“Explain it to me again,” he said, with the frustrated impatience of a man who hadn’t thought he’d have to pay any particular attention.

Penny hesitated, wanting to choose her words carefully, since her owner didn’t seem to understand how important it was that he listen.

“There’s only one reason someone would break into this apartment and not take anything valuable,” she said. “That’s if they’re looking for something else.

“This break in took place between the last time I left, before the party, and when we returned to set a trap for Shannon.”

He nodded. “Right.”

“It’s dimly possible that this is just someone hunting for information on something that used to be important to me, something I was working on before. But the timing tells me it’s not.”

“So you think someone’s looking for you.” It wasn’t a question. It had taken three passes at explaining - she had expected her owner to immediately grasp the same subtleties as she’d picked up on - but now he saw the issue.

“I’m confident of this.”

“Okay. Who?”

She’d been thinking about this for a while. “I know the Raineses will be looking, but if they’d had Roger break in here we’d have known the moment we saw the door,” she said thoughtfully. “Mm… it might be Zaxxon. They’ve put a lot of work through me lately and they were looking at more. I know their corporate dirty tricks department is a big one.

“And Congressman Dawson owes me a lot of favours. He’s spent some time trying to find ways to pay them off on his schedule, not mine. This would probably seem like a great way to do that, in his eyes.”

“And, uh, what do you think about it?”

Penny could imagine the expression on Kelly’s face if the other woman were to hear that question. The man who controlled them both had come to understand that he could do whatever he chose to do, but he was having a lot more difficulty with the idea that this was because they could not want to be anything but his.

“I don’t want them to succeed,” she said simply, after a few moments of silent contemplation.

“Good. Why not?”

“Because you own me,” she said, “and that is what’s right, and that’s how it’s supposed to be.” She offered him a subdued smile, though she was sure some confusion on her part shone through.

He wasn’t ready, she realised. He could just be enjoying himself with his spells but he’d set his sights higher, out of idealism, and he wasn’t ready. And she’d already tempted him further onto the path.

Could she make him ready in time?

Did she have the right? It was supposed to be her under his control, but sometimes when she pushed it didn’t feel that way.

“So we have some ideas who it might be,” he said. "A corporation or a congressman. Right?”

She nodded.

“How do we stop that?”

Penny wished she could give her owner an accurate answer.

*

Elsewhere, Melissa Wilder was satisfied with her day’s work. As much of it as she’d been able to do under Darby’s nose, at any rate.

She was headed back to the AirBnB she’d rented in town before she started her evening’s work.

The interim emails she’d sent off were more confusing than they had to be; she wanted to file a proper report with Doctor Kraft, who might not be the one who ultimately controlled her mind but was still the woman who’d first conquered her mind, and Melissa was always just as happy to please her as the Doctor, who she barely knew half so well.

Once that report was done and sent, she intended to learn a bit more about her mystery colleague. Whoever they were, they were good; Melissa was glad to have them around. She’d just prefer to be the one who knew more, not less.

After that… well, Melissa had lost almost two full days without getting a proper sense of the city yet, and she had a list of possibilities. It was time to get into costume and get a feel for the world she was working in.

Her team never believed her about this - the training she’d received from Red Fox was effective enough that she could often do the job in just a few hours anyway - but not knowing the city was like trying to do her job blindfolded. You needed a shape in your head, an understanding of how quickly or slowly you could move between locations.

It had nothing to do with how rich or poor the area was - criminals came in all shapes and sizes and their primary requirement for premises tended to be that they were empty at the time the criminal needed them, the cost often being bypassed - but if you didn’t know how fast people could travel realistically, you were drawing guesswork circles on your map and you couldn’t even calculate a route in your head.

The fact it had taken her so long to even do this spoke volumes about how much other factors were slowing her down, but she intended to get her feet back under her and spring into action.

The taxicab took her most of the way. She always approached the last couple of blocks by foot, though, and kept her eyes out for anyone who might be following her. It was a precaution born of long experience.

There wasn’t anyone following her, not that she’d really expected it. She left herself in and headed into the back room to set her laptop up and flesh out her notes into a proper report.

The near microscopic hole drilled into the windowframe went unnoticed.

*

Chen knew that a lot of people didn’t like to cook, or only cooked simple meals, midweek. She’d had that attitude herself for years; it was one of the few changes someone had tried to brainwash into her which had stuck, and which she’d found surprisingly soothing after a long day.

