THE BLUE ROSE

PART 2: BE THE FIRST TO RUN

The next morning sees the girls startled awake by shrieks of abject horror. Chloe’s on her feet before her conscious mind even kicks in, unsure exactly what she’s expecting to see but left with an inchoate sense of doom by the previous night’s eavesdropping and the inexplicable sight in the trophy corridor. It’s with a mixture of annoyance and relief, then, that she finds the only monster in the dorm is Jessie, who appears to be having a loud meltdown in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

“I look like a balloon!” she wails, turning this way and that, dressed only in her underwear. “How does somebody gain weight on a liquid diet? I thought it was meant to be tailored to our metabolisms or whatever? Oh god, look at me, I’m a whale! None of my dresses are going to fit! How has this happened?”

Chloe’s first inclination is to laugh, and her second is to laugh more, but Lottie’s apparently feeling more helpful, as she’s over by Jessie’s bed already and is looking from the curvy redhead to her reflection and back in consternation.

“Jessie,” she says with exaggerated patience, while behind her a handful of the other girls are breaking into noisy panic, too, looking at their own expanded images in their mirrors. Chloe doesn’t dare glance at her own in case the same has happened to her, conditioned as she is to consider gaining a pound just about the worst thing she can imagine. She has the nightmarish notion that this is some new punishment, perhaps concocted in response to whatever went on with Violet in the conditioning room, and crueller by far than anything she’s endured; that the timing doesn’t seem to line up might not mean much, since this wouldn’t be the first time the girls have been sedated and woken up days later, believing only a night has passed, to find their bodies changed in their sleep. Chloe’s hyperventilating and crying with panic and fear by this point, certain beyond doubt that something unspeakably awful has happened without even looking at herself, and it feels like an hour later that she hears Lottie speak again, even though it can only have been ten seconds at most.

“Jessie. Jess. Jessica, listen. Jessie! LISTEN TO ME!” Lottie yells, clearly sick of being sidelined in favour of histrionics.

“What?” Jessie snaps, whirling around. annoyed at being interrupted when she’d really hit her stride.

“It’s the mirrors, you idiots,” Lottie says to the room at large, turning to glare particularly hard at Chloe’s tear-stained face. She grabs Jessie by her ample hips and steers her over to one side of the mirror. “Look, it’s warped; it’s bulging out from the wall.”

“And that’s made us fat?!” Nicci chimes in, hopelessly lost.

“It’s made you all look fat,” Lottie replies wearily, and if she adds “in a way that wouldn’t have fooled a six-year-old,” at barely any lower a volume, it’s mostly lost on the roomful of girls now checking their own mirrors and their bodies in a state of hysterical relief. “I don’t know, maybe there was a minor earthquake, or the frames warped, or… or they used the wrong kind of glass, or something?” Lottie suggests, but she doesn’t exactly sound confident in her explanations. She manoeuvres her hyper-exaggerated figure from mirror to mirror, peering at where the reflective surface has parted from the surround, but she hasn’t come up with a convincing explanation by the time Chloe remembers she’s got somewhere to be.

“So what did you get up to last night, naughty girl!? I want all the dirty details!!” giggles Nicci as Chloe stops to give her a quick good-morning peck on the cheek.

“Oh, you’d better believe I got some juicy stuff to share,” Chloe says, “but it’s gonna have to wait, innit. I got business first. I’ll fill you both in later!”

With that, she whirls away into the dressing room; she showered off the thick coating of cum and dumped her thoroughly ruined uniform in the laundry bin before falling into bed the previous night, so while the other girls are milling about and doing their daily exercise she’s powering through the many, many steps of her makeup regimen, applying an extra-heavy spritz of perfume, and sneaking out into the sun-soaked early-morning corridors with a mission. She’s still wearing her gauzy nightgown and fluffy heels - far from appropriate attire for running in - but she does her best, trotting down toward the teaching wing as if she’s headed to class, then swinging a quick left then right down a side corridor to reach the admin hub. She takes a sneaky look through the reinforced glass, and is happy to see there’s only one guard inside this early in the day, as she’d hoped; all the better, it’s the one Nicci has coercively named Sugardick. Lottie once described him as ‘the nicest man keeping us locked up on Unnecessary Surgery Island’, and she wasn’t wrong; he’s unusually respectful by guard standards, and while that doesn’t mean he’ll hesitate to slap, shock or restrain the girls if they get out of line, he doesn’t seem to take anything like the cruel pleasure in it most of the others do. As a result, Chloe isn’t usually all that bothered about chasing after his cock, however sweet certain parties might claim it tastes; she’s been built to crave subservience and degradation, and his relative gentleness doesn’t exactly get her motor running. But needs must, and she’s here this morning with an agenda.

“Morning, Chloe,” the guard calls over the intercom, somewhere between amused and exasperated at the pair of giant spray-tanned tits pressed up against the observation window. He rolls his eyes and unlocks the door, letting her sway in with her boobs still out and her sexiest wiggle on. “Morning, Sug… er, Sir,” she purrs, licking her glossy, over-painted lips. He’s trying to seem unaffected, but Chloe can see very clearly from the growing tent in his pants that he’s not immune to her charms. She sways over to where he’s sitting in front of a bank of low-security camera feeds and front-of-house admin systems, slipping out of her transparent nightgown and letting it dangle from the end of a long fake nail. “I was wondering whether I could ask you for a little tiny favour. I’d be ever so grateful, Sir.”

“What’s… what are you after, Chloe?” murmurs Sugardick, clearly trying to stay cool as she practically sits in his lap and starts running her tongue up his stubbly cheek. His manner might not be entirely to her taste, but close proximity to any man has a powerful effect on Chloe, and she’s inhaling his scent with a fast-growing hunger.

“Well, I was just wondering, since the assignments ain’t gone up yet, whether there was anything I could do to maybe go to Medical today?” she asks smoothly, leveraging countless hours of training to make even that sound seductive.

“You know I’m not allowed to do that, Chloe,” he says, somewhat unconvincingly.

“Mr Daddy done it the other week, when Lottie didn’t want to do anal training,” Chloe retorts, moving down to stroking the bulge in the guard’s uniform pants with a practised, teasing touch. He snorts with suppressed laughter at the other guard’s nickname, but he can’t hide how heavily he’s breathing by now.

“Why do you even want Medical?” he asks her, his resistance clearly hanging on by the barest thread. “I thought you girls hated it.”

“Well, I been feeling a bit hot, ain’t I; maybe I need a little checkup,” Chloe replies with a sultry and entirely unselfconscious smirk, and then he’s unzipping his fly and she’s got her mouth full of a surprisingly girthy cock. Sugardick doesn’t take control or try to force her, which is a bit of a letdown after the cruel, humiliating, mind-blowingly erotic ordeal of the previous night; he just lets her glide expertly up and down his shaft as extensive lessons have taught her to do, teasing the head with her tongue stud and taking the full length down her throat faster and faster while the guard’s soft little moans and whispers of ‘yes’ intensify. That isn’t to say she isn’t enjoying herself; Chloe has never met a dick she didn’t want to touch, taste, smell and/or hop aboard the very moment she laid eyes on it, and giving oral is something her brain has been rewired to find intensely pleasurable for its own sake. In fact, by the time Sugardick grunts and thrusts and floods her throat with hot, delicious cum, which she swallows down greedily before showing him her empty mouth as she’s been trained to do, she’s feeling like maybe she misjudged him, and that’s only 80% due to the size of his penis. She stands with a teasing ass-wiggle, plants a kiss on his lips, and turns with an exaggerated flick of her hips toward the door.

“So, I’ll go and get changed into my nurse uniform, yeah?” she says breezily, over her shoulder. Sugardick doesn’t respond, but before the door closes she hears the sound of hurried typing and mouse clicks, so she assumes she’s getting what she was after.

The Medical uniform is a latex nurse’s outfit, but it’s a far cry from the skimpy costumes hanging elsewhere in the girls’ dressing room. It’s based loosely on something a nurse in the 1950s might have worn, with puffed sleeves, a high collar, a trailing headpiece like a nun’s, and a long, heavy skirt. It’s designed to be punishing and restrictive to wear, barely exposing an inch of skin beneath the white, crushingly tight longline corset, latex stockings and layers upon layers of heavy-grade rubber. Chloe assumes there must be some latex couture designer contracted to produce the Blue Rose girls’ fetishwear; whoever they are, they’re both wildly talented and have a wicked imagination. There’s rubber underwear, too, ridiculous bloomer-style panties with an uncomfortably large built-in buttplug and a restrictive underskirt on top. Chloe squeezes herself into each piece of this with the aid of copious amounts of silicone oil, her arousal growing exponentially as her freedom of movement diminishes. She dresses in a practised order; underwear, stockings, the preposterous seven-inch platformless heels, then corset, because once that’s on and tightened sufficiently she can barely bend at the waist, and her steps are already constrained by the boned stays that reach past, but barely contain, her ample butt. She’s trembling from the erotic charge and feels about to cum in her cage by the time she pulls up and fastens the acres of rustling latex that comprise the underskirt, which she’s already half-raised so she can reach it (avoiding the humiliating but tantalising prospect of having to beg one of the other girls for help while they all giggle at her, as she’s done to them all on more than one occasion). All that’s left is to carefully lower the heavy rubber dress over her head. She’s lost in endless folds of latex for a moment, the feel and smell of it bringing back deliciously humiliating memories of punishment uniforms and days spent locked in bondage, on public display for all and sundry to grope, smack, and fuck, sending an electric shiver all the way down to her toes. Then she’s pulling it down, with difficulty; the thick latex is stretched taut by her corseted tits, and the high, stiff collar buttons tight around her throat. Finally she buttons closed the long sleeves, making moving her arms difficult, pulls on the gloves, adorns the whole ensemble with the added weight of the full-length apron, and clips the ridiculous upside-down watch (nonfunctional, of course, with no hands and no numbers on the dial) on top. The very last step is to shine herself up, and that she can’t do alone.

“Hello nursey!!” Nicci calls excitedly upon seeing her. She’s assembled alongside all the other girls - Violet being the obvious exception, as she’s still yet to return - waiting in the main dorm for inspection. As Chloe sees them she realises with a plummeting heart that literally every one of them is dressed identically, in the school uniform she so thoroughly ruined the previous night. It must be a classroom day for the whole group, and while it isn’t entirely unprecedented for one girl to be assigned elsewhere, it’s unusual, and guaranteed to draw attention. She shrugs internally, unable to do anything about it now, and waves the bottle of gloss oil at Nicci and Lottie. Like the rest, both girls’ makeup looks a little less practised than usual, the consequence of having to do the best they could with only funhouse-mirror versions of their reflections to go on.

“Seriously, what’s going on, Chlo?” murmurs Lottie, as both girls go to work on every available inch of Chloe’s outermost layer, buffing her to a high shine and, in Nicci’s case, getting more than a few not-so-covert pinches and squeezes in alongside.

“Chlolo’s been agsinated to be a sexy shiny nursey today, duhh!!” answers Nicci.

“She ‘agsinated’ herself to be a nursey,” Lottie says, flatly. “What I want to know is why?”

“Something really weird’s going on,” Chloe whispers, under the auspices of Lottie getting her tits extra-shiny. This inevitably makes her focus on Lottie’s own J-cups, which are barely contained inside her far-too-small shirt and blazer, and which Chloe’s almost certain will burst out before the end of the day, leaving their owner red-faced and squirming; she’ll be sad to miss it, but needs must.

“They dragged Violet off to the chair after hours last night, and she never came back,” Lottie hisses in reply. “Is it something to do with that?”

“I think that’s part of it, yeah, but there’s-“ Chloe begins, but she’s interrupted by Ms Malynovskaya making a sharp, tightly controlled entrance through the staff-only door. The girls jump to attention; Chloe, hopefully shiny enough to pass muster, tosses the bottle onto her bed and joins them, standing out like a reflective beacon at the end of the line.

“Hm. One of these things is not like others,” the dorm mistress says, running her crop lightly along the row of girls at crotch-level. Today she’s wearing a severe, tailored dress and towering Louboutins, and Chloe can’t entirely tear her eyes away from the woman’s taut figure and the swell of her modest but perfectly-shaped breasts. She stops as she reaches the end of the line, tapping the end of the crop against the outermost of the many layers covering Chloe’s cage. “Tell me: why are you dressed like medical pervert, Chloe?”

“It was on the assignment board for today, Miss,” Chloe replies innocently, eyes deferentially lowered, heart beating double-time.

Ms Malynovskaya ‘hmph’s and makes a few sharp taps on her tablet. “Yes, I see. Last-minute change to assignment. Scheduling did not bother to inform me, of course, but when half facility is running around panicking about emergency nobody will talk about, I…”

Belatedly she seems to remember where she is, and glares at the row of straight-backed, unmoving girls as if it’s their fault she’s said more than she should in front of them. Chloe feels a rare shiver of genuine, unerotic fear; Ms Malynovskaya usually has iron-clad control to match that of Ma’am herself, and to see her slip up so blatantly implies whatever’s going on must be serious.

“All of you, one demerit for sloppiness,” she snaps, cracking an unfortunate Felicia on the thighs with the crop for good measure. “Now get to assignments, double time. Now! Move! Go!”

Ms Malynovskaya chases the girls from the dorm with stinging smacks from her crop; none waste any time in hurrying out of the room, in a swish of skirts, a wash of perfume and in Chloe’s case, the creak and rustle of latex under severe strain. Unfortunately for Chloe, the dorm mistress follows along with the group, hurrying the schoolgirls to their class; there’s no opportunity to explain what she knows and what she suspects to Nicci and Lottie before their paths diverge and she’s making slow, awkward progress toward Medical, hindered by her severely curtailed steps and the sheer suffocating weight of her uniform.

Ms Malynovskaya peels off at some point between the dorm and the teaching wing, ducking wordlessly into one of the staff-only doors in response to an urgent chime from her tablet, leaving the girls to make their own way to class. This necessitates passing through the trophy corridor, reliably the impetus for a flurry of dirty jokes when a large number of girls have to traverse it unsupervised. Today, however, it’s met with confusion and unease.

“Where have they all gone?” asks Felicia, peering into an empty jar as if the testicles might be hiding.

“Maybe they took them out for cleaning??” asks Nicci, making Lottie snort with laughter.

“I don’t think they do that with balls, do they?” asks Marcie, straight-faced and utterly earnest.

“Oh yeah, didn’t you know? You just pop them in the washing machine,” replies Lottie, somewhat less sincere. “Four hundred and seventy-two testicles going round and round on a delicates cycle. Best hope they remembered to tie them together, or we’ll never figure out whose are whose!”

“It’s not just warped, it’s dirty, too!” exclaims Jessie, who doesn’t even seem to have registered that the trophy corridor is completely devoid of trophies, and has instead walked ahead to peer into another full-length mirror as if it’s bending out from the wall to spite her personally. “Look, there’s this one fleck of… ugh, is it getting bigger? That’s disgusting; there must be something living on there! I’m telling Ms Fields, and whoever was supposed to clean down here is going to be in trouble…”

The group moves on quickly, every single girl feeling a strong, unvoiced desire not to be left behind in the eerily desolate space.

 

-

 

“You’re late, domestics!” calls the high, sneering voice of Margot, unquestioned head girl of the matrimonial class, as the girls file hurriedly into room 3A for their lesson. The space is filled with old-style school desks, each with an intentionally uncomfortable chair, open at the butt to allow for easy correction, a blackboard at the head of the room, and a real desk from behind which the teacher holds court. To the service class’s collective relief, this is currently unoccupied; less pleasing is the fact that roughly half the seats have already been claimed by members of the matrimonial class, all of whom are making clear their opinion of the latecomers.

“The first-period chime hasn’t gone off yet, has it? And Ms Fields isn’t even here yet? That means we’re on time,” snaps Jessie, hackles thoroughly raised. As if to illustrate her point, the three rising tones marking the beginning of the morning session - upon which the girls had better be at their assignments, or trouble will follow - sounds over the PA.

“I bet Miss will check the cameras and you’ll all get three demerits anyway, and since we were all early, we’ll get to pick your punishment,” drawls Amelia, starting a sotto voce discussion among her class as to what humiliation they’ll inflict. The trophy-wives-in-training are distinguished from the servants by their cream ties, as compared to the maids’ pink, and by their attitudes; where the girls in Nicci, Lottie and Chloe’s class have been conditioned and trained to show deference to everyone in a position of power, the matrimonials are encouraged to consider themselves superior to anybody who isn’t either a teacher or their future husband, including one another and most definitely the serving girls. This means the class are forced to find their seats amid a barrage of teasing and childish pranks, like snatching Nicci’s chair out from behind her just as she sits down, or repeatedly pretending to write something on Cecily’s back then acting innocent when she turns around. Lottie’s forced to take a seat right in front of Margot, and she’s only been sitting down for a moment when the kicks to the back of her chair start up.

“So, do you have any new escape plans brewing, Ho-dini? I can’t wait to see how stupid you come back looking this time,” the girl - who Lottie knows for a fact is twenty-six and used to be an investment banker - giggles from behind her. “I heard they’re just going to jam in two beachballs to save money this time - it’s not like they’ll be in there for long, after all; you’re so turned on by looking like a freak, it’ll only be a matter of time before you try again, won’t it?”

With difficulty, Lottie resists the urge to punch her - losing her clothing privileges for a week was not worth the satisfaction last time - but she does turn around with fires burning in her eyes.

“Don’t take it out on everyone else because the only thing you’re turned on by is the thought of your hubby’s shrivelled little cocktail sausage,” she snaps. “Remember, while we’re getting it from celebrity guests and playboy investors, you’re going to be lying there night after night, pretending to feel something while a withered old tortoise in an oxygen mask wheezes and grinds and falls asleep mid-thrust. I wonder what happens when he drops dead of a massive coronary in the first year, Margot, because there is no way in hell his fake wife is inheriting; do his kids just quietly bump you off, do you get buried alive in his coffin with him, or are you just conditioned to croak on command? All it’d take is the right trigger word, after all! Let’s see, maybe it’s ‘Calamity’. ‘Persephone’? ‘Annihilation’. How about ‘Verisimilitude’?”

“Stop it!” cries Margot, having progressed rapidly from dismissal to concern to outright distress, trying without much success to put her fingers in her ears; her nails aren’t quite at the impracticality level of Lottie’s, but they’re not too far off.

“Kilimanjaro!” Jessie tries, grinning conspiratorially at Lottie in a rare moment of solidarity.

