Susan’s voice, when it came, was not so much a call as a small, seismic shift in the air, a vector snapping all competing threads of attention directly toward her. “Meredith,” she said. Across the chattering density of the conference lunchroom, Susan’s gaze seemed to pre-exist the act of looking: it was there, waiting for Meredith to meet it, inescapable and oddly intimate, as if nothing else in the room could be of equal consequence. “Join me,” she said.

It was not a question. A small hush gathered around the imperative, as if the words themselves had a gravity of their own.

Meredith’s response was automatic. She felt it as a minute, almost imperceptible rearrangement of her muscles, her legs shivering, then propelling her forward before she’d even considered whether to obey or not. She moved like a person under the influence of a strong but benevolent current, the crowd parting in loose eddies as she threaded through. She caught a glimpse of the grad student’s face, frozen in mid-thought, his mouth still forming the next sentence of a conversation already swept into nothingness. Even the food on her plate seemed to weigh less, as if the act of moving toward Susan had shed her of any extraneous substance.

The table Mistress Susan had chosen was an island in the commotion, set against a window that caught the fractured gleam of a courtyard fountain outside. A tablecloth, white and immaculate, was draped nearly to the floor. Two place-settings, arranged with the geometric precision of a ritual. Susan sat at the vertex of the arrangement, her posture both relaxed and absolute, the calm axis around which the rest of the hall seemed to orbit.

She gestured toward the chair opposite her and said,

“Sit.”

Meredith complied. The word was a command, but its effect was strangely comforting, as if sitting here was the most natural thing in the world, the only correct answer to a question Meredith had not known she was being asked.

A waiter appeared, bearing a carafe of sparkling water and two empty glasses so thin they seemed made for music rather than drink. He poured, careful to avoid the smallest splash, and retreated silently. The room’s ambient noise fell away, replaced by the close, almost tactile silence of Mistress Susan’s attention.

For a moment, the hypnodomme said nothing. She examined Meredith in utter silence. The gaze was direct and clinical, but neither invasive nor cold. It was as she was taking inventory, not of Meredith’s posture or dress or expression, but of something more essential: the way the air moved around her, the signature of her breath, the precise cadence with which she lifted her water glass and set it down again.

“You’re feeling it again, aren’t you? The bliss of trance flowing in and out of you?” Susan asked, her voice softened by the intimacy of the question but still shaded with the authority she wielded on stage.

Meredith considered the honest answer. “Yes,” she said at last, her eyes fixed on the droplets racing down the side of her glass. “I feel like I’m two seconds behind myself, watching everything happen in slow motion.”

“Good,” Mistress Susan replied, a smile flickering into existence and then subsiding. “You wear trance very well.”

The words lingered in the air. Meredith felt a surge of pride, then a flush of uncertainty. Was that a good thing? Was she being praised or just measured, calibrated for some larger project yet to be revealed?

She tried to remember the sequence of events that led her here: the demonstration, the questions, the sensation of being unmoored from her own body, and then being brought, gently but irrevocably, to a world that no longer felt quite the same. She wanted to ask Mistress Susan what was happening to her, what subtle machinery had been set in motion, and whether it could ever be put back the way it was before. However, at the same time, she wanted the opposite, too: not to question, but to go deeper time and time again. The contradiction inside her was particularly maddening.

They started to eat, taking small bites one at a time, and enjoying each other's presence more and more. Suddenly, the mood at the table shifted. Meredith sensed, rather than saw, two figures approaching. The aura of their arrival was almost theatrical. Ava and Rachel advanced in lockstep, each carrying a plate in one hand and a careful, unreadable neutrality in the other.

Ava looked to Susan, then to Meredith. “May we join, Mistress Susan?” she asked. There was no hint of actual uncertainty; the question was a formality, an acknowledgment that everyone’s consent was already a given.

Rachel set her plate down and smiled. “We didn’t want to intrude, but we’re curious about what you started in there.” She nodded toward the closed conference doors. “It was such a rare gift.”

Meredith blinked. For a second, she couldn’t tell whether Rachel was talking about her, or about Susan, or about the thing that had happened between them on stage. The ambiguity hung in the air, unresolved.

Susan inclined her head, a subtle signal that the table was open to expansion. “You’re both welcome,” she said, her gaze sliding over to Meredith for a heartbeat, as if to measure her reaction to the new dynamic.

Ava slid into the seat beside Meredith, Rachel taking the spot to her left. The geometry of the group changed; what had been a private axis was now a quadrangle, lines of force pulling Meredith in unexpected directions.

Meredith felt suddenly outnumbered, even though the others radiated a sense of invitation rather than threat. She was unprepared for an audience, adrift in the wake of Susan’s focused attention and now subject to the lateral pressure of these two new presences. She hesitated, unsure whether to speak or wait for some further cue, and in that microsecond of indecision, Susan’s hand flickered in a motion barely above the threshold of perception.

“Meredith and I were just talking about the bliss of trance, something you two know very well, but she’s only starting to discover. Perhaps, you’d like to tell her a thing or two about your experiences as well.”

“That would be my pleasure,” Ava said.

“Mine too,” Rachel added.

Meredith took a deep breath and wondered about what was coming.