After the day Celmira disappeared, Kara put her watch back in its decorative box, not understanding why it took her so much time to do just that. It felt like she had to decide several times before she was able to take it off, and even once it was off her wrist, getting it shut away in the box didn’t happen for two days, during all of which time, whenever she saw it, she found herself tempted to slip the band back around her wrist and drop the magnetised watch into place.

Kara wasn’t at all sure why she’d done it, either; it had felt like the right thing to do, and a stubborn streak in her kept thinking about it until it was done.

It was several days later before it occurred to Kara that her odd erotic dream would explain Celmira’s absence, if true. She spent a quiet morning, ignoring her tutors, contemplating the use of the remote control.

At that point in her life, Kara had spent three years living with what at first had seemed the reality of a situation where her mother had been brainwashed and stolen away. As she’d grown older, the casual assumption by teachers, the parents of her friends, and her friends that her mother had either run from her father or had been having an affair and had abandoned her family had shaken her conviction; the further into the past her own hypnotic encounter had faded, the more it had seemed only a dream.

It was easy, therefore, when items like that appeared in her dreams for Kara to assume they were, in part, her subconscious exploring an idea that had lodged there as a young girl. She was now beginning to wonder if they perhaps hadn’t been fake.

There was a TV at home that now lived in the attic. It had been used to place Kara and the manor staff into a trance, and after her father had rescued them all on his return, it had been moved out of everyone’s way. Kara made a mental note to go up to the attic once she’d graduated.

With a timer in the plug socket, she could test whether the TV would put her in a hypnotic state, and she could use that to confirm whether or nor the family legend of brainwashing had been true.

That was the lesson she took from Celmira’s disappearance. The fact she’d removed her watch, as she’d done so on unclear instinct, wasn’t considered in the same context, even with Monsieur Hofmann’s look of disappointment on the morning he’d noticed she no longer wore it. It was natural he should be disappointed; the watch had been a gift.

The TV, on the other hand… that was now a way to confirm whether or not her father had made up everything to do with her mother’s disappearance. In her reverie, a vision came to her, an imagination of what might be to come.

Seated on the rickety old sofa that also lived in the attic, she would connect the television to the power, turn it on, and flip through the channels. If she made it through a circuit without interruption, her father had lied.

Of course, after she had come to believe that Celmira was under remote control, that her friend had been auctioned off to the highest bidder, it seemed plausible again that her father had told the unvarnished truth.

In which case, somewhere in her cycle through channels, Kara’s eye would be arrested. Her finger would cease to tap at the remote. Her mind would empty, almost instantaneously, in the way she vaguely recalled had happened before. She would spend a period of time empty in this way; without stress, without fear, without expectation, without thought.

If her memory could be trusted, as she had spent three years telling herself it couldn’t, it had been a pleasant, even pleasurable experience, to cease being heiress Kara Kraft, who was expected to behave as perfectly as the Meillures Filles tutors tried to show her, and to be instead a nonentity without conflicts or duties.

Was that what had happened to her mother?

And if it was, had her mother left because she was compelled or because it was simply easier?

The image of herself, empty of thought, sat on the sofa, glassy eyed without any risk of an actual brainwasher interfering, appealed to Kara on a level she couldn’t properly articulate. It could be quite a comfortable, cosy thing, she thought. She’d put on a loose sweater, wear some comfortable baggy pants…

…though the image swam in her head for a moment. She imagined herself instead sitting there in that sexualised version of a serving staff outfit she’d worn while Celmira was sold directly in front of her, legs crossed, head lolled back against the sofa cushions, neck at an odd angle for her eyes to drink in what was on screen, back arched, her breasts prominently on display…

That was better, she decided, whatever ‘better’ might mean. But impractical; she didn’t own such an outfit. Instead she imagined herself in lingerie, something she didn’t own much of but would be wanting to buy in any case. She found herself smiling at the idea.

Was it possible that had come from elsewhere?

She couldn’t quite see how she could have got the idea to sexualise trance from anything but her own mind. On the other hand, she couldn’t quite see how anyone could have put it there.

If she had been obedient, happily gropable wait staff for Monsieur Hofmann, surely that would be the only effect he had achieved. And besides, nothing else had happened for days.

