Kara unfolded the bulky laptop and started booting it up, setting her pen drive down beside it. Briskly she stripped out of her night mission garb and folded it away into her luggage, where she expected it wouldn’t be discovered unless already had reason to be suspicious of her.

She ran the virtual machine program before plugging the drive in, just in case there was some kind of tracker malware she might have picked up, and while the drive was being scanned she stepped away again, pausing in front of the room’s large mirror where she stood, in only her bra and panties, and looked critically at her reflection.

She walked a fine tightrope as she worked, and she was very aware of it; she had to be fit enough to climb, run, or fight if needed. She needed to look like she was foolish aristocracy, which meant perfecting an innocent look. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but for a woman to pack on muscle made that unreachable.

Kara Kraft knew that she turned heads, just as her mother always had. She was, if not beautiful, striking; her figure was trim rather than athletic, disguising the capacity for danger she carried within her. It was only to be expected that she would attract attention. It wasn’t always positive.

The scan, she knew, took a while longer. She took a quick shower. By the time she sat down in front of the laptop, wrapped up in the hotel bathrobe, her hair tied up atop her head in a towel, she was feeling much better.

Opening up the drive directory, she started looking over its layout carefully. The chances were that it was going to take extensive research and digging around before she figured out what was going on. She might need to take a break to rest while she was working on it.

Not for the first time, she wished she had a computers expert she could trust. Someone she could just upload this to and go follow up on another lead while they worked on it. The fact she didn’t currently have any other leads didn’t help with that.

None of the folder names jumped out as relevant, and so procrastination won out. She ordered room service, a snack and a large pot of fresh coffee, and ate it before proceeding. When she sat back down at the computer, she opened one of the folders at random, then the first document in the folder, then began reading.

Five minutes later she was frowning thoughtfully, wondering if her assumptions about the contents could possibly be right.

*

Jillian was in the squadroom, smiling her way through another night shift, when she felt a vibration against one buttock. That meant a private phone was ringing, one she had to keep hidden but also tight enough against her skin that she would always know if it rang.

She pushed off from the desk she was leaning against. “Back in a second,” she told her sergeant, interrupting his train of thought. She headed for the bathrooms, knowing he’d put two and two together, come up with five, and end up too embarrassed to actually address it with her.

As soon as she was out of sight she changed course, going up a flight of stairs before stepping into the elevator and making her way to the roof.

Once she was on the roof - not monitored by cameras, usually empty - she delved into her panties to extract her phone. It had long since stopped vibrating, but its job had been done in any case. It had alerted her that her Master had new orders. The responsibility and compulsion were then on her to seek out these orders so she could in turn feel a responsibility and compulsion to follow them.

And all because she had locked eyes with her Master, which had allowed him to seal the obedience her sister had hypnotically primed in her. Her sister, now her fellow slave. Her betrayer and her baptist.

Jillian tried not to think about that much. If she didn’t think about the way she had become a slave, she was quite content; every time she acted on compulsion and carried out an order, the rush of euphoria was like nothing she’d dealt with before, and she had reliably been able to carry them out, so she had avoided her Master’s intermittent cruel streak.

All the same, the fact was she had been under his control now for almost four years. Her Master wanted her at work as much as possible - there were others in the squadroom who would chaff her for how little PTO she used - in case he wanted something from a Boston PD cop, and he wanted as little contact with her as possible to minimise the risk that she would be identified and her value be gone. Even so, every five months he summoned her out of town so he could look into her eyes again and refresh his control over her, usually with his cock filling her mouth as his words filled her mind..

If he wasn’t able to do so, she would have been free for almost three and a half years. Instead, because her sister had failed to keep the Master captive even longer ago, she had lost four years of her life to their Master. She had stayed in a role she had been determined to retire from. Was still there. Still dealing with suspicion and dissension and the sinking feeling that she had entered a career she did not suit.

She could suppress all that, most of the time, and think only of how good she felt and how happy she was. She just couldn’t do so while thinking about her sister.

Looking down on the streets directly in front of her precinct house, she dialled a number from memory. It wasn’t stored in the phone, was better protected than that.

It rang only three times before it was answered. Another woman’s voice said simply “Identify.”

“Jillian,” Jillian answered.

“One moment.” She could picture the other woman’s fingers tapping at the screen of a device. Cuing up a voice note. And then her Master’s voice spoke to her in recording.

