teach herself to like hypnotized oblivion better, and that would be that.

She had some kind of time limit, too—part of what had kept Mistress from letting the Guests play with her. Inside her, Tweet squirmed wistfully, wishing she could have been played with, and Kerry shared the pussy-quiver until she bit her tongue and resisted.

So they were going to do something else to her. Perhaps another, even deeper session with the spiral. More frightening—and so arousing that she had to fight to keep from touching herself—Mistress might have some new way to degrade her, some new submission too addictive for Kerry to want to fight anymore. Even now the very thought of it pulled at her . . .

Only the certainty of discovery kept her from tearing the plastic on the nearest one and speed-reading the instructions right there, to set it off.

But God—it felt so good to do something!

Sue. Thank you.

Kerry foresaw the despair of getting one out somehow and finding it didn’t work, so she’d take two. No, three.

From the top of the case, immediately visible as taken if it were opened? From the bottom, it’d go unseen—but like a full water bottle against their first flight from the Tribe village, it would scream escape attempt if someone did find it.

But the case had gone untouched for a while, from the looks of things, so the odds of anyone coming for a radio—or needing so many they’d have to get down to the bottom layer—were low.

Taking a breath, she selected three and replaced everything. Wrapping her prizes in a small totebag from a pile on another shelf, she scurried off before she could think about what she was doing.

Alone in Jessamyne’s anteroom, she slipped the radios behind a sofa, praying that she’d still remember after whatever hypnosis she underwent next. As she entered and knelt to Jessamyne to offer her the desired articles, she shuddered with dread and an awful arousal.

This was Jessamyne. If it had been Mistress herself . . . she imagined the tearing feeling inside as she crawled back out to get the radios, the suicidal delight as she raised them up to Mistress, her chest pounding too hard to confess but knowing Mistress would see the obvious. Glare at her.

Then—Mistress would smile.

28.

Kerry padded out of Jessamyne’s presence, and collected the radios. Jessamyne had come up with another errand, a packet of diskettes for the stable at South Compound. No playtime for either of them, but it gave Kerry another trip through the complex.

No one challenged her, and in this first long period as a drone when she could think, her freedom of action scared rather than encouraged her—it reminded her of how very powerful they were here. But she made it out one of the exits to the open area, the foot of the wall around this part of the complex.

The radios weighed in her hand and she was eager to get rid of them. She’d wondered how to hide them, not wanting to leave them in the Buildings anywhere. She found some soft ground and buried them in the plastic, after looking around and seeing no sign of busywork that might turn them up.

She might not find this spot of ground easily again, though. She looked at the flat but rough stone of the wall, and saw it covered with moss. Taking a stick, she set the point to it, then stopped.

No. “Radios Here” would not be a good idea. She smiled, and felt her throat tighten, as she considered a heart with “K&S”.

It didn’t matter, really—even something shapeless would work as long as she knew it when she saw it. She doodled, bothered by a symmetry that might draw attention if someone still capable of it passed by. But it needed to catch hers—and if a booted safari girl did stroll past, would she be looking at the base of the wall?

As she rose to obey Jessamyne’s command to bring the diskettes to the stable, she realized she’d drawn something that looked like natural discoloration, but that could also pass as a fleur-de-lis.

Like a Scouting emblem.

She’d never know where Sue finally lay down for the last time there in the jungle, and it made her sad that this might be the only marker Sue would have—and that for now at least, it should not be seen to mark anything. But seeing what she’d drawn, she felt grateful and irrationally stronger for knowing that something of Sue was inside her, too.

The stable. As she entered, the absence of any horse-smell disoriented her before it helped her remember what they used to pull carts here.

The door she’d chosen opened to a darkened row of stalls, and she almost hesitated to go past them to seek offices or wherever the Owner in charge was. For a moment she thought it might be better to be Tweet.

Then she realized how helpless the ponygirls were, and that they might be the least dangerous of Dormignonne’s strange inhabitants. She stepped inside.

There was a stirring, and the women all came to stand quietly the front of their stalls, looking at her. One or two pranced nervously on their leather hooves but stilled themselves, eager to behave. This was not like the little curiosity behind the village. All these women had been controlled into thinking they were beasts of burden, and seeing them together Kerry felt her chest tighten. So many, all of them taller and stronger than she was, but all of them docile and gentle, their hands unbound but oddly still from disuse.

Their eyes—looked like horses’ eyes.

It was hard to remember specific things from the tranced days on Shadow Queen, but she remembered worrying about what the separation of the stronger women meant. She wondered what they’d thought, finding themselves ordered to train and stay apart and unable to disobey the strange command, or increasingly even to question it. She had a partial idea of what sort of mind control had turned her into a superstitious, suggestible Stone-Age primitive. What had the Owners done to these women, to make them—draft animals? When had the first change come, the first moment of being pony?

Had they even been capable of being aware of it by then?

She walked quietly past the first couple, seeing their hurtfully open gazes, eyes clear and focused on her—and innocent, as far as she could tell, of any belief that they were as human as she was.

They looked clean and strong, well-cared for. She remembered the stablehand in the village nuzzling her charge affectionately, calling her pet names.

Drugging her deeper with food that almost put the stablehand to sleep herself.

