The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

1.

Nancy had to answer the phone.

She tried not to drop whatever she was doing, but as she put it down she forgot to wonder what it had been. She concentrated on not sprinting through the apartment to answer.

Just to hear the phone warble turned her on, lately. Ever since, she realized, she’d gotten back from the lovely vacation on Isle Dormignonne. She tried to hang onto that connection, blinked in distraction as she realized she’d thought it before, forgotten it before—

Forgot it again. The room went dim, as though she saw it through a cheap bead trinket that clicked rattled rang warbled ohhh

Nancy had to answer the phone.

Not another telemarketer. She’d worried, when she she’d first noticed herself getting aroused whenever the phone rang, that it would leave her susceptible to whatever pitch the caller would give. That she ‘d pantingly agree to the subscription or the phone deal before she came down from the dizzy heat.

But the sheer disappointment when it turned out to be a telemarketer, or just a friend, killed the turn-on before her mouth could open. She didn’t know who she hoped would be calling, really. She just got hornier each time.

Nancy picked up the receiver, her thighs tight together.

“Hello?”

“Ms Sheppard?”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“This is Queen Like—I’m sorry, Queen Lines Resorts.”

Nancy froze. The woman’s beautiful voice was already inside her head, echoing quietly. She’d never heard it before but she trusted it completely. She thought about being on a stage, forgetting the silent crowd that watched as she stared into someone’s eyes and opened her mind.

“With an aftermarket survey.”

“Queenlike,” Nancy repeated. She just had to.

She lived alone, but even so found herself looking around now. Her body was tingling and her head spun, and the apartment almost looked like someone else’s, but the only thing about it that mattered was that—

“I am alone now.”

I am alone? Years of urban instinct shouted, waking her from a half-trance she hadn’t felt herself put into.

“Who—?” Nancy tried to gather her thoughts and was mildly startled not to find any. “Wait a . . . minute . . .” She blinked, wondering why she was feeling so completely passive.

Why it felt so good.

In her ear, the woman breathed smoothly. “Isn’t it true that penlight navigation makes thinking so hard to do?”

Nancy went rigid. Urban instinct blurred out of her awareness. Everything did.

Nancy’s thoughts darkened with pleasure and slowed to a pulsing halt.

“Penlight . . . yes.” The words went out of her. She felt herself getting damp. “Hard to . . . think.” It was shameful and very erotic to admit that, and it was the only thing in her mind. “Not . . . think . . .”

“Are you still listening, Ms Sheppard?”

“I must listen—and obey.” Arousal filled her throat. She remembered even as she forgot. Yes. She had to obey.

One thing confused her. “Who is . . . Ms Sheppard?”

“Who are you?”

“I am export lot 602.” She was proud and excited.

“I must obey.” She said it again. She wanted to keep saying it.

“It’s time to go home, now, slave.

“Time to go home forever.”

Lot 602 didn’t wonder how she could be blank and frantically in heat at once. The programming had become her mind now, and she let the trained responses move her.

“I must listen and retain the instructions. I will obey them asleep or awake.” She just felt so good to say it and know it.

“Obedience arouses me, but I know and will remember that I must not climax until I have reached my destination and received my owner’s activation code.” As she said it, she wasn’t even aware of her hand falling back to her side, away from her darkened crotch. The idea of masturbation died in her mind. Only someone else’s command could revive it.

“You are doing very well, lot 602. You will now remember the one-way air ticket you received from a dear friend and the place you hid it during the trance she put you into.”

Lot 602 could not remember the friend but remembered how deeply she trusted her. She could not remember the color of her eyes but could still feel their hypnotic pull as she sagged back on the couch, listening and forgetting.

“You will dress as you remember being told to, and leave immediately for the airport.” Lot 602 now thought of the clothes she must wear, knew she would change her sopping panties and wipe herself and not juice again until she was told to.

“As you submit to the programming, slave, your arousal will increase.” She would be melting inside but she must show nothing. It would be unbearable. “And deepen.”

She cried out softly, knowing she would bear it. Deepened. Oh god. Oh yes.

She was a slave.

“The more you try to hold on to your current life and thoughts, the faster they will slip away.”

Lot 602 blinked and looked around, wondering what that meant. She was a deep-sea diver, adrift among wreckage she could see through dark, impassable water. Her mind and will were sealed in a helmet, and she could hear the breath of the woman who controlled her, sighing through the hose.

My current life. It was there, in the deep water that held her still and upright. She tried to focus.

My—life. She hung on without knowing why. It felt almost stupid to bother.

“What’s—happening—?” It was barely a whisper, but the breath in the helmet paused.

Then it tweaked her brain.

“Peremptory nebula.”

Oh.

The Words boomed in the emptiness of her head. She almost fell over—only the trance-induced deepwater kept her standing.

Her universe was a spiral, rotating slowly before her with the resistless turning of a galaxy. She was a drone, nude in her harness. She was under the Buildings on Dormignonne but the memory meant nothing. She knelt and worshipped.

She was nothing.

She became less, as she watched it spin.

“Yes.” The helmet dissolved. The water flooded her.

Submission drowned her and she breathed it deep.

“I obey. I must obey. I obey.”

She stared at the room. Nothing in it had color or meaning. She looked at where the ticket was hidden, remembering it now.

The voice in her ears buzzed. She answered compliantly and compliance felt good, but the programming controlled her completely now, and when the voice let her hang up she moved quickly to strip, wash, dress, fetch the ticket and the passport, glance unseeingly at the visa stamp she didn’t recall getting.

Lot 602 stared at the clock, her mind quite empty, primed to the time or a ring when the cab arrived. Leaving the apartment without looking back, striding out of the lobby, leaving everything behind, turned her on unbelievably. In the cab she stared forward, swallowing the moan of her growing need.

She drifted, unable to think. There was arousal and the spiral and the mechanics of sitting upright and watching the cabbie for cues. Dimly she remembered kneeling, being naked, the laughter of people who utterly owned her, but they were flashes decorating the turn-on. She knew she’d be suspended in this erotic trance for hours, perhaps a day as she flew, but it didn’t matter.

She was an export lot, with neither future nor past. She obeyed each command her program opened in her mind and slept eyes-open until the next one activated her.

The airport lines didn’t annoy her. The clerks and their balky computers and harried looks left her serene, and she saw one of them actually blink and slow down, soothed by Lot 602’s brainwashed calm. Lot 602 forgot her immediately as she started walking down the concourse, with only the gate number in her mind.

She found the gate and sat and waited. She felt a nice little twinge as she saw the speakers of the public-address system at the agents’ podium. She was primed to obey it: the flight announcement would trigger her and the boarding call would command her.

Lot 602 looked at the men and women behind the desks. One of them would speak and become her controller, ruling her absolutely, and they would have no idea of the power they had over her. They would only command her to stand and wait and sit in her assigned place but it was command, and inside she writhed happily in her drone-harness.

Obedience aroused her.

