The alarm clock was designed to connect to a phone (usually, it ended up being Marisa’s). It played a pleasant piece of music that grew gradually louder over time (usually, something classical that Marisa herself had played, back in her music-school days). Marisa would rise while it was still quiet (usually, she was awake before it even started playing). That morning was far from usual.

The alarm was at full volume when Marisa dragged her eyes open, then sighed contentedly. She had that warm sensation cloaking her entire body, the sensation she used to have when she and Kat would do a trance scene before bed and Kat wouldn’t even bother to bring her back up before they went to sleep. Kat tranced me last night, she managed to think. First time in months. Everything’s gonna be all right.

The alarm clock had only one button—indeed, it wasn’t even a button, just a touch sensor as wide as Marisa’s hand. Without looking over, Marisa raised her left hand and flopped it onto the sensor. The sensation of her arm dropping onto the button was like the sensation of dropping into trance.

Kat stood in the bedroom doorway, fully dressed, and watched Marisa’s breathing slow back down. Once she was satisfied that the suggestion had worked, she turned to leave, head already down and tapping away on her phone.

Colleen Peters had not had to prepare a go-bag in almost two decades. After September 11th she had frantically thrown one together, but she had never had to use it and eventually the panic subsided. It was more work than she remembered.

After Katherine Alexander had left her apartment, Colleen had been awake the entire night through. She sent emails cancelling appointments with what fish were remaining (although most of them had already been cancelled, as Kat had taken up so much of her time recently). She ended all of her subscriptions and paused gas and electric service at the house.

The only hypnotic prop she took with her was the prayer bowl; Kat was solidly conditioned to it, and Kat was the only one she could use. The plan was simple: Kat would fund her way out of the country. She seemed to have money, based on her only half-hearted complaints about the cost of the sessions so far; enough money to get Colleen to Canada. If the law was looking for her, they would be looking for one woman traveling alone, so Kat would provide useful cover while swearing up and down that her traveling partner was on the straight and narrow.

Colleen did not know about the impending raid against the CDP, because Kat had not known about it yesterday. But her intuition told her that Melanie Pursell getting arrested, combined with Kat and the girlfriend getting involved, meant the CDP was no longer safe. Time to strike out on her own, and use Kat to do it.

She had considered trying to use Kat against Stacy Kellner as well. Stacy’s money was, obviously, the mother lode. But targeting Stacy struck Colleen as a classic case of a con artist getting too greedy. If Stacy had been talking to trained hypnotists, then there was no telling how many of the old triggers still worked.

Plus, Colleen was completely exhausted from the all-nighter and could barely manage one thrall. Two would be risky.

No, it would have to be Kat only. The CDP knew a guy at the Canadian border; it was a risk to use him, since the police might already know about him, but over the last two decades Colleen had let herself grow too lazy in terms of escape, and that guy was the only out she had left.

Once in Canada, she could rebuild. She could try to make arrangements to sell the row house in such a way as to not get arrested, the money from which would help her start a new business up north. It was a cold-assed country desperately in search of that nice, warm trance feeling. It was a polite country that would not tell her to go fuck herself once she moved on to the more risqué suggestions.

And, with herself in charge this time, there would be no need for a “no touching” rule.

Having reduced all of her worldly possessions into a single bag, Colleen was just leaving the row house when her phone buzzed. She pulled it out to see a notification of a text from Kat.

on my way to the place

Colleen smiled. Kat was not the first deprogrammer that she’d turned. All you had to do was use their own intensity against them. Like judo of the mind.

It did occur to her that Kat might not get all the way to Canada. She struck Colleen as the type who might get gradually more resistant, the more distance there was between her and the girlfriend. But her intuition told her that there was no time to turn the girlfriend, or anyone else, so Colleen had no choice but to do it this way. In any case, there were plenty of places between here and Montreal where a resistant person could be ... deposited.

Kat did not consciously know where she was. She had been given directions—take the A train to Times Square, walk X blocks, and so on—but she was struggling to consciously process where that had taken her. She had the vague idea that it was Hell’s Kitchen.

She had been told to look for a white Honda parked in front of a public school playground, and after following the directions for some time, she saw one. As she arrived next to the car, the window of the Honda went down. Kat saw Calliope was at the wheel of the car, and her perception seemed to warp. The world curved around the car. The Honda’s window was like a deep tunnel, demanding all of Kat’s will to perceive the end of it.