She had a pan with boiling water on the hob, along with another in which silken tofu was frying off in sweet chilli oil, and she was wielding her knife with enthusiasm on the vegetables she had to hand. It wasn’t anything special, but the attention she was paying it assured it would be delicious once she got to it.

The tapping at her window surprised her, not least as she was on the top floor of a five-floor brownstone; immediately, she reversed her grip on the knife, holding it by the tip of the blade, and turned to investigate.

Her kitchen knives were all balanced so that they could be used for food preparation, fighting, or throwing; her best operatives got given a set of the same blades as a reward for particularly big cases.

“After all,” she would always tell them as she handed the case over, “you just got the attention of at least two powerful people with that solve. One of those people loves you now and wants you to do well. One of them wants you dead.”

Most of them smiled before realising she was serious. One or two never understood how serious she was. Some of the team who’d racked up a lot more tenure before earning their reward understood what she was telling them right from the word go.

Dangling upside down to look in the upper half of her kitchen window was a curvy redhead in a red leather jumpsuit - which was definitely not what Chen had expected. The white domino mask over her eyes was actually somewhat reassuring; it didn’t feel like the kind of costume a typical meta hitwoman would choose for herself.

The two women looked each other over silently for a good while before anything happened.

The redhead shrugged, a curious thing to watch when someone was upside down. Chen kept her kitchen knife ready in one hand and used the other to slowly open the window.

“I need you to know,” she said, “that I’ve been chopping peppers with this knife. You really don’t want me to use it.”

The redhead laughed. “If it helps? I got a call from my boss, and my boss got a call from a guy called Colby.” She let that information hang in the hair for a few moments. “Does that make me sound safer?”

“A little,” Chen allowed. “So long as Colby hasn’t been mindfucked.”

There was another pause. A range of emotions flickered across the redhead’s face. “So far as I know, he hasn’t?” she offered.

Chen took a couple of steps back, still holding the knife ready. “You’d better come in,” she said, “either way.” After a moment she added “You haven’t been mindfucked, by any chance?”

Gigi was ready for that question, and she simply shrugged. “I feel like everyone in our line of work has at some point,” she said. “I’m Foxtrot, from the Symphony. I don’t know if you heard about General Walters…?”

Chen pulled a face. “I heard some,” she allowed. But that had been years ago, and mental manipulation had to be refreshed at least once every six months, and some people thought it needed to be done a little quicker every time.

“Some is enough, I reckon.”

Chen nodded. “It’s been a while for me, too, but it’s happened a couple times.”

Gigi nodded. “I get why you’d feel suspicious,” she said. “I’m not here to sit in judgement. I’m here because this guy Colby asked my boss, as a favour, to look into things. And my boss owes Colby, I think?” She made the question sound like she was fishing.

“Sometimes I think everyone owes Colby.”

“Must be a hard worker,” she said. Chen finally turned away, heading back to the chopping board. “So,” Gigi asked as she followed, “what’ve you got for me?”

“It doesn’t leave this room?”

“Well, I might tell my boss if she asks,” Gigi allowed. “Who do you want it secret from?”

“Nobody needs this getting back to anyone official. That’s not covering my own ass - that’s covering my role.” She looked back. “I’m Sergeant-in-Arms in charge of security for the United States Senate. Every so often we get noises about the department being canned and replaced with hired security.”

Gigi made a face. “It’s not like internal security is perfect - no offence - but a private organisation starts off more vulnerable to bribes and the rest.”

“Right. So I don’t want this story surfacing anywhere it could give people ammo.” Chen’s head jerked, her chin thrust out firmly. “If this needs to go public, we can say I carried out an independent security assessment. But we don’t talk about why. Do we have a deal?”

“Sure.” Gigi shrugged. “That works for me.”

"So tell me why you’re involved?”

What Gigi was entirely unwilling to do was admit she’d already been involved before her subMistress got the call from Agent Colby. There was no telling how smart this woman was, or what she might infer.

“You think it’s more than just old favours to Colby?” Gigi shrugged. “Sorry, ma’am. I’ve only got enough time, really, to look into this. Understanding my boss’ motivations is a whole extra investigation on top.”

Chen stayed quiet a long time, watching Gigi, who looked back, not quite impassive - the ‘not quite’ doing some heavy lifting there.

