The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“Hello?”

“Ms Davis?”

“This is she. Who’s calling, please?”

“This is Queen Like—I’m sorry, Queen Lines Resorts. With an aftermarket survey.”

“Queenlike . . . uh . . . s-sorry . . . I am alone now, continue. Wait, why did I just tell you—?”

“Isn’t it true that penlight navigation makes thinking so hard to do?”

“Penlight . . . yes. So hard. I can’t . . . think . . . now.”

“Are you still listening, Ms Davis?”

“I must listen—and obey. Who is . . . Ms Davis?”

“Who are you?”

“I am export lot 459. I must obey.”

“It’s time to go home, now, slave. Time to go home forever.”

“I must . . . yessss . . . obey. I must listen and retain the instructions. I will obey them asleep or awake. Obedience . . . oh . . . ohh . . . 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.”

“You are doing very well, lot 459. 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.

“You will dress as you remember being told to and leave immediately for the airport. As you submit to the programming your arousal will increase. And deepen.”

“Deeeeepen. Ohhh, yes. The more I try to hold on to my current life and thoughts the faster they will . . . slip . . . away . . . yes.

“Yes. I will obey . . .”

1.

Tara tensed as she woke and then realized the tension didn’t ebb. She was tied down.

No. Oh god. Still in one of the conditioning chambers. Just a dream. She’d never been freed, she was still a slave, and the dream of being free meant her thoughts were loose. The Owners would wipe her mind and brainwash her again.

She tried to scream but it came out in a breathy whistle, and the sound startled her into silence. She breathed in and smelled alcohol and pleasantly bland soaps, not the strange drowsy thick smells of the training labs on Isle Dormignonne. Forcing her eyes open she looked up at the ceiling, expecting to see the pulsing glowing hemisphere with the Spiral across it ready to steal her mind from her, right through her staring eyes. But there was just a rectangular frosted panel over fluorescents, not even over her head but a few feet over.

Tara waited anyway, wondering when it would begin blinking hypnotically, dim bright dim bright glare . . . but it didn’t.

She almost wanted it to.

She closed her eyes again. It hadn’t been a dream. She was free. The slavers were gone, and she was in a hospital. But it was almost worse, because she could remember the voices of the women who weren’t free now.

The women she’d been putting into trance, going down the phone list as she’ d been programmed, unable to do anything but obey. Calling and triggering until someone had disconnected her headset and physically pulled her away.

There was someone in the room with her now, a brown-haired woman in loose white clothes and a blue lab coat with a nametag that said “Dee,” and she was next to Tara’s bed, her hand warm on Tara’s, not doing anything medical, just looking worriedly into her eyes.

Dee. Demurely pretty in her uniform. Tara imagined her—fought for a frantic moment but then had to imagine her—on Dormignonne.

Nude, her body glowing with the tan she’d get through the sunscreen they all had to wear, that made everyone so wonderfully languid and—obedient. Simpering with vague contentment as they lost themselves in menial busywork for Tribe.

Chattering softly in the deep inanities of Tribeswomen until the drumbeat started, breaking up their shallow drugged trivial “thoughts” so easily. Tara could see Dee, even weaker than she, surrendering first to the throb, losing her train of thought and then thought itself, her eyes going cow-like under drooping lids, rising from her knees to obey the call . . .

Mesmerized by Dee’s helpless fall into trance, Tara would barely feel herself sucked into her own. The drumbeat insinuated into her own head, flattening her rudimentary thoughts again. Played through her body, slid into her belly, teased her cunt from the inside . . .

“Tara.” Dee wasn’t a hypnotized Tribesister—she was here. Her voice was soft but firm. “It’s OK now. You’re awake and free and we’re taking care of you.” It was as soothing and gentle as Dee’s touch and went even deeper, and Tara felt herself start to soften under it.

Tara closed her eyes. Her own voice must have sounded like that, to the women she’d been triggering. They responded the way she felt now, sleepy and trusting. But there hadn’t been a concerned nurse there to protect that trust and guard that sleep. There hadn’t been anyone.

Just Tara on the line, softly erasing their wills for the last time.

She didn’t try to explain to Dee why she was crying now, and Dee didn’t ask.

Instead she said, “Tara, were you frightened when you woke up in the restraints?”

It was better for Tara than the hug that Dee clearly wished she could give, because it broke the focus on how Tara was responding. “I was—no, not of the restraints.” She nodded, looking up at Dee.

“I remember.” She swallowed. “I tried to kill myself. I’m sorry.”

Dee nodded. “It was right after you woke the last time. Was it after a dream? Like now?”

Tara looked away, as if to think on it. “Not like now—I don’t think so.” That was true.

“I don’t really remember.” That wasn’t, but she wasn’t ready to talk about that. “I guess I got caught up in—doing it.” She recalled the despair—and the weird embarrassment—when the instrument tray turned out to have no scalpels, nothing sharp, and as they swiftly, skillfully, painlessly overpowered her, she was apologizing. She apologized for being sloppy, not for trying, but maybe they didn’t know.

“Tara, we didn’t sedate you. Partly there are some odd things in your bloodwork and the doctors aren’t sure what’s safe to give you, and partly . . .” Dee looked her in the eye, and Tara chose to believe this was honesty, not just a professional pose of it. “Partly they felt dirty putting more drugs into you.”

Tara nodded, wanting to thank her but more comfortable not saying anything.

“But if you do need something to sleep, Dr Wardlow can discuss some options with you. Dreams should be safe places to be.”

“This seems pretty safe,” Tara said, moving her hands slightly in the restraints. She made herself smile, and when Dee laughed, too, she felt rewarded. Even coming half from nervousness, it was a pretty sound. Dee was a pretty woman.

I’m flirting. Tara didn’t know if that was a good thing or not, or whether the nurse noticed.

A bad thing, probably. Tara didn’t trust the lust that brushed her crotch and seemed ready to start climbing the pleasant way she felt about Dee, like a vine quietly killing a young tree.

Thinking about kissing and cuddling and fucking this warm, quiet girl made it too easy to dream about holding her down until a spiral put her into trance. Now she saw Dee in a training rack, wasting the last of her resistance in feeble struggle against the straps Tara was tightening as a voice commanded her. It brought back the nightmare that she really did remember, the one that had sent her lunging for a blade to die on.

She dreamed about one of the women her owners had made her activate. She didn’t remember who it was, not the name, but she recalled the voice, timid and quiet enough when she’d answered and painfully vulnerable in trance.

Tara dreamed that as this woman’s plane came down over the alien land she was bound over to, to a place she’d be alone and property, she’d—awakened. That the woman was as deeply fucked as she’d been but now didn’t even have the trance to protect her, remembered everything she’d done to strip herself of identity and safety and help. Descending to spend her life as someone’s trained slave, wide awake.

Praying to skid on the runway and die in flames, instead.

Dreams weren’t safe.

Dee looked at her. “Do you want to be left in the restraints?” She didn’t sound disapproving or even surprised, taking Tara’s statement at Tara’s value.

Tara looked at her. “I remember enough. I think I’m OK. But . . .” She closed her eyes. “If I want to die, later, I won’t have to try to stop myself. It won’t be up to me.”

“Tara?” She opened her eyes. Dee was looking at her.

“Yes?”

“The therapy. Is it hurting you?”

Tara looked back. “Is asking me that part of the therapy, Dee?”

Dee met her gaze. “Fair question. No, it’s not. I don’t know what they do to—with you, and they’re supposed to brief us so we know what you’ve been through after a session.

“But I wanted to ask you.”

“Thank you.” Tara sighed. “I don’t remember much of it. I think they’re using some of the same triggers the . . . Queen Lines people used on the ship and on the island, to put me under. They didn’t get all of them, but they’re trying.

“It still feels the same, to be controlled like that, so it must be working . . .”

Dee’s hand was on her shoulder and she realized she was crying again. “Trying to deprogram me with the same things that programmed me to start with.”

Dee looked at her. “God.”

Tara shut her eyes tightly, suddenly wanting Dee and the world to disappear, because she could feel the excitement ambush her, the heat between her thighs at just the shadowy thought of hearing those words and sounds, the feel of the floor as just seeing the Spiral they’d built here melted her to her knees in the darkened therapy room.

