Gigi had finally got past the fake internet logs and saw - more accurately, heard - what was actually happening in the building.

Multiple internet users researching various things; three or four Lexis-Nexus searches, some email, but importantly the whole place was wired for sound, and the person doing it had used commercial solutions to do it. Smart-house microphones were placed everywhere.

To Gigi this was basically just handing her the information she needed as she made her entrance. She’d just heard her colleague - no, that wasn’t the right word; on the other hand, Doctor Bimbeau’s submissives had yet to coin the right word for a co-slave - but in any case, Swift Fox had not just pledged herself to another but also her entire team.

Gigi wasn’t entirely sure whether her team also belonged to the Master, but either way, this was intolerable. She caught the guttering on the edge of the roof with one hand while sending her feet flipping over her head, gracefully descending the side of the building and finding the window to the room that that speaker had been placed in.

She went through the window feet first. It happened that Gigi’s team leader and subMistress had overhauled the team uniforms and her boots and bright red catsuit took real effort to cut, but to rescue her colleague from this heresy she would have done the same barefoot in shorts without hesitation.

There were, as she expected, only two figures in the room. Also as she expected, neither of them was in an ideal position to fight back.

It pained her to do it but she went for her co-slave first. Unless, perhaps, the Ghost had studied stage fighting, Gigi didn’t really think he’d have studied at all.

Coming in through the window, she extended one leg down to land on it, giving her a solid base to pivot about while she still had all of her momentum. That spin put all of her momentum behind the raised shin of the kick she aimed at the costumeless Swift Fox, but she was faster than Gigi expected.

Melissa was already rolling backward as she released her hold on her tits and, consequently, let go of the cock she’d been dedicatedly milking. An arc of his cum jetted into the air, shocked by the sudden assault, his appreciation of the situation entirely ruined, but Melissa was moving to her feet out of range of the kick.

Gigi didn’t hesitate; years of combat training had her continue moving forward, a right hook forcing her opponent to duck before she’d even finished straightening up - just to keep her off balance - and then a half-jump forward, her knee raised to catch the blonde in the jaw.

The Ghost was shouting behind her but, pressing the advantage, she had him mostly tuned out, her mind only briefly scanning each utterance for key words, like ‘guards’ or ‘reinforcements’ or ‘gun’.

In the meantime she was practically sparring with the young woman.

Red Fox, who presumably had been her mentor before she was introduced to the far better path that was service to their Master the Doctor, had been a relative newcomer when Gigi’s first heroic life was interrupted, when she’d been brainwashed and put into stasis as part of General Walters’ Operation Broodmare scheme. Even then it had been pretty clear that he’d be something special, and part of that was a style of close combat that elevated dirty fighting to an artform.

His student wasn’t much below him; Gigi blocked one swing with her elbow only to find a throat jab coming her way. She twisted to evade it and had to spring backward over a legsweep.

She felt like she was fighting at a slight disadvantage; she was sure her co-slave wouldn’t hold back, seeing Gigi as a threat from her past, but Gigi still recognised her as a slave. There were certain things she couldn’t do, certain strikes that her programming would hold her back from.

Then she noticed Melissa break off a kick midway through its arc and go for a grapple instead. It didn’t seem like it had been a setup for a feint; in fact - Gigi caught her with a rabbit punch, doubling her over, leaving her gasping - it had completely unbalanced her, left her wide open for attack.

She realised only as she moved in to grapple and restrain that she hadn’t been the only fighter handicapped in that combat; Melissa might not have needed to pull her punches, but she did have to follow orders. Orders that had been shouted by a panicking hypnotist with, Gigi would bet, no actual combat experience.

Melissa was still fighting, but she was doing it with almost no air in her system, courtesy of that one good punch while she was distracted. Gigi shifted her grip, flipped her, and jumped forward. She landed with her thighs either side of her opponent’s neck, where she tightened her grip, little by little, until she saw signs of a carotid choke settling in while her hands sought out Melissa’s arm, snagging both of them in a hold.

