If there was a moment during the next week that Marisa would say she got the most nervous during the entire affair, it was the morning when Kat started rising from bed before Marisa. To say, this never happened, would be an understatement; Kat was such an anti-morning person that Marisa had often wished she could change this behavior with trance work, only to decide that even hypnosis had its limits.

On that morning, Kat was not suddenly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as Marisa was seemingly every day. She rolled out of bed making the same grumpy noises that she made on most mornings, and she wobbled toward the bathroom on unsteady legs.

Marisa had been half-awake when Kat started moving, and fully awake once she realized what it meant. She asked, “Up this early?” Forcing a casualness that she did not feel.

Kat muttered something which Marisa, accustomed to translating her morning-talk, believed to be, “Shower first.” She was in the bathroom before Marisa could say anything else.

Marisa went into the kitchen and began to scramble some eggs. Her tradition was Cheerios, but she wanted to get some protein into Kat, give her some energy.

Kat trudged into the kitchen, fully dressed and ready to leave. Marisa tried to consider her objectively: how does she look? Unfortunately, her paranoia kept wanting to respond, she looks like shit.

Marisa asked, “How are you doing?”

“Uh-huh,” Kat muttered, chewing her eggs.

”You feeling okay to keep going?” During their planning, they had established a rule: if either one of them was worried about Kat’s physical or mental health, Kat would walk away, whether they had anything to give to the marshal or not.

”Uh-huh.”

Of course, Marisa mused to herself, Kat had been a champion athlete in college — only Division III, but still a champion. An athlete at that level was going to overestimate her resilience right up until she got injured.

”Look, I’m not trying to nag here,” Marisa said. “I knew what we were getting into when we did the planning. I just want to be sure you’re ... you know ... staying objective.”

”I’m fine,” Kat mumbled, slurring the words together into one: Mfine.

”By my count you slept 16 hours out of the last 24,” Marisa said. “And that’s not counting time spent in trance.”

”Mfine,” Kat said again, around another mouthful of eggs.

”Kat, look at me.”

Kat looked up from her plate. Her eyes were puffy from sleep.

”The day before wasn’t much better,” Marisa said. “If you’re not going to talk to me, really talk, then I’m gonna have to give you the stop trigger.”

There actually wasn’t one stop trigger; Marisa would have to take Kat down into the Sapphire Void and read a whole script to her. But Kat wouldn’t remember that.

“Ris, I’m okay,” Kat said. “She’s trying to grind me down. Session after session, with no aftercare, it’s wearing me thin. But it’s not wearing me out. I’m still in control.”

“You’re looking worn out to me.”

”Ris, we’ve almost got her. Don’t let that work go for nothing.”

”Well, I hope it’s pretty soon,” Marisa said. “These sessions are costing us all our Kellner money.”

”Ris, I’ve got it under control. All that extra sleep is helping me keep it under control. Okay?”

Marisa managed a small smile. “Okay.”

Kat finished her breakfast and left without saying any more. When the door closed behind her, Marisa immediately made a beeline for her phone.

Where it had taken forty minutes to get from home to Calliope’s office on the first day, now it took Kat almost an hour. Her legs were heavy, she was walking slower.

Kat knew why she felt this way. She knew what was happening to her, and that it was the same thing that happened to many people who were now living full-time at the Church of Divine Passion. But it also felt decidedly different than The Thing had felt. Each of the previous seven days she had visited Calliope had felt more and more like the normal trances she had experienced in the days before she’d met Marisa. She was healing.

Kat was also aware that she had to keep herself from associating the sensation of healing from the sensation of being under Calliope’s influence. But, with the overconfidence typical of the autumn of 2019, she felt like she could put that issue off for some time to come.

Kat stopped in front of Calliope’s building. There were three steps down from the sidewalk level to the level of the basement front door, and Kat thought

(The steps are leading down.)

something was funny about them. After a second, Kat took a step forward and

(Each step sends you)

down. Kat blinked slowly, but her legs were moving on reflex, and before her eyes were fully open she had taken another step

(Each step closer to me takes you)

down. Eyes half-lidded, Kat took the final step.

(Sinking, sinking, sinking)

”Down,” Kat murmured aloud.

