The gift shop in the tower sold plastic water bottles of a standard size, each for more than a dollar. Trinity coughed up the money, in some sort of debt to Marsh and Dot for trying to cover for her. Meanwhile, she stole glances at Marsh.

“Are you okay?” she whispered, as the two left the checkout with their cool spoils of victory.

“You’ve got to stop asking that. I didn’t hear any of her words. It was just an induction. A little trance.” Marsh blinked a few times. “I can’t believe I’m not over the moon about this.”

“Never meet your heroes, huh?” Trinity mumbled. “We’d better get these back to them before they go warm and we can’t pretend to help Dot with them.”

“Wait.” On the way out of the gift shop, Marsh halted. “Do you think we could win back their lack of suspicion?”

There was no doing that for Trinity. Victoria had already been suspicious of her and had put a stop to her plot to not only kiss, but also tell. Trinity resolved, before anything could happen about it, to not share this thought with Marsh.

Marsh tapped on a glossy puffin keychain dangling from a rack of its comrades. “Who would buy one of these for someone they didn’t like?”

“Do you really think everything will smooth over because of a couple of fake puffins?”

“We can’t very well give them the real ones.” Marsh turned the puffin around in their hand. “Oh my goodness, scrap that plan. Look.”

Trinity leaned in, more to humour Marsh than out of genuine belief in the plan. “Twenty-five dollars?”

“Each.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

They wound their way back down through the precarious stone steps of the tower, then stepped out into the blistering daylight. Their steps on flat ground were unsteady and uncertain until they found their bearing across concrete and pavement, and then, they had to readjust again once on the grass.

“Looks like you got your water just fine,” Mr. Rodriguez said with a hearty smile as Trinity and Marsh passed him.

“Thanks for telling us where to get it.”

“Mind the heat out there today, all right?”

“For sure, thanks.”

Back across the grass, halfway to the vacationers and their woman behind enemy—no, no, Trinity thought, that was not the word to use at all, even if it felt just about right in the moment. Rivalry was fine enough a category, and that distinction had more to do with Victoria’s winning of that old auction than anything else… how time had gone by. How much had changed over the course of a little frustrating vacation—lines, they strode until Marsh stopped and prepared their binoculars again to do their work.

“Concentrate less this time,” Trinity advised. “Now, what are they doing?”

Marsh frowned.

“Can I see?”

“Dot is up and walking about.”

“Hell. Do you think Victoria knows the injury was nonsense?”

Marsh lowered their binoculars. “One way to find out.”

The pair ran like it was their last shot at making it to a track team. Trinity considered, for a moment, that at least, if she or Marsh tripped and actually did annihilate an ankle, they already had cold water in tow to ease the pain.

“We’re back,” Marsh yelled. “The line was enormous.” Untrue, but effective.

“Dot, how do you feel?” Trinity called.

“I am surprised if you don’t already know,” Harlan mentioned.

When the distance eroded between the runners and the waiters, Trinity and Marsh threw each other glances.

“Don’t mind if I say, but did I see you, Marsh, with binoculars on the hill?”

Victoria gazed upon the culprit with a lifting brow. Marsh shrank beneath the scrutiny.

“Oh, yes,” Dot exclaimed. “It’s just like in that movie.”

“What movie?” Victoria whispered to Harlan.

Marsh nodded with vigour. “Rear Window. Haven’t you seen it?”

Trinity stifled a smile of pride in her quick-thinking friends. She added, “Marsh didn’t believe the guy in the movie could see all of that so well with binoculars and a camera. We don’t have a camera that good, but there were binoculars in Marsh’s house.”

“I was worried about your leg,” Marsh confessed.

“It’s okay,” Dot said with a wink. “Victoria fixed it up so well, I can’t even feel the pain at all.”

Genuineness floated in Dot’s alert eyes, and despite her suspicions, Trinity wondered if maybe Victoria had, yes, hypnotized Dot, but did so in a manner that was entirely above board. It was a great relief if so, but, then, why did Dot get to enjoy pleasant, benevolent hypnosis, while Victoria used it overwhelmingly against Trinity? Her legs burned with the desire to run off and find some corner in which to indulge in righteous malcontent and perhaps a sprinkle of self-pity, but then, she remembered, Victoria had not been too objectionable the first time she hypnotized Trinity.

So, then, what did or did not lie in store for Dot?

“Trinity, you look ill,” Harlan said.

“Again?” she eked out. She would have to work on a poker face if life kept being so unfortunate and confusing.

“Is it a result of the drug again?”

Trinity shook her head. “I just ran too quickly, that’s all. And I was really worried about Dot’s leg. Do you, uh, still need these?” Trinity and Marsh held out the water bottles.

“You went all that way to get them, and it’s appreciated.”

Dot took one of the water bottles and placed its chilled surface against the feigned injury. “It doesn’t hurt anymore, but this should prevent any swelling.”

“Victoria hypnotized you well, huh?” Trinity asked, attempting to remain conversational, and definitely not interrogative.

“Totally. It was so cool. She’s really good at it, you know.”

“We all know that,” Trinity agreed with an awkward laugh.

Victoria spoke up, breaking her observing silence. “You know it especially well, don’t you, Trinity?”