She knew it was staining her hospital gown where it outlined her crotch, and she could feel the thin flannel teasing her nipples as they strained against it.

Dee could see it. She was hearing Tara talk about things bad enough to make her try suicide, and she was watching Tara turning herself on with it like a slut. It was as though she were back on Isle Dormignonne, serving pleasure in the Buildings, juicing on command to make a Mistress happy or just to make Tara herself beg more urgently.

Tara was too ashamed to cry now, and Dee didn’t seem to know what to do. But she didn’t pull her hand away.

Please don’t stroke me. I don’t know what I’ll beg you to let me do for you, if you stroke me.

“Tara.” Dee’s voice was uncertain but she was forcing conviction into it. “You’re not always going to feel this way. You’re going to come all the way out. We’re going to help you.”

Tara couldn’t help herself, and she closed her eyes and let the other woman ‘s strength wrap her. Dee seemed to sense it and grow surer, stronger. “We ‘re going to restore the Tara that was and when you leave here you’ll be the person you want to be.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

Dee laughed slightly, thinking it was gallows sarcasm, and only when she looked down into Tara’s horrified gaze did she realize.

Tara stared at her, past shame and just fighting the need, but it was a losing struggle. Too much of her had fallen into the obedience pattern of hearing instructions. Hearing herself submit out loud, even just by reflex, pushed her to the edge, and the grip of the restraints, keeping her helpless at Dee’s mercy, sent her over.

Against the restraints, she climaxed, and wept, and didn’t even notice anymore what Dee was doing.

“Hello?”

“Ms Napolitano?”

“Yes? Who is this?”

“This is Queen Like—I’m sorry, Queen Lines Resorts. With an aftermarket survey.”

“Queen. Like. Yes. I am alone now. Continue.”

“Isn’t it true that penlight navigation makes thinking so hard to do?”

“Yes. Not thinking now.”

“Are you still listening, Ms Napolitano?”

“I am export lot 460. I must listen and obey.”

“It’s time to go home, now, slave. Time to go home forever.”

“I must obey. I will obey asleep or awake. I must not climax until my owner activates me.”

“Your mind responds, lot 459.”

“Yes. I must obey. Must get ticket and leave for airport. My arousal increases as I submit.”

“It deepens, lot 460. Your current life is fading away . . . ”

“I obey. What . . . is . . . my . . . ‘current life’?”

2.

Dr Natalie Kupiec watched the woman on the tape who sat stiffly in the hospital gown, as she stared into space. The blankness was deeper than Natalie had seen heavy psychotropic drugs create, deeper than psychotic withdrawals or catatonia.

The therapist’s voice asked, “Do you recognize her?”

Splitscreen showed a photo of someone outside, smiling at someone behind the photographer. Her face was the same as the woman in the gown, but it took moments to see that, and a blink could make them strangers again. Natalie wondered why the expressionless woman on tape somehow seemed more real than the vibrant one in the photo.

“She looks like me,” the gowned woman said, almost whispering.

“She is you,” the therapist told her, his voice sounding blunt and false in the room.

The woman stared, not agreeing but no longer knowing how to say No. Natalie shivered.

“Don’t you think so?”

“I am not programmed to think,” the woman said, straightening in the chair, and even in the speakers Natalie could hear her voice go husky with arousal. She thought Either no one briefed that therapist or he’s completely out of his league—setting her up like that. He may even have helped reinforce whatever was done to her.

She put aside, for now, how it felt watching a woman get wet by declaring herself a zombie.

Dr Wardlow leaned over and paused the tape with his usual flair for the dramatic, leaving it frozen on the woman as she sat, her pupils dilated and her eyes wide around them, exalted.

Enslaved.

Wardlow said, “You saw it on GlobalSat, the way we all did. They’re still trying to figure out the scope, let alone the real intent. The women at the resort when they got there are being treated, and many of them were in an early stage of the brainwashing. A lot of the ones they had working as staff, the slaves they called ‘drones,’ are much more deeply conditioned. The preliminary consensus from the panels working on it is that at least some of them have had their basic personalities altered beyond readjustment. Wiped and overwritten.

“They’re permanently enslaved.”

That was the word of the hour, now. Natalie had listened while no one said “enslaved,” and now everyone did, to show how well they could deal with the wreckage coming out of Dormignonne. Wardlow was watching her to gauge her reaction, but Natalie was tracking with him, and he was famous for reacting to nothing even as he drew others out. Instead, almost comforted by his callousness, she said, “But the ones they sent to us here?”

“There seem to be three categories of slaves that they let run loose,” he said. “Mainly they wanted to stagger disappearances, and do them gradually, so they let them leave to avoid any linkage to the island or Queen Lines. And their conditioning system was extremely strong. It kept these women tethered even back in their free lives, and they could be reeled back in to be caught anytime the controllers wanted to summon them.”

The image—or Wardlow’s use of it—made Natalie acutely uncomfortable, but she said nothing. But she saw the women walking slowly away from danger. Then pulled back. Made to bring themselves back . . .

“The first category includes the women who went to the island once and went through the initial programming but no further.”

“Like Kerry.” Natalie thought of the woman who’d become famous, the lover of the one who’d summoned the French Navy and ended it. Tried to end it.

Wardlow frowned, then nodded. “Exactly. Women like her were pretty deeply conditioned, but they can be deprogrammed without too much difficulty. As far as we can discern, their conditioning was designed to hold up under the normal stresses of being back in their real lives. But Queen Lines, or whoever’s behind them, didn’t plan on active efforts to decondition them.

“Next are the repeaters, the ones who recruited others they knew and went back with them to the island. They’ve had at least two courses of the brainwashing, and the conditioning’s become a part of them. Jury’s still out on whether we can free them.” Wardlow’s tone betrayed neither agreement nor dispute—he was old guard, the sort of doctor who believed nothing was untreatable but death.

Natalie looked at the slavewoman on the screen, halfway to orgasm just by remembering she’d been depersonalized, and she wondered.

“The third group appears almost equivalent to the ‘drones’ on the island. They’ve been so deeply imprinted that they cling to their slavery almost as hard as a free person might resist losing freedom.” Now he sounded skeptical—perhaps at how they’d really fought.

Natalie’s eyes slid to her computer, where she’d been reviewing the rest of the reports before he came in. She thought about the survivors’ fragmented accounts of what they could remember had been done to them. QLR had been thorough and layered, and Natalie had no accusation to make against women who’d gone unsuspectingly into that endlessly self-reinforcing conditioning program.

“Some of them probably did resist that hard,” she said, and met his eyes. She’d acquired a respect for the women like Kerry’s lover, and perhaps Kerry herself, who’d managed to stay themselves against the brainwashing. She couldn’t let him dismiss them like that.

He looked at her, then shrugged. “Well, maybe QLR was better at breaking that down than we are.” Now he looked at the preorgasmic slave on the tape, perhaps regretting leaving that image up.

“At any rate, there are things we won’t do.”

Natalie felt better, because Wardlow sounded more like a doctor, then, than he had up to now.

“This third group staffed the QLR call centers. The places where they activated the first- and second- level women and sent them out of the country. These call-drones had quietly left their lives for the most part, or just disappeared.” He saw Natalie nod. “You knew that. Anyway, they were awaiting shipment themselves—some back to the island to be drones there. Going deeper.”

“That I didn’t know,” she told him. She thought about what she’d seen about how they’d been kept, like a nightmarishly quiet version of a sweatshop. Until the call centers were turned on when the raids started, they’d literally been warehoused, sleeping and learning and exercising, bombarded by audible and subliminal commands every moment, in a constant haze of arousal. Going ever deeper.

Natalie wondered if Wardlow imagined existence in one of those slave-kennels, nude women drifting hypnotized through their instructed routine, in a fog of potent drugs and sex.

She realized that she was actually treating that as a question. Never mind—Wardlow was human, and these women were beautiful.

“There were the suicides.”

Natalie sat straighter, her eyes flicking again to the slave on the tape.

“Some of the call-center staff made individual attempts—only one or two successes, but medical personnel reported them repeating—the compulsion.”

