The metal bar hurt her teeth. Katie glared up at James, nostrils flaring, trying to keep her jaws clenched and not let him pry them apart, but he was always so damn patient. As soon as her tired muscles slackened the slightest bit, he pushed it a little farther, and farther still. It didn't take long for Katie to find her mouth distorted by it, grimacing around the thing, like a rough iron bit to which he held the reins.

She was still unprepared when he actually used it that way, though. His sharp yank back forced a little grunt of surprise from her, and let him twist the bar so its broad side was turned up, wedging her jaw open farther still.

"Let's review, shall we?" James murmured in her ear. Katie tried to snarl at him, but barely made one choked-off noise before she found herself struggling not to gag on metal.

She was back in the basement, in the most fearsome room at all, the one with the reconfigurable machine and its endless array of armature devices. This time James had her in a deeply uncomfortable inverted C-shape: shoulders resting on a flat bench, head hanging down, torso lifted up and curled over, her hips positioned over her chin. She was naked, of course, her pale body spotlit, brown hair a tumble down below her. He'd even removed her plug-belt and control collar for the time being. Her arms were pulled out straight to each side; he'd made the sadistic choice to bind them to the bench at intervals with zip-ties, pinning them across her biceps, elbows, wrists and individual fingers with sharp tight lines of pain. Her knees were doubled over two metal bars, set at angles to each other, which served the dual purpose of keeping them elevated and keeping her thighs open. And her calves were bound up against her thighs, secured with their own set of thin, horrible plastic bands. It was impossible to breathe deeply, and the pressure of being upside-down made her ears pound. And here he was yanking her around like a pack animal and talking about a review.

"Lesson one," he said, and flipped on a monitor, angled down just right for her field of view. It was a video of her: three simultaneous feeds, one of her full body, one of her upper torso, one of her vulva. The only thing it didn't show was her face, hidden by a dehumanizing rubber hood. This was a recording of the first time he'd brought her down here and made her come on command. She trembled with humiliation, seeing it. She also felt an uncontrollable swelling flood between her legs.

"Lesson two," he said, and flipped to another video—their session the following day. Different configuration, different techniques, same unbelievable humiliation as he forced her body to writhe to his tune. Despite herself, she did realize she was reviewing the last several days, going over the things he'd forcibly taught her about her own capacity.

Katie had learned that her that nipples were, in fact, sensitive enough—with the right mix of stimulation and adrenaline—to bring her to orgasm. She had learned that the region on the anterior wall of her vagina, which James regularly tormented with the angular steel buzzer, was in fact an internal adjunct to her clitoris, a larger organ than the little hooded glans with which she was familiar. It, too, could drive an orgasmic response, and indeed could do so over and over until her body tried to double up with cramping pain.

There were weirdly-named places deeper within her, too, that his machines had violently fucked: so deep they made Katie almost sick, pinned down on her belly, feeling her internal organs actually shift with each thrust of a long metal shaft. That could make her orgasm. The painful, pleasurable, humiliating things with which he had penetrated her ass were not enough to make her come—yet—but vibration and pressure on her perineum, the place she would have called her "taint," certainly were. And, of course, direct electric current through pads applied to the nerve cluster branching from the base of her spine could induce a response that technically qualified as orgasm. It was a revolting, dehumanizing feeling, possibly the one she hated most.

"And lesson seven," James concluded, with a recording of her convulsing like a wet fish, mouth open and gasping as he dialed down the current through her sweat-drenched and thrashing body. "You're doing exceptionally well so far," he said. "Everything's going as expected with induction—your nervous system has accepted the trigger word as a strong climactic motivator. Remember when I said one word and made you come even with the numbing gel on your clit?" He smiled fondly, and she shuddered, unwilling to think about how that one had felt. "That's usually the marker I use as a clear sign to move forward. I'm certain we have your gas pedal well installed."

He ran one hand along her rib cage, feeling her shallow breaths, and gave her a proprietary slap on her hip. Katie didn't even flinch. She was too busy thinking that, in this metaphor, he had to start talking about giving her a set of—

"That's right," James grinned, reading her eyes. "Brakes."

Katie didn't like that thought at all, but she wrinkled her nose in disdain at him anyway. What the fuck was he going to do to stop her from coming? Hurt her? She wasn't exactly thrilled about it, but he had shown her already that pain was no impediment to orgasm—several times, she had come from pain, screaming through her teeth as he struck or shocked or wrenched her most sensitive places.