Across from her sat another woman with a lovely blank look. She held a purse and a book and stared into space, and for a moment Lot 602 had a strange certainty that the woman would not open the book. In that moment Lot 602 recalled she’d taken a book from the place she’d been before this, already vague in her mind, and then it disappeared from her awareness again.

Here and there, sitting still, she saw other women waiting, as blank as she was. There was a nostalgic quiver in the silent, juiceless turmoil of her pussy. She half-remembered kneeling with other women in a jungle clearing, in a marble-floored indoctrination room, all of them hypnotized and obeying the same external will. It felt like this.

We must obey. It was harder to hide the desire she felt, but that was part of obedience too.

There was some commotion, conversation rising here and there, and knots of official personnel moving faster than the flow of people down the concourse. There were snatches of conversation, “kidnapping” and “resort” and “brainwashing,” none of which made sense to her.

Lot 602 glanced at it all incuriously, sensing she must not be too visibly different than the people around her, who were looking too. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but boarding her flight and obeying her program.

Her glance intersected that of the woman across from her. They paused, each seeing the stunned obedience behind the other’s eyes. Lot 602’s pussy quivered again but that was all, and she saw nothing change on the other slave’s face either.

They stared past each other. I must obey.

She heard her flight number and stiffened, and in the crowd’s random movement she saw the other slaves stiffen too as the trigger pinged them all. She waited for boarding instructions to obey but instead the agent recited some names, none of which meant anything to Lot 602. There were people looking at them.

She waited. Others came to the podium and then they started boarding. The line was slow but Lot 602 was programmed to obey at any speed. As the passengers behind and before her fidgeted, she saw someone in a security blazer looking at her thoughtfully, but she did not know what to do. Her programming did not prompt her to fidget.

She could look around, as before, and saw the other slaves waiting too, conspicuously patient.

Someone stepped over to one of the slaves, and the slave showed him something.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” The woman in the security blazer was next to Lot 602, asking for her ticket. Lot 602 obeyed, vaguely concerned but unable to summon the will to do anything but what she was told.

She was told to leave the line, and went to the lounge they took her to.

As they sat there, she saw one woman stand again and go to the guard at the door, looking very upset. Lot 602 and the other tranquil slaves stayed as they were, and she wondered why the woman had been put with them.

The woman did not look obedient, or even tranquil. The guard seemed to sense this, and let her stay next to him at the door.

A man walked in, and he told the guard to let the non-obedient woman leave. He introduced himself, and his name slid off Lot 602’s brain like all other names.

He told them that everything would be all right. He was a male, not an Owner, but he spoke firmly and he had will, as they did not. They were safe now, he said, and they would be free soon.

Lot 602 and the other slaves were too deeply controlled to worry that they would not be instructed to orgasm for a while, or to wonder why a male voice compelled them. They just accepted the stalled arousal, sat quietly, and looked back at him, waiting for the next command.

2.

The party was pleasant, but as usual, Nancy seemed to drift through it in her own bubble. She missed Beth, who would have helped her blend a bit, and on her own she would probably have stayed home. But Beth was away, and had specifically told her not to keep to herself. Beth, she knew, wouldn’t be keeping to herself.

Still, by the time their host cajoled the semi-celebrity writer to demonstrate her hypnotic abilities on some volunteers, Nancy had already slipped out to the balcony and found a suitably absorbing view of the city. The party was large enough that her fade wasn’t noticeable. She’ d weighed the odds of standing quietly and not being “asked” but decided even a small risk was too much.

Nancy didn’t know how she’d respond to being hypnotized in public, especially by a woman. It was easier just to wait it out.

The first night of the cruise on Mystery Queen she’d hung back, chuckling nervously as the volunteers trooped up to the stage. They were fingered by tablemates, up for it, curious, gluttons for attention, and Nancy was none of those. But the hypnotist, Rusalka, had subdued all of them with the same sinister ease.

If it had seemed sinister then, as it did in hindsight, it must have been a fun sort of sinister. More than fun, it had been erotic, though by the time she’d realized that, the eroticism already had her.

Rusalka’s induction had been long, but before Nancy could find it boring she was enthralled with its sensual quiet, the way it varied for each woman as her nerves or giggles or halfhearted defiance would soften into meek, sleepy acceptance. Nancy knew it was just a show and so she could safely ignore the excitement as each woman in the line of chairs onstage softly recited, surrendering her will to the hypnotist and vowing to obey her. Rusalka’s chant was unique as she started to entrance each woman she was conquering, but the end was always the same.

“I obey only Rusalka. Rusalka thinks for me. I sleep and obey for Rusalka.”

It was just a show. Nancy forgot anyone else was watching it with her. Had part of her already known what she was watching? Just the first, easiest batch of them being led into slavery?

When the performance was over Nancy had already lost track of time and self. All she consciously recalled were the amusing things the volunteers had done in trance. But what rang in her head was the dark music of how obedient Rusalka had made them.

She’d learned, later, that the whispering she’d imagined in the hiss of the cruise ship’s air conditioning that first night, as she and her cabinmates slept, hadn’t been imaginary: it had been the start of Queen Lines Resorts’ gentle, irresistible assault on their minds. The next day brought sunscreen, soporific CDs with more whispered commands, a good-naturedly snoozeworthy lecture that really did put them to sleep before the text shifted more explicitly to their need for obedience. They wallowed in relaxation and compliance and an almost sexual anticipation of the hypnosis show to come.

Nancy glanced back in at the party through the balcony windows. No loud laughter wafted out, but she half-expected something, if this writer were feeling frisky with her subjects.

Volunteering to be hypnotized that next night had been so natural that Nancy was standing before she knew it, and seeing Rusalka point to her and nod had felt like a light from heaven. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the hypnotist from then on.

Even deprogrammed now, Nancy still couldn’t quite remember what it had felt like when the girl next to her sighed and succumbed, and her own turn came to give up her will. In dreams she sometimes saw Rusalka’s eyes spark, as she took it away from her.

It was after Mystery Queen had delivered them to Isle Dormignonne, of course, that the real brainwashing began, addicting them en masse to the control. Nancy and the others were conditioned to need to be hypnotized regularly.

But Nancy felt she could remember that yearning from before, from that performance. She hadn’t resisted what came after because Rusalka had put her soul to sleep, and taken what was in her to resist.

Nancy sighed, without glancing back at the party. The whole mind-slave trip was not the easiest thing in the world to explain.

Being outside had its tensions, too. She watched an airliner rise over the skyline, and thought about how close she’d come to being on one, the day her controllers had triggered all the slaves and tried to send them to new owners in a horribly tranquil stampede.

But she hadn’t. They’d had the list with her name on it at the right airport in time. They’d told her the flight would have taken her and the others to Rome; from there they’d have gone on separately, east and south. She’d passed, when they offered to tell her where her ticket would have taken her in the end.

She watched the horizon now, let the plane lift out of view, and sipped her wine.

Heels clicked crisply nearer and paused. Nancy kept looking out, waiting to be urged inside, wondering how she’d refuse. She heard someone breathe, and then set a glass gently on the stone rail.

“Pretty popular show in there.”