“Hello, Katherine.”

Kat said nothing. Too much effort.

“How are you feeling?”

“Good.” Kat smiled vaguely.

“I’d like to take you to a place where we can relax so much more deeply.”

Kat smiled. “Okay.”

“You would like to relax so much more deeply, wouldn’t you, Katherine?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to drive us in this car to that wonderful place, Katherine.” The car was a rental in the name of Calliope’s last safe fake ID. She would have to ditch it once she was far enough upsate to take a bus.

“Okay.” Kat made no move to get into the car. She stood by the driver’s side door, staring off into space.

“Get in the car, Katherine.”

Kat did not consciously think front seat or back seat. She simple grabbed the first handle she saw—the one for the driver’s side back seat—and opened it. As she got in, Calliope began running the wooden handle around the rim of the metal bowl. Kat closed her eyes and drifted to the wonderful sound.

Some gentle questions to Kat revealed that Kat had deposited the check from Margot Kellner at a Bank of America. This was ideal for Calliope’s purposes; the big chains are like the fast food of banking, and no one looks too closely to see if the person next to them in line at Burger King is looking trancey.

Kat’s branch was over by the West Side Highway. It was a location that Calliope thought would be under-used, and she was right. There was no security guard at the front desk, and only three or four associates that she could see at the various cubicles. Only one teller was at the array of glass windows. Calliope supposed that business would pick up soon, as people’s lunch hours approached, and that they should hurry.

“You first, Katherine,” Calliope whispered into the redhead’s ear as they passed through the doors. “It will be so relaxing to close this account completely.”

Kat was not asleep. Some part of her understood that she was about to put a large amount of money into Calliope’s hands. But she felt like it would be okay. Rather similar to cleaning the bathroom yesterday; whatever gross feeling she might have at first, would dissipate the next time Calliope made her come.

“They’re gonna need to know your name,” Kat said slowly. “For the transfer.”

Crap, Calliope thought. I didn’t specify cash, so she thinks I want a direct transfer. I blundered on the suggestions. Fucking all-nighter. I’m getting too old to run like this. “Colleen Peters,” she said.

The woman in line in front of Kat turned around. Kat did not look at her, because there was no need in this moment to look at much at all. “Excuse me, do you have the time?”

The woman was wearing a black shirt with a yellow design on it. Slowly, Kat’s eyes focused on the design. It was a spiral.

I know that spiral, Kat thought. I know that shirt.

Kat fell into the spiral, and remembered.

Day 0

Kat lay on the couch like she was poured into it. Marisa was explaining the plan to her, and she was hanging on every word.

“Over the next few days, you are playing a character, Kat,” Marisa said. “Your character is about to be brainwashed by Calliope. Only when you see me wearing the spiral shirt you bought for me, will the performance be over. When you see the black and yellow spiral, you will remember who is truly in control.”

“I am,” Kat said in her sleepy voice.

“Yes, Kat. When you see the spiral, you are in control again.”

Day 9

Kat looked up at the same time Calliope looked over, to see the other woman’s green eyes.

Striking green eyes.

“Marisa,” Kat said.

“What?” Calliope asked.

“You...” The fog in Kat’s head was clearing, but it had been a heavy fog. “You need to call Cates.”

“Way ahead of you, babe,” Marisa said.

Calliope sensed that she was losing control of the situation. Her legs tensed to run. But it was a difficult decision to make, to sprint across the lobby with no money and no plan. Before she could commit fully to doing so, a hand fell onto her shoulder. She could see its owner in her peripheral vision, and she did not even need to look at him. The color of his suit, combined with the way he grabbed her shoulder, screamed cop. “Colleen Peters,” he said.

“What?” Calliope repeated. She was not answering the man behind her, as much as trying to get a grip on the universe.

But he interpreted it as an answer. “I’m David Cates with the United States Marshals Service. You’re under arrest. We’ll start with attempted kidnapping and go from there. You have the right to remain silent.”

Kat turned around. The drowsy trance-look she’d had just minutes before was fading. She said, “I think I might have told you about my girlfriend, Marisa?”

“What...” Calliope looked around, completely nonplussed. Cates’ backup, two men and one woman in equally cop-like business suits, were rising from the cubicles to approach them, showing their badges. She looked back at Kat. “You were faking?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Marisa said from over Kat’s shoulder, an impish glint in her eyes.