Do your worst, she almost wanted to dare him. He'd performed unthinkable torture on her. He'd twisted and raped and wrecked her. But she knew that she, alone out of all his victims, hadn't broken yet.

James locked eyes with her. His gaze was light and mocking. He picked up a little square of plastic, maybe half an inch on a side, glossy and transparent; she only caught a brief glimpse of some kind of tracery etched into it as it flashed in the glare of his spotlights. Then he reached into her mouth, still forced wide open, and pressed it against her hard palate.

"You should be grateful for this part, Katie," he said, eyes crinkled in that almost-smile. She didn't think she'd ever hear anyone speak with tolerant amusement again without feeling a murderous rage. "Girls like you who get trained into induction, but not aversion, burn out pretty fast. I've seen it happen; it's not very nice—" She choked on something like a laugh. "—And frankly, it's a waste of a precious commodity. So don't worry about your safety. Given the way you've been shaped already, I promise, it's for your own good."

Katie's tongue was busy and frantic, trying to find and dislodge whatever he'd stuck to the top of her mouth, but she couldn't even find it. Maybe there was something that felt a little slippery, tiny, clinging—but the bar was in the way. Fuck!

As she grunted in frustration over that, he was reaching up to one of the limbs of the machine, drawing down one that was tipped with a large, silicone tool. It had three asymmetrical prongs, and a quick glance was enough to give Katie a guess at their purpose. The smallest, most distinctly flared part was going in her ass. The one with the tip shaped like a little bag of marbles was going to press her clit and upper labia. And the thing that looked like a barely-tapered rubber beer can was going to push its well-lubricated way into her cunt.

Once, such a thing would have intimidated her—and it did make her pulse speed up to think about how fucking thick and tight would feel, taking that cylindrical shaft. But by now she'd taken bigger and survived. She could even glean from her glance an idea of both precisely how much it would hurt and how fast it would be able to drive her to the edge of orgasm.

What worried Katie, right then, wasn't the machine. It was whatever twist James had coming with it.

She felt the bar start to move back out of her mouth, scraping painfully sideways and making her ears ring. Before she could close her mouth and rest her aching jaw, though, it was replaced by short, thick hard rubber dildo on another of the arms. It resisted her desperate tongue and slid just a couple inches in—not enough to throatfuck her, but enough to remind her that she was more or less being forced to suck cock. She gave James a look that she hoped conveyed withering disdain.

James accepted that look, reached down, and tweaked her ear very hard. She betrayed herself with a pained little squeak, muffled by the tool in her mouth. He had such a way of hurting her in the places she wasn't ready for.

"Stimulus, response," he said. The arm above her hissed and sprayed her orifices with the horribly-familiar cold lubricant mist. "Let's get you up to speed."

The silicone tool moved in with a robotic whine, and Katie's hunched form gave one uncontrollable shudder, bracing her to be penetrated once more.

It wasn't any easier than she'd expected.

When the cylinder had sunk itself to the hilt inside her, the pressure of its girth seemed to be somehow pushing her clit out, spreading her unbearably wide and taut; the oscillating beads on its forward head barely had to touch her clit before her nerves redlined, jamming her right up against the limit at which her arousal could accelerate. Fuck, it was cruel. The pleasure barely even read as pleasure to her; it was just edge, the only true name for that feeling and what it did to her. It raced like a razor along her skin. Katie stiffened and strained, gurgling a little behind her cock gag. James wasn't just stepping on her gas pedal, he was trying to strip her gears.

James traced an idle circle with his fingertips around her small breast, which lay flat against her tense, bent chest. Then he palmed it and began to knead, hard, squeezing the soft flesh in his hand like a ball of dough. Katie panted through her nose and glared at him. The arm penetrating her had begun to move slowly in and out of its own accord, and the way her body was all jammed together by his positioning forced a grunt from her lungs with each thrust.

Behind James, she could still see the monitor, which had switched from recorded video to a live feed: one of the camera-tipped arms must have been looking directly down on them, and its primary view was of her distended orifices. He'd waxed her clean a few days ago—yet another of the times she'd come in pain. The sight would have been obscene, even if her bright pink and swollen face hadn't been just visible between her thighs, nostrils flared, mouth stuffed.