Nancy turned to her. “If you’re into that kind of thing.” She smiled. “I’m Nancy.”

The blonde, short and zaftig, smiled back and held out her hand. “Cherie. Hi.”

Nancy looked at her. She could almost hear Beth whispering Lovely. Just lovely. Find out how she tastes, and make me envious. For once, that whisper seemed warmer than Nancy’s own jealousy. She didn’t think of the taste of whatever woman she’d ask Beth not to speak of, when Beth came back.

Cherie didn’t notice the look.

“So you’re not? Into that kind of thing?” She sounded so hesitant it threw Nancy off-balance.

She sipped her wine again. Her mouth was already open to answer as she realized how much she’d let herself drink this afternoon. “I had a bad experience with it once. Very bad.” She’d meant it to sound mock-dramatic, but it sounded nothing like a joke when it came out. She closed her eyes, sorry to dump on this stranger and drive her away just for making conversation.

Cherie didn’t move away. Nancy looked at her again. Cherie was watching her and licking her lips as though she didn’t dare speak.

“So did I.” Cherie dared. “So bad I almost didn’t come back from it.”

Nancy started to feel hot.

“It wasn’t someone just making me cluck like a chicken,” Cherie said.

Or making you get up and dance naked? But Nancy had danced naked, night after night, and right now the memory of her scent and the other slaves’ merging into the Tribal drumthrob was making her knees weak.

She noticed Cherie’s eyes were pale blue. She could see those eyes, dulled and wide as dinner plates, as Cherie swayed mindlessly beneath them. She saw Dormignonne’s moon gleaming on Cherie’s sedative-anointed skin.

She looked very quickly away from Cherie’s eyes while they were still focused.

Cherie breathed in, abashed, and Nancy’s stomach twisted in empathy. Now Cherie did move away, her heels sounding so fragile on the stone.

“Cherie—”

The heels clicked away.

“When were you on Dormignonne?” Nancy asked, watching the skyline. She closed her eyes when she heard the footsteps halt.

3.

“When they raided it.” Cherie was next to her again. Her arm was a white blur beside Nancy as she reached to the rail for the drink she’d almost left behind. “I’m sorry. I haven’t ever met anyone else who was there. Not since then.”

Nancy wondered whether either of them had, after all, met others from Isle Dormignonne, just walking down the street or the aisle of a store. There was no knowing. Even if a woman you saw had eaten you endlessly during a Tribe orgy, or she’d been strapped into the next seat in the training chamber while Queen Lines Resorts turned you both into drones, the conditioning blurred things. Wiped them away.

They stood there for a moment, and then Nancy turned to look at her. She enjoyed Cherie’s curves and the soft play of her hair, the tentative way she looked back at Nancy, wanting to smile again but not sure she ought to, yet. Nancy tried not to think of this friendly soft woman at rigid attention, her yielding flesh belted in the drone-harness, her hair slicked back helmetlike over her head, as QLR reached into her mind and obliterated what she’d been and dreamed and loved, to robotize what remained.

Nancy couldn’t help it, even though it felt like she was hurting Cherie just to imagine it. By that point in her processing Cherie would not even have the Tribe name they’d implanted, and her pretty eyes wouldn’t be wide like a drugged Tribeswoman’s. Her pupils would be pinpoints by then from the next-phase conditioning, her eyes like inhuman crystals, belying her round face with their icy obedience.

Cherie leaned toward her, taking her hand again. “I know. It feels very, very weird. And scary.”

Cherie was gorgeous.

It was hitting Nancy before she was really conscious of it. Even before Beth, she’d been noticing women more since the cruise, even after the deprogramming had taken that compulsive aspect out of her sexuality and freed her from the way QLR had wired the obedience reflex into it.

But before, there’d always been that distance. When QLR owned her, all her sex had been with other slaves or with controllers. Her bedmates had worshipped the same flame or the same Spiral, and she could climax just at the feel of a collar against her lips—or else she’d been high on how low she crawled and what the Owners could make her want to do.

The women she’d slept with after that, since she’d been freed, had been different. She didn’t know whether it felt like they had more than she did, never having been someone else’s property, or as though they actually lacked something. No matter. They were sweet, wonderful, but different.

Cherie wasn’t different. Cherie was like her. Cherie had worn a collar.

Nancy breathed in, wondering if this same tempest was raging behind Cherie’s pretty blue eyes.

“It’s—I don’t know,” she whispered, and saw Cherie’s eyes were fixed on hers, uncertain and trusting. “There’s so much I keep secret when I meet people,” she said. “But now it’s not.”

Cherie nodded slowly. “It’s not like you can talk about being a brainwashed slave.” A winningly impish grin glowed and faded. “Not like you’d usually want to. But—” She swallowed.

“It’s like you’ve seen me nude. Or watched me kneel in front of a . . . priestess and forget my name.”

“It’s like I’ve tasted you.” Nancy’s face burned as she realized she’d said it aloud.

Cherie’s eyelids fluttered. “Yes.” It seemed all she could manage. She turned away from Nancy with an effort, taking a fortifying swallow from her glass, and looked inward to the party.

“It might be that I really don’t think I can deal with a female hypnotist—especially one that looks like she does—or maybe I just don’t . . .

“Nancy? Can we go somewhere? Please? I feel really strange and I don ‘t know that I can handle it without someone who knows what strange is.”

Nancy had fallen so far into what Cherie might be feeling that it took her a moment to know she felt it too.

She wanted to pull the shorter woman to her and hold her, and the way she knew Cherie would feel against her almost conquered her judgment. But she clung grimly to her mind. QLR had turned it off for so long, precisely to keep her from caring about the women she was with.

“We shouldn’t leave together,” she said. “People I know and probably people you know here”—Cherie nodded—“know we were on Dormignonne. It might not ever occur to them to compare notes, but if they associate us, then everyone here could end up talking about it.”

And they’ll be guessing that we’re on our way to fuck each other until we pass out. She wanted to close her eyes but didn’t.

Cherie was looking solemnly at her, accepting her thinking. Or her dominance? Nancy considered voluptuous Cherie, who looked like a sub in some ways. Nancy remembered the conditioning was gone, that they’d been freed of the need to obey and the need to enslave.

But they still had to protect each other, if only from rumors.

It wasn’t even being talked about for the rumor of sex—it was that they’d been slaves. She didn’t want some acquaintance staring her down in a ladies’ room later, or making some kinky dommish play for her at a gym or in their living room. Or even here, when the kitchen or hallway seemed empty for a moment.

She wasn’t sure she’d say no, and she didn’t want to put herself in that position.

Or to put Cherie there, come to that.

Cherie took the initiative. “I’m just visiting town on business. Friend of a friend of the host’s.

“I’m at a hotel.” She pointed to it, out in the skyline. Nancy was impressed.

From somewhere Cherie conjured a business card and an elegant little pen and wrote a suite number on the back. Her fingers were cool as she passed it to Nancy.

