In a police precinct, nobody looks twice at a figure in uniform. Christina was actively wanted by Boston PD; her face was known to a number of officers and detectives, most especially her sister, but she hadn’t been in uniform for years and she’d never worked out of this building.

As worried as she was about it, this was more than enough camouflage to hide her as she moved through the crowd of officers, civilian staff, and, of course, actual civilians, guilty or innocent. It was strange how differently she viewed them all now. Before Master, there had been the blue brotherhood (much of it neither dressed in blue, nor brothers, but a brotherhood nonetheless), support teams, the guilty and the victims. She’d looked down on the last three; they were beneath her. How could it be otherwise if they needed her to protect them? If she could pluck them off the street for their crimes, their reputations, to make quota?

Now she still saw herself as above all four, but there was no sense that this was their fault. She was not above them by right; she was above them by the happy chance that Master had found her and taken away her will. A slave of the Master was obviously a more important person than anyone with will of their own (except for Master himself), but it didn’t make her better. She’d been chosen by chance.

When her sister Jillian finally fell to her Master, Jillian would be above her; she had been deliberately selected by Master to fulfil a role Christina no longer could. Posing as an officer for a few hours wasn’t at all the same as maintaining her cover long-term in order to begin the subversion of the police department.

But a few hours was more than enough to do the thing she had been programmed to do; to carry out the one overriding goal her Master had left her. And if she was lucky, Christina would be busy with her role long enough that she would be unable to give in to her weakness. Unable to succumb to the urge, the drive, to save her sister.

She hoped that Master’s additional brainwashing had restored her to a state of full submission, in which she would not waver. Would not regret. Would rejoice in Jillian’s slavery, not mourn. But she was weak - she knew this; it was how Master had broken her in the first place.

If her weakness led her to betray her Master she would be ashamed.

Her thoughts were torn from this turmoil when she noticed a suitable target just off her current path.

Any major organisation had a lot of computer security around its network. And almost any major organisation had one key vulnerability; people walking away from their desks without logging out. Boston PD was no exception.

Christina sat and began to carry out her programming.

*

Henson felt euphoric as she stumbled along the pavement in heels she was still not entirely used to. It wasn’t the stares she was collecting - although she was, to her satisfaction, receiving more attention than she had in over a decade, and the attention seemed to be much more positive.

Master had remade her into a slut, and in so doing he had given her a purpose when before she had simply been marking time, working with her husband to make money for a future they could never acknowledge was coming. They’d had no real goals. No aims. They’d just made their way through life without question or intent, and that aimlessness had dulled the spice of life.

But Master’s slut had a purpose, a goal, an intent. She was a tool, turned to her Master’s will, and that made her happy in a way life had failed to.

It was hard for Mrs Henson to understand why, if she’d been asked before Master, she would have considered herself and her husband successful, because they’d had nothing that mattered.

And now she’d travelled into Boston, once a destination for the occasional idle weekend, but now she was on a mission.

Master had given her a clear task, and she would obey. She had no other choice, and would have considered the idea that she might to be insane.

Overall, it was delightful.

It was hard to find her quarry in working order on the streets of Boston, but eventually she saw what she needed. She sidled up to the payphone, fed it some cash, and dialled a number her fingers knew which was locked away from her mind.

She waited, counting out the rings in her head, until the phone was answered.

“Jillian Stoppel,” she heard.

“Caffe Vittoria,” Mrs Henson answered. She waited again, listening, and heard an indrawn breath, then the call was ended. She nodded to herself, satisfied that she’d set the terms of their meeting correctly and that the suggestion had fired just as it should.

Hypnosis. Ugh.

Such a trivial thing, compared to the power of Master’s gaze. She’d been told that hypnosis could even be resisted, if you wanted to and were ready (and, of course, if there wasn’t a toxin in the target’s bloodstream to weaken their resolve.)

Of course, it wasn’t as if Mrs Henson had access to much else. She didn’t have the power of her Master. She only had what she’d been drilled to do. Techniques she neither understood nor consciously remembered.