Natalie nodded. She’d seen those files. The women had actually been saying “Must—self—destruct” like some sort of bizarre robot scenario, and she knew why Wardlow didn’t want to repeat it aloud now. She almost smiled, imagining it in his baritone. The smile died inside, as she imagined how it had sounded to the people who’d been there, watching the women try so hard to die.

Wardlow looked at her, and she sensed she’d need to match his facade even more now.

“That was individual. The mass attempt succeeded.” His face softened for a moment. “You wouldn’t have seen it yet. It’s in an appendix and I didn’t give you time to get to it.” Then he actually smiled. “I know you don’t skip ahead, Natalie.”

This much personal regard from Dr Wardlow was scaring the shit out of her.

“Frankly, I felt something when I heard about it—alone—that I didn’t want to inflict on anyone else.” He sighed.

“It was at the Russell Clinic in Portland. They had most of the women from the two northwestern call centers there, about twenty. There were only four nurses in with them.

“They started—chanting. Something about submitting to Tribe, which was one of the—”

“The primitive-village area,” she said.

“Yes. Part of the cult-conditioning. It turned them . . . on. They rushed the nurses and someone screwed up, because they dosed all the nurses with the aerosol tranquilizer that should have been subduing them. With the nurses docile they brought them along when they got out, and—it wasn’t even a hostage situation. They were still officially victims themselves. No one knew what to do.” He smiled coldly. “Just then, the mind-controlled slaves had the initiative.

“They got into a clinic van and drove off. No one even followed them for a couple of minutes—all the lead time they needed. We understand they used it to . . . keep chanting, which deepened them and had an effect on the nurses, who were susceptible from the tranqspray.”

Natalie looked at him.

“One of the nurses was obedient enough just from that to leave the van and buy gasoline containers.”

“And fill them,” she said. “And bring them back?”

Because her head was full of happy gas and groupthink and they’d told >her to . . .

He seemed almost to pity her for being able to grasp it.

“How do we know this?” she whispered.

“When they hit the bridge abutment, one of the nurses was thrown clear. If her leg hadn’t been broken in two places she would have run to it and burned with the others. As it was the witnesses that got to her before the police caught up thought she was trying to go back and pull people out.

“She doesn’t think she’s ‘Tribe’ anymore or needs to die. But she’s been on sedatives since then.”

Natalie sat back.

“Where does my new patient fit in this? Tara Newman?”

Wardlow seemed pleased at how she’d shifted focus. “Ms Newman is an anomaly. She’s tried to commit suicide three times, the latest yesterday. But she’s reacting differently. This is almost . . . understandable. She has enough selfhood left to appreciate what she was doing at the call center.”

Natalie shivered. She’d avoided thinking about the women whom QLR had tranced into abducting themselves. She’d had the excuse of plunging into work as the hospital sent staff to help in the general mess and she and others covered for the personnel that deployed out.

But to think about those women, beyond all rescue, utterly helpless—and to be the one who’d sent some of them there . . .

“She wants, or wanted, to die for her own reasons. Terrible ones, but still her own. She’s suffering a great deal, but something in her was stronger than they thought.”

“Or weaker,” Natalie said, regretting it when he looked at her sharply.

“An insight, Doctor?” he asked.

“Not yet.” She couldn’t admit it was just a contrarian impulse. “Just keeping an open mind.”

He nodded approvingly.

Natalie looked at the slave on the tape, paused in her arousal. It occurred to her that the woman’s brainwashers could have trained her to experience something like that. She imagined being kept on the edge, knowing simply that she could earn it by obeying the people who could make her feel it.

She wondered how long she could hold out and remember the value of being Natalie Kupiec, before the itch between her thighs started thinking for her.

That would be hard to resist without spending days deeply hypnotized.

She wanted to meet Tara Newman.

“Yes?”

“Ms Shelby?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Queen Like—I’m sorry, Queen Lines Resorts. With an aftermarket survey.”

“Yes. I—I am sorry, I am not alone now.”

“I see. I’m sorry to disturb you, Ms Shelby.”

“It’s . . . all right. I just . . . who did you say—?”

“Photonic apple, Ms Shelby. This is a telemarketer you’ll forget when you feel the handset in the cradle.

“We’ll call you at a more convenient time.”

“Yes . . . yes. Thank you . . .”

3.

Tara lay back on the bed as the new doctor came in, glad she’d let Dee persuade her to try without the restraints.

Dr Kupiec was a tall blonde with enviable cheekbones and a level stare, and Tara guessed she might be younger than she seemed, decades younger than her eyes. She exuded authority and Tara almost felt comfortable with the submission it pulled from her, as though it were right and safe to let this woman control her.

The stare wasn’t hostile, just remote. Tara remembered a blue-eyed wolf she’d seen once in a zoo, that had looked at her as if to say And why would I eat you, anyway?

Dr Kupiec looked at Tara’s clothes and glanced at Dee, who stood by the bed. Tara looked up at her too and smiled. The T-shirt and sweatpants weren’t quite the norm, but if she started juicing again it might be easier to hide it than in another gown.

Tara recalled Dee helping her dress, after suggesting the change, and could still almost feel the need that had swept over her as she stood nude before the nurse. She’d hugged her, her body finding Dee’s contours with its own, singing with the feel of the warm clothing against her skin. Dee had grunted in surprise but hadn’t pulled away, and Tara had let herself go boneless in the other woman’s strong hands. Waiting and hoping to be taken.

Dee had held her head to Tara’s without speaking for a moment before drawing back, and her eyes were confused, but Tara saw the arousal there was lower, a body-reaction to warm flesh and not awareness of a nude and ready girl.

She tried to apologize, hearing her voice fade, but the nurse just shook her head. “It’s all right, Tara.” She stood calmly, calming Tara that way, and when the need passed, she started to dress Tara.

Now, Dr Kupiec nodded at the clothing. It occurred to Tara that the psychiatrist might have been expecting a half-naked sex slave, and was seeing her as more of a person now.

“Good morning, Doctor,” she said, seizing that assertiveness while she felt it.

“Good morning, Ms Newman. If I could go though some preliminaries?” Dr Kupiec came closer, and Tara almost shrank under the pressure of that stare. She was aware of the other woman’s shape under the lab coat, smelled her light perfume and Dr Kupiec’s own scent under it, darker and more alien than Dee’s delightful smell.

Cool fingers took her wrist and Tara gazed up into the doctor’s face, sinking back into the pillows.

Something deeply submissive and humiliating was gathering under her ribs, a slave’s plea to this woman to take her and own her. When she gasped it out she’d be dreaming the woman’s fingertip equally cool on her swollen clit, the gaze thoughtful on her face as Tara herself went blind with the orgasm and her eyes rolled up.

“This is hard for you. Just being touched.” She’d closed her eyes—to fight the image or give herself to it—and Dr Kupiec was looking at her, so close to what she’d just daydreamed that she flinched.

“Very well . . . Dee will have taken your vitals. No need for me to duplicate.” Tara sighed at being spared that tease—and screamed inside at being denied it.

“But your heart is racing.”

“I’m—” Tara found a lump in her throat, and found it felt good to open herself. “I’m turned on, Doctor. You’re a very attractive woman.” She looked back into the blue. “I’m imagining serving you.”

“As my slave?”

She had to close her eyes, and held herself rigid.

“Yes, Doctor. As your willing slave.” Just saying it let some of the tension out, but . . .

“You were conditioned to feel that way toward all women?”

Tara looked over at Dee. So firm and gentle . . . but she saw that Dee wasn’t melting with hunger for Dr Kupiec to touch her, and drew strength from that. “So far,” she whispered, and laughed.

They laughed with her, and Tara’s heart leaped to see that exquisite face soften.

“I’m also conditioned to obey women in authority over me.”

Dr Kupiec nodded. “It must be a complicated feeling.”

“Only when I try to fight it, or just think about it. Otherwise, it’s very—relaxing.”

“Do you remember when you didn’t feel that way?”

Tara shrugged. “I don’t think so. I can remember what I did before I was enslaved”—she felt the blush as the word heated her up, but Dr Kupiec didn’ t blink—“but not really how it felt.