It was another month before Kara remembered her earlier dream, and wondered if that might also be connected. But a voice in her head that almost sounded like her whispered No, and as it sounded so like her, she saw no reason to doubt it. She was a trustworthy witness, after all.

*

It had not occurred to Mike to remove her watch, and if it had done, perhaps she would not have had the sustained willpower necessary to achieve its removal.

Mike was still not entirely sure why her family had sent her to Meillures Filles specifically. She understood completely why they had wanted her out of the country, and she had been happy enough to agree to that deal - she too wanted out of the country. But Switzerland? An odd choice even if you assumed Uncle Stephen had heard the word ‘neutrality’ and jumped to an inaccurate but at least well-meaning conclusion. And a finishing school? No one in the Anderson family had ever been sent to a finishing school before, and it was Mike’s opinion that if you were an outside observer looking at her family, she would not have been anyone’s guess for the most likely to be first.

At least she’d made a couple of friends along the way. They were probably just as unlikely as friends for her as she was unlikely as a student at Meillures Filles, but she’d become close with them for all that. Probably her closest friend was Kara, and if Mike was a little jealous of that thick, long mane of red hair and those if-anything-overdeveloped breasts that preceded Kara into every room, well, she’d always been good at hiding that kind of jealousy.

Besides, despite Kara’s muscles (and oh, those biceps… Mike had spent many a private moment contemplating those biceps and the frankly astonishing way her shoulderblades looked when she exerted herself), Mike would put money on herself to win any kind of physical competition, except maybe for skiing. Kara definitely had the capacity to excel, but she never really pushed herself. Mike had the determination and drive to leave her friend in the dust if she had to.

As strange as that might be, it was enough for Mike to consider the scales balanced. It wasn’t that either of them were better; they were just manifestly different.

What Mike didn’t tend to admit to herself, and what she perhaps should have, was that she also found her friend attractive.

Mike had been sent out of the States after her mother caught her with her girlfriend - her ex, now, Mike supposed - and the impression she got was that her family thought she was shameless.

Mike was far, far too Catholic to feel shameless about the women she loved, and she was usually pretty successful in hiding her attractions even from herself as a consequence.

She regarded the strange, weirdly erotic dreams she’d had occasionally over the past couple of months at Meillures Filles as a sign that maybe things were changing; maybe her attraction to women was the phase she’d grow out of that many dismissed it as; the fact she was dreaming about men groping her, about sucking cock, about letting cum drip onto her bare cleavage while she knelt, holding the glass of a man she couldn’t even see, little more than an object being made of use…

…well, hopefully it would soon mean that she was only interested in men. Mike had always been drawn to the exceptional, but she seemed to notice far more exceptional women than men. Where she grew up, where her family had its influence, that wasn’t exactly looked on gladly. Mike might be the black sheep of her family but she still wanted to benefit from its wealth and its interests. If that meant sticking to men…

Mike sighed. This was the part that was the problem, and the proof it was a problem was right there, in the way her thoughts on the topic were unsettled and… frankly, jumpy. She didn’t like to admit just how much more interested in women she was than men, and even thinking about it too deeply unsettled her.

Like Kara, Mike had been disturbed by the fact Celmira had vanished not long after she’d dreamed what she’d dreamed. Unlike Kara (though the two had not discussed this), Mike hadn’t been so surprised by the idea of a sale of Celmira. In fact, it might explain a little more about her own presence at the finishing school; maybe whoever was behind that was someone her uncles knew. Maybe there was a business relationship.

That would certainly explain her family knowing about this place. Mike didn’t much like the idea she might have been deliberately sent somewhere that was involved in people trafficking, but when your family is mobbed up, not everything goes the way you’d hope. And it was unlikely the place would sell everyone.

You’d need to be able to mess with people’s heads to do that and get away with it, wouldn’t you?

*

Most nights, once she was asleep, Kara wouldn’t be woken until she was good and ready. Back in Scotland she’d often slept through her alarm. Meillures Filles had improved her performance, but only insofar as she now woke in time for the appointed breakfast hour. It usually didn’t matter what happened around her; once she’d dozed off, she wouldn’t notice.

One night in May she discovered that this fact she knew about herself was not exactly and not entirely true. When the door to Mike’s room opened around two a.m., Kara found herself abruptly and fully awake.