Kerry was drawn to them despite herself. She stepped to the next pony, a muscular dark-haired girl who snorted softly in excitement and blinked down at her. She saw the ponygirl’s nipples stiffen, and her own responded. In the dimness she saw the other nipples were pierced, and as the pony grew more excited, the rings clinked softly.

The pony’s healthy, toned body had a light, pleasant scent that blended with the tang of her arousal. Kerry’s knees were weak with the sudden heat of wanting. I can take her, she thought, finding herself leaning against the wooden edge of the stall as the ponygirl moved again in her agitation, obedient to her training and awaiting command but just as helpless to resist her sexual programming.

Kerry thought about the strong, smooth body, completely at her disposal. Then she saw that body, so much stronger, overpowering her in the urgency of the desire the pony no longer had a name for.

She thought about being assigned here to serve. Being the little foal the ponies used for relief. She closed her eyes and didn’t even try to resist the lust, just stood quietly and let it pass.

As it made her juice anyway, she saw the pony—the woman, god help them both—looking at her shaven pussy, and licking her lips unself-consciously.

Something brought her back. She could still think in words. Unself-consciously. They’d mindraped this beautiful athlete out of both self and consciousness. Part of Kerry still liked that idea—wanted to fall to the floor of the stall with her and melt into a tangle of limbs and sweat and swollen wet lips at both ends—but enough of her just reached up to hold the woman’s shoulder.

“Good girl,” she whispered softly, and stroked the pony. The pony looked confused, but it passed and she let Kerry draw her closer and stroke the taut muscles of her flank and hip. She nuzzled Kerry’s hand contentedly, and then they were face to face.

The ponygirl looked at her so vulnerably that she had to smile. “OK,” she murmured. She closed her eyes and felt the other’s breath dance on her cheek, and then the delicate touch of her lips around her ear. A tentative nibble and tug at her hair.

Kerry raised her hand slowly and touched the pony’s face. Opening her eyes she smiled into the other’s, and kissed her. The pony’s eyes shone. She was just happy to be touched, and the need for sex had passed painlessly out of her attention span.

Kerry forced herself away. She couldn’t look at her anymore.

She went along the row, trying to keep from moving too quickly and upsetting them, or too slowly and tempting another to lean out for a caress or a taste of her. The spectacle of a stable full of them horrified her—and so did how hot it was making her.

But near the end she had to stop. She gripped the diskette package tightly enough stretch her tendons against her fingerbones, and felt nothing in them. The horror—and the heat—were too intense to let her notice.

Jennifer.

Kerry met her eyes. She couldn’t tell if the tall woman still recognized her, or if Jennifer were just responding to her programmed lust.

She was even more beautiful than Kerry remembered, and Kerry prayed that wasn’t just her own warped reaction to seeing her friend brainwashed into a bridle.

“Jen—do you know me?”

Jennifer looked at her intently, and came smoothly to a more alert stance, looking unbearably like a mare sensing a threat to the rest of the herd—lovely, graceful, skittish.

Someone had woven flowers into her hair, and no one had combed them out. Kerry wondered if Jen were a special pet of the stablehands, and if they’d decorated her that way.

Unable to take her eyes from her, Kerry stepped to the stall and set the diskettes on the ledge without looking at them. Jennifer looked at her.

I wonder if she’d kick me, if I spook her. Those thighs, driving those—hooves. She could kill me. The idea made Kerry feel worse for Jen than herself.

“Sshh. It’s all right,” she said, and her breath caught as she saw Jennifer respond, tamed by her voice. “Right, sweetheart. Just be still. I won’t hurt you. No.”

Jen let her approach, and Kerry took in how splendid her friend’s body looked. She’d seen her changing on the ship, showered with her, but by then she’d been reeling with her first dose of hypnotic sunscreen subliminal CDs.

The temptation was less, here. She couldn’t think of taking Jennifer—it would be fucking, not lovemaking, and suddenly Kerry knew that after Sue she didn’t want to fuck if she had any choice.

Jen let her touch her head, and as Kerry looked closely at the flowers in her hair, she ran her fingers gently across the other woman’s scalp.

“You won’t find scars.”

Kerry froze, and then amazed herself by ignoring the newcomer for as long as it took to calm Jennifer, who shook at Kerry’s fear.

When she turned, she saw a slim figure in a loose white shirt and leather pants nodding approvingly at her care for the pony.

Circe.

She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling Jennifer’s warm lithe strength. Then she faced the hypnotist.

“A problem with operations this successful,” Circe said she approached. “Things get lost. As you did.

“But your friend . . . we don’t lobotomize ponies. We just stimulate them. Very simple pleasure/pain, mostly pleasure, until we teach them to lose interest in everything but the simple ponygirl absolutes.

“She’s in bliss, Kerry. She—oh.”

Kerry was crying, and leaned against Jennifer. The last time she’d heard her real name from anyone else was in Sue’s voice. When she felt Jen’s chin move gently on the top of her head, dumbly comforting her, she bit her tongue against the scream.

Jennifer’s arms stayed at her sides.

“Poor little one. Come to me, Kerry. Come to me now.” Her voice wrapped around Kerry’s mind and Kerry felt her mind changing. “Yes, obey me. Sleepier now with each step, with each breath, yes . . . but good girls don’ t sleep till they’re told.”