She seemed to float the final few feet to Calliope’s door. Her arms were so heavy; she could not lift her hands to ring the bell or knock, but somehow she knew that was okay. Kat floated in place, eyes half-open and unfocused, for a few minutes until the door opened.

Kat was not asleep during those minutes. Her mind was working, though sluggishly. She knew that she was in trance, even vaguely remembering Calliope giving her the trigger. This is how we get her, Kat thought slowly. I am in control.

But it sure didn’t feel that way when the door opened and Calliope’s voice said, “Hello, Katherine.”

Kat said nothing. It was more relaxing to wait for a question.

”How are you doing, Katherine?”

”I’m deeply hypnotized,” Kat mumbled.

”Good. Come in, won’t you?”

There was a gentle touch on her forearm, bringing her forward. The world at the bottom of the stairs had been a bright blur, and then it became a somewhat darker blur. Presently Calliope said, “Do you see the chair, Katherine?”

Kat’s pupils were dilated, her vision blurry, but she saw a shape which reminded her of the lounge chair. “Yeah.”

”When your head touches the cushion, you’ll drop a hundred times deeper. Do you understand?”

”Yeah.”

“Sit down now.”

Kat did not actually think the words Here we go, but the sensation of preparing herself followed her down into a deep, dark well.

David Cates did not always enjoy working in for the Marshals Service. It seemed like every other week some dumb-assed local cop got himself caught on camera doing something that made Cates ashamed to be in law enforcement. More and more often he caught himself checking LinkedIn for private security jobs.

But none of those other jobs could offer a feeling like the one when he knew he had his suspect nailed to the wall. The feeling he was having right now, with Melanie Pursell seated across the interrogation table.

“You can’t keep me here like this,” Melanie said. She kept trying to fold her arms, only to be foiled by the handcuffs she was wearing. There was a sullen look in her eye, a look of someone who knew what it meant to be caught. “I have rights.”

“Your rights are being respected,” Cates said. “It’s just taking the authorities from Virginia a few days to get here and exercise their warrants against you.” This was a trick as old as police. The Virginia cops were driving up, not flying, to give Cates a few more days’ worth of interrogation. And you could be damn sure they were driving the speed limit, stopping at every rest stop, and sleeping in every morning at the motels.

“Well, you might as well send me back to the holding cell,” Melanie groused. “I got nothing to say.”

“You don’t want to play it that way, Melanie,” Cates said. “Look at your situation. Hell look at this guy,” he said as he gestured at Melanie’s public defender. The kid looked barely old enough to be shaving, let alone graduate from law school. “He can’t even fight his own acne, forget about the law.“

“Hey!” The PD jumped in his chair as though string by a bee. “This interview is—”

“Shut up,” Melanie said, shooting the PD an acid look. Turning back to Cates, she said, “What are you trying to say?”

“I know all about the CDP’s high-powered lawyer,” Cates said. “But Jared is not coming. You know he would have been here two days ago. His office says he’s on vacation.”

“Vacation,” Melanie said bitterly. She looked like she might spit on the floor, but thought better of it.

“The CDP is cutting you loose,” Cates said. “They think you don’t know anything to be afraid of. I think differently.”

“I been cut loose before,” Melanie grumbled. The New Age-y affect she had put on in the yoga studio was long gone. The child who had grown up rough in a bad part of Cincinnati was talking to him now.

Cates replied, “And how did that work out for you? The pimp when you were eighteen, he walked. The dealer when you were thirty, you ended up doing more time than him. Your partner in VA, he got away clean, didn’t get picked up until a year later in Illinois. He already had a new partner by then. You weren’t even a memory.”

That one stung her, Cates could tell. Melanie turned red and looked down at the scarred surface of the interrogation table.

Cates leaned forward. “Melanie, when I make a deal with someone, they don’t get cut loose. I can see to it that the cops from Virginia fuck off. I can get you some job training, make sure all those math skills from the cons you ran go to good use. You’ll get a chance at a life on the right side of the law. That is a promise, and there is a camera in the next room, taping me while I make it.”

All of this was true, and when Melanie lifted her head to look at him, tears welling in her eyes, he saw that she knew it. “All the years and work I did for them, and the lawyer says he’s on vacation,” she said, fairly hissing the last word out. “He was at the fucking compound three days ago, and he took the same train back to the city that I did. What do you want to know?“

The other girl looked Kelly in the eye, finally changing her face with a sideways, sarcastic grin. “You think I dress like this because I’m trying to ‘speak for’ one of those guys?”