The other woman was a dirty enough fighter that Gigi wasn’t prepared to leave her up and active behind her, but it left her able to do nothing more useful than watch as the Ghost bolted for the door, clutching his shirt and jacket, frantically buckling the belt around his dress pants. Her jaw set into a thin line, but this was what she had to do; she owed he co-slave the care of returning her to the service of her true Master.

She let the coward flee, but when Swift Fox had stopped struggling (and after Gigi had waited a tactful few further seconds to be sure it wasn’t a feint) she scooped the other woman up in her arms and made her way back to the rooftops.

At the back of her mind she was wondering where the Ghost’s other blonde was. Even if the others he’d recruited were noncombatants, that one had been willing to charge headlong into battle, and could easily have been a problem.

*

The place was huge, impossibly, dauntingly huge. So were all the other buildings on (or more accurately, set well back from, with the walls opening out onto) the street. Kelly stood outside the gate for a long while.

Others in her situation might not have been willing to approach the house simply because of the way they were dressed, by now shabby and makeshift, but that didn’t even cross Kelly’s mind; over her time serving Roy, thinking of him as Master, his real identity completely irrelevant to her, she’d become used to it (as horrifying an idea as she now found that).

Instead, she hesitated because she didn’t know the person inside, had wronged her, and needed her help now.

There had been stories in the news, two years back, about a trial featuring a mind controller, some guy by the name of Bimbeau, who’d been arrested and stood trial in Federal court. Kelly hadn’t paid it much attention, but she was hoping that the woman who lived in that house would have done.

It was too easy to assume all mind controllers were people like - what was his name - Fantasio, or that Serpent guy who’d been building up a cult in Florida last year. And it was easy, if you did that, to think of them as a problem for capes and cops, not for regular people.

Kelly very much hoped Mrs Raines knew mind controllers were a problem whatever their name might be.

After a long debate with herself, she finally approached the gate. She hadn’t even considered that she might have difficulty with the security guy, but he was in no hurry to let her in.

She finally showed him the sigil, sketching it in the air before his eyes. You were supposed to imbue it with your willpower, and Kelly didn’t feel like she had much of that left after the past six months of enchanted slavery, so instead she put all of her stubbornness behind it.

She left him with a hard-on that he wasn’t allowed to touch until he got off shift and that wouldn’t go away in the meantime no matter what he tried, and she went up the path toward the big doors at the front of the house slightly embarrassed by what she’d done, and also feeling drained in a way she never had before. It didn’t seem plausible to her that she could do that again, which was a shame, because it might have been the one option she could have relied on.

Knocking on the door, she felt her stomach churn with her uncertainty. This wasn’t helped when a young blonde woman answered the door. She only knew a little about Evelyn Raines - she’d helped Roy with his research, because he’d told her to, and she couldn’t disobey him - but she knew what the woman looked like, and this wasn’t it.

The blonde looked at her with visible distaste. “Can I help you?”

"I…”

She was so tired. So drained. She wanted to go home and sleep. But Roy knew where home was, and when he noticed she’d gone he’d be angry and he’d panic all at the same time, and going back there would just be a recipe for getting into trouble.

And besides, she reminded herself fiercely, fuck Roy. She wouldn’t just be safer if he could be arrested and locked away, she’d be happier for it too.

She was drained and tired but stubbornness and spite would carry her through, she decided. “I need to speak to Evelyn Raines. About her friend. The kidnapped one, I mean,” she blurted, hoping to get ahead of whatever dismissal was percolating behind the suspicious, worried eyes of the blonde.

True to form, although she was suspicious, she wasn’t willing to rule Kelly out entirely. “Anything you’d tell her, you can tell me,” the blonde said. “I’ll make sure she hears it.”

Kelly shook her head. She knew she was wild eyed, half furious, half exhausted; she probably looked crazy. “No,” she said. “N-no. Because - because you’ll try to get it right, but you might not. And then she might tell people the wrong thing, or something, and then -“

She cut herself off abruptly, conscious she was babbling and embarrassed about it, and she looked at the other woman with her eyes a silent entreaty.

The blonde looked back at her steadily. After what seemed like an eternity but couldn’t have been very long, she sighed. “Well, you’re not worried I’d pretend I found out myself, so I think I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Kelly felt the weight of her anxiousness lift from her shoulders.