Kerry blinked in the sudden drowsiness and rubbed herself against Jennifer as she turned slowly to face the hypnotist again. For a second, she tried to resist. But her skin chilled—then flushed—as she knew she’d been too well-trained. Too many sessions in ship and compound before the drums had called her to Tribe. Kerry was just like every other woman in Circe’s unblinking audience, taken too deep to want to fight anymore.

Circe had conditioned all of them into her bitches, and Kerry had to go to her.

So sleepy . . .

She began to walk toward Circe, rapt. She let her arms swing and her hips sway, displaying herself and suddenly feeling more owned than ever before.

“You’ll spend the rest of your time here in deep conditioning.” Circe’s tone was flowing into Kerry’s head, seductively velvet where Mistress’ voice had ravished her with leather, but just as irresistible.

“You won’t remember it, but you’ve given everyone here the most anxious few days they’ve ever had.”

Kerry tried to hate her, but Circe’s sincerity undermined whatever resolve her voice hadn’t already started to reshape. “Sue would—” be proud of that, she tried to say.

“Yes,” Circe said quietly. “More complacency, with her drugs. Pointless. No one ever has to hurt.

“Nor will you, Kerry. You’ve been through more than enough. You’ll sleep now.”

It almost put Kerry under right then, but she managed to whisper, “The spiral?”

She didn’t remember seeing Circe’s eyes so closely before. How really lovely they were. Vaguely she saw Circe’s smile beneath them.

“No.” Circe drew a fingertip across Kerry’s hairline and her eyelids drooped but she stayed trapped in the hypnotist’s eyes.

“Just sleep.” She leaned forward and kissed Kerry between her eyes, and they closed.

29.

“Wake up,” the whisper commanded Kerry, even as its exquisite warmth across her throat paralyzed her as she lay there. She opened her eyes and then had to struggle to keep them open as fingers worried at her crotch.

“You still have to shave down there, and we’re going to be late to work. Again.”

Kerry looked up into Andrea’s calmly grinning face, and again her breath almost failed her at the sight. She started to remember the white-hot sex that had kept them in bed yesterday, but something else in her mind made it pale. When she drew Andrea down and took her breast in her mouth, she held it tenderly instead of nipping it, and heard Andrea’s yelp dissolve into an astonished sigh.

“Kerry.” Later Andrea breathed her name. “Are you feeling all right?”

“I feel wonderful.” Kerry slid against her, too relaxed to do more.

“You were talking in your sleep.” Andrea’s head, her copper hair finer than a child’s, rested on Kerry’s breast. “Or maybe crying. It was so quiet.”

Kerry ran her hand across Andrea’s belly and heard her breath catch. “Maybe you were dreaming.”

They survived the shower, and even shaving Kerry, without slipping to the tiles together by making faces at each other, mimicking Ms Forsyth’s frown as they came in after the others had started. Kerry dressed quickly, watching and enjoying how Andrea looked choosing her own clothes and basking in Andrea’s looks at her.

It had been a wonderful vacation on Isle Dormignonne. Kerry was still tingling with the peace and well-being the island interlude had infused into her soul, and she’d started work with more enthusiasm and focus than she could ever remember having. She also felt so much better about her relationship to Ms Forsyth, now that being away had opened her mind to the need simply to defer to her superior, to obey her and accept the goals she set for Kerry.

But there were other sweet rewards from the trip.

Andrea.

Neither of them had expected to fall in love, and certainly not with each other, but the soporific tropical sun and seductive tropical moon had cast their spells. The “Tribe” experience had made them close—Kerry could remember that lovely feeling more than any of the unimportant details of their day-to-day frolics, the swimming and fishing and hiking.

They weren’t the only couple to spend a lot of time in their stateroom during the return voyage on Mystery Queen.

Kerry couldn’t really recall who’d suggested they move in together right away, but she hadn’t questioned the idea. It already seemed like they’d been there for a long time but they hadn’t even been back a week.

The office was abuzz about them—they walked in hand in hand, and people who’d grown used to Andrea’s faded jeans and Kerry’s loose silk trousers stared appreciatively at the short skirts and tailored jackets they wore now.

As Kerry fastened the garters onto her dark hose, she wondered how many realized how little either of them wore underneath the biz-bimbo outfits. They helped each other into bras, panting and locking eyes but fighting the need to fuck again. It was one of the tests they did: by now they could make it into work, long enough to fall into the almost trancelike absorption they could now devote to their tasks.

But sometimes, when she was really in the zone, and knew she had six good hours of productivity behind her and the same yet to come, Kerry started to dampen, hyperaware and very aroused. She’d nearly come a couple of times in that state, when Ms Forsyth had stopped in to compliment her personally at how well she was performing since she’d gotten back.

Just an e-mail from Ms Forsyth nearly sent her over the edge, thanking her for using her breaktime to recommend the Queen Lines Resorts experience to her coworkers.

That night—last night?—she recalled Andrea’s breathless whisper that she’ d found the same intense joy in her work now, and the same heat from their boss’s personal attention. Then, with their corporatewear strewn across the apartment, they’d made it as far as the couch.

Today, she read through the morning task list from Ms Forsyth, trying to contain the moans of admiration at the woman’s sheer managerial virtuosity.

“Uh—Kerry? Got a second?”