It turned out that a sound that was out of the ordinary would catch her attention where louder noises she could anticipate wouldn’t. Music from Antoinette’s room, long into the night, Kara completely ignored; there probably hadn’t been a night since Kara had come to Meillures Filles that Antoinette had not been playing music.

She sat bolt upright and listened, very carefully. She heard Mike’s door - definitely Mike’s, there was a squeak on one hinge that was surprisingly recognisable - close again, but with a very slow swing. Less the way someone shut their door as they went out and more the way a door closed if it was left untended and allowed to swing shut in a breeze.

Kara slipped out of bed as quietly as she could and tiptoed to her door, then opened it as slowly as she could, slow enough she was fairly confident she wouldn’t make a sound. On the way to her door she glanced out of her window, and saw no activity from the other building; Monsieur Hofmann’s room light was off, as were the lights of the rooms belonging to the other tutors there.

Peering out, she saw Mike making her way down the corridor, wearing only a T-shirt that, two sizes too large for her, almost but not quite covered her modesty, and her watch. She walked with a strange gait, very slow, swinging her feet in across each other with each stride so that her hips rolled slowly, the hem of the T-shirt rising and falling with her pace, the twin moons of her buttocks revealed beneath the soft starlight seeping through the skylights.

To put it mildly, this was not at all how Mike walked; she was a woman with purpose, and she had clearly been taught before ever arriving at Meillures Filles that if you walked with enough pace and determination, other people got out of your way, something Kara wished she’d developed the habit of. She’d been trying to emulate that confidence ever since, hoping that ‘fake it til you make it’ was as workable a strategy as her father had always claimed.

She nearly called out to her friend, but something about the atmosphere, plus a nervous frisson from the adrenalin of her sudden awakening, scared her out of it. Instead she stepped out into the corridor, closing her door just as silently, then hurried after Mike on tiptoe, coming to a screeching halt when another door opened much nearer to the main staircase, just as Mike reached it.

Darcy Sterling was a new arrival to Meillures Filles, twenty-two and frustrated about being there - her comment to Kara and Mike, upon realising them to be kindred spirits, was “I was about to flunk college and a Sterling can’t be allowed to flunk, and this is the best they can come up with for me, but my trust fund only becomes mine when I graduate somewhere, sooooo…” with a roll of the eyes so extravagant she could probably see her own brain.

She was tan in the way that only Californians tanned, a glowing brown that had built up so slowly and so naturally that it was impossible to imagine her looking any other way. Her blonde hair still had pink tips that made Monsieur Hofmann wince every time she turned her head and they danced in the light.

And it appeared, as she stepped out from her room, that she wore to bed only a pair of dark blue cotton shorts with a single white stripe down each side. Her slender figure was otherwise bare, except for another watch; Kara’s eyes narrowed as she caught its telltale glint.

Like Mike, Darcy didn’t react to Kara at all. She fell into step alongside Mike, taking the same swinging, swaying steps not only at the same pace but exactly in sync with one another. As Kara tiptoed after them, watching, she realised suddenly that each step took exactly one second, their bodies following precisely the beat of the watch.

They made their way down the staircase; Kara halted at the top, worrying about being seen by someone who wasn’t affected by the watches. There had to be some people in this building who had their own wits about them, except for her, didn’t there?

Only those people were probably in charge of what was happening. Kara had two and a half years of judo and kung fu classes under her belt, but as that belt was still pretty far from being black, she didn’t exactly feel like the conquering heroine.

She watched the two brainwashed women proceed down the stairs to the beat in their heads. Unbidden, the night her brainwashed mother had returned to Kraft Manor sprang to life in her memory, suddenly clear again, prompted by something in the behaviour she saw in front of her.

*

“Mum?”

Kara watched her mother freeze in place, halfway up the other set of stairs in the main hall. She came to a halt of her own, halfway down.

“Kara, what are you doing here?”

It took Kara a moment to realise what her mother meant, but when she’d disappeared, Kara had still been away at boarding school. To Candace Kraft, Kara’s presence was probably more surprising than her own.

“I wanted to come home. Mum, you were missing. Dad says you were hiding for a while but answering the phone, and then you just… stopped. I thought maybe you’d been kidnapped.”

She watched the confusion and concern cross her mother’s face. It was impossible to read her expression, especially at that distance, but she thought that perhaps her mother was caught between needs that were impossible to reconcile.