(“That’s right, Katherine,” The Voice said, cutting across the dream. “Relaxing more and more. You’ve already explored this part of the dream, haven’t you?”)

The dream began to dissipate, leaving Kat drifting in the darkness behind her eyelids. ”Yeah,” she murmured.

”I’d like to approach the dream from a different angle, Katherine,” Calliope said. “Just focus on the sound of my voice.”

Kat thought, This is different, but it didn’t really matter. She was completely relaxed either way.

“Katherine,” Calliope went on, “when you had the dream in your yoga class, who was it who recommended you to me?”

”Stacy Kellner,” Kat murmured. Was that right? Didn’t matter. Just keep relaxing.

”Oh, really?” The tone was only mildly curious, the same sort of tone Kat herself might take when making small talk with a taxi driver or hairdresser. “I didn’t know Stacy was back in the city.”

”Yeah,” Kat said. Her lips were tingly, starting to go numb. “She came back.”

”Did she say why she came back?”

”Said the people up ... state were some kind of ... cult.”

”Oh, that’s so interesting,” Calliope said.

”That’s why I ... hypnotized her,” Kat said.

Calliope’s eyebrows arched so sharply that the brows might have jumped off of her head.

The caller ID told Marisa it was David Cates calling her, so it was no surprise when she answered and he said without preamble, “You’re getting paid.”

Marisa said, “You got what you needed?”

“And then some,” Cates replied. “Turns out Melanie Pursell had secret financial records on everything the CDP did, just in case they tried to burn her. Con artists like to do that shit. So now I have a paper trail on all those lame-ass arm bands they make. I imagine the compound upstate will be getting a visit soon.”

Marisa said, “What about Calliope?”

“Who?”

Marisa bit her tongue to keep from shouting curses into the phone. She counted to three, then said, “The past-life quack I told you about on our last call.”

Her barely controlled rage must have been clear to Cates even over the phone, because there was some defensiveness on display as he said, “If her name is in the shit we find upstate, then she’ll go down too.”

“How long do you think it will be, before that happens?”

“Come on. You know I can’t tell you when the raid will be. I’m putting a lot of trust in you just saying there’s gonna be a raid. But trust me, it’s soon.”

Marisa did not shout at him, but it was a close thing. She said, ”Soon? Kat has been busting her ass for a week to get evidence against that clown!“

Cates snapped back at her, “Well, I didn’t ask for that, and now I don’t fuckin’ need it! Get her outta there before the two of you do another stupid thing!”

“Kat is going to get out of there with evidence you can use,” Marisa said. “You’re going to pay us a second time, and you’re going to apologize for talking to me that way when you do.”

She took the phone away from her ear, to break the connection. But before she did, she heard Cates yelling into his microphone, ”Wait! Wait, wait, wait!“

Marisa sighed and raised the phone to her ear. “What?”

“I’m sorry, okay?” Cates said. “I know you two have done a lot of hard work here.”

“You wouldn’t apologize if you didn’t need something,” Marisa said.

“I’m gonna need your help with the survivors,” Cates said. “About five dozen people are going to have their worldview shattered at the same time. I’m sure some of them will have families willing to pay for help with their recovery.”

“We’re not only in this for the money.”

“Hey, help as many of them for free as you want,” Cates said. “All I’m saying is, they’re going to ask me for recommendations on deprogrammers, and I’m going to give them you. You’d better get ready.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” Marisa said, trying not to sound too sarcastic. She’d already told Cates multiple times that they did not consider themselves deprogrammers, but he hadn’t listened. “Now I have a ton of calls to make.”

This time she did not wait to hear a response from Cates when she hung up. Marisa immediately swiped to find Stacy Kellner’s number.

They didn’t talk about the dream any more. Calliope was now much more interested in other things, and Kat was so deeply relaxed that she hardly cared.

Kat was on her hands and knees in Calliope’s office bathroom. She held a spray-bottle of cleaning solution in one hand and an Oral-B toothbrush in the other.