She looked up and smiled deeply at Stephanie. Mmm—how would Stephanie look, topless and tanned (carrying a basket on her head) playing in the surf?

Seeing from Stephanie’s hesitation that some of that was radiating out in her smile, she said, “It’s OK, Steph. I’m not on the prowl. I’m a one-woman woman.”

Stephanie swallowed. “No, that’s OK, Kerry. Well—not that it has to be OK with me, or anyone. You two just look so happy with each other.”

“We are, Steph. Thanks. What can I do for you?” Kerry kept one eye on the phone. No matter what, she felt a powerful determination not to let a phone ring unanswered. Ever.

“Just wondering—what happened to Jen?”

Jennifer. Kerry was positive she’d just soaked her chair, but under her desk her crotch was still outwardly dry to the fingers that reached under her miniskirt.

“Twenty-first century success story,” she said. “The cruise ship had a Web link and she finished negotiating with some company that’d been courting her since spring.” Kerry recalled kneeling on the floor with the phone at her ear, talking about this. Or being told about it. By someone . . . “Accepted the offer on the trip back. E-mailed the news to Ms F.”

Stephanie looked even prettier with her eyes widened in bafflement. “Wow. You’d think she’d hit the roof if someone bailed like that, but she’s been fine.”

“She can handle it,” Kerry said fervently. “She can handle anything.”

“Right,” said Stephanie. “But when did you go Stepford? You’ve been really into all this since you got back. No resort’s that good.”

“This one is, Steph. And since it was she who let us all go as a group, I’ ve been looking at her a lot differently. With Jen gone, we needed to pitch in and take up the slack. It’s not Stepford, Steph. It’s . . . vision.”

Stephanie grinned suddenly. “It’s sunstroke, is what it is, Kerry. I’ll stick with skiing when I take mine. And you’ll be back in the rut soon enough.

“I just never figured Jen for that kind of Type-A. E-mailing from vacation? This is the woman who threw her pager from the car on the Interstate and convinced them it was sucked out by the slipstream.”

Kerry laughed at Stephanie’s cue, trying to remember and failing. “You know—some people can just never turn their minds off and enjoy life.”

As Stephanie left, the computer popped a summons and Kerry was on her way to Ms Forsyth’s office before she’d really registered the image.

Liz was standing in front of her desk when Kerry arrived. She seemed subdued, and Kerry remembered impressions from the time on Dormignonne. Liz had seemed awfully reflective, though nothing specific entered her mind.

Ms Forsyth was looking up at her. “Hello, Kerry.”

“Hi, ma’am! What can I do for you?”

“You can join me in wishing Liz a successful transition.” Liz stood almost blankly, looking at Ms Forsyth and seeming barely aware of Kerry. “While I hate to lose her services, I’m pleased that a very good friend has made Liz her latest acquisition.”

Kerry blinked. “Wow—congratulations, Liz! Who’s the lucky manager?”

“That’s not important,” Ms Forsyth pointed out, and Kerry nodded, letting the stupid question fade too quickly to be embarrassed. “But she’ll be leaving immediately, so you and Andrea will need to cover her tasks as well as Jennifer’s.”

Kerry stiffened, avid for another chance to please Ms Forsyth. “I’ll make it my first priority, ma’am.” She breathed faster, imagining how excited Andrea would be when she told her why they’d have to cancel dinner.

Instead, they could fuck on the conference table in the teaming resource center, though they’d make sure the figures were done and correct before a stitch came off.

“Say goodbye to her now, Kerry. The one who, ah, ‘bought’ her away from us will be picking her up in a few minutes.”

Kerry stepped over to Liz and hugged her, and felt Liz return it. Liz smiled at her, and if her eyes didn’t really blink, then maybe she was just that excited. “Hey, pickup! Good deal! No one sends limos for me.

“But I have to thank you for setting up that vacation, Liz. I feel so much better about everything now! I am so jazzed about working here, and getting the vision finally, and . . .”

Liz looked into her eyes, and seemed to glow, but said nothing.

She felt as though she wanted to make some kind of impression on Liz, for all that Liz had done for her. Looking to Ms Forsyth for support, she just saw her boss looking at her with amusement, seeing her stand so close she was starting to press her thigh between Liz’s.

Blushing, Kerry met her eyes, and felt as though Ms Forsyth had reached into her head for a moment. Then she looked back at Liz. “If it weren’t for you,” she said, quietly and deliberately, “none of this could have happened for me. Or Andrea. Or Jennifer—!”

She felt Liz shake in her arms, and the other woman’s eyes glittered for a moment before fading to a dull contentment.

“I’m so glad,” she said quietly, and stared deeply into Kerry’s eyes. Kerry looked back, and by the time she realized Liz hadn’t blinked she knew she hadn’t either. Wow. Hypnosis for real, she thought. As she started to pull away, she felt Liz hang on for a moment, as though wanting to prolong the moment.

“Kerry, I—”

Looking at her, Kerry squeezed back. “Yes, Liz?”

“I—” Liz closed her eyes and swallowed. She opened them, and smiled drowsily. “Nothing, Kerry. I’m sorry. Just a few butterflies before I’m sold off the place.”

Kerry gave her a peck on the cheek. “Oh, don’t worry. They sought you out, right?” She looked to Ms Forsyth, who raised her eyebrows and nodded. “So they know the quality of the material already.”