“Someone gained access to the Hendricks clinic. A woman. Find out who, and figure out how to bring they and I together.”

“Yes, Master,” she answered compulsively. She ended the call and tucked the phone away where it would not be suspected once more, then made her way back downstairs. She would complete the conversation with her sergeant, so he had no reason to suspect, and she plan how best to go about her Master’s business.

She did not envy her fellow police their free will. They only misused it. In her experience, almost everyone did.

*

Kara’s coffee had gone cold still in the mug. It was late enough at night that it was almost morning again, and she hadn’t slept yet. She was still reading, and at this point, it wasn’t even because she needed clues to figure out what was happening.

She knew what was happening. She knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it. She didn’t know who they were - well, Dr Hendricks was clearly one of them, but equally it seemed very unlikely she had any choice in the matter; the real names she wanted were of those pulling the strings.

But while she was already sure the rest of Hendricks’ reports wouldn’t give that away - she had been careful in what she had written down - the results of her work held an eerie fascination for Kara.

It was widely known, within the field of people who had reason to care, that mental control and other manipulations lapsed at around the six month mark, unless it was reinforced during that time.

It was looking a lot like Dr Hendricks had spent the past two and a half years trying to identify something that would extend that mark or, failing that, something that would ensure the victims’ recollections of their time under control would be vague or completely lost. Dozens of different things had been tried, a couple of them even things Kara vaguely recognised; just reading the series of mantra tests had Slaves of the Serpent, Warriors for His Will echoing through her head again.

So far, there had been no successes, although Hendricks noted that some techniques seemed ‘less susceptible to overthrow by subject agency under stress’.

Reading that sentence gave Kara a chill down her spine. She had escaped both the machinations of her finishing school principal and the control of the Serpent when a spike of stress had combined with her own determination to rebel against control and allowed her to free herself; she had also encountered the stress of failure to fulfil an order when she had been purified into Concubine Delta in the Court of the Secret Queen, and that had been enough to help her break free even though she had not felt any other reason to rebel.

The Secret Queen’s control had been so tender and gentle that even looking back on it, Kara didn’t regret having fallen to her, she only regretted the time lost from her hunt for Doctor Bimbeau, but even there, the idea that the loss of control could be permanent…

To Kara that was a chill that extended beyond the horror of being controlled and misused. Until that moment she didn’t realise how deeply she’d always taken for granted the ability to come back from it. Even when they could renew control, you could always hope for a failure, a battery dying or a fuse burning out, a break in the supply of psychedelics, a jolting moment giving you the power to push through.

Suddenly she realised why there was a part of her who wanted the limit to be in place, who needed it. Because after all, her mother was under the spell of another. If she couldn’t be won back, then she was lost to Kara forever - how else could they possibly reconcile?

She frowned deeply. Whatever else was going on with these experiments, she decided, whoever was behind them, they couldn’t be allowed to reach a successful conclusion.

Kara rose from her seat decisively, determined to do something about it, but almost immediately she felt herself dizzy. Raising her head to her forehead, she worried for a moment before realising just how late it had been allowed to get.

She was exhausted. She laughed, not at the realisation, but at the worry that had preceded it, compared with her understanding.

Tactically it might be good sense to move immediately, while the guard she’d skirmished with and whatever the organisation behind it was would still be catching up and assessing what she might or might not know. But strategically, one had to consider the bigger picture.

A significant part of the bigger picture was that when tired, people made significant mistakes. She didn’t want to be doing that. Reluctantly, she staggered across to the bed, crawled under the covers, and almost immediately slipped into a deep sleep.

*

As urgently as Kara wanted to bring down the intelligence behind the experiments, Jillian wanted to obey his command to bring the intruder to him. All the same, after she had spoken to Ellie Masters and heard her account of the break-in, she deferred her visit to the clinic until Dr Hendricks was there, on the basis that acting with urgency was usually less effective than acting intelligently, and if she waited, she would be able to ask questions of Dr Hendricks, too. On her own, an immediate visit would be far less effective without the option to share information.

Dr Hendricks showed a concern over the break-in which Jillian was sure was absolutely genuine, and didn’t volunteer any comments about people hanging around watching the office or anyone who’d confronted her elsewhere beforehand. That suggested they’d selected their target some other way, and that they might well be new in town. It ruled out a few other options.

