Miranda’s first thought was dawn, but it wasn’t a natural light on her skin. She remembered the bedside table, the fringed lampshade, the chain pull. Above it the room’s blue ceiling was stained with red. Everywhere beyond was dark. Cassie’s bedroom. She was lying in Cassie’s bed, loosely covered. She was naked.

She felt zero inclination to get up, or even move her head. She let her eyes adjust to the dimness. She was in Cassie’s bed. There was a voice coming from the foot of it, low, urgent. She seemed to have been hearing it for a while. She could make out “momma” and “please” and sluggishly the idea formed in Miranda’s head that it was Beedee, that Beedee was calling for her.

What she couldn’t make out was how her daughter had come to be there.

It took an effort of concentration for Miranda to position herself so she could look. When she succeeded she found herself confronted with two Beedees. One cowered on the floor beside the bed and the other was atop it, kneeling. The one on the bed had Cassie’s retro-trash party dress on, zipped down halfway below her navel. She loomed over the other girl, bending forward to let the zipper pull dangle in her eyeline, the big ring gleaming dully red while she played it back and forth on her finger.

Beedee was the one on the floor. A small piece of the world slid back into place. At first glance she looked naked: she had her own slut dress on, Miranda saw, but it had slid off her shoulders and up her hips and she was basically wearing it as a belt. Cassie dandled the ring at her and kept up a soft, monotonous, indistinct patter. Both Beedee’s hands were folded into her crotch and her hips were working. She stared at the ring and swayed slightly with its movement and even in the bad light Miranda could see the lost, hungry look that had entered the girl’s eyes.

Cassie was a hypnotist. That seemed—unexpected, somehow. Something else that didn’t track.

Miranda tried her voice. Beedee came out in a weak, barely audible croak.

Cassie pivoted her head at the sound, slowly, a voracious grin spreading on her face. Forgetting the other girl, she shifted her body toward Miranda and came forward knee-walking, silent. Her hand never stopped toying with the ring. Miranda pressed herself back into the bed. She felt half-caught already, and wondered where she would find the strength to avert her gaze and break this weird spell she was under.

There was a loud laugh from somewhere, and the overhead light snapped on. The sudden, dazzling exposure came over her like a vertigo. Miranda felt herself surrender and fall.

Miranda blinked. She was immediately aware that she felt, not just calm, but calm. It was a sort of enforced placidity she recognized at once as a mark of trance.

She was sitting upright on the bed. The two girls were tangled together on the floor over in the far corner, humping each other’s legs. She had no reaction to the sight. Renate sat opposite them beside Cassie’s vanity, astraddle the room’s one chair. She smiled at Miranda.

“There we are,” she said encouragingly.

“Did you enjoy my little playlet? You should have seen the look on your face, though!” Renate chuckled. “Like you’d been found sneaking out of the house.

“Really though, Miri, that business of the dresses? So clever. Such a cute way to introduce them to each other. At least, I assume that’s what tonight was about.” She waved a hand dismissively. “No doubt you had something much less camp in mind, but it just came to me, you know: hypnodress! I couldn’t resist.

“I do apologize about the triggering though, before Beedee and I got here. Very undignified for you. Also that chicanery with the phone battery. I had to precaution myself in case you bolted! Whi-ich, after all, —“ She made a face, shrugging. “Don’t be annoyed with me.”

That was Renate teasing. Annoyance wasn’t possible for Miranda just now.

There was a pause, and Miranda was reminded how searching her old mentor’s gaze could be. She was without impetus to speak. At last Renate said, in a lower voice, “You have questions. Ask.”

How did you know?

“About the cheerleader, whatever she is? Your bit of fluff there? Ah, but darling, I didn’t!” Renate took up a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the vanity table. She drew one and lit up.

“You are a very diligent spy against yourself, my dear. One of your sterling qualities. You informed me more than once these last few weeks there was this dance coming up. Such a banal thing to want to bring repeatedly to my attention! Yet I could never quite get at what it meant to you.” Renate snapped her fingers in the direction of the girls. “I thought, she’s dodging something. She has something to tell me about this that she doesn’t want to tell me. So I came round early to have a look.”

Beedee detached herself and began crawling head down toward Renate. Cassie mewled a weak protest then started humping her own wrist. Beedee’s dress, such as it was, started off in a band at the top of her thighs and by the time she reached the chair it was looped around her ankles, where it stayed while she knelt at Renate’s feet. She was too mindless to think to shake it off.

Another space opened for Miranda to speak.

I thought I was free. She really had thought that. It was strange that she had. Miranda said it the way you mention some odd detail recalled from a dream.

“And were you not?” There was an asperity in Renate’s tone. “Free at least of any knowledge that you were bound. What better freedom could you have?” She took a leisurely drag of the cigarette. “Not to mention how entirely I left you off leash! Until this last little bit at least.

“No, Miri, I kept my promise. Quite strictly. I never told you I was making it permanent. It’s not that time for us yet.”

Renate poised her cigarette downward, with its long tip of ash, and in the same gesture Beedee rose off her heels, opened her mouth wide and exposed her tongue. She waited till Renate had withdrawn the cigarette again then carefully closed her mouth around the deposit and swallowed, eyes shut, aglow with devotion like a postulant accepting the sacrament.