“They do,” said Ms Forsyth. “And they only take the best.” Her intercom came on and her secretary’s voice came incomprehensibly through.

“Well, they’re on their way up to box up their new asset.” She smiled. “They may want to inspect you. We’d best leave them to the takeover bid, hadn’t we, Kerry?”

Pulling away from Liz, Kerry felt a rush as she agreed. “Yes, ma’am!” She turned to leave.

“Kerry?”

“Ma’am?”

“I approve of your skirt. Pleats are quite becoming, but thighs like yours really belong under a straight hem like that. Don’t you agree, Liz?”

Kerry half-posed, trying to keep her thighs together on the heat that bloomed between them. Ms Forsyth liked her legs . . .

“Yes, Ms Forsyth.” The tone drew Kerry’s gaze. Liz sounded tight all of a sudden, even—sad. “She’s lovely. You’re right, of course.”

Something held Kerry there, knowing Liz wanted—needed—to say more, but puzzled at the intensity.

But Liz blinked again and they both looked again at Ms Forsyth.

“Back to work for you, young lady,” she said,.

Kerry smiled, feeling a weirdly pleasant shiver as she came to mock-attention and fluttered a hand by her temple in salute. “Right away, ma’am!” She about-faced in her heels without falling over, and started for the door.

“’Sold off?’ They’ll want to see your teeth, then. And everything else.” Ms Forsyth reined her laughter. “Better strip for that inspection. Wench. Now.”

Kerry laughed without turning around, and the door closed on whatever Liz might have answered.

30.

Kerry was too busy for the rest of the morning to think about missing Liz, much less about the oddity of her sudden departure—or the greater oddity of Kerry’s own inability to wonder about it. She didn’t have a chance to break away to let Andrea know.

Her first break found her on the phone with one of the women she’d met on Mystery Queen on the trip back from Dormignonne—or had it been on Shadow Queen enroute there?

No matter. She enjoyed networking with Ruth, even if all they’d really talked about was how much they’d loved being on the island, how pleasant the cruises had been.

Well, they had compared notes on how much happier and more fulfilled they were now, especially in their relationships with their supervisors.

“I’m secure enough to—well, submit now,” Ruth confided to her, and Kerry could barely tone down description of the strange but really positive sexual vibe she got in deferring to Ms Forsyth.

They agreed on how good it felt to be able to tell their colleagues how much they’d loved the trip. “I’m trying to get a group together,” gushed Ruth. “You know, what they say about sales is true—if you really believe in something, you can convince anyone!”

Kerry congratulated her on doing that so soon after getting back. “You know, I’d be doing more to spread the word, but I’m concentrating on output now until the boss says otherwise. I need to cover for the ones who’ve left.”

“You have departures, too? So do we. Funny. But we’re glad to cover, and when we get someone new she sees how happy we all are, so we can backfill eventually.”

“Ruth?”

“Yes, Kerry?”

“I sometimes get the feeling . . . that I’d work here forever.” It rose in her unexpectedly, the idea of being part of something large and powerful and infinitely greater than her. “Not forever, but—”

“—all the time,” Ruth’s voice came softly. “I know. Yes, Kerry. I wish I could. Not eating, or sleeping, or even fucking. Nothing. Just doing everything for the company. Being everything for the company. It’s my life.

“My life.” Ruth’s voice sank to a whisper. “I just . . .”

“Yes. Oh, god, Ruth, it’s so good to talk with someone who understands. Feels it in her pussy. I want—” Kerry closed her eyes, forced them open. “I want to be able to look Ms Forsyth in the eye and tell her ‘Yes, Ma’am. I will gladly do anything you want. Anything you tell me to do. Anything. At all. Just command it and it’s done.’ 24/7, do or—die.”

The sound at the far end was awestruck. “I know you mean it, Kerry. Oh, god.”

“We’re so lucky,” Kerry whispered. It was all she could bear to say right then.

Ruth was silent for a moment. “Kerry?”

“Yes, Ruth?”

“Are you . . . looking at your cursor?”

Kerry blinked. “No.” She smiled. “Get caught again?”

“Yes.” Her friend sounded sheepish, but a little proud, too.

“At least we didn’t send each other to never-never-land, like last Monday.” Kerry had told Ms Forsyth about the inadvertent hypnosis, and was thrilled at how pleased she’d been.

She’d told Andrea, too, and the sex that night had shattered glass.

“That was kind of—yes? Sorry, someone’s—” Ruth covered the phone as she dealt with her visit, but her hand seemed to slip off the mouthpiece as Kerry listened.

“W-what kind of—? Kind of meeting . . . ?” Ruth sounded suddenly like she could barely keep her eyes open.

Someone else near Ruth’s desk spoke softly to her, insistently. “The silly stupendous staff meeting, Ruth.

“We all must attend the silly stupendous staff meeting.”

“Silly . . . stupendous . . . staff . . . meeting . . .” said Ruth in a monotone that sent something running along the inside of Kerry’s skin. “Yes. We must.”

“Ruth?” Kerry was concerned, but she found her hand under her miniskirt again. Ruth didn’t answer for a moment, but Kerry heard what sounded like her office door. “Ruth?”

“Yesss . . .” Ruth was breathing deeply and slowly. “Have to . . . go . . . now . . . must . . .”