“And I’m glad.” An eyebrow rose. “Because I’m afraid I’ll start ‘remembering’ being my favorite teacher’s pussylicker.” She swallowed. “Or my big sister’s. I don’t know. But my Owners can do a lot of things to bend someone’s mind. I know—I think I know, anyway—that they’ve altered memories of past events.”

She closed her eyes. “Doctor? Can you do that?”

“Alter your memory?”

“Yes.”

Dr Kupiec looked at her. “What do you want to forget?” she asked softly.

“Them,” Tara said, already wishing she hadn’t spoken.

“The slavers on Isle Dormignonne?”

“No . . . the others.”

“The women that you called.”

Tara nodded stiffly, looked at her legs, shapeless in the sweats. “I dream about them. I remember them. I can’t—” Her legs flexed and she saw their lithe contours against the fabric now. Everything’s a sex object to me—even me. At least it moved her mind for a second away from the others.

Her victims.

“Do you blame yourself for that?”

She hadn’t the energy to rage at the psychiatric cliche.

“You know you were obeying deeply-conditioned orders, Ms Newman. That far under you were practically a robot—all of you. From what we already know about the methods they used to control you and the others we don’t think anyone on her own could have resisted.

“You were all used, terribly abused and exploited. But, Ms Newman, not one of you was responsible. Your brainwashers were.

“We don’t blame you, Ms Newman—some people are in awe of you for fighting it even this far.”

Tara looked at her and saw it was true. Oh god. “I didn’t fight it. I couldn’t. I didn’t—” I didn’t want to!

“Don’t be in awe of me. I’m not . . . I’m safe here with Dee and everyone to care for me. I’m not curled up on someone’s stone floor waiting to beg to be fucked or . . .”

Dr Kupiec waited, not protesting. When Tara just lay there breathing hard, she said quietly, “We’ll all do what we can. We will, and you will.”

“What I could do wasn’t enough, Doctor. I sat there and I called and I turned those women back into slaves. Just because someone told me to.” She swallowed, and made herself continue. “Just because it made my pussy slick just to say ‘Yes Mistress,’ let alone obey . . .”

Now Tara gritted her teeth. Her mind had tricked her. She’d thought she was being brutally honest, but she was only brutally mindfucking herself, as saying that and thinking it started dampening her here and now. She tried to ride out the images of sitting at her console, smiling up at the senior slaves who kept her and the others to their tasks. Hoping for a pinched nipple before hearing the next voice in the headset go dull with obedience.

“I have to break this cycle,” she murmured to herself.

“Yes,” said the doctor. “You do. And my most important job after keeping you alive is to help you find a way to do that.

“May I try, Ms Newman? Tara? Because if you don’t agree there’s no way. You’ve been forced enough.”

Tara looked at her, wanting to believe it. She didn’t look at Dee, because she knew Dee was loyal to this woman and the hospital first.

“Yes, Doctor. I don’t think it’ll work, but yes. Please.”

“Hi! This is Leigh, and you missed me—and you’ll hate yourself for it.

“Kidding! But you know you’ll like yourself again, if you leave a message at the tone.”

“This message is for Leigh Stafford. Queen Lines Resorts calling, to see how compelled you felt . . . to take another relaxing journey with us . . .”

“Please feel free to call us as soon as you can.”

4.

Dr Kupiec seemed genuinely happy to hear her agree, and Tara did look at her nurse now, rewarded by Dee’s grin and high sign.

But Dr Kupiec was all business again. “Your file says we’re trying to deprogram you with some of the techniques that they used to control you. Do you remember much about that?”

Tara looked at her. This one didn’t tiptoe around it, and she felt more encouraged by the confidence than frightened by what the answers might do to her.

“Bits and pieces. The time we spent on the ship being drugged and trained and hypnotized breaks everything up—it’s all half a dream after that, and in the seaside dorm place it was more of the same.” She leaned back. “God—just thinking about it makes me a little dizzy. Sometimes it’s as if nothing at all was happening, just endless, mindless . . .”

Tara made herself sit up, and let Dr Kupiec’s eyes rouse her like cool water. “There were the hypnosis shows. They started out just like ordinary performances, but the later ones—I’m not even sure whether I’m remembering or dreaming when I think of those.” She blinked. “I get so hot just thinking about volunteering . . .”

“And Tribe?”

Tara gasped. “I’m sorry. That still—ohhh.” She closed her eyes—but the nerve-sparkle on the inside of her eyelids was curling into a Ritual flame, and her belly was feeling the ghostly throb of the drums. She opened them again, quickly.

“Tribe . . . Doctor, if I were summoned, I’d go to them at once. I’d obey instantly.” Her heart was racing, and saying it felt like masturbating in front of the other women. She started to pluck at her clothing, but feeling the fabric cleared her head a bit.

“After that . . . the Buildings where they did the deeper training . . . I can’t recall much that makes sense. I have flashes of being a houseservant, attending to—” to my Mistress’ divine crotch. She knew the others could guess what she meant, as she reddened again.

“Thank you.” Dr Kupiec seemed, at least, to have more questions than answers. “I’ll review your file again. I just wanted to meet you for now.” She smiled again.

Tara knew she’d learn to do tricks to earn that smile. It felt OK, somehow.

But turning tricks for her might be OK, too . . .

“But I wanted to see if you were willing to let me put you under hypnosis.”

Tara lay very still. Willing. W-willing.

Willing to give you my will?

Willing to crawl to you on my belly with my will in my teeth, to wipe your feet with it until you step on it and laugh, and your laugh makes me come until I go insane?

“Doctor, I’m addicted to saying ‘yes’ to questions like that. But . . .”

Dr Kupiec looked at her.

But please don’t give me the chance . . .

“But part of your recovery is not letting that happen?”

She nodded.

“This wouldn’t be about domination, Ms Newman. I’m not planning to become your Mistress, or to get into your mind through any means but your willingness to talk to me.

“I’m looking, as I said, at the means they’re using to free you with the methods that brainwashed you. That may work, and it may help us understand how we might free some of the other women.”

Dr Kupiec stared earnestly at her, and Tara felt another urge—low and sweet but possible to resist—to slide off the bed and kneel, putting herself under the stronger woman’s protection. Her influence.

Her control . . .

“But your self-awareness is something unusual.

“Something precious.” There was a flicker of emotion in the psychiatrist’s voice at that, and Tara felt herself weakening further, in a new direction.

“Hypnosis—the consensual kind—can help us make a better link than violating your will all over again. I don’t suggest stopping the deprogramming, but if we . . .”

Tara breathed in deeply. She’d barely felt it, but now the need to please and obey Dr Kupiec was overwhelming, like an undertow in a quiet surf that had swept her from her footing and was taking her helplessly out to sea.

She was panting. “Doctor, I don’t want to, but I want to so badly. It’s because I don’t want to that I—I have to. I want to bend my will to suit yours.” She wondered whether her exhibitionism might actually be helping her if it let Dr Kupiec know what she was losing.

“This is our own, Tara.” She was saddened and aroused to see that the Doctor was going to hypnotize her anyway, taking her stethoscope and holding the disk up, where Tara’s hungry eyes clung to it and started glazing over. “This is a bond we’ll build together, not from their commands but from your choice.”

Tell me what to choose, her mind implored the hypnotist, hearing the Doctor’s soft voice repeat the instructions, too mild to be commands but driving her crazy with need. It was like—like—trembling bent naked over the chair, panting for the whip’s sting . . . and feeling an oiled caress instead.

Tara’s mind was clouding and the rest of her thoughts were wisping away in the bright gleam of the disk that transfixed her. One thought stronger than the rest was a tentative dream of how she’d be taught to please now, and how soon.

The faster she slipped into trance, the sooner she could submit and obey and obey and obey . . .

She wanted to be nude and exposed as she went deeper, and a little growl of frustration tickled her throat as she felt herself chastely bound in clothes. Who’d—?

Dee. She couldn’t turn from the hypnotic glow of the disk or the Doctor’s controlling voice, but she thought she heard a sound from that side. Her body remembered how Dee’s had felt.

Dee’s body. Dee’s quiet acceptance.

Dee’s mercy, not taking her and using her when she’d been so open and . . .

Helpless.

She grasped it and held it against the pull of the induction, but she was too weak to fight. Win or lose, it was too seductive to let Dr Kupiec take her mind.