“Éphémère!” contributes Cecily.

“You stink!” volunteers Nicci, who hasn’t understood the assignment.

“Phlebotomy! Achilles! Revanchism!” Lottie continues mercilessly, as Margot flees the room in tears. Lottie sits up a little straighter and rearranges her blazer with the air of a job well done.

“Wait, you can’t leave without permission!! You’ll get in trouble!?!” Nicci calls in the direction of the door, very clearly for the sake of the others hearing her say it, since by this time Margot’s long gone.

“Get in trouble with who, though?” Marcie asks the room at large, twirling a strand of impeccably teased hair around an elegant finger. The girls have to collectively admit she has a point; none of them remember a time that the instructor hasn’t been present when the chimes sounded, and the absence of immediate authority is unsettling.

“Maybe it’s a test,” suggests Felicia, fretfully. “Like, we’re supposed to be good girls and do our lesson, and Miss is watching through the cameras to see if we do?”

“Okay, but what lesson?” asks Lily, the other half of an inseparable and largely indistinguishable pair. “Nobody’s told us what we were supposed to be doing.”

“Well, whatever it is, it certainly isn’t to bully a classmate until she runs away crying!” sniffs Alice, another of the wives-to-be, shaking her head at Lottie in supercilious disdain.

“Do you think… should we go and find her? She might be really upset,” says Tegan, one of Margot’s closest hangers-on and possessed of very little backbone even in the eyes of the compulsively obedient serving-girls. She gets to her feet and then, in the absence of a rousing chorus of support, she nervously sits back down again, prompting not-so-subtle sniggering from a few members of the domestic class.

“Maybe you maids should start scrubbing something, and we’ll supervise you,” says Amelia. “It’d be good practice for your future.”

“Maybe you should cry into your Chanel while we fuck your husbands,” shoots back Jessie, voice sickly-sweet. “It’d be good practice for your future.”

“All right, that’s it,” announces Lottie, getting to her feet and straightening her skirt. “We’re going to find Ms Fields before anyone ends up strangled with their own tie. Come on, Nics.”

“But I don’t wanna get in trouubllleeee…” whines Nicci, nevertheless getting up with a sulky pout and trotting along behind Lottie as the others watch them go, still bickering in their ones and twos.

“We won’t, okay? We’re finding the teacher; that’s good-girl behaviour if anything is, right?”

“I suppooooose…” Nicci sighs, the weight of the world clearly lying heavy on her shoulders as she vaguely wonders if the corridors are usually this dark during the daytime.

 

-

 

Between the uniform and the girls’ total lack of medical training, Chloe’s long suspected that assignment to the hospital wing is more of an exercise in public humiliation (and perhaps practice completing basic tasks in severely restrictive fetishwear) than anything of great practical use to the operation of the Blue Rose. So, after the real, sensibly-attired nurse on duty has distractedly concluded that someone must have ordered the help, even though nobody seems to remember doing so, she’s put to work restocking perishables and taking inventory. It’s far from an urgent task, and something literally anyone could have done more efficiently than the tottering, half-bound Chloe, but the lack of supervision does give her time to pursue her actual reason for being there.

Medical is arranged like an absurdly well-appointed private clinic, which it technically is, but for the elective nature of its patients’ presence there; the walls are stark, antiseptic white, the floors are glossy tile, and the fittings are stainless steel where they aren’t staggeringly expensive upholstery. Chloe doesn’t know the layout well; most of her visits here have been spent either unconscious or heavily sedated, so she’s reduced to making her awkward, increasingly hot and sticky way around the perimeter corridors, checking empty room after empty room, deferentially lowering her eyes and trying to look like she’s doing something useful whenever she passes a doctor or orderly, who for their part are so wrapped up in urgent, hushed conversations amongst themselves that they barely seem to notice her. Off to her right are the White Rooms, topic of hushed conversation and violent nightmares among the girls, where new arrivals are first broken and then acquainted with the nature of their new existence after waking from their months-long surgical ordeal, before their introduction to the facility proper. It’s empty now that Violet has been released into general population, all the separate cells fully opened up to reveal the series of hidden fixtures - closet with clothes, vanity with makeup, wall-mounted dildos, fucking machines - that the new girls are introduced to and forced to utilise on pain of further electric shocks, starvation and sleep deprivation. Next are the surgical suites, similarly devoid of subjects, equipped with a panoply of devices and appliances Chloe can’t even guess at the names or functions of. After that she reaches the recovery rooms, where new or freshly-modified girls are kept strapped to the beds in a drugged haze between procedures, and here she finally finds an occupant.

“C… Chloe?” Violet murmurs, waking blearily at the loud click of stiletto heels on tile. She looks disoriented and pale, but her gaze is steady and her pupils look normal, so Chloe guesses she hasn’t been too heavily drugged. “What are you wearing?”

Chloe breaks into an inadvertent grin at the question. “Never seen a nurse before? I’m here to give you a sponge bath and stick a thermometer up your bum, innit.” Seeing Violet’s confused and frightened expression, she relents. “Nah, it’s like, I just wanted to see whether you was okay, yeah? I heard something happened in conditioning. They said someone died?”

“I don’t remember,” says Violet, trying to sit up and quickly discovering the limits of the wrist and ankle restraints. “They came and took me to a room with… I don’t know, computer gear or something? Then they made me put on this horrible rubbery wetsuit thing and put me in a chair, with needles in my arms and some sort of helmet thing on my head. And then… I don’t know, there were colours, and sounds, and pictures, I think? And pain, and… stimulation, but too much. It was awful. I must have blacked out, and the next thing I knew there was all this… noise, different noise, and there was blood on the walls, and… I don’t know, there was someone there… someone else.”

“Who, Vi?” Chloe whispers, breathless and only partially from the uniform. “Who killed them three people?”

Violet shakes her head like she’s trying to clear the fog away. “I don’t… I can’t, I don’t want to… three? No, no, there were two, the other’s over in the next… he was talking, before. He was being so loud. He wouldn’t stop talking, saying something about, about the, the… oh.”

Violet lets out a sigh and goes limp in the restraints, head flopped to one side on her pillow. After checking she’s still breathing, which is about the limit of her medical expertise, Chloe swallows her renewed sense of dread and, with a rustle of latex skirts and the rapid click-clack of restricted steps, hurries out and into the next recovery room along. Inside there is indeed a patient confined to the bed; he’s bearded, middle-aged, somewhat out of shape, and Chloe doesn’t recognise him, although if he’s a conditioning technician then that’s no surprise, since her time in the chair wasn’t exactly conducive to forming coherent memories. He’s awake before she enters, already straining uselessly at the straps, and his head snaps from side to side as if he’s fighting with the limits of his own body. There are bandages around a thick gauze dressing on his forehead, an IV drip in his arm, and from his sallow skin and madly rolling eyes, Chloe’s surprised he’s conscious at all.

“W… w…” he croaks, spittle flecking his unkempt beard.

“Water? Can I get you a glass of water, Sir?” asks Chloe, bobbing an awkward curtsey as best she can. She makes her way over to the cabinet, where there’s a filled jug and a stack of plastic cups, and brings one over to the patient, noting how taut the tendons in his arms are, the way a trickle of blood is leaking from his head wound into one too-wide eye. The closer she gets, the more agitated the technician seems to become, thrashing and fighting the restraints and mumbling thick, mashed-together words she can’t quite decipher.

“Mmmuunnnghhh… urrrhh… itttt came, uuhh… it spoke…” he groans, and his eyes are fixed not on Chloe’s face or the water she’s offering, but on his own reflection in the glossy expanse of her chest. She’s no stranger to having her tits ogled, and in fact usually considers it a compliment, but in the circumstances it’s a little disturbing.

“It’s there! It’s right… RIGHT THERE! Uuuhhhhh… STAY BACK! STAY AWAY!!!” the man shrieks suddenly, startling Chloe so badly she yelps and drops the cup onto the bed, where the contents soak into the sheets unheeded by their occupant. She backs off a few unsteady steps, and the patient seems to calm down proportionately, falling gradually again into his mumbling nonsense monologue.

“What happened to you?” Chloe dares to ask, almost hoping she doesn’t get an answer. The tech’s wide, boggling eyes swivel to focus on her, and he seems to really see her for the first time.

“Begin the procedure, schedule one, initial program, moderate dosage,” he says, in a monotone as if he’s reciting woodenly from a script. “Biometrics within normal range, brainwaves approaching threshold, receptivity estimated at seventy per hang on what is that? What is that? The charts shouldn’t look like that what the hell is that noise AND THEN IT SPOKE AND IT WAS NOT THE VOICE WE GAVE HER and what it said, it said, it said… the others, Marco and Jonesy, they found a way out but I lived… WHY DID I LIVE? WHYYyyyyyyuuuurrrrhhh…”

The man’s awful, broken moan trails off into silence, leaving Chloe breathing hard, utterly aghast. As she stumbles for the door, he seems to summon up some last reserve of strength and calls out to her, just loud enough to hear over the sudden clamour of wailing medical alerts and beeping monitors.

“Please don’t make me see what comes next,” the survivor pleads, and then every alarm in the room starts screaming and, insofar as she’s able, Chloe runs.

 

-

 

“Lottie-loo, I think it really is like, darker than normble in here??” Nicci ventures, clinging tight to Lottie’s hand as they make their way down one of the richly-appointed second-floor corridors, from which the teachers’ offices extend. Their trip should have only taken a few minutes; down the hall, up two flights of stairs and past six or seven doors to an office bearing Ms Fields’ name. Instead they’ve been walking and walking, up and down corridors and staircases almost identical to the one they’re seeking but slightly different in their details, like the direction of turns and the number of unlabelled doors. Lottie’s been telling herself they must have managed to get themselves lost somewhere along the way, but she never knew the teaching wing was so big, and she’s getting less and less confident in a rational explanation as time wears on.

“Maybe there’s something up with the generators, and Ms Fields had to sort it out,” Lottie suggests, for her own sake as much as Nicci’s, although it’s something of a hard sell that their female-dominance-and-sexual-submission trainer moonlights as an electrical engineer when the facility has so many specialist staff on-site. And Nicci’s not even wrong; the corridor really is dimly-lit compared to most parts of the Blue Rose, and seems to be getting gradually darker as they come closer to Ms Fields’ office. Both girls have been summoned there before, as a prelude to creatively cruel ordeals neither will soon forget, but the dread they’re feeling now is of a different texture to the fear of punishment. Somehow, though, turning back feels like it would be a much worse mistake than venturing on, the kind you only make once: instead they cling together and continue, the click of their heels on hardwood the only sound in the constricting silence and deepening dark, until after walking for an implausibly long time, they finally reach the heavy oak door on which a plaque reading A FIELDS is just about legible in the dark.

“Uh… Ms Fields?? Are you there!? Wewerewonderingifmaybeyouforgotaboutourclass…” quavers Nicci, accompanied by a knock on the door so timorous her hand barely brushes the wood. Taking a deep breath, Lottie gently moves her out of the way and knocks hard, as if defying the inchoate terror both of them are feeling will help dispel it.

“Ms Fields! It’s Lottie and Nicci, from Service class! We just wanted to check if you're feeling all right, Miss!” she calls, glancing nervously back down the darkened corridor every few seconds, though there’s nothing there that either girl can see.

“Well, at least we tried-“ she begins, inwardly sagging with relief, but she’s interrupted by a sound from inside Ms Fields’ office. Later, both girls will find themselves completely incapable of describing exactly what they heard, except to say it isn’t something they ever want to hear again. Hard and sharp yet delicate somehow, tender, like sharp glass cutting into something wet and vulnerable. Lottie makes to run, but when she reaches for Nicci’s hand she finds her peering intently through the keyhole, and whatever she’s seeing seems to have her almost entranced.

“What is it? What’s in there?” Lottie asks, so afraid she’s almost forgetting to breathe.

“I don’t know!? It’s like, hard to make out ‘cause it’s so dark, but you know how Ms Fields has those mirrors for naughty time?!”

Lottie nods, because she’s intimately familiar. Fields has an area in her office with mirrors arranged like a fitting-room cubicle, and she’s fond of keeping girls who’ve displeased her standing facing them for hour upon agonising hour, bound in all sorts of painful and humiliating predicaments, so they can see every facet and angle of their bodies and the debasement they’ve earned themselves.

“She’s kind of standing betweem them, and she’s, like, shaking super super fast!? Like a big naughty vibator!!” Nicci replies, and Lottie stares at her, wondering if she misheard or if the girl’s completely lost it. Then that same awful sound cuts all-too-delicately through the air, louder this time and accompanied by what can only be a soft sob, and without pausing to rationalise it both girls are in full flight, arms bent and wrists out because there’s no fighting some compulsions, Lottie’s tits flying beneath her shirt like they’re making a break for it too.

Lottie and Nicci don’t stop until they’re back in the familiar territory of the ground-floor teaching wing, both exhausted from the effort of descending two flights of stairs in their heels but relieved they didn’t inexplicably get lost this time, making the distance they travelled in the other direction all the more perplexing. Just as the pair of them turn to make their way back to the classroom, the lunch chimes sound over the PA system, which only confuses things further.

“Ooh, lunchtime!!” says Nicci, all terror apparently forgotten, clapping her hands in excitement.

“Doesn’t that seem a bit early?” Lottie asks, straightening her blazer around her copious chest for the hundredth time and shivering. Nicci shrugs, holding a finger to her pout in exaggerated perplexity.

“Where the hell have you two been?” demands Jessie, marching up to the pair of them at the head of a little gaggle of their school-uniformed peers. “You bitches had better not have been fingering each other in the supply closet; we were actually worried about you, you know!”

“Of course we weren’t!!” protests Nicci. “It would take much more than a finger to satisfy Lot-Lots, I’d definitely have to use my whole-“

“What she means,” Lottie says over Nicci’s squeak of outrage, “is we literally went up to Ms Fields’ office, knocked, got no reply, then came back down. That’s it.”

“Girl you were all morning,” scoffs Jessie, smoothing her voluminous red waves with a dismissive flick. “It’s been like, hours, probably.”

“We got lost!!” Nicci declares, totally without guile or shame.

“You got lost between class and the teachers’ offices,” says Jessie flatly, looking at Lottie with extreme scepticism. “Her I can believe, but you?”

“Look, it’s been a weird morning,” says Lottie, weariness evaporating off of her like steam. “Let’s just go and get lunch. What happened with class, anyway? Are we in trouble for leaving?”

“Nah, nobody ever showed up. We just sat there scoring points off the posh bints,” Jessie says, puffing out her ample chest a little. “Then Sasha started making out with that sarky bitch Amelia, because she’s a dumb slut who can’t control herself for five minutes, can she?-“ this directed at a sheepish-looking Sasha, whose uniform is definitely rumpled and lipstick smeared “-and it all went a bit Chloe, if you know what I mean.”

Now that Lottie’s looking for it, she notices a lot of the girls’ makeup is a mess, and Jessie’s skirt is definitely on backwards; they’ll get a caning at minimum if they encounter Ms Malynovskaya before they redo their looks for afternoon classes, although she imagines it might be tempered by the sale value of the footage from the cameras. She laughs with a sort of brittle, desperate relief at the temporary restoration of normalcy, however bizarre that might be on the face of things.

“Did that include Margot?” she asks, on impulse.

“Bitch never came back,” Jessie says dismissively. “Neither did Alice, when she went to look for the idiot after you two dipped. We figured maybe all four of you were hatefucking in a cupboard somewhere, but since you two apparently got lost, who knows?” she shrugs. “Maybe they did too.”

Chloe runs into the girls at the intersection between Medical and Teaching, just past the still-empty trophy corridor. She’s flushed and sweaty from struggling down the eerily deserted halls in her absurdly restrictive latex, and uncomfortably aware that it’s barely light enough to see the end of the corridor, despite the unbroken blue sky and calm sea still visible through the tall windows. She finished her shift, since there’s no easy way to leave Medical without being buzzed out by the duty nurse, but she spent it as far away from the bandaged man and his disturbing proclamations as she possibly could, which mostly meant counting tongue depressors and IV bags in the stockroom. Her presence outside the injured conditioning tech’s room seemed to barely warrant the arriving doctors’ notice, which was a relief; she just stood there blank-faced and silent until someone snapped at her to get back to work, which she jumped to obey. That something is really, fundamentally wrong couldn’t be clearer; since she left Medical she hasn’t passed a single staff member or student, and every last mirror has been warped further and further out of shape. As if, in a picture she can’t seem to stop her mind from drawing, something were pressing on it from the other side. She’s immensely relieved, then, to see the rest of the class rounding the corner ahead, and speeds up her rustling, creaking pace as best she can.

“Chlolo!” calls Nicci, waving like they’re being reunited after months apart.

“Awright, sluts?” Chloe says as breezily as she can manage, shoving her fears so far down inside herself that they land in a pool of Sugardick’s cum. “How was class time with next year’s last year’s models?”

“With… wait, next last year’s last… huh!?” Nicci trills, her face a perfectly sculpted picture of confusion.

“Don’t worry about it, babes,” says Chloe automatically, although Lottie’s snickering indicates it wasn’t lost on everyone.

“Ms Fields never turned up, and Lottie made Margot cry so hard she just straight-up stopped existing, so you know, it was alright,” replies Jessie with a combative air, posing like an exaggeratedly curvy runway model. “What about you? Had fun doing the worst job on the rota when you didn’t even have to, you weird pervert?”

“Dunno what you mean,” says Chloe, with an incredibly unconvincing air of innocence, because Jessie is a snitch second only to Chloe herself when there’s praise and/or a dick on the table.

“Right, because legging it back to the dorm before first chime with jizz dripping down your chin is just a normal morning for you, isn’t it?” Jessie responds, and the pair of them are by now almost touching tit-to-tit, shirt and tie to thick rubber apron, eyes locked on one another’s in what both of them sincerely still believe is pure rivalry.

“So what if it is?” asks Chloe, all fear temporarily forgotten, moving a half-step closer, breathing hard. Then Lottie takes both of them firmly by the arms and drags them bodily toward lunch, because she really, fervently doesn’t want to hang around in the gradually darkening corridor, listening to the distant, troubling sounds she’s becoming convinced are getting gradually louder, while the two of them resolve their struggle for superiority literally the only way they know how.