*

Melissa shook her head slowly. Reread the last sentence she’d written in her report. Deleted it. Took a deep breath. Tried, again, to write out what she’d actually intended.

It wasn’t coming together; her focus didn’t seem to be there. She’d get about halfway through a sentence and the rest would meander off following some chain of mental associations. Everything made sense, but it was far from a model of clarity. It wasn’t a report.

It barely had anything to do with what she’d been working on; she was just writing about almost anything, one topic after another.

It reminded her of when the Mistress had sat her down in front of the Master’s database and told her to add everything she knew to it; that same impulse that anything and everything should be set down. The difference was, then she’d been rational, she’d been organised.

She’d set down information only when dealing with the topic.

…Melissa paused, and reread the last sentence she’d written in her report.

Examining this evidence took longer than expected even without support, and about halfway through a sentence, the rest wanders off following some chain of mental association, barely touching on what I’ve been working on, just writing about almost anything, with the same compulsive desire to inform as when You sat me down on the island with an interface to the Master’s database and You groped me as I sat, just a wet, helpless pair of tits for Your pleasure, but You still made the most of my mind even when I imagined I might never access it again, when I thought I was nothing but a sex toy for You and especially the Master, whose cock I can still taste, can still feel, and crave

She took another deep breath, but didn’t delete the sentence this time. Whatever else that was, the confession was honest, and she hoped it would please Doctor Kraft.

She looked for what she’d been saying so she could try again.

The letters were blurred. Eye strain. She’d had it before, usually after longer days. Hitting the key combination to zoom the text was instinctive.

But the letters were no more legible, they were just bigger.

Melissa yawned. She shouldn’t be that tired, she thought.

…why was she so tired? She’d just been in an office all…

She jerked awake, suddenly aware she’d nearly dozed off sitting upright, still so very tired.

The thought this has to be gas floated across her mind, followed by, I hate gas so much, before her eyes rolled back and she slumped forward over her keyboard, her forehead drilling an extended row of Gs into the document she’d been working on.

It would be another hour or so before the people dispensing the gas into her apartment levered open a window to extract her.

*

Darby Harrison had left the office Evelyn Raines used, but she hadn’t stopped working for the day; she still had to make sure Evelyn made it to a working dinner, then to a dinner meeting twelve blocks from the working dinner, and then across to a Concerned Mothers of America fundraiser. Once Evelyn was safely there Darby could stop working, steal away, and probably catch up as best she could on the day’s political news in case she needed to tweet anything on Evelyn’s account.

Of her employer’s bookings, the last one was the one Darby anticipated being the most trouble. If truth be told, she wasn’t at all sure how it was Mrs Raines had become one of their leading voices around the Capitol; what she’d seen of the Senator’s wife after coming to work for her included a private persona that was definitely more… earthy… than Darby could imagine a typical Concerned Mother being willing to accept.

Some of the remarks she’d made, when it was only Evelyn and Darby to hear them, had been very derogatory of the organisation, too. They certainly didn’t seem to see eye to eye, privately.

Darby wasn’t sure whether they’d once been aligned and parted ways or whether, as honestly seemed more likely, Evelyn had just always been a much hornier woman than her public persona suggested.

She liked to think she wasn’t completely naive. She knew how many illicit affairs, condoned or not, took place between the rich and powerful; knew how many people spent time in Washington because they enjoyed being fucked by the powerful in ways other than the usual; knew that ‘sexual’ was in a category of favours that got traded freely behind the scenes.

Evelyn seemed above that, somehow, to a degree that even her husband wasn’t; almost always, when she showed a flash of sexuality or desire, her husband was clearly the subject. Truthfully, her eye seemed less wandering than Darby’s own, as she would at least take the time to enjoy what was visually on offer.

All the same, there was an hour before the working dinner; Darby decided to see if she couldn’t build up her own detective skills a little in the meantime.

What was the story with Melissa Wilder?

Something as basic as googling her name gave one big indicator; her father was high-ranking in the Chicago PD. Probably that was the big inspiration in her career.

It wasn’t like Chicago was a city that didn’t encourage investigators outside the law, either. Red Fox had laid claim to the city, and the usual claim was that nobody in the Safeguard could break an alibi or track a motive chain as quickly or effectively as him.