“No,” Calliope said to Kat, as her arms were pulled behind her for the waiting flex-cuffs. “You weren’t faking. I made you come.”

“That sounds like a confession to me, Marshal,” Marisa said, her voice bright and chipper.

“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law,” Cates said agreeably.

“No!” Calliope yelled. She began to struggle, but the cuffs were already tight. “This is entrapment!”

Kat wanted to say something, to give her the perfect kiss-off line. But she still felt dazed, her mind far from full speed. All she could manage to say was, “I’ll give you my statement when she’s gone.”

As Cates dragged Colleen Peters away, her protestations of innocence growing louder and louder, Kat turned back around to Marisa. “Um, didn’t I ... put you to sleep?”

“You did what I told you to do, if Calliope ever proposed brainwashing me or getting me out of the way,” Marisa said. “And I set a second alarm, days ago, to be ready for it.”

“Wow,” Kat said. “You played me like a cello.”

“No,” Marisa said. ”We played her like a cello. You just don’t remember it yet. That trance felt super nice, by the way.“

“I have so many questions,” Kat said.

“Not here,” Marisa said. “Not in front of the cops.”

Kat thought that, as soon as she saw a bed, she would sleep—real sleep, not trance or anything close to it—for about ten years. So once everything was sorted out at the scene of the arrest, they went to a diner instead.

Marisa requested a corner booth, in the back, and told the waiter that they would need some time to decide. Once he was gone, she looked steadily, silently, at Kat for a full minute.

“What?” Kat said.

“Sapphire Void,” Marisa said.

Kat’s eyes went out of focus. Her body remained completely still, her chest rising up and down in rhythm.

“I don’t have time here, in public, to reverse everything, Kat,” Marisa said. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Kat said. She stared straight through Marisa, the booth, and whatever was beyond the wall.

“But you deserve to understand,” Marisa said quietly. “So, Kat, I’m going to tell you what happened. As I tell you the story, your memories will return. The memories will return slowly, in your own time, so as to put you at ease. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Kat said, her eyes still far away.

“Up, up, up,” Marisa said.

Kat blinked. “What?”

“You heard me talking just now, Kat?”

Kat cocked her head, trying to remember. “Uh ... yes? You were saying something about...” She trailed off.

“Let me help, Kat. We always knew that Calliope would ask you to forget things, or hide things from me. And we knew that you would do it, because playing along to her suggestions was the best way to get her to incriminate herself. So we created a place in your mind where I could go to get the truth from you, without your conscious mind realizing that you gave it to me.”

“The Sapphire Void,” Kat murmured.

Marisa smiled. “I see you’re starting to remember already.”

“And I was playing a character,” Kat said. “A character who wanted to be brainwashed.”

“Yeah,” Marisa said. “I mean, the character was still you. But, as soon as you thought Calliope was going to get you got go out to the compound, you were supposed to tell her about us. Not the truth, exactly, but something close enough to the truth that she would think you couldn’t resist.”

“I told her I hypnotized Stacy,” Kat murmured. “But I never did that.“

“Nope. That story, that particular bank branch, all of it. Just enough to string Calliope along.”

“But, wait,” Kat said. “You were nagging me the whole time. Trying to talk me out of it.”

“The nagging was a trigger,” Marisa said. “Every morning I nagged you, I was really telling your subconscious that the scam was still on. It wasn’t that tough a role for me to play. I was still worried that something could go wrong.”

“And Cates?”

“I called him again last night, before you got home,” Marisa said. “He was kind of a dick to me on the phone yesterday, but once I told him when and where we could serve up a high-ranking CDP member on a silver platter, he got a lot nicer.”

“Honestly...” Kat rubbed her brow. “It does kind of sound like entrapment. Maybe Calliope was right about that.”

Marisa shrugged. “We’re not lawyers. But it sounds like Cates will get so much from the compound, she’s going down regardless.”

Kat looked at her. “You know you owe me big time, right? Like days of aftercare. I’m not getting off the couch for a week.“

Marisa grinned and waves a hand. “Oh, come on. It wasn’t that bad.”

“Hey, you scrub the bathroom floor and see how you like it.“

“I did that, remember? Two nights ago when you were too zonked out to do it on schedule.”

Kat leaned forward, pitching her voice lower. “I scrubbed. Her bathroom floor. With a toothbrush.”