When Calliope had first suggested the bathroom, Kat had thought, Ew, gross. She’d been too relaxed to refuse, of course, but it wasn’t until Calliope had made her orgasm that she realized the bathroom wasn’t as disgusting as she might have feared.

Calliope was sitting in a folding chair, just outside the bathroom doorway. The prayer bowl was in the crook of one of her elbows, and its metallic hum provided a gentle massage on Kat’s brain.

Now and then Calliope’s voice would float into the room and through Kat’s mind, asking questions. “So Margot Kellner hired you?”

“Me and Marisa.” Scrub, scrub, scrub, a slower and steadier rhythm than Kat would ever have had patience for on her own bathroom floor.

“Oh, who is Marisa?”

“My girlfriend.” Kat flicked a piece of lint off of one finger and into the trash basket.

“And are you both hypnotists?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t say. That’s private.” Kat was satisfied with the corner she had been cleaning, and shifted to look at the area under the sink. As she did, Calliope tapped the prayer bowl with the handle, sending a gentle gong through the room.

Electricity galvanized Kat’s sex. Every muscle south of her belly button clenched at the same time. She wanted to sit up and use her hands to satisfy herself, but she knew that was forbidden even before Calliope said, “Hands and knees, Katherine, just like we talked about. Just let the pleasure happen.”

“Yes,” Kat said, the word escaping her in a hiss as her legs and hips clenched and quivered.

Calliope sat in her chair and watched. This was the rule: no touching someone who would end up out at the compound. And the leader always knew, somehow; Calliope had tried to break the rule once before, and had to spend several months getting back into his good graces. So instead she watched, and stored away what she was seeing for a later time when her vibrator would be available.

At some point Kat became aware that the heat and tension between her legs was less, around the same time as Calliope said, “So, you and Marisa are both hypnotists?”

“I am. She’s still learning.” Answering the question relaxed her further, and Kat was able to begin scrubbing again.

“And the two of you used hypnosis to persuade Stacy Kellner to leave the Church?”

“Yeah.” Kat grinned as she scrubbed. “It wasn’t tough. She was still pretty resistant.”

“When you talked to her, is it possible that you were wrong about the Church?”

“Wrong?” The question made Kat feel odd, but not odd enough to stop scrubbing. “They’re a cult. Cults are bad.”

Calliope tapped the rim of the bowl with the wooden handle. A few minutes later, when she asked the same question again, Kat found much more nuance in her answer.

When Marisa Ivan entered the Kellner apartment, she noticed immediately the changes to the decor that Stacy had talked about last time. The glass coffee table was gone, replaced with a simple wooden one from IKEA that would not reflect light from the television. Bean bag chairs that would not have been out of place in Marisa’s music school dorm room were scattered here and there. The only thing that was missing was Stacy herself.

“In here,” Stacy called from the kitchen. Marisa entered, mildly surprised to see Stacy, an apron tied on over her jeans, fussing at a pot on the electric stove. “I’m making potato curry.”

“Mmmm, spicy,” Marisa said, savoring the sharp smell. “I didn’t know you could cook!”

“Well, um...” Marisa could see Stacy start to blush even from across the room, and immediately recognized her mistake. “When my mother hired you, she didn’t know, either.”

“Because you learned to cook out at the compound,” Marisa said sympathetically, as she crossed the room to where Stacy was.

“Yeah.” Stacy looked down at the simmering pot. “They have this work therapy thing that everyone’s supposed to do. But, because I was so used to my mother’s servants, I wasn’t very good at it. The kitchen was the only place they could put me where I wasn’t a disaster.”

“There’s no shame in that,” Marisa said. “Just because the CDP does a lot of illegal and immoral things, doesn’t mean everything they taught you was harmful.”

“Yeah, that’s what my mother said,” Stacy replied.

“It’s actually the work therapy that I wanted to talk to you about,” Marisa said. “I’ve heard that other people may be leaving the CDP. People who were at the compound longer than you. People likely to be more hostile to talking with someone like me. Whatever you can tell me about what they went through, it would be useful.”

“Well...” Stacy glanced down and to her left, a classic tell which suggested to Marisa that she was honestly remembering, and not just imagining. “They had these drums, and you were supposed to work at pace with them. No faster, no slower. Which was my problem, I couldn’t keep pace when I was hammering nails or cutting people’s hair or whatever.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Marisa was starting to get an idea, based off of an induction Kat had once done on her.