On the other hand, something that googling conspicuously hadn’t turned up was any listing of Melissa Wilder as a licenced private investigator. Which…

Darby drummed her fingers on the desktop for a while. Diverted off her initial train of thought, she spent a little while confirming how necessary a licence was in Illinois.

*

Most superheroes didn’t really train to assess their circumstances at speed, but the Red Fox emphasised it in his little adopted “Fox-family”. His rogues’ gallery had a penchant for an elaborate deathtrap, and the faster you could visualise it, the better your chances of escape.

She knew as she regained consciousness that things had not gone to plan. If you could feel gravity pulling against your wrists as your body dangled, and it wasn’t because you were holding your grapnel launcher, something had gone wrong.

Melissa was pretty sure her wrists had been strapped together, too, or cuffed and clipped perhaps; either way, there wasn’t exactly much room. And there was an ungainly, unwieldy weight to her head that told her she was wearing some kind of helmet, something bulky, the majority of its weight in front of her forehead.

Behind her, a counterweight; a metal bar strapped along her waist and to her other restraints. It was cold against her elbows and her thighs; she hadn’t been there long.

Her shoulders and her wrists already ached; it had probably been their protests which had startled her out of her drugged stupor.

That was right. She’d been drugged with some kind of gas; that was what had happened. And now, wherever she was, she’d been moved.

She could tell she didn’t have her costume on, but this was, all the same, what Red would have called a ‘classic’ deathtrap.

Right. Now she knew everything she could gather without showing any signs of awareness, the next step was to open her eyes and find out what had been clamped around her head. Some sort of comm system and camera, perhaps, so whoever had grabbed her could monitor her.

Her mind was already running back through the ever-shortening list of suspects she’d been working on with Darby when she opened her eyes.

She wasn’t entirely sure what she’d been expecting. Partially obscured sight, maybe a HUD, some blinking text message waiting for her to wake so this whole automated plan could begin.

Instead, she found that the headset extended as far as bulky goggles covering her vision.

The screens were showing the same image; a bright yellow backdrop, like a theatre curtain dyed by a madman with a love of primary colours, against which something dangled, something which in contrast to the brightness of the yellow was just a blackness; it looked for all the world like someone’s necklace decoration hanging from a single cord.

The decoration wasn’t clearly defined - rather, the contrast against the bright yellow made the definition hard to see - but Melissa initially guessed it might be a mermaid or something; just that it was odd to see a mermaid depicted with their tail straight down instead of curving.

After a moment’s puzzlement, though, Melissa suddenly realised that wasn’t what she was seeing at all.

This was a question of perspective, and once she’d clicked through to the right one, suddenly what was going on was obvious, and it couldn’t be anything else.

She was watching herself, suspended, filmed against this bright yellow curtain in front, from a camera feed set some way behind her. That was why the silhouette didn’t look like much of anything; it was more important to the designer that she be restrained than that she be artfully arranged.

Just to confirm, she flexed one arm, shifted her elbow away from the pole. She saw the figure she was watching twitch correspondingly.

What kind of deathtrap was this? She wondered. There didn’t seem to be any actual thread visible…

A soft, brassy chime sounded in both ears and Melissa couldn’t help but jump in her restraints - and she saw that movement reflected on the screen.

She’d drifted slightly to one side with it. She watched the cord from which she was suspended swing back to the centre to correct, except that it kept swinging, further out to the other side, then back further again when it course corrected.

She could feel herself moving slowly from side to side and in front of her eyes, she saw it just as clearly. At each point the direction reversed, there was the same quiet chime; this was clearly part of whatever was going on.

Maybe there was something on one of the walls, then, and the worst of the trap would come when they finally got to either edge?

There was only so much movement she had in her bonds but she started to use it, concentrating on the image in front of her eyes, using her own body as a counterweight to stop the pendulum she was strapped to from swinging too widely.

If she could keep the swings exactly the same length, perhaps she could eventually bleed off whatever mechanism was counteracting momentum, could get it to still again, and could get herself free.

A quiet ratcheting clack-clack-clack joined with the chimes of each end of the arc, steady and ongoing throughout, and it took a little time for Melissa to notice that with each clack the theatre curtain was rising slightly; her attention was on the swing, had to be on the swing, so she could avoid whatever this deathtrap held for her.

The deep red backdrop with swirls of a creamy almost-white behind the curtain gradually resolved, as it rose higher and higher, into two big spirals, and Melissa’s own efforts, shifting her weight to change the swing, stabilised until she changed direction every time at the exact centre of one or the other, hanging for just a moment in the heart of the spiral.