She hung up.

Kerry saw one of her lines blinking, and switched to it. “Kerry? Have you got GlobalSat on? Get GlobalSat on! Isn’t that the place where you—?” The caller hung up.

Kerry had recognized Stephanie’s voice, and reached for the remote. The picture was a man in front of some official building, and it took her a few moments to register what he was saying.

“. . . French government initially didn’t agree to release the data but there seems to be some urgency now, and the response has been very swift.

“The danger, John, the danger seems to be that they, the people behind this, are also trying to move, even more swiftly, and until the computers—until and unless, I should say, the computers there can be recovered, the data from them, we may not know exactly how many women are at risk from this. Or where they are.”

Kerry stared at the man, feeling nothing at all.

“The initial focus was on the captives that were here when the naval force arrived . . .”

The picture shifted to an aerial shot of an island, of a harbor surmounted by a large and impressive complex of buildings on a headland. The visual feed had the thumping of the helicopter and rapid commentary in what sounded like French, but the GlobalSat reporter forged on: “Precious hours may have been lost. The thing they’ve told us, John, is that initially no one here realized this was just part of the operation or conspiracy that . . .”

There was a bright white liner at the end of the dock, with a blue insignia on its funnel. Lying out in the harbor were a pair of sleek gray ships, glinting with menace and pointed toward the headland like weapons. Kerry heard what sounded like “guided-missile destroyer Ariadne.”

She heard Dormignonne. She started to feel cold in her belly.

“. . . too many people, both victims and victimizers, for the forces on hand to be able to do more than try to secure the area and . . .”

“Kerry.” She looked up to see Andrea in her doorway. “Ms Forsyth wants us now.”

Kerry didn’t click the TV off, finding herself backing away out of the office as though not to provoke it as it spewed out the frightening images. She couldn’t hear the voice-over as they left, but the last shot was of a group of women in what looked like an airport departure gate.

Ms Forsyth had the TV on, too. Liz was gone. Ms Forsyth was on the phone, and just glanced at them as she argued with whoever was on the other end. It hurt to see her so agitated, but Kerry had the sick certainty that all her devotion was useless to help Ms Forsyth, when her boss needed loyal compliance more than ever.

“The network’s ‘down’? What’s ‘down’? It’s a few rooms of catatonic whores with phone lists, not a computer. How can it be—what?

“How did they get the phone bank locations in the—?” She looked up at Kerry and Andrea. “Never mind. I can send them. No. I can—I can—just trigger them and—no.”

“. . . not like hypnosis. Not sure what it is, but these people, these women, are completely under control. Someone commands them, and they obey. Without question. We’re lucky they’re not—we think—they’re not sending some kind of suicide compulsion. But some of the places they’re sending these ladies I’m not sure ‘lucky’ really . . .”

“Look. Your security falling apart isn’t my doing. What do you mean, my fault for not ordering in-office triggers?” Ms Forsyth was staring incredulously at her inkwell.

“Well,” she said in a tone of exaggerated reasonableness, “then why don’t you just give me the triggers you have to activate them for scatter? They do have destinations, don’t they?

“You don’t have the triggers there? Well, who—?”

She closed her eyes, tapping the blotter rhythmically.

Andrea moved closer to Kerry until their arms touched. Kerry resisted the urge to take her hand. They waited.

The TV sound crept into Kerry’s ears.

“. . . network of call centers, apparently staffed by other—slaves is the word we have to use—which is being used, has been used for the last several hours, to activate the hypnotic or mind-control conditioning in these women.

“They’re being instructed to depart for foreign destinations, and the State Department and the FBI are trying to coordinate with several—”

“Oh, fuck you!”

Kerry shook. She’d never heard Ms Forsyth swear.

“I have to,” someone said quietly. Kerry looked over at a woman blinking in news lights, in yet another airport, or the same one. “I must obey the programming,” the woman said with a bruised look in her eyes, not fear but the sorrow of failing the greatest task she’d ever be given.

Suddenly Kerry wondered where Liz was. If she were at an airport.

The camera panned, a room with a half-dozen dazed women, some being brought in by unformed personnel.

Kerry looked back at Ms Forsyth, and suddenly knew her boss was terrified out of her mind.

“. . . just can’t identify all of them. This—mind control isn’t something you can see. We detained someone who looked like she was . . . it was a lawyer who’d been flying all night from Australia.” Flat-eyed with fatigue and anger, the security spokeswoman looked more fucked-up than the one who’d talked about obedience.

“It could be the bright-eyed woman in the business suit, or the student with a backpack. Or the flight attendant. Or the pilot.” She swallowed, and seemed to age years as she opened her mouth again. “God help them, because they can’t ask us for help. We’re going to lose most of the ones that get this far, and oh, damn it to hell, we can’t do a f—”

The camera cut away, and then there were pictures of throngs moving through a concourse.

“Fine,” Ms Forsyth snapped and hung up. She looked at Kerry and Andrea.

“. . . basically a race between the effort to identify and warn the women on the lists who’ve already been programmed, and the controllers, who are systematically turning that program on to essentially herd them out of reach. I have never seen interagency, even intergovernment, cooperation like this but it still looks as though—” Ms Forsyth clicked it off.

“All right,” she said with forced calm. “Listen to my voice.

The rain softly falls on the dark bamboo.