But she would carry out her programming nonetheless.

*

Jillian’s morning had largely been spent looking at her resume and trying to work out which of the skills the Boston PD had helped her develop would be useful in work that wasn’t being a cop, slumming it as a security guard, or losing all her free time as a private detective.

She wasn’t keen on either of those routes; it wouldn’t just feel like a failure to make her career, but she knew it would look like one, too. She could deal with the first, but couldn’t abide the second.

No, leaving the department had to mean going somewhere nobody would think was anything other than snubbing them.

The decision to leave had been, however, so very freeing. She not only felt better for it, but the past couple of days had actually been brighter even while working. Everything was easier now she had, if not an exit plan, exit intent.

She was still a little bit irritated by the phone call. A random number she’d almost decided not to answer, but at the last moment she’d reached out and picked it up - idle curiosity could be a hell of a drug. And then a voice she hadn’t recognised just saying two words. Why someone would do that wasn’t really clear to her. It wasn’t exactly a typical wrong number.

Still, the Caffe Vittoria…

She didn’t go there often, but she’d enjoyed having a snack there a time or two, and she loved the coffee. So there was a legitimate temptation now she was thinking of the place.

By about one she’d decided that even though she’d had plans for lunch at home, they could wait; instead she’d get out for the day and enjoy a treat at Caffe Vittoria. Might not be the perfect midday meal, but she’d enjoy it, and she might as well make something positive of such a weird call.

She hurriedly changed out of the pajamas she’d been on course to spend her day in and headed out of the door.

It wasn’t a far enough walk to bother with transport, but she found herself dragging her feet. What should’ve been maybe fifteen minutes ended up taking the best part of half an hour, and it was nearly two when she arrived at the Caffe’s door.

She paused again just before pushing it open. The same lingering feeling of weirdness she’d had about the phone call had come back on the walk - so much for fresh air clearing her head - and if anything, it was worse than ever.

She scanned the streets, unable to shake the feeling she was somehow being watched, being manipulated. But aside from a woman working the far corner way earlier than you’d expect, nothing was out of the ordinary, and Jillian wasn’t in the mood to enforce the law off duty, obligations or not.

“A slice of limoncello cake and a Nutty Irishman to drink.” Having ordered, she took her seat and picked her phone out of her purse. Killing time until her treat - probably a bit early to be starting the alcohol, too, even just a shot in her coffee, but she felt like she needed to justify the trip to herself. A little indulgence was about the only reasonable argument for her to have come out here, so obviously it was what she’d chosen.

Twitter barely got the chance to distract her, though.

“Excuse me,” a woman said, “is this taken?” And she sat down across the tine black-and-white marble topped table from Jillian without asking.

Jillian was surprised - startled even - to recognise the daytime hooker from across the street. Looking at her face to face the woman was older than Jillian had expected, although her body barely betrayed it; the toned stomach revealed under the belly top showed a punishing fitness regime, and the way she carried herself said that workout was all about the way the body looked.

She probably spent more time in the gym than Jillian did, and Jillian had a minimum fitness standard to meet for the job. And speaking of the job - Jillian wouldn’t be a very good cop if she didn’t see a problem with that. As well as a problem with the fact someone had been hanging out on the street watching and waiting for her.

She frowned. “Alright. Start talking, and fast.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something fishy is going on, and I’m low on patience. You can explain or you can deal with what happens if you don’t.”

The suspicious hooker shrugged. She leaned out from where they sat against the wall and craned her head around, checking who might be paying them any attention; it would have been enough for Jillian to consider her suspicious if she hadn’t already passed judgement on the woman. But it didn’t seem like anyone else was paying attention, or that they’d started based on the woman’s actions.

She leaned in forward. “You’re a cop, right?” she asked, her voice hushed and low. Jillian sat back, her eyes darting across the bottle-blonde’s face, trying to read it. If she’d been followed here, that was one thing; if she’d been followed because she was a cop, and this woman wanted to make contact - well, maybe that was another.

