Her head ached, and for a few moments Kara couldn’t even remember why. It felt like a hangover, but she hadn’t allowed herself to get so drunk she’d had one since…

…since her mother had vanished the second time, after giving her the hope of reunion.

Drinking hadn’t been legal for her then but there’d been no way, no way at all, that that would stop her. She hadn’t bothered to check but she was pretty sure that drinking at Meillures Filles would be against the rules.

Oh.

Her eyes opened sharply, looking around her with a sudden fear. She tried to bring her arms around but found them tied securely behind her back. She’d been out cold on her side; as she wriggled onto her knees, looking around, some skin that hadn’t acclimatised itself to the cold wooden floor touched those floorboards, telling her with a chill shock that her pajama top had been removed.

The room she was in was almost completely dark, illuminated only by the few stars touching the skylight above. On one knee Kara paused. Nobody had reacted so far, but she was tied up only above the waist, she wasn’t gagged or blindfolded. Considering Monsieur Hofmann had not only the watches but some kind of drug - and whatever else he’d used to break Celmira into an object for sale - and considering he now knew that she knew his secret, she could be sure he’d pull out all the stops against her.

She waited until her eyes had adjusted, until she could make out as much of what was in the room as she was ever going to be able to. And, indeed, she wasn’t alone in the room; two of the other Meillures Filles students were in there. Mike and Manon. Someone Hofmann knew she considered a friend and one of the sportiest, most physically capable women at the academy. And now, as well as their watches, they wore sports bras, and sports bras only; Hofmann’s idea, presumably, and one designed to cut down on any feelings of discomfort that might have

She’d been keeping quiet out of some instinct to remain stealthy, to maintain an element of surprise if she even possibly had the chance. With heavy heart, Kara realised that she could have screamed as loudly as she could at any time and it would have made no difference. Monsieur Hofmann had puppet strings to pull for almost everyone in the academy, and nobody outside would hear. If she screamed - if one of the few girls who didn’t have a watch yet woke, and heard, and came to investigate - Kara would just quicken their enslavement.

Fleetingly she thought: but chasing someone else down would make such a lovely distraction; she dismissed the thought almost as soon as it arrived. Escaping that way… well, it wasn’t the person she wanted to be. She might, as she had on the roof, make a decision she regretted on impulse; she was determined not to make a decision she’d regret consciously and deliberately, from the planning stages onwards.

So. Could she take on Mike and Manon, stagger them enough to get by, and flee before Monsieur Hofmann returned? With her hands free, Kara would certainly have tried; the odds would have been firmly against her but that didn’t always mean failure, after all.

As things stood, she knew she stood no chance. Fortunately, though both pairs of eyes were on her even if she moved about the room, they made no move to interfere; she imagined that would soon change if she went near the door, though, and there was no other exit.

“I suppose you can’t really answer me if I try to start a conversation?” she asked them.

Manon remained silent, peering at her glassily. Mike said “We can answer you.”

Kara swallowed; she hadn’t really been expecting that, and hadn’t thought of anything to say as a follow-up. Was there anything worth saying?

“What would you do if I left?”

“We will subdue you,” Mike said, and her tone was still flat and empty. “You will not be further restrained. Instead you will be forced to strike your friends if you wish to leave. And you will not succeed in leaving in any case.”

Kara stared at her. The emotionless delivery. “You do get that you’re one of those friends, right?” she asked.

“I understand I am one of your friends,” Mike told her. It didn’t sound like she understood why. It didn’t sound like she was capable of understanding.

“Do you feel like I’m your friend?” It was sarcastic, impulsive. Far from thought out, as responses went. Intellectually, Kara wasn’t at all sure that Mike had any kind of emotional reaction at the moment, but some part of her couldn’t believe that.

“Yes,” said Mike. The tone was still empty, Kara told herself. But whether she’d actually heard something or she just wanted to believe, wanted to hope, she couldn’t make herself accept that.

“A friend would let me go,” Kara said. Mike didn’t answer. “Will you let me go?”

“No. We will subdue you,” came the reply. “You will not be further restrained. Instead you will be forced to strike your friends if you wish to leave. And you will not succeed in leaving in any case.”

An exact echo of her words the first time, and Kara was suddenly certain that these were not the words of her friend. That was what Monsieur Hofmann had said when he instructed the two women in their task. She shuddered, but she also backed away from the door.