Wordlessly, her mother opened her arms for a hug. Kara’s breath caught - she could barely believe it - but then she started moving, clattering down the staircase to where the two stairs joined at the mezzanine, then up to crash into her mother, holding her as tightly as she could.“I’m here now,” Candace said quietly, stroking her daughter’s hair. “It’s alright. I promise.”

Despite herself, Kara’s voice caught. Her head was reeling, and like her mother she realised she was caught between needs. She wanted comfort from her mother, but she also wanted to understand, and any comfort, she felt almost instinctively, would be a lie. “So… why did you…”

“It’s not your fault, darling,” Candace said gently. “Not really anybody’s. Well… your father and I had… an argument.”

Kara tensed. Anger wasn’t something she’d had to worry about much, not since (at a much younger age) the others at school had been persuaded of the folly of making ginger jokes in her earshot. She didn’t really know how to manage her temper. But her mother wouldn’t be saying something like that, even if she wanted to mislead, unless some version of it was true. By the end of the next day, Kara realised, she would be angry with at least one of her parents.

“It’s OK now,” Candace reassured her. “Well… it will be, I hope. Let me guess - he told you everything was fine and nothing had happened?”

She nodded into the crook of her mother’s shoulder.

“That’s OK,” she soothed. “I can’t blame him for not wanting to bother you. He probably thought I’d calm down much faster.”

Candace took a deep breath, and said “Sweetheart, I promise, I’ll sit down with you as soon as this is done.” Her voice was warm and loving and the sinking worry Kara had held that her mother was lost to her was suddenly entirely gone.

“But your father and I need to talk now, and we need to talk alone.”

Kara looked up at her mother, meeting her eyes, trying to gauge the truth in them. She saw only sincerity.

“This isn’t as serious as you’re worried. I’ve calmed down now. And honestly, I’m looking forward to seeing him again.

“But I want to hear all about school once I’m done, alright? I’ll come straight down to meet you. In fact – why don’t you head into the kitchen and see what you can persuade them to rustle up to make breakfast special?”

Hope surged in her. “You promise?”

Candace bent her head and kissed her daughter on the forehead. “I promise, Kara. And we’ll talk about you staying home from school for a little while, alright? So that we can sort this all out.”

She hugged her mother tightly and hurried off to the kitchen, which had been where she was planning to go in any case.

*

Less than five minutes after that encounter, Kara had been in a trance of her own, staring wordlessly at the same TV as the staff, and her mother - and her father - had both disappeared before they came round.

Doctor Candace Kraft had seemed her own self; she had walked as she usually did, albeit a little faster and a little more determined (a lot like the way Mike did, actually). But somehow, the way Mike and Darcy had moved stood out to Kara’s hindbrain, screamed out as the same thing. Connected.

For the first time in over a year, Kara believed entirely in the story her father had given her once he got home after his own brainwashing.

Something was very wrong at Meillures Filles, and she had to get out of there. But - and as she watched Darcy approach Monsieur Hofmann, settling to her knees, and begin to undo his belt, while Mike walked up to Monsieur Watson, a visiting tutor who covered the relatively new course on board room and conference etiquette, to do the same - Kara realised it wasn’t going to be as simple as sneaking out. Her friends were trapped in this, and she couldn’t rescue herself without rescuing them.

She watched in a strange fascination as Mike took Watson’s stiffening cock in one hand, then almost immediately into her mouth in one fluid motion. She recalled having that motion perfected, as well, during her own erotic dreams…

She couldn’t do it now, she was pretty sure. Not with that easy accuracy. Possibly not without choking.

Looking at both of them there, Mike sucking Monsieur Watson’s cock, Darcy’s head rolling loosely as, his hand around the base of his dick, Monsieur Hofmann kept it swaying around, keeping the blonde from being able to lean forward and begin her task, Kara found herself thinking idly of her own imagined trance on the attic sofa back at Kraft Manor. She could just picture herself, emptily and usefully vacant, her lips parted, her body on almost full display in the soft green lingerie she now planned to buy, when her view of the screen would be broken by a figure stepping between her eyes and the hypnotic focus.

He would be naked, of course, or perhaps just naked from the waist down, his cock out and already hard, and her eyes would transfer from the strange hypnotic static to his cock.