It tweaked the very center of Kerry’s clitoris. Every word that followed filtered through the ecstasy.

She remembered a huge, sluggish spiral she’d never seen before and felt it pluck her mind like a moon kidnapped by a vast planet. She relaxed completely, and was glad to feel the strange painful knowledge of the past few minutes fading away before something she could rely on, give herself to.

She must obey.

I will gladly do anything you tell me to do. Just command it.

She would obey Ms Forsyth.

Do or die.

31.

They looked at each other when they got to the apartment. They’d been deeply in trance while Ms Forsyth instructed them, but the general outline of what they must do seemed clear. They were to wait until they received a command, and then obey it.

They sat silently for a while.

Andrea started breathing harder, long deep inhales, and then she spoke. “I ‘m—hungry.” She blinked, and with an effort she added, “Kerry? . . . Are you?”

Kerry’s mind was like a pool slowly freezing into slush as the sun set. She struggled, focused on Andrea, who sat straining. Neither of them could muster the will to move now that they were where they were meant to wait.

Kerry was so lightheaded she even found a spare thought: Why am I doing this? Who’s in control?

Hungry. Kerry thought about the dazed women sitting along in airports, waiting to go on long journeys. She wondered if they were hungry. Suddenly something very hurtful was in her mind, hardening as the slush turned to ice: she thought about the women alone, hungry, waiting. Then going. Not eating, with no one even to . . .

“Yes.” She looked at Andrea, who’d run out of—whatever had let her speak.

But Kerry still had some. She wanted to shut her eyes for a moment, but was afraid she wouldn’t open them until . . .

No. She realized how Andrea would feel, seeing Kerry leave her all alone without moving an inch.

Kerry had something left. “Andrea. Will you . . . please . . . make something?”

Andrea gasped with relief. It was enough of a command that she could obey it, and she stood, going into the kitchen. Kerry waited, straining herself against the urge to shut down and close her eyes.

Andrea’s hand on her shoulder. Andrea was turning her command into something more general. “Please . . . tell me what we should have, and if you want the TV?”

Kerry trembled, free to act under the new command, a little, following Andrea’s lead. “We could reheat the casserole.” She reached for the remote.

Something was on the screen, people in a room arguing. It meant nothing at all to Kerry’s congealing mind. She pushed buttons, wondering when she’d run out of will to do that. And what she’d be stuck with then.

Then she saw the warships at Dormignonne, and stopped.

Volume up.

“. . . initial reports of some sort of special or covert operations, or so-called ‘black ops’ units being inv—”

“Ray, the French are saying those reports are false, circular from other rumors. There are no commandos here, no troops other than the marine complements from Ariadne and the other ship, Suffren. Their information is that—I’m getting this directly from the warship, the government is being very cautious—their information is that one or two of the women here, the actual slaves, somehow got the message out.”

Kerry sat and listened, seeing Dormignonne in the blurry foreign video, its idyllic terrain looking grim, a place for the dead.

Why didn’t she remember this?

Why did she feel as though she did?

This citadel over the harbor seemed like something from a dream. She had hazy memories of the compound near the beach, and the beautiful grove and clearing with the huts of the village where she’d . . . she’d . . .

A warm smell shyly addressed her nose. She sniffed it, almost hiccuping with relief. Food. Andrea was still functioning.

She didn’t dare look at the telephone.

“. . . captain of Ariadne says the young woman was killed, but we’re not certain at this point, and we need to remind viewers that the only people on site are the, in fact the French naval personnel from these two ships that were conducting a patrol which Paris has categorically denied relates to environmental protests—”

Kerry stared at the screen, wincing at more scenes of airport crowds. An airliner lifted and leaped toward altitude, transfixing her as the camera tracked it with the journalist’s silent question—was everyone on it sure why they were aboard? Was there someone slumped numbly in 26A, wondering when the next irresistible compulsion would hit her?

Was her mind filled with hardening ice like Kerry’s, so that she couldn’t even weep for herself?

Something terribly important had happened on Dormignonne. Kerry didn’t kid herself that knowing it would help them, but the point was just to know . . . before it happened, whatever it was.

The rich smell deepened, and she struggled. She had to try—she wasn’t alone. Andrea was here, fighting through her own ice.

She thought about the security officer’s angry despair.

The TV showed police leading another group of blank-eyed women from an anonymous office cube, while personnel ran in. “One of the mind-control plot’s deadly equivalents to an e-business call center. Authorities say some of them are crosslinked to a larger system, and they have been retrieving data on an undisclosed number of women who have not yet been ‘activated’ by a trigger word or phrase from a center like this.

“One of the stranger and uglier aspects of this situation is that the work here is being done by other woman who have also been subjected to the brainwashing.”

“Peter? Do we know, does anyone know, how long this has been happening? When this ‘program’ was set off, when these women started being commanded to leave their homes and depart the US?”

“We’re not sure, but the French gave a time for the initial receipt of the SOS by its warships and the time they reached the island and started deploying armed landing parties. This operation, and the, ah, slavers’ countermove have gone on for about a full day now.”

The phone rang.

Kerry tensed and almost fell off the sofa. The need to pick it up and put it to her ear was beyond a desire, or a compulsion. Her body wanted to move. She just became the space she occupied.

It rang.