 

-

 

Lottie, Nicci and Chloe share their recent findings with the rest of the class between long draws on suggestively-shaped meal containers and mouthfuls of creamy sustenance. Jessie and the others are disinclined to believe Chloe’s story about the jars in the trophy corridor spontaneously starting to boil, but they can’t deny that the grisly mementoes are demonstrably absent. Everyone’s seen the encroaching darkness and the warped mirrors, although electrical faults and ‘a weird reaction to a new kind of polish’ provide just enough of a rational explanation to keep anyone from descending completely into panic. Tales of endless labyrinths in the teaching wing and doomsaying technicians in Medical are dismissed out of hand as overactive imaginations and characteristic attention-seeking from Chloe respectively, but by then most of the girls seem much less confident in their mocking laughter. More worrying still is the continued shortage of staff; presumably there’s someone behind the serving hatch, and there’s one guard in the room, but that number should be at least three, and it isn’t anyone Chloe knows well enough to pump for information while he’s fingering his taser and glancing nervously around the room, leading her to suspect he’s been drafted on short notice from elsewhere in the facility. All of the other girls in the hall are similarly huddled in furtive knots, and Chloe’s attempts to call out to Aisha or Zoey or any of the senior trainees from the girls’ sister class are met with a meaningful tapping of the guard’s baton, so comparing notes isn’t happening. Notable by their absence are Margot’s matrimonial class; their more advanced counterparts, who none of the trio know by anything but their sneers and casual cruelty, are present, but the girls’ familiar foes haven’t turned up at all. Before she can really interrogate that, the second-period chimes are sounding, and it’s back to the dorm for Chloe and the rest so they can find out what awaits them in the afternoon.

Ms Malynovskaya has never been such a welcome sight to Chloe, at least with her clothes on, and it’s all she can do to stop herself running up to the dorm mistress and hugging her. Which, given her clear expression of profound impatience and the wicked cane she’s swishing back and forth, would probably end in tears. Chloe notes that all the warped mirrors have been removed from their frames during the girls’ absence, leaving blank rectangles of unfinished wall and impenetrably black two-way glass where she’d expect to see her own sexy pout and impeccable tits, a little burst of narcissistic pleasure she’s come to relish and is disappointed to be denied, even if she feels a profound relief at the disturbing sight being gone.

“I hope you all enjoyed free period this morning,” Ms Malynovskaya snaps, obviously displeased in the extreme. “Do not expect it to be repeated. Now, there has been something special organised for this afternoon,” she says, and from the look on her face Chloe guesses she’d rather it hadn’t. “Formal uniforms, girls, and refresh makeup. One hour. Dawdle and I will make you sorry. Go! Now!”

The class at large hastens to obey; Chloe, heart in her mouth, rustles to a halt and awkwardly curtseys as she passes Ms Malynovskaya.

“Er, please, Miss, a few of us has noticed some stuff that don’t seem quite right this morning, and some of the other girls are worrying a bit, Miss. So I was wondering if maybe I could ask-“

She’s interrupted by a sharp crack across her thighs with the cane, albeit one somewhat dulled by the layers of latex. “You may not! Idiot girl!” the mistress snaps, fury in her eyes along with something that might almost be fear underlying it. “Speak only when spoken to. Stupid, stupid. One more demerit, and report to my office later for further punishment. Now get moving. And shower first, you are sweating like slutty hog!”

“Yes Miss, sorry Miss, right away Miss!” Chloe says, hurrying away in the direction of the bathroom, although privately she’s starting to wonder whether demerits really matter that much any more.

When she strides into the dressing room, still drying off her tanned, toned, Insta-ready body with a fluffy pink towel and wearing nothing but her chastity cage, there’s another welcome sight waiting for Chloe: Violet, looking mostly recovered after her time in Medical and presently suffering the ministrations of Lily, Tamara and Felicia as they attempt to squeeze her into the formal uniform. Chloe shoos them away and sets about doing the poor bewildered girl’s makeup for her while she can still sit down relatively easily, which brings her conveniently into range for a surreptitious interrogation. There’s still something profoundly discomfiting about being in close proximity to Violet, and Chloe can’t figure out exactly what it is, but she knows to expect it now and is trying hard not to hold it against the girl.

“Feeling better, then?” she asks, while dabbing spots of dark cream contour stick just below Violet’s surgically lowered hairline and reconstructed cheekbones. Being so close really highlights the quality of the work done on the girl; Chloe’s spent countless happy hours staring at her own sculpted face, and Violet has even fewer of the subtle markers left by extensive surgery. Not that Chloe would choose Violet’s delicate, understated beauty over her own; she loves her bold, over-sexed, unashamedly artificial look. Perhaps a little too much, if the number of times she’s been caught making out with the mirror are any evidence.

“I’m okay, I guess,” Violet murmurs, as Chloe goes to work with a blending sponge. “They said there was nothing wrong with me, although the… erm, the brainwashing or whatever, I guess that didn’t take.”

Chloe laughs lightly, keeping her hand steady while she works on Violet’s eyes. “Yeah, I’m not surprised; a session normally takes the whole day. You was only in there for half an hour or so, by the sound of it. And you still don’t remember what happened?” she asks, as gently as she can manage. “’Cause things have been getting a bit weird out here, babes, and I can’t help thinking whatever happened to you is kind of maybe… still happening?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Violet replies, looking more distraught than Chloe expected. She goes silent for a short time, while Chloe lines and fills in her lips with a dusty pink from the untouched selection in the girl’s brand-new vanity. “That man in the next room died,” she says, eventually, in a small voice.

“Damn,” Chloe says, although privately she’s thinking that on the basis of what he said to her, the poor guy was probably relieved.

“I do remember… something else,” Violet says, almost dreamily. Chloe pauses mid-stroke with the blusher and focuses intently on whatever’s about to come out of the girl’s mouth. “It came back to me when I was lying in the hospital bed. I remembered… I was lying in my own bed, just the same way… this was before, you know? Before here. Before all this. And I remember them… they came in, and grabbed hold of me, and covered my head with something, and… and then they took me away, and I knew it was to somewhere terrible. Just the worst place in the world.”

“Oh. Yeah,” says Chloe, disappointed in the lack of a real revelation. “That happened to all of us, babes. It’s how we got here, innit. Well, except Jessie is convinced Felicia volunteered, but I think that’s just her being a bitch.”

“No, no, this was- like I said, it was before, long before any of this. I was… I don’t know, ten? They came, and they took me… somewhere, down and down all these stairs to where it was cold and damp, and through the big door with all the stone around it, and there was such a strong feeling… remember I said there was someone else in the room, when those men killed themselves? They were there then, too. And I don’t know, it’s all hazy, but there was this sound, and I keep thinking I hear it…“

“What’s it sound like?” Chloe asks, lip wand hanging slack in her hand.

“I genuinely can’t describe it,” Violet says, shaking her head. “I feel like there just aren’t the words.”

“Okay, I’m officially freaking out that you’re the second person who’s said that today,” Chloe tells her, heartbeat loud in her own ears.

“What does it mean?” asks Violet, as if Chloe would know.

“No clue, babes. Let’s just make it through the rest of the day, I guess, and then we’ll see.”

 

-

 

The special activity that afternoon turns out to be a mock garden party, held on the front lawn of the Blue Rose under a cloudless blue tropical sky. The structure rises four storeys behind the girls like a combination of high-end spa resort, boarding school and billionaire’s secret getaway; beautifully-ornamented white stone turns the sunlight dazzling, tall, narrow windows reveal dark wood and lavish drapes inside, and manicured, minimalist lawns and rock gardens leave sightlines open all the way out to the pristine sand and sparkling sea on every side. If anyone were to stumble on the place, they’d most likely think it some exclusive island resort or international criminal’s fortified mansion in the brief moments before they were shot, and in many ways they wouldn’t be wrong. There are certainly armed guards out on the grass with the girls; six in total, including Sugardick and Mr Daddy, and Chloe wonders whether the number was upped specifically because known flight risk Lottie is being allowed outside. The alternative explanations that arise aren’t especially reassuring, so she resolves to believe that’s the case.

The serving-girls are hurried along to where a large, round table has been set up beneath a white marquee that’s flapping like a sail in the ocean breeze, and there’s a variety of food, drinks and tableware ready to be laid out. The trophy wives’ absence from lunch suddenly makes sense: the girls are to serve them a selection of finger foods and sugary fancies while their betters practice making small talk, directing the help and making it look like they’re actually eating, in a facsimile of the sort of social setting they’ll be expected to navigate when their husbands claim them. Having to wait hand and foot on the horrible wives is excruciating for Chloe, Lottie, Nicci and the rest, and there’s probably a lesson in that, too, and a test of their ability to stay obedient and deferential while serving their serial tormentors. The girls are once again crammed into the stiff-sleeved, wasp-waisted dresses with absurdly short skirts that comprise the formal maids’ outfits, and are battling the difficulties they’re designed to present; the wind is constantly attempting to flash the girls’ panties, their spike heels are hardly ideal for walking on grass, and Violet in particular is having terrible trouble with the vicious corset and towering shoes.

For Chloe it’s something of a welcome return to the normalcy of intense humiliation, erotic denial and endless servitude, and after twenty minutes spent standing in line with the other girls, as motionless and anonymous as the garden furniture, drifting blissfully in lurid fantasies of cock, she’s beginning to wonder whether she didn’t let a power surge in the conditioning equipment, the subsequent failure of some lights, and a batch of defective mirrors send her down a fantastical rabbit-hole of imaginary peril. The trophy wives have finally made an appearance, runway-perfect and rail-thin to a girl, looking cage-tighteningly incredible in a variety of designer sundresses and hats that must have set the Blue Rose back a small fortune. The mysterious, vanishing Margot is among them, to Chloe’s grudging relief, although she seems oddly distracted, lagging listlessly behind her peers as if she’s in a trance. Chloe’s generalised anxiety about this is rudely dispelled before it can really coalesce into anything by someone snapping fingers imperiously in her face; the ironically named Virginia, a breathtaking beauty gifted by the chair with an almost comically snobbish affect.

“You. I say, you. Maid. We are ready to be seated. Attend us at once!” the girl snaps, her accent so upper-class it’s practically married to its cousin.

“Yes, Ma’am, right away, Ma’am,” Chloe says, executing a crisp curtsey while one side of her mind strangles the snooty bitch and the other longs to be demeaned by her all day. The exercise is being overseen by two trainers, Mr Halliwell and Ms Carter, and the latter of these taps Lottie and Nicci on their backs, sending them trotting forward with Chloe to smoothly pull out the wives’ chairs for them as they take their places around the beautifully-laid table. Not a single one of the matrimonial girls lets the interaction pass without some sneering comment directed at the servants, at least until they reach Margot; by contrast, she and Alice sit without a word, moving almost too smoothly, as if they’ve been replaced by mannequins. Chloe isn’t complaining, exactly, and the thought of someone being replaced by a mannequin is honestly a huge turn-on, but the shift in personality straight after Margot and her chief hanger-on went missing for the whole morning doesn’t leave her feeling great about things.

While this is going on, the instructors have tasked a handful more girls with retrieving platters of food and bringing them to the table. One of these is Violet, and to say that Chloe is nervous about her performance in this exercise would be a gigantic understatement. If it weren’t an area of thought made difficult to focus on by her conditioning, Chloe would be of the opinion that it’s kind of unfair to expect the new girl to perform alongside the rest of them, since she’s had no training whatsoever and hasn’t even been properly conditioned herself. But then, the Blue Rose isn’t exactly famed for its even-handedness, and this certainly wouldn’t be the first time one or all of the serving-girls have been set up to fail; Chloe can’t deny that struggling to complete an impossible task and being punished for failing is one of the most deliciously demeaning things to happen to her. Lottie and Chloe did try to give Violet a crash course in service on their way down to the main doors, but trying to pack more than a year of intensive training into five minutes was always a doomed endeavour, especially when Nicci wasted a good three of those telling a rambling story she turned out to have forgotten both the point and the end of.

“May I offer the ladies a glass of wine?” Chloe asks the table at large, taking the initiative while her fellow maids glide back and forth, smoothly delivering platters of tiny sandwiches and beautifully-decorated miniature cakes for the girls to artfully push around their plates. Moving at the measured pace they’ve all been made to practice for endless hours, wordlessly avoiding collisions with the others like a faceless, nameless part of an intricate machine, she makes her way to the catering table and retrieves a bottle of expensive white in the little pail of ice that’s serving to counteract the midday heat, lays a white cloth over one arm and glides back just in time to see disaster strike Violet. The girl still isn’t managing her heels well, and almost in slow motion Chloe watches her trip over herself and launch a whole tray-load of scones across the table, upending glasses and wrecking the meticulous arrangements on the other platters. The wives’ artfully vapid small-talk stops dead, and is quickly replaced by a chorus of outraged cries of ‘stupid girl!’ and ‘clumsy cow!’ and the like, as both instructors circle menacingly, watching, like sharks who’ve scented blood.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I mean, Ma’am, or Ma’ams, I suppose, er… I’ll just get those, terribly sorry, whoops, there we go,” Violet’s babbling, and if Chloe wasn’t so committed to her own blank-faced, affectless table-service act, she’d have her head in her hands. Lottie and Cecily are helping pick up the errant scones as best they can in their formal uniforms, but Violet herself is mostly just panicking and stammering and repeatedly trying to curtsey, which only succeeds in giving the impression she really needs the toilet. To Chloe’s horror, the awful bitch Tegan waits til Violet’s down low, then with great ceremony and no small amount of encouragement from the rest of her class, picks up the large bowl of clotted cream that was meant to accompany the scones, and dumps the entire thing on Violet’s head. Violet squeals and tries to wipe the thick, glutinous mess out of her hair, which only results in it getting all over her dress and face as well. The table of wives-to-be erupts in cruel laughter, and Chloe reaches the table just in time to see Violet slip in the patch of cream that’s landed beneath her, and land on her ass in a pile of sodden underskirts with an audible squelch. Now she’s crying, and repeatedly skidding and sliding as she tries to regain her feet and only manages to cover herself even more completely in muddy goop. Chloe desperately wants to help her, but with both teachers hovering nearby and tacitly approving of the wives’ cruelty, she doesn’t dare. She’s just about to serve Violet’s tormentors wine while the poor girl suffers and struggles, which feels simultaneously wonderfully obedient and like a terrible betrayal, when abruptly a commotion starts up from two of the guards stationed on the ocean side of the lawn.

Chloe distinctly hears the word ‘boat’ amid the shouting, said repeatedly in tones of disbelief. Two more guards have by now joined their fellows on the rocky promontory facing the sea, and the pair of instructors are jogging to catch up, leaving the girls largely to their own devices. There’s the repeated crackling of a voice emanating from a walkie-talkie, presumably giving the guards their orders, and Chloe takes the opportunity to help the sodden, sobbing Violet to her feet while everyone’s distracted. The trainee wives are all out of their seats, craning their necks to see whatever’s got the guards so worked up, and the maids have largely paused their tasks to do the same, sensing that this might be somewhat bigger than their training exercise.

“Are you okay?” asks Lottie, arriving from behind Chloe and Violet, still carrying a silver platter with half a dozen champagne flutes and with Nicci close at her heels.

Violet does not seem okay; she’s still crying as she despondently flicks globs of cream to the ground and tries pointlessly to clean her dress. “Is this what my life’s going to be like now?” she wails. “Just pointless work and cruelty and… and looking like some stupid doll, and getting degraded while everyone laughs at me, and I just have to smile and curtsey and take it? Act like I like it?”

“Don’t worry, Vivi! After they take you to the chair again, you will like it!” Nicci supplies, and this is clearly not what Violet needed to hear.

“Also there’s usually dicks involved somehow, which is a big plus in my book,” Chloe feels compelled to add, as someone who’s been to the chair and does indeed now like it. Violet bursts into a new round of wracking sobs, as Lottie takes her gently by both shoulders and waits for her to meet her eyes.

“You get used to it,“ she tells her, kindly but with a distinct note of bitterness in her voice. “And at least you won’t be alone, okay? You’ve got Chloe, Nicci and me. Promise.”

Violet never gets to respond, because just then the sirens discreetly mounted to the exterior of the Blue Rose begin sounding an intermittent blast of noise, last heard when the facility’s most persistent amateur escape artist was missing from morning inspection. One of the matrimonial class lets out a rather undignified shriek of “There’s a BOAT!”, and some judicious squinting does indeed reveal, to the girls’ collective amazement, a small vessel approaching the island. By now there are blue-uniformed guards streaming out of the main doors, a red-faced Mr Warner among them, and both classes of girls seem to have been completely forgotten.

“What’s so exciting about one little boat?” sniffs Violet, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin Nicci stole from somewhere.

“Oh, honey,” Lottie says, sounding unintentionally a little condescending. But then, this is her specialist subject. “This is not an island that gets drop-in visitors. They keep it off the maps and the satellite images somehow: money and connections, I imagine. There’s one boat every three months, scheduled literally a year in advance, beaming out some sort of special transponder code so the defences don’t activate.”

“Defences?” asks Violet, wiping pointlessly at her ruined dress.

“Sea mines, depth charges? I don’t know, I just know they go bang when there’s a boat,” Lottie says with a shrug. “You think that’s excessive, do you see that rocky outcrop over there? That’s a disguised surface-to-air missile battery.”

“Good grief! All that, to keep us in? To stop anyone trying to rescue us?”

Lottie lets out a bitter ‘hah’’. “Nobody’s trying to rescue us. It’s to stop anyone seeing what happens here and getting away. Think about it; this place is funded and patronised by some of the richest people in the world, and everything they do here is so immoral and illegal it probably counts as a war crime. They might act through proxies and shell companies and whatever, but there’s still gonna be some sort of trail to follow. So, missiles and mines and who knows what else, to stop anyone getting a hint of that trail. For a boat to have gotten this close without the satellite radar or the AI optics spotting it is… I don’t know. I’d have said impossible. And the mines haven’t gone off, obviously. Whoever it is and whatever they want, I would really like to know how they managed this.”

“Lottie,” says Chloe warningly. “Don’t you be backsliding, girl.”