*

The Ghost had fled his headquarters ahead of Gigi, but not quite ahead of 0018. Her owner had selected her to observe the location not because she was the most attentive of his staff (although once they had been through training, all of his staff were deeply attentive to matters their owner found important) but because of all his staff she had the most relevant sporting background, having run track at college before entering his sphere of influence and inevitably then succumbing to his control.

How well her stamina and her speed had been retained over the past two years of largely sedentary slavery, her owner was curious to know; either way, she had seemed the most useful resource available to him, and consequently had been chosen for deployment.

He had not anticipated that the Ghost would flee so quickly; however he had arranged, on the address’ confirmation, to forward it to his last remaining asset in Senate Security. It would have been much better to be able to give orders directly to Sergeant-at-Arms Chen, but his recent attempt to subvert her had failed; not only that, it had cost him one of his assets in her organisation. He was holding the number 0099 open for her, even as the future 0100 and 0101 were receiving the conditioning that would have them accept their numbers.

In any event, 0018 saw a man exit the building and followed. That it was a male was enough to trigger her instructions; her owner had believed no further identification were needed, as his understanding was that the Capitol Ghost, like himself, selected only feminine candidates for conditioning and control.

The fact he was shrugging a shirt on as he ran was irrelevant to her, because her instructions had already fired in her mind. When her instructions fired, the few thoughts 0018 usually had all went away at once, replaced by the need to comply, to carry out her duties, and above all, to serve.

She followed him around a corner, across a busy street - where her lack of conscious thought proved an advantage, with more of her mind given over to tracking the traffic around her and anticipating where it would be, which allowed her to get from sidewalk to sidewalk much faster - and down an alleyway.

Her mind was just a problem solving process governed by an enslaving programming. It did not occur to her to wonder why he hadn’t got in a vehicle, nor to conclude that he must not have one available.

That was left to the woman who followed them both, wondering who the other pursuer was and what her existence meant for the puzzle she’d fallen into.

She almost lost them at the road crossing, and again just past the dumpsters in the alley, where it turned out that the Ghost had ducked through an open fire door; the other woman had been fast enough to see but she hadn’t, and only her luck in hearing a startled yelp had alerted her to what she’d missed.

June Chen almost burst in on them both, but then she stopped, and wondered, and decided to hang back.

*

The blonde was still there, annoyingly; she wouldn’t leave Mrs Raines alone for Kelly to talk to her. Kelly wasn’t at all comfortable to be telling everything to more witnesses, but she didn’t exactly have a good choice; she confessed or she vanished into the night, unable to return home.

So she talked anyway.

After a while the words seemed to come more easily, after she’d crossed some threshold where her mind went I’m committed now, I gotta keep going, and she could feel herself relax even though she had no assurance that anything was going to be done about it.

She hadn’t realised how much this was weighing on her; the only person she’d been able to talk to about it had been Penny, and Penny had bought into her own version of his vision quickly enough that Kelly had lost that option.

She envied Penny that spirit, that determination. It turned out that even enchanted, there were ways that someone could steer their enthralment in a direction they liked; they just needed the drive and the ideas.

The more she talked, the clearer it became to Kelly that being stubborn gave her will to fight, but did not give her drive. She would stand her ground, but she didn’t really have goals - except for the revenge she wanted on Roy.

Was it a lack? Was it something she should worry about? Penny had been worth more to Roy than her, but she had thought, while in his thrall, that this was just Penny’s knowledge and experience; once he’d mastered the sigil, he hadn’t needed to call on her for more, except to use her body. It wasn’t until she put it all together, explained it all, that she saw the true difference between her and the other woman. But was that difference something lacking in her, or was it just that they were others?

She finished telling her story and the room was plunged into silence. Kelly sat there, awkward and uncertain, waiting for a reaction.

This had seemed the obvious thing at the time; find the other wronged party, a woman of power, of means of her own, forewarn her and pit her against Roy. Maybe she could get the Secret Service involved somehow. Roy couldn’t use the sigil on everyone, if they sent enough people for him.