Tara reached for what little was left. Without even the strength to close her eyes against the disk, she whispered, “Please . . . don’t . . .”

She sighed. Obedience had her now. She’d tried and she’d failed. She waited to be told to sleep, to strip, to suck.

Warm on her head—a hand. “Wake now, Tara. It’s all right.” The Doctor’s voice, soft and forgiving. “You were only under for a moment and you’re back. Fully alert now.”

She sat on the bed, and Tara was too spent to weep or to worry about how it felt to be so close—almost too spent to be relieved the other woman didn’t gather her closer.

“I’m sorry, Tara. I shouldn’t have done that, not now. I’ll let you rest and we can talk later.”

Tara nodded. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Shhh. Rest now and we’ll see what happens.” Without making promises or fussing further, Dr Kupiec stepped quietly out, and Tara basked in the feeling of trust she left behind her.

Tara sensed how badly Dee wanted to hold her now, and wanted to thank her for resisting the need, but as Dee pulled the sheet over her stomach Tara was already falling asleep.

“Good morning!”

“Good morning. Ms Diaz?”

“Yes?”

“This is Queen Like—I’m sorry, Queen Lines Resorts. With an aftermarket survey.”

“Yes. I am alone now, continue.”

“Isn’t it true that penlight navigation makes thinking so hard to do?”

“Yes. Not thinking now.”

“Are you still listening, Ms Diaz?”

“I am export lot 461. I must listen and obey.”

“It’s time to go home, now, slave. Time to go home forever.”

“I must obey. I will obey asleep or awake. I must not climax until my owner activates me.”

“Your mind responds, lot 461.”

“Yes. I must obey. Must get ticket and leave for airport. My arousal increases as I submit.”

“It deepens, lot 461. Your—”

(“Hi, Mom—finished early. Who’s that?")

“It’s . . . a survey, honey. From my trip.”

(“Oh. OK. Can we eat soon?")

“Yes . . . soon . . . what must I—?”

“Continue to obey, lot 461. You will obey your programming.”

“Yes. I will—”

“—leave immediately.”

“Yes.”

(“Mom? Where are you going?")

“You must do an errand first.”

“I must do an errand first.”

(“Can I come?")

“I . . .”

“Bring him, and obey.”

“But—I . . . he’s . . .”

(“Mom—? Are you OK? You’re kinda zoned looking . . .")

“You’re fine, just tired, that’s all.”

“I’m fine, just tired, that’s all.”

“Beachball ornithopter, slave. Obey. We will take care of him and you will go home forever.”

“. . . mmm . . . yes. Yes, I understand.”

“Your arousal deepens, 461.”

“It deepens. Yes. Yes.

“ . . . Come on, honey. We have to go to the airport.”

5.

Natalie Kupiec sat at her desk and shivered. She’d watched Tara practically dissolve in her arousal at the simple hypnotic induction, and felt like a vampire hunter who’d visited the crypt with a toothpick. She told herself they’d try again, maybe use drugs to tranquilize the patient and blunt the edge of her response.

But this was so much more powerful than she’d imagined.

Natalie had never seen such a sexualized reaction, and that was only the top layer. Tara had been fighting it and seemed barely conscious of how hard she fought, and even as she’d folded under the lust, she’d known it was happening to her. She’d been horrified.

So was Natalie. She felt dirty for what she’d almost done to the woman. Tara’s apparent freedom was misleading, if not completely illusory. She was as thoroughly mind-controlled as the zombie on the videotape—as the suicidal women who’d drugged their nurses into fueling their pyre and dying in it with them.

Natalie wondered if their selves were along for the ride like terrified passengers, as Tara’s seemed to be, careening where their programmed minds took them.

No. Tara wasn’t an illusion. She was in there, prey to impulses someone had buried in her head and wired to her sexuality over weeks of intensive brainwashing, but still somehow aware.

She decided she’d have to watch the tapes of Tara’s intake interview when they’d brought her and the other women from the call center, her tortured confession about the calls she’d’ made for QLR that day, the women whose voices were haunting the other half of her mind, gently driving her to try suicide.

Just not now.

We’ll bring you through this, Tara. I will.

“Doctor?” Wardlow, saying it, conveyed that there was someone else. Natalie turned to see him standing in her office doorway with a striking young woman whose calmly assertive hazel eyes were belied by the ragged concern that clouded her features.

“Dr Kupiec, this is Helen Newman.” Natalie moved quickly around the desk. “She’s your patient’s older sister—we got her bonafides in the computer while you were in the consultation.”

Helen shook her hand distractedly. “Doctor.” She let out a breath, and stared at Natalie, appearing at a loss. Too many questions to ask.

Wardlow bowed a little. “I’ll leave you in Dr Kupiec’s skillful hands.” Coward, thought Natalie, seeing Helen nod back and smile weakly.

“Please,” she said, and found Helen willing to be led to the sofa that looked Euro-austere but felt comfortable enough to sleep on. As they sat she looked at Tara’s sister, yet another secondary casualty in all this. Exhausted and frightened as she was, her eyes were powerful as they focused on Natalie, and she thought Maybe they have the same strength—something even the Dormignonne mind-thieves couldn’t quite erase in Tara.

She blinked them once and asked, “How is my sister now, Doctor?”

Natalie knew she really wanted to ask Can I see her? Now? and admired her self-control.

“She’s awake and aware, Ms Newman. She’s appalled at what she’s been involved in, and she’s angry they made her part of it. That’s very good—it ‘s a cliche, but she’s halfway back if she’s that ready to fight for herself.

“We’re still trying to assess what was done to all the women, and she’s helping because she can describe parts of it. She’s very brave.”

Helen narrowed her eyes even as she nodded. “Thank you, Doctor—but I don’ t need to hear her canonized.”

Natalie smiled in the severe way she knew how. “Nor would I, Ms Newman. But it’s an important part of how she’ll recover from this. I would never encourage her—or you—to believe something untrue.”

Nodding again, Helen smiled. “Good. I’m glad she’s got someone like that on her side.”

“Tara is very deeply affected by what happened to the other women. It’s not just survivor’s guilt—the mind-controllers used her as one of their tools to trigger others, and she feels intensely responsible.”

Helen’s eyes didn’t widen, but Natalie saw her swallow. “The ones who were sent out of the country.”

“Yes. She was in one of the call centers, activating their post-hypnotic programming.” Natalie looked at her and made a decision.

“She’s attempted suicide.” Helen twitched but did nothing else. “I think we’ve agreed she’ll give some new approaches a chance before she lets herself think that way again, for now.

“How much do you know about what was done to her?”

Helen settled back sideways on the couch, the blush under her olive skin already answering. “The, uh, people who gave us the first notification, I think they were federal, explained. Then there was the news.”

Natalie nodded, mirroring the rueful not-quite-grin. The press had had a field day with lesbian sex-slaves running naked around paradise, and tragic icons like Kerry and Sue, the women who’d helped each other sound the alarm, had only partially offset the general prurience.

“What you may not have been told very clearly is that sex wasn’t just what some of them were kept for. It was very much part of how they were brainwashed and kept under control. A lot of what she says and does is driven by the sexual needs they implanted in her. Most of her battle is inside—and a lot of her doesn’t want to win.”

Huddling against the cushions, Helen looked as vulnerable as her sister. “Doctor—would she even want to see me? If that’s how she feels . . . Tara’ s always been very, not repressed but restrained. Everything about her is private, but especially sex. I don’t know what she’s done, like that, but it may be easy in front of strangers than—family.”

Natalie was relieved. She’d expected to parry a request to see Tara until she had more time to assess how the patient was dealing with things. “We could ask. How long will you be here?”

Helen smiled tiredly. “The duration, Doctor. I have a leave of absence from my firm, an open ticket, and a suite at whatever hotel that is at the edge of the techpark.”

Then Helen’s face clouded. “I have to confess some things, Doctor. A few months ago, Tara tried to recruit me for this.”

Helen was almost whispering, and Natalie leaned closer. “I can’t abide ships, Doctor. I get so seasick I have convulsions. Nothing works.” Her mouth twisted. “I even tried hypnosis.