With her thoughts so recently on her own brainwashing, Melissa might have marked that down as a sign that this was an entirely other type of trap, but she had already drifted into an almost automatic, empty mental state, simply making one action every couple of seconds, predicting the arc of the curve she was on.

Melissa didn’t have enough theory to realise that these patterns were something that talented hypnotists could exploit, and by the time the atmosphere that was priming her was obvious to her, it was too late; at one point, when she reached the leftmost part of her swing, there was no chime but instead a cultured, confident, almost arrogant voice - a posh Englishman, she thought - saying “Sleep,” with the kind of firm certainly that it would have the correct response that her mind just sort of went along with his certainty.

Her eyes rolled back into her head and her body went slack, but the pendulum mechanism stopped her at the lowest point of her swing in any case.

It had never been a deathtrap but something else entirely. In her initial slumber, a name drifted up into near-consciousness, a villain the Red Fox had tangled with at the beginning of his career, when a theatrical over-elaborateness had been briefly on trend in the supercriminal underworld; a stage hypnotist with high ambitions, Baron Brainwash.

Her unmoving, unresisting form was lowered gently until the tips of her toes touched the ground.

She was aware of footsteps; the brisk stride of someone with purpose, but not so loud across the floorboards as to throw off any speech.

There was a strange, loud rattling from off to one side of her head; Melissa dozed through it, deep in trance, her mind happily, hypnotically fogged up, and continued to doze even after enough of the headset’s bolts had been unscrewed that the rattling was more audibly the unscrewing of the fixtures that remained.

The helmet was lifted off, and the figure who was revealed, standing in front of her, the big spirals daubed on the wall behind him, was a dapper youngish man, barely any older than Melissa herself, with short blonde hair and a fussy pencil moustache, wearing a tuxedo with an opera cape attached, and with a monocle firmly attached to one eye.

“Can you hear me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I can hear you.”

“What is your name?”

“Melissa Wilder.”

“Are you currently working for Evelyn Raines?”

Perhaps other phrasings might have led her to hesitate in answering. But this was a simple “Yes.”

He smiled, and the sudden tilt of the head caused the monocle to flash. “Splendid,” he said. “You’re doing very well.”

Melissa, who had started to worry a little, under her trance, that this was perhaps not the way things should be going, was reassured by this.

“Are you doing important work for Evelyn Raines?”

“Yes.”

“So you want to be important.”

It wasn’t a question. In his voice, in the state she was in, that made it settle into her mind like a weight, shaping her thoughts around it.

Of course she wanted to be important.

“I can offer you a much better post, for someone who wishes to be important,” he said. His eyes flickered down her figure; he smiled appreciatively. “Do you know who I am?”

“Baron… Brainwash…” she sighed dreamily.

He seemed thrown by that. “Are you from Chicago?”

“Yes.”

“Ah. That explains it. No; the Baron was my grandfather.” He perked up slightly. “I am the Capitol Ghost!”

“Yes,” she agreed, filing the name and family connection away automatically. She’d heard of the Capitol Ghost briefly in her research before travelling to the city, but she was too deep to bring any of that information back up.

“The Capitol Ghost is more than a performer, dear lady,” he told her, his voice rising to a theatrical swell. “Rather, I shall change the world.

“I am here to accomplish what my grandfather never achieved, to topple the secret aristocracy of the American political class and to create a new American empire, with myself on the throne and those below me loyal, obedient drones!”

Melissa still dangled from her restraints, drinking in his words and his purpose. Helping achieve that would make her important, she thought dreamily. Very important.

“But to do that, like any great stage performer, I first need support. My Stagehands I already have. But I am, now, instituting an inner circle.

“You will be the first. You want to be the first. And we will use your knowledge to recruit others, taken from within this corrupted establishment, so we can in turn undermine the politicians and their wives who stand between me and my goal.”

He had started off by gesturing to accompany his speech; now, instead, his hands traced her curves in the air before her. She arched her back against the pole binding her, already conditioned to crave submission and to associate entrancement with sensuality, trying to tempt him to put hands on her.

“You will be the first of my Beautiful Assistants,” he told her.

“Yes,” she answered, but he shook his head.

“Yes, my Ghost,” he prompted.

“Yes, my Ghost,” she replied, and it felt right.