The edge rose fast and hard inside her. Katie felt sweat break out on her forehead and chest. James dug his fingers in hard, pressing the heel of his hand against her nipple, and she clenched her eyes shut against it. Any second now, she was sure, he was going to say her trigger word and force her to come, and then hurt her for it. Any second.

But he kept not saying it. And not saying it. And not saying it again. The machine fucked her onward like an animal being driven toward a cliff. She felt her labored breath hitching, felt her feet tighten and flex against her will. The edge climbed the nape of her neck, her scalp, her ears—

She felt herself tip over into orgasm, and then, before the rush hit, there was a faint tingle in the back of her throat as the little square on the roof of her mouth activated.

Revulsion. Sheer blank disgust, a deep hindbrain reaction, every part of Katie flinching hard back from the explosion of pleasure that was trying to go off inside her. It was akin to nausea, and her stomach heaved slightly, but her body didn't need to vomit, and she didn't. It just revolted.

Her skin felt clammy, greasy, cold. She felt completely coated with a sickening film, outside and in. Her anus tightened around the tool penetrating it and she found herself trying to climb down somehow, away from it, away from the violent, filthy foreign object—a reaction that had somehow dulled over the last week, now renewed and multiplied. She couldn't climb anywhere, of course, and the result was panic.

Katie screamed, a high-pitched squeal of animal desperation, as her orgasm collapsed underneath her like a burst balloon. Her holes pulsed a little, weakly, around the inescapable things she couldn't push out. She thrashed as the pathetic, tiny firework of her climax fizzled out and died, producing nothing but another layer of furious frustration.

The tool slowed, pulling almost all the way out of her, then suddenly reversed and shot hard and deep down into her—and kept pushing, past the point of pain. Katie was made to realize, for the first time, that the bench-and-bars frame she was bound to was hung on some kind of spring. She felt the unbearable pressure shoving her whole body down, farther and farther, until she was face to face with James's feet instead of his crotch.

"Brakes," said James. A floor panel just in front of him slid open with a hiss, and Katie's head and shoulders plunged into the water pool beneath the floor.

It was a shocking chill, of course. He did love cold things. Her whole crotch was throbbing with pain, stretched to its limit by the tool that was forcing her entire frame downward. Katie twisted her head back and forth as best she could with the cock-gag still in her mouth, and the scream of pure hate that bubbled from her lips must have rung through the room even from underwater.

The tool relented. Her body bounced back up out of the water with a splash, just another mechanical element in the middle of this apparatus, as the spring lifted her once again to his waist level. Water streamed from her flushed face and down the tangle of her hair. Katie could just glimpse, in the monitor, the visible line of pink across her chest that marked where the icy water had reached. No wonder he'd taken off her shock collar; it would have played haywire with her getting dunked like this. He didn't need to jolt her. Every part of her hurt already. She was gasping and shivering uncontrollably. James crouched down to bring his face close to hers, idly tugging at one of her stiff nipples.

"I hope it's clear by now that you really are nothing but a bundle of nerves, Katie," he said, his voice a murmur. "Stimulate them one way: pleasure." He tugged her nipple to one side. "Another: pain." He tugged back the other way. "A third: repugnance, horror, aversion." He rolled the tip of her breast hard between his finger and thumb and pulled up a couple of times, making it bounce a little. Katie was still too busy sobbing for breath to wince.

James released his grip and stood, reaching up to pat the arm still positioned between her legs affectionately. "Even if you do understand, though, I'm afraid we're going to have to drill this one in a few times. No way around it. It's the only way to teach your body to really fear an orgasm without permission—to put the brakes on for you automatically." He tilted his head, looking down at her. "Go ahead and dissociate if you want. Or can. I don't really need you conscious for this."

Katie had her gaze locked on his again. She didn't know if the wet feeling in the corners of her eyes was from getting dunked or from tears of helpless rage. But she could see, somehow, that there was a flicker of genuine curiosity in his expression.

The fucking machine seemed to ready itself, then struck.

This time it didn't bother with a warmup phase. It jammed its thick shaft down so deep into her swollen pussy that she screamed again, extending the spring that held her bondage frame to its limit in a breathless second. She plummeted back under the water. The oscillating, bumpy tip rolled against her trapped clit, throbbing with vibration, and her body struggled to respond.

