It’s early evening when Christine Hale sits down opposite her one-time kidnapper and everything she thought she knew about Dorley Hall is turned on its head.

A summons to Aunt Bea’s office is never going to be a reassuring thing to receive, even after Christine’s official discharge from the program, and the consequent assurance she feels that she isn’t about to be reprimanded for wearing too little makeup or still being dressed in a T-shirt and shorts at three in the afternoon isn’t enough to completely prevent her feeling nervous. She settles into the chair she suspects was chosen more for its intimidating appearance than its comfort, and faces the woman who still technically holds her freedom and fate, not to mention her paycheque, in her hands. As she does, she’s simultaneously relieved and concerned to see that across the expanse of mahogany sits not Aunt Bea, iron-willed ruler of the secret basement and scourge of the malignantly masculine, but simply Beatrice Quinn, looking exhausted, careworn and alone.

“We have a problem,” she says, without preamble.

“Oh, is something up with the last security patch? I knew I should’ve run a few more tests, I’ve just been so busy trying to catch up with my coursework, and it seems like there’s always something breaking, and I-“ Christine begins

“The problem,” she says, eyes fixed firmly on Christine’s, “is this.” Beatrice slides a neatly-stapled sheaf of papers across the table, and it takes Christine a moment to understand that what she’s looking at is a print-out of an article from some local newspaper or other, so poorly formatted for print that the text is jammed into a single, narrow column spanning a wildly unnecessary six pages. Given the disconnect between her appearance and the obvious affectation of her role as ‘aunt’ it’s easy to see Beatrice as ageless, somehow, but occasionally something serves as a reminder that the internet, the convenience of sharing a link rather than printing hard copies, and the percentage of the discretionary budget that goes into ordering stuffed sharks from IKEA are still all relatively novel to the woman. Christine smiles, overcome briefly by an unaccustomed fondness for her kidnapper, and skims quickly through the pages. It’s a report on a murder; a woman, thirty-one, pretty and white, and Christine wonders momentarily if Beatrice and her contacts have had some role in keeping it out of the national media, because this is exactly the sort of victim who tends to get a lot of-

“Wait, this woman. Is she…?”

“One of us? A graduate? Yes.” Bea answers, soft and achingly sad. Christine’s heart clenches in her chest like a fist has closed around it. “But I’m afraid that isn’t the worst of it.” She pushes two more printouts across the desk. Different newspapers, from different parts of the country, and with different print-formatting errors, Christine light-headedly notices, but that’s her recoiling mind burying the lede: two more women dead, in similar circumstances, and she doesn’t feel she has to ask about their histories.

“Someone’s murdering Dorley graduates?” she breathes, aghast and almost begging Bea to gainsay her. Instead, the older woman simply nods, gently taking back the papers and primly arranging them with a few neat taps against the desk.

“I believe so,” she says, simply, and something about her calm suddenly seems infuriating.

“Then how are you not out there doing something?” Christine blurts, certain she’s crossing a line but unable to stop herself. “Beyond the, you know, the horror and grief and loss of innocent lives, have you thought about what that means for the rest of us? They’re going to autopsy these bodies, Beatrice, and however good the surgeons on Dorley’s payroll are, a coroner is going to notice certain commonalities between the victims! And they will trace those victims back to Almsworth, back to Saints, and then quite frankly, we are all screwed! This is already in the news, even if it’s just local - however powerful your mystery contacts are, they can’t sweep this under the carpet forever!”

“I’m aware,” Bea says, snapping briefly into the frostiness Christine remembers well from less liberated times behind Dorley’s walls, but the older woman is clearly unable to maintain the posture, which is almost more concerning. “Believe me, I’m aware. And as for the question of doing something, as you put it, aside from expending more resources than I would like on preventing the national media making the obvious connection, well. That is why I asked you up here today.”

“Me?” Christine asks, genuinely perplexed and not a little nervous. “I’m just the tech support. What do you think I can possibly-?”

“Do?” Beatrice finishes for her. “Enough to make a difference, I hope. Because I have a strong suspicion that these murders won’t be solved without digging up a chapter in Dorley’s history that none of us particularly wish to remember. And it may be that your particular skills are well-suited to unearthing the skeletons in our collective closet, as it were.”

“God. I was stressed about getting my assignment in on time, so this is… you know. Kind of a lot,” Christine sighs, and leans her elbows on the table in exactly the way she knows Beatrice hates. She figures she’s earned at least one. “Okay. Lay it on me, I suppose.”

“Well,” Beatrice says, letting out a deep breath. “How to explain this…? All right. Let’s start here. In its fourteen years of operation, I am proud to say that Dorley Hall has successfully produced almost a hundred happy, healthy, self-actualised young women.”

“And?” Christine asks the pregnant pause, arms folded.

Beatrice sighs deeply and sags into the chair, exuding weariness and resignation. “Yes, all right. And one serial killer. But I assure you that wasn’t our fault.”

Christine can’t keep the horrified astonishment from showing. “Wait. You’re telling me the Dorley method managed to turn one of the boys into a serial killer down there?”

Bea shakes her head, breathing out slowly. “There’s reason to believe she was already a serial killer. Or a serial killer in the making, at the very least. We just failed to realise that at the time. No, what we did to her was… well.” Beatrice taps a lengthy code into a keypad hidden beneath the mahogany expanse of her desk, and after the audible thunk of a lock disengaging, extracts a slim manila folder from the bottom drawer. She turns it before sliding it across to Christine, so she can read the label: Amber. “It’s probably better if you read it for yourself.”

***

It’s only Lucie’s second catch, and she feels like it’s gone very well. Much better than her first, where the target thrashed around so much that she only managed to inject a partial dose of tranquiliser, and subsequently had to half-drag, half-carry a semi-conscious date-rapist most of the way across campus, wearing heels, all the while praying no drunken stragglers or early-morning joggers happened to pick the same route around the backs of the buildings. And after all that, the absolute shit ended up washing out in his third week! She was amazed when Aunt Bea approved a second target, but she figures persistence must count for something, and she’s certainly demonstrated that this time: she’s stalked her target meticulously from lecture to library to halls of residence, and then to the night-time gardens and quiet cul-de-sacs where her quarry pursues his own prey. An unassuming young man, so thoroughly ordinary it might almost seem feigned if Lucie hadn’t watched his every move for weeks now, noting down acquaintances, habits, times and places with meticulous care. He doesn’t seem to have friends or more than a cursory social life, which fits the profile, and she’s only thankful that his activities haven’t progressed beyond taking pictures through windows and sneaking into empty houses and dorms. He’s practically perfect as a candidate for Dorley’s underground rehabilitation program, and Lucie hardly even needed to argue the case for his inclusion in the year’s intake, who at present are mostly still banging on the walls of their basement cells. Even the capture was easy: for someone with so few meaningful connections, the target attends an unusual number of social gatherings and house parties, albeit to hover at the fringes and observe, noticed by few and remembered by even fewer. Maybe scouting for new targets to stalk, Lucie thinks with disdain. It was simplicity itself to follow the steps laid out in the handbook: approach, befriend, isolate, subdue, and if part of her could swear she heard the target breathe the word ‘finally’ as the needle went in, she puts it down to adrenaline and elation at a job well done.

Now, in the basement, the boy is an enigma: in stark contrast to his peers in what is shaping up to be a difficult year, he doesn’t rage, doesn’t fight, doesn’t even shout at his captors. He simply sits, watching, showing no sign whatsoever of fear or even concern. He’s capable of being talkative, articulate, even charming when he wants to be, but the overarching impression is that he simply isn’t particularly interested in the majority of the conversations he’s been engaged in. He’s just waiting calmly for the next thing to happen. Lucie, now his sponsor, is very vocal on the subject of how unsettling she finds him, and has half-jokingly raised the possibility of washing him out on that basis alone, but she can’t point to a single thing he’s actually done to resist the programme; he accepted the implant and medical exams with a politely curious equanimity, and something about his presence even seems to make the other boys less inclined to act out. So he continues, not dissociated or unresponsive or even, seemingly, bored, despite his total lack of engagement with the limited entertainment on hand. He sits crosslegged on his bed, gazing evenly into the camera, for hours on end, and after a few weeks of this the security staff have started to swear blind that his eyes track them when they get up for a snack or shift in their seats.

The first undeniable sign that something actually is very wrong comes when Harry disappears. The boy has been a problem since intake, has resisted violently at every step of the way, and is widely considered the most likely candidate for an early washout. But ultimately his fate is sealed on an otherwise uneventful Wednesday, when in the course of his usual ranting and raving, he manages to strike Lucie in the face. It’s not a particularly hard blow, but it’s enough to bloody her nose, and in the resulting clamour of security staff wrestling the thrashing captive to the floor and cuffing him, escorting the others to their rooms and applying first aid, it’s little wonder nobody notices the quiet boy in the corner watching the struggling Harry being dragged away with an eerie intensity.

Next morning, despite having been secured in his cell and cuffed to the bed, Lucie and the other sponsors find Harry gone. Unbeknownst to the boys in the basement, this triggers a complete panic upstairs, where the senior Sisters and Beatrice herself race to locate the presumptive escapee before he can call the police, or the newspapers, or do anything similarly catastrophic. In the end, though, he simply never turns up; there’s a mysterious gap in the surveillance footage between three and four that morning, and in the absence of any other candidates, blame falls on the security staff, who find themselves prematurely rotated back to their firm’s headquarters with a stern reprimand. Only Lucie notices the single drop of blood, so artfully positioned just behind the door in the quiet boy’s room. She tells herself it must have come from her own nose, or one of the guards’ knuckles, or the kind of minor injury that happens all too frequently when the inmates get rowdy, but she can’t entirely escape the suspicion that it’s a message, and that in scuffing it away before anyone else notices she’s made herself complicit in something she doesn’t yet comprehend. The room’s occupant meets her eyes as she stammers an excuse and turns to leave, and the faintest hint of a smirk twitches across his lips.

