Their handler had insisted on returning in person this time, and he had Quinn in tow when he did. Her look had somewhat changed for this encounter; she sported a skirtsuit in forest green, with a high-buttoned khaki dress shirt underneath. Dark tights and businesslike black leather flats completed a look they’d never seen on her before; her hair, too, was scraped back into a tight ponytail, her face bore only the faintest traces of soft makeup.

She blended in with their handler perfectly, looking for all the world like a junior pencil-pusher in an Army back office somewhere.

Her focus word, domesticated, kept playing through Nick’s head as the two of them made themselves at home in his apartment for the meeting. This didn’t seem like a result he’d expected from it - the almost stereotype housewife mode he’d last seen her in had been much more what he expected - but evidently between Quinn’s own thought patterns and their handler’s contributions, she’d been pushed into a new mode he hadn’t at all expected.

He wanted to ask - actually, he wanted for the first time to test out their debug trigger, just to try to access the logic states and chains that had brought her to this point - but he was worried that would look like there was another question he didn’t have the answer to, and something, some instinct, told him - rightly or wrongly - that this was not the time to look anything but in full control of the project.

Quinn sat primly on the sofa beside the Colonel, producing a notepad and pen. She crossed her legs at the knee, opened the pad to a new page, and waited, her attention on the Colonel.

Nick forced his own attention away from her. It was, he decided, presenting her with an entirely different world to exist in that had allowed the Colonel to push her so much further. It had to be, surely.

“We have a problem,” the Colonel said, and Nick was jolted out of his brief technical ponderings, snapped back to the situation by the sudden dizzying vertigo of trouble. The Colonel’s tone was enough to tell him ‘a problem’ was, at least as far as the Army was concerned, an understatement.

“The sooner I know what it is,” he said, “the sooner I can solve it.” It was a gamble, as responses went; the answer might be to ask why he didn’t already know. Thankfully, the Colonel simply shrugged acknowledgement of the point.

“We implemented campus surveillance last week,” the Colonel said. Nick felt a chill run down his spine. Just how unprofessional might he have been on campus? “Relatively simple to do, too. Security staff here should probably be paid more if the college doesn’t want its people suborned.”

“Okay.” Nick relaxed slightly. Campus CCTV wasn’t exactly omnipresent, and more or less every student knew where not to stand if they were doing anything a fairly conservative Dean might have flagged as inappropriate. If that was all…

“Several of the experimental subjects have yet to show up on campus CCTV anywhere.”

Nick nodded slowly. Sure, you could hide pretty well from the cameras, but the idea that you might disappear for a week, not showing up anywhere, without something happening?

That was a lot less plausible. And now he - finally - came to think about it, some of the women they’d run tests on hadn’t been in contact for the best part of a month.

…He’d fucked up, hadn’t he?

*

Unity was having a pretty good day, so when Nick messaged her asking if she could join him for a drink that afternoon she was willing to agree.

In Unity’s experience, Nick was nowhere near so slick as he thought he was, and when he reached out for a one-to-one with Unity it usually meant he was having a spectacularly shitty day. She didn’t always choose to make herself available so he could cry on her shoulder - Nick had other friends, and the emotional labour of dealing with him got shared fairly well - but it had been a good day and she felt like giving back, so she made her way out to the bar with reasonably good cheer.

She almost turned back when, a few paces into the bar, she caught sight of him. He looked like he was going to be sick, not through illness or even really through emotion but through dwelling on the same horrible prospect for too long; the nausea of implacable logic.

She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to deal with that; all the same, it was a little late to leave and a little unfair to ghost him. Instead she made sure she had a stronger drink than she’d planned - much stronger than she’d usually drink in the afternoon.

She took it over to him and sat down opposite him. He’d ordered a beer, but by the level in the glass, hadn’t so much as started it.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

“Hm? Oh… about half an hour.”

So he’d ordered a drink, sat down, and not actually drank in that time. Didn’t have a phone out either. In other words he’d been sat staring into space.

“Let’s hear it,” she said, halfway between sympathy and irritation at herself; this had clearly not been the right time to say yes and now that she was thinking about it, she wasn’t at all sure why she had. “What’s happened?”