Well, it didn’t actually rule them out - as Dr Hendricks herself pointed out when Jillian let her in on what she was thinking, Hendricks could be programmed not to remember any of this if someone had got to her first. Jillian mentally filed that note as a cautionary cross-check, but felt a little more confident that Hendricks was still on the Master’s side simply because she’d offered the correction instinctively.

The clinic had been outfitted with various security gadgets, including cameras, but these had been of no use against the intruder. Jillian wasn’t surprised; a professional would check for these, might have simple ways to neutralise them or employ complex tricks, or if nothing else might simply work to stay out of view of the cameras.

A professional would do that. An amateur would not have avoided Ellie. Avoiding the camera had been a minimum standard; avoiding the silent alarm marked the intruder out as more savvy than most.

Reviewing the footage at the secretary’s terminal, Jillian caught only fleeting glimpses of the intruder - a fight in near-darkness meant avoiding cameras was harder, especially the hidden ones, but it didn’t lend itself to clear images. She was left with impressions; powerful shoulders, muscular arms, a half-second glimpse of a strong profile, long hair tied back in a ponytail, either red or brown to judge by the half-hearted attempt at colour on the screen.

Jillian had made it her business (because it was her Master’s business) to be as aware as she could of anyone in Boston who might turn costumed, whether villain or vigilante. She frequented several different gyms across each week, switching which days she went where according to no schedule (the better to ensure nobody else’s pattern evaded her), kept an ear out for any external law enforcement coming into town, tried to keep up with private investigators and the like.

Boston was a big enough city to make that impossible, over six hundred thousand people being too many for one individual to track even the potentials, but all the same, the impression she had didn’t match against anyone she’d dealt with.

On balance, therefore, she decided that the intruder wasn’t local, and she felt pretty confident they weren’t federal either; partly because she would have expected to hear at least some rumours through the precinct when a fed on an unusual investigation blew into town, partly because they weren’t acting federal at all.

Accordingly Jillian started working the hotels.

Front desk agents respect the privacy of their customers, most of the time; Jillian already knew that a warrant might be needed if she was going to try and get information out of them.

Happily, every hotel also had a large collection of underpaid employees, all of whom would be happy to make a quick buck or two if they could get it without jeopardising their steady paycheque. Jillian just started there, gaining access to them away from surveillance by their supervisors by the simple expedient of checking the backs of each hotel, where anyone on a smoke break would gradually congregate.

She started with the high-end hotels, on the back of a decision she would have described as a coinflip but which was actually driven by instinct and unconscious analysis of the little crumbs gleaned through reviewing the footage. Something in what she’d seen of the intruder had said ‘rich’ to Jillian’s practised assessment, on a deep-down level she wasn’t even aware of.

The staff certainly wouldn’t know if any of their guests had gone out to one of the cheaper parts of town and broken into a psychiatric clinic. On the other hand, a woman like the one Jillian had glimpsed would be noticed. Anyone who came in yesterday and stayed out late who looked like her was someone Jillian should know about.

In theory, most cops loved investigative work. In practice, whoever seemed like the most obvious candidate was usually as far as they got. While Jillian sympathised with that position normally, it wouldn’t do when carrying out work for the Master. ‘They’re probably guilty of something’ just didn’t measure up when you were compelled to find the specific person responsible.

Where she could, she bought the names of anyone on her list. Something else she couldn’t do as a cop, but the Master had recognised that sometimes bribes were necessary, when you didn’t have his power.

Her next step was to Google the names. It was her experience that people with unusual skill sets left a footprint on the internet.

Jillian soon had a priority suspect.

*

The good thing about knowing your investigation subject was at work, Kara reflected, was that it made breaking into their home a much less nervewracking experience.

Doctor Hendricks had moved to Boston a couple of years earlier, according to the internet. She and her husband had taken an apartment of a suitable size for a family, Kara saw when she scouted the address. There was surprisingly little on their previous history, but her children had been enrolled in a school in the Seattle area, so Kara was working on the assumption they’d moved across country.

There were three possible reasons she was entertaining for that. First was that she’d somehow been headhunted by the Boston mind controller. Second said she or her husband had had a career opportunity here, one attractive enough to uproot her family entirely.