“Okay, but did she make you brush your teeth with it afterward?”

Kat threw a napkin at her. “No! Gross! God, what kind of a monster are you?!”

Marisa smiled crookedly. “When we get home, you might find out.”

Cates texted them mid-meal about getting paid again; apparently Calliope’s residence was a cornucopia of evidence. So they took their own sweet time at the diner, even though they ate light, and took a taxi home instead of the subway.

As Marisa unlocked the front door of their apartment. Kat leaned in close to her ear. “There’s only one more question I have. One more thing to remember, right now.”

Marisa’s heartbeat quickened. As she opened the door, she said, “What’s that?”

“Tell me how the dream ends.”

Marisa grinned wickedly and replied, “Sapphire Void.”

Kelly Allen opened her eyes. The vast blanket of stars covered the sky above her. “Wow,” she whispered.

A face appeared in her field of vision, looming over her from above. She was upside down due to the angle she was leaning over Kelly’s head, but Kelly would have recognized those green eyes anywhere.

“I know, right?” Melissa Isaacs said. Calliope would have frowned to hear the modern idiom come out of the mouth of a sock-hop beatnik, but Calliope was in jail and no one sharing this dream gave a shit what she might think. “Doesn’t it feel amazing?”

“Amazing,” Kelly echoed. She cocked her head, noticing how different ‘amazing’ felt now, than it ever had before. “What ... what did you do to me?”

Melissa stroked her temple, tucking stray hairs behind Kelly’s ear. “Nothing much,” she said. “I gave you permission to be yourself. Not the woman all those other people want you to be. But what that actually feels like is totally up to you.”

“It was like...” Kelly became aware that she was lying on her back on the school roof, her head pillowed on Melissa’s crossed calves. Her best sock hop dress was getting dirty, but she felt no compulsion to get up. This felt wonderful. “Like getting the perfect amount of sleep and waking up on a Saturday morning with nothing to do.”

“I’m glad I could help,” Melissa cooed.

Without warning Kelly reached up with both hands, palming the sides of the other woman’s head. She pulled Melissa down and kissed her harder than she had ever kissed anybody at any of these damned sock hops. That the kiss was upside down added a novel sensation, reaching forward and falling backward simultaneously. Her pussy was a turbine that had been fully activated for the first time, fairly thrumming with power that threatened to obliterate all sense in her forebrain.

Melissa reached forward, easing both of her hands down the front of Kelly’s dress. She was acting blind, her eyes closed as she caressed the other woman’s lips with her own, but she moved surely and with confidence, as though acting on her own body. Kelly’s breasts were firm, toned from youth and the exercise of constant dancing.

Melissa’s thumbs gently rotated the nipples, slow circles first to the left, then back to the right. It was like turning a dial, Kelly thought. No, like a crank. Winding her up, more and more no matter which direction the thumbs were going in, and Kat began to understand that she was on the couch, lying on her back with her head pillowed on Marisa’s calves, Marisa playing her breasts with a mastery that she had not even reserved for Mozart, Kat not screaming only because she was still in a trance, too relaxed to do anything but moan softly, until Kat came with such force that she clutched at her lover’s head to keep from falling off the couch.

Some minutes later, after Kat had recovered and awakened fully, she gasped, “Wow.”

“Yeah,” Marisa said. She leaned back against the couch cushions, fanning herself like the protagonist of a Tennessee Williams imitator. “That one surprised me, too.”

With some effort, Kat pulled herself up so that she could look her girlfriend straight in the eye. “Ris, I haven’t thought about The Thing in days. I even tranced you yesterday, without thinking about it!”

“Yeah,” Marisa said, grinning crookedly. “I know.”

“I mean,” Kat said, with an uncharacteristic blush creeping up her neck, “I owe you. For months. There’s so much we could have been doing.”

Marisa held her hand, gently. “We have time.”

“But...” Kat furrowed her brow. “You never answered my question. How does their story end? What happens to them? I told Calliope it was a nightmare, a bad one.”

Marisa leaned in close, and Kat thought she might just drown in those green eyes. “We were stringing Calliope along,” she said. “There was no ending, because there is no them. Those girls were us the entire time, we don’t live in the 1950s, and around here we write our own endings.“

Kat took Marissa in her arms as she murmured, “Well, let me give you some edits.”

THE END