Katie felt herself dragged unwillingly onto the edge again, jerkily rising and falling in time with her repeated plunges into the suffocating chill. Her ass hurt. Her cunt hurt. Her back and arms hurt, but it didn't stop her core from tightening with stuttered tension.

She couldn't seem to decide whether to breathe, or when, and then the machine broke its rhythm for a second and she mistimed her inhale and choked. That was a new level of panic. She tried to blow out through her nose, then pulled reflexively on the cock gag in her mouth—which rewarded her with a stream of pure, welcome air through a previously unknown hole, like a perverted snorkel.

Christ. Of course. A little extra level of training, trying to teach her to suck cock in order to survive. Katie felt herself pulled back up out of the pool, wracked with what would have been full-body shivers if she wasn't so immobilized, water pouring off of her. And then the tool fucked back into her and she was submerged with a splash again.

The prong in her ass shifted slightly that time, and hit her with a burst of unexpected vibration. Underwater, with her upper torso one pure wall of aching cold, she started to come again. And then James hit her brakes.

Katie fell over the edge just as she rose up out of the water, and "fell" was the only word for it—amid the violent disgust that tore through her, the sub-nausea and instinctive loathing of everything she felt, Katie's orgasm dropped once more into disappointment, a flat pile of spasming nothing. No satisfaction. No relief. No afterglow.

No break, either, as the fucking machine didn't bother to pause for James to talk to her this time. The revulsion faded as her arousal was grindingly forced into her again. Katie realized, with a little shock, that she was barely clinging to consciousness.

She thought of James's dismissive permission to pass out, though, and something left in her still rebelled. She was. Not. Broken. Katie cast about, through the punishing sensory overload, and latched onto something she'd first noticed days ago.

On the back wall of the cold concrete room, behind all the frightening instruments and degrading video monitors, there was some kind of electrical junction box. It wasn't a breaker panel or anything, just a place where steel conduit ran in and out, enclosing some kind of cables. It had a warning sticker on it.

That had struck her, when she saw it. It made her think about the circumstances of this place: this house, this prison. Someone had built it. Not James. Maybe not even someone who knew what it would be used for. And they had believed that someone would need to be warned about electricity.

Katie started to come, again, and felt her weaponized revulsion tear through it, again. She heaved for air and twisted her arms uselessly, feeling the plastic ties dig into her flesh. She was being tortured. She was being tortured right in front of a sticker that pretended to care about human life.

She took all the loathing she felt and focused her eyes, each time she rose above the water's surface, on the stupid little metal box on that wall. She hated it. She felt her veins stand out with tension and her eyes blur as she focused on it, again and again. She hated it. She hated it.

She hated it so hard the lights flickered.

Instantly the machine stopped. Katie hunched there, her hair dangling in the water as she choked for breath, while James flicked his gaze around the room. He wasn't quite wary, but he was aware, and listening.

After a moment he looked down at her, and his face was calculating. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to pause this lesson, Katie," he said. "It shouldn't be long. Try not to let your body forget what we're doing here. I'd hate to have to start over again."

Then he walked to the heavy steel door, twisted its industrial lock open and slipped out. Katie didn't think she'd ever exactly seen him in a hurry before.

She expected the machine to start up soon, to keep running her through the paces of this unique new brutalization, but it didn't. Maybe James had to be watching her readouts to time the punishment for orgasm properly. Or maybe the sick bastard just wanted to.
She hung there for a moment, catching her breath, allowing her heart to slow until she could hear anything besides herself in her own ears. The room was still. There was still the quiet hum of a computer fan, somewhere tucked away and powering the monstrous apparatus, and the occasional plop of a drip of water, running down her shoulder, neck and ear to fall back into the pool below. Just breathing, she was the loudest thing there.

She tested her bonds one more time: slowly, now, without James to distract her or her own overwhelming panic to make her wild. She couldn't budge them any more than before. But trying to pull at each individual tie, one at a time, made them seem less impossible. They were tough, but they were just plastic, not magic.

Katie thought about it. For all his preternatural abilities, James still walked the same speed as a normal human. She knew about how big the house was; she knew he probably had to climb some stairs to check whatever he'd gone to check. Five minutes. Maybe six. She felt an odd bubble of clarity inside her, suspended by a thread over the foaming sea of rage and fear in which he'd tried to drown her.