She’d imagined, or assumed, or something, that Raines would spring immediately into action. The longer the silence drew out, the more it felt like it weighed on her.

“Well,” Evelyn Raines said eventually, “that explains more than I’d like.”

Kelly looked up to see Raines and the blonde exchanging looks. With a murmured “Excuse me,” the blonde rose and left, and Raines seemed surprised to see it, just for a moment, before a mask seemed to come down and her expression became unreadable.

“Do you have a defence against this magic?” she asked, and from a moment of delight that she’d been believed Kelly came crashing back down.

“No,” she admitted. “Nothing like that. Um… I guess speed? And surprise.” She added, reflective and vindictive all at once, “Or if someone broke his fingers.”

That won a sharp, surprised laugh. “Alright,” she said. “I can’t promise much, exactly. But I have some resources I can tap.”

There was another long moment of quiet before she spoke again. “What are your plans?”

Kelly felt a moment of panic at the expectation that she’d already have some. She was still grasping for words when the Senator’s wife spoke again.

“Right. Well in that case, let’s have you here, in case. I’ll have a room made ready for you.”

And with that, she was already striding out of the room.

*

The Ghost had not been hard to subdue. 0018 removed his belt and her own belt and used them to restrain him.

There was now just one more action that needed to be taken before her current orders were complete, but it was potentially a complicated action. She sat cross-legged beside her bound and gagged captive, the back of her hands resting on her thighs, palms open to the sky in a strange kind of supplication.

She proceeded not to think for two more hours, an internal clock almost as accurate as a computer’s counting down because waiting for the right time was now her duty.

*

Darby closed her bedroom door behind her and turned back to the suitcase. She realised when she saw it that some part of her had expected it to be gone by the time she got back, somehow; had thought the decision would be taken away from her, because she’d taken so long to make it.

Of course that hadn’t been the case. It wouldn’t be, would it? This wasn’t a game.

It was a puzzle. Now she knew some of it, knew where Penny had gone. But she didn’t know what had happened with Swift Fox. Darby had a sudden dizzying, vertiginous perception of a much bigger and more confusing picture than she or Evelyn had expected.

Or, at least, more confusing than she had expected. She wondered sometimes if the secrets she knew Evelyn kept included anything more than the affairs and rumourmongering that she’d expected to find on Capitol Hill; there was something about the way she behaved that was apart, somehow, from the other political wives and husbands making deals their elected partner couldn’t be seen publicly to support.

Darby put that firmly from her mind. She didn’t have all of the puzzle, but she had enough, now, to get started.

She picked up the utility belt, still half-expecting it to be trapped but determined to push past that, and went through the compartments one by one with growing confidence, a plan forming in her mind.

Staring at the costume, she began to undress.

*

Master was furious, and Penny’s attempts to soothe him were falling on deaf ears. Shannon was trying, too, but the discovery that Kelly had walked out seemed to have changed everything for him. He was somewhere between raging and panicking, and the panic was fuelling a rage.

“She can’t do that,” he kept saying, and then “YOU can’t do that,” he told them, over and over, and they responded, their voices in enthralled unison, “Yes, Master.”

Penny didn’t think the problem was anything like as big as he seemed to, either; Kelly had long since ceased to feature in her own strategies except insofar as Master might like more variety in the women he enjoyed, and she was one of the options.

She also only really knew the original plan, where Penny had been simply there to get a single law passed, instead of introducing her Master into the backstage deals that were the true secret of lasting political influence. Congressmen had a very high incumbency rate, but some lost their seats every election; lobbyists and dealmakers were forever.

Looking at the way Master was behaving now, he might need more support to become one than she’d thought. She hadn’t realised his enchantment could fail, and the idea scared her; she didn’t want to be free again, didn’t want her independence. It seemed to her that independence and purpose were opposed, and that purpose was much better, and while Penny understood rationally that this was a consequence of the spell she was under, emotionally she did not and could not believe that. People had independence. Slaves had purpose. Aside from Master, of course, who was perfect, slaves clearly had the better end of the deal.

As perfect as Master was, however, there seemed no calming him at that moment.