A few of the bolder girls from both classes creep gradually up the nearby rise to try for a better view, but none demonstrate curiosity as powerful or self-control as lacking as Chloe, who brazenly goes all the way to the rocky edge and peers down. The guards, who’ve been arranged into a defensive formation on the beach by Warner and are pointing serious-looking automatic weapons at the incomer, seem to neither notice nor care. The boat’s small and seriously weather-beaten; it looks like a fishing vessel, with peeling paint and rusty fittings, and Chloe’s amazed it made the trip, although she’ll admit that with no way to know where the island actually is, she has no idea how far it’s come. It putters and chugs its way up to the shallows, and where Chloe expects it to stop or drop anchor or whatever boats do, it just steams on and beaches itself with a horrible grinding squeal at the centre of a rapidly narrowing circle of guards. She can hear Warner yelling through a megaphone, the standard spiel about stop, lay down, hands on your head and so on, but truthfully if he isn’t calling anyone a cumbucket she isn’t all that interested in what he has to say. Far more arresting is the figure making its way over the rail and through the surf like a ragged, flapping seabird: he appears to be the boat’s only occupant, and frankly he looks like a lunatic. He could be anywhere between thirty and seventy, so little of his face is visible between lank hair and wild, salt-crusted beard, and his bare, wiry arms and legs stick out like twisted, tattooed branches from what might almost be a monk’s habit. He’s ranting and raving as he approaches the guards, gesticulating in anger or frustration. Chloe hears Warner yell a clear ‘final warning!’, and at last the intruder seems to hear, stopping abruptly as if his feet were suddenly welded to the sand. He’s close enough now that his voice is just about audible to Chloe, a hoarse and utterly unexpected mixture of West Country farmer and frothing, sermonising zealot.

“Render unto me the Vessel and we won’t have to have no trouble, will we?” the intruder barks at the nearest guard. “At least, hah, in what time there is left. Then there’ll be trouble, oh yes indeed there will, and them what isn’t right with the Lord might well consider pissin’ ‘emselves ahead of time, aye, they might well.”

“You are trespassing on private land! Place your hands above your head and lay down on the ground immediately!” Warner bellows, heedless of the man’s bizarre rant.

“I knew it! I knew!” the scraggly figure crows. “I can feel it, oh, I feel it, the one, the one, the shattered watcher, the locus o’th’ sublime is here, here, so close as ter touch! Kneel, yer callow sods, kneel an’ beg fer absolution, for the day is almost dawned!” The man’s volume rises to a throat-shredding crescendo of deranged piety; one spindly arm shoots up to point not at Chloe, as she initially, breathlessly fears, but slightly off to one side and below her, finger jabbing at an area of bare cliffside distinguished by nothing she can see.

“Final warning! Surrender or we will open fire!” Warner hollers, his amplified voice still struggling to top the deranged interloper’s sheer fervid mania.

“Lo, the Vessel! Open yer minds ter the infinite and weep, for there is no stoppin’ what has been set in holy motion!” the man cries, lurching suddenly forward, up the beach and toward the facility. He makes it exactly two steps before there’s a shot, and the intruder falls face-first into the surf. Behind Chloe, the few of the girls who saw what happened are screaming; Lottie’s just standing there in shock, while Jessie’s giggling, but it’s definitely trauma-induced. Chloe’s shocked, for sure, but she’s mostly left wondering what the hell just happened: how what appears to have been a half-starved transient could have found the Blue Rose, how he evaded detection, why on Earth he didn’t stop when faced with the business ends of thirty rifles. She’s pretty sure she’s never seen anyone die before - and the sheer quantity of blood in the breakers makes it pretty unequivocal that she has now - but she finds herself curiously unmoved as she makes the appropriate noises and gives hugs as required, while the girls mill about fountaining tears and a relay race of guards brings out a body bag and spirits the corpse inside the facility at double time.

“Fuck are you pairs of tits still doing standing around out here? Get inside before I give the lot of you a kicking!” yells Warner on his second or third trip past the directionless group of captives, his abuse sounding for once like his heart isn’t really in it. Nevertheless a couple of guards hurry to enforce his orders, and the girls find themselves herded back inside at taser-point like a flock of sheep, confused, distraught and lost.

That the facility isn’t exactly operating with its usual frictionless efficiency is evident from the way the class is trooped back to their dorm and left there without any specific instructions; the wives are taken toward their own quarters, and are presumably in the same situation. Lottie and Nicci help Violet undress and shower off the gunk, and once she’s out of the awkward uniform the others gradually take it as tacit permission to change as well. It’s too early to get into their nightgowns, and nobody wants to be disciplined for being improperly dressed if the day does somehow deliver more lessons, so what begins as a ten-way argument about what to wear rapidly becomes an impromptu dress-up session. By the end there are two nurses, two Playboy bunnies, one Catwoman, two sexy secretaries, a flight attendant, two cheerleaders (one of them Violet, who the others lost track of long enough for Nicci to get her hands on her) and a Regency-era lady (because Cecily has refined tastes), and everyone is sure they’re collectively going to be in trouble whatever the activity. Relief that nobody subsequently comes to check on them gradually gives way to worry that nobody will, then hunger when the sun drops well below the point they’d have expected the evening-meal chimes to sound. The dorm door is as unlocked as ever, but after an investigatory peek out into the pitch-black corridor, from which some indistinct but troubling banging, scraping noises are just about audible in the distance, Chloe thinks better of trying it, and anyway isn’t sure where she’d be going; it’s not as if the kitchens are accessible, and the dining hall is only useful if someone’s actually sending their meals up. It’s a mercy, then, when the half-forgotten dumbwaiter in the corner emits a grating buzz, making half the girls jump out of their skins, and delivers eleven protein shakes. But with no chimes, no announcements and no Ms Malynovskaya, the girls are adrift in a way they’ve never been since they each first woke in the White Room.

 

-

 

As evening draws into night and the automated shutters on the windows hum smoothly closed, the disturbing snatches of sound coming from the corridors - half-heard mumbling, a sporadic long, low groan, and most worryingly, what sounds decidedly like a heavy, squelching sack being dragged over the floorboards - only intensify. The girls are huddled together in the middle of the dorm, most wrapped in pink duvets taken from their beds, and loud, defiant chatter is entirely failing to distract them from the uncertainty of the situation outside.

Abruptly, Nicci shrieks, which sets off three or four of the others, without even knowing what they’re screaming about. While everybody was trying to take their minds off things, she’s crept over to one of the shuttered windows, and was peering nervously through the gaps into the night despite, in Chloe’s opinion, not being likely to see anything other than her own reflection.

“He was thereeeee!!!” she gasps, breathless, pom-poms clutched protectively against her chest.

“Who was, Nics? What happened?” demands Chloe, grabbing the panicking girl and pulling her back into the tenuous safety of the middle of the room.

“I, I, I heard something outside!! It was a voice and it was like, calling my name, and I knew nobody would blelieve me so I went to look and he was there, his nasty smelly old beardy face!! And he looked at me and he smiled, Chlolo, and it was so scaryyyyyy!!!!”

“It’ll have been a guard on patrol, Nics,” says Lottie, instinctively squeezing the smaller girl tight.

“Yeah,” Chloe agrees, straightening her flight attendant’s hat, although she doesn’t feel anything like as certain as she’s trying to sound. “You didn’t see it, but that guy is dead as. Promise.”

“What if he’s dead and that’s still him out there, though?” whispers Tamara, painted eyes wide in exaggerated fear. “What if he’s a ghost, or… or a zombie?”

Jessie snorts. “Maybe he’s a werewolf, Tammy. It’s even full moon.”

“Well, you don’t know, maybe they-“

Now it’s Felicia’s turn to scream. “I heard it! I heard it too! It was right out there!” she stammers, pointing an inch-long scarlet nail at the window behind her, on the opposite side to where Nicci did. “And I was close enough to hear him yelling when the, you know, stuff happened, so don’t try and tell me I don’t know! It was his horrible scratchy voice, mumbling and cursing, and it was just outside the window!”

“Alright, listen, just stay away from the windows, yeah? It’s not like anyone can get in even if there is someone there,” Chloe says, starting to get caught up in the panic despite herself.

“Oh! Oh, I hear him!” exclaims Jessie, and if she isn’t going to win any prizes for acting, she has at least half the other girls absolutely rapt, huddling closer and closer together in the very centre of the room as she theatrically cups her ear. “He says… oh, false alarm, girls, it’s just Nicci’s owner here to collect her.”

“No it’s not!! Stop it!!!” squeaks Nicci, ineffectually covering her ears.

“Yeah, he says he’s renamed his manky old boat Nicci’s Dream House and you’re gonna be his sea-wife, Nics. Bet you can’t wait to get your lips around that wrinkly cock, can you, you lucky girl?”

Nicci fully squeals and kicks her legs in disgust, and Lottie has to catch her before she tips over backwards.

“Leave her alone, Jessie,” says Lottie, warningly.

“Funny how the only ones seeing all these spooky, scary things are Chloe and her little gang,” Jessie says conversationally to the room at large, seemingly unbothered by the continuing sounds, real or imagined, that have at least some portion of the others jumping like startled cats every few seconds. “For all we know she’s got no idea what she’s even seeing; how often have any of you known her to go five straight minutes without spacing out thinking about dicks?”

“I know what I seen, Jess,” Chloe snaps, shooing away the big, hard dicks that had been creeping into her mind’s eye. “He was ranting and raving about some vessel or something, and flapping his weird robe around, then Mr Warner shot him in the chest and they took him to the morgue in a bag. End of story.”

“Did you say ‘vessel’?” asks Violet, who’s been withdrawn even by her usual standards since the sounds started up, and has barely said a word in an hour or more.

“Yeah, I thought maybe he meant another boat, or something,” Chloe says. “Why?”

“I don’t know, I just… I thought I remembered something…” Violet tails off, and falls silent again. Chloe squeezes her hand in concern, but nothing more seems forthcoming.

“Of course I believe you, but it seems like the others are a bit doubtful, Chloe; I think they need some proof,” Jessie says, oozing insincerity, a smirk forming in defiance of the whispers and soft susurrus that all the girls can faintly hear now. “That is, unless you’re scared too. Scared of the ghost man, or scared of being found out, hmm?”

“How old are you, Jessie?” sighs Lottie, who’s been busy trying to keep Nicci from complete screaming panic, but she knows she’s powerless to arrest the feud-fueled momentum that’s built while she was occupied.

“Scared?” laughs Chloe, refusing the bait. “I ain’t lying, hon, and I ain’t stupid neither. I’m staying put because there actually is something really weird going on - and I was the first one to notice it, by the way, not like anyone believed me.”

“Oh honey, I know you like to act tough, but when it comes down to it… well, maybe there really are terrible things out there, waiting, lurking in the dark,” Jessie says, hamming it up terribly but hitting close enough to a very large mark to have the other girls squealing in terror and huddling closer together. Seeing this, she gets frustrated and actually stamps a foot. “Or maybe Chloe’s just trying to be the centre of attention again with all this doom stuff; come on, she’s got you hiding under your blankets and screaming at every creak just because there’s a power cut and the staff’s busier than normal. You’re all being ridiculous! She just wants attention, as usual!”

“Stop being an idiot, Jessie,” Chloe snaps. “You can’t seriously think there’s nothing wrong. What about the stuff me and Lottie and Nicci seen today? What about the noises? Has a teacher ever been so busy they missed class before?”

“You know what? Fine! I’ll show everyone that you three are just trying to scare them when there’s a simple explanation for everything!” Jessie declares, springing to her feet, curves emphasised by her bunny-girl outfit with its tight, corseted body and pom-pom tail, even if it undermines her seriousness just a little.

“Oh my god, just let it go, will you? Nobody cares,” Chloe exclaims in exasperation.

Jessie, of course, immediately doubles down. “No, listen: I’m going to march down to the morgue, and I’m going to snap a photo of this dead guy, lying exactly where the guards put him, and nothing is going to happen. And then maybe everyone can stop panicking about zombies and ghosts and indulging Chloe and her stupid stories!”

Jessie storms over to the cabinet where the custom-built phones, entirely lacking in communication capabilities, on whose cameras the girls are expected to take a strict quota of revealing selfies per week are kept. She snatches one up, flicks on the screen to serve as an incredibly weak flashlight and straightens her bunny ears before marching toward the door.

“Jessie, seriously, it’s not safe,” Chloe says, unsure if she’s more against Jessie endangering herself or getting a significant leg-up in their ongoing squabble by looking braver than she is.

“That’s what you want me to think, isn’t it?” Jessie says, and whether she’s been conditioned to be this stubborn or has arrived at it entirely under her own power, both Chloe and Lottie are independently considering hitting her over the head and tying her up.

“You know what, Jess? Fine. If you’re going, I’m coming too,” Chloe declares, to gasps from the trembling costume party in the middle of the room. “At least that way we can watch out for each other, innit.”

“As if there’s anything to watch out for,” Jessie sniffs, but there’s a definite undertone of relief there.

“Chlo-Chlo, no!!” wails Nicci. “I really think there’s sonethimg, like, super bad out there!! And I don’t want my Chlolo to get…” she whispers the next word as if it’s the worst peril she can envision, “…eaten!!!”

“Chloe, this is stupid. Just let her go,” Lottie says, sounding as frustrated with Chloe as she is with Jessie.

“Can you imagine how much trouble we’ll get in if we watch her walk out there alone and she don’t come back?” Chloe says, trying a different tack. Lottie looks unconvinced, to say the least.

“And this has nothing at all to do with you not wanting her to look better than you, which would be an insane reason to risk your life?” she says.

“No!” Chloe says, with feeling. “You really think I give a f…udge how I look next to her?”

“Hah!” Jessie spits.

“Well, you’re not seriously going out there with just the two of you,” Lottie says, flatly.

“We’ll be fine,” Chloe replies, all bravado now she’s committed.

“No, I mean if you’re really stupid enough to go, I’m coming too,” Lottie says, maneuvering her considerable assets from sitting to standing, never a simple operation. She’s dressed as a spectacularly unprofessional secretary, for reasons she now can’t entirely recall, and she’s having serious trouble keeping both tits inside the tiny blouse while walking in the tight pencil skirt and towering heels, although the purely cosmetic glasses do give her a slight air of authority. Nicci emits a wordless squeak of distress and jumps to her feet beside Lottie, pigtails flying and pom-poms clutched protectively to her crop top, on which is emblazoned the word SLUT in place of a team name, although arguably that’s the real team everyone present is playing for whether they like it or not.

“You can’t leave me here all alone!!” she protests. She appears to become aware of a few reproachful stares from the other girls, and amends, “I mean, not alone alone but like, alone with people who I… I mean, I don’t, I’d just feel… I’m coming, okay!?!”

Chloe gets to her feet, adjusts her pillbox hat and silk scarf, and grabs each of them one of the cameras, with which they can cast at least a little light.

“Can you even get to the morgue?” asks Lily, looking up at the four of them with wide, teary eyes from under a very pink blanket. “I thought Medical was locked down at night?”

“Morgue’s outside Medical, innit,” says Chloe, feigning confidence to cover the growing sense she has that she’s mid-mistake and incapable of applying the brakes. “You go down past the security office, take a left into the utility room, then down the fire exit stairs to the back door of Medical. The morgue’s on the right, just before the proper keycard door. You can’t get in, but you can take a picture through the window, no worries.”

“I’m afraid to ask how you know this,” Lottie says.

“I’m not always hunting for dick when I go out after hours, you know,” Chloe says reproachfully.

“Yes you are.”

“Alright, yeah, but sometimes I get lost, okay?”

“Vivi, are you coming too???” asks Nicci, possibly hoping for another warm body to put between herself and danger. There’s no response from Violet, who appears to have retreated entirely into her own head and is rocking slightly, to Lottie’s obvious concern.

“Violet, are you okay?” she asks, aware that she obviously isn’t but at a loss as to what else to say.

You are reading story The Blue Rose at novel35.com

“Hmmm… uhnmmnm… uuuhunm…” Violet hums, clearly reacting to the question but otherwise lost to the world.

“I think maybe she’s just tired, innit,” Chloe says, feeling uncharacteristically protective. “She’s been through a lot the last few days. Best she stays here. You lot had better look after her, all right?”

There’s a tremorous chorus of assent from the other girls, and Sasha wraps a spare blanket around Violet to show willing. Chloe nods approvingly and marches boldly over to join the little expedition where they’re waiting at the threshold, squashing the severe trepidation she’s feeling as far inside her as she can make it go, down with disgust and anger and all the other faint remembrances of a self she’s gladly shed.

In the pitiful, trembling light of the girls’ camera screens, the richly-appointed hallways of the Blue Rose take on a definite haunted-house quality. Every fitting, sconce and ornament outside the radius of the meagre illumination becomes some shifting, oily thing, reaching to grab at the girls, only to reform into a mimicry of the familiar when the torch beam touches it. It doesn’t make Chloe feel any better that she’s only maybe eighty per cent sure what they’re seeing is a trick of the light.

The way to the back stairs has never felt so long or winding; the other three are following Chloe as she leads them past shuttered windows and darkened classrooms, and she swears she’s taking them the right way, but they inexplicably keep ending up in places that shouldn’t even be close to the route they’re meant to be taking, or more worryingly, places that seem subtly wrong in a way that shouldn’t be possible. What little remains of Chloe’s rational mind between the conditioning and the oppressive dread she’s feeling is insisting the darkness and the fear are messing with the girls’ heads, but exactly how confused they’d have to be in order to believe they’d wandered upstairs without noticing and encountered a hitherto unseen corridor featuring nameplates with backwards characters that hurt their eyes to read, she can’t say.

“Are we ever going to get there?” Jessie pipes up, from her commanding position at the back. “Where are we, even? Are you just leading us in circles?”

“I think we’re right on top of the wives’ dorm, actually,” Chloe whispers. The foursome are crossing an intersection she’s pretty sure she recognises, and with extreme haste; there are unpleasantly moist, fleshy sounds emanating from the girls’ bathroom to their right, and unless Chloe’s wildly off the mark in her read of her fellow trainees, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone’s having a quickie in there on this particular night.

“Thank god, we’ll be safer in there than out here,” Lottie mutters back, swinging her paltry torch from side to side in the desperate hope she won’t catch anything moving.

“We are not going begging to them for help,” Jessie replies, stamping a stiletto, which seems to provoke a sort of wet, slushy groan from somewhere off in the distance.

“Yeah, let’s all agree not to do that again, shall we?” Lottie whispers, glaring face like a death mask in the scant illumination.

“She’s got a point, though,” Chloe says to Jessie, waving her camera. “We could just drop in for a sec, couldn’t we? See what’s going on? If they’re having any, you know, hilarious panic fits that some enterprising sluts could video for future use, kind of thing.”

“Chloe, don’t you think we’ve got enough problems without making more?” Lottie says, but both of them know it’s futile.