Nick looked up at her and slowly, wordlessly, shook his head. Unity tutted.

“I came out here,” she said. “We both knew what kind of conversation this was going to be. I’m not sure how unpleasant whatever this is has been for you, but unless you tell me what’s going on, there’s only so much I can do.”

He was nodding along with her, his eyes sheepishly elsewhere. Whatever this was he was embarrassed about it. Embarrassed enough that it was hard for him to admit. “You know what?” he said finally. “There’s plenty you can do without knowing. I thought I was going to try something else, but… no.”

She tilted her head and frowned. “Nick, there’s only so far that I’m-”

“Unity, are you subservient?”

She forgot what she’d been going to say, blinking rapidly several times, and smiled. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Is there anything I can do for you?” She met his eyes shyly. “Anything at all?”

“Plenty,” he said, “but I don’t know that you’ll enjoy the first bit.”

“I’m sure I will, sir. Should we leave?”

“Soon. But not together.” He gave her a lopsided smile, and just the fact she was helping someone so much greater than her made her feel wonderful. “Well… maybe later. If you’re good,” he amended.

“Yes, sir. First?”

“First I need you to demonstrate what a good PA you are…”

*

Unbeknownst to Nick or Unity, one of the bartenders had been watching Nick suspiciously since he arrived, and was currently wiping down the bartop for the fifth or sixth time in the hour to justify standing in position for a better view.

She reminded herself for the ninth time to stop clenching her jaw, and it was a profound relief as she deliberately, consciously did so, even knowing it would be clamped shut again before too much longer.

Victoria wasn’t a student, but she was frequently in and out of the campus psych department anyway. Tips weren’t all they could be in a student town, her hours were sometimes unpredictable, and the job itself was hell, but she didn’t have an escape plan she had any faith in yet. Any other money she could make was, therefore, welcome.

She wasn’t at all sure why she was so mad at the guy, but her budget had gone in the toilet this month, she’d missed a couple of shifts with no good reason, and in general it felt like she’d started being stupid about things she absolutely needed to handle smart. And there was nothing that made more sense to peg that turnaround to than the experiment that guy and his snotty little buddy had been running.

Watching the way the woman seemed to change mid-sentence gave her chills. The psych student interrupted her - she wasn’t close enough to hear with what - and it was like seeing an independent woman regress into something weaker and lesser in the space of heartbeats, and smile as she did it.

That, Victoria thought, wasn’t how someone angry took good news. Some level of anger and frustration always remained. In this case, in a single comment all that anger and frustration had been wiped away.

Like her personality had changed in an instant…

A chill ran down her spine. Now that comparison had presented itself, it sounded uncomfortably like what Victoria half-suspected had happened to her. Had she not always been like this?

She watched the two of them talk for a while, fighting the urge to steal closer and listen in. She ached to understand what had happened to her, what had happened to this other woman, but any action she could think of to find out felt too, too dangerous.

At length the woman got up and walked out, and the psych student stayed sitting there. Where his head and shoulders had been sunken in on himself, he was sitting upright now, and so far as she could see he was smiling; a small, nervous smile, far from the transformation the woman had undergone, but a smile all the same. He began to drink his beer at last.

Whatever had gone on between the two of them, he was a lot happier about it.

Disgruntled in ways she couldn’t properly explain, Victoria skulked back to the other end of the bar, where at least she felt safe from being noticed.

*

Unity walked the pathways of campus with a purpose she rarely felt in herself. She wasn’t an investigator, but she was, as she often put it, a “glorified PA” for Professor Montrose, who used his research assistants for research, attending faculty meetings, backup TAs, and much more. She’d spent a lot of time, in her last two years on campus, working out how to do a new job from first principles; but this wasn’t even like that.

Nick wanted her to find a number of women on campus. Honestly, this wasn’t that far from what she did for Montrose whenever he decided he needed to talk to another member of staff who was busy and didn’t want to be found; it was her job to run the other professor to ground, wherever they happened to have gone.

It was a little strange that all the women Nick was looking for had been at the experiment, but there you were; Nick sometimes wanted to follow a whim, and she could not pretend for a moment that she expected to understand him.