Trinity’s face burned, and not from the daylight heat.

“This isn’t about me right now.”

“How humble. I like to see that in you, Trinity.”

What the hell? Harlan was right there. Surely, he would get the hints that Victoria threw down, and realise his wife was coveting his digital neighbor, right? A bit of teasing was fair among friends, but the special attention, so blatant, had to eventually tip him off, didn’t it?

The desire to warn him roiled inside of Trinity, in equal measure with her affrontedness at Victoria’s blatant irreverence toward her own marital status. She opened her mouth, and before any more than a long breath of air could escape, trance smothered her mind in a heavy sheet. Her struggling thoughts escaped or died away, and while the world moved beyond her hazy eyes, she processed none of it.

Words broke through the wall. “Oh, Trinity,” Victoria cooed, “you’ve had another one of your lapses. You had such a hard night. It would be cruel of me to not try to help you, considering I just helped Dot with her ankle. I wouldn’t want to look like I’m playing favourites.”

Trinity shook her head weakly in protest.

“Victoria did wonders for my ankle,” Dot insisted. “I don’t remember a whole lot about the process, though.”

“You were pretty far gone, my friend, but you went under quite well. I am glad to see that your ankle is no longer in pain.”

Oh, so now Dot was ‘my friend’ while Trinity got the hypnotism that made her hide near-adultery? No, Victoria was not playing favourites at all. Nor was the planet round nor the grass green nor fact true. Maybe Victoria favoured her lips and her dwelling mind, but not in the manner of a peer, a dignified friend.

Trinity abandoned water and wanderers and headed off in the direction from which she came, her fists clenched all the while.

Adultery, was that where it was all going? Not if Trinity could help it. It was one thing to be Victoria’s good little hypnotized pet (even thinking those words again in that order made Trinity’s skin crawl, even as her heartbeat shuddered), but to be her paramour without Harlan’s knowledge would be well beyond crossing a line.

A hand settled on her shoulder.

Trinity froze. Don’t be Victoria, she thought, don’t be Victoria, don’t be Victoria, for the love of peace and the health of the rainforests: Do. Not. Be. Victoria.

Harlan asked, “Where are you going? I’m concerned about you.”

That was worse!

“Your wife is…”

Deep. Immeasurable. The profound pull of the hypnotic emptiness stole Trinity from herself.

“Trinity.”

“Damn it,” Trinity yelled.

“I’ve told them to go on ahead. I’ve looked at the map. There are some cannons on the hill they’re going off to see. Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

“No, I can’t.”

“I understand.”

“No you don’t. I want to tell you.”

Harlan crossed around to face Trinity, then held her in his arms. They were comforting and warm, and just a little bit loose in their hold.

“This makes it worse,” Trinity complained. “It would be easier if you weren’t so kind to me.”

“Is this about what Victoria did at the airport? You’ve been rattled since then. She should have asked you before hypnotizing you.”

“Does she ask you?” Trinity inquired.

“She hasn’t hypnotized me in quite some time.” Harlan gazed past Trinity’s shoulder, off into the wild, green distance. “Our disconnect, in our marriage, it’s not the sort of thing we talk about with friends. The world she sees and the world I do align only in a mere sliver in the Venn diagram. That sliver doesn’t include hypnosis anymore, and that’s fine.”

Trinity tried to pull away from Harlan, but did not want to rip his shoulders out of his sockets with the noodlesque form of his embrace; not exactly an immovable object.

“That’s not true,” Trinity refuted.

“It’s a bit hard to believe, I understand. We make it work even when Victoria’s passion is not part of the equation between us.”

“No, I saw her put…”

Thoughts cascaded down, one into the other. Harlan’s head striking the headboard. Victoria’s pressing questions. Those hard, dark eyes. Yes after yes after yes, and the words and ideas not meant to be shared. They were all so tangled up in each other, that she could hardly sort one out from the other. A simple phrasing would not work at all, even if Victoria had not commanded Trinity not to tell Harlan about his own trance. Everything was tied together.

“Can we sit down?” Trinity asked. “For safety.”

“Are you still feeling out of it?”

She nodded, for it was true, but it was not only her own safety she had in mind.

The grass was plush and held her securely, more than Harlan’s worried arms had. She placed one palm on the bright green blades. With her other hand, she brushed the grass, bringing her fingers together over the tallest of the blades: index beside middle, both upon her thumb, the grass trapped between.

“I know you might think Victoria is frivolous about her work. It’s been freaking you out, isn’t it? And then the incident at the bar last night, I’d be unnerved, too. But are you maybe placing your concerns about the bar and about having been hypnotized somewhere they don’t belong?”

“I know she did it to you,” Trinity insisted. “I think I can prove it, maybe.”

“How are you going to—”

Trinity released the blade of grass, retaining the position of her fingers. She fished for the correct words in her swimming mind. Her hand raised, then, into the air. Fingers pressed tightly. Two downward, then. One upward. Striking like a match and producing not a flame, but a crisp, clear finger snap. Trinity repeated it in succession with the other.

The words sounded nothing like belonging to Victoria when they came out of her throat and up past her lips, and they tasted just like the bile behind her tongue when she had heard them spoken before.

“Sleep deeply now, Harlan.”

And his eyes started to roll.