“You saw what they was like with Violet earlier. They need bringing down a peg or two. Maybe we rattle the doorknob a bit, do some spooky moans, write ‘DIE BITCHES’ on the wall with this handy lipstick what I cleverly thought to bring. Then we video them wetting themselves in terror. It’ll be mint.”

“There’s already rattling and moaning, Chlolo, and it’s not coming from us!!” says Nicci, her voice trembling. “They’re properbly super-scared for real, just like I am!!!”

“Even better, we don’t have to do anything! I’ll just poke my head round the door and get a quick shot of them bricking it,” Chloe says. “Come on, it’ll be funny tomorrow.”

“Assuming there is a tomorrow,” Lottie murmurs, but by now she just wants the whole thing over with. She lets out a deep sigh. “Okay, whatever, just do it fast.”

Chloe slinks carefully around the corner and down the short hallway to the other dorm, walking as softly as it’s possible to in five-inch stilettos. The sound of her heels is jarringly loud with her tight flight attendant’s skirt keeping her steps short; she worries she’s about to be faced with ten maddened made-to-order wives intent on strangling the intruder with their pearls. Instead, she gradually becomes aware of a hum in a singularly unsettling register: like the drone of hundreds of insects or a wire bearing a lethal current, simultaneously loud enough to drown out all other sound and lingering just on the edge of hearing, as if it’s arriving in her brain without troubling her ears. Curiosity temporarily overriding self-preservation, Chloe creeps to the door, where the awful, throbbing hum is so omnipresent she can barely assemble a coherent thought - not her strongest suit at the best of times - and hesitantly pushes it open a crack, camera held up and ready to record.

Inside are all ten members of the matrimonial class, but they certainly aren’t cowering in the middle of the room as expected. Instead they seem evenly spaced around the perimeter, and Chloe’s confused by the scene for a second until she realises they’ve piled the broken remains of their beds and assorted other furniture in an unruly heap in the centre, and are now each standing, apparently suffering full-body tremors, in front of one of their full-length mirrors, which either weren’t removed like the subordinate class’s or have been replaced somehow. Front and centre is Margot, stark naked, her spare, elegant body daubed all over with bizarre symbols in lipstick or mascara. Chloe has a moment of wrenching vertigo as she realises the characters are the same as those the girls saw on the nameplates in that inexplicable hallway, and is doubly glad they decided against trying any of the doors. Margot’s head is tipped back to stare sightlessly at the ceiling, and she’s mouthing words but no sound is discernible over the deafening, silent hum, which it’s abundantly clear now is emanating from the shuddering mirrors themselves. In front of her kneels Alice, arms raised in supplication, wrists touching and hands splayed like a flower reaching for the sun. And Margot is indeed radiant; a sickly sort of blue-pale light appears to be pulsing from her milky skin, washing in oily waves over the girls shuddering and twitching in the glare of their own reflections. Everyone in the room seems lost in their private rapture, and they pay no attention to Chloe as her phone records a few seconds of footage while her mind reels in confusion and fear. She backs away, and she knows her heels are making noise but by now she’s unable to hear anything but that incessant, maddening hum, which feels like it’s strumming at her blood and her bones until they’re vibrating in sympathy. After a few increasingly hasty backward steps she can’t stand it any more, and fully breaks into as fast a run as she can manage, taking her back around the corner to where the other three are waiting breathlessly in a silence that should be impossible so close to the nightmare dorm.

“What is it? What’s going on in there?” Lottie asks, eyes wide, upon seeing Chloe’s dumbstruck expression. Chloe’s still catching her breath, so she wordlessly holds out her phone for Lottie to tap open the most recent video.

“What on Earth are they doing?” Jessie asks everyone and no-one, after the nine seconds have looped twice, caught somewhere between laughter and panic.

“It’s like there’s somebody talking inside the mirror!?” says Nicci, focusing uncharacteristically hard. “There was this time I thought I heard my refection tell me to get a coffee, but when I came back with one, Lily laughed and said it was like, just a guard in the obversation room on the other side, which I don’t really get?! But like, maybe there’s a guard telling the wifeys to jiggle and hum and be weird?!”

“I don’t think that’s it, Nics,” says Lottie, glancing nervously down the hall toward the wives’ dorm door, beneath which that eerie glow is starting to seep like tar.

“Margot’s got nice tits,” Chloe says, watching the video again, sounding a little shell-shocked. “You wouldn’t think to look at her, but… they’re nice tits.”

“So we’re going back to the dorm, right???” squeaks Nicci, nervously fiddling with a pom-pom. “We can put our blankets over our heads, our fingers in our ears and hopefully this’ll all be over by morning!!”

“Ohhh, I get it now; I see what this is,” says Jessie, with the air of someone upon whom a grand revelation is in the process of dawning. “You three little schemers set this up, didn’t you? You planned this whole thing! You’ve got your accomplices hiding somewhere making weird noises, you’re leading us in circles to mess with me, you even got the wives to act weird just to see me freak out! You really are obsessed with me, Chloe, and frankly it’s creepy! Well, there’s one place you can’t get at, and that’s the morgue! And when I go there and find the body exactly where it’s supposed to be, everyone will know how much of a batshit-crazy stalker you are!”

“Jessie, when they conditioned you, did the technician seem drunk?” Chloe asks, pulled back into the moment by the sheer force of Jessie’s obstinacy.

“We’re more than halfway there,” Lottie puts in. “If it’ll keep her quiet, maybe we should just, you know, finish what we started? I mean, while there’s no security or anything…”

“Lottie,” says Chloe warningly. “Tell me you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking. Those tits get any bigger, you’re gonna need a handcart to carry ‘em.”

“Just come on, Chlo,” Lottie murmurs, marching off toward the admin area without checking anyone’s following.

“Nooooo, Lottie-loo, I’m scaaaaaared!!!” Nicci whines, nevertheless dutifully hurrying along after her into the grasping dark, pom-poms and pigtails flying.

If anything, the inexplicable labyrinth that the Blue Rose seems to be striving to become is more fully manifest between the wives’ dorm and the admin office. The girls hurry through oak-panelled corridors completely devoid of windows or doors; they pass beneath the many-eyed gaze of portraits and busts they’re certain nobody in the facility would ever have commissioned. At one point they detour through a practice room laid out to imitate a dinner party, only to discover it impossibly merged in the middle with one of the intentionally archaic classrooms, wooden desks and dusty chalkboard and shackled demonstration table run together like wax. There’s even a faintly hissing crossover point where a row of desks become high-backed dining chairs, and there’s something about the precise transition that’s so profoundly unsettling nobody can stand to look at it for long. The inside of the locked admin room, where Chloe blew Sugardick what feels like a month ago, is darker somehow than the corridor; the girls’ reflections in the black surface of the window are strange and distended, as if the glass is stretching and deforming while they watch. Chloe hurries the group past, feeling inexplicably certain she saw something large shift restlessly in the inky absence on the other side. The distant squelching, moaning sounds haven’t abated, have grown wetter and thicker, somehow, but not any closer; it’s as if someone or something is following the girls at a distance, not bothering to disguise its presence but in no hurry to pounce. Finally, after a brief unintended diversion down a short hallway in which all the signage reads ‘ABSCESS’, the nondescript door to the utility room appears like a beacon of hope in the darkness.

“Thank fuck,” breathes Lottie. The four of them have paused outside the door, somewhat to catch their breath and somewhat because nobody really wants to be the first to face what horrors might lurk inside. Even Jessie, ostensibly the architect of the whole trip, is unusually quiet, and seems like her steel-plated denial might be proving surprisingly brittle under the weight of what they’ve experienced. “God, I’d never have suggested we carry on if I’d known it was like this,” Lottie murmurs, brow moving infinitesimally with guilt. “Does anyone else feel like… I don’t know, like reality might be kind of… melting?”

“You think maybe they’re putting something new in the meal shakes and we’ve all been off our tits and stumbling around in a storage cupboard for an hour?” asks Chloe, with a fleeting grin.

“We can but hope,” Lottie replies, with feeling, and opens the door.

Inside, the admin utility room is almost suspiciously normal. Unlike the places the girls’ cleaning supplies are stored, which are meticulously staged and very much front-of-house, this is halfway between the staff-only backrooms and the polished wood of the training-school facade; a fluorescent-lit cave of unpainted concrete with racks of metal shelving stocked with replacement parts, lightbulbs, fuses and so on. At the back, tucked away in a corner, is another door, leading to a drab grey metal stairwell that plunges two storeys into the earth, before ending at a cursory landing with a heavy steel high-security door on one side and a more ordinary passage leading to Medical and the morgue on the other. Technically the girls aren’t supposed to come down here at all, but Chloe’s serial midnight assignations and poor sense of direction mean she’s passingly familiar with all sorts of strange little spaces like this; she leads the others down with cautious confidence, peering into every corner and shadowy nook. The signs reading RESTRICTED AREA are both legible and the right way around, which is encouraging, but the fact the back door to Medical is hanging wide open to reveal a yawning, pitch-dark corridor is not. The identical door to its right, leading to the facility’s small but well-equipped morgue, is open too; so extremely open that only about half of it is still in its frame.

“So where’s the body?” Jessie demands, and Chloe tells herself that if the girl starts accusing the three of them of sneaking off and annihilating the heavy morgue door just to fuck with her, she’s getting ditched down there. The body bag lying detumesced on one of the stainless steel tables is very definitely empty, though, and very definitely torn open, and if that comes as a shock to the girls then it’s definitely a muted one after experiencing the Blue Rose’s apparent, ongoing slide into nightmare.

“Eww, there’s wet footprints over here!!” Nicci reports. “They go right into Medical!! But the door should be biomagically locked, so that must mean… the dead guy works here!??”

“You’ve cracked the case, babes,” Chloe replies, patting her on the head.

“It’s all real,” splutters Jessie, thunderstruck. “It’s all… I mean, the dead guy… and the wives, and, and the noises, and… we should tell someone! A guard, or a, a teacher! We need to tell someone what’s happening!”

“The first person we see, I promise you, we will tell the shit out of,” Lottie says.

Chloe snaps a couple of photos of the empty bag, the damp footprints and the trashed door, on the basis that evidence couldn’t hurt and is also likely to make her the centre of attention later, although she can’t imagine who she’s planning to show it to.

“So now what, fearless leader?” she asks the still-spiralling Jessie, insincerity rising off her like steam. “Off to tell everyone how I’m so obsessed with you I’ve got the whole place putting on a massive horror show with special effects and stuff just for you? Think all the staff are about to jump out and go ‘boo’? I mean, I’m not being funny, but if one of us is obsessed…”

“Whatever, it’s not like you can blame me, with the way you three bitches are always acting!” Jessie snaps, regaining her self-righteous tempo at record speed. “Sorry for trying to find a rational explanation, I guess. I mean, what is this? It’s ridiculous! This sort of thing just… it’s impossible! It doesn’t happen!”

“You know what else doesn’t happen? Getting kidnapped, taken to a secret island compound, surgically transformed into a girl and conditioned to be a sex toy for the super-rich,” Lottie spits, surprising Chloe, who had a comeback of her own ready and now feels a little backed up. “So maybe don’t worry about what does and doesn’t happen, and focus on helping us get out of the mess you’ve gotten us into, okay?”

“But why is this happening?” Jessie wails to nobody in particular, the idea of contrition bouncing off her armour-plated ego without leaving a mark. “Is it that man? Is this all him? Maybe if we find him, he can make it stop?”

“Oh, yeah, we’ll ask him nicely, I bet he’s lovely when you get to know him,” Lottie says, bitterness creeping into her voice. “Or maybe we can use some of the weapons the guards are always leaving unattended; they’re so easy to get hold of!”

“Well, we could at least follow him!” Jessie protests. “Better than standing around here doing nothing!”

“I am not going in there!! No no nope nopey no way!!” Nicci declares, peeking cautiously around the doorframe into the black expanse of Medical floor B2, from which nothing at all can be heard, which is somehow worse. Chloe shivers, and nods in heartfelt agreement.

“It’s not him anyway,” she says. “Can’t be. It was starting to happen last night, when I was coming back from fff- er, when I was in the halls. For no reason. And there’s the mirrors this morning, and Lottie and Nics getting lost trying to find Ms Fields, and, shit, Ms Fields, maybe… it seems like it started the day before, so what happened then?”

“Nothing!! It was a super-normal day with nothing undusual at all!! Oh, except, I guess there was…”

“Violet,” says Lottie, with all the weight of a coffin lid slamming down.

“Nah, come on, that ain’t fair, just ‘cause she’s new don’t mean she’s evil or nothing,” Chloe protests. The girls fall silent for a moment, and as has tripped her up so many times before, she lets her mouth carry on without supervision. “The fella on the beach did point sort of off to the side of me, though,” Chloe says. “He said something about a vessel. I thought he was on about another boat, but where he was pointing was right where you was all standing with her. So maybe he meant, like…”

“Like there’s something inside her,” Lottie concludes, voice hollow. All four girls look at each other wide-eyed, three with expressions of mute horror and one vacant perplexity.

“Vivi wouldn’t do this, she’s too nice and pretty!!!” protests Nicci, stalwart in her defence of someone she’s known for all of two days.

“You know, she might not even be aware she’s doing it,” Lottie muses, no happier than the others to suspect the stray the girls have adopted.

“You think maybe if she did know, she could make it stop?” Chloe says, grabbing at the faintest ray of hope, however tenuous.

Lottie shrugs. “It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard today.”

“Have you gone completely barking?” Jessie demands, incredulous. “We can’t go back! Did you see the wives? What makes you think our dorm is any different? Your new little friend is clearly possessed or evil or… or a ghost or something, and we have to get out of here!”

“They took the mirrors out of our room,” says Lottie. “They didn’t get to the other dorms before this all started. That might mean it’s not happening there. And anyway, take it from me: we can’t get outside. The outer doors are locked down tight, and the trick with the hairpin and the eyelash curlers won’t work a second time.”

“I’m not leaving Vivi anyway!!!” Nicci declares, arms folded in a picture of petulant defiance.

“Sounds like it’s three against one, babe,” Chloe says, looking smug despite the circumstances. Jessie rolls her eyes, but she clearly likes the idea of wandering the corridors alone even less than she does going along with someone else’s plan, so she manages almost the whole ascent back to the utility room without complaining once.

Chloe’s expecting the worst when the girls arrive back on the ground floor, but the facility’s metaphysical descent seems to have temporarily plateaued, or perhaps the dead man getting up and roaming the Medical wing has had an effect on things. Whatever the cause, the halls look more or less the way they did when the girls went down to the morgue; unlit, and somehow darker than they should be, filled with corner-of-the-eye twitches and flickerings and the eerie hint of wailing voices in the distance. Up and down, around and around the girls go, four pairs of heels click-clacking out a racket that seems almost obscene in the brittle quiet. They hurry past those mirrors that are still in place, mirrors that have become now flawless quicksilver expanses in which reflections look somehow too perfect, more real than real. At one point, after finally reaching the end of a hallway that opens on the dining hall once, twice, again and again, each time with the furniture and fittings differently arranged - tables upside down, standing on end, half-merged with the walls - the girls find themselves at the intersection leading to the wives’ dorm again. Any temptation to check on the other class is quickly dispelled by the way the awful, obliterating hum is audible even from the end of the hall now, and the sickly bluish light has fully escaped to flow like oil under the door and lap hungrily at the girls’ stilettos as they hurry by.

It’s halfway down an endlessly repeating facsimile of the empty trophy corridor, off of which, for the tenth time, the dark, silent entrance to Medical beckons, that the girls encounter the first guard they’ve seen all night, and any relief they might have felt is tempered by the fact the man is obviously, extremely dead.

“Big Bear!!” Nicci cries, running heedlessly ahead, pom-poms flailing, to confirm that the corpse is indeed the man she persisted in thinking of as basically a giant teddy bear despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

“God, what happened to him?” Lottie asks, half-crouching against the wall to briefly take the weight of her gargantuan tits off her back and try to slow her panicked breathing.

“Umm… there’s a lot of stuff?? That probably should be inside him?! And like, isn’t!?” Nicci says, and gives the body an experimental prod with the toe of a high-heeled ankle boot for good measure.

“He’s been stabbed,” Chloe adds, by way of a more clinical assessment. “Well, I say stabbed, more like gutted. Well, I say gutted, more like…”

“Do you think this was… you know? Him?” asks Jessie, peering worriedly into the yawning, wide-open maw of Medical; there are no telltale footprints leading out, but it isn’t difficult to assemble a timeline that puts the four of them directly in the resurrected intruder’s path.

“We should get back to the dorm,” Lottie says, levering herself back to standing with a shudder. “Let’s hope Violet’s got a way to put an end to this. It’s only going to get worse til then.”

With that, the only choice is to continue wandering the seemingly endless maze that’s grown to displace the familiar interior of the Blue Rose. All four girls’ feet are hurting by this point; they spend almost all their time in heels, but walking significant distances rather than standing or kneeling as their assignments dictate isn’t something they’ve often had to do. The slapping, squelching sounds grow closer, pausing when the girls stop, resuming when they move, sometimes clearly emanating from behind doors they quickly hurry past or down passages they give an exaggeratedly wide berth. At one point the girls freeze in a classroom doorway, watching in mute terror as what can only be the source lumbers moaning by the door on the opposite side: the lack of light obscures any kind of detail, but it’s big, and amorphous, and brings with it a strong, ripe odour that makes Chloe instantly turn to the others and silently mouth “Bollocks!”, evoking uninvited and entirely unwelcome images of the empty trophy corridor. The quartet waits as long in the dark as they dare, torches off and breath coming fast, but it’s still with extreme caution that they hesitantly set off again.

An unclear length of time passes as the girls traverse the same corridors backwards, forwards and upside-down, hurry through mocked-up practice sets for office work, bedroom duties, exotic dance lessons and club hostessing, and almost descend into screaming hysterics when they find themselves looped back around to the wives’ dorm turnoff, where the sinister hum and light have been supplanted by a rhythmic, wet thudding, which absolutely nobody volunteers to investigate. Then, down a gradually narrowing hallway the girls are certain should be way off the edge of the floor plan, there’s another body lying prone in their phones’ meagre light, and this time it’s Mr Halliwell, the fussy etiquette instructor who the girls last saw striding around the lawn barking orders in his reedy little voice. Now he’s sprawled on the polished flooring like a rag doll, neat tweed suit thick with blood from what must have been a gushing neck wound, still seeping steadily into the sticky black pool around the man’s corpse.

