• on the rest of her body
• with a cold, wet hand towel
• proceeding with a defamation lawsuit
• that left only two
• his brother and he were twins

Tune in next time part 252                           Click Here for Earlier Installments

“I can’t believe you were just using me, too,” I said to Tessa. She stood over me, a sponge in her panties and glistening sweat on the rest of her body.

“Not just using you.” She located a small towel among the junk stored in the subbasement and dried herself before getting dressed.

“What did you mean about an ultimate goal? What is this exotic compound? There’s plenty more where that batch came from, by the way.” I wasn’t too proud to give seduction one last try, but I was too proud to ask her again about the handcuffs. I knew the answer already anyway.

She just hummed to herself as she put her clothes on, then crept up the steps that led to the root cellar. I shuddered.

When she was out of sight, I sat up and started getting ready to escape. There are things I enjoy less than post-coital cleanup with a cold, wet hand towel, but not many.

Betrayal, for instance. Being abandoned, in shackles, in a memory hole under our old school. I looked up, picturing the halls of the Academy, and wondered whether any of the faculty were still proceeding with a defamation lawsuit against the student government.

I set to work on the cuffs. I’d never been much good at picking locks, but the old cabinets and file drawers down here were filled with bobby pins and paperclips so I was bound to succeed eventually. The tunnel to the sub dock was behind a stack of boxes, easy to access once my hands were free.

Voices startled me, coming from that very tunnel. A man and a woman.

I squeezed under a table and pulled a crate of unclaimed diplomas in front of myself just in time. The woman was speaking as they emerged from the tunnel.

“… so we chased all the others off a cliff, and that left only two. Do you want to know the best part?”

“Naturally. Tell me everything, you vixen.”

“Those two. It turned out that his brother and he were twins.”

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• “Look at that thing, man.”
• get into the good graces of the buxom widow
• escape from one calamity
• shortly returned on tiptoe
• marry after she graduated

Tune in next time part 250                           Click Here for Earlier Installments

They hadn’t uncuffed me, which pissed me off. John, I expected that kind of shit from. I glared at Tessa as I got up. That was also an excuse to avert my eyes from the crotch region of John’s tacky and immodest getup. And vulgar. I mean, was a vacuum sealer involved in putting it on?

Then there was Hipster Jane, the wildcard in my predicament. I swiveled my glance her way, trying to remember everything about her. She’d been in the music scene forever, originally as half of Jane and Able, a wife-and-husband duo. Able liked the groupies too much, though. Eventually he vanished under suspicious circumstances, and Jane shifted to the promotions side of the biz. She taught at the Academy as a sideline: Suspicious Circumstances 101. And she had more than one weakness.

I locked my eyes onto John’s groin, jutting my face forward to really sell it. “Look at that thing, man.” Part one of my plan was to get into the good graces of the buxom widow in the tube top and lamé hot pants.

It worked. Hipster Jane licked her lips and drew hard on her cigarette.

“Enough of that,” John said. “Let’s try to act professional.”

“Wow,” I drawled. “You’re really taking that, ‘dress for the job you want’ advice to heart, aren’t you, John.” Part two of my plan was still coming into focus, but I knew it relied on keeping John irritated and distracted. Otherwise, I’d just escape from one calamity and pratfall into another.

Tessa shot me a weird look, like everything she’d been suspecting had run away to hide around the corner, but shortly returned on tiptoe and whispered new aspersions about me in her ear. Or like she’d surprised herself with the memory of whom she’d planned to marry after she graduated.

Hipster Jane was dragging John up into the root cellar. Tessa was still staring into my eyes.

Time for part three.

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• nursing a glass of hooch
• handed the wad of cash to the wrong person
• feelings of such deep emotion
• the reunions didn’t go well
• mother’s favorite bracelet

Tune in next time part 248                           Click Here for Earlier Installments

“Tessa,” I said soothingly. “You don’t need to knock me out. I’ll keep the cuffs on, if that’s how you want to play it.”

She slid her bottom lip to the side and lowered her eyelids at me, a look that really would have seemed more natural if she were nursing a glass of hooch on the veranda at some big society cotillion. Which was probably deliberate, meant to remind me that it was I who handed the wad of cash to the wrong person in our Academy graduation project. But I was also the one who got it back, and we had such fun spending it later.

All my memories from that period carried feelings of such deep emotion, but none more than the clock tower. It had been my job to trigger the detonator, and Tessa’s to plant the charges. I missed her signal when she got clear, so I thought she was still inside. Which was why I didn’t press the button. Instead of a boom, our enemies heard their tacky carillon tolling noon atop its hideously modern tower. Tessa vowed to go back and finish the demolition someday, but never got around to it. Arlo’s weird structure was just a proxy.

“You really don’t get it,” she said. Any sense of playfulness had again left her face. “You think I have a choice.”

“Of course you do.”

“The committee was quite explicit.”

Oh, shit. Our 20-year Academy reunion was coming up. In general, the reunions didn’t go well. Casualties tended to run close to 20%, and usually at least one government was toppled. What committee had recruited Tessa? I spotted an important clue on her wrist: Mother’s favorite bracelet.

But she was too quick with the hypodermic, and I didn’t have time to draw any conclusions.

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• Where were you when I needed you?
• ugly ghosts from the past
• followed after him in a wild mob
• hardened crystalline structure
• You knew this was inevitable

Tune in next time part 246                           Click Here for Earlier Installments

Viscount Arlo dispatched his henchmen to go after Jason. When the van left, he turned back to me.

“You knew this was inevitable,” he said. His sneering accent made me want to punch him, but he wasn’t stupid enough to uncuff me. He droned about being the one responsible for all my hardships, a monologue I ignored as soon as it became clear that he had all the facts wrong.

I looked past him, at the strange building like a hardened crystalline structure of some milky, waxy substance. It had to be his lair. I wondered if it was as fragile and unstable as it looked, or if it would offer him protection if all the people he wronged ever followed after him in a wild mob, if ugly ghosts from the past would be thwarted by its opalescent faceted walls.

Suddenly, Arlo’s insufferable monotone stopped. He slumped from the waist, revealing Tessa standing behind him, holding him up by his belt. I smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

Her lips curled in a snarl as she let Arlo finish collapsing to the ground. She swatted a tear from her cheek and cried, “Where were you when I needed you?”

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