She would stare for a moment, Kara thought, while the instructions that passed for thoughts in a hypnotic state flowed and processed with a slow, delicious inevitability, and her mouth would open wider as she sat up and forward, and she would suck, and…

…and…

…Where was all of this coming from? Why was the idea so exciting to her? If it were to happen, some arsehole would be taking advantage…

Well. Maybe not. Maybe, if it was in her own attic, she could arrange for a male friend to come up to the house to visit her, and he could discover her while she was in blissful trance, while she wasn’t thinking, while she had no need to think, while everything was somewhere between contentment and bliss…

Darcy’s mouth was around Monsieur Hofmann’s cock now and she moved with the same precise motions and intent as Mike did around Monsieur Watson. Both of them were eager, Kara thought, though their glassy, expressionless eyes couldn’t show it. But they must be. That was how it worked, wasn’t it?

Her lips, her mouth, her throat were dry. Called back to reality by this, Kara cleared her throat - then immediately winced. It had been a reflex action, but sounds carry in silence, and the soft sucking and gentle slurping of the women below didn’t change the situation enough. Monsieur Hofmann looked up first. Kara froze, her cheeks red with embarrassment, her mind whirling with fear. Upstairs was dark; hopefully he couldn’t tell who she was. But it was bad enough that he knew anyone was there.

“Secure her,” he said loudly, pointing up to Kara. Immediately both Darcy and Mike disengaged from the cocks they were pleasuring, turned their heads to follow Monsieur Hofmann’s gesture, and saw her.

She was turning to flee as they simultaneously rose to one knee.

*

Kara sprinted along the corridor, hearing footsteps behind her, her mind a whirl as she desperately tried to think of a good way out of this. She hadn’t exactly done much to give herself an advantage; she was barefoot, as were her pursuers, and the loose-ish pyjamas she slept in weren’t great for movement and did nothing to suppress the sway of her chest, which meant above a certain speed every step could be painful.

On a cloudy night, she might have been able to find some shadows she could blend into well enough to hide, but the skylights gave enough light that no corner of the corridor was completely dark. She had no doubt that Mike and Darcy would chase until they caught her or until Hofmann called off the pursuit, no matter what else happened.

A glance over her shoulder told her that they hadn’t quite reached the top of the stairs yet. She had to act fast.

Seized with inspiration, Kara threw herself sideways, wrenching open Mike’s room door and plunging inside. She slammed the door behind her and stood with her back to it, not daring to breathe, hearing her heart pounding like a hammer in her ears.

There is a peculiar heightening of terror when your adrenalin runs high but you don’t dare move. Kara stood as still as she could, body tensed, listening, as the footsteps of the other women came closer… and closer…

Surely they’d pass her by? This was one of their rooms, they wouldn’t expect someone to hide here, so if she’d just got in before-

The doorknob rattled and her heart sank. They’d seen her, or they’d seen the door close. Or, she suddenly realised, if she’d recognised the sound of Mike’s door opening and closing, Mike surely would. One of them shoved at the door, and she was barely able to keep it shut. In an instant she saw the future if she just tried to keep them out of the room; overwhelmed by weight of numbers, the watch would go back on, and Monsieur Hofmann would definitely have something else up his sleeve.

She might be gagged and tied up, she still didn’t know what the remote control used on Celmira did or how it worked. If she stayed where she was, she was unquestionably doomed.

In the same instant, a solution presented it to herself. It was wild, it was risky, it might be beyond her capabilities, but with no other options on the table, she sprang forward, diving over the bed and rolling to come up by the window, which she flung open. As the door opened behind her she was already stepping out onto the ledge outside, no more than four inches across, and by the time Mike and Darcy had rounded the bed she’d moved to the next window.

This was a balance beam with higher stakes than she’d ever endured in gymnastics class, and there was a wall on one side just to increase the difficulty, but Kara was determined, and her love of gym class and her recent years of martial arts training both proved to be very helpful.

She glanced back over her shoulder once she’d travelled two rooms’ worth of difference and saw that Darcy had beaten Mike to the window. She was moving as fast as she could, almost as fast as Kara, but she didn’t have the same skill at balance and it looked like she was dangerously close to a fall.