Chloe cautiously edges forward, ignoring the other girls’ cries of dismay, and gingerly prods Halliwell’s body with a toe. She casts a dispassionate eye over the instructor’s injuries, surprising even herself with how unaffected she feels.

“Looks like he’s not been dead for long,” she says, without turning. “Lot of blood still coming out, innit.”

“So we’re catching up with the dead man,” Lottie says, and there’s a definite tremor in her voice.

“Aye, ye might say y’are, at that,” says the dead man, unfolding like a spider from a shadowed corner Chloe’s absolutely certain was empty a second before. All four girls react with suitably exaggerated displays of shock, and Nicci flailingly runs halfway to the next intersection before she realises everybody else is just standing frozen in terror and sheepishly comes back, but the man doesn’t seem to have any immediate interest in hurting the girls. If he looked sickly and emaciated on the beach, death hasn’t done him any favours; the skin on his arms and what little of his face can be seen between matted beard and lank hair is mottled with a patina of bluish-green, and the gunshot wound that originally felled him is evident as a dark, ragged stain on his filthy brown cassock. There’s an unsettling sort of shimmer to him, only noticeable when the light from the girls’ phones catches him in a particular way, and it gives him an air of flickering unreality in the dark, but there’s nothing insubstantial about the long, jagged shard of broken glass he’s holding in an unprotected hand, or the ropy muscles bunching in his gnarled arms and lopsided neck.

“Please please please don’t hurt us!” Jessie squeaks, bunny tail pressed up against the wall next to the other two. The man sidles closer to the three of them and, to the girls’ total confusion, sniffs the air off to one side, long and hard. This makes Chloe weirdly aware of his own lack of odour; he looks like he should stink of pipe smoke, old sweat and formalin, but there’s just nothing, and in itself that scares her.

“Ah, aha, I see, I see. Faint, faintest, faltering but Its mark is on ye, yes, yes indeed. So no harm, no foul, no no no. But lest we get it sideways, I bid ye not interfere, now we’re at the lynch, the crux, the cornerstone, ye follow? Or, hah, me sliver of glint might find yer needfuls anywise.”

“What are you talking about?” Jessie demands, crossing the distance between terror and outrage in record time. “We know you’re doing this! Make it stop, right now!”

“I? I?” the man croaks, amid an eruption of grunting wheezes that might be a distant relation to laughter. “O little rabbit, would that I were the Elect, oh aye. Oh, no, no, no; if it were, ah, how blessed, how profane, and how much bloody easier, hah! Now hop, skip and jump along, rabbit, for you’re later than late and your children are gone.”

“What?” Chloe mouths to Lottie, who shrugs helplessly, looking petrified. Nicci is still sort of hovering behind the man’s back; Chloe’s been trying to convey to her with only facial expressions not to do anything to piss off the unstable lunatic who has the other three cornered, but it seems she needn’t have worried; the closest Nicci’s come to action has been bursting into tears, and the ragged intruder doesn’t appear to have noticed her at all.

“Can you tell us exactly what’s happening here?” Lottie asks, slowly, as the man twitches and mumbles to himself and seems to briefly become captivated by his reflection in his crude weapon.

“Happening, aye, the last and the first and the only, the only. Sacred! Sacred!” he crows, doing a strange little shuffling jig, flailing his extemporised knife in a way that has the girls pressing themselves against the wall to stay out of the way. “But there’s work to be done afore the happening happens, and It’s been patient so very long. Come if ye’re comin’, girlies,” he says, with a cursory wave of his gnarled hand, and shuffles off down the corridor without waiting to see if anyone’s coming with him. Chloe shares a long look with the others, then shrugs and follows at an exaggeratedly safe distance.

“You can’t be serious! We are absolutely not joining up with the Blue Rose Butcher!” Jessie snaps at Chloe, hurrying to catch up with her.

“You heard him; he’s not after hurting us, and it seems like he can find his way round, right? In case you ain’t noticed, we’re wandering in circles here. I’d rather find Vi than spend the rest of my life walking up and down the same corridors listening to whoever it is what’s having a creepy wank in the distance, thankyou very much.”

“The whiff o’ the Lord about ye keeps the rough beast at bay fer now, surely enough,” the man murmurs agreeably, ambling along at the head of his little costumed flock. “But the mirror-maze be a mouth, a throat, a jaw, and woe be on them as move in the wrong direction. Woe or rapture, but more likely woe, aye. For where there be a mouth, there’s surely a belly, and the knowless’d find that a hard bed to lie, oh aye, yes indeed,” he cackles.

“We just need to get back to our dorm and find Violet,” Lottie says, again speaking slowly and over-enunciating as if the muttering, twitching revenant is hard of hearing. “Can you show us the way?”

“Violet?” the man demands, turning and jabbing a gnarled finger into Lottie’s boob, making her recoil in horror. “Violet?” he repeats, then his mood instantly seems to shift, and he collapses into hoarse laughter, almost doubled over with hacking wheezes. “Oh, Violet, sweet Violet. Hah, aye and damn but he did try. God loves a trier, they do say, but God won’t look kindly on that one when It comes, oh no. Always did think the words a bit flowery, and here’s your proof, aye. Violet! Hah!”

Chloe and Lottie look at each other in mutual perplexity as they trail the man’s erratic, stop-start progress down past the entrance hall. In his wake, the geometry of the Blue Rose seems more rational, even if he leads them a meandering dance through the halls, frequently pausing to scratch and pick at one or another of the swirling, jagged tattoos inked all over his arms and hands, or to mutter and rant at seemingly empty corners, as if someone nobody else can hear is answering back.

“Stop right there! On the floor, hands on your head, NOW!” yells a man’s rough voice, and out of the gloom lurches a hulking shape the girls instantly recognise as Lloyd Rage, a guard Chloe started calling that after he grunted out his own first name in flagrante delicto with her. He’s maybe mid-thirties, shaven-headed and steroid-sculpted, and still makes for an intimidating figure even bleeding badly down his left side and clutching his rifle in hopelessly trembling hands. His eyes look crazier than usual and there’s another wound on his temple, which Chloe doesn’t think bodes well for his judgement, and when the intruder reacts only by letting out a low, weird chuckle, Lloyd’s bellowed orders deteriorate into incoherent swearing and then gunfire almost immediately.

The guard roars along with his rifle, and there’s the unmistakable wet sound of bullets impacting flesh amid the din of the shots. The dead man jerks and sways, but his cackling and muttering continues unabated, and out of nowhere he erupts into motion; impossibly quickly he’s scuttling along the floor, then the wall, then the ceiling, pulling himself along hand and foot like some demented insect. Before either the girls or Lloyd can react, he’s dropped feet first onto the guard and eight inches of jagged mirror shard are rammed into and clean through the unfortunate man’s neck. The cultist, monk or whatever he is tips his head inhumanly far back to give the girls a yellow-toothed, upside-down grin as he blindly stabs again and again, rupturing veins, arteries, organs, and coating the walls with hot gouts of blood and tissue. Nicci covers her eyes and wails; Jessie retches and hacks but produces only a thin, watery issue, and both Lottie and Chloe just stand rooted to the spot, clinging to each other and watching in abject horror. Finally the guard’s body folds at the knees and slumps bonelessly to the floor, and his murderer dismounts with surprising grace.

“Nor will man nor beast stand afore the stairway to the Throne,” the man intones, with great seriousness and every indication he’s quoting scripture that may well only exist inside his head.

“I’ve got to admit, he’s growing on me,” says Lottie, although she sounds somewhat like she might be having a breakdown.

“H… how are you alive?” demands Jessie, waving in the general direction of the multiple fresh holes in the man’s already-ruined sackcloth robe, the lack of any blood from his new wounds, and the fact he’s still standing.

“Alive, hah! Oh, alive, alive-o, what a thing, to be alive in the spring,” the man croons tunelessly, holding out his arms while his feet dance a disjointed and apparently independent little two-step. He freezes mid-gyration, spins on his heel to face the girls, face deadly serious. “I en’t been alive for some years now, girly, oh dear no. No, no, no, my other, he found a sharp end very much like yer fella here, in point o’ fact, and he were glad to receive it. And I, I come on through the glass that very night, and have served faithful and true ever and since.”

“You’re saying you’re the… reflection of a dead man?” asks Lottie, while Chloe and Jessie are both puzzling over the man’s cryptic stream-of-consciousness and Nicci appears to still be catching up to the fact a guard just died.

“So y’are listening, girly, well done!” the old man cackles. “I were born that night, born again, never to die, can’t catch me in yer trap, y’old fucker, hah! The good Lord, It done made me, an’ made me strong, and en’t I served faithful and true? Even when the fine ladies an’ gentlemen tried me sore, I been loyal and I done as bid, oh aye. And here we stands, the grand ol’ day about to dawn, and it’s as stark an’ as comely as they ever did say, oh yes indeed and aye.”

The girls trail helplessly behind their shuffling, capering guide, giving the gruesome remains of Lloyd Rage as wide a berth as possible in the confines of the corridor. The man leads them up a flight of stairs, then almost immediately down another at an angle that shouldn’t be physically possible, and abruptly they find themselves standing in one of the forbidden staff areas, previously only glimpsed in the moments when an instructor or guard would enter or leave. Two-way mirrors looking out on darkened classrooms stretch down the white-panelled hall, along with recording equipment set up to capture the girls’ lessons, and a table with papers strewn and an overturned coffee mug reading ‘Girls: if you can’t beat them, join them’. The shifting of rooms and corridors is actually visible here, from behind the mirrors; it’s as if multiple distorted images of each space have been laid on top of each other and are constantly swimming in and out of focus, each different, some with vague shapes that might be staff or students moving around in panic or confusion. The door the mad old cultist has brought them to is triple-locked, with the standard biometric reader, a keycard slot, and a heavy mechanical tumbler. Its nameplate simply reads ‘CR-1’, and the muttering intruder’s hand passes through the heavy steel like wax. He gropes around for a while as the girls look on, aghast, before he yanks the heavy locking mechanism out completely, dropping it to the floor with a resounding thud and leaving the door with a gaping, waxy-edged hole in the metal, swinging freely on its hinges.

“What even is this place?” Chloe asks, not really expecting a coherent answer but unable to bear the silence any longer.

“’Tis the workings for yon big electrical spire on the roof out hither,” the man mutters, seemingly distracted enough to be relatively straightforward for once. He shuffles inside what turns out to be a room mostly full of blinking, humming electronics, with a single chair and barely enough space for one other person alongside. Chloe watches with a dreadful fascination as he passes his hands repeatedly over banks of buttons and switches, keyboard, mouse and flickering, glitching monitors, humming a low, droning note that seems to fluctuate in and out of audible range. Finally, and without preamble, he stabs a twiglike finger into a button largely indistinguishable from the rest, prompting a loud pop and a wash of static from the speakers. His other hand picks out a rapid sequence of keypresses, paging without even looking through screens of text and numbers on which Chloe fleetingly catches the words ‘satellite connection’, while he leans into the central microphone and clears his throat, hacking and wheezing like he’s trying to bring up a lung.

“Fitchley calling the Manor, repeat, this is Mr Fitchley calling the Manor, if it please yer,” the man - Fitchley, Chloe gathers - says into the receiver, enunciating with almost comical care and a newly deferential tone.

“Kkrtshk- is the Manor. Tell me you have something, Mr Fitchley; time is getting rather short, over,” says a man’s voice so plummy it could give Violet a run for her money, if she still had any.

“Oh yes, m’lud, that I do, that I most assuredly do, over,” Fitchley replies, almost capering with glee. Though separated from him by a chasm of age, sanity, personal hygiene and possibly status as human, Chloe feels a pang of kinship at seeing the man so obviously desperate for his master’s approval.

“The Vessel is safe? Over,” the voice on the other end demands, breathless and with what might be a clamour of other voices and sudden activity audible behind it.

“Safe enough, m’lud, and moving sharpish toward completion. The maze is descendin’ quickish toward the threshold o’ the lens, aye, an’ flesh is starting to refract, if I be any judge. Forgive me, m’lud, but I advise ye get out here fast if yer wish to perform manumission afore the throne is sat. I can perhaps delay a touch wi’ the words and strictures, if the Lord abides, but yer well know anythin’ such as the likes of me can do will be a fart in the wind, excuse me language, m’lud.”

“Co-fffhhkkt-inates received. We’re on our way. Stay with -kkthht- Vessel and we shall be with you shortly. Good work, Fitchley. Over and out.”

With a final click, the line goes dead. “So. So and so and so. Now me work’s been did, how’s about we go and pay a visit to yer little friend Violet, hmm?” Fitchley says with a crooked grin, before slipping past the girls by some means none of them can quite follow, and skittering away down the hall, leaving them helpless to do anything but hurry along in his wake.

 

-

 

“Violet? Sasha? Lily? Anyone? You sluts all right in there?” Chloe calls out with forced nonchalance, as the girls approach the door to the dorm. The sight of it has put a spring in all four of their steps, even if it isn’t normally accessed via a perfectly black, perfectly square hallway with a variety of empty light fittings jutting from walls and floor at irregular intervals. The mad old cultist Fitchley simply vanished as the group rounded the last corner; whether he’s hanging back, has abandoned the girls to whatever awaits, or - most troublingly - is still there, unseen, has been the subject of some urgent, whispered debate, and all four have found themselves compulsively checking the ceiling just in case. The dorm door looks as pristine and unblemished as usual, with no hint of the unsettling hum or eerie light from the wives’ quarters, but the absolute silence beyond is almost more worrying as Chloe tentatively pushes it open.

Violet is sitting in the exact centre of the darkened room, hugging her knees in her cheerleader outfit, looking like the perfect picture of misery. She’s alone. Evenly spaced around her, scattered across discarded blankets and pillows and items of skimpy clothing, are - Chloe draws in a breath, deafeningly loud over the pounding of her blood in her ears - four lines of soft grey ash, radiating out from the girl like the points of a malevolent star.

“What the h… I mean, g…. I mean, fuck, fuck fuck fucking fuck, what happened here, Vi?” Chloe demands, the floodgates bursting wide open after that first proscribed swearword leaks out, especially now it seems likely that punishment isn’t on the cards. The fact that authority, power and all the structures of control Chloe’s been constructed to crave and rely on are rapidly collapsing hasn’t fully sunk in yet, but she’s subconsciously very aware that gears are turning deep inside a mind designed for a very specific environment, and on some level she’s afraid to discover what might result.

“I’m sorry!” Violet wails, forlorn, lifting her tear-streaked face to focus on the girls, and something in her gaze triggers a primal terror in Chloe. Even Nicci hasn’t run up to throw her arms around the distraught girl yet, and Chloe isn’t sure whether that speaks to an unanticipated instinct for self-preservation or just the strength of Lottie’s grip on her arm. “I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry, “ Violet sobs, and the next words make Chloe’s blood run cold. “It was desperate. It needed… it was so hungry. To fuel the… I couldn’t make it stop. Cecily and Sasha went to look for you, but the others…”

“Wait, what do you mean, wh-“ Chloe begins.

“What was hungry, Violet?” Lottie interrupts, quiet and more threatening than Chloe thinks she’s ever heard her sound.

“It’s ahuuumm-mmm-mmnnn-mmnnn-“ Violet begins, whatever she was trying to say lost in a long, droning hum as she appears to slip into a trance, rocking wildly back and forth with only the whites of her eyes showing between her exaggerated lashes.

“What I think the great an’ terrorful Vessel means to say is, have yer ever looked at yer reflection and felt like somethin’ else entire were gazin’ back?” Fitchley says in a tremorous voice, making Nicci and Chloe jump as he steps unannounced out of the shadows right beside them.

“Can’t say I have,” says Lottie acidly, indicating her extreme proportions with a sarcastic wave of her hand.

“Aye, well and aye. Since such a time as the only way were to peer into a still pond on a clear day, folks’ve been trying to reckon what it was they did a-spy there, lingerin’ just on the edge of seeing,” Fitchley continues, taking up station behind the swaying, droning Violet like a faithful retainer. “But since yer tain-glass, yer lookin’-frame, yer fancy mirrors become commonplace, it’s got so much simpler, en’t it?” he cackles. “The more yer look, the more yer want to, and them as can see will see what’s ter be seen. There’n a flaw, y’see, in the mirror, oh yes. In every mirror, and not in the mirror at all. Hah! A little fleck o’ the greater dark, never twice in the same spot, and once yer find it, it findeth thee also. But stare in, press yer ear close, and mebbe ye’ll hear it whisper. That’s what the gentlefolk done, y’see; listened and learned and scribbled down all them things they’n heard It say, and some things what come from inside their heads alongside, because the Flaw en’t too good for rightside-up thinkers, no, no. On an’ on anon they passed that sacred duty father to son, down the whatsit, the generatives, an’ bit by fickle bit they sorted the message from the jabber, din’t they? Well, by and by they done what It said to do, and en’t It rewarded ‘em richly, eh?” he crows, indicating his own faintly shimmering body in a mimicry of Lottie’s motion. “What It truly craves is to be free, so the efforts o’ our merry little band was turned to that end. And for good and all, here we sits at the end o’th' great chain; the grandest dawning what’s been awaited fer hunnerds o’ years. I’m humbled ter see it with what’s very nearly my own eyes, and ye should be also. Them as gone ahead is blessed, as be we all, for when the Flaw in the Mirror shatters Its hoary old bonds an’ bursts forth inter the world whole once more, we’ll join ‘em in glory. Oh yes indeed, mourn not yer girlies gone ter ash, as all shall quiver an’ rejoice an’ meet they’n reflection in doubled rapture soon and well! The Young Ma… aha, make that Mistress here, yes and aye, will sit the throne afore the reflecting pool an’ converge the myriad rays, an’ them scuttly dead fuckers’ poxy gaol will break into an ‘unnert thousand jagged slivers and be done. Rapture! Rapture!” Fitchley roars, stamping his bare, scabby foot for good measure, scattering the sad greasy ashes that were until recently four of the girls’ classmates. His mad, rolling eyes are fixed on some point beyond the visible world, glassy and shining with some inner light, more focused than Chloe’s seen him in all their short acquaintance.

“Thank you, Fitchley,” Violet says, climbing to her feet with a wince born of stiffness from sitting cross-legged for so long. It’s such a human reaction that Chloe can’t entirely sustain her effort to see the waifish figure in front of her as the walking container for unspecified horrors; whatever else Violet is, she’s the vulnerable, scared new girl the three of them took under their collective wing as well.