“I’ll see you there,” she said as she walked off, looking back hesitantly until Nancy smiled and held it up. She seemed to feel Nancy’ s glance, even when she turned away and clipped off on her heels to the other end of the balcony, and Nancy left it on Cherie like a hand on her shoulder. When the other woman was gone she turned back to the skyline and hugged herself, emptying the wineglass.

She took it inside, edging to the kitchen to have a polite-guest excuse to stay away from the hypnotic festivities in the main living area, but the writer was done with her demonstrations. Nancy was able to leave without more than catching bits of aftertalk that hinted that the hypnosis show had stayed friendly and G-rated.

But as Nancy looked at some of the other people there, guessing from the way the conversation flowed who’d been a subject and was hearing what they’d done and describing how it had felt, she knew meeting another Dormignonne victim had given it all an even greater charge. Even to see one of these other women fully clothed but under someone’s spell, dreamy or wide-eyed or with her head bowed in sleep, would have been hard to stand.

She might not have been able to resist volunteering.

As this jovial writer induced her, would Nancy’s revived memories have transformed her into Rusalka? Would she have startled everyone by sinking deep and promising the woman her obedience unto death?

It seemed that Cherie, leaving early, hadn’t been caught in the last part of it, either—no one said anything and there was no sign of her.

Nancy managed not to covet the image of Cherie, subverted by her own responsiveness, reverting to slavery in front of everyone. How helpless and soft Cherie would be as she knelt.

Here, among friends of her friend, perhaps no one would want to use her. And she’d been deprogrammed anyway, hadn’t she? Like all of them. Like Nancy.

The image of Cherie kneeling blissfully did not leave her mind.

Nancy fled.

4.

“After I undressed I wasn’t sure what to plan for, and so . . .” Cherie closed the door of the suite and glanced shyly back at Nancy.

Cherie wore a striped men’s dress shirt that came to mid-thigh, open to show lavender lace at her crotch and breasts. She was barefoot, and without her heels her eyes were level with Nancy’s chin. Nancy almost shrank from how vulnerable she was. Even to tell Cherie softly how painfully lovely she was, like that, might spook her—dim her eyes with tears or send her scurrying to the bedroom.

Nancy turned to change the subject, to compliment the room.

Then she looked back at Cherie, seeing how still she stood. Her breasts moved gently but urgently behind the striped cotton. Her lips weren’t quite together. Cherie didn’t want her to look away, or change the subject.

“Come here.” Nancy could barely hear herself, but Cherie did. She looked up as she stepped closer into Nancy’s arms, then closed her eyes and leaned into Nancy’s neck. Nancy put her face against the blond hair and tried to stay on her feet, melting at how soft and warm Cherie was to hold.

“Yes. It’s all right.”

Cherie held her tight. “I love my husband,” she whispered, and Nancy was startled, but didn’t move. “Ever since I came back and they deprogrammed me I hadn’t remembered how good women feel. Not remembered with my body.”

Nancy stroked her back through the shirt and Cherie relaxed against her. “It’s all right, Cherie.”

Cherie was trembling, and Nancy caught herself before she settled them both to the carpet right where they stood. She steadied Cherie and walked her to the divan, leaning her back into the corner and keeping her arms around her.

Opening her eyes, Cherie smiled. “Thank you. Part of me keeps thinking this is wrong. Not just because of Fred, but . . . this is something they’d like. Me turning into pudding when I meet an attractive woman and wanting to—

“What?”

Nancy averted her gaze. “Sorry.” There was just no way to explain how “pudding” made her think of Cherie curled in a dessert glass, or where the spoon would go. She turned back and met Cherie’s eyes.

“Everything’s all right, Cherie. I’ve been”—happily doing women since I got back? No—“It’s a little more familiar to me, wanting women.” She was lying outright, knowing how unfamiliar it felt this time, but the relief dawning in the blue eyes made it worthwhile to lie.

“It isn’t just sex. We’ve both been through something most others haven’t. We’re like sisters, I suppose—from a really, really dysfunctional family.” Cherie smiled at that.

“Anyway, we can relate any way you feel comfortable with.” She took Cherie’s hand. “If that means we end up in bed together, I’ll be one very happy woman.” Cherie blushed and Nancy kissed the hand she held. “You are beautiful. You’re what some of us just dream about meeting and loving.”

Cherie’s breathing picked up. She closed her eyes and seemed to be trying to resist the need.

Nancy let her, and just enjoyed how she looked with the shirt fallen open.

Cherie looked at her. “I just need to talk now.”

“I understand.” Nancy could almost see the way Cherie would collapse. They’d be in bed only if Nancy took them there, because fairly soon this voluptuous little wife would be ready for sex wherever she was put down.

She should kiss Cherie and leave and not talk to her ever again. Maybe just leave.

She rested an arm on the back of the divan. “You said you were on the island when they raided it?”

Cherie nodded. “It was a hunt. We were out gathering something and then the Others were everywhere.”

Nancy held her eyes and they both remembered. Most women’s time on Dormignonne as drugged Tribeswomen ended when some of the Queen Lines slavers, kitted out as safari huntresses, swept through the jungle and gathered them up for the next, more intense phase of their enslavement.

“It was frightening. They’d programmed us to be aroused and submissive when it happened, and I was, but it was scary too.” Cherie’s brow furrowed. “All my friends were terrified. We were running and screaming or hiding. I tried to think but I was just reacting. I heard someone calling out her friend’s name and she just—stopped.

“I think she got hit with a dart. I think she did.”

Cherie swallowed. “I kept feeling this awful dread—they’d get me too, they’d get all of us. I was even afraid for the Priestesses, and they turned out to be QLR, too.

“God. I’m getting dizzy and I don’t even have all their stuff in my head anymore.”

Nancy put both hands on Cherie’s. “Trauma is real, and it lasts. Take away the mind control, and a slave hunt is . . .”

“I know. I know. I was getting horny when it was happening, but now I can’t remember how that felt.

“But then I heard shooting. It was that French landing party. They were mostly shooting in the air, scaring the safari bitches away.”

Nancy tried to think of the hunt when she’d been taken. She tried to forget the gloating smiles of the safari girls, or how wet they’d made her, and tried instead to hear the snarl of submachineguns in Dormignonne’s humid day. “Scared you all, I imagine.”

Cherie blinked. “For a few seconds I didn’t even remember what it was. Then to see men again—not entirely sure some of us remembered what they were, either.”

They both laughed, and searched each other’s eyes, hoping neither one truly recalled being that far gone.

“But then there was her voice.” Cherie looked at the windows of the suite, losing herself in the drapes’ translucence. “It was Sue. The woman who’d called the ships. They had her on a public-address system, talking to us, telling us it was over and the marines were there to save us, not rape us or eat us.”

Nancy had read about that. It wasn’t clear if they’d really thought a woman’s voice would be something the QLR slaves would trust, or if it had been calculated exploitation—knowing the women would obey commands, even gentle ones, in a female voice.

“There were a few of the newly-arrived women they found at the shore compound who spread out over the island and did the same thing in person, coaxing us out of the undergrowth, once they started to come down from the drugs. They’d been brainwashed on the cruise ship, but they hadn’t been in the Tribe village like we had. They still could still remember the ship.