She tested the ties on her legs again. This time, flexing her foot, she touched something. Plastic, she thought. A cable? She twisted her head to one side, but even though she was forced to look upward, the arm shoving its gag into her mouth blocked her view.

Katie pulled her head back, shoving with her tongue, and just managed to slide her mouth out from around the gag. She grunted and worked her aching jaw, then immediately went to work with her tongue. It took time—precious fucking time—but she found it: the sharp straight edge of the despicable plastic square stuck to the roof of her mouth.

It hurt to pry free; it didn't want to let go of her. She knew there would be consequences for it. But when Katie spat the stupid little piece of shit out and watched it flutter down into the water, she was filled with a furious satisfaction that made it feel absolutely worthwhile.

"Okay," she muttered to herself, "plastic." She could move her head farther to one side now and just see, between her wet and trembling thighs, the little loop of wire that she'd brushed with her toe. It was taut but bent, something intended to coil and uncoil as the tool penetrating her—still there, to her intense dislike—shifted or thrust.

James had taunted her about control and choice ever since he'd taken her, but this was the first time she'd ever actually had the opportunity to make a real decision, outside his engineered lessons and tests. She could wait here, submissive, and hope for mercy when James inevitably returned. Or she could try to catch the cable, pull it, and see what happened. See if something besides her broke.

It took her five tries before she got it, just barely hooked under her third toe, a breath away from slipping back.

Katie's teeth were clenched, and there was more sweat on her forehead now than there had been during the active portion of her torment. How long had it been so far? Was James about to burst back in and ruin everything? He'd moved the live-feed monitor out of her view when he'd left; she couldn't see, on its corner clock, how long it had been. Was he watching it, somewhere? Was this another test after all?

"One way to find out," she muttered to herself, stretched her foot a bit farther, and pulled down.

The tool rammed down into her, and Katie let out a ragged scream just before she plunged into the water again.

It wasn't fucking her this time. It was just pushing, only pushing, and she sank head-first into the icy cold past her shoulders to her breasts, her ribs, her belly. Her poor cervix was a shrieking bruise and she had little air in her lungs at all. She looked up through the rippling surface, wild-eyed, expecting to see James looking down with a smirk.

He wasn't there. No one was. The tool gave a renewed push, so that the water lapped at the tops of her thighs, and then stopped.

It was going to leave here there. It was broken. She was going to drown.

Katie felt curses boil through her at the thought that she could have been breathing through the goddamn cock-snorkel right now if she hadn't pushed it out. Motherfucker. She felt pressure building behind her eyes, and her throat burned.

She could do it. Suck in water. Choke on it. Let James choke on it, too, and see that he didn't control everything after all. No more torture. No more training or victimization. No more satisfaction for him.

Or, she thought bitterly, he'd just fuck her corpse before he disposed of her and grabbed some other girl.

Her view up through the water had narrowed to a tunnel. Blackness danced around her. She lost control of her body, which was bent on one last thrashing seizure, still trying to escape the inescapable. The sea rose inside her, fear and rage still fighting to sink her brief clarity.

Katie thought about the little metal box she'd hated. She thought about how she could never possibly hate anyone else the way she hated James. She thought about hating herself, her weakness and her failure, after all that time and effort spent—

Spent what, she thought dizzily. Spent what?

She thought about how much she hated the tests. The people who told her what to do next. The people who told her what she was going to do, and what she wasn't going to remember.

Remember what?

Katie hated their little catch phrase.

what

catch phrase

She opened her mouth to inhale water, and she hated that she couldn't hear as they forced their way out of her mouth, three words, bubbling up to the surface with the last of her air.

Katie felt the ties around her right forearm strain and snap.

She tore her arm loose, clenched her fist, and broke all the little ties holding her fingers too. She was losing her vision. Her left arm was harder. Part of the bench came off, still bound to her, with a wrenching crack.

She exploded up out of the water and sucked in huge gulps of air, choking and coughing, her seasick lungs struggling to force themselves clear. She caught the shaft of the fuck-tool with her elbow and dug her fingers into the straps around her left leg. They were thicker, but less secure; all she had to do was work them up over her knee, one at a time. One leg came free. Then the other.

Katie gritted out a harsh sound of pain and pure will as she finally pulled herself off the machine and collapsed, heaving, on the cold hard floor. Her muscles had locked in cramp, but she had no time for that. She got one foot under herself, then a hand, and pushed until she could stand.