“Listen, you don’t have to do this, Vi,” Chloe implores her. “I’m not pretending I understand all this stuff, ‘cause it’s pretty fuckin’ obvious I don’t, but surely you can just… stop, yeah? Please just stop.”

“I think the facility is probably pretty much done at this point,” Lottie adds, taking Chloe’s cue and adopting a considerably gentler tone. “We don’t have to stay here. We can go… home, I guess, or somewhere else. We can go anywhere; just let all this stuff go and come with us, okay?”

“Go?!” Nicci cries. “Nononono!! What about our owners!? What about learning to be good girls?! What about Daddy, and dresses, and butt stuff?? What about butt stuff, Chloe!? I know Lottie likes to be a bad escapey naughty girl, but you like it here as much as I do!! You don’t want to leave, right??!”

Nicci’s fully in tears at the thought that her besties might want to abandon everything she cares about in the world, and Lottie’s looking sidelong at Chloe. For her part, Chloe shuffles her feet and fiddles with her jacket sleeves, uncomfortable under exactly the wrong kind of attention for her liking.

“I just, I mean no, of course I… I mean, like-“ she begins, and genuinely isn’t sure what she’s trying to say, caught between the pull of the contradictory impulses inside her.

“It doesn’t matter,” says Violet, with a sudden easy confidence that’s almost entirely unlike the girl the others have come to know. “I understand it all now. I remember.” Fitchley beams at her with a mouthful of discoloured teeth and a glow of almost paternal pride, which Chloe thinks might be the most disturbing thing she’s seen all night, as Violet continues. “I hated them so much when they pulled me out of bed and dragged me down to the cellar all those times. To the door that was always kept locked. They held me down before the big, old mirror with the carvings all around, and they cut me, and… fed me. Mercury, and glass, and… other things. I should have died, I suppose. I certainly got sick enough. But I lived, and I heard It! It spoke to me, later, when I’d press my face against the mirror in my room and find out the whole day had passed without my knowing. For a very long time, I didn’t remember. But deep down I knew! It told me the truth: that I’d been born for this, ritually conceived for this, shaped for this. That I was the end of such a long, long chain of faith and toil and sacrifice. That I should be proud. And I was, you know? I really was. And then oh, silly Mr Laurent, he always did take the writings too literally. He thought- well, it doesn’t matter now, really, but he thought sending me here would stop the convergence from happening. It didn’t, of course, although the sedation and the surgery definitely left me confused for a while, which I suppose he can claim as a small victory if it makes him feel better. Ultimately, though, he didn’t achieve a thing. It has waited so, so long, girls. Every reflection Its prison, holding a tiny fleck of Its divinity captive down the long ages. But the prison is about to shatter! Through me, something wonderful will come back into the world! I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to, but more importantly, I don’t want to, Chloe. You’ve all been kind to me, and I really will try to keep you safe until my part is done. After that, well. Everything will be different. Goodbye, Chloe, Lottie, Nicci. Come along, Mr Fitchley. We have an appointment to keep.”

“Violet, wait!” Chloe yells, lurching forward to grab at Violet, to knock her down, to hug her tight, to do what exactly, she can’t say. It’s too late, anyway; it’s like moving through treacle (a rebellious part of Chloe’s subconscious gets slightly aroused at the thought of trying to move through treacle) as pallid light in a colour none of the girls can name pulses out of Violet in vertiginous waves, as Fitchley gives the girls a crooked, jerky salute, as she calmly takes hold of his hand and with great reverence he leads her into one of the restored mirrors hanging unsupported in front of their frames, as the pair touch their reflections, submerge into the quicksilver pool of the glass and are gone.

 

-

 

“What the absolute screaming fuck are we supposed to do now?” Chloe demands of nobody in particular, having spent the interval of the stunned silence hastily picking her way across the room without disturbing the remains of their sisters and banging on the mirror’s surface, which to nobody’s surprise seems entirely solid.

“She didn’t say I’d been kind to her!” Jessie cries. “I was so kind! I told her that shade of lipstick made her look sickly, I said she should ask whether her uniforms were tailored properly, I even offered to help her lose some weight! Oh god, she’s going to turn me into a dung beetle!”

“We’re going to have to leeeeeave!” Nicci’s wailing, simultaneously. “And I’ll never finish my training and Daddy won’t want me and maybe also he’ll be dead because all the mirrors are turning evil because Violet ate glaaaaassss!!!”

That Lottie fails to even try to correct her doesn’t strike Chloe as an especially positive sign.

“Tamara, Lily, Felicia, Marcie,” Lottie says, looking down at the scuffed trails of ash one by one, although there’s no way to determine which girl’s remains might be which. “I can’t… I mean, when we saw what it was like out there I suppose I knew they might not be okay when we got here, but…”

“We was supposed to help each other be good girls. Graduate together. We’d have been together for another year, probably longer,” Chloe says, tears pouring down her cheeks.

“Yeah,” Lottie agrees, her hand finding Chloe’s and squeezing tight.

“So, er… do we have any ideas about what we’re meant to do next?” Chloe asks, after a few moments’ reflective quiet.

“Does it seem like there’s any way we can stop her doing whatever she’s going to do?” Lottie asks, apparently sincere.

“Are you kidding?” Jessie scoffs, poking indelicately at a clump of ashes with the toe of a shoe. “You saw what the creepy old fart did to an armed guard who shot him like ten times. What are we going to do, beat him to death with our straighteners?”

“Well, we can’t just give up!” Chloe snaps, rounding on her, red-eyed and dishevelled.

“Um, yes we can!” Jessie declares. “That’s exactly what we can do - get our hot little arses to a boat and get off the island before the whole place turns into mirror nightmare hell, or whatever stupid thing is about to happen here.” Nicci takes this as a cue to burst into even more dramatic sobs, and Lottie finally relents and gathers her up in her arms.

“Good luck finding one,” she mutters, as Nicci sniffles into her right tit. “Jessie, do you even have any idea where to find a boat? Or how to get it to start? Or make it past the defences? Don’t start acting like you’re in charge when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing!”

“I should be in charge, since it’s thanks to me we’re all alive!” Jessie bites back. “If I hadn’t had the idea to go down to the morgue, we’d have been here when this happened! And as if there’s not an escape boat or helicopter or something. You were probably just looking in the wrong places before. Face it, honey, you didn’t end up with those tits and arse from being the brightest bulb on the island!” she adds, and Chloe can see Lottie winding up to detonate.

“We don’t need to stop her, we need to rescue her,” Chloe says resolutely, trying to distract them both. “You heard her; she said she’s been groomed for this shit since she was born! She’s not herself! She’s been brainwashed, obviously!”

Jessie, Lottie and even to some extent Nicci give Chloe long, silent stares.

“Bad brainwashed, not sexy brainwashed! You know what I mean. Shut up.” she snaps.

“So where do you suggest we start looking for this super-secret escape boat, then, considering the whole place is turning inside out and upside down?” Lottie asks Jessie with an acid smile.

“Well, first we-“ Jessie begins, but she’s cut off by the door swinging open and everybody assuming her personal conception of a fighting stance, which makes them look more like a novelty night at a strip club than anything else.

“Oh, fank god you are alive!” Cecily gushes, as she and Sasha pile in and slam closed the door behind them. Both are bleeding from cuts and scrapes, but otherwise seem unharmed; Cecily’s lost most of her giant Regency dress and panniers, leaving her in corset, hoop skirt and stockings, resembling the star of some particularly lavish porn production of Moulin Rouge and causing Chloe to temporarily forget all about monsters and looming peril. Sasha’s unintentionally progressed from a flawless 1992 Catwoman to the version from the end of the film, with latex torn, hair sticking out of her ragged hood and lipstick smeared.

“Wait, what ‘appened ‘ere? Ou est les autre girls?” Cecily asks, and Chloe’s heart sinks further as she realises it’s inevitably going to fall to her to explain.

“Violet…” she says, indicating the trails of ash, the tear-streaked other girls, her own expression, and hopes that tells enough of the story, because she doesn’t trust her voice to make it through the details just yet.

“They can’t be dead!” Sasha cries, looking aghast at the ash-smeared sheets and carpet. “They were just here, we can’t have been gone longer than… than…”

“I think it ‘as been longer than it seemed,” Cecily says. “You said Violet eez responsaible? I don’t comprende ‘ow zis is possible, Chloe.”

“Me neither, babes, and we seen her ourselves,” Chloe says, choking down another sob. “We heard her admit it and we still don’t understand nothing, really.”

“Well, we can’t stay here!” Sasha declares, giving the pathetic cremains as wide a berth as she possibly can. This triggers another round of muffled wailing from Nicci at the thought of leaving, who’s now burrowed her face so far into Lottie’s cleavage that Chloe isn’t sure she can find her way out.

“Thankyou, that’s what I’ve been saying!” Jessie says, shooting a quick glare at the dissenters among her original three unwilling subjects.

“Don’t get too excited, O Captain my Captain,” Lottie says. “We don’t know where we’re trying to go, and we don’t have any idea how to get there.”

“Non, we do! Monsieur Warnair ‘as fortified ze ground-floor staff room! ‘E is gathering as many staff and students as ‘e can, to stay together and wait for matin, when ‘opefully it will be safe!”

“We came back to get you and the others,” Sasha adds.

“Mr Warner?! The staff??” Nicci gasps, partially extricating herself from Lottie’s chest, looking comically hopeful beneath her tear-streaked makeup. “You mean maybe it’s not all over and we won’t have to leave and make Daddy sad and never get to be good little dollies??”

“We can dream, Nics,” Lottie says, failing to successfully disguise the bitterness in her voice.

Back in the mirror-maze of reversed, duplicated and recursive spaces, things appear to have deteriorated fast. The halls are still pitch-black, and there’s no question in anyone’s mind that furtive, half-seen things are moving when the feeble lights the cameras cast aren’t on them. The brass ornamentation on staircases and light fittings, the chandeliers; everything seems to be trying to become something else when no eyes are on it, freezing mid-transformation in mind-bendingly complex spirals and arcs that shouldn’t be possible in solid material. The girls are watching for glowsticks, which Sasha and Cecily say Warner has his guards leaving as a sort of breadcrumb trail guiding survivors to the staff room, although the usefulness of that on a floorplan as inconstant as chalk in the rain is anyone’s guess. Warner himself has supposedly led a couple of the surviving guards down to Conditioning, but he was characteristically unhelpful when the girls asked why. Faint snuffling, sobbing and that same awful squelch-thud-thud fade in and out of hearing, and Chloe finds herself picturing the protean horror they glimpsed waiting behind every door they pass. After coming to a starkly red-lit wall cutting across the centre of a corridor, humming ten times as loud as the wives’ dorm, with something making fleshy, grunting impacts against the other side and necessitating a frantic doubling back, the girls seriously start to fear they’ll be wandering the endless halls forever. They turn and turn again, sidling around blurry-edged, keening mirrors to find their prior paths become elsewhere entirely. Eventually their route takes them back to the second-floor staff corridor, absurdly located downstairs from a hallway jarringly interrupted by the beckoning maw of Medical, which causes Nicci and Lottie to stop dead and refuse to go another step in that direction. That would be that, except for the spot of greenish light barely visible in the distance, which could conceivably be a glowstick, or could equally be something much less encouraging.

To reach the end of the corridor, the girls have to creep past the doors to each of their teachers’ offices, many of them multiple times; most are dark and silent, the nameplates inscribed in that same incomprehensible, eye-watering script and only the occasional creak or low moan sounding from within. Ms Fields’ office is different, and far worse; it looks elevated somehow, set apart from the other doors by twisted, curlicued ornamenting that seems to have grown out of the wood, and again there’s that syrupy, blue-grey unlight seeping through the gap between door and frame. Lottie and Nicci lead the others past at double speed, and neither breathes again until the incessant, mindless grinding of what sounds like thousands of teeth is well out of earshot.

To Chloe’s amazement, the faint green radiance actually is a dying glowstick, dropped next to an arrow crudely spray-painted on the antique wood panelling, pointing left at an intersection whose two routes both twist away downward into the dark. She glances at Lottie, who shrugs equivocally. Feeling for the first time since the fever-dream ordeal began something that might almost be mistaken for hope, she takes a cautious step in the indicated direction, and that’s when a sound behind them causes all six girls to huddle together in a frightened clump.

“Girls… oh girrrls, is that you, my little Jezebellesssccchch?” calls a wavering but familiar voice, over the sudden cacophony of scrabbling and scratching that puts Chloe uncomfortably in mind of rodents gnawing on something in the walls.

“Ms Fields?! Oh, I’m so happy it’s you, Miss!! We’re lost and super scared and please could you help us find the staff room??!” calls Nicci, eternally trusting, before anyone can get a hand over her mouth. Beyond the edge of the wan light cast by the girls’ phones, Chloe can just about see the door to Fields’ office swinging slowly open, and while the shape that begins to emerge is hard to make out, it’s far, far too big to be a person.

“GIiiiIirrRRcchchrlLLLsss…” calls the voice again, curiously sing-song but still identifiably Ms Fields’ despite its horribly mushy, glottal quality and the strange way it wavers between sounding like one person is speaking and many. “chchchBADbadbadBADbaDGiiiiRRrLs!” Fields’ uncanny, out-of-step voices bellow and whisper, and there’s an awful slapping and squirming along with it as whatever is inside the office tries to drag itself out into the hallway, outlined just enough to be utterly terrifying by the not-quite-light from the open door. Everyone’s backing away, but the corridor they were about to take now terminates in a wall hung with a portrait depicting a figure mostly composed of blank, discoloured skin. The opening on the opposite side is gone completely, replaced by a seamless section of hardwood panelling as if it had never been anything else. Cecily and Jessie are struggling to open a nearby door, seemingly chosen at random, and as Chloe, Lottie, Nicci and Sasha join them, they’re all almost knocked to their knees by a blast of rancid air and a smell like rotting flowers and mould from the direction of Ms Fields’ office and the heaving enormity still struggling to free itself.

“This isn’t going to open,” Lottie gasps, catching her breath, as Chloe gags for the first time in more than a year.

“Well, what’s your suggestion, then? We wait to have a little chat with whatever that is?” Jessie snaps, rattling uselessly at the handle in frustration.

“It’s just Ms Fields, and I know she can be a little mean but there’s no need to be so scared of her as long as we’re good girls!! I’m sure she’ll help us find Mr Warner and the other staff!!” Nicci adds guilelessly, apparently so relieved to encounter some kind of authority figure that she’s failed to spot that anything might be even slightly amiss.

“There’s a way through there,” Chloe says, sounding like she’d really rather not have noticed it. She’s pointing back down the staff corridor, where there is indeed a narrow passageway the girls either failed to register or that didn’t exist when they passed by. The thing dragging itself from Fields’ office is almost free now, wetly scrabbling at the floorboards and gibbering incomprehensibly in its multiple voices, and while there is some distance between it and the gap in the wall that might be the girls’ salvation, the prospect of intentionally getting closer is not one that appeals.

“Eet eez coming! We ‘ave to go now, if we are going!” Cecily says, terror making her voice shake. Jessie, not to be outdone, shoves past the others and brandishes her phone like a weapon in an utterly futile display of competitive bravado. This has the effect of fully revealing what’s advancing on the girls, and their chorus of screams almost drowns out the oncoming deranged babble.

What Chloe can no longer deny was formerly Ms Fields is mostly limbs. It’s as if her arms in particular have undergone some foul mitosis, doubling and doubling and doubling again until there are more than she can see to count; easily over fifty slender, pale appendages erupting in a crazed thicket, groping and scrabbling and flailing mindlessly at the floorboards and walls, leaving slick trails of blood from broken nails and shredded skin as they drag the awful mass of the body along. It’s clear that what supports the explosion of arms is no longer anything like a human torso: long, thick, convoluted and headless, what features it might retain are mostly obscured by the fingers. They reach, beckon and flex in their multitudes, from what might have been the face all the way down to the floor, hundreds upon hundreds of them grasping hungrily at the air like bony cilia. Fields’ nightmare voices emanate from within this forest of fingers, and occasionally there’s a horrible flash of red-stained teeth visible between the phalanges, and perhaps even worse, the glint of a rolling, bulging eye. As the instructor’s new flesh thrashes and humps itself forward like a grotesque caterpillar, it reveals a tail of sorts, dragged along behind and composed of innumerable legs and feet fused together, sprouting from the monstrous core like malignant shoots. This is what makes Jessie reflexively retch, and she isn’t the only one of the girls to do so. There’s something raw and debrided about the thick, rippling flesh to which the riot of extremities is anchored, as if the luckless woman’s body parts have split the skin and opened her like an overripe fruit. Some autonomous part of Chloe’s mind is also aware that technically she’s seeing Ms Fields naked, which is something she’s dreamed about in private for quite some time, but this is pretty far from the after-hours fantasies she’s shamefully indulged.

“Oh god oh fuck, run!” Lottie manages to stammer out. She grabs the blindly panic-stricken Nicci by the hand and bodily drags her the ten or so steps forward to the passageway, squeezing herself as tight as she can against the corner to stay as far as possible from those groping hands. The Fields creature seems to be having some kind of tantrum or seizure, slapping palms and fists against ceiling, walls and floor of the corridor she almost fills, shaking the boards and bringing down great plumes of dust as her hundreds of fingers clench and unclench in spasmodic waves. Cecily shoves a screaming Sasha forward and quickly follows, steering her into the relative safety of a passage the girls can only hope is too narrow for Fields to enter, and Chloe is hot on her heels. She glances back to make sure Jessie is with her, and her heart plummets into her shoes as she sees the girl’s curvy shape motionless like a terrified animal in front of the horrific thing their teacher has become.

“BAdgirLSluTTttccchWHOooOOrecUNtchchpunISHSpaNKSLUtcoCKSLEevESsssccchhhdesERVEit!!!!” the Fields-thing shrieks suddenly, seemingly coming back to whatever passes for her senses to find most of her prey already fled. She pulls herself taller, looming over Jessie while her myriad arms open in a horrifying embrace and her sea of fingers all crook in a sick parody of beckoning.

“There’s no need to run. It’s already here, it’s… it’s in me,” Jessie says, vague and dreamy, not addressing Chloe or even Fields. She isn’t moving, seems mesmerised, and half of Chloe wants to dart back and grab her, but the other half can see how suicidal that would be. “I feel it… it’s moving inside my head, it’s reflecting, all I can see is me but it’s, it’s not me, it won’t be me, I won’t be me any more if I let it in, but I want to…”

“Jess, you dozy twat, fucking move!” Chloe screams, reaching out for the girl even though she isn’t showing any inclination to reach back.