“The only reason I’m not one of your patients—or one of those poor women my sister is hurting herself remembering—is that there was no plane to Dormignonne.

“So I have a stake in this.” She sat up. “A couple, actually. I’m a lesbian, and Tara isn’t—wasn’t. That didn’t matter a damn to either of us. We love each other, and I love my life but it’s not hers, not what she is. It might have made me easier pickings for them if they’d gotten their hands on me. But I want . . .” Just like that, she stopped. Her face looked so calm that it took Natalie a moment to realize it was tensed.

She took Helen’s hand. “Thank you. Thank you for telling me. I’m not making any extensive diagnosis, let alone treatment plans, until I can speak more with Tara and see how she’s really doing, and I’d like to talk with you, first.

“But I think it would be good if she at least knew you were here.”

She could feel Helen’s nervousness as the woman waited obligingly by the nurse’s station and she went on to Tara’s room. When she heard her sister had come, was actually here, Tara’s expression was hopeful but fragile, and Natalie asked softly if she were sure. Tara nodded soberly, and that told Natalie more about how lonely she must feel. She saw something similar on Helen’s face when she went back out, and stifled an urge to embrace her.

Following her in, Natalie looked at Tara and for a moment was deeply confused.

Tara was bolt upright, gripping the sheets in white-knuckled fists and staring at Helen.

“No!”

Natalie knew it was a scream, even at whisper-volume.

Helen had stopped dead with her hand raised halfway out, and was using that same self-control to stay where she was. Natalie had to look away from the pain in her eyes as she fought down the impulse to rush to her sister’s side.

Then Tara said, “No. Make her go away! That’s not my sister! That’ s—not!”

It was too much for Helen, who clearly had expected anything but this. Her lovely eyes were nearly as glazed as the drone’s on the videotape, opaque with grief instead of lust. “Oh. Tara. What . . . did . . . they . . . do to you?” She shook her head and started to cry.

Natalie felt her mouth go dry and damned herself for letting pretty impulses guide her. She weighed the potential damage of abruptly ending the fiasco against letting this drag on. She’d heard Tara say it: they’ve altered memories of past events. Could they have been erasing Tara’s family memories to make her susceptible to deeper control?

Now Tara was gaping at Helen, and trying to disappear into the bed beneath her without moving. “Oh, no. No no no no . . . she’s . . . she’s . . .” Unable to let go the sheets, she buried her head against her shoulder like a sleeping bird and began to shake.

Helen turned to Natalie. Speechless, she nodded back at the door and then slipped out of it after one agonized glance back at Tara.

Thankful that one of them had solved herself, Natalie moved to the bed and put her arms around Tara, who curled in her hold and sobbed.

“I’m so sorry, Tara.” Again . . . “I won’t let anyone near you to hurt you. From now on just Dee and—”

“N-n-not my sister,” Tara mumbled against her bicep. “Not . . .” Then the other shift nurse was there, and Natalie mouthed an order for sedatives, staying until Tara was limp in her arms and tucking her in.

She found Helen pacing near the nurse’s station. “Doctor. I am so sorry. I don’t know what they did to her, but . . .” She looked on the edge of collapse herself, almost unaware of Natalie’s reassurance that it wasn’t her fault, but she held together until they reached Natalie’s office.

Then she collapsed. Natalie found herself with another warm armful of Newman sister, and noticed how subtle but powerful her perfume was. It was tempting to bury her face in Helen’s fragrant hair . . . but that meant she was as off-balance as these two. She tried to pull away, but Helen clutched her blindly, and she felt herself going pleasantly lightheaded for a moment, her nose held near the sweetness.

She almost had to fight the lethargy to disengage, but Helen’s sobs, as racking as Tara’s, subsided.

She looked up apologetically at Natalie. “I don’t know. It felt for a second as through I were in her head and I wasn’t her sister. She really believes it . . .” She trailed off in stunned awe.

After another few moments, while Natalie blinked away her own daze from the perfume, Helen went through her bag and pulled out a slip of thick leather with a small blued-steel ring at one end and what looked like a coil of horsehair at the other—a keyless keyring.

She held it for a few moments like a talisman, staring at it, then looked up at Natalie.

“I’ve had this since we were kids. Tara made it at camp for me. There was this . . .” She closed her eyes and just rode out whatever it was. “Never mind. It would sound very lame to you. But it should mean something to her. Just something to touch her memory. They’ve made her forget my face or look like someone else—maybe someone who hurt her—but maybe she’ll feel safer with just this little piece of—” She started to form junk but couldn’t, and Natalie was pleased. This little oddment might be quite the opposite of junk.

“Could you please just . . . let her have this? I’ll just go stay at my hotel and wait and . . .”

Natalie took it and then leaned forward to daze herself with another long hug. “It wasn’t your fault,” she murmured into that soporific cloud of scent. “You Newmans are too responsible. You need to start blaming other people.” She felt Helen shake with laughter, and relax against her.

When Helen raised her head her eyes were moist but steady, and their gaze rested on Natalie’s like fingertips on skin.

Natalie almost dipped her head but didn’t. She looked back. “I’m not,” she said.

Helen waited a few heartbeats and nodded. “Damn,” she whispered.

They traded smiles, the spell broken before it was cast. Helen was calm enough now to write down her hotel room and extension, and she left.

Natalie sat for a long time, not thinking about Helen, thinking about how much she’d underestimated what QLR had done to Tara Newman’s head. Turning the camp-craft keyring over in her hand, she thought about her silent promise to Tara.

We’ll do it. We’ll just need to get used to it taking longer. You’ll walk out of here knowing who you really are, Tara. You will.

“Hello? Queen Lines?”

“Ms Stafford?”

“Yes, how did you—?”

“Thank you for returning our call so promptly when told to.”

“Well, I had to, didn’t I? I do as I’m—told. But . . . wait . . . had . . . to?”

“Are you feeling relaxed now, Ms Stafford?”

“Yes . . . very relaxed. Almost ready—isn’t that strange—ready to sleep, but I mustn’t . . . until . . .”

“You are alone?”

“Yes. Alone now.”

“Isn’t it true that penlight navigation makes thinking so hard to do?”

“Yes. Not thinking now.”

“Are you still listening, Ms Stafford?”

“I am export lot 462. I must listen and obey.”

“It’s time to go home, now, slave. Time to go home forever.”

“I must obey. I will obey asleep or awake. I must not climax until my owner . . .”

6.

Tara woke again, reaching for the plastic water jug even before the dry mouth registered. The tranquilizers were mild but still left her thirsty, but Dr Kupiec had chosen well, and they’d taken the edge off the nightmares.

Her mind kept shying away from the Person who’d come in, the woman she was terrified of and terribly drawn to. She’d seen Dr Kupiec with her and for a moment she wondered if Dr Kupiec herself had been hypnotized, and told to believe that this tawny-eyed witch was her sister—instead of one of the most powerful of the brainwashers who’d tamed her like a bitch and made her love it.

But . . . what if it really was her sister? What if they’d taken that from her so she’d trust one less person, have one less ally to fight them?

They don’t want you to love anyone—just to love what they’re doing to you.

And you do love it, don’t you? How it can feel—?

Tara stared at the water jug, too confused for a second to realize she wanted to drink from it.

No. She knew the woman from somewhere, and it wasn’t from growing up with her. Tara felt herself shake, seeing those eyes again, and told herself it was fear.

Maybe she really had mesmerized the elegant psychiatrist.

It was better than believing that Dr Kupiec, whom she so wanted to trust, was willingly letting that woman play with her.

Tara just stopped, feeling too grim to continue. She’d caught herself before trying to scare herself out of the seductive lethargy that kept tempting her. But it was just another way into the same trap. It was less frightening, sometimes, to recall the bliss of sitting nude in the holding center, working mindlessly while the truths boomed out of the walls so constantly she no longer heard them, just noticed sometimes that her mind had changed.

If she tried too hard to scare herself, or it worked too well, it made her need the submission more. It made her dream of how good and simple and orgasmic it was just to obey.

Then, on the nightstand, she saw the leather keyring.

She blinked, and reached over to pick it up. The metal ring was cool and the leather was buttery-smooth, and the little horsetail—she blinked again. Horsetail.