She looked helplessly across to Shannon, hoping the other woman would have an idea. Anything they could try was worth trying, anything that might solve the problem. Shannon looked back, her eyes just as wide and concerned.

And then the window imploded.

Something was flying into the room with them, something small and black turning end over end and scattering clouds of black smoke around it. “What the fuck is that?” Master demanded, dumbfounded, and it took a few moments before the answer clicked in Penny’s head, realising that she was seeing something for the first time.

“A grenade?” she said, and even though it made more sense than anything else, it just sounded wrong, implausible, an intrusion from a world that wasn’t hers.

Something else plunged in there, a figure, Penny thought, but there was enough smoke for her to be unsure.

There was a sudden loud crackle in her ear, coupled with a disorienting jolt. Penny fell forward, suddenly limp, her limbs not wanting to comply with her actions…

*

At length, the clock in 0018’s head reached the conclusion, without thinking once, that it was past one a.m., which meant traffic on the streets was significantly reduced, and also that any traffic tended to be hurrying home without paying attention to the sidewalks.

0018 boosted the Ghost into an over-the-shoulder carry and she left the building where she’d tracked down and subdued him, heading for her programmed destination.

She had not been instructed to watch for anyone following her. Her owner had assumed the Ghost would either be taken by Senate Security or would escape them and leave once they had gone. 0018 registered that a woman was waiting just outside the door she took to enter the city’s alleyways, but it was, to her, just null information, beyond the scope of her programming. Her owner would, later, have cause to regret the particular lack of initiative his staff displayed when under specific instruction.

For the moment, however, her owner was delighted at her delivery.

“My dear boy,” he told her captive, “welcome! I don’t mind telling you, you’ve led me a merry dance for some time, and I’m very glad to know it’s over.

“Your problem is that you’re showy, you’re obvious, and now people are actually looking for mind control on the Hill. I mean, what got into you?”

After a moment he rather ruined the effect by instructing 0018 “Take that gag out of his mouth, I want to hear this.”

Once the gag was removed, his captive gasped for breath for a few moments (being carried across one shoulder tends to drive much of the air out of you), collected himself, and then declaimed loudly, “Imbecile! Release me at once and you may be spared the wrath and judgement of the Capitol Ghost!”

The only answer was a sigh. “This is exactly what I mean. And ‘Capitol Ghost’ doesn’t even mean anything. I’m assuming you have some connection to the old Opera Ghost, whoever he was, but really I don’t care.”

The Ghost stared at his captor. “Alright,” he said at length, his voice completely different, “so what happens now?”

“Now? Now I put you through my process, just to ensure you’ll do as required, and then you go far away. You can carry on with the costumes and the names and the gimmicks - just not here. Those of us who have our schemes locally, who’ve invested in illicit technologies, we know to keep our heads down and not to stir the pot. There was no investigation into mind control in politics until you abducted the Rutherford woman.”

“Wait - I didn’t - I figured that was someone else.”

“It wasn’t you?”

“It wasn’t you?”

Now the staring was mutual, both men trying to understand what had happened here. Sebastian was marginally quicker to put the pieces together.

“Oh, fucking hell,” he said. “There’s somebody else out there.”

At that moment a red light began to flash in the corner of the room. Sebastian glanced up at it, then rounded on 0018. “Were you followed?” he demanded.

“Yes, Master,” she answered. He turned with an oath and started for the window, then stopped, looking around the room. No, there was too much evidence to hide before they got here, even with his staff stalling… well, whoever had evidently bypassed the reception desk and triggered the alert.

Running was the only option. He hurried to the fire escape at the window, only to find Sergeant-at-Arms June Chen and two of her men there, waiting for their trap to flush him out, smirking.

Desperate, he threw a punch. It never connected; Chen did something in response, and he was flat on the floor and his shoulder ached. He was none the wiser what she’d done, but he was already shouting for 0018 to defend him.

Chen met her coming with some kind of takedown and had them both cuffed in moments.

“You’ve got to help me!” the Ghost was shouting. “I’ve been kidnapped!”

“I know who you are, dumbass,” Chen retorted, and he fell silent.