“They said, once you reached the perfect working state, you were allowed to make the Bracelets of the Process.”

“Yeah, I’m familiar,” Marisa said coolly. These were rip-offs of the old Lance Armstrong armband concept, except that each armband was supposedly a bespoke talisman charged with the spiritual energy of the person who made them. They were a cash machine, the entire reason that the CDP could afford a prime plot of land in Westchester County. They were also the entire reason that the Church was in Cates’ sights, as their manufacture violated all sorts of federal labor laws.

“But I never got that far,” Stacy finished, with a sigh.

“Do you remember how the work therapy felt? What you were thinking about as you did it?”

“Not really,” Stacy said. “When you do the same thing every day for months, it kind of becomes a blur.”

Marisa thought it might be a blur for a different reason. “Would you be willing to do a memory exercise with me, kind of like last time?

“You mean, hypnotize me again?”

Yes, but your mother has some very TV-movie ideas about how hypnosis works, and they’re cramping my style. “Not really,” Marisa said. “I just think I can help you remember those feelings a little better.“

“Okay,” Stacy said, gesturing with her head towards the living room. “You want to go over to—”

“No, actually,” Marisa said. “Let’s just stay right here.”

She took a wooden spoon off of the kitchen counter and offered it to Stacy. “What I’d like you to do is, just start stirring the curry with both hands on the spoon, and close your eyes.”

“Um, okay.” Stacy did as she was bid. She held the spoon upside down, like a plumber with a plunger, in an awkward grip. Marisa liked that, as the awkwardness of the grip was the whole point.

“Now, Stacy, can you tell me what the drums sounded like? What pace the drumbeat moved at?”

“It was like ...” Stacy’s head seemed to float as she went back into the memory. “Boom. Boom. Boom.”

About one beat per second, what Kat referred to as the Magic Number, with respect to hypnosis. Marisa began to slap the kitchen countertop with the palm of her hand, in time to the beat Stacy was describing. “Like this?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Stacy’s head bobbed drowsily. Geez, this is going even faster than I thought.

“Just keep stirring the curry in time with the beat, Stacy.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Stacy’s head bobbed again, slightly deeper this time. Marisa had wondered if she’d have to keep slapping the counter for ten minutes, but clearly not.

“And as the curry keeps cooking, it’s getting thicker. Thicker and tougher to stir.”

Stacy’s next stir slowed noticeably. Her closed eyelids were fluttering in that way which Kat claimed Marisa was so good at. Marisa’s heartbeat quickened. Here we go.

“Three more stirs, and the curry will be just too thick. Two more stirs, and you can imagine how relaxing it will be to loosen your grip. One more stir, you’re almost there. And, relax and let go completely.”

Stacy’s hands slipped off of the wooden spoon to drop to her sides. Her head sank down until the chin was on her chest.

Marisa stopped the drumbeat on the kitchen counter. “Now, Stacy, it’s so easy to think back to the kitchen during work therapy. Tell me what the therapy was like.”

“I’m stirring the curry,” Stacy mumbled. “They call it ‘driving the tank’ because the pot is so big. Enough to feed everyone.”

“Stacy, take a deep breath in, and as you let it out, feel now what you felt then.”

Stacy began to sway from side to side. Marisa looked down and saw that this was because she was rubbing her thighs together. “Hot,” Stacy sighed. “Makes me so hot.”

Shit, not again! Marisa opened her mouth to end the trance ... and stopped. Why the hell would they want to get people horny in the kitchen? I mean, this was not like Kat and Marisa in the kitchen. She was getting hot while cooking for more than sixty.

You should explore this.

Yeah, and what if Margot shows up while I’m ‘exploring’?

Then explain yourself like a fucking professional. This is what you do.

Marisa leaned in close to her ear. “What makes you hot? What is it?”

“Calliope’s voice,” Stacy said. Her hands twitched; Marisa guessed that she wanted to play with herself but could not lift her arms. “She’s reading the Methods of the Process and it gets me so hot...”

The Methods were like the Ten Commandments of the CDP. Marisa had read them herself, right after the first meeting with Margot. They were not exactly erotica.

“How does her voice make you hot, Stacy?”