Trembling, dripping wet, naked, she stood straight and unbound for the first time since the night he'd taken her. This was not possible, she noted to herself. She could not have done what she'd just done. The most likely scenario was that she was hallucinating as she drowned, or that she was drugged, imagining all of this while her distant body was subject to further violation.

"Oh," said James, standing in the door of the room, looking surprised, but less surprised than he should have. Katie's gaze hit him.

He ran.

Katie stood there for a moment. That didn't seem very likely either. James had a foot of height on her, and easily fifty pounds, and he'd never had any difficulty handling her like a toy. She wasn't armed; she wasn't even clothed. Things shuffled and rearranged themselves in her mind. There was something extraordinary crackling through her, and, she thought, James had seen it. Seen it and fled.

Katie walked after him, bare feet splashing in the skim of water that had pooled on the floor as she stood. She was thinking very hard. She intended to find her captor, and to make him pay for everything when she caught him. But she wasn't in a hurry. He wasn't going to leave the house, she was certain, and that meant that she had time to consider three things that had been bothering her.

First: when James threatened her or the other girls, he used force, leverage or their control collars. He never held a gun on any of them, which she took to mean that there were no such weapons here. It was a good idea: a gun can be taken away and turned against one's captor, but strength and size cannot. Her body felt strong. Too strong. It was an impossible, feverish strength, but James was afraid of it, and the evidence said he could not shoot her to stop her.

Second: James had said she'd been betrayed, sold out to him. But for all his violence and sadism, he didn't actually seem to have anything personal against her. She hadn't been made to read ransom demands on camera or provide anyone proof of life. She wasn't the target, not really. She was being used for some other purpose. She was as much a tool as any of his machines, so the only way to know why she'd been sold was to find out who was buying.

Katie had walked down the basement hallway to the base of the switchback stairs and, ignoring the elevator, climbed them. She stopped at the ground floor, where the stairs opened up into the big open entertainment room, with its sunken floor, furniture and meticulously polished lamps. To her right was the kitchen. To her left was the stupidly large, glossy TV screen. Deactivated, it stood like a monolithic black mirror.

Katie studied herself in reflection. She was still damp, her brown hair a wet tangle stuck to her neck and shoulders. Her eyes were bloodshot and very cold. The shape of her body was... subtly different than the last time she'd looked in a mirror. She'd seen herself on video many times in the last week, of course, but that was James's gaze, not her own. She could see subtle planes of muscle in her arms and flanks now as she walked, and blunt angles like chisel marks to delineate her belly from her hipbones. She'd been worked past the point of exhaustion for days on end, and her body had tried to build against that, burning through its soft reserves.

It didn't explain the way she'd snapped through the zip-ties. Nothing could. But she was arrested all the same by the sight of her slender, strong form, still bare and gleaming, banded red in an almost decorative way by the marks of her bondage.

The third thing that bothered her was the nature of this building. It looked like a house. It was appointed like a house, and furnished like a house, at least in part. But it wasn't a house. It was a hellhole, a nightmare, an edifice of torture. It was a prison.

A prison in the modern paradigm, she remembered from her philosophy textbook, was a panopticon: a place where every inmate was subject to the all-seeing eye. James had certainly made them all believe he could see their every move at any time. But he was only one man. He had limits. He couldn't be doing all of this without help.

Katie stepped to one side of the massive screen and pushed experimentally. It slid, heavy but smooth, to the side, revealing a plain steel door flush with the wall behind it.

"Very good, Katie," James murmured.

Her shoulders tensed in reaction, but she already knew he wasn't there: his voice was coming from all around, through the blithely tasteless surround-sound speakers that matched the fake TV. She was sure he'd be able to hear her, though.

"I'm going to tear my name out of your throat," she said.

"Now, now. How are you going to get any answers if you mutilate me?" he said.

"What makes you think I want answers?"

"You want them more than you want to live," he said, "or you wouldn't have pulled that stunt in the basement. A neat trick, by the way. Did you know you were doing it, or was it pure chance?"

"It doesn't matter," she said.

"No," he agreed. "It doesn't. But answers do, I think, to you. Go ahead. Keep looking."

Katie walked to to the steel door, aware of the outside chance that it was a trap, but unafraid of it if it was. She pushed, and it swung inward and open.