“Most of them knew what had happened to them and they were angry.” Cherie’s smile reflected the same thing. “I heard even a couple of the island—staff—helped. Literally with guns to their heads.”

Her voice grew quieter. “Sue did it, too. I saw her. She was in this set of naval fatigues, and someone was pulling her around on a cart because she couldn’t walk. They said later she’d told the navy guys she knew what it was like to hide out in the jungle and she didn’t want anyone to do that.”

Cherie looked at Nancy. “She was already dying then, I guess. I just stared. She looked so pale, and I just thought it was—sunscreen.

“I tell myself sometimes that she looked at me, that she saw something, but I was still so blank I don’t know.”

Nancy looked at her. “She saw one of the women she’d saved.” She smiled. “Bet she was glad she did, too. And I’m glad, now.” She leaned down and kissed Cherie deeply, and the smaller woman tensed and then softened. She lay passively as Nancy reached into the shirt and felt for her bra catch, letting her fingers rest on the feverish hollow of Cherie’s spine. She felt the bra go as limp as Cherie was, and found no straps.

She leaned back and put the little scrap of lavender behind her, finding the coffee table by feel without looking away from Cherie. Cherie’s breasts lay soft and ample against her ribs, looking even larger behind the broad aureoles and tiny nipples. Cherie left her arms out, open and helpless. Her eyes were clouded and her eyelids darkened with wanting. There was still some of the regret there, but it was fading. She licked her lips.

Nancy knew she probably couldn’t carry the smaller woman but the idea took her, just the same. She wanted to protect Cherie and control her, to feel her nestled submissively in her arms.

She extended her hands, and Cherie took them to let herself be drawn to sit upright. Then Cherie stood, her eyes alight, and looked down at her. She shrugged off the shirt, and stood before Nancy in nothing but her lavender panty.

All she needed was a collar. Her eyes were already dull with the lust that owned her, and her hips were starting almost imperceptibly to sway. Nancy wanted to hear that rhythm, to feel it in her womb. Cherie opened her mouth.

I am Tribe. I am called—

“I need you, Nancy.” Cherie was still; Nancy had imagined her slave-dance just now.

But Nancy knew a Tribesister’s desire. She rose, and reached back to undo her dress, letting it slip off her, heedless of wrinkling it. She looked down at Cherie, seeing the shorter woman nearly nude, her sex clearly shaped under the snug and darkening lace, feeling the submissive flow from her.

Cherie reached up for Nancy’s camisole, but it was nothing like Nancy’s possessory removal of the bra. Cherie was an attendant disrobing her lady, and Nancy stood still, letting Cherie kneel and pull down her satin panty next. She shuddered as Cherie’s urgent breath brushed her pussy and cried out softly as she felt lips on her thigh, Cherie no longer able to resist the obeisance. She left her heels on as she stalked behind the other woman into the bedroom.

It glowed with candles, all safely in deep holders, and Cherie had already turned the bed down. Nancy felt an endearing amusement. The zaftig little businesswoman had been planning to seduce her.

Cherie stopped and looked back up at her, her mouth hanging open now, and Nancy’s breath caught as she saw Cherie was past being embarrassed. Cherie was too deep to remember whatever she’d meant to do—she saw only a beckoning pillow, and the woman behind her, and the warm sleepy glow of the room behind the drawn drapes that made twilight of the afternoon.

She put a hand on Cherie’s head and faced her forward, feeling the other woman relax and let her take control. She hugged Cherie from behind, and kissed her deliberately as she pressed against Cherie’s silken nakedness. She brought the other woman’s hands up to her breasts and nuzzled her head, until Cherie bowed it down.

“Be still,” she breathed, and as she pulled away she heard Cherie sigh her obedience.

In the bathroom she found what she wanted, and went back to see Cherie just as she’d left her, eyes closed and wrapped in herself. She sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Come here.”

Cherie unfolded, lovely as the candlelight caught her curves, and her eyes glistened as she saw the bottle of moisturizer on the bed by Nancy’ s bare hip, the gleam of Nancy’s hands as she warmed the first cool dollop between them.

Her hands shook as she pulled the lavender bottom off, and she was panting as she came to stand at Nancy’s knees to be anointed. Nancy was close enough to her pussy to see it shine through the fuzz, and saw Cherie was no natural blonde. Somehow it made her dearer, and Nancy kissed the flower and its undyed foliage tenderly.

Cherie didn’t fall, but she moaned so sweetly Nancy had to do it again.

When she was done Cherie was sleek and gleaming, and then she reverently covered Nancy with the fragrant lotion.

The shining skin was familiar but the scent was citrus, not the coconut of QLR’s topical sedative. Nancy hung onto that, and she was able to think This is not theirs. This is ours. This is our pleasure and she is my sister long after Tribe.

In the back of her mind someone breathed deeply of coconut and whispered I am Tribe. I am called—Dew.

As she bore Cherie to the sheets, her thoughts faded into heartbeats and drums, and the only light in her mind was the reflection on fire on oiled flesh.

They were both dancing by then.

5.

Nancy dreamed of Dormignonne, when she was Tribe, and called Dew. She knew it was a dream, and that filtered out the dread. She was still shallow when she dreamed of the hunt, and it pushed her into wakefulness, sweating under the sheet. She didn’t know if it was the horror of the way her Tribesisters screamed in the traps, or the almost-climax when she thought she’d been roped and taken herself, the first time, before she’d thrashed clear and run.

Sweat and oil slid her against Cherie’s sleeping form, and the other woman stirred against her. She hugged Cherie and lay still, trying not to wake her. Cherie was murmuring softly, in her own dream, but her pliant warmth lulled Nancy back to sleep before she could try to listen . . .

The gentle unreality welcomed her back. Sweetberry, the senior Tribeswoman in the hut, had clapped softly, and as she’d trained them, Dew and her sisters woke and rose to their knees. Sweetberry smiled at them, and they smiled back as they recited, “Obedience is better than sleep.”

They grinned at each other, seeing everyone’s eyes brighten with the morning truth. Dew moistened, as she always did to see all the faces with the same blank eyes, the same open smiles, the identical collars.

Lightfoot, as usual, was kneeling close to Sweetberry, simpering and licking her lips in offering, and Dew felt a greasy liking for the senior’s-pet. Lightfoot asked, “Tribesister, are you going to entrance us so we may hear and obey the commands for today?” They all sighed hopefully. They enjoyed receiving their hypnotic guidance from Sweetberry’s soothing voice almost as much as they liked carrying it out, mindlessly laboring in the fields or the groves or around the village.

Sweetberry smiled, and actually squirmed, as though she were as new and bashful as they. “No, Lightfoot. As I slept last night a Priestess came to me. I dreamed I was to lead you all to Blossom’s hut and there I was to obey her as you obey me.” She blushed. “Blossom will hypnotize me. We will all go to sleep at her command, and her voice will quell our minds as we do Tribe’s bidding today.”