Kara doubted the watch’s commands would help anyone to break their fall well. She hesitated for a moment, wondering what to do, just relieved that Mike was slowed by having to bring up the rear. But both pursuers were wavering.

Kara needed to escape, but she needed just as badly not to injure her friends in the attempt. The ledge might be safe for her, but it wasn’t safe for them, and they didn’t deserve anything bad; they were just following Monsieur Hofmann’s orders.

Kara wasn’t sure where Hofmann might be, but he clearly thought he had enough options for doing his own dirty work.

She was trying to decide what to do when the window she was stood beside opened too and Sofia’s head emerged. Kara whirled back to face her, hoping she had an ally here, before seeing that the woman wore a watch of her own. So Hofmann had other troops he could activate. Kara kicked herself for not realising this.

Sofia was probably the least threat of the group; she was in her early thirties, here having recently inherited a controlling stake in a major German electronics firm. She was perhaps the student most in need of Monsieur Watson’s class; she’d only been awarded the watch a day or so ago, as a prize for performing best in a practical test. At any rate, she had lost some of the fitness she’d probably had in her early years and though her plump frame filled out business suits and gowns in an aesthetically pleasing manner, she was likely to be the worst at a chase.

As she too stepped out onto the ledge Kara’s mind was made up for her. She couldn’t allow any more of the students to risk themselves on the thin ledge, especially when a sudden gust would make things even worse.

Kara turned to face the building, nearly skinning her shoulder and actually grazing one buttock against the rough wall, and reached up. She could just about grasp the guttering at a full stretch, and these were old-fashioned cast iron gutters either installed many decades ago or maintained after the style of the originals. Bolted firmly to the wall, they took her weight when she pulled herself off the ledge and, feet scrabbling against the wall, hoisted herself onto the roof.

Mike was the first of the others up there, and Kara ran across the shingle to the other end of the house, thanking everything that she’d been discovered on a peaceful spring night, rather than finding herself scrabbling across a snow-covered roof in a blizzard as might have happened on her birthday night. But she wasn’t the only one; Darcy followed too, and Sofia (which, as much as it meant more danger, Kara couldn’t help but be relieved about; she’d worried the larger woman would have an accident in the ascent).

From the other side of the chalet they were joined by Antoinette, by Allison, and by Rafaela. Kara swallowed; this wasn’t a good idea. There wasn’t a great exit…

Mike was closing in. Kara threw a low kick, catching her on her thigh; Mike had made no move to react, as if the watch didn’t have any options for that. Kara stepped closer, grabbed one of the arms reaching out for her, and half-threw, half-steered her into a collision with Allison. With two of them down she ducked past Darcy’s outstretched arms, squirmed clear of a sudden lunge by Rafaela, and ran for the back of the chalet, where there was a ladder. If she could get down to the ground, maybe - just maybe - she could get clear, get to the garage, and get out.

All thoughts of rescuing her friends were now out of the window, impossible. She promised herself she’d come back with the police, reached the ladder just a hair ahead of Sofia - who turned out to have a standing-start sprint that Kara hadn’t seen coming at all - and swung herself down, scrambling to get a couple of rungs ahead of her pursuit.

Suddenly there was a pain in her scalp; Sofia had dropped to her belly and breasts, the watch’s control overriding any natural urge to wince at the impact, and reached down, catching hold of Kara by the only part of her in reach, her unruly pile of auburn hair.

Kara wrapped one leg around the ladder, bracing herself, reached up with a freed hand, and grabbed Sofia’s wrist. She twisted as hard as she could. Sofia wouldn’t release her hold of her own free will, but maybe she’d be able to force a reflex…

Sofia grabbed Kara’s arm with her free hand, and then Mike’s arms joined in. Kara panicked. There was no good way out of this.

She shifted position again. Bracing against the wall with both bare feet and her palm, and she shoved away, her captured arm wrenching free of her captors, an ache in her scalp as some of her thick, luxuriant hair was lost.

Her gymnastics training took over; she flipped backward gracefully, spreading and retracting her arms to adjust her rotation, and she landed like a superheroine on one foot, one knee, and one hand.

And a heartbeat later Dai Lu and Manon stepped out of the shadows by the ladder. Manon seized Kara by the arms from behind and Dai Lu plunged a syringe into her neck.

Kara just had time to register the glassiness in Dai Lu’s eyes before everything went black.