The room was circular. Stairs spiraled around its edge, up and down through a floor and ceiling that seemed to be made of luminous, milky glass. The walls were lined with featureless metal cabinets. She touched one, and it popped open. Stacked neatly inside were bundles of currency: American, Canadian, Euro, pounds and yen, more she didn't recognize. She touched another: dozens of gleaming license plates with current tags. A third: cell phone SIM cards by the hundred, loose in a box.

"You don't have the resources for this kind of stuff," she said quietly. "No one person does. And definitely not the kind of person who does his own dirty work."

"Very good again," he said, and his tone was warm, congratulatory. "But what if I'm the kind of man who just likes to get his hands dirty?"

"That's not a real question," she said.

"So you think I'm working for someone else. Are you going to demand to speak to my manager next?"

"I said you were working with someone else, not for someone else," she said. "But maybe you are just a little bitch who lets the bigger monsters tell you what to do. Is that how you sleep at night? Telling your victims you were just following orders?"

Silence. Katie allowed herself a little smile, flexing her hands. She walked to the spiral stairs and went down, bare feet leaving damp prints on the glass.

"Victims," he said at last, and if her point had struck him then his voice was still steady. "That's an interesting choice of word. Do you feel like a victim right now?"

Katie ducked her head to look around the room. Here was what she'd expected: video screens, every surface covered with them, multiple angles on every room she knew in the house and more she'd never seen. There were even feeds of the outside of the building, like security cameras, though she couldn't quite glean an understanding of its exterior from them. A confusion of stone, gravel and gleaming windows, and somewhere, trees. She did see a curving wall and realized that from outside, this part of the house must be a cylindrical tower.

"I feel like a survivor," she said, looking around at the video. "Do you?"

Katie saw Emma and Jen on one of the screens—the round room with the floor pads where she had been told, once, to kneel and wait for her control accessories to recharge. They were side by side, wearing the collars and plug-belts she expected, heads bowed and still. Emma had a length of red rope bound around her in a thick, glossy braided harness. Jen was naked but for a heavy, opaque black helmet that completely obscured her face. Katie only knew it was her by the length of glossy black hair that spilled down from under it. She did not see Amber, oddly, or James.

That narrowed the scope of her search. James was surely aware of the blind spots of his own cameras, but it seemed unlikely he could broadcast and taunt her while squeezing himself into a corner. The only place he wouldn't need to surveil would be his own surveillance rooms. This tower.

He still hadn't answered her question. Two points for Katie. She descended another set of stairs, but the lowest room was less interesting: just racks of servers and switches, blinking in silence, coils of fiber cable running off through the walls in every direction. There was a door here, and she was pretty sure she'd be able to push it and walk through into the basement from an apparently solid wall, if she chose. She didn't need to, but it did help establish James's movements.

No more stairs down. She climbed back up to the monitor room, then the cabinet room, and up to the floor above. It was empty, but for a single kneeling pad set in the center of the floor.

Katie took it in for a moment. This was a clue, but she wasn't sure of its nature yet. The room was aglow all around her, blue-white light filtering through the translucent floor and ceiling. Some kind of twisted little ceremony room? Or a personal meditation chamber? There was one more floor above her. She didn't want to leave this room until she understood it, but she couldn't get it. Not yet. And she wasn't sure how long the fury and power coursing through her body right now would last.

"I'm going to warn you, Katie," said James, his voice soft. "There are some things you can't un-know. I can't stop you from walking up those stairs. But you may wish you hadn't."

"Someone already made me un-know things once," she said. Would he be able to hear her? She wondered if she would ever have discovered this emergency override within herself if she hadn't skated so close to death. She wondered again if he'd engineered it somehow. But James, though twisted, didn't seem that kind of tricky.

Katie climbed the steps to the top floor and looked at them.

Three girls, seated in an outward-facing triangle around a central pillar. Physically, they weren't so different from Katie herself, though she thought they might be a few years older. They were all slender, on the short side, with small breasts, supple skin, and little hints of muscle tension here and there as they twitched or shifted. They wore only equipment: half a dozen electrodes, control collars, and large helmets that reminded her of VR visors, but extending down to cover their mouths and noses as well. Their ankles were chained to the floor, their hands locked palm-down at their sides under some kind of metal-and-plastic housing. Their genitals were covered by a more baroque version of the plug-belt she'd been made to wear, with tubes and wires running down from them through slots on their chairs. The whole room smelled like female arousal.