“Can’t you fight it, Mike?” she asked. “For me?”

“Fight what?”

“You’re under Hofmann’s control. This isn’t you. But you don’t have to do what he says.” Though she remembered, in hindsight, that it had taken her a very long time to finally remove her watch when she’d decided to, and could tell now from that just how much of a struggle it had been to do so. “You can resist.”

“Yes,” Mike agreed.

“So resist.”

“No.”

“Why not? Just… just fucking why not?”

“I have not been instructed to resist.”

“Resist, then!”

“I do not serve you.”

There was something in the empty certainty of the way Mike said that that sent a shiver up Kara’s spine. It sounded so much like the way she thought she might, enjoying herself on the sofa in her attic, in front of the hypnotic screen…

Suddenly Kara could see ahead of her a future where she wouldn’t even mind what had been done to her, not unless she was told to.

“You don’t have to serve me. You don’t have to serve Hofmann. You can fight this.”

“Yes,” Mike agreed again.

“But you’re not fighting, are you?”

Mike remained silent. Kara stared at her, wondering. Was this Mike fighting? Was this something her friend had been instructed not to talk about, so that Kara wouldn’t be sure? Was Mike trying to decide on an answer?

Manon spoke for the first time. “No.”

Kara was startled just to hear her. “Why not?”

“I never liked you,” Manon said simply.

Kara found hope in that, and for a long moment, she couldn’t have said why, but on reflection she realised: If Manon had chosen not to fight her control because she disliked Kara, that definitely made it possible that Mike was fighting her control for the opposite reason. She turned back to her friend. “Mike. We’ve got so many plans for the future, but our futures don’t exist unless-”

She would never be sure whether, if she’d been able to finish the sentence, it would have helped or not, but at that point the door opened and two figures entered, backed by the light that flooded in from the corridor. Unable to raise her hands to shield her eyes, Kara had to settle for squeezing them shut.

Darcy was accompanying Monsieur Hofmann, and the man had clearly decided to make a mockery of both Kara and Darcy. Her lips had a glossy red tint under her glassy eyes as the headmaster had compelled her to apply makeup; she was dressed in a skimpy white-and-pink fabric nurse’s dress, bearing absolutely no relation to anything an actual nurse might wear, purely designed for titillation, and she wore tall pink stiletto heels, high enough that she was tottering on them.

She was also wheeling a steel trolley, one Kara was more used to seeing as part of their lessons in taking and serving afternoon tea in different contexts. What it carried this time was difficult to tell as a green cloth covered it; Kara could make out some kind of boxy device, some uncertain shapes, and a circular rise with a dip in the centre. That might be a coil of electrical cable, maybe, Kara thought.

Accompanying Darcy, however, was Monsieur Hofmann, with a face like thunder.

Kara rose unsteadily to her feet, hating how at a disadvantage it made her to have her hands tied behind her back. She would normally pride herself on her balance, if asked; until her arms had been fully restrained she hadn’t realised how big a factor they were in something as simple as standing upright.

Hofmann just stared at her for a long moment. “You know,” he said at last, “every couple of years I get someone who finds out some of what’s going on. Invariably they become a real pain for a very short period of time. You know why it’s only a short period of time?”

Kara could see what was coming, but she wasn’t interested in giving him the satisfaction of knowing that. She shrugged; as both elbows ached afterward, she quickly regretted it.

“We know how to deal with you,” Hofmann said flatly. Kara couldn’t tell if he was irritated she didn’t talk or not. She wondered how long he’d been running this scheme; how many of these ‘real pains’ he’d dealt with the way he planned to deal with her. Maybe by now it didn’t matter to him. “I didn’t expect it to be the angry little Scottish girl, though. I’ll give you that; you were a surprise.”

Oh, she thought. It matters to him. Or he wouldn’t be trying to provoke me.

“I hope you didn’t think I’d be a teacher’s pet after you sold Celmira,” she said, and she had the satisfaction of seeing surprise on his face. He hadn’t realised how much of it all she’d put together. She felt fiercely glad to have given him that surprise, and tried not to admit even to herself that it wouldn’t matter.

“Well, you shouldn’t have let yourself get attached to her,” he said brusquely. “I have a job to do, Miss Kraft, and it supercedes any concerns of the students here. You aren’t my customers; you’re the raw material for the products I shape.”