The last was that it had been part of a last ditch attempt by husband and wife to keep their marriage stable, but the divorce had followed so closely after the move - less than two months - that she thought that was least likely.

Instead she was betting on the controller having found her after she moved, then forcing through a divorce and estrangement from her children, the better to have total access to Hendricks, to push her further along this plan. Or possibly just because the controller could, she reflected.

In any event it meant, when she spliced the alarm out of the circuit and picked the lock, there should be nobody in the apartment. She made a quick circuit first, having a brief moment of concern when she heard a noise and caught motion out of the corner of her eye at once.

It turned out to be a roomba. Breath caught in her throat in a silent chuckle, the tension easing out of her. It was midafternoon; she could safely expect another two hours before Hendricks even left her practice, with probably another hour before she got back.

She went systematically to work, checking anywhere she could plausibly believe somebody would hide something important. Each book on the shelf was opened, gripped by one cover, and shaken out before replacing; a few of them yielded up scraps of paper or card that had been pressed into service as bookmarks.

She checked under every shelf, in and under and behind every drawer. Some places were perfect to hide a thumb drive, just as soon as you taped it up, and she aimed to be thorough.

It took about three quarters of an hour before she found it. A slim manila envelope that had been glued to the ceiling of a wardrobe, nicely out of the way. She pulled it loose and sat cross-legged on the bed to open and read it.

“C.A.L.I.B.R.E.,” she breathed aloud. “Shit.”

C.A.L.I.B.R.E. was one of America’s newer intelligence agencies, formed when the rapid growth in numbers of superhumanity shortly prior to WWII had become a cause for concern. She didn’t know much more about it than that, in much the same way she didn’t know too much about the FBI or the CIA. Unless you ran into them on a regular basis, you probably only knew what they were responsible for, and not how they did it or who oversaw them. Kara had encountered a C.A.L.I.B.R.E. agent once before, when the two of them had been aligned in their investigation.

Seeing that Hendricks had been involved with them in some way brought the risks of this investigation immediately into much sharper focus.

The documents themselves were legal; they dealt with the occasion of Doctor Hendricks leaving the organisation, and acknowledged that she maintained her security clearance (Kara had no idea how minor or extensive it might be) but that her obligation to secrecy remained in place, that both were to continue until and unless notice was served by the agency Director at the time. The end of her C.A.L.I.B.R.E. career came shortly before she’d moved cross country.

After a moment of silent contemplation, Kara added a fourth possible explanation for the move; running away from something.

“What happened there?” she asked herself, looking at the ID card clipped to the paperwork, the picture of Hendricks perhaps six years old now. “What did you see?”

Because she couldn’t have been an agent. That didn’t fit with her education and training at all. The only plausible explanation was that Hendricks had worked with agents. Boston had not been the first time she’d been in business dealing with the possibility of mental manipulation.

She was a deprogrammer, and her talents were currently being twisted to make her instead into a reprogrammer.

A deprogrammer might hear about terrible things, she thought. Might encounter agents who’d been given, and obeyed, terrible orders.

Now Hendricks was trying to make deprogramming impossible. To prevent people from breaking free under their own will, when faced with something they felt strongly enough about.

Hendricks was failing to fight that.

…Hunh.

Had Doctor Hendricks come to Boston before, to be part of untangling the Anointed? Was that how she’d been found?

They had seemed so sure that the Anointed were all accounted for, but as Kara had already seen, a mind controller who wants to slip away from the clutches of law enforcement has several options. Even if the effect of the suggestion would wear off after six months, a half a year’s head start is enough time to muddy a trail and settle somewhere out of sight.

It certainly explained why she’d been offered the role here, and might explain why she’d taken it.

Kara rose again and reattached the envelope to her hiding place, then left the apartment, walking as if it were perfectly reasonable she was there. She’d hidden her traces, not perfectly, but she hoped it would be enough that nobody checked the footage immediately. So much of her working camouflage was based on the idea of being in and out fast, before anyone could realise who she was, why she was there, and respond.

*

The woman had been responsible for bringing down multiple people with mind control capabilities, according to a flashy writeup Jillian found on the Forbes website. Quite why Forbes had profiled this Kara Kraft, Jillian had initially been unclear about, but it turned out she’d inherited a fortune and had managed to increase it through speculation in between these outings (and, Jillian speculated privately, several others that hadn’t come up - her timeline didn’t make sense, a bunch of strange absences). There was some kind of investment fund involved, one her father had set up and which she now managed.