She reached for the shelf where the little ceramic jars of sunscreen were kept, and began passing them to the reaching hands. “We will anoint ourselves before we must go to Blossom.” Soon the scent of coconut was subduing them all, even before they felt the touch of it on their skins, putting their minds a bit more deeply to sleep.

Dew took a jar and began stroking the dazed, willowy woman who stood before her, blinking slowly. Dew hadn’t seen her before and didn’t know her name, and guessed Tribe had absorbed her during last night’s ritual and put her under Sweetberry’s guidance—she had the attractive blankness of a woman fresh from the shore compound that seemed so hazy in Dew’s own thoughts.

Smiling as she slathered the sacred ointment on the new Tribesister’s gently moving breasts, Dew knew last night was hazy enough for her. A Priestess had chosen her to be one of the dancers, and after the drums and flutes took her mind, everything had swirled into glowing throbbing glory.

She turned, seeing Sweetberry running her hands over Lightfoot. The fawning Tribesister was already under the sunscreen’s power, and starting to look as drowsy as the new girl, but her need to please Sweetberry still moved her to lean down, trying to take Sweetberry’s nipples in her lips. Sweetberry smiled and leaned into her, letting her suckle, and then turned to look at Dew, her eyes dropping a bit.

“Dew, you will not come with us.” Dew stirred, already missing the dream of surrendering to a new voice, and of hearing Sweetberry’s voice whisper obedience along with hers. “You are to go to the Priestesses. One of them awaits you.

“Look into her eyes.”

Dew felt the numbness as her hands fell away from the slender newcomer, leaving her to the deeper trance of the sunscreen.

“I obey the will of Tribe.” She took a breath. Priestesses could hypnotize instantly—when Dew looked, she would obey. She trembled, wanting it, but waited submissively until Sweetberry sighed, pulled away from Lightfoot, smiled as Lightfoot’s lips still sought her breasts, and told her to go.

. . . Dew awoke on a jungle path. She remembered nothing about visiting the Priestess, but the pleasure was warm, the taste on her tongue was warmer, and the certainty of what she must do was wrapped around her like another armlet of seashells. She relaxed and obeyed and went where her body took her.

She felt the Priestess’ will over her like a veil, and went unafraid of Others or tree spirits.

Around a turn, the little cart waited. The nearly-naked ponygirl hitched to it stood motionless in the traces, arms behind her back, displaying breasts that moved gently as she breathed. Her long legs shone in the leather of her hoof-boots, neatly together.

Dew saw she was wearing blinkers but her eyes were closed and she was smiling faintly. She didn’t seem to sense Dew’s presence, though once she moved her hips gracefully from side to side, her tail swishing gently from behind her thighs as they tightened. Whoever had led her here and draped the reins round her shoulders had put her into a happy little pony-dream to keep her from shying at sounds from the woods.

The cart was full of baskets neatly packed with sunscreen bottles, and Dew had an odd flash of seeing identical containers like that. She glimpsed a store, thought of going there in . . . clothes, to spend . . . money . . .

She knew she must resist that memory to please the Priestess. She looked at the sleeping ponygirl, whose skin gleamed with sunscreen everywhere she wasn’t leatherbound.

Thinking about this draymare being readied for her pull, perhaps while Dew and her sisters had still slept, was so much hotter than thinking about—a store. Maybe other Tribeswomen, their own minds softly echoing with commands, had run this pony tethered in a paddock to warm her up, and then rubbed her into docility until her bright eyes faded.

Dew leaned close to the pony, savoring the deeper scent all the tranquil hooved women seemed to have. Someone had said the ponies were kept soothed with another kind of lotion.

But Tribal lore said this tractability was something that serving Tribe naturally drew forth from a pony, a different way of submitting. Tribesisters who’d tended them and had sex with them said their own heads were spinning with it afterward, and they were much sought after themselves, more so than other partners until the pony-scent faded.

Dew thought of sampling this one while she slumbered, but what she wanted to do was obey the Priestess’ will as it coursed through her. She touched a fingertip to the ponygirl just below her navel. The pony gasped but did not wake.

Dew put two fingers to the pony’s cleft, finding reins and rings there, working gently, persistently between them. She closed her eyes, guiding herself purely by the warmth her finger found and the frantic hiss of the other’s breathing, but she couldn’t resist looking, seeing the pony tremble helplessly, still bound in sleep.

The harnessed pussy was freely gushing now, oiling itself and the thongs around it as Dew’s fingers slid home and worked around inside. Dew watched the girl’s face, wondering what wild pony wetdreams enthralled her now.

She withdrew her fingers slowly, pausing, listening to the panting and the quiet jungle-morning sounds behind it. She looked at the honey she’ d conjured from the entranced pony, and smiled into eyes she didn’t remember. “By your will, Priestess,” she whispered. “Only for her to taste.” She raised her fingers to the pony’s face instead, and put them against her cool, firm lips as they parted.

Whimpering, the pony drew her fingers in, and Dew nearly climaxed at the focused, mindless strength in her lips.

Tasting herself freed the ponygirl to orgasm, and her face contorted as she hummed around Dew’s finger, bending her knees and sinking against the straps that bound her to the cart poles. Her lips almost hurt Dew’s fingers, but Dew was too hot herself to mind.

The pony’s eyes were open and shining, and as she straightened she looked at Dew, releasing her fingers and smiling so trustfully Dew had to look away. Dew took the reins from her shoulders and pulled them away. The pony’s gaze went vague and she turned to face forward. Dew snapped her fingers, and the pony raised one knee, holding still.

Dew flicked the end of the reins against the ponygirl’s asscheek, and the pony leaned into the load and high-stepped away. Dew had to trot alongside to keep up and needed to make herself look at the path to keep from tripping. It was so wonderfully distracting to see the pony so fulfilled, pulling a cart and clop-clopping down the jungle path with someone holding her traces.

They reached the Tribe village and Dew knew somehow to pull the reins in and click her tongue, and saw the pony come smartly to a halt by one of the larger huts. Several Tribeswomen came near, and Dew saw hungrily how they moved, in drowsy synchronization, their eyes lidded.

“Must . . . replenish . . . sunscreen,” they whispered, not quite together. Dew moaned without hearing herself.

Each woman came to the cart, ignoring Dew and the taut-bodied pony, taking a basket or two of sunscreen and pivoting away. Their lips moved, chanting the compulsion. They were going into the huts to renew each one’s supply of the delightful ointment while the rest of the Tribe toiled contentedly in the fields.

After their Tribesisters drifted back, stupefied from the day’s labor and the breaks for trance and sex, they could anoint each other anew before Ritual.

Dew gently draped the reins over the ponygirl’s shoulders again, and the pony beamed back at her, contented too. Dew thought about embracing her, pressing herself against that gleaming body, reaching around under the bound arms that could neither hug back nor push her away, and kissing the lips that had sucked so powerfully at her fingers.

Give her some more Dew to taste.