It came to Kara that this was an argument people made, from time to time, about any school. The student isn’t the client. They’re the work at hand. Kara had disliked the argument, but had felt it was reasonable.

It was very different when the finished product wasn’t an educated, independent adult. Or at least she thought so.

“Restrain her,” Hofmann told Darcy, who moved silently to obey. Kara wasn’t entirely sure - her attention hadn’t been on the sentries - but she thought she saw Manon twitch for a moment as if she were going to follow her orders until she was corrected.

The American stooped and collected, from the lower shelf of the trolley, a black metal bar, about two feet apart, with cuffs on either end, and with a short length of rope tied to the centre. She moved toward Kara without hesitation, and Kara weighed up how possible it might be to escape the three in the room, with her hands tied behind her back, and to then make her way from the chalet and to the nearest other people while naked except for a coil of rope around her wrists.

In later years it was a challenge she might have leaped into without a plan, hoping to figure out what she needed to do on the way. At not far past her eighteenth birthday, it wasn’t a gamble she was willing to make. She lacked both the certainty in herself and the skills she would go on to develop.

Darcy moved past her, to stand behind her, and Kara made no move to strike her, took no steps forward. She felt the American take the ropes that bound her wrists in one hand.

Then Darcy put one foot across the back of Kara’s knee and pushed forward and down, no undue pressure, enough to drive Kara to her knees but not enough to hurt. She stooped, and Kara felt one of the cuffs close around an ankle. Darcy adjusted her foot placement and spread Kara’s legs wider, so that the other cuff could reach despite the bar between the two.

Then, efficiently and silently, Darcy tied the rope that trailed from the bar around the rope lashing Kara’s wrists together. She was trapped on her knees now, unable to move her wrists more than about fifteen inches from either ankle. Any escape would have to be made face down and wriggling, and even the strange fascination she had with the idea of the right person compelling her to obey didn’t make that sound any more appetising.

She glowered up at Monsieur Hofmann. “So,” she said. “What happens now? You keep me here until you can sell me off?”

He chuckled. “Dear me, Miss Kraft,” he said. “I don’t know whether that’s underestimating me or yourself. I already have three buyers who’ve expressed an interest. One of them was a tutor here who took a shine to your, ah, oral presentation.”

Kara must have pulled a face showing even more distaste than she had before, because he laughed. “However,” he said, “there are questions of timing if I want a successful auction. And doubly so, as one buyer wants you for part of a pair.”

She didn’t want to know, but she couldn’t help herself asking. “With who?” Please don’t let that be why Manon is here.

“There’s precious little point telling you, dear girl,” he said. “But then again, you won’t remember soon enough. Let’s just say you were observed as a pair, and a buyer took a liking to that pair.”

If she hadn’t felt the rising tide of fear within her, there were any number of questions she might have asked about that. One question, though, was so much more important than the others that she could only think of it. “What do you mean, I won’t remember?”

“Well, that’s what we’re doing here,” the headmaster smirked. “I can’t just leave you under the remote state until I can get the auction set up. And I can’t really have you disappear. But if we just erase all of this from your memory, well, everything will be fine right up until you graduate and we sell you on.”

Kara’s jaw dropped. “What?”

He pulled the cloth from the top of the trolley. What was revealed looked like a large battery with an elaborate control box and two thick leads ending in metal electrodes.

“I won’t lie,” he said, “this will be deeply uncomfortable for you.”

Kara opened her mouth to yell, but he touched the electrodes to her temples and she lost any ability to think.

*

It was less of a pain and more of a throbbing ache, but it ripped through her train of thought with ease. Kara knew this was supposed to erase memory - though she had no idea how it might do so - and she was trying to hold on to what she needed to remember.

She was far from convinced that would be easy.

“You’re a dumb bitch who doesn’t know what to be scared of,” Hofmann said, and it echoed through a stunned mind. The weight of his words clung to her thoughts, as if by static electricity, as they tried to recover. She was a dumb bitch. She didn’t know what to be scared of.

No…

She was no dumb bitch. She told herself fiercely she could push out whatever he poured in. She could hold on to the truth about herself and the truth she’d uncovered. She marshalled her forces mentally to hold Hofmann’s influences in check.