They didn't move or turn their heads as Katie entered. They just trembled and breathed shallowly, and the monitors attached to the column above them showed peaks and waveforms, steady scrolling data. They didn't know she was there. Katie wasn't sure they knew much of anything at all.

"I did tell you," said James's voice, all around her. "All gas, no brakes, burnout."

"What are you doing to them?" Katie whispered.

"Actually, they're doing it to themselves," said James. "They're a very powerful computer, linked together, one with subtle abilities that can't be duplicated by silicon yet. The system is excellent at parsing hidden meaning when I speak commands, for instance, and at recognizing only authorized voices. And at analyzing vast amounts of biometric data in real time."

"All your little tricks." Her voice was trembling. "The way you pretend to read minds. Read bodies. The way you always know everything that's going on..."

"Oh, give me some credit." He actually laughed. "I am pretty good at all this. But the system enhances things, like one of those... digital assistants. Only useful."

"Where did you find them?" She hated his laugh so much; her strength surged in her again. "Human trafficking? Do you just bulk-order girls who fit your type?"

"Your type," he corrected. "A particular shape with a useful body fat ratio and specific metabolic requirements. And female, of course; can't do this kind of thing to a body with a prostate. Orgasm suppresses higher brain activity in girls—do you remember that from our lessons? One of the interesting parts of the system is that it can monitor its own stimulus cycle, maintaining the suborgasmic state to suppress executive function. Then it runs its code where that would normally go..."

"It," said Katie, quoting him.

"That really is the best pronoun for their gestalt collective," he said, voice mild. "Not human, but able to take advantage of human wetware. The girls you're looking at were once named Ashley, Rika, and Erin. The sum structure of their connection is just... the house."

"That's your big fucking magic secret," Katie said. "That's how you run this place. Brainwashed slaves."

"Yes," James agreed.

"This is evil."

"I wouldn't try unplugging them, or any other misguided attempts at heroism," he said. "They're heavily interlinked. It takes a very careful shutdown process to extract a component. Removing any one of them without it would leave all three badly damaged."
"Oh, because you care so much about their welfare. Our welfare." Katie shuddered. "This is what the training is for, isn't it? This is what you wanted to do to me. And Jen, and Emma, and Amber. Wipe our minds and swap us into... this. Thing."

"Four is the preferred number," James said. "You need three running to keep the system in balance. With a spare girl, you can rotate them, so no one spends more than twenty-four continuous hours wired in." She could hear the twist of his mouth as he spoke; it was mocking, cruel. "Plus, you can fuck the extra one if you feel like it."

"I'm going to kill you," she said.

"I won't underestimate you again."

"The kneeling pad downstairs," she said, "it's supposed to be for the spare girl, isn't it? But she's missing."

"Very good, Katie," he said, and this time his voice had grown cold.

"What's the matter? Did someone escape? Did big bad James make a mistake?"

"Someone killed her," he said. "Trying to get her out."

He'd been so clever, so quiet, letting the speakers continue to broadcast his voice as he approached her. It was only the slightest change in his breathing that told her he'd been climbing stairs. It was only the faint tingle on the hairs at the back of her neck that told her to move, now.

As his hand descended to drive the needle into her shoulder, she turned in toward him, a fluid spinning movement, and caught his strong, heavy body under his arm. She turned and bent with the long muscles of her back, her small form magnified by leverage, and threw him. The needle went flying. James hit the floor hard. Katie didn't know what told her how to fight him, but she did know a great satisfaction as she heard the grating pop of his dislocated shoulder.

James was up again, grimacing, right arm hanging useless at his side. His gaze flicked to the needle, unbroken, rolling on the floor. He started to move toward it, but Katie was faster than him, faster than she'd ever felt. She slid along the glass, needle in her hand now, but he'd only been feinting, and had sprung around one side of the room to half-run, half-fall down the spiral stairs. Katie whipped the needle at him like a dart; it caught the fabric of his dark sweater and shattered on the wall.

She glanced back at Ashley, Rika and Erin. Could she believe him? Would freeing them really be worse than what they were going through now? They hadn't responded to her voice or to the noise of the fight, and the fact was that James had never actually lied to her yet. She would come back for them, after. She promised them that.

Then she went after him.