Then she thought about the pony-dew she’d taste, herself, on the other’ s lips, and wondered what spell it would put on her. She imagined her mind going dim as they stood, mindless pony and seduced Tribeswoman. When someone found them and pulled her off she might just sink to her knees, forgetting speech and her name and Tribe and everything. Drunk on pony.

She wouldn’t resist when they bridled her and led her off, gently but firmly, to wherever they broke ponies and trained them. Then it would be she who stood sleeping in her blinkers, with no memory of the one who ‘d driven her to the jungle path, and no idea of the bemused, aroused Tribeswoman who would find her and admire her and finger-fuck her to wakefulness and obedience.

Dew shook herself, wondering how close she’d come to succumbing. A part of her she barely recognized tried to sort the lore. Just soul-kissing a freshly-oiled pony and wrapping herself around her wouldn ‘t drug Dew with whatever made ponies blissful, would it? It would just stun her quietly, the way stablehands were when they played with their stock.

But it felt wrong to think critically. It was better to obey than to think.

It was better to obey than to think.

Dew smiled as she felt that truth take over her mind, which had something waiting for her to obey. She felt her thoughts slowing and dimming as her eyelids drooped and she swung back to the cart. The pony stared past her, smiling cheerfully at the trees beyond, but Dew was already too somnambulistic to notice.

She extended her hands and took up a pair of baskets, then turned crisply, finding a hut in the distance without knowing why and walking toward it.

“Must . . . replenish . . . sunscreen,” she whispered, and juiced to hear it echoed by the next blank-eyed girl who came past her for her own load.

In the hut her body brought her to, Dew found two women back on some errand from contented toil in the fields. They looked at her, and she could only say “Must . . . replenish . . . sunscreen.” She carefully emptied the baskets onto the shelves, collected the empty containers, and turned to sleepwalk back to the cart.

“Dew?” one of the women asked uncertainly. She stopped and turned, looking into confused eyes. The women were clutching each other as they watched her obey. It occurred to her that this was her hut, and these women shared sleep on its floor with her under Sweetberry’s teaching.

But it was easier to sink into the blankness and forget.

“Must . . . replenish . . . sunscreen,” she explained with sleepy pride, already thinking only of the next basket she must fetch.

As she turned away, she heard the women gasp, and one of them whispered “She submits to—oh—Tribe—” She left the hut before they’d sagged to the floor.

6.

Nancy jerked awake, holding Cherie, and looked down at her. Cherie was awake, too. The candles had burned low, but there was still some light. In it, the voluptuous blonde was beautifully disheveled and lay beside her looking defenseless. Cherie’s eyes were haunted as they sought hers.

“I dreamed,” she whispered. “Of being back there.”

“Yes,” Nancy said, and her voice caught. It was too much, waking to a warm slick body and the taste of Cherie after that dream. “I did, too.” She wanted to lean down and put her face to Cherie’s softness again, but she sensed Cherie needed other contact now.

Cherie’s eyes held none of the lust Nancy still felt. She only looked afraid, and it was as though she were waking from more than sleep after lovemaking. Nancy tried to be where the other woman was, to be appalled at what they’d both been in thrall to before, at letting it invade their dreams now.

Nancy tried, but Cherie was smooth, and her thighs were warm, her shoulders were cool, her cunt was hot, hot.

Cherie saw that, and what finally snapped Nancy out of the sexual trance was how very lonely her lover looked now.

Cherie was already tearful, and Nancy felt her tense under the arm and thigh Nancy had draped over her as they’d slept. Cherie would have rolled over, turned away, maybe slid out of bed entirely. Maybe run to the bathroom and hidden.

Nancy was feeling her own regret. She could have left . . . she leaned down now, to tell Cherie softly that it was all right, that Cherie was sweet and good and not still a slave at heart, perhaps just to kiss her.

Cherie couldn’t pull away and didn’t flinch, but her eyes were wide and she wasn’t vulnerable now. She was already wounded, and it was Nancy’s doing.

Nancy just nodded and eased away, pulling the sheet up to cover Cherie, getting it between then as she moved off the bed. Cherie looked at her and did nothing except put her hand over the sheet.

Nancy grabbed her shoes. She couldn’t find her panties but she was sick to think of Cherie finding them, later, after she’d managed to start pretending this had been a dream. She knelt to look until she took them from under the bed. Cherie lay still, still staring at her as she retreated for the rest of her clothes in the living room.

She dressed there, hastily, glancing in the mirror. Disheveled wasn’t quite the word for it. Her makeup wasn’t too smudged and the sex-hair wasn’t too wild, but borrowing a comb wouldn’t hurt.

Nancy sighed at the mirror. She looked fucked—in the best sense, but still—and not quite street legal.

She started back into the bedroom, and heard Cherie murmuring. She saw the cellphone at Cherie’s ear as she lay back under the sheet.

“. . . no, I was just . . .” Cherie’s voice was tentative, yearning. Nancy felt the need to go to her and hold her jerk through her muscles, but backed silently out of the candleglow again before Cherie saw her. “. . . yes. It does get lonely. But I’m—no. I just needed to talk to you. Hear your voice. You know . . .”

I love my husband.

Nancy saw nothing else of hers still to retrieve, and tiptoed out of the suite, making sure it locked behind her. She didn’t want anything even worse to happen to Cherie.

Hearing it click her option closed, she felt a moment’s chagrin that she hadn’t just slipped past the bed into the bathroom anyway. Cherie wouldn’t have looked at her, though her husband might have heard something in her voice.

But it was easier to leave herself in disrepair and let the people in the corridor and the elevator and the lobby think she was a whore leaving an outcall. At least they’d guess her trick was upscale, in this place. Being taken for a prostitute felt like atonement for what had happened, though it managed to excite her.

That, finally, did appall her.

Back in her apartment, she started to strip. She noticed she’d put her wrinkled party dress back on over moisturizer and lovesweat, and it had ridden her oddly all the way back. She wondered if she could save it, and then put it aside.

She looked herself up and down in the mirror, peeling down her panties, remembered Cherie’s delicate touch when she’d done that. She tried to ignore how seeing herself that way was hitting her so gently in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to wash herself off.

Nancy stopped, licking her lips, tasting Cherie. She’d be washing Cherie off, too, and she didn’t want to think of her as something to look away from as it swirled down a drain.

She regretted how Cherie had felt in the end, and how their tryst had revived Dormignonne memories, but she was glad she’d at least touched Cherie, that she’d tried. God, I hope she can feel good about it later. I hope that’s not all I left her with. She remembered Cherie writhing and mewing, and gazing at her in adoration that had nothing brainwashed about it, and she hoped Cherie could keep the good feeling.

Nancy stepped into the shower, and for a while her mind was filled with nothing but warmth and sweet soap that did not smell anything like coconut.

It was when she stepped out and stood completely nude and clean before the mirror that she felt the excitement loom behind her.

Her skin grew goosebumps that owed nothing to the air conditioning as she walked deliberately to the windows to close the blinds, as always sensing no one looking. Her heartbeat surprised her as she gathered the candles and brought them to the bedroom—then brought some back out, lighting them and turning the gloom soft yellow.