Another jolt buzzed through her head. This time Kara was sure; this wasn’t just electricity. There was something at play here, some corrupting principle. Electricity was just what delivered it, what left her head open to Hofmann’s words, what allowed his words to cling to her thoughts.

“You’re a dumb bitch who doesn’t know what to be scared of.”

She was Kara Kraft, born to Dr. Candace and Angus Kraft. She was heir to the Kraft fortune, depleted as it was. She had uncovered Monsieur Hofmann’s brainwashing and sex slave auction scheme.

He jolted her again, hit her with more electricity. Her scalp was tingling now. The more he used it, the more the aching throb echoed in her pussy. Was that by design? Or was that her?

“You’re just a dim, needy slut who needs a man to take charge.”

She was Kara Kraft, born to Dr. Candace Kraft, and to Angus, the man who’d taken charge of her mother. She was heir to the Kraft fortune. She had uncovered Monsieur Hofmann’s brainwashing and sex slave auction scheme.

(First taken charge of her mother, she fiercely corrected herself.)

He hit her again while her attention was on Bimbeau, and she gasped, her lips popping apart, strands of drool flying from them, eyes wide open. She gazed up at him now, vacant and empty.

“You’re a dumb bitch who doesn’t want to make waves.”

She was Kara Kraft, born to a brainwashed woman who didn’t make waves. Her man would be heir to the Kraft fortune. She had uncovered Monsieur Hofmann’s brainwashing and sex slave auction scheme.

“You’re a total teacher’s pet.”

She was Kara Kraft, born to a brainwashed woman who didn’t make waves. Her man would be heir to the Kraft fortune. She wanted to help her teacher with his brainwashing and sex slave auction scheme.

That was better. So much better.

*

Kara came to that morning in her own bed, lying on her side. Her arm was up on the pillow directly in front of her, so when she opened her eyes the first thing she saw was the watch Monsieur Hofmann had given her, back in pride of place on her wrist.

Huh, she thought. That wasn’t there yesterday.

She sat up sleepily, the duvet falling from her, and at the cool touch of the air conditioning on her bare chest she realised she wasn’t wearing her pajamas either. But she remembered dressing for bed…

And with that, it all came back to her. Monsieur Hofmann had found out she was suspicious in the worst way. He’d set everyone, or it felt like everyone, to chase her, and they’d caught her in the end. She’d been stripped nude, and Monsieur Hofmann had…

…he’d tried to erase important information from her mind.

And the fact she could remember what had happened meant it had failed.

She should tell him, she thought, so she could help him better. But it would have to wait for the right moment; anyone wearing the watch, she had cause to know, would absorb their memories of the night before into a dream or some other convenient fiction. If Kara slipped, and said anything in earshot of Mike, or Darcy, or Manon…

…well, then they’d realise what was happening, the way Kara had. And a teacher’s pet wasn’t going to make life more difficult for her headmaster if she could possibly avoid it, was she?

She showered lazily, wondering why she’d remembered when she hadn’t been supposed to. Was it because she was fighting it so hard?

She hoped so. If it wasn’t, that meant it had failed because Monsieur Hofmann didn’t understand what he was doing.

Dressing for the morning, Kara paused and thought that through, frowning.

Monsieur Hofmann probably didn’t understand what he was doing, she thought; at least not on the technical side. He was a headmaster - he was a good headmaster; Kara was quite confident she’d think that even if she wasn’t a teacher’s pet - but he didn’t strike her as an inventor. Probably he was doing this with the aid of someone who understood mind control technology.

Someone who just needed a convenient locale where eligible women could be found, out of the eyes of law enforcement and anywhere else; women who were set to make a change in their lifestyle, where it wouldn’t be surprising if they were abruptly married off.

“I bet this wasn’t even your idea,” she said aloud, and if you’d asked her, she could never have told you why she found that contemptible. “Whoever developed this found you.” No wonder, she thought, that he hadn’t been able to erase her memory. He hadn’t done anything.

He was just lucky she was such a teacher’s pet, or she’d blow the whistle on the scheme right away.

She went down to breakfast, an uncomfortable feeling in the back of her brain insisting she’d forgotten something, somewhere.