The single photo accompanying the story also matched Jillian’s impression of the glimpses she’d seen on security camera. Not exactly confirmation - the CCTV footage was blurred, dark, and partial - but Jillian was confident that this was going to be her first target.

She shed her uniform in favour of the nicest, most expensive clothes she owned - a little tight now; she hadn’t spent money on luxuries since coming under the Master’s control, but she had filled out a little more since, as the Master was known to enjoy curves on a woman. She got to serve him only rarely, but pleasing him was still a top priority.

Then she packed a clutch and headed over to the hotel, where she sat in the lobby on her phone and waited to see that red hair walk through the front door. It seemed to her a sucker’s bet that little miss Kraft would be out and about. Finding her in the city would involve a lot of guesswork, doing it without being noticed maybe more, Instead, she could just wait for her to come back, and hopefully get it sorted before her next shift began.

Kara Kraft walked into the lobby at about half past four that afternoon and breezed across to reception. As she did, Jillian rose languidly and made her way over to the elevators, tapping the button to call one.

She stepped into its opening doors a moment before Kara Kraft did, buying herself apparent innocence at the cost of being clearly seen. Her thumb picked out the top floor; Kara dialled for one a couple of floors below. Jillian wished she knew what room number Ms Kraft was staying in. If she had, it would be so much simpler to solve the problem in the elevator…

The doors opened and Kara got out. Jillian waited until the doors had started to close and stepped out, creating enough of a gap between them that she wouldn’t immediately be noticed.

She headed toward the other woman on tiptoes, opening her clutch and pulling the injector out as she went. As she saw Kara slow near a door, she picked up speed.

The injector phunked into Kara’s upper forearm as she produced her keycard. Sensing contact, the system fired. The Kraft woman was already pivoting on one foot, leaning her upper body away from Jillian and bringing her foot up in a graceful high kick; Jillian caught it on her forearm, the impact rattling up and down her arm, her clutch spilling from her grasp.

If Kara Kraft saw the two rolls of duct tape that fell out of the clutch, it didn’t faze her. She followed up her kick with a short jab of a punch to the side which doubled Jillian over, but didn’t have the amount of impact behind it that Jillian would have expected based on the kick. The next punch, Jillian blocked with an arm, and it barely stung at all.

Jillian was just fighting defensively, and counting in her head. She feinted forward, which Kara answered with a lifting knee, but Jillian was able to twist clear. At that moment, she’d reached the count of five.

On the count of six, when Kara’s foot touched the floor again, she stumbled unsteadily. Jillian exulted. She fielded another punch on seven, jumped back from another kick on nine, lunged forward on ten, and caught her opponent’s body as it crumpled into unconsciousness on eleven.

Kara Kraft was duly lowered to the ground. Jillian unlocked her room with the keycard, scooped everything back into her clutch, and dragged the unconscious adventuress inside, privately thanking the Master’s insistence she maintain higher standards of fitness for her ability to manage the taller, more muscular woman’s weight.

*

Whatever space she was in, Kara thought, it was noisy, dark, and cramped. Her wrists were crossed over behind her back, and an attempt to move them suggested they’d been taped together; her ankles were also together, and similarly would not part. But either of those testing movements ran into many other limitations. She had been folded into an awkward, tiny space barely wide enough for her own shoulders and hips.

She was jolting regularly. She assumed that whatever she was in was being taken somewhere.

She cursed herself bitterly. She wasn’t at all sure how she’d been found, but she had, and she hadn’t been ready.

The jolting stopped. She lay still for a while. Moments later, she was hauled upright or, rather, whatever she was in was. Then she started to move again, this time swinging as she did, without the blunted, distorted sound of engines.

It came to her clearly. She was in a suitcase. Probably her own. After she was knocked out she’d been bound, efficiently gagged, and shoved into her own suitcase.

Her cheeks burned with embarrassment. Her soul burned with anger.

A series of jolting lifts presumably brought her upstairs, before she was laid on her side and the sound of a zipper opening, accompanied by light that blinded her after her time in the darkness, proved her own dedication.

“Haul her upright,” a man said. “She must look into my eyes.”

“Yes, Master,” three women’s voices chorused.

Internally, Kara swore blue.