It felt good to hold it, like some little packet of relaxing Zen sensations, and she sat up in the bed. It tickled her memory, too vaguely to know if it might portend something happy or not. She felt absurdly friendly toward it, and after it had warmed in her hand she lifted it to her cheek.

Mmm. The leather was real and high-quality, and the scent was—heady. Full. She held it against her mouth, feeling the metal on her cheek and the horsehair . . .

Ohhhhh. She closed her eyes. God.

Horses.

No . . .

Ponies.

Her thighs tightened as the rest of her went boneless, but she was already too lost in it to feel herself pour back onto the pillow.

The stable. She’d served and obeyed in the stable. For so long. The Others, the safari-girl slavehunters, had taken her with Tribesisters near the village in a great hunt, but once she’d been put into drone harness the only part she could really remember was being put to work under the higher-slave stablehands. But she wasn’t a stable whore for them, not usually.

She was there to keep the ponygirls happy.

Tara opened her eyes for a moment, trying to keep her awareness here in the dim hospital room, but she was forgetting why. The little leather knickknack slid down the sheets and clicked to the floor too quietly to hear above her panting.

She couldn’t feel her hand snaking under the waistband of the sweatpants, and the maddeningly light touch on her cleft was like someone else’s. Her eyes flickered closed, enticed by shadows of tall wide-eyed women with pumped bodies and empty minds.

Ponygirls.

Tara was the little foal. She bathed the ponies and helped feed them, she tended their feet when they were out of their hooved boots, she wiped them down after they’d been running, she took them for exercise. She shaved them gently, lovingly, perfectly. She took them for reinforcement sessions, though the hypnotic inductions left her remembering nothing afterward but falling at their feet as they stood and stared obliviously at . . . at . . .

Mostly she worshipped them.

Their flat bellies. Their long arms. Their sweat-beaded skin and hair.

Their bright dazed faces.

Their—thighs.

Tara had lived between their smooth, powerful thighs. She’d prayed sometimes to die there.

She was the little foal. She was the one with heels instead of hooves, the long-legged weak one they got to ride.

Sometimes they just took her when she went into a stall, pressing her against the wall until she slid down to kneel and suck, knocking her down and settling over her mouth, whinnying their need. Sometimes it was when she was tending to them—unwrapping the hot leather tack and unable to resist tasting the skin, taking out the tail-buttplug and leaning down between the firm hard asscheeks and plunging her tongue into the slickness. Going lightheaded as the spasming thighs gripped her head, squeezing her.

Tara thrashed quietly on the bed at her hand’s mercy, trapped by memories that had none.

Sometimes so gentle, like the one with almost blue-black skin who’d been lamed, who cooed so sweetly when Tara would massage her leg and then suckle on her breasts until they fell asleep in the stall.

The newly-branded one, fucking Tara’s face and banging her head against the stable wall. Her pain drove them both, higher and deeper.

Tara tried to cling to her free ideas, tried to remember the voices, the ones on the phone, but now she just wanted to guide the women on leather leads, each into her own stall. When she knelt to beg forgiveness she would address their damp succulent pussies and when she kissed them and started to lick, no one would remember what needed forgiveness.

Now Tara remembered her own conditioning. Even foals needed command from the Owners.

There’d been her turn mixing the food slurry that fed the ponygirls, the fragrant vat to be stirred and ingredients added to. Owners visited the sealed room where the slurry was mixed in plastic suits and masks, but slaves like Tara toiled there naked, tingling on their skins and in their heads from the special extracts that steamed around them.

After that her head had buzzed deliciously for days.

Most of which she spent looking into the Spiral.

It turned majestically inside Tara’s head now, and she lay curled on the bed, a lazy climax rocking her body now and then that only her inner mind was aware of, but driving the erotic prong deeper into her each time.

Deeper.

An idea was in her mind. Like all ideas it was placed there and allowed to stay by the Owners.

She thought it devoutly: the Spiral was like a drain, with a steady stream swirling into it.

Tara’s thoughts, her beliefs, anything the Owners hadn’t put in her mind, was being flushed down that drain. She was pouring out. It was sucking it out of her. Everything she’d been, and everything she’d thought she’d wanted to be, flowed from her like thin dirty water.

Something else filled her again. Something thick and warm and slow was pulsing into her. Like syrup, like come, like fluid to make her a hydraulic automaton.

She was . . .

Tara woke. She could taste herself, felt the slick shapes of her fingers and saw she’d been sucking on her hand as she slept. She just basked there in the warm afterglow of the orgasms.

Orgasms. What—?

She felt too happily weak to sit up, so she lay trying to remember the dream. Not very hard.

For once she felt good. It was as though a storm had blown through her while she slept, and she could barely recall why she’d tried to hurt herself, before.

Before she could focus her mind on that, she thought about lying here, restrained and exposed, while a lovely nurse who could see how wet Tara was told her things to believe.

Mmmmm . . .

“Hello?”

“Ms Donovan?”

“No, this is—who’s there?”

“Ah—Ms Powell?”

“I asked you—”

“Of course. This is Queen Like—I’m sorry, Queen Lines Resorts. With an aftermarket survey.”

“Yes. I am sorry, I am not alone now.”

“Is it Ms Donovan who’s with you, Ms Powell?”

“Uh . . . yes, it is.”

“Put her on please, Ms Powell.”

“But . . .”

“Pomegranate epiphany, Ms Powell.”

“Ohhh. Yes. Put her on now . . . Franny? Phone for you. No, it’s just important.”

“Hello? This is Fran.”

“464 obey now.”

“I am obedient. I am export lot 464.”

(“F-Fran? What . . . who is that? Why do you look so . . . ?")

“Isn’t it true that penlight navigation makes thinking so hard to do?”

“Yes. Not thinking now.”

(“Fran? What the fuck?")

“Who is with you, lot 464?”

“Export lot 463. She is not yet obedient.”

(“Fran! Please! I can’t move!")

“She is resisting activation. You will help her achieve obedience again, lot 464.”

“I will help her.”

“Then you will both remember what you must do to go home.”

“We will obey and go home forever.”

(“Fran! My god. I can’t—even—scream—")

“Retrigger her, then put her on. Her trigger is ‘pomegranate epiphany.’”

“Yes.

“Pomegranate epiphany.”

(“Ohhhhhh . . . nnnooo . . . yesss . . .)

“H-hello? Oh god—”

“Obey, Ms Powell. What are you wearing now? Below your waist? Pomegranate epiphany.”

“Nnnng. I . . . ohhh jeans . . .”

“Tell Ms Donovan to kneel and undo them. She needs access to your crotch. Obey.”

“. . . she’s . . . oh, she’s . . . Fran, what . . . please . . . please . . . don’t . . .”

“Relax and feel it, Ms Powell. It makes you want to obey.

“Now listen only to the sound of my voice, and we can begin to reactivate you.”

7.

Natalie put her head in her hands, looking away from the clock by the office door. Not quite three in the morning. She’d tried to catnap on the sofa, but woke to strange dreams. Helen Newman had danced in them, and as Natalie woke she found the cushions still smelled like her.

Hazel eyes in firelight.

I REALLY need to get out more, Natalie told herself, and let herself consider why she might be thinking about her patient’s sister. Maybe enticing straight girls was Helen’s hobby. She had a natural charisma, and the vulnerability she had now, whether it was something she put on or a response to her fears for her sister, made it a potent trap.

She’s not the one I’m getting paid to diagnose and treat. Natalie turned back to the screen and the notes Wardlow and the others had made about Tara.

A queasy admiration had been building in her for the minds behind Queen Lines Resorts, at least the psychologists who’d designed the mind control program. It was so layered, so interdependent that it reminded her of an engine, parts helping other parts work. The women were set against each other, slaves at higher levels helping deepen newer arrivals. There were drugs, and those cult-based ceremonies. There was pervasive, repetitive hypnosis, and hypnotic symbolism everywhere.

Natalie thought about the zombie-like woman on the tape. The documentation said they still didn’t know who she was, and she didn’t seem to care. She ‘d been given a new identity—had it stamped onto the top of her brain—and addicted to it.