Renate stroked the girl’s hair. “What an exquisite ashtray our little Beedee makes! Who would use another?” She nodded at Miranda, “Well done you.”

Beedee sank back onto her heels. Even in the flatness of trance, Miranda could feel an undertow of something like jealousy. The way that she flowed with Renate’s command. The self-abandonment. In one night—not even—the girl had surrendered more to Renate, more fully and more gracefully, than she had in a year of Miranda’s painstaking indoctrination.

“I mean it unironically, darling: well done.” Renate took another drag. “Diligent, inventive, at scale—I want you to appreciate your work here, when you can think a little better. It’s quite a big step in your evolution.”

She reached over to pick up the cigarette lighter and began fidgeting with it on her thigh. “But then you get yourself a crush. Go all swoony. You think: what a pretty dolly I have! And the little top in your head starts spinning, you start to daydream about dressing her up and showing her off, and showing off what you can do with her, and of course you don’t just daydream, do you? and before too long“—she paused while her eyes traversed the room— “we reach the point of absurdity.

“I give you the infatuation, darling, and mazel tov. Though this one I admit I really can’t see. But we must take care against you going off the rails. There is no room in this sort of life to make mistakes.”

The space that opened now was deep, and too wide to see across. There was only one question left to ask. Miranda tried and failed not to know what it was.

What happens to her?

Her voice almost broke saying it. Renate’s face darkened. She held the lighter up and mimed inspecting it. “I should say that was much more a Miri question than a Renate question, wouldn’t you dear?” The lighter went back to its place on the vanity, and Renate looked Miranda in the eye once more.

“After all, you were the one trying to abscond with the slut.”

A patch of Renate’s dark hair flamed in the sunlight, almost purple, and Miranda found herself staring up at it. It was a morning light, issuing from the window over the small bed. She was on her knees. She’d been that way for a while. The night had passed and she hadn’t noticed.

“Rise and shine,” Renate said in a quiet, ironic voice. There was something almost rueful about her.

Miranda’s gaze went to Beedee, kneeling on the other side of Renate. She had her party dress on, though it looked limp and out of place. She knelt as if she was suspended from the ceiling. Miranda remembered telling the girl not to wear it. She remembered her crawling naked on the bedroom floor with it bunching up between her knees.

Over Beedee’s shoulder the far corner of the room was empty. Miranda wasn’t sure what she’d expected to see there.

“I packed the wench off downstairs.” Renate’s expression was sour. “It knows how to cook breakfast, seemingly. I suppose we’ll find out. Anyway I’m famished.”

She saw an image of sheets tangled in the moonlight around a girl’s thigh.

“So!” Renate straightened in her seat. “Let’s stuff our fat faces with bacon, US style.” Her put-on American accent was hideous. She reached behind her to draw a cigarette. “And then maybe we’ll go take a look at this safe house.”

It felt like all that was holding her up was weariness. If she tried to move her whole body would crumble. She had a sudden sharp memory of the slave whore of Reen’s that she’d been plotting to steal.

Renate was watching intently. “And suppose you had hidden her away from me, what then?” She sounded almost sympathetic. “There was only ever one way for this to end for her. From the moment she caught your eye. You are always hardest darling on the toys you like the best.” She shook her head and pouted. ”And I am the cruel friend who tells you to stop playing and time to clean up!”

Renate picked up her lighter. Idly she flicked the flame on, then off again. “Still, we take all things for the best.” She winked reassuringly at Miranda. “And maybe we can have some fun with friend Beedee in the bargain, what do you say? Build out her narrative a bit. She’s quite safe at this point, you know. You should really let yourself loosen up with her, it’ll help with your stress management.”

The lighter flared on again. A kind of exhausted commitment lit up in Beedee’s eyes. Her hips rose to bring her to attention and her mouth fell open. Her tongue was grey. The girl’s whole body seemed to vibrate with the need to serve.

Renate brought the lit cigarette partway to her mouth, then paused to muse at it. “I don’t really want this,” she said. She blew on the tip till it glowed, pale red in the yellow of dawn. “I guess I have two willing mouths, don’t I?” She glanced shrewdly towards Miranda and wagged it at her. “Make up my mind for me, darling: which tongue do I use to put this out?”

Miranda had an image of kneeling in the confessional when she was a girl. The light around the priest’s indistinct head, like a halo. She felt the dread of awaiting her penance. How she always wished it harder, to make her forgiveness more sure.

This is how it feels when she’s set my mind right.  There was a dull soreness in her mouth. She wondered what her resistance had been.

Beedee took the hot coal unflinchingly, only a light grunt on contact betraying her. Renate patted the girl’s head and turned back toward the vanity. Beedee’s mouth stayed open.

It’s not enough to make a slave stop fighting, Renate had said to her once. They have to remember there was nothing in them that could have fought in the first place.

Suddenly Miranda was ravenous. She dropped onto her hands and crawled the few paces separating her from Beedee. The pain in her legs made her go slow. She reached for the zipper and yanked it down then got up on her knees and shoved her hand down the dress. With the other she grabbed the girl’s hair and canted her mouth to her. She took Beedee’s tongue, the burn still fresh on it, and between them they shared the hard, stale taste of the spent fire.