It wasn’t her place to understand him. Her place was to fulfil his wishes, whatever they were - and yes, she would privately admit that she would have preferred that he put her to use in a more traditional way, which would also have been her place to do - and just because that meant running to ground an eccentric list of women didn’t mean she should ask any questions, or allow anyone to find out this was on Nick’s behalf, or give away anything that Nick might want to keep private.

It certainly didn’t mean she had any right to complain - but confusingly, she found that she didn’t really want to complain, either.

This was…

This was fulfilling, in a way she didn’t understand, a way she didn’t need to understand.

Not that this made it much easier to find these people. Students and staff who’d just… vanished from campus, or who in a few cases she learned from their roommates had decided to hunker down in their accommodation and not attend anything. Unity couldn’t understand it, and she didn’t want to ask questions, but her duty here was to Nick, her duty was to do the best job she could, and so at the back of her mind, she kept note of anything she heard about or from these people, her mind sifting for patterns.

Some of them were just… missing.

For the most part, though, it wasn’t that they were missing, or not according to witnesses; it was just that their behaviour patterns weren’t as expected. Beatrice Wilson, for example, just hadn’t bothered to come onto campus for the past few weeks; she seemed to be completely ignoring her degree now, devoting herself to her new boyfriend.

And her boyfriend…

Her boyfriend was Nick’s friend Joey, a living example of how you might be able to pick your friends, but you couldn’t pick their friends. Joey was aggressively straight which meant that Nick didn’t have to deal with his worst traits regularly, unlike Unity and plenty of other women she knew, but he had plenty of other issues that had to be hell for anyone, male or female. Unity had wondered before now whether Nick had a hidden darkness that helped him mesh with Joey, or whether there was instead something better in Joey that she hadn’t seen, and that was how the two connected.

Was that the pattern that would help her find the others?

She worked down the list Nick had given her methodically. If this had been an assignment for Montrose, she would have gone further; having recognised that everyone on the list had been part of Nick and Joey’s experiment, alongside her, she would have written down every other name she recognised from that experiment and investigated them all, looking for common factors among the easier-to-find figures that might help her identify those who were harder to find.

But she didn’t want to do that here. A part of her found that both curious and frustrating; she wanted to do her very best for Nick even more than she did for Montrose. Doing well for Nick wasn’t just what she was paid to do; it was her duty, her natural role, her purpose. Doing well for Montrose was just doing more than her job required. It stood to reason she should want to do more for Nick than Montrose.

But she didn’t want to exceed the boundaries that Nick had set for her. The very idea made her slightly queasy.

She’d made her initial phone calls, visited the dorm rooms of several on the list who were based out of campus, spoken to a number of their friends, even spoken to some of them directly.

Turning to a few of the less accessible cases, she found a woman who neither studied nor worked on campus; who didn’t have an address registered with the college, for the simple reason that she neither studied nor worked there. So what information did she have?

She searched on social media and came up with a connection to a local bar.

The same bar that, earlier that day, she’d met Nick in.

She stared at this for a long moment before sighing audibly.

“For fuck’s sake,” she said as she got up and left the room.

*

The woman came back in, and she didn’t even go back to the psychologist. Instead, to Victoria’s mounting horror, she beelined for her.

“Victoria Symanski?”

She gave the woman a slow, very grudging nod, and was rewarded with a radiant smile, a beam that seemed out of all proportion to what was, after all, a fairly small confirmation.

“Though I’m not super happy hearing my surname here,” she said, and into the fact of the other woman’s confused look she said “I don’t tend to like it when the customers know my full name.”

That earned a nod of enlightenment and a sympathetic grimace. “Nobody will find out from me.”

“Not even your friend there?” She nodded in Nick’s direction, and realised only after seeing the delighted surprise on the other woman’s face that she hadn’t noticed his presence. Evidently she’d been the exclusive focus of the woman’s attention.

As cynical as her question had been, she didn’t expect the puzzled expression on the other woman’s face. “Oh, but I have to tell him,” she said. “That’s just the right thing to do.”

Alarm bells were ringing in Victoria’s mind. “Whatever it is you’re after, honestly, I think you should leave.”

“Oh, but I need to know why you haven’t been on campus lately.”