She chose a CD with a low, pulsing beat and flutes, not quite what would have enthralled Ritual dancers and those who watched them, but enough to resonate between her hips. She opened a drawer in the bedroom, the music filling her thoughts so that she was surprised to find herself impatiently tossing things aside until she found the old dark-blue bikini, a Rio-cut suit she hadn’t worn since college. Dropping the top back onto the stirred-up lingerie, she slid the bottom up her legs and smiled as she felt it tight in her crotch.

Nancy closed her eyes as she found the choker, kept them closed as she put it on. She glanced at the bathroom, thinking of baby oil, but she couldn’t wait, and turned to the mirror.

She gasped, gazing in wonder at the wide-eyed, barebreasted Tribeswoman who walked dreamily toward her. Lowering her hands to her sides, she opened her mouth to say it. She lost her voice on the first try but seeing herself like this was too erotic to be distracted.

“I am Tribe,” she told her reflection. “I am called Dew.”

By the time she realized she was undulating to the beat, she was already playing with her breasts.

7.

She was struggling to wake up from the trance she was only now recognizing, but all her sanity could tell her was how much better she’d have felt slick with oil. It wouldn’t be softening her mind to make her suggestible, but her mind was already softening anyway in the heat from her pussy.

This is wrong.

She turned away from that, and the wrongness lost its sting when she was no longer watching a collared Nancy writhing in the mirror.

She missed the sting.

While her hand slid down her hip and under the waistband, she looked back.

As if to welcome her gaze again, the Nancy in the mirror swung her hips through an obscene oval, staring back at her.

Nancy leered at herself and stepped slowly back until she found the bed with the back of her knee. Pitching backward, she reached into herself and thrashed as she hit the sheets. She grunted as her thighs spasmed around her hand.

“I am—Tribe—”

It was a huge effort to form words, and choosing to force those words out felt good. Just not quite there. She could feel the climax gathering inside her, slow and inevitable. It would heat her up just to keep thrashing there, moaning dumbly as she masturbated. Reduced to the automaton she’d been in the Dormignonne slave process.

She felt the bikini flap around her knee, and didn’t know when it had left her waist.

Nancy felt something else float up to the top of what simmered inside her. She was appalled again, and this time it felt good.

It was still appalling. She could have been a sex slave now, without job or clothes or the right not to be killed if it made someone laugh to do it, and she was jilling off on the nostalgia. Women she’d known on the island, women she’d fucked and curled up to sleep with, were slaves now. QLR had mindfucked them into wanting it, but . . .

Her fingers felt good, and the dirtier her thoughts grew the higher their touch was taking her.

Some of those women were probably dead. Part of Nancy tried to ice her arousal with that. She tried to wonder which was worse—if there were a sliver of the free woman left, screaming voicelessly as the noose tightened around her last desperate gulp or air, or if there were nothing but obedient joy as the slave died, hoping only that her last spasms were pleasing.

Spasms. Nancy felt them run through her, as she imagined the slave dying, her eyes already empty, happy to be used.

No! This is wrong!

She fought it. Not only slaves had died. The woman who’d stayed free and gotten them rescued, the woman Cherie had actually seen. Sue had stayed literally a heartbeat ahead of her own death from coronary failure, waiting, then signaling, then just trying and trying until death caught her.

It stopped Nancy. She pictured Sue in front of her, watching as she masturbated over the thing Sue had died to stop. She could almost see Sue’s face.

Worse than anything else, Sue would understand. With her smuggled medication keeping her mind clearer than the others, Sue hadn’t completely succumbed to QLR’s brainwashing, but she’d seen what it did to everyone else. Her own lover, Kerry, had—

No.

I’m not brainwashed now. Nancy lay quietly, her hand still warm and wet in her cunt. I’m incredibly perverted, but it’s all me.

I wonder if Sue could understand that.

Then she pictured herself in the jungle with Sue, finding her, weak but afire. Sue might be lying still under a tree, tense and desperate as she saw another Tribeswoman, then happier as she saw Nancy was alone, not part of a hunt. Sue’s loneliness and hope would shine from her, with whatever else it had been that had bound Kerry to love her and helped Kerry find and free herself again.

Nancy would look down, and even in her Tribe-trance she might sense the kind of woman who lay dying but defiant before her.

Nancy could imagine the smile on her own face as she looked back at Sue. If the wind was merciful, it would blow toward her, so Sue couldn’ t smell the arousal dripping from her.

On the bed, Nancy shut her eyes, but it only made the Dormignonne jungle more real.

“I am Tribe,” she would say slowly and clearly to Sue. “I am called Dew.”

Then she would kneel and lick Sue to climax after climax. If Sue’s heart were as merciful as the wind, it would stop, before the other Tribeswomen found them. Maybe there would be more pleasure than grief in Sue’s mind as it darkened.

Dew, loyal Tribesister, would be too lost in her dying victim’s folds to regret that Sue’s mind would still be her own, then.

No. No. No!

But the more she tried to escape this, the more Nancy opened herself to it. Sue might only faint from the first touch, and when the others came they would find her alive. They would await a Priestess’ will as their conditioning compelled them, and the Priestess would put them into trance when she summoned the QLR safari huntresses. They’d take Sue away, and they might even keep her alive.

There would be no radios and no French marines.

Dew might be rewarded with orgasms of her own. Or she might kneel with her sisters to be wiped clean of any memory of the clear-eyed woman who’ d run away, and then march blankly back to the village to resume contented labor and hypnotic Ritual. They’d fall deeper into Tribe until tree spirits lured them away, or the Others netted and darted and beguiled them into the drone pens at the end of the island for the more intense conversion.

Nancy would awaken slowly on Mystery Queen or another ship, remembering implanted lies about the island when she was conscious and masturbating to forgotten truths when she was triggered, later. She’d go on with her life, waiting for her second trip to Isle Dormignonne, forgetting to remember the little encounters with compelling women that kept tight the bonds in her mind.

When the phone finally rang one day for Export Lot 602, there would be no hue and cry. No one would know, and no one would stop her at the airport.

Nancy was shaking, and she realized she’d gone so far she didn’t know where she was now. She was able to stop thinking about Sue, for a little while.

For once, thinking about her own brush with permanent slavery was less disturbing. She noticed the slower warmth it kindled in her, but just relaxed.

She remembered her trigger. The people who’d made her their puppet had trained her to submit to a nonsense phrase.

“Peremptory nebula.”

It sounded odd, in the glow of the bedroom. Nancy’s thighs tightened.

She’d been freed from the control, and part of the deprogramming had been hearing and saying that phrase, without trance, without arousal. She’d proven to herself that the words were no longer hardwired into her brain. They had no power over her.

She wrapped her lips and tongue around them, remembering the phone call that had stolen her mind, the ruthless smooth voice that had plunged the words into her before.

“Peremptory nebula.”

The trigger had power now. It was safe but it didn’t feel safe. It was imaginary but it was unbearably intense, and she was making it happen herself. It had made her a slave. She’d be its slave now, even if only until the orgasm.

When she knew that, she came very hard.