Their captors’ obvious panic and inability to explain the disappearance only serves to rile the remaining boys up, and for the next two days they’re almost uncontrollable. This comes to an abrupt head when, during a brief unsupervised period in the common room necessitated by the fact most of the sponsors and guards are away searching for Harry, the door lock mysteriously engages and the cameras cut out again. The last few frames to be recorded are of the quiet boy turning to face the screen and smiling, slowly and broadly. None of the others will ever say what passed between him and them during the twenty minutes it takes for the duty guard to force the door, and none are physically harmed in any way the sponsors can identify, but afterwards, the boys are the most obedient and compliant group Dorley has ever hosted. In fact, if it weren’t for the ongoing, sporadic vanishings of the security staff, this would be an almost effortless year; when faced with disclosure, voice training and even orchiectomy, all it takes is a glance into the cold, grey eyes of their fellow captive for the soon-to-be girls to choose the lesser horror and acquiesce. For his part, the source of this unprecedented meekness complies calmly with each and every step, and the blandly polite interest he-becoming-she displays at being gradually turned into a girl eats mercilessly at Lucie, who every day is becoming more of a nervous wreck, far more than any amount of resistance might. The prospect of washing her out is raised regularly during sponsor meetings, and while there’s no hard evidence she’s responsible for anything worse than tampering with the equipment, Beatrice is reminded rather forcefully by every sponsor who’s had to spend time with the troubling new acquisition that Dorley isn’t beholden to any rules but its own, and that everyone would sleep better (or at all, in Lucie’s case) without the looming fear that they might be next. The first time the discussion progresses beyond the theoretical and into actual plans for removal and pickup, a single severed foot appears on Bea’s desk the following morning, still wearing its uniform boot.

"Well,” says Beatrice, unflappable, poking at the grisly paperweight with a pencil.

The subject doesn’t come up again.

“I’ve chosen,” says the eerily affectless girl, looking levelly at the trembling, bloodshot-eyed Lucie in a perfect inversion of the usual sponsor-subject relationship.

“A-already?” Lucie stammers, scratching compulsively at the back of one already red-scored hand with the nails of the other. “You know you d-don’t… you don’t have to decide for, you know, days…weeks even…”

“I know. But I’ve chosen,” she repeats. The girl’s been working tirelessly on her voice, sitting in her room mechanically reciting scales and the vocal exercises everyone has by now been issued for hours on end, and the result is that she sounds almost indistinguishable from someone headed into her third year. Lucie finds this intensely upsetting rather than impressive. She’s slight, what little muscle mass she possessed having been shed in seemingly no time at all, and her breast and hip development has been relatively modest. Her blonde hair reaches past her neck to graze a collarbone that stands out sharply against milk-pale skin, and those chilly, colourless eyes are perhaps the most impenetrable Lucie has had the misfortune to be regarded by. The electrologist has already registered concerns about the girl’s mental state due to her total lack of reaction on the table, and how to navigate the upcoming round of facial surgery is a hanging question, but short of decisive instructions from Aunt Bea - who so far has told the sponsors to wait for further developments and refused to elaborate on what those might be - there’s nothing to do but stay calm and pretend everything is normal, even if in private Lucie has taken to yanking out clumps of her hair just to keep from screaming, and silently she suspects she isn’t the only one.

“So w-what n-name? Have you, uh… chosen?” Lucie manages to get out.

“Amber,” says Amber with a very uncustomary smile, and subsequently everything changes. Overnight she becomes chatty, girly, gregarious and positively sisterly, and by now her fellow kidnappees are so terrified of her that they collectively follow suit. Before the sponsors even have time to catch their breath, they’re playing host to a veritable sorority, with the newly minted Amber at its centre, and the girls are embracing femininity with an eagerness that borders on the pathological.

The disappearances of the security staff do not stop.

The first year progresses into the second and a group of girls far more developed and less resistant than any before them emerges above ground, and if there’s relief that the hired guards stop disappearing - the company has presented Beatrice with a fairly pointed spreadsheet demonstrating that the Dorley assignment has a higher fatality rate than any number of actual warzones, and has unceremoniously cancelled its contract - it’s matched and exceeded by a panicky, obsessive scanning of the local papers for further instalments in the sudden rash of grandiose, almost theatrical murders in the local area. Lucie, by now a nervous wreck thanks to the close, sisterly bond any outside observer would believe she and her charge share, has long since abandoned hope of anything other than surviving the next two years, but the impending round of facial and genital surgeries does spark the idea of getting rid of an unconscious Amber for good among a couple of the other, less cowed sponsors. Whether in response to these furtive, largely unspoken plans or purely for her own edification, Amber flatly refuses all anesthesia, and the way she lies there and watches the surgeons slice and suture with every appearance of polite interest drives at least one of them to a breakdown. Year two becomes year three without apparent incident, although more than one washout amongst the fresh intake mysteriously vanishes before he can be shipped out, and the surveillance system continues to experience intermittent failures in time with the ongoing horrors the news media is attributing to the 'Almsworth Ripper’. By now it’s almost background noise to the staff, who have collectively resolved to hunker down, say absolutely nothing to the new security contractor, and hope the nightmare passes.

Amber finally causes Lucie to have a complete dissociative break, possibly from sheer relief, when in front of the whole year she stands up, solemnly thanks her beloved Sisters for everything they’ve done for her, and announces her intention to leave the hall and pursue her dreams in the big, wide world beyond. The locks are changed, the surveillance system upgraded for what will be the first of many times, and thus closes, arguably, Dorley Hall’s darkest chapter.

***

“That’s it?” Christine says, slapping the file down onto Aunt Bea’s desk in disbelief. “She just left? You just let her?”

“Sometimes she sends postcards,” Bea replies, staring off into the distance. “They’re very cheerful. The subtext would give you nightmares. Once she sent us a gift-wrapped box containing a full set of human finger-bones, plated in sterling silver. I’m not sure whose they were, or why she thought we would want them; the card didn’t specify. I assume she thought it was self-evident.”

“And now she’s out there murdering people,” Christine exclaims, head full of images from the files: heads, torsos, organs arranged like sculpture, the most horrific methods of murder turned into cryptic statements from a genuinely terrifying mind. “And you never, I don’t know, went to the police? MI5? The FBI? Interpol?”

“Quite apart from the fact that Amber’s experience here would be a touch tricky to explain, do you genuinely believe that would do any good?” Bea replies, a little testily. “Most serial killers are rather pathetic. Opportunistic, cowardly, preying upon the vulnerable, and rarely dangerous once exposed. The agencies you listed, perhaps they could deal with someone of that nature, given the information we possess. The girl - the woman, now, I suppose - is, in the estimation of a small number of very trusted graduates with whom I’ve consulted over the years, the other kind. The real thing, one might say. A genius polymath with absolutely no behavioural constraints, moral or otherwise, barring those she sets herself; a practically supernatural ability to evade discovery, and a fundamental drive to commit the most grotesque murders imaginable as, I can only infer, a twisted form of artistic expression. No, Christine, my first responsibility then, as now, was to safeguard the women and soon-to-be women of Dorley Hall. Given that, for whatever reason, Amber seemed content to play the role of participant in the program and, latterly, devoted Sister, I judged that the best way to achieve that was to play along. And I was right: not once did Amber harm one of us, save for those who had already washed out or were about to. I think she genuinely considers us her Sisters, after her own twisted fashion.”

“But, I mean… where is she now?” Christine says, feeling like she might faint.

Bea holds out her hands. “I genuinely don’t know. We kept tabs on her movements for as long as we could, but as you can hopefully now understand, when she wanted to disappear, she very effectively did so. I’ve had an associate’s associates, let us say, collating news reports on unsolved murders of a certain… artistic bent, and from that we can perhaps make guesses as to her activities, but lately… there’s been nothing of note. We haven’t had any contact with her in some time. I only pray this isn’t what I always feared, during those terrible years.”

“Which was what?” Christine asks, but from the yawning pit in her stomach she thinks she already knows.

“A massacre,” Beatrice says flatly, and Christine’s mind refuses for a moment to accept that her eyes are telling her the older woman is on the verge of tears. “During her time here, Amber made it clear to me that her forbearance when it came to her Sisters was entirely predicated on her being considered, and treated fully as, a Sister in her own right. Break that covenant, and there was nothing she might not do. Nothing, you understand?”

“And you think that’s happened? Something’s made her stop seeing herself as a Sister, so now she’s set on murdering us all?” Christine asks, unsure whether she’s supposed to be comforting Beatrice, which is a scenario she can’t quite seem to reconcile with any accessible reality.

“No, no,” says Bea, shaking her head and sounding suddenly twice as weary. “Outside of the paranoid imaginings of an old woman who should know better, I actually don’t. If she had finally decided to seek some sort of twisted vengeance against Dorley Hall, why attack three random graduates, none of whom was in the same year, or even lived here while she was present? And I assure you, stabbings in dark alleyways are not at all Amber’s style. It simply doesn’t make sense, and Amber never did anything without a reason, however twisted. Which leads me to believe that this is someone else.”

“What happened to the girls from her year? Or her sponsor, this Lucie?” Christine asks, thoughtfully, chewing over that. “It has to have affected them, living with her for all that time. Where are they now?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Bea says, shaking her head. “But I have already pursued that line of inquiry as far as it goes. We always kept an extra-close eye on the graduates from Amber’s intake, and while every single one of them left at the first opportunity, and not one has returned even to visit, all six of them continue to be happy, relatively well-balanced young women with cast-iron alibis. As for Lucie, the poor girl has been for some time a resident of a very pleasant psychiatric facility, at our expense, but she’s doing much better now and I am assured she has been nowhere near the sites of these killings.”

“So why show me all this, if you’re so certain it isn’t Amber?” Christine demands, suddenly growing heated out of frustration and fear. “Just to scare me?”

“I showed it to you,” Bea says, sounding a shade closer to her usual self, “because I need your help, Christine. I don’t know who is murdering our Sisters, or why, and I don’t know where to begin trying to stop it before anyone else is hurt. Amber is the closest thing to an… expert in such things that we have access to, and I need you to utilise your particular talent for accessing restricted information in order to find whatever trail she may have left. I fear it may be time for her to come home for a visit.”