“You can’t talk to me like that, you skank!” Jessie snaps in instant high dudgeon, seemingly jarred out of her fugue by the force of her outrage. That’s the last thing Chloe ever hears her say, because then Ms Fields is on her with her hundred arms and thousand fingers, engulfing her and drawing her struggling shape into the thicket of body parts, and even though she turns away, the horrific cacophony of screaming and tearing and the awful grinding of molars is something Chloe will never, ever be able to forget, no matter how many dicks she pictures.

Aghast and weeping, Chloe staggers a few steps into the relative safety of the narrow passage, where the remaining girls are cowering terrified, before she collapses. Immediately Lottie is pulling her close, and Nicci too, babbling her relief inside the reassuring cloud of both girls’ perfume, the only place that really feels like home to her any more. Chloe’s so grateful she can’t speak, at least until the comforting smell vanishes in a wash of dead roses and decay, insistent, maddened scrabbling and a chorus of mocking voices intruding from the entrance to the quirk of nonsense architecture the girls have crammed themselves into.

“CHLooooOOOOeeEEE…” Ms Fields croons with some of her mouths, while others are audibly still grinding and mashing at the remains of Jessie. “YOu aLWAys wERE chhchmmmY FAvoouRITttTE. TTttHhe wAYYychh yyOU SQuiiiRrrm, ssSssuhsuhsuhsOSO ccchdDElicIOuss. BEeee a gOODGIrrRrl aNDd chhhcCOMeTAKEYourpUNISHHHMENT!!!!”

At this last part, the awful thing’s attempts to reach the girls abruptly redouble, become an utterly frenzied battering and pounding against the entrance to the passageway, as tens of Ms Fields’ small, delicate hands heedlessly snap fingers and tear nails trying to widen the aperture, shredding wood and plaster and making a worrying amount of progress.

“Get away, you big nasty meanie!! Nobody likes you and you’re not hot any more and we all just wish you’d crawl into a hole and die!!!” Nicci screams out of nowhere, and if the actual insults weren’t the most devastating then Chloe’s still giving her top marks for effort. Even Lottie manages to summon up half a smile. In response, Fields actually begins to squeeze her bulk into the narrow space, breaking the bones of countless arms where they won’t fit and forcing apart the thicket of fingers on her body, exposing the horror of the bloody, sunken mouths and bulging eyes within. Screaming anew, all five girls scramble in abject panic deeper into what is rapidly revealed as a dead end.

“We’re trapped!” Sasha gasps, pounding her latex-gloved fists with their useless plastic Catwoman claws against the narrow wall at the end of the passageway, as with a series of horrible cracks and squelches, Ms Fields further compresses her awful bulk into the narrow space, reaching out with a multitude of broken arms and bleeding hands, their tips only a metre or so now from the terrified girls.

“We are going to die in ‘ere!” Cecily sobs. Chloe knocks desperately on the confining side walls, but there’s no evidence of anything but solidity behind the wood. Nicci’s crying again, her burst of angry defiance apparently having left her spent, and Lottie’s sitting on the floor with her eyes closed and her lips silently moving. Chloe’s never known her to be religious, but it strikes her that, as with any number of forbidden topics, they’ve never actually discussed it; she wonders fleetingly if the death of formal authority at the Blue Rose has freed Lottie to indulge in behaviour their trainers would have stamped out in a heartbeat. Or maybe she’s just scared out of her mind and grasping for anything that might offer comfort; Chloe doesn’t know and it’s hardly the moment to ask, especially considering she’s on the verge of passing out from fear herself.

“CHhhHloooeeee… it’s not so very bad, you know,” Ms Fields calls, and she’s using only one voice - perhaps one mouth - now, sounding disturbingly like her old self despite the thick, grasping mountain of flesh audibly snapping whatever internal structure it might possess to reach the girls. “It demands… cchhhch… sacrifice, It moulds you to Its liking… chchhch… but none of that’s new to you, is it? So why not give yourself to It? The world, the world, the world will be made for such as I… oh goddd auuunnhchchh it hurrtsss, whhh… what haaass it donnnne to meee, yhh… you cOulD BE RRreALllL, yOU FAkE LItTLE PLASttTTIC chcchcCHCHCWwHOrRRE!!! HOWww DArE YOUu REFUuuuuUUSE!!!”

Chloe pulls herself to half-standing, still unsteady on her heels, and straightens the stewardess’ hat she’d have lost long ago if it weren’t pinned to her dishevelled hair. She isn’t consciously aware of a plan, but the thing Fields has become seems to be fixated on her, and the ruined hands and raw, beckoning, champing meat of their former instructor are only getting closer, so she can’t escape the feeling that if the other girls are going to survive, she’ll have to be the one to act.

This is the moment the floor beneath the girls simply drops away, sending all five tumbling and shrieking down a sudden steep incline, away from Fields’ grasp and into the lightless unknown. The bright screen of one of the girls’ cameras momentarily illuminates scores of hands beating at the walls in impotent frustration, and then there is just screaming and the slide down into the dark.

 

-

 

“Where the fuck did you cunts come from? Answer! Now!” demands a deep, menacing voice, and Chloe’s almost too afraid to open her eyes and see what breed of horror Mr Warner has become. She’s too conditioned and accustomed to obedience to hold her silence long, though, and finds herself squinting in the glare of the underslung flashlight attached to a serious-looking automatic rifle.

“We, er, we come out of the wall, Sir. Sorry, Sir,” she says, biting back the note of resentment she unexpectedly feels like adding, getting to her feet as best she can and attempting a lopsided curtsey. She’s less relieved than she thought she’d be to find Warner still approximately the right shape, red-faced and built like a brick shithouse, dressed in military-style body armour and accompanied by at least three more guards and a handful of staff Chloe doesn’t recognise, all of whom are loaded up with overstuffed backpacks and holdalls alongside their weaponry. From the look of their surroundings Chloe suspects the bruising slide through the dark deposited the girls somewhere in the teaching wing, whatever that might mean now; the dim green light of a glowstick is visible between the guards’ milling feet, and there’s what might be a second one glimmering beyond that in the distant gloom, so she figures maybe reality has decided to play nice for the moment.

“What should we do with them, Sir?” asks one of the other guards, pointedly not lowering his rifle. The remaining girls are largely on their feet by now, standing to attention as best they can with broken stilettos and twisted ankles.

“I’m fucking thinking!” Warner barks, making his subordinate palpably flinch, then raises his gun again and addresses the girls as a whole. “Listen up, bitches, because I am only asking you this once: are you absolutely fucking certain you’re all who you say you are? If any of you have any doubts whatsoever, you’ve noticed any strange fucking behaviour in the others, now is the time to say so. Shaking fits, staring into mirrors, appearing where they shouldn’t be, singing that FUCKING tune, whatever: if I find you’ve kept anything from me to protect your dumb cunt friends, or any of you endangers the group, I will not discipline you. I will fucking shoot you, costs be damned.”

The silence drags on for an uncomfortably long time, but nobody speaks until finally the internal pressure grows too much for Chloe’s insistent desire to please, and she hesitantly opens her mouth.

“No, Sir, we ain’t seen nothing like that, Sir. Well, apart from the wives’ class-“

“I’m well fucking aware of the state of the matrimonial class,” Warner says heavily, rubbing at his side, where a fresh field dressing is visible beneath the flak jacket. “And how do you explain a gap opening in the fucking wall and the lot of you just happening to fall out right in front of us when we’re almost at the safe room?”

“I can’t, Sir,” Chloe says, truthfully. “Ms Fields was… she’s turned into something bad, Sir, and she… she killed Jessie, and we was hiding in a kind of gap between two walls, and then the floor fell out from under us and we was here, Sir.”

“It’s true, Sir,” Sasha volunteers, and the others volunteer an assortment of similar sentiments and nods.

“Hm,” Warner grunts, and Chloe’s torn between the familiar pleasure of a return to unthinking obedience and the uncomfortable awareness that he’s deciding whether or not to shoot them all. “Stay behind us, keep your slut mouths shut and do as you’re told,” he snaps at them, sounding as if he already regrets the decision. “And stop that fucking blubbering,” he adds, indicating Nicci with a jab of the rifle’s barrel.

“Y… yes, Sir!! Sorry, Sir!!” she sniffles, clinging tight to Lottie as the girls dutifully join the back of Warner’s little procession and follow their weary trudge toward the supposed safety of the staff room.

 

-

 

“They just fell out of nowhere?” the voice on the other side of the door demands. “And you brought them here? You seriously thought that was a good idea?”

“I made a call,” Chloe hears Warner say, sounding very much like he’s grinding his teeth. She’s not used to his authority being questioned, so either whoever’s inside is very high in the Blue Rose’s hierarchy, or that hierarchy has collapsed completely and Mr Warner’s just a thug with a gun and a truly enormous penis.

“What possible use could a bunch of brain-fucked trainees be?” whoever’s behind the staff room door asks, but then another voice says something out of earshot - a woman - and there’s a muffled discussion that ultimately seems to result in the door being unlocked.

“Thank you kindly,” Warner snarls at the tweed-suited older man standing sullenly just inside, sounding very much as if he’d like to strangle him with his own tie. There’s a short, incongruously kindly-looking woman beside him, and Chloe recognises neither of them, which probably means they’re part of the sprawling corpus of administrative and support staff working entirely behind the facade of the trainees’ world. Behind them, the survivors Warner and his guards have managed to gather are variously sleeping, talking in hushed twos and threes, and sorting supplies as if preparing for a long stay. There are no more than twenty people, all clustered toward the middle of the smoke-scented, lavishly-furnished space, dark wooden bookshelves and antique leather chairs arrayed around the fireplace that, in the absence of power, is casting the whole scene in a lurid, flickering light. There are three girls from the more advanced classes, two wives and one unfortunate servant, who’s already bent over a chair with her skirts pulled up and the familiar look of blank acquiescence on her face. The rest are mostly backroom staff, although Mr Percival and Mr Goss are lurking at the rear of the room, and there might be a couple more instructors the girls recognise among the rest. Nobody reacts especially positively to the addition of another five of the facility’s products to the gathering, but in any case, they’re much more interested in the supplies Warner’s group has retrieved from the storerooms, falling on water bottles and dry snacks with all the grace of a pack of starving dogs.

“Get in the corner and keep it the fuck down,” Warner mutters dismissively, tossing a bundle of what turn out to be blankets at a startled Sasha. Nicci seems greatly comforted by the reassertion of some kind of authority, and conversely Lottie looks mutinous, but all five of them quietly obey, sitting in a little huddle with their torn costumes and compounding traumas.

“Well, this is something,” Lottie murmurs, reclining like Venus on a drab grey cotton shell.

“We’re really safe in here, though, aren’t we?! We are, right?? Safe??” Nicci asks, trembling in both voice and person.

Lottie shrugs. “If we’re not, we’ve only got to run faster than these people, and a lot of them don’t exactly look like they do daily cardio,” she says, with a grim smile.

“It’ll be fine, Sir knows what he’s doing,” says Chloe, although in her head she’s still watching Jessie die, and she feels like she’s reading from a script she’s only half memorised.

“Oh, yeah, bet he’s done a hundred practice runs of this exact thing,” Lottie mutters. “Moving walls, horrible monsters, people d-“ her voice catches, “-dying. People dying. All by-the-book stuff,” she concludes, but she’s lost her grip on her sarcasm and by the end she just sounds sad.

“Do we even know we’re secure in here? The way things are out there, what’s stopping the walls from disappearing and letting in God knows what?” the girls overhear the thin, tweedy man demand of a livid-looking Warner. Chloe feels a shiver of commingled fear and excitement at the sense-memory of him working out similar frustrations on her body, and an unexpected surge of self-loathing at how much she wants it.

“We’re safe here. This room’s stable,” Warner says, with the unspoken but crystal-clear undertone that the conversation is over.

“How can you possibly know that?” the man asks, and Chloe marvels that he hasn’t gotten punched yet.

“I just do,” Warner grunts, turning away to rifle through a bag of supplies as if he’s genuinely uncomfortable. “Do you see any monsters? It’s fucking safe. We’re done talking about it.”

“Even I’ll admit that don’t sound comforting,” Chloe whispers to Lottie.

“Well, for the first time ever, I genuinely hope he’s right,” Lottie murmurs back.

Time passes the only way it can in a room full of terrified people with nothing to do but wait for danger to find them; agonisingly slowly, and on a constant knife-edge between tedium and panic. The girls largely go ignored; at one point an unfamiliar instructor haltingly orders Chloe to bend over one of the fancy leather chairs, and she experiences a welcome flood of humiliated arousal as her skirt is yanked up and her panties pulled down in front of anyone who cares to look. The man seems to lose his nerve before he even gets his dick out, though, leaving her standing there awkwardly with her underwear around her ankles, her flight attendant’s jacket riding up and her ass on full display, frustrated and unfulfilled. When someone finally pays attention to her, and it turns out it’s only to tell her to move because they want the chair, she’s so full of bottled-up lust, grief and anger that she very nearly snaps something extremely unbecoming of a good fuck-toy, which rattles her to her core. She tells herself it’s just the stressful circumstances, that she isn’t losing the capacity for eager acquiescence that has defined her and formed the core of her self-worth, but it’s cold comfort when she feels like such a useless little failure as she shuffles over to the others and sits back down.

There are murmurs among some of the surviving staff that the night’s gone on far too long, that their watches and the clocks on the facility-issued, local-network phones are showing nonsense numbers, or things that aren’t even numbers and hurt to contemplate. The girls are perhaps advantaged here, as they’re so used to having their sense of time tampered with that it doesn’t bother them as much as it seems to bother everyone else; the staff and guards are fretful and clearly unable to sleep, while the girls from the other classes and, eventually, Chloe, Nicci, Lottie and the others eventually bed down on the floor without much trouble. Sleeping in their clothes and makeup goes against the powerful compulsion they all feel to take care of their hygiene and appearance, but the girls aren’t flush with choices, and in any case the discomfort is surprisingly manageable after the horrors they’ve all experienced. Chloe’s lying between the other two in a horny, frustrated, intensely unhappy state, unable to prevent herself replaying all her most spectacular rows with Jessie intercut horribly with the images of her death that seem seared into her mind’s eye, when she registers a soft beep and a click, and she hears Lottie make a muted gasp.

“Chloe. Hey. Chlo! Wake up, you’re not going to believe this,” she whispers, her soft voice and warm breath tickling Chloe’s ear and grazing the hairs on the back of her neck. Then something falls in front of her face, a small, dark object, and it takes her a moment of intense confusion before she realises that to her amazement, it’s Lottie’s chastity cage, unlocked and detached. She’s never even seen one open before; any cleaning and maintenance is done while the girls are sedated for their semi-regular medical workups, and consequently none of them have actually seen their own penises in probably two years.

“What… how?” she asks, rolling over to look at her best friend, her wide eyes framed in smeared mascara. Lottie’s enormous breasts are pressed up against her back, both girls’ short skirts barely covering crotch and butt, and the aching want Chloe’s feeling is of a type she’s never experienced before.

“I don’t know!” Lottie whispers back, breathless. “Maybe something’s happened in the control room? Or there’s interference, because of all this? Something the system mistook for the unlock signal?”

“Mine’s still on,” Chloe replies, not entirely without relief. She isn’t sure how she feels about her own desperately straining girldick, or about the possibility of it providing something other than endless, tantalising denial, whereas Lottie seems uncomplicatedly thrilled.

“Nicci’s not screaming the place down, so hers probably is too,” Lottie says. “And nobody else seems, you know… so yeah. Just me”

“So, you wanna…” Chloe asks, aching lust making her voice extra-breathy. From the pressure in the small of her back it seems Lottie’s making it fairly plain that her answer’s yes, so Chloe manoeuvres herself the other way around as quietly as she can. The fact they’re doing this in front of a roomful of people - any of whom could easily see everything if they were paying the girls any attention whatsoever - is kind of exciting to Chloe, albeit she’d naturally prefer if they were making filthy comments and emptying used condoms all over her, and maybe if she was locked in spreader bars or strapped to a Sybian or something. Lottie has fewer exhibitionist tendencies, and additionally she figures it’s probably a good idea to keep this development between the two of them for the moment, so she’s making a rare effort to be circumspect.

Lottie’s dick is moderately sized even after two years on a feminising pharmaceutical cocktail and locked in a cage; there’s a particular taste and smell to a female penis, as Chloe knows from occasionally servicing Ms Malynovskaya, distinct but no less delicious, and she takes her time and savours it, running her tongue up and down from base to tip, before she slips her pillowy lips around Lottie’s cock and starts rhythmically throating it, going gradually faster beneath the thin blanket while the other girl lies on her back and fails to hold in urgent little moans of pleasure. A long-nailed hand finds the back of Chloe’s head, and doesn’t grab or force but twines its fingers in her hair and ever-so-gently guides her up and down the shaft; her own dick is trying painfully hard to get erect in its prison, and for all that the girls regularly seek temporary relief together in the dark of the dorm, Chloe’s surprised, because there’s no humiliation, no degradation, no cameras or audience to speak of, yet she’s so turned on she’s barely thinking of her grief over Jessie at all. In that moment, in those circumstances, she can’t imagine anything she wants more than to give one of the two people she loves something uncomplicatedly good, and when Lottie finally lets out a soft cry and thrusts her hips, and shoots a small amount of tasteless fluid into Chloe’s eager mouth, it’s somehow just as fulfilling as if it had been a gallon of cum.

“God, that was amazing,” Lottie says, sounding slightly dazed, as the two of them lie tit-to-tit on their thin blanket, having to crane forward to kiss over the soft mountains of silicone and saline.

“Nicci’s gonna be so mad we didn’t wake her,” Chloe murmurs, grinning.

“She needs the sleep, poor thing,” replies Lottie, rolling on to her back again and gently stroking the smaller girl’s hair as she makes tiny grumbling noises and snuggles closer to her side. Chloe responds with a huge, distinctly unladylike yawn, which thankfully nobody is in a position to reprimand her for.

“She ain’t the only one, babe,” she says, taking up a position on Lottie’s other side, one arm wrapped possessively around a J-cup tit, and almost before the end of the sentence she’s out like a light. Lottie lies there for a while, awake and staring at the ceiling, and if anyone was watching her expression, they’d see it gradually shift from a warm glow of satisfaction to a look of the most profound guilt and dread.

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