“Suppose I am,” Jillian said. The hooker reached out and took the phone from her hand, set it down, and took her hand, holding in both of hers with a curious tension and urgency that didn’t make much sense to Jillian.

“If you are, I need to talk to you,” she said, and pulled Jillian’s hand a little closer to her, holding it one-handed around the wrist, keeping Jillian’s palm up and showing. “I’ve got vital information.”

Internally, Jillian wanted to scream. So dissatisfied was she with the job that she had less than no interest in doing the work outside her scheduled hours. But the woman’s eyes were locked on hers - it was somehow uncomfortable to look away - and Jillian saw no lie in them. This woman believed what she had to say, and thought she needed a cop urgently enough to approach one she evidently recognised out of hours.

Whatever else this was it wasn’t good.

*

Christina had fulfilled her programming. Five separate PCs in the precinct building had been loaded with the trojan, and she’d made it back out onto the street without being stopped. The last of her orders was complete as she started to walk away and, as always when she didn’t have direct orders or scheduled duties to obey, she felt a little light-headed.

In that moment, there was a sudden whirl of vertigo, a rush to her head. Christina felt like she was going to faint and, tripping over her own heel, she nearly fell.

It was Christina who tripped, but it was Sergeant Detective Christina who caught herself, threw out a foot just in time to prevent herself falling. The woman buried under the Thoughtsmith’s commands looked around, eyes wide, taking in the streets of the city she loved. The city she was sworn to protect and serve.

There was a dizzying strangeness in her head. This was Boston. This was her home. But she remembered she was now a fugitive, and it would take some time before she could recover her job. Only the fact it was known that mental control would eventually fade gave her a path back to her old life, and she wasn’t even thinking about that. Her thoughts were focused on her sister.

Who was, at this time, primed to go somewhere Thoughtsmith’s obedient little slut had summoned her. Somewhere Christina didn’t know.

She had to think about this logically. The two best options were to try and outguess their venue selection - which might work, she’d doubtless had her ideas picked for the process - but there was also a chance they’d deliberately pick somewhere they knew she wouldn’t have thought of.

She should have worked harder to top that stupid slave persona from confessing its weakness to the Thoughtsmith. If she’d just suppressed that urge, she’d probably be in charge of this right now - and there’d be a good chance she would still have broken free.

So that left the other option. Get to Jillian before she left the apartment. Get there in time to stop her and even if Jillian turned her in, it might be enough to keep her from this meet-up at the wrong time.

She set off at a run. The Boston street crowd might have been an impediment, but seeing a police officer running, people parted to let her through. Much more effective than trying to get a taxi through lunchtime traffic.

*

“There’s someone out there collecting women,” the hooker said. “He’s out to collect all of Boston, I think.” She was still holding Jillian’s hand, her fingers nervously twitching and shifting against her palm. Some kind of tic.

“Women like you?” Jillian asked, and the hooker gave her a strangely amused look. Jillian registered the idea that she’d said something truer than she’d intended, but she didn’t have enough time to think about it before the hooker’s thumb swiped firmly over her palm as if it was wiping out the patterns her fingertips were tracing.

“Women like me are at risk,” she said. “And that’s sort of why I came to talk to you.”

“Uh huh.”

“You’re a cop,” she said. “You’re supposed to stop people like that. Make them understand. Some people can’t be free.” That same strange swipe of the thumb punctuated each statement, and as the hooker’s eyes continued to burn into her, Jillian felt a strange tingle at the crown of her head. Something about the woman’s focus, her manner, what she was staying…

There was a lot coming in all at once, and it made Jillian feel somehow both special and small, important and insignificant, grounded and lost.

“You’re supposed to stop,” the woman repeated. “People like that, make them understand - some people can’t be free.” Again the strange pattern of swipes and circles, the overwhelming intensity, and the tingle through Jillian’s head was growing.

Stop.

People like that make them understand.

Some people can’t be free.

Jillian was falling away from where she sat, a strange sensation of out-of-body experience. The hooker was still talking, but Jillian wasn’t hearing.

She’d stopped listening.

She understood some people can’t be free.

And she was one of them.

She seemed somehow to be watching herself from outside, seeing her sit there, almost unmoving, eyes locked with the hooker, a numb, blank, tingly feeling so ever-present that thoughts were dulled into nothingness. She sensed rather than saw the waitress deliver her coffee and her cake, and a tiny voice from the part of her in freefall marvelled at how quick this had clearly all been.

She watched the hooker, with her free hand, fish three tens out of her top and lay them on the table. And she watched as she rose with the hooker and walked out, hand-in-hand.

Jillian wanted to scream, but she couldn’t. She wanted to panic, but she couldn’t.

And as they continued to walk, her awareness faded away…

*

For the second time in less than a week, Christina let herself into her sister’s apartment. She was aware that she was still pulling the kind of crap her erstwhile ‘Master’ had made her do, but there was no getting around it. Besides, she was about to change the program.

“Hello?” she called loudly.

Silence.

She disengaged the alarm and made her way into the apartment, treading cautiously. She had one hand down by her belt, near the holster with the sidearm taken from the cop she and Henson had mugged - which now felt like the second worst thing she’d done after setting up her sister - just in case. Every fibre of her was on high alert. Nothing about this situation felt right - and while her sister, across town, had seen something that felt wrong and lacked the context to sense the danger she was truly in, Christina knew full well what level of threat there was.

She just didn’t know the shape of it.

Her first indication came when she stepped into the living room and saw again the wall fixture that ran into the room for about a yard and a half; it rose to waist height, where it was capped with a wooden shelf. Jillian had used it for an indoor herb garden, a year or so ago, but it was empty now - except for the metal pole that rose from the wall to the ceiling.

Christina found her steps taking her toward it. She felt reasonable about this; the sensible thing to do would be to look beyond the wall and see if anyone was hiding there. Her hand stayed on the release flap of her pistol holster, just in case.

Looking over the wall she saw nobody there; despite her sigh of relief, she still sensed danger, and she turned, putting her back to the pole, looking out over the room and its doorways, wondering where the threat might be coming from.

As idly as if absent-minded, her hand slid from the pistol to the cuffs and unsnapped them from her belt. Her eyes were on the kitchen door as she clipped one of her wrists into the cuff, then reached behind herself, putting her arms behind the pillar, and snapped the other cuff into place until she was locked to it.

Only then did she realise what she’d been doing and how ridiculous it was; but now, too, she was locked into place, unable to get her hands to the belt pouch with the keys.

She suddenly realised that the Thoughtsmith had buried a couple of suggestions so deep that even her conscious self hadn’t been able to thwart them, hadn’t even hunted for them because she was so sure she’d broken free.

Shit.

Shit shit shit shit shit.

She tried tugging at the pole, hoping it wasn’t securely attached - but it held strong. So the obvious escape route wasn’t available either.

She heard the front door open - the one she’d left unlocked, unalarmed - and almost called out, but fear stopped her words in her throat. Who was it? What if it wasn’t Jillian?

Awkwardly she shuffled around the edge of the wall. She squatted to her knees, awkwardly leaning forward so her arms weren’t in pain between the cuffs and the pole, hoping her wrists alone wouldn’t give her away until she had a chance to assess the situation.

Whoever had entered the apartment closed the door behind them and made their way into the living room. Christina listened to their footsteps as they entered the room, chuckled, and immediately circled the wall.

Don’t look up. Don’t meet their eyes. Just in case.

The feet in front of her belonged to a man. With a sinking feeling Christina recognised the expensive leather loafers her erstwhile Master had treated himself to with some of the Henson money. And with her arms restrained and her weapons on her hips, not to mention the low, awkward posture she’d hidden in, she was at as complete a disadvantage as she could remember.

“You broke it, didn’t you?” asked the Thoughtsmith.

Christina bit her lip. Even as tears welled up in her eyes, she was determined not to give him the satisfaction of that kind of response.

He’d had this way, when she knelt before him, of reaching down, cupping her chin, and tilting her head up to meet his eyes. She was anticipating the same thing again, was preparing to bite down on his hand when it came in range, to get whatever petty little revenge she could.

But the gentle gesture, it turned out, was reserved for his enslaved sluts. He took a handful of her hair and pulled her head back with that, his eyes meeting hers. The pain had her eyes wide and that seemed to give him a better opening as she tumbled, falling forward into his senses, into his control, in almost no time. And then he looked away; it had been enough to tip her back into obedience, but not enough to return her to slavery. She still felt. Still thought.

“Open your mouth,” he said. She was compelled to obey, and she watched him reach out and pick up an item he’d set down on the wall, in readiness. Part of the plan she’d probably hatched with him before she seized control back. Part of her own humiliation.

The Thoughtsmith, she realised with sinking clarity, intended to break her mind completely this time. Still, her mouth stayed open as he fastened the gag in place; a soft pink rubber cylinder, an inch wide, with grooved ridges running along it, held in place by black leather.

She tried to protest, but all she could manage were muffled grunts and squeaks. The tears in her eyes began to escape, running down her face as she realised her defeat.

*

Jillian listened to the woman’s soft words as they walked arm in arm, all the way back to her apartment. She was vaguely aware it was her making the turns and guiding the route, that she was leading the woman, but it didn’t feel like it. She wasn’t even sure which of the words she was hearing her companion say and which were still echoing in her own head.

The two of them climbed the stairs to her apartment, but the hooker stopped her just before she could draw out her key to open it. Jillian thought that she heard more soft words, and her vision seemed to swim, everything unfocusing into glassy swirls of colour.

If she understood the colour right, though, the hooker had produced something deep blue from somewhere about her person. It billowed for a moment like a flag in the wind before it seemed to flow toward Jillian’s face. The soft words echoing through her head, she stood still and allowed the deep blue to envelop her vision, and as her senses returned, she realised there was now a blindfold around her head.

Without the sight of her surroundings to constantly reinforce what ‘upright’ might mean, she swayed gently on her feet. She felt adrift, lost, rudderless and utterly out of control - and try as she might, there was no protest echoing through her mind. It just felt so good to be so helpless, an idea which felt like her own thought but sounded like the other woman’s words.

The woman took her by the hand and led her forwards, and Jillian stumbled as she followed her lead. Being led was only right, was somehow what she had led the woman here for. Some people can’t be free. Jillian, as a policewoman, was one of them. She didn’t deserve freedom, or choice, or thought, and only a fleeting sorrow she hadn’t already found a new job stood in protest.

She had a suspicion she was in her apartment now, but unable to see where she was, her disjointed, disconnected way of thinking didn’t give her enough feedback to know.

She was vaguely aware of a distorted moaning, as if someone nearby were wordlessly giving in to despair.

*

The Thoughtsmith raised his hand, still holding Christina by her hair, and so Christina struggled from her squatting position back to upright. He drew her back around the pole so she would face the doorway into her sister’s living room.

She saw the front door open and recognised Mrs Henson walking in. With a sinking feeling she knew who’d be following her even before a chance movement showed her sister’s blindfolded face over the older woman’s shoulder.

She tried to shout, to scream, to make a loud enough noise that Jillian might be startled into running, but she knew how muffled it all was, and the gag was large enough to make most sounds difficult to achieve. She could already feel drool startling to collect and channel down the grooves in the block, and she shuddered to picture how that might look when her mind had it taken away…

Mrs Henson stopped a few paces in front of the Thoughtsmith and brought Jillian forward so she was standing just inches away from the controller.

The Thoughtsmith looked back to Christina and smiled. “You’ll always know you didn’t get to save her,” he said. “And you’ll always remember watching her succumb. But don’t worry too much - once I’m done with her, the last reason you had to fight is going to be burned away.”

He turned back to Mrs Henson and nodded. She removed the blindfold, and Christina screamed her muffled scream as she saw her sister’s glassy eyes meet the stare of the mind controller…