*

Kara’s unnoticed change of heart regarding Monsieur Hofmann had taken place in early April, and the weeks seemed to slow down afterwards. Her graduation - and that of Mike, as well as Dai Lu, Antoinette, and a couple of the others - was set for early June, and knowing Monsieur Hofmann couldn’t sell her on to her new man until she graduated turned the days into an agonising, frustrating grind.

Obviously Kara kept her attention focused on her studies - she was, she would sometimes remind herself, a dumb bitch who didn’t even know what to be scared of (though every time she reminded herself of this, she noticed, she became irrationally angry toward Monsieur Hofmann for some hours, and it was the one part of her own self-assessment she found herself disagreeing with), and that meant she had to work hard to get the results her father and, more importantly, her headmaster expected of her.

All would have been well except that she was beginning to really worry about Mike. Her friend had never seemed to be around, coming from just a day or two after Kara’s change of heart, and that made very little sense to her. True, she spent more time on her studies than she had - but then, she had to; the whole ‘dumb bitch’ thing - but she still had a couple of hours of freedom each day.

Before that point, she, Mike, and usually Darcy had spent most of their spare time together, enjoying themselves…

…enjoying themselves mocking Monsieur Hofmann and most of the guest instructors.

Hmm.

That didn’t feel like something she’d ever do. It didn’t make any sense for such a hard-working student. And yet she could remember mocking Monsieur Hofmann’s manner, his delivery, his teaching style, the way he organised the curriculum…

She tried to reconcile these memories with what she knew of herself and found that she simply couldn’t.

Still, she reassured herself, her mother had often said people’s opinion of themself was always biased. Perhaps she was just too close to the problem to see it correctly.

She determined to check her thinking with Mike or Darcy, whichever she could most easily find in private to speak to. And that was how she confirmed, through late May, that Mike was now avoiding her entirely.

Darcy seemed less concerned, though it still took a few days before Kara could get her alone, which she eventually did by enlisting Allison’s help. Allison arranged the meeting at Kara’s request, but lagged back before arrival, giving Kara a quarter of an hour to raise the topic.

“Darcy,” she said, as soon as she was sure they had no eavesdroppers, “I have to ask you a question and it’s going to sound super weird, but I feel like you might know the answer. And it’s important that you understand that I don’t, OK?”

When they had first met, if Kara was particularly emotionally worked up about a topic of conversation, Darcy wore a confused expression while she tried to unpack the words Kara had said from an accent that was much thicker when she was emotional. She wore that same expression in response to this opening, and Kara, fearing that she might just be embarrassing herself, forged on before her nerve could fail.

“Have I been acting different lately?”

Darcy looked at her for a moment and just burst out laughing, and Kara felt affronted until, with a sinking feeling, she realised she’d been right. Something in that night where Monsieur Hofmann had caught her had left her changed.

“Uh. Yeah,” Darcy said, once she’d recovered. “We’ve been calling you the Stepford Student.”

Kara flushed. Far worse, somehow, that her odd behaviour had not only been noticed but had been discussed more widely.

“It’s weird, though,” Darcy said, “because for a couple days around when you stopped hanging out? We were both calling you a dumb bitch, and, sure, I was angry? But that’s not something I’d say about anyone I actually liked, and I do actually like you. At least, the bits of you I’ve seen.” She smiled. “And you’re not dumb. Far from it.”

Kara fell silent, thinking. Darcy worried she’d pushed things too far. “Hey,” she said. “I didn’t mean - uh - ah, screw it. Are you OK?”

Kara realised with a sinking feeling she didn’t know the answer to that question. “I have to talk to Mike,” she said.

*

Mike, unfortunately, did not want to be talked to, and with advance warning from Darcy reaching out to her, she took steps to avoid it. Day followed day and week followed week until the day of graduation itself.

A part of Kara had been glad, at first, to realise she’d been mentally manipulated by Monsieur Hofmann. She’d thought that knowing this would still that nagging sensation that something she didn’t know about was wrong.

She dressed in a beautiful gown, one suitable for dancing in as well as simply being seen, in flowing, shimmering green; it had only one shoulder and, at the rear, swept down to show the dimple just above her buttocks. At the side opposite the shoulder it slit open from mid-thigh down. The tights she wore beneath were a dark green, and the pea-green high heels she wore were tall enough that before deportment classes at Meillures Filles she would not have been able to walk properly in them.