“I don’t...” Stacy shook her head in slow motion. “Don’t remember. Just ... ever since that time I lost it during meditation, her voice...” Stacy trailed off into a moan of arousal.

Marisa took two steps back from Stacy, her mouth wide. Since she lost it during meditation? But before she had remembered—

Marisa quickly replayed the previous session in her mind, and almost instantly she discovered the problem: she’d put Stacy under and said, as though it were happening to someone else.

“It was her,” Marisa whispered. “She was talking about herself that whole time and I never realized.”

Stacy mumbled, “What?”

“Ah, relaxing more and more, Stacy,” Marisa stammered, trying to re-find her Trance Voice. “In a moment I’m going to count to three. On three, you’ll go into your bathroom and finish for yourself. Release all of the pleasure you are feeling right now. Then you’ll awake, and finish preparing your dinner. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I’m leaving now, Stacy. We had a calming conversation, then I left. Thank you for your hospitality.”

In a slow voice, Stacy said, “You’re welcome.”

Marisa walked backward to the front door, raising her voice to say, “One. Two. Three.”

Leaving the Kellner place, Marisa had thought, with any luck, Kat will be home when I get there. Of course, her luck had not been that good.

It was not until eight p.m. that the lock clicked, and Kat stumbled in like a woman half-drunk. Marisa was perched in a papasan, legs crossed, holding a mug of hot tea in both hands.

“God,” Kat mumbled. “Long day.”

“It’s over,” Marisa said flatly.

“What?”

“It’s over,” Marisa said again. “Cates got what he needed from the intervention with Stacy. The CDP compound is going down in a matter of days. Calliope is going down with them.”

“But I didn’t ...” Kat shook her head, as though trying to clear it. “I don’t have anything yet.”

“Stacy told me about Calliope. She was up at the compound plenty of times. It turned out, we got to Stacy just in time. Calliope was working her over pretty good. Like she’s working you over.”

“I’ve almost got her,” Kat said.

Marisa set aside the mug and rose from the chair. “Kat, she’s got! Cates has everything he needs, and even if he didn’t, I’m fucking sick of watching you stumble through the door and say it’s no big deal! You think I don’t know what you’re going through, with her? She’s made you come more times in eight days than you did for me in eight months!“

Kat blinked, then squeezed her eyes shut, tight. When she opened them again, she said, “You’re right. You’re right. This is over. This needs to be over. I’m done.“

Kat looked up at Marisa, holding her arms wide. “C’mere.”

Marisa took three quick steps across kitchen to her, spreading her arms wide. Right before the hug would have happened, Kat slipped her hands into Marisa’s armpits, yanking her forward, barking, “SLEEP!”

Kat had done pattern-interrupt inductions on Marisa before, but they always came after a negotiation, and Marisa had always known a trance was coming. This was the first time, ever, that Marisa had truly been interrupted with a trance. She dropped like a stone. If Kat had not had a solid grip on her armpits, she would have face-planted onto the floor.

“Deeper and deeper down, Marisa,” Kat whispered into her lover’s ear. “Seeing how much I have healed. I can take you down as deep as we used to go, and it feels so good, doesn’t it?”

Marisa sighed out a long, single syllable that only Kat would have been able to interpret as yes.

Kat dragged her by the armpits into the bedroom, took off her slippers, and laid her out on the bed. She ran a thumb over Marisa’s knuckles, asking, “Do you remember how this feels in trance, Marisa?”

The handjob-in-public was supposed to be a turn-on when awake; in trance, it was a hundred times stronger. Marisa moaned and whined as she came, months and months of patience paid off, her arms and legs heavy as lead even as her pussy came alive and jumped for joy.

Kat gathered up her phone as she said, “Now, Marisa, I’m too tired for anything more. We’re both so tired, Marisa. When I take you in my arms, you’ll just slip into a deep sleep, and sleep until the alarm goes off. When the alarm goes off, you’ll become even more sleepy. Turning off the alarm tomorrow morning will send you into even deeper sleep. Do you understand?”

That same positive syllable again: yyysssssss.

Kat tapped out a text message to a number given to her earlier that evening:

We’re all set for tomorrow. Marisa won’t interrupt.

With the text sent, Kat undressed and slid under the covers, her arms around Marisa, beaming as she slipped off to sleep.

TO BE CONTINUED