“You can’t be serious,” Christine says, with the sinking, undeniable certainty that she absolutely is.

***

“Christine, you know I can’t just move out,” Paige says, holding Christine’s body tight against hers, running fingers lightly through her girlfriend’s hair, smoothing out the tangles of the third sleepless night since Aunt Bea handed down her new assignment. “Do you have any idea how many clothes I’d have to pack? And my makeup alone could definitely fill a moving van. Not to mention, I’ve finally gotten the lighting set up just right, and having to dismantle and reassemble it all…”

“You’re not taking this seriously,” Christine chides.

“There’s a homicidal maniac picking off graduates from our kidnapping and nonconsensual surgery programme. There was a homicidal maniac in that program at one point, and we’re not sure the two are even the same person. We’re hoping we can catch the killer before anybody notices, maybe with the psychopath’s help because she’s curiously loyal to this place, and that she doesn’t murder anyone we know and like while she’s doing it. Believe me, I’m taking it seriously. But really, it’s one woman, and we’ve all been issued these ridiculous tasers: what could she actually do?”

“You’ve not read her file, or seen the footage,” Christine replies, with a shudder borne of late nights in the security room, spooling through old tapes and leaked crime scene photos, feeling irrationally like the cold-eyed girl on the screen is staring directly at her across time and space. “She never hurt any of the Dorley girls back when she was here, but who knows how she’s changed.”

“How who’s changed?” asks Steph. “Your door was ajar,” she adds belatedly and somewhat apologetically. “I was coming to see if either of you wanted breakfast; Faye made way too many pancakes. Like, way, way too many. Oh, hey, you’re packing. Are you going somewhere, or has Vicky finally gotten sick of living backstage at London Fashion Week when she stays over?”

“I’m unpacking,” Paige replies, a little testily. “Because my darling girlfriend decided all I’d need if I were evacuating was a bag full of last year’s beachwear essentials and an awful lot of lingerie.”

“I packed it in a hurry,” Christine huffs.

“Evacuating?” Steph mouths to Christine, looking somewhere between concerned and amused and almost angelic in her innocence about it all.

“I was about to come down and tell you,” Christine says, awkwardly. “Keep it quiet, though, okay? I’ve no doubt Aunt Bea assumed I’ll tell Paige, but it really isn’t meant to go any further than that, on pain of… well, I don’t know, but I can’t imagine it’d be much fun. Don’t panic, but there’s kind of an emergency. Aunt Bea’s had me researching one of Dorley’s more, erm… complicated graduates. And, as of last night, I’m quite reasonably concerned that she might be aware I’ve been snooping.”

“My girlfriend might have attracted the attention of the woman this place turned into a serial killer!” Paige says, brightly and with less than total sincerity.

“It didn’t turn her into a serial killer. She was already a serial killer. Probably. We just made her a girl serial killer. Which might have made her better at it?” Christine corrects her, driven by nervous tension. “And I’m just suggesting a few simple precautions, which-“

“I’m sorry, Dorley had a serial killer?” Steph exclaims over her, eyes wide. “Why is this the first I’m hearing about that, exactly? What did she do? How did they catch her? How did it get from murder to dick pics, in terms of reasons to kidnap people? I mean, I’ve heard of mission creep, but that’s a long way to slide, right? And they reformed her? How?”

“Oh, she’s definitely not reformed,” Christine says mildly, blinking in the face of this outpouring, wondering if maybe the girl’s been spending too much time around Aaron. “They picked her up for stalking, which was either a massive failure of surveillance or an intentional ploy on her part. But once they realised what she was, they were all so terrified of her that they more or less let her do whatever she wanted.”

“Which was let them turn her into a girl.”

“She’s done worse things, for worse reasons,” Christine says, the weight of uninvited knowledge hanging heavy on every word.

“And you said attracted her attention, Paige?” Steph asks, starting to look perhaps a touch worried.

“She’s left tracks here and there,” says Christine, slightly wild-eyed. “Moving money around. Car rentals, that sort of thing. None of it’s in her name, and I’m not sure it’s all even her, but last night most of the records just suddenly disappeared.”

“You think she realised someone was snooping?” Steph asks.

“Or she only left a trail at all as a trap,” Christine says, morosely. “And since then I’ve noticed some odd activity on the Dorley network; outside connection requests from weird IPs, that kind of thing. I’m pretty sure nothing’s been accessed, but still…”

“I think perhaps you could use some more sleep,” says Paige, her tone kind but clearly not taking Christine all that seriously. “Go and get your pancakes, Steph. We’ll be along in a moment.”

“I’ll try my best not to get serial-killed on the way!” Steph laughs, taking Paige’s cue, to Christine’s obvious exasperation.

“I feel like nobody’s taking this half as seriously as they should be,” Christine grumbles. Paige opens her mouth to respond, but before she can say anything Steph’s suddenly back, peering around the doorframe with a thunderstruck expression on her face.

“Christine, you might want to, ah… take a look in the kitchen,” Steph manages, before holding her hands up in a universal gesture of helplessness and backing away in the other direction, face apologetic. Trailing a bemused Paige in her wake, Christine follows the high, bell-clear laughter of an unfamiliar voice down the corridor, feeling a steadily-increasing sense of dread.

Christine has seen far more of Amber in the past couple of days than she’d have preferred, but most of it has been via the medium of Dorley’s old surveillance system, and in any case was recorded in the early and middle stages of the girl’s quasi-coercive transition. Certainly, none of it has adequately prepared her for encountering Amber in person, inexplicably on the inside of all the locks, cameras and motion sensors that are supposed to stand between Dorley’s residents and danger; the woman has an aura of easy charm so bright it’s almost dazzling, and to Christine it’s clear how the unprepared might find her utterly disarming until it’s entirely too late. Based on her intake year, Amber is most likely in her early thirties, but she could easily pass for an extremely polished twenty-one; she’s petite by Dorley standards, which still puts her a couple of inches above average height, and her immaculately styled, shoulder-grazing straight blonde hair, artfully understated makeup and subtly expensive jewellery imply she has real money coming in from somewhere. Christine decides she’d rather not speculate as to where. Through a sort of fashion osmosis that’s inescapably taken place over time spent with Paige, Christine guesses Amber’s deceptively simple sweater, belted miniskirt and ankle boots must have cost ten times her annual salary, and she feels mildly ashamed of herself for recognising the bag carelessly placed on the table as this year’s Bottega Veneta. Certainly the last thing Christine can imagine anyone suspecting Amber of being is a serial killer, let alone one with such a sheer breadth of atrocities under her Dolce & Gabbana belt.

“Get Bea,” Christine murmurs to Paige, who, to her credit, nods and hurries away with a minimum of opposition and just a quick squeeze of her girlfriend’s hand.

Dorley’s monster is holding court at the kitchen table with a handful of wide-eyed, bedheaded second-years, clearly all very taken with the sudden appearance of a chic, wealthy alumna in their kitchen, and as Christine opens the door they’re visibly hanging on every word, which rapidly proves a mistake.

“And then - it was the funniest thing, I realised one of the screws had come out of the numbers on the door, and it had twisted around, you know? So I wasn’t at number 109, I was at 106! But by that point his lungs were on the hooks, I was elbow-deep in intestines, and he really was making some very troubling noises, so I thought, you know, best not to leave a job half-done, eh? You might have seen that one on the news: they got some lovely angles, but they always go and ruin it by blurring the best parts, the prudes. Anyway, enough about me; what did you all get up to this summer?”

Most of the second-years are laughing nervously, apparently still waiting for the punchline, although a couple have gone slightly pale and are visibly looking for a way to extricate themselves. Mia is literally clutching her sides, giggling uncontrollably over what she appears to think is the funniest joke anyone’s told all year. Christine, protective instincts commandeering her body against the protestations of her quailing mind, steps through the door precisely as Amber’s head snaps around to greet her with a broad, radiant smile on an unexpectedly expressive face. Her lips are thin, but form a perfect, bee-stung bow, and her lipstick is very, very red.

“Christine Hale! Oh, it’s so nice to finally meet you!” Amber exclaims with every impression of sincerity, rising and pulling a stunned Christine into a hug with a single whip-quick movement. She smells like vanilla blossom and chamomile, and Christine has to tell herself firmly that the faint, coppery hint of old blood she can detect underneath is definitely in her imagination. Her narrow frame feels oddly solid, if even smaller to the touch: macabre wonderings about how she possibly manages to heft body parts and power tools with such apparent ease rise and multiply unbidden in Christine’s mind. “I already know so much about you; your friends, your studies, the places you like to go. Your lovely family. It’s like we’re besties already!” she gushes happily, and the threat in that is all too apparent. Now it’s turned on her full-bore, Christine can easily understand how that cold, grey gaze gradually abraded away poor Lucie’s mental health: Amber’s eyes reveal absolutely nothing, a seemingly bottomless void of limpid, colourless emptiness that Christine, not usually given to such florid thoughts, momentarily finds herself imagining really might be a window to the woman’s soul.

“Now, who fancies a nice cup of tea?” the killer asks cheerily, releasing Christine to sag into a nearby chair before her knees betray her. Amber’s rooting through one of the cupboards, retrieving and discarding mug after mug for purposes unknown, and a panicking Christine takes the opportunity to frantically mime at the second-years that they should make themselves scarce, which most of them do fairly readily, and Mia grudgingly does only after some resistance.

“Aha! I knew they must still be in here somewhere!” Amber exclaims triumphantly, brandishing a mug she’s retrieved from the very back of the deepest cupboard, behind the sticky toastie-maker nobody dares use and the lids that don’t fit any of the pans. The florid cursive text printed on it reads There Are Three Ways To A Lady’s Heart: Flowers, Wine and Chopping, which almost raises a snort from Christine. Her heart’s still hammering as she sits there helplessly, watching a known serial killer fuss with kettle and teabags, running down her list of options, which largely amount to run and cry, when there’s a merciful approach of footfalls from the corridor; deliberate and heavy, resolute and almost audibly angry.

“I thought we’d gotten rid of the last of those,” Beatrice says drily, standing in the doorway, eyes hard.

“Oh, Auntie, you can’t fool me; I know for certain I saw you laugh at Lord, Grant Me Coffee For The Things I Can Change, And a Power Drill For Those I Cannot when you thought nobody was looking,” Amber says pleasantly, pouring an exact amount of water into each mug before she turns to face Bea.

“Yes, and then I found the receipt from Homebase. Hello, Amber”, says Beatrice, in the coldest tone Christine’s ever heard her employ, and for a moment she isn’t sure whether she’s more afraid of the dead-eyed serial killer or of Bea. For her part, Amber seems entirely unfazed, abandoning her tea to dart forward and give the older woman an entirely one-sided hug.

“I was so flattered when I realised you had someone checking up on me! I have to admit I’d been starting to worry you didn’t care, but here we are, back together like a happy family, and it’s just like it used to be!”

“You might have called,” Beatrice says, brushing heedlessly past Amber to take over the tea-making in what seems to a silently horrified Christine the world’s most genteel dominance display. “She always did brew it too long,” she says, conspiratorially. The murderer, laughing lightly, accepts a mug with every appearance of sincere gratitude, and settles herself at one end of the table while Bea sits opposite, placing the other tea in front of a Christine who’s entirely too stiff with tension to even consider drinking it.

“Oh, I know how you love a surprise, Auntie,” Amber says. Beatrice looks like she’s bitten into a lemon, and seems on the verge of saying something hasty, but swallows her words with visible effort. Instead she steeples her fingers and clears her throat.

“Well. Since you’re here, I assume you know why Christine was trying to find you,” she says.

“Girlish curiosity? A quite understandable desire to connect with Dorley’s most unfairly maligned daughter? Fashion emergency?” Amber laughs, indicating Christine’s tank top and shorts with a studied twinkle in her eye. “No, but really, you know I don’t keep up with the mundane day-to-day. Consider me a terrible naif, Auntie, and just spell it out, if you would.”

“Very well,” says Beatrice. “Three Dorley graduates have been murdered, in similar circumstances. Disparate locations. No obvious motive. And while I am not insinuating you were responsible-“

“Good! I was about to get a little offended!” Amber says, cheerful tone failing to mask a distinct undercurrent of something else.

“-I had hoped you might be able to offer some assistance in working out who is. In the spirit of Sisterly solidarity I know you so treasure.”

“Before all your sordid secrets end up headlining on the Evening News?” Amber asks, amused.

“Before anyone else dies,” Beatrice admonishes, scowling.

“But yes, the other thing too, ideally,” Christine adds, spurred by a needle of worry that Aunt Bea doesn’t fully appreciate the risk posed by even a faint evidence trail in the age of true-crime obsessives and crowdsourced investigations.

“Sounds like fun,” Amber says, with a carefree shrug and a brilliant smile. “Never let it be said I wasn’t there when my dear Sisters needed me. And it’ll be such a nice opportunity to bond with Christine here, too! Girls’ trip!”

Christine chokes on her tea. “I’m, er… I mean, I just… I’ve got a lot of coursework…” she manages, sounding a lot less resolute than she did in her head.

“Nothing that won’t keep, I’m sure,” Amber says, in exactly the firm tone Christine was going for.

“I’m not letting you steal my third-years, Amber,” Bea admonishes her firmly, to Christine’s immense relief. “You’ve always… worked… alone; I see no reason for that to change now.”

“Well, boo to you,” Amber pouts, then lets out a theatrical sigh, the weight of the world clearly resting heavy on those narrow shoulders. “Oh, fine. I’ll start in the morning, I suppose. I just miss the company of my dear Dorley girls so much, you know? It’s a cruel world out there - I should know - and sometimes you need someone who understands. Maybe I’ll drop by more often; after all, it would hardly be fair to turn away a Sister who’d go to such lengths to help, would it?”

“We’ll see,” Beatrice says between gritted teeth.

“So, you’re running the security here before you’ve even graduated, Christine?” Amber asks, focusing that colourless gaze back on the younger woman. “That’s very impressive; do you know, I actually had some trouble getting in this time! I’ll show you how I did it so you can patch the holes, if you like.”

“That’d be, uh, really useful. Thanks?” Christine mumbles, desperately hoping she can find a way to avoid any alone time with the killer.

“And how are the current crop of pretty little flowers coming up? Not too much pruning required, I hope? You know, I’d love to take a look in on them while I’m here,” Amber ventures hopefully, turning back to Bea.

“That… might not be the best idea,” Christine manages, beset by visions of Aaron and Steph unexpectedly confronted with a beaming serial killer, let alone which among the other boys she might decide is unsalvageable and thus fair game.

“Absolutely not,” Beatrice agrees, in a tone that not only verbally slams the door on that notion, but triple-bolts and welds it shut.

“Hmph. Well, is Doctor Ashtone still around, then? I wanted to thank him for my lovely jawline,” Amber asks innocently, undeterred.

“No, Amber, he had a breakdown and gave up medicine. He’s raising sheep somewhere in New Zealand now, I believe,” says Beatrice, her tone making it abundantly clear whose fault she considers this to be.

“Oh, that’s a shame,” Amber says, clearly feeling none whatsoever.

“Christine, didn’t you need to be getting to class?” Aunt Bea says, extending a merciful hand as the awkward silence begins to yawn.

“Are you sure? I could, you know, stay…?” Christine asks, all too eager to escape but beset by visions of an unescorted Amber wandering around Dorley, talking to a parade of inadvisable people including but not limited to Mia, Faye, Aaron, Yasmin, Lorna, Melissa…

“Go,” Bea tells her, kind but firm. Christine figures Beatrice has more than enough experience managing Amber to be fine on her own, but she still feels like a traitor as she puts her mug in the sink and turns to leave.

“Bye, darling! See you soon!” Amber calls after her as she hurriedly leaves. Christine tries not to consider that ominous, but it’s hard work. “Now, Auntie, you must show me where you decided to display my gifts,” she hears that clear, oddly accentless voice saying from behind her, and doubles her pace.

***

“So what’s the Almsworth Ripper like?” Paige asks, teasing her, clearly still not taking the whole thing entirely seriously. It’s the end of a long day spent absolutely anywhere but Dorley Hall, which mercifully does appear to still be standing and inhabited: by the testimony of the handful of Sisters hanging around in the dining hall, Beatrice was earlier seen escorting a petite, blonde stranger very firmly out of the building, and standing ramrod-straight and stony-faced on the front steps until long after she’d driven away. Paige and Christine are together in Christine’s bed, warm and safe in a world where serial killers and murder sprees seem extremely far away.

“Very chatty,” Christine murmurs, on the verge of sleep. “Pretty, in this kind of like, trust-fund, It-girl sort of way. So nice you can barely tell when she says something absolutely terrifying.”

“Sounds like you two hit it off. Should I be worried?” Paige says, smirking.

“I think we should all be worried,” Christine whispers, but she’s smiling back, and she falls asleep secure in the knowledge that Amber is thoroughly somebody else’s problem.

***

Christine wakes to find the world streaming by in a blur of speed and noise, the unseasonable sun making her squint and the chilly wind whipping at her clothes.

“Morning, sleepyhead!” an all-too-familiar voice trills brightly, over the growl of the engine and the roar of the wind.

“Mwfhg… whuh?” Christine manages, pulling herself upright on the soft leather of the passenger seat, squinting against the bright morning sunlight reflected from the road and the blush-pink hood of the convertible. For a moment she thinks she’s been tied up, and she struggles weakly against her restraints before she realises it’s just a seatbelt and an unfamiliar winter coat laid over her to keep her warm. The car’s top is down, and her unbrushed hair is streaming behind her as a giggling Amber blazes down the motorway at a speed that must be dicing with police intervention. Dorley’s pet serial killer has changed into a dazzlingly white shirt and light jacket, loose pants and a huge pair of couture sunglasses, a similar pair of which she reaches over and delicately places on Christine’s face, which provides at least some respite from the glare.

“I thought we should really head out nice and early, and you were so deep asleep, I’d have felt like a real shit for waking you,” the murderer says, by way of an explanation.

“You… you’ve kidnapped me?” Christine gasps.

“Not as if it’s your first rodeo, babes,” Amber laughs. “And your last kidnapping improved your life immeasurably, so maybe just go with it, darling, hey?”

“But, I mean, what about Paige, and… and Dira, and Steph? What about Aunt Bea? They’re going to think… I don’t know what they’re going to think!”

“Don’t worry, I left a note! I’m not a monster!”

“A note saying what?” Christine demands.

“Relax! I was very reassuring; I just said you decided you wanted to come along after all, and everything was fine, and that you’re perfectly safe with me, and that we’d have this whole investigation wrapped up in no time. And if anyone tried to track us down before then, I’d force-feed them their own eyeballs. I was very polite,” Amber says, and appears to consider this a complete and satisfying resolution to any concerns. “You know,” she goes on thoughtfully, “I wasn’t lying when I said I missed having a connection with my Sisters, Christine; try as they might, nobody else can really comprehend what it’s like to be remade into something beautiful and free like us. Isn’t that right?”

“Uh… yeah,” Christine mumbles, feeling two or three steps behind, still desperately trying to get her head together while whatever Amber dosed her with wears off.

“See, I knew you understood!” Amber says happily.

“And Paige is okay. You promise.”

“She’s wonderful! Sleeping like a beautiful, leggy baby. Girl scout’s honour.”

“So what do you… actually want from me? Christine manages to ask.

Amber shrugs expansively. “Companionship? A little Sister to spend some good, solid girl-time with? And actually, I think you might be genuinely helpful with the investigation; I really am impressed at how quickly you tracked me down. You see the connections, and that’s a rare thing, truly.”

“And leverage?” Christine dares to venture, made bold or reckless by the heavy cotton wool lining the inside of her skull.

“Perish the thought!” Amber protests. “Honestly, I love Auntie Beatrice, and I always will, but she really is awfully uncharitable in her characterisation of me. I would never, ever do anything to endanger one of my darling Sisters, let alone use her as some sort of bargaining chip. You’re probably safer with me than you would be anywhere else in the world, my dear.”

“I’ve not packed anything,” Christine protests weakly, hardly imagining this will be cause to do an about-turn and take her home. “What am I going to do for clothes? And, you know, toiletries and stuff?”

“Oh, don’t worry about any of that; I’ve called ahead, and by the time we arrive there’ll be a full selection from my personal wardrobe waiting in our hotel rooms.”

“I’m not sure I’m your size,” Christine says, only partially processing that idea; she’s slim, but she’s conscious that Amber is smaller in practically every dimension.

“You know how it is, darling; sometimes you just find yourself in possession of a whole selection of clothes in other people’s sizes,” Amber replies, favouring Christine with a sly wink. Out of protestations and still barely able to string two thoughts together, Christine gives up and lies back in the soft embrace of her seat, letting the wind play with her hair, coat clutched tight against the chill. Amber smiles at her like the indulgent big sister she apparently imagines herself to be, and reaches for the car stereo, loading up a playlist titled ‘Girly Road Trip’. Somehow it’s the least surprising thing Christine can imagine that it opens with Taylor Swift’s Look What You Made Me Do.

***

The hotel Amber has booked the girls into is all marble and gold inlay, and Christine worries she’s about to be kicked out as she trails behind her sister-slash-captor across the immaculately understated lobby in her sleepwear and socks, winter coat and sunglasses, attracting stares from the handful of early-morning guests. Floating somewhere in her foggy mind is the idea of calling for help or making a break for it, but by this point she’s been exposed not only to the files detailing Amber’s past, but two hours of frothy, giggling conversation that has done a wholly inadequate job of disguising myriad atrocities, and she doesn’t rate her chances of making it far. Beyond that, and more insidiously, she finds she genuinely doesn’t feel afraid; the whole excursion still has the texture of a dream, but not yet a nightmare, and letting the surreal logic of it carry her along intuitively seems the only way to make it through.

A trip up to the palatial suite Amber has booked for Christine, adjacent to her own, and a plunge into the revitalising torrent of the shower serves to dispel such notions in record time. Christine clutches at the extravagant fittings, hyperventilating, mind racing with a million escape plans and a million reasons they’re futile. She’s been drugged and snatched from her bed by a serial killer, and the fact she presently has the run of a ridiculously expensive hotel room doesn’t mean she’s safe, or that there are any routes to freedom that Amber won’t have foreseen and blocked. So she’s almost unable to believe it when she’s able to pick up the room phone, follow the pre-recorded instructions to request an outside line, and frantically tap in Paige’s number, constantly glancing over her shoulder as if Amber is about to burst in with an axe.

“Hello? Who is this?” Paige’s voice is shaking, and she’s clearly been crying, but hearing her is like a balm.

“It’s me! It’s me, I’m okay, I’m okay,” Christine repeats, desperate to offer some reassurance before her girlfriend has to endure another minute’s not knowing.

Christine, thank god,” Paige breathes. “Are you safe? Has she hurt you? Is she there now?”

“No, it’s… I’m fine, I’m in a hotel. We’re in… I don’t know where, but I think we drove north for an hour or two. She hasn’t done anything; she says she just wants company, and for me to help her investigate, like an assistant or something.”

“Can you get away? Do you want me to call the police?” Paige demands, growing audibly panicked again.

“No, no, don’t do that!” Christine blurts; everything happening, from the murders to Amber to Christine herself, is so inextricably bound up with Dorley Hall that she can’t see a way involving the authorities isn’t the worst decision anyone could possibly make, and that’s without considering Amber’s potential reaction to the betrayal. And as she thinks that, she finds herself realising she doesn’t really have a choice. “I’ll be okay,” she says to Paige, feeling her resolve solidify. “I think I should stick with her. I believe her when she says she won’t hurt me. And we need to get this thing solved, right? Which means we need to keep Amber on-side and happy.”

“Not if it means putting you in danger!” Paige protests loudly.

“I’m not. I promise,” Christine says, feeling herself welling up. “Listen, I’ve got to go, but I’ll call again when I can. Let Aunt Bea know I’m all right. I love you, I’ll see you soon. Please trust me on this; don’t let her send anyone or interfere, okay? This is the safest way for everyone.”

“Christine, wait, I’ve-! Chri-“ Paige manages, before Christine - feeling like the worst person in the world - hangs up the receiver and wipes at her eyes. She’s only prevented from calling back by the suspiciously well-timed appearance of what actually might be the worst person in the world, who looks incongruously pleased with herself. Christine’s heart clenches and she shrinks away in fear, anticipating Amber’s rage when she realises her captive has gone behind her back.

“Feeling better for that?” Amber asks, favouring Christine with an unexpected, brilliant smile. “You’re not my prisoner, sweetie; you’re quite welcome to call anyone you like. In fact-“ she rummages in the tote bag she’s holding, then lightly tosses a small box over to Christine “-there’s a new phone for you, since -oopsie!- I completely forgot to grab yours. And once you’re done setting that up, come on over to my room, and we can get you all dolled up for our first bit of detective work!”

“What do you mean?” Christine asks, suspicious and anticipating the worst.

“Well, since it’s been long enough that the crime scenes won’t be of much use, we’re going to have to have a cheeky little look at the bodies themselves,” Amber replies. “That’s why we’re here; god knows I wouldn’t have set foot in Leeds if I didn’t have to. But, tedious as it is, the hospital here is where the bodies from a surprisingly wide area go, and they’re presently sitting in the morgue awaiting a proper investigation. So we, my dear Christine, are going undercover! Exciting, right?”

Christine doesn’t respond, but her face betrays exactly how excited she isn‘t.

***

Dorley may be Makeover Central, but no amount of time under Paige’s patient care has prepared Christine for Amber’s ministrations. She knows from the files that the woman is ambidextrous, but seeing her effortlessly apply makeup with one hand while working on her hair with the other, it’s all too easy to mentally substitute the straighteners, mascara wand and sponges for all manner of bladed implements. True to her word, Amber’s comparably gigantic room is dominated by a number of wheeled racks absolutely heaving with clothes, the cost of which Christine balks at even estimating, and from one of these Amber delights in having her try on outfit after outfit - a process Christine has to admit she starts finding almost fun after the first couple - until she settles on a charcoal skirt and silk blouse, the kind of thing Christine can imagine wearing to an office job if she earned about ten times as much as she presently does. According to Amber, the plan is to impersonate a forensic pathologist and her assistant, and if Christine thinks the pair of them - Amber in a grey pantsuit, and both on heels somewhat higher than is wholly practical - look more like the Hollywood version of female scientists than the Leeds one, she’s certain Amber’s uncanny charm will see them through. Amber gently perches a pair of clear-lensed glasses on Christine’s nose as a finishing touch, hands her a nondescript shoulder bag, in which she places her new phone, and in a whirl of perfume she’s gone, and all Christine can do is allow herself to be pulled along in the wake of the woman’s absolute poise.

“Silly me, I almost forgot; your name’s Anna Harper, you’re a medical student, and I know the picture on your ID isn’t you, but hopefully it’ll be close enough with the glasses and the hair that nobody will make a fuss,” Amber says, smoothing a few errant strands of Christine’s bun in the lift down to the lobby.

“What about you?” Christine asks, figuring it’s probably helpful to know what to call her, if they’re really going through with whatever she’s been dragged into.

“Doctor Felicity Cox at your service, darling.”

“That sounds a bit fake,” Christine can’t help saying, from sheer nervous tension and remnant tranquilisers. “Like a scientist in a James Bond film.”

“She’s a real person!” Amber protests. “Well, was.”

“Wait, you didn’t…?”

“Don’t be silly, darling, I didn’t bump somebody off just for this. When would I have had the time?” Amber says, smiling broadly. Christine relaxes by exactly one degree. “No, I killed her absolutely ages ago. They just haven’t found her yet. Or at least, not the important bits,” Amber adds with a laugh. “Dear Felicity’s been immensely helpful when it comes to getting out of the occasional little jam. Do you know, it’s so easy to keep up the appearance of an academic being alive and well. All you’ve got to do is answer a few emails, bash out a quick paper here and there, and nobody really bothers to look in on you at all! Terrible system, really. Zero checks and balances.”

Bash out a quick paper, Christine thinks. Genius polymath. Right.

***

There’s a rented car waiting in the hotel garage; something anonymous and grey, Amber’s blush pink Porsche being by her reckoning ‘a little ostentatious’ for Felicity Cox. The rainy streets pass by in a wash of drab colours and faceless people, and Christine finds herself growing increasingly nervous about what she’s being dragged into, but Amber keeps up a stream of bubbly, light conversation that both helps distract from the worst of it and mercifully rarely touches on the subject of her many crimes. In what feels like only minutes they’re pulling into the hospital car park, and there’s little time left for fears about being caught on surveillance alongside the woman who’s impersonating a dead pathologist, because there’s an umbrella pushed firmly into her hand and they’re hurrying across the tarmac and into the faintly antiseptic-smelling lobby. It’s fascinating, if terrifying in equal measure, to see Amber age ten years with just a change in her affect; gone is the giggly, chatty socialite, and in her place is suddenly a brusque and businesslike professional who steamrolls layer after layer of bureaucracy, pulling a helpless Christine, laden with empty file binders, along in her wake. Nobody even asks for her ID; Amber’s own selection of falsified credentials and a dismissive introduction as ‘my assistant’ seems sufficient to get her into a secure morgue that she thinks should probably have needed police certification at the very least. Christine also doesn’t fail to notice Amber taking the opportunity, when the clerk at the admin desk turns to rummage in a drawer for the appropriate sign-in sheet, to deftly insert a thumb drive into an open USB port on her monitor and tap out a few quick, assured upside-down keystrokes before spiriting the device back into her bag. “For later,” she whispers to Christine with a wink.

And then, before Christine’s remotely ready, like a jump-cut in real life, they’re there; left alone in the humming chill of the morgue proper, and Christine’s realising too late that she’s completely unprepared for seeing her first dead bodies.

“Hmm hmm hmm… let’s see who’s receiving visitors,” Amber says, clearly in her element, instantly dropping the body language, vocal inflection and subtly changed stance she shrugged on like a coat when she became Felicity Cox. She wanders up and down the steel drawers like she’s shopping for shoes, reading off serial numbers from the few that are occupied, until she settles on one, opens it with a grinning flourish, and there it is, in its full, horrible reality: the corpse of Hannah Young, still and terribly pale and so real it’s almost as if she could climb up from the steel tray and tell her story herself, were it not for the horrific wounds crosshatching her face, arms and upper torso. Christine is overcome by a sudden wave of dizziness at the sight; she crouches, head between her knees, and breathes hard for a moment while Amber massages her shoulders with hands she sincerely hopes haven’t yet touched the body.

“Darling, are you feeling all right?” Amber asks, sounding genuinely perplexed as to what the problem is.

“I’m just, uh… this is my first time seeing… you know, that,” Christine manages.

“Oh. Oh! Oh no, you poor dear, I didn’t even think! Do you need to step outside?” she asks, all concern.

“No, I’m… I’m good, I’m okay. It’s just, I can’t believe this was… someone who went through it all. Dorley. She was one of us, and then… this. It’s awful.”

“I know, darling, I know, I know. I’m sure you think I’m completely inured to this kind of thing, but I promise you, it’s different when it’s one of our Sisters,” Amber says, gently but firmly guiding Christine back up to stand beside the body. “And that’s why we’re here: to find out who did this terrible, horrible, artless thing.”

“Are you seeing anything useful?” Christine asks her, casting a quick glance over the corpse then looking away before she can start feeling nauseous again.

“Well, first off I’m very unimpressed,” Amber says, lips twisting into a look of professional disdain. “Just look at the quality of these cuts; no pride in their work whatsoever! It’s like they waved a cheap blade around at random until the poor girl died of secondhand embarrassment. It’s one thing to be murdered, but to be murdered like this is simply an insult. Now,” she muses, “What we have here are defensive wounds, which means our unfortunate sister probably wasn’t caught unawares. That’s something. I don’t see any restraint marks, either… or anything under the fingernails. Hmm.”

“What about the other victim?” Christine stammers. Amber practically dances over to the next row of drawers and slides out another body. Christine thinks she’s prepared, but the sight of another set of horrific, ragged wounds marring once-perfect skin sets her head spinning and her gorge rising again.

“Priya Mahajan. Surprisingly different incision pattern this time,” Amber muses, prodding at the pallid flesh around a bloodless gash in the dead woman’s torso. “More stabbing, less slashing. With all the aesthetic flair of someone plunging a toilet. The same weapon, though, as far as I can tell. How strange, to change approach like that. Hey, Christine, look here,” Amber says eagerly, leaning in and indicating something that Christine sincerely tries her best not to see. “The pattern of cuts on both of their faces crudely mirrors the incisions made during facial surgery. And the tracheal shave. You see? Hah, that brings back memories. The surgeon was so awkward; he could barely keep eye contact with me, and I kept having to tell him I’d kill his family if he fainted before he was finished. Good times.”

“It has to be someone who knows what Dorley’s doing, then? And resents it?” Christine offers, doing a surprisingly good job at mentally censoring that last part. “And wants to, I don’t know, punish the graduates for being okay with it? But there’s never been an escaped washout, at least as far as the records say. So one of the guards? Or someone from the bad old days?”

“Possibly,” says Amber, although she doesn’t sound convinced. “Whoever it is, they’d have to have access to graduate files, and recently, since at least one of these poor women had moved all the way down the country inside the last year. They weren’t in the same intake, so it isn’t as if someone is staging an impromptu reunion, either. What about the current sponsors, Christine? Do you think we should drive back up to the Hall and, hm, ask a few questions?”

“What? No, no!” Christine blurts, struck by visions of Amber interrogating Abby, Indira, Pippa. “No, there’s no way. And anyway, I can track access to the restricted files, and there’s been no unusual activity. It’d have been flagged. It’s one of the first things I checked.”

“All right, so, perhaps it’s someone capable of identifying Dorley women without access to the files?” Amber muses. “The New Personal Histories have gotten better, but the older ones did tend to be a tad shaky under scrutiny, and there are unmistakable patterns if you know what to look for.”

“Do you really think someone could do that?” Christine asks, gripped by a sudden shiver of fear not just for anonymous graduates of the program, but for her friends and herself in the future.

“Well, I could,” Amber says. “But obviously, I would never. Still… hmm.”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing, just a funny feeling,” Amber says, actually looking slightly perturbed for a moment before the veneer of easy charm slides back into place. “So. A killer able to target Dorley girls, and obviously fixated on the physical alterations we all received… that’s interesting. No injury to the genitals in either case, though, which is a relief. It’s always a little unsavoury when people make these things sexual. Now, the weapon was serrated, probably a kitchen knife by the striations, which makes it tricky to chase down when and where it was bought… I’d almost say it seemed opportunistic, but there’s clearly intent here. Perhaps we’re simply dealing with an extremely disordered mind.”

“Do you need to see more?” Christine hastily asks, really quite ready to get away from the remains of Priya and Hannah.

“Oh, no, I’ve got what I need, darling. Eidetic memory and all that. And I’m definitely having some thoughts. Hmm, yes, definitely. So what do you say, Anna; ready to hit the road?”

As Amber turns seamlessly back into Felicity with barely an eyeblink, Christine confirms that yes, Anna is absolutely, definitely ready to go.

***

Back in the gilt-and-marble purgatory of the hotel, Christine watches with professional curiosity as Amber pulls out a wafer-thin laptop and deftly enters a long series of commands into a terminal window, without seemingly even really looking at the screen. Once the opaque strings of numbers which result are apparently to her liking, she opens a barebones database program, some unwieldy, bespoke thing that screams British institutional contracting, and - muttering under her breath in frustration at the slowness - brings up a series of records, meticulously filling out a couple of text fields and changing a single dropdown flag.

“Okay, what are you doing?” Christine asks her eventually, having suffered Amber’s sly little smirk of amusement at her increasing interest and continued perplexity for long enough.

“Just covering our tracks, my dear. And those of the murderer, coincidentally, which would perhaps be unhelpful if we weren’t so thoroughly on the case. The bodies of our unfortunate Sisters are, as of now, marked in the hospital database as having divulged any secrets they were keeping, and ready for immediate cremation.”

“What about their friends and families? Won’t they want a funeral and, I don’t know, a coffin and stuff, not just to have them… disposed of?” Christine asks, almost choking up at the memory of the dead women and the thought of their loved ones losing their last chance to say goodbye.

“Unfortunate but necessary, I’m afraid,” Amber says, and it’s clear she really couldn’t care less. “Can’t have some unusually perceptive coroner making the connection between the dearly departed, can we now?”

“And the third body?” Christine says.

“Trust me, one body does not a pattern make,” Amber replies, smiling as if recalling a fond memory she elects not to share. “And really, the thought of driving all the way up to Scotland is frankly a bit depressing. No, that’s quite enough messing around with boring administrative nonsense,” she says, abandoning the computer and whirling over to yet another rack of exquisite clothes with a spring in her step and a twinkle in her eye. “There are much more entertaining uses for our time, darling. Like dressing for dinner,” she concludes, ominously.

***

Later, after a staggeringly expensive dinner spent squeezed into an elegant yet tasteful black dress at Amber’s behest, and at which Christine puts away one too many glasses of wine, Amber excitedly drags her over to the other suite for what she calls a ‘girly movie night’. This turns out to involve Legally Blonde and Mean Girls bracketing a genuinely upsetting film where a clown does horrific things to people for no obvious reason, and Christine isn’t drunk enough not to be disturbed that Amber’s laugh-out-loud reaction to all three movies is exactly the same.

“So, okay, so you do it, though, don’t you? You do it. No like, dancing around it or whatever? You totally do,” Christine slurs, the contents of the well-stocked suite bar having taken a further toll on her coherence and restraint.

“Aha, do what, honey?” Amber giggles. She’s put away just as many drinks as Christine, but whether she’s actually drunk or just acting like it is a distinction far beyond Christine’s grasp at present.

“Kill people. You’re a murdler. Mudrerer. Murdererer. Er.”

“Oh! Oh. Wellll... I prefer to think of myself as an artist, darling. Working in what you might call unconventional mixed media, haha. But hah, yes, okay, I might do the occasional murdle here and there. Let’s keep that between us, though, Sis; it’s a secret,” Amber stage-whispers.

“But… why?”

“That’s a bit of a big question for two in the morning, sweetie,” Amber laughs.

“Well, okay… why Dorley, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know; a chance for reinvention, perhaps? I think at the time I was mostly curious, and curiosity turned into fascination, and by then I’d realised that I really rather liked being the person they were making me.”

“Right, okay, but Dorley trag… tralit… traditionally makes good boys into bad… no, wait, bad boys. Good boys into bad girls. Good girls.”

“One or the other,” Amber manages to say before collapsing into uncontrollable giggles alongside Christine. This goes on for a minute or so, before Amber suddenly sits up straight from where she’s sprawled on the bed next to Christine. “Hold up,” she says, sounding instantly sober. “What did you just say? Repeat that for me, would you, darling?”

“Good boys to bad girls,” Christine mumbles, looking up at her in bleary confusion.

“Shit,” Amber exclaims, and Christine drunkenly realises it’s the first time she’s heard the woman swear. “Christine, I think I know exactly who’s been bumping off our Sisters.”

***

The next morning finds a barely-conscious Christine slumped in the seat of Amber’s car once again, this time from the consequences of the previous night’s drinking rather than the after-effects of any knockout drugs. Having fallen asleep in Amber’s suite, something she’d never even have contemplated while sober, she woke tucked neatly into her own bed, with a simple but stylish shirt, jeans and improbably high heels laid out nearby and a fresh cup of coffee still steaming on the table. She had a quick text exchange with Paige, who seemed terse after the abrupt end to the previous day’s conversation, but Christine can hardly blame her; she’s almost relieved not to have been pressed for too many details, since she’s choosing to view her ‘adventure’ with Amber as something best concluded as quickly and frictionlessly as possible for the sake of everybody’s safety.

Amber’s driving hasn’t gotten any more cautious overnight, although she seems completely unaffected by her own consumption; nonetheless she’s been unusually quiet all morning, and Christine is unsettled by her impulse to try and find out what’s bothering the serial murderer.

“So, where are we headed?” she asks instead, sitting up and trying semi-successfully to clear her head.

“In a general sense, the outskirts of Birmingham,” Amber replies. “More specifically, well… there it gets a tiny bit complicated, my darling.”

“What do you mean?” Christine asks. “Last night you sounded pretty sure you knew who was killing the graduates, so… are they in Birmingham or not?”

“Mmm. More like, they were born there,” Amber says, staring straight ahead at the road. “Assuming I’m right, of course. Which, if I’m honest, I sincerely hope I’m not. Sorry, darling, this is a little difficult for me to talk about,” she says, dabbing at a single tear rolling rather ostentatiously down her cheek.

“Oh. Um, sure,” Christine says, wondering whether a single thing Amber says is sincere, or whether this is all some kind of manipulation, but hardly feeling safe to rock the boat either way. “I had a different question, actually, if that’s okay?”

“Go right ahead, my love,” Amber says, instantly back to her usual, dazzlingly cheery self.

“Well, you’re - I mean, you’re obviously pretty wealthy,” she says.

“I get by,” Amber replies, with a smile.

“I just wondered, how? You came out of Dorley with the same stipend as the rest of us, right? So how did you go from there to driving a 911 Turbo S and handing out Louboutins like party bags?” Where does it come from?”

Amber laughs, high and clear against the wind and the sound of the engine. “Here and there, sweetie, here and there. You’d be amazed at how generous people can be when they’re properly motivated. And then investment is so easy! It’s just predicting what people are going to want and what they’re afraid of, which is really my entire oeuvre in a nutshell, if you think about it. Honestly, I forget how much there even is, most days.”

“Must be nice,” murmurs Christine, half-under her breath. “So do you pick your, erm, what did you call them, your raw materials for… I mean, do you go after the rich specifically?” she asks, feeling bold, and like an answer in the affirmative might make her feel slightly less dirty about collaborating with Amber on any level.

“Oh, how appallingly mundane that would be!” Amber laughs. “No, darling, no, the reasons I do what I do are much more nuanced than simple avarice, or at least I certainly hope they are! I seek facets of the greater human truth, caught and pinned like butterflies under glass, transformed into something beautiful and lasting and real. I suppose the overarching themes of my work are hypocrisy and secrets, but there’s so much room for exploration within that. A couple of years ago I produced a wonderful series on faith and family. You might have seen one of those; I think it made the national news. The priest and his mother? No? I really thought that one turned out very well.”

Christine swallows hard, because yes, she has, and she remembers more details from the file than she’d prefer. “Couldn’t you just, I don’t know, go after bad people?” she asks, wincing pre-emptively at how naive that sounds. “I mean, there are so many people out there doing… evil stuff. Wouldn’t that be, you know…”

“Better?” Amber suggests lightly. “I suppose it might, at that. But it wouldn’t be very interesting. And I assure you, a spate of very visible deaths among Tories, billionaires, those horrible transphobic feminists? It wouldn’t achieve what you’re hoping it might.”

“I guess not,” Christine says, trying and failing to suppress a shudder.

“Anyway, I do think more of my little helpers fall on the nasty side of the line than the nice, on balance, if that makes you feel any better: the evil do tend to live more interesting lives than the good, after all. And that brings us nicely back to the subject of money, because the wealthy are most certainly overrepresented among my target demographic,” Amber says, and she could be talking about last night’s TV for all the weight she puts on the subject.

Christine, wrapped up in Amber’s bizarre artistic diatribe, has barely noticed the car turning off the motorway and snaking down a series of winding extraurban backroads, and it’s only when the ride comes to a smooth halt by a patch of scrubland facing what appears to be an abandoned industrial site that she realises, with a shiver of trepidation, that this is the destination.

“What are we doing here, Amber?” Christine asks, fervently hoping the answer isn’t ‘killing you and dumping the body somewhere nobody has voluntarily gone since 2002’.

“Well. Therein lies a bit of a tale,” she says, sliding elegantly out of the car and retrieving a different astronomically pricey bag from the back seat. Wherever the two women are going from here, it seems it’s on foot. “A couple of years ago,” Amber says, leading the way down a pitted asphalt approach road, between scrubby bushes and eruptive weeds. “I confess I hit a little bit of a rut. I was directionless, jaded. Treading water with my work. I felt like the human body - the human heart - didn’t have any more to show me. The same vices, the same secrets. The same implements, cutting at the same… well, you can imagine, I’m sure. I became so disconsolate I actually considered giving it all up, you know? Changing my name, moving overseas. Maybe I’d kill a doctor and take her place; really do some good in the world. Ridiculous thoughts like that.”

At the end of the driveway is the building Christine saw from the road, a tangled mass of one- and two-storey warehouses or sheds, overgrown with indistinct metal fretworks and rows of dormant chimneys. Amber makes a beeline for a flaking, badly rusted set of doors set into the sheet metal and brick, from which Christine notes that all signage and company insignia appears to have been removed.

“Anyway, in the midst of all this wallowing, I had myself something of a revelation: of course I was feeling unmoored! Of course I had become a great, empty void that not even the most absurdly elaborate acts of violence could fill: I’m a Dorley girl, and like any Dorley girl I need the companionship and support of my Sisters. We’re simply not made to be solitary creatures, my dear. But with Beatrice quite unfairly slandering my name - when she even admits I exist! - even if I’d gone back, it just wouldn’t have worked. So I thought, well…”

Amber brandishes a heavy ring jingling with any number of keys, and after a moment’s deliberation, unlocks a smaller door set into the larger cargo entrance with a flourish. Inside, the building is cavernous and filthy, if surprisingly well-lit by a row of narrow, dirt-spackled windows placed high up along one wall. Rust-caked industrial equipment hunches menacingly astride narrow concrete channels, and it’s as the women carefully pick their way across the remains of a long, ceiling-mounted rail, now fallen among the detritus littering the floor, that the place seems to snap into focus for Christine as having once been the final destination in countless animals’ journey through life.

“Why have you brought me to an old abattoir, Amber? What did you do?” Christine asks, privately dreading the answer.

“The only thing I could do, darling,” Amber answers with a cryptic smirk, and seems unwilling to say more, clearly enjoying drawing out the suspense. The pair skirt around an ominous steel vat wreathed in collapsed ductwork and choked with debris fallen from the high, arched warehouse roof. “This place is a wreck,” Christine comments, somewhat unnecessarily.

“Protective camouflage,” Amber answers, from slightly ahead, her voice echoing eerily. “The renovations were confined to the lower floors. It only seemed appropriate.”

“Renovations? Isn’t this place abandoned?” Christine asks.

“Only to look at, darling; in fact, I own it,” Amber replies lightly. “Or, well, ACR Logistics does, and through them Highline Holdings, and on and on via a whole labyrinth of companies and financial instruments until ultimately there’s me as the sole shareholder, so in effect I do.”

Christine’s thoughts on the notion of Amber owning a mouldering abattoir occupy her for long enough that the pair arrive at a filthy, pitted steel door, half-hidden by defunct machinery yet suspiciously accessible via a cleared area of floor behind a row of pipes. After Amber manipulates a whole series of well-disguised locks, this swings open on incongruously well-oiled hinges to reveal a short passageway lit by a single bulb, which Amber leads Christine down with a teasing, wordless smile. A long climb down an openwork staircase that feels surprisingly solid and new beneath a purely surface-level patina of rust leads to another door, and once even more locks have been opened, this reveals what is to Christine a simultaneously horrifying and almost homely sight: a corridor, lined in cheap wood-effect laminate and lit by fluorescent strips, with evenly-spaced doors on either side.

“Welcome to Dorley Hall!” Amber exclaims, as if she’s throwing a surprise party and she’s just jumped out from behind the couch.

“You built your own Dorley,” Christine breathes, utterly appalled.

“I like to call it Dorley Hall: Amber’s Version,” Amber says, grinning broadly at Christine, a grin that turns slightly brittle when she realises her audience is staring at her in genuine confusion. “You know, like Taylor’s… actually, you know what? Don’t worry abut it, darling. Anyway, it’s really just the residential corridor, if I’m honest, and it was mostly as a cheeky in-joke,” she says smoothly, rallying admirably while radiating self-satisfaction. “The rest is quite different. I had some really revolutionary ideas for how one might run a place like this if she weren’t shackled to the floorplan of a stately home and the modifications originally made by a bunch of decrepit old perverts.”

“How was all this even built? You can’t have done it yourself,” Christine says. “Were there contractors or something? How would you keep them from telling anyone? Wait, you didn’t…?”

“Perish the thought, darling! Far too much fuss and mess. No, a couple of lazy afternoons getting a grounding in architecture were enough to draw up blueprints that could pass for a gym or some sort of training centre, and then I simply handed over enough money that nobody worried overmuch about any funny little quirks. The real trick is hiring one firm to do part of the work, then another to do the next bit, and so on. Nobody ever sees the full picture. And then, oh no, the money runs out and the work is abandoned before ever being finished. So sad, such a shame, on to the next job. No, I guarantee the people who worked on this place haven’t thought about it in years. And then, with a few finishing touches installed by yours truly… ta-da!” With a flourish, Amber throws open the door to what would be a sparse but comfortable bedroom beneath the real Dorley Hall; here, it reveals a tiny, square cell, with a single chain hanging from a hole in the ceiling, terminating in a steel collar with electronics that presumably allow it to be released remotely, and a floor that slopes down to a drain. The concrete surfaces are mottled with indistinct stains, and although Christine would very much like to believe they’re solely from damp and disuse, it’s a hard line to swallow. She steps back quickly from the sight, feeling the raw human misery practically radiating off the walls, shivering from head to toe; seeing and hearing about atrocities at a remove is bad enough, but being confronted with the woman’s hideous parody of the most important location in her life is another entirely..

“Now, Auntie has her program of rehabilitation, which of course is terribly noble and worthwhile, as both of us can attest,” Amber says. “But as I built my little tribute, I found myself in a more, hmm, experimental mindset. What would it take, I wondered, to do the opposite?”

“Turning girls into boys?” Christine asks, frowning in confusion.

“No! Yuck! What a horrid thought!” Amber exclaims, twisting her face up like she’s bitten into a lemon, to all appearances genuinely disgusted by the idea. “Ew. Why would anyone want to… No. What I wanted was to turn good boys - the kindest, the most noble, the boys who wouldn’t hurt a fly - into very, very bad girls indeed.”

“Bad girls… like you?”

“Are you calling me a bad girl, darling?” Amber asks, teasingly, leaning against the wall of her nightmarish torture cell with a coquettish smile.

“I mean, you made them into murderers?” Christine asks, tone flat, largely too horrified to even notice.

“I helped them appreciate the beauty to be found within people,” Amber says primly, seeming slightly put out. “And to see the glorious freedom in womanhood, of course. And I did it a good sight more quickly than Dorley ever managed, to boot.”

“God, that’s… I mean… did that work?” Christine asks, feeling light-headed from the sheer force of the idea.

“Eventually,” Amber replies, and doesn’t elaborate further.

“I think this might be the worst thing you’ve done,” Christine breathes, without entirely intending to, and her heart seizes as she realises what she just said to the self-proclaimed murderer presently sharing an isolated space with her.

“Worst thing I’ve done so far!” Amber replies happily, and Christine can’t decide whether the thought that she’s making the reference intentionally or accidentally is more ridiculous. Amber closes the cell before crossing to the opposite side of the corridor, where there’s a heavier, more forbidding door, which she unlocks and attempts to open to no apparent avail. There’s something blocking it on the other side, and even Amber’s bizarre physical strength can’t shift it even an inch.

“Hmm. I hope this doesn’t mean the ceiling has fallen in,” she says, perfect brows furrowed in frustration. “I knew that last contractor was cutting corners. I shall have words. Still, at least this way we can take the scenic route,” she continues, visibly perking up. “It all looks a little crude now, but I was quite proud of it at the time.”

Amber whirls around, instantly back to maximum pep, and practically skips to the end of the corridor, past where the common room and showers would be and toward a ceiling-height pair of double doors: featureless, white and ominous. It strikes Christine that this constitutes the only place the inmates of Amber’s dungeon could go when released from their cells, and she follows with a significantly increased degree of trepidation.

“Now, here’s the point where we really diverge from Dorley Original Flavour,” Amber says, leading Christine through and into an even narrower space; a pair of blank walls painted a deep, arterial red, which extend a few feet above Christine’s head but don’t reach the surprisingly high ceiling, and which run straight ahead for ten or fifteen metres before breaking off to form passages to the left and right. The floor is a mess of bits of ceiling tile and flaky paint from the walls, and the whole place looks rife with damp and mould, no doubt contributing to the sour staleness of the chilly air.

“A maze?” Christine asks, perplexed.

“Well spotted! Once one of my lovely daughters-to-be was released from her room, she had to run the maze in order to get any of the things she needed. Toilets, food, sleeping quarters, that sort of thing. I’ll admit it’s a little blunt, but it really was fantastic fun, and it worked wonders in breaking down all that initial resistance,” Amber says, wistfully. “The walls are on rails, so they can be moved around from the control room to keep things interesting. I think the original plans said this was going to be a paintball arena,” she laughs, running a hand fondly down a mouldering, flaky partition.

Christine follows Amber to the junction, and takes a few exploratory steps down the left-hand path, where she can see a more open area ahead.

“Oh! Christine, stop!” Amber suddenly exclaims, breaking from her reverie and dashing forward to grab at her arm, but she’s too late: the section of floor beneath Christine’s leading foot depresses slightly with a soft click, and a loud, mechanical buzz almost makes her jump out of her skin, but nothing more seems to follow. After a moment’s tense silence, waiting for the other shoe to drop, she turns to look questioningly at Amber, as the other woman erupts into relieved giggles.

“Whew! Thank God for faulty wiring, eh?” Amber says, letting out a breath. She leads a badly shaken Christine in the other direction, then left at a further branch - each step crunching more detritus underfoot - before coming to an abrupt stop halfway down what appears just another identical passageway. Amber bends at the knee, picks up a large piece of debris and in one fluid, whip-quick motion, throws it ahead. Almost as soon as the chunk of sheetrock hits the floor and breaks into smaller, crumbly lumps, there’s a ratcheting whirr from somewhere behind the walls, causing Christine’s heart to tense in fear. About five paces ahead, what appears to be a circular saw blade abruptly comes flying out of a near-invisible gap in the left-hand partition, ricochets off the opposite wall and spins away into the darkness with a sort of sad twoing. A counterpart on the right only makes it partway out before becoming lodged with a gear-stripping metallic squeal.

“That never did work properly,” Amber says regretfully.

Christine edges around the stuck blade with exaggerated caution, deathly afraid that any disturbance might set it off, while Amber trots by with a complete lack of concern. Ahead is another open area; a square two or three times the width of the passageways, marked out by more segmented walls, and here the rails in the floor by which the maze is reorganised are visible. There’s a small raised platform, also mounted on the rails: on top of it stands, ominously, a dressmaker’s dummy, unclothed and water-stained. Amber frowns upon seeing it, and stalks over to a section of wall painted white, and clearly capable of hinging back like a door.

“This shouldn’t be here,” she says, sounding more vexed than actually concerned. “I mean, it shouldn’t be active. I’m absolutely certain I didn’t leave any of the challenges turned on.” She turns to Christine and adds as an aside, “They had to put the dress on before the burners started up,” with a nod to a series of menacing, stubby nozzles arrayed around the base of the podium. Christine belatedly notices the scorch marks amid the mess on the floor and some of the sections of wall, and wonders whether the white, crumbly bits of debris around her feet are really plaster and paint. “I know, I know, it’s a bit crude, but it was a small part of a more nuanced whole, I promise,” Amber says, with a surprisingly genuine embarrassed grin. “Now, as for the override, it should be somewhere around…”

Abruptly there’s a loud crash, reverberating off of all the hard surfaces and straight lines of Amber’s death maze, and the overhead lights instantly cut out. While Christine, panicking, fumbles around to try and locate either a wall or Amber, a harsh ceiling-mounted spotlight illuminates the pedestal with a sharp bang, while soft red lights limn the base of each wall with a hellish glow. If this is a preview of how the maze looked when Amber’s torture basement was in operation, Christine is doubly glad she was kidnapped by the original.

“I am never hiring that contractor again,” Amber says, by now actually sounding slightly concerned. “Something has gone badly wrong down here. What on Earth-“

“Well well welly well, look who’s come to visit!” says a new voice out of nowhere, high and breathy and audibly unhinged even on the evidence of so few words. A screen inset into one of the walls facing the pedestal flickers into life, and while the picture is clearly the worse for years of neglect, it resolves semi-coherently into a genuinely unsettling close-up of an aged, cracked porcelain baby doll in a frilly white dress, strung like a puppet and smeared with crudely exaggerated makeup. This does not remotely seem an encouraging development to Christine. “We’re so, so very glad you’re home. We’ve missed you very, very much,” croons the voice, as the doll wobbles and twitches and leans in closer to the camera.

“YOU PUT LITTLE MABEL DOWN RIGHT NOW, DO YOU HEAR ME!” Amber erupts into the rafters, in a maniacal shriek that’s entirely new and terrifying. “SHE IS NOT FOR DIRTY HANDS TO SULLY!”

Amber takes a long, deep, calming breath, then turns to Christine and adds in something more akin to her usual voice, “Sorry. As I said, it was a funny year.”

“Welcome back, Mother,” says the wavering, dreamy voice, while the doll dances and jiggles artlessly on the screen. Christine doesn’t miss Amber’s twitch of discomfort at that, but she’s far more concerned about the line of tiny blue pilot lights that are flickering on beneath the dummy on its platform.

“Erm, Amber, should we be worried about-“ she begins, but she’s interrupted by the disembodied voice, suddenly loud and unhinged in an eerily similar way to Amber herself.

“QUIET, REPLACEMENT!” the speaker barks. “Now, as I was saying, it’s so awfully lovely to have you home, Mother dearest. It’s been ever so long, and me and Little Mabel have been ever so lonely with nobody but the spiders and the rats to talk to.”

“Annabelle? Is that you? We talked about this, dear! It’s Aunt Amber. ‘Mother’ makes me sound like an absolute MILF. Now get out of the control room before I become angry; you know it’s off limits,” Amber says, in a tone of genuine menace.

“Seriously, I think we might be about to die…” Christine whispers with a desperate urgency, certain she can feel the beginnings of flames licking at her ankles.

“SUBSTITUTE! SHUSH! Although also yes, you’re absolutely correct; it’s time to DIE, Mother, for leaving me alone, for never, ever writing, and for all the times you made me wear the naughty shoes!” the voice presumptively named Annabelle shrieks, accompanied by the sound of her jabbing at buttons or keys. Now the burners kick in properly, with an audible rush of gas which has Christine pressed against the wall, anticipating a fiery demise, before she cautiously opens one eye and realises nothing more than the tiniest puff of flame has emerged.

“They cut off the gas supply to this place years ago, Annabelle! Which you’d know, if you were the one paying the bill!” Amber calls out triumphantly, before crouching to poke at something beneath the pedestal, which results in a heavy mechanical clunk and the white door swinging haltingly open. “Terribly sorry about this, Christine darling,” she says, standing and brushing herself off, “I really didn’t anticipate that one of them would still be here. Why are you still here