She realized she’d heard glass break in the kitchen. Oh no. If Andrea answered, then it would get them both. It would take one of their minds and give that girl the power to take the other’s.

If she answered—no difference.

The ringing stopped. Kerry closed her eyes and waited.

“Did—?” Andrea’s voice was very shaky. “Kerry, did you—?”

“No!” She’d been in no spot to count the rings, but voicemail might be uploading the trigger meant to turn off their minds.

She looked at the phone, saw the tiny switch for the ringer. If she could only move.

They’d try again, and she suddenly knew it was someone like her at the other end, programmed to push buttons and play tapes and stay deaf to the sound of woman after woman stumbling dazed out of her last moments of free will as the trigger unlocked her stored obedience and blew her life away.

“. . . commander of the Ariadne, Enguerrand Malvoisin de Valliere, with us now. Sir, what actually happened? Did French commandos land here, and if so—?”

Kerry was distracted for a moment by the video feed of the gray-haired captain, who was looking away from the camera to his own monitor.

“I am sorry. There are no commandos. There was a young lady, a woman who had some radios, which she used spread-spectrum—perhaps this is not . . .”

Kerry trembled, suddenly sick and not knowing why.

“. . . fruits, and it is not clear, perhaps she could take food also. She could not say. She was sick, very sick, she should not have been out in a jungle for, we think, days perhaps, a week.”

Malvoisin de Valliere stopped and looked down. “I am glad she stayed alive to see us come. She was not sure that she would know if she had succeeded.”

The phone rang.

Kerry tightened but she was so much weaker this time. She felt herself starting to rise from the couch.

“How did she get the radios?”

“She said she did not, that there was someone else. We are still trying to find this woman, if she is still here.”

Kerry was on her feet, and there was a horrid traitorous soft warmth in her crotch, and she knew it would get better, and worse, with each step she took to take up the phone. She listened despairingly to the deep, softly-accented voice, the last thing she would hear before . . .

“She said something for this woman, this other who found the radios, but my—certain officials have said this may be a manette? Comment dit-on—? Trigger. They do not think I should transmit it.”

Kerry was feeling her resistance coming apart, melting on the heat in her pussy and an answering throb in a place in her head she knew she no longer owned.

A place that rejoiced in being owned.

“We understand, sir, but—”

“But they are in Paris and I am here, and I do not think it is a trigger.”

Kerry’s world had contracted to the phone and the shrinking stretch of floor between it and her. She had mercifully forgotten Andrea, whom her weakness was about to betray.

“She had perhaps the age of my daughter, and she was in great pain but she did not let herself die before she had finished. This is her battle and ours. She died to win it. She is not a slave, and she said this other is not.

“I will do what she asked.

“This other is named ‘Kerry.’”

Kerry swayed as her world suddenly grew.

“She said to say, ‘Kerry, I remember you. I know from the mark that you remembered me when you had to. I hope you still can, Kerry.

“’I love you.’”

Kerry stared blindly. Shaking.

Standing still.

Sue. My Sue. A muscle in your chest failed. Your heart never did.

Till death—do us . . . join.

The phone was ringing, but now there was a distance. Kerry started to breathe, to let the waves of the need to pick it up and give her soul away flood and ebb. She could outwait it now.

Sue had shown her how long a person could wait.

She heard more breathing, and Andrea was beside her, even shorter without her heels, her nyloned feet noiseless as she’d sleepwalked out of the kitchen, unable to resist the ringing.

She saw Andrea reaching forward, slowly, stunned or resisting or just so tired . . .

She made herself lift her arm and touch Andrea’s shoulder. She felt the shorter woman startle out of the trance. She turned and blinked uncomprehendingly, as though the muted din of the phone were a too-bright light.

Her eyes focused on Kerry. “I need to,” she murmured, and in her eyes there was only some doubt that she should obey the command that Kerry felt in her own head.

The phone stopped ringing, and resumed almost immediately.

No. They were the last. The others were answering and sleeping and being harvested. Fewer and fewer targets left. More frequent calls—

Kerry pressed Andrea, through the shoulderpad of the blazer she still had on. It was all the strength she had left. Andrea’s eyes widened.

Raising her hands, telling herself Your heart still beats—earn it! she touched Andrea on either cheek, and then reached forward, grateful still to be in her heels, not to have to lift her nerveless arms higher.

She covered Andrea’s ears, cupping the cool flesh as gently as she could. Andrea, facing her now, stared into her eyes, and then closed her own. She didn’t pull away.

Kerry stood and tried to fight the ringing alone.

She shivered. This time it’s for both of us. And I’m almost out of—

Then she felt Andrea’s hands, reaching through her own. No. Please don’t fight me.

The fingertips caressed her cheeks. And then Andrea’s warm, silken palms were over her ears, between Kerry’s mind and the ringing. Andrea’s eyes looked into hers. Confused, worried, very very weary.

But trusting her.

They stood against each other.

After a moment, the noise was gone. They tentatively lifted their hands. Andrea leaned up to kiss her—then pulled away.

Tore the silent phone from the wall, and hurled it across the room.

Laughing and crying, they didn’t even feel the hardwood when they slid down. They held each other for a long time.

When Kerry was able to cry for Sue, Andrea held her, and waited some more.

The police found them there, and it was yet another while before they even noticed.

END