It was a delightful enough addiction, Natalie thought. No one would ever be strung out when getting the next hit was as easy as thinking I must obey. But each time made it stronger.

But here was Tara Newman, actually putting herself into withdrawal, lonely—and horny—inside her own devalued head. More remarkable because she’d been in the second of Wardlow’s categories, the more deeply-brainwashed “repeaters” who didn’t just retain the programming that primed them to be drawn back, but could be programmed to serve actively.

Recruiting others. She thought about Helen’s quiet horror at Tara’s attempt to lure her into this, and the queasiness was back, as she saw sisters preying on their own flesh and blood. Someone knew how to make all this happen, knew human nature well enough to—to fuck with it this thoroughly.

Natalie thought Helen’s horror seemed to be less about her own close call and more about how it would affect Tara. She clicked through the summaries and then the index for the interview, but Tara hadn’t mentioned it.

Maybe it was why she’d tried to kill herself.

Something had dragged Tara’s mind back up from where her owners had buried it. It seemed tied to the other women, the ones she saw as her victims—and as far as that went, it seemed to have done her no favors.

Looking up, Natalie saw it was 3:30. I wonder if Tara’s awake. Or if she ‘s dreaming anything pleasant.

She still felt guilty about the attempt at hypnosis that had impaled Tara on her addiction, and the mess with Helen—that was going to require some extensive work. She decided to go look in on her, not sure whether she hoped Tara would be asleep or wakeful but determined that she’d be with her patient on at least this particular long dark night of the soul.

As she walked the quiet corridors, she recalled that this was also a favored time for conducting coercive interrogations. She wondered if the fight for Tara Newman would come down to pitting one ruthlessness against another, Darkness at Noon against The Manchurian Candidate.

No. Only one side had tried to tear Tara down and turn her into a slave. Natalie and this place would study the pieces and then do their damnedest to rebuild the free woman she’d been.

She stopped at the nurse’s station, relieved to see a veteran night nurse looking over the monitor at her. “No suicide attempts, Doctor. But she did manifest the other behavior they left in the notes.”

Natalie looked at her. “She masturbated?”

The nurse’s mouth twitched. “Thoroughly.” They smiled at each other. “She just finished a shower. Took the sedative you wanted on offer before that—at 0312.” She didn’t glance at the chart; neither did Natalie. She smiled again and walked on.

Tara was next to her bed facing away from the door, wearing an oversize T-shirt with the hospital logo. It rode up now almost to her butt as she raised her arms to dry her hair, and on tiptoe as she was her legs stretched fetchingly. Natalie tended toward the slender, and had envied women with legs that finely balanced between willowy and voluptuous.

“Tara?”

She was glad to see her patient turn without jumping, and wondered if the sedative was already buffering Tara’s emotions. “Doctor,” Tara said softly. She smiled and folded herself to sit on the bed with her enviable legs tucked under her in one sinuous motion, seductive and graceful. Natalie wondered if she’d been taught that on Isle Dormignonne or after. She took a chair by the wall.

“How are you?”

“Rested,” Tara said. She did seem a little more energetic than Natalie felt, and it occurred to Natalie that she might be making her third error of the day by coming here at the end of her wick instead of waiting until tomorrow.

But she was here. “Good. I just wanted to apologize for today, Tara. I was too sensitive to opportunities—it’s not always good to seize them. I can’t promise you a painless process but I’m supposed to limit it to either the necessary or the inevitable.”

Tara sat very still. “I understand, Doctor. Please don’t worry. A lot of things can spook me, but then I realize it’s because I’m remembering something—not living it.”

She’d decided not to ask Tara about her sister without a lot of forethought, but she could deal with the other thing. “Thanks. About hypnotizing you . . .”

Tara looked at her serenely.

“Tara, do you still feel those compulsions? About me?”

Now she saw Tara’s eyes change—her pupils dilated, visible even in the room’s low light. Her third mistake? She realized how that could sound like a sexual advance, especially for someone with Tara’s experiences—Wear my collar?

“To be your slave?” Tara’s voice was soft. She nodded gravely, and the effect was odd, perched as she was with the T-shirt like a microskirt too high up her thighs.

“Yes, Doctor. Oh, yes. Part of me wants to crawl to you and show you just how . . . but not all of me. And some of that is real—I trust you, and I know I’ll have to rely on you without any other reference. Unquestioning obedience.” She smiled, almost the way the nurse had before.

“So maybe I’ll just be an especially compliant patient.”

Natalie had to smile.

“I was remembering, earlier.” Tara’s smile faded. “Maybe all this has jarred some things loose. But I realized how you may have felt, seeing how I—reacted to being hypnotized. I need to explain that, if I can figure it out myself.

“We used to do it to each other. We were just pawns—less than that, pinballs playing off each other, but it was almost as . . . hot . . . to do it to some other woman as to submit to it yourself. You’d find someone staring you down and you’d learn not to look away, just to let it happen. Later you’d find someone fixated on your mouth or your breast and you’d just start speaking to her, softly or firmly, just telling her to relax.

“Sometimes, back in Tribe, there’d be feedback. You’d start saying how obedient everyone felt, how just lost in submitting to Tribe, and then someone would be turned-on enough to top you, and then someone else would get excited . . . pretty soon it was like you’d all be playing with each other, stroking, stroking . . .”

Natalie found it too easy to imagine the doomed women at the Russell Clinic, doing that until they’d turned their minds completely off and started their suicide program. Feeling a sustained orgasm . . .

She wanted to leave—she needed to deal with this information when she was sharper—but after today she owed Tara, and she’d just adapt to the timing. If this was when Tara needed to talk, so be it.

“You were always sleepy there—in the village where it was always so warm, in the Buildings where there was always some kind of subliminal hum coming out to keep you tranced.

“It was impossible to think, to keep an idea in your head except the ones they wanted you to have. You just didn’t want to think.” Tara was almost whispering now, and Natalie felt a mild worry that this might actually lead Tara to lapse into a trance as she remembered doing it in captivity.

But it seemed easier just to let her talk. If she sleeps I can just wake her.

Or just let her sleep.

“You’d get aroused and susceptible, or susceptible and aroused. You’d do nothing but obey. Obey and sleep. Sleep and obey. You sleep with your eyes open and with your eyes closed, there. You obey asleep or awake. Asleep or awake.”

“Asleep or awake,” Natalie repeated, so Tara would know she was still with her. She should really get up and leave and start this tomorrow, but . . .

“You know obedience is sleep is arousal is obedience is sleep.”

Natalie squinted a bit, but she’d been watching Tara’s eyes and the other woman was still awake, though very still. Natalie wished she weren’t so sleepy already.

“Sleeping with your eyes closed and becoming very aroused.

“Sleeping with your eyes open and obeying without having to think.

“You look into her eyes and relax and it’s so easy just to sleep with your eyes open.”

Natalie felt a little better, as she realized how she could resolve getting this information entered with getting a good night’s sleep. All she had to do . . . really had to do was . . .

“. . . listening to me, and not thinking about anything else, not thinking about anything, not thinking.”

She’d missed something. Something important.

“You’re just looking at my eyes, Natalie. That’s right. Not into them, because you might get hypnotized that way. That’s right, Natalie. You’re doing well. I get hypnotized that way all the time, but it’s OK because it’ s such a turn-on.”

Not really important . . . was it . . .

She couldn’t track it, not and listen to Tara.

She must listen to Tara now.

Especially since she was so sleepy.

“You’re getting turned on by it too, Natalie. Even though you’re not being hypnotized. Move your hand again, just as I told you . . . there. Hmm?” Her eyebrow arched in such a pretty way.

Natalie shimmied weakly in the chair, moaning with the pleasure. It felt so good to listen and sleep with her eyes open.

She didn’t have to worry about missing anything. Tara was putting it into her mind. She just had to . . .

“Will you obey me now, Natalie? Do something I tell you to do?”

Natalie stirred. It was . . . about time she obeyed Tara, after all the times she’d asked . . .

Easy to breathe. Easy to stare at but not into Tara’s eyes. Easy to say it and make Tara happy.

Her voice was a meek whisper. It sounded like someone else.

“ . . . I will obey.”

She didn’t hear the little noise she made as she came. She was looking into Tara’s eyes now.