At the chalet, of course, there was no woman who couldn’t move as easily in those heels as in their stocking feet - probably some who even found it easier.

Those graduating on the day were to be the guests of honour at the event; those yet to complete their course were simply in attendance. Unlike almost any graduation ceremony, families and loved ones had not been invited, though most of those at the chalet came from families with the money to have attended despite the travel.

Today, she and Mike would have to be stood or seated next to each other for a long time as part of the celebrations, at the end of which, Kara knew, there would be an auction. She didn’t have long to talk to her friend and restore the acquaintance they’d had.

But was it still worth doing, even?

They would soon be sold off to their men. All that worrying Kara had done, and Monsieur Hofmann had at least held up his end of his deal with his shadowy backer, with the supplier of the technology.

Kara secretly felt, of course, that she could have done better. She could imagine herself as the woman behind the man who designed the technology, the one working away to ensure he would succeed as he deserved to. It occurred to her, as she mused on this, that this was what had happened to her mother, and she hastily buried the thought, embarrassed.

Graduation was just after lunch, and if Kara had thought the last month had gone slowly, the morning seemed to take as long to pass as the month had before it. In spite of that, she couldn’t get close to Mike until they were stood in line with their fellow graduates - too public an arena for Kara to say even a quarter of what was on her mind.

She and the other graduates excused themselves from the lunch table just before coffee was poured and went through to the robing area, where Monsieur Hofmann helped each of them into their black ropes with the blue and white hood of Meillures Filles settled across their shoulders. Then, one by one, he handed each of them a slim band of metal shaped into a hollow oval, a thin line of metal visible on the interior, the remainder coated in a skin tone band of soft fabric.

To his credit, this was not a one-tone-match-all, such as the students had been taught was an embarrassing faux pas while dealing with guests of colour; each one had been individually matched to the graduate. “We took photos that have been taken over your time here,” Monsieur Hofmann assured them all, “and we used those to confirm the skin tone. These hoops are supposed to secure your mortar boards in place, they should be out of sight, but just in case a portion of them shows up in photos…”

Most of the graduates nodded. At first, Kara couldn’t believe that. This was so obviously part of a control system that she couldn’t believe the other women hadn’t noticed, even though they hadn’t noticed what the watch was doing to them.

She took her band happily and fitted it snugly into place around her head, eager as ever to help Monsieur Hofmann out with his scheme, then clipped her mortar board down to it.

She had expected to immediately lose track of her own awareness, but there wasn’t so much as a tingle in her head. Not until after Monsieur Hofmann’s interminable speech, until she had crossed the stage, received her diploma, and shook his hand, until the attendees had scattered to the four corners, their afternoon free to do as they wished.

Not until Monsieur Hofmann looked at his group of graduates, smiled, and said “Well, now.”

He pulled a slim remote control from his jacket and pressed a button, and Kara, like Mike and the others, felt their heads still, their faces slackening, their bodies stiffening to attention.

They stood as statues, gazing at whatever they’d been watching before their will was taken away, flesh robots with as little free will as the most basic computer program, a strange tingle filling their brain on a level with the hoop, all thought processes interrupted as they passed through the static.

Monsieur Hofmann pressed another button and they formed into an orderly line directly in front of him. Kara was third in line, staring directly at the back of Mike’s head. As curious as what little of her mind remained was about what was happening in front, she couldn’t decide to move her head and look. She couldn’t decide anything.

Clicks on the remote sent each of them to stand before Hofmann, then proceed past him in turn, maintaining the line. Only when Kara reached him did she find out what he was doing, and only by it being done to her; with one hand, he moved her graduation robe further open. With the other, taking advantage of her unnatural stillness, he ran a sharp blade under the shoulder of her gown, severing the fabric, and then another cut across from the slit up her thigh until he could pull her gown away and discard it.

She didn’t see what had happened to it, of course. Her attention was still locked elsewhere, but she could feel the material move against her body.

Two more quick cuts and her bra was discarded, too, and then another click of the remote sent her moving two steps forward. The mortar board and robe remained in place; her panties and her tights were still there, too. But to anyone who looked at her, her breasts and her bare belly were on clear display.

The six graduates marched in lockstep into another room, where a spotlight and a high quality webcam awaited. They moved from single file out into a line, all of them visible beside a raised auctioneer’s dais.