“The… college campus?”

“Right.”

“College where I’m not a student?” Whatever this was about, Victoria was having none of it. “Yeah, I need you to leave.”

“I can’t,” she said, and the sheer open honesty in her eyes as she said it was disturbing. “Not until I have an answer I can give him.”

“There’s no reason for me to come on - look.” Victoria took a deep breath. “Is this about his psych experiment?”

The other woman nodded, fractionally, and then her eyes widened. “I can’t say,” she answered.

“None of this is good.” She put down the cloth she’d been cleaning the bar with and moved across to the hatch. There wasn’t much custom in, but there were enough people that escorting someone out would provoke comment. On the other hand, it was clearly the only way she was getting rid of the woman. “And you’re leaving.”

She took her firmly by the arm and manoeuvred her out past a couple of empty tables, then swept her past one with a couple of young lovers. There was a chance, at least, that they wouldn’t notice.

Past them smoothly and headed toward the table with four students bent over binders. When she’d served them last they’d been muttering about a group project, and Victoria had worked that bar long enough to know that meant no matter how distracted they seemed, they’d turn their attention to literally anything if it gave them a few minutes where they didn’t have to think about their project.

She was bracing herself for a commotion when it came, but not from the source she’d anticipated.

“Excuse me!” the woman she was escorting out called, loudly. Victoria hadn’t expected this; usually they either went quietly or they were a noisy problem right the way along. The fact she’d started out quiet had led her to relax, somehow instinctively sensing the need.

Everyone’s attention was on them now. “Nothing to see here, folks,” she said, keeping her moving, but of course one of the people who was looking was the man who’d obviously sent her to do this. He was getting to his feet, and her problem customer had fallen silent again. There was an air of complacent certainty about her, as if she was sure, now, that everything was going to be exactly as she wanted it to be; a confidence that was downright eerie, somehow.

Victoria picked up the pace, drawing the other woman to the door much more quickly, but her eyes were on the psychologist, who had delved into his pocket and was fumbling with his phone. He started moving toward them. “Shit,” she muttered. “Come on. Out.”

At least she was letting herself be led along. It made it easier, even if it also worried Victoria that maybe she was expecting some perfect solution.

But, Victoria firmly reminded herself, that didn’t matter, because there was no such perfect solution. She wasn’t going to change her mind. Wasn’t going to give any answers.

She was shoving the woman out of the door when the psychologist caught up with her. “Excuse me,” he said, “are you adoring?”

She was about to snap back that the question was a dumb one and made no sense when the programming caught up with her brain.

She looked up at him with a startled, sudden, but deep adoration.

It was a word often misused. Downplayed. True adoration, as Victoria suddenly remembered, was a state very close to worship. It was…

…oh.

It was a state she’d spent a lot of time in. The psychologist’s loathsome little friend had visited her several times and she’d found herself worshipping him, doting on him, showering him with attention and pleasure and gifts.

Why hadn’t she remembered that?

With a start she realised the golden, perfect man standing beside her was waiting for an answer.

“Yes,” she said. “I am adoring.” Her voice seemed distant. Everything seemed distant. Every nerve on her skin was tingling with something halfway between exhilaration and pleasure. She wanted - oh, how she wanted - to show him her devotion, to do anything for him.

“We should have a chat,” he said. “Let go of my friend, please.”

“Oh!” Victoria blushed. “Of course.” The other woman’s arm fell from suddenly nerveless fingers. “I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well. Let’s - do you have a back office?”

“Of course. Only employees are allowed in, though.”

He smiled and her heart swelled. “Oh, you’ll make an exception for us.”

*

Quinn was giving him a very skeptical look, but Nick forged on as best he could. “We’ve already located most of them,” he said. “We have a couple of outliers and I’m working on securing them now, but we know where the others are and I’m confident we’ll be able to bring them in for the second appointment.

“Once they’re there, we can reinforce and cement suggestions.” He cleared his throat. “It’s, ah, it’s quite important that you attend as well, you know,” he said.

Did she really just roll her eyes at him? Was her own personality starting to imprint itself in the imprint?

He really wished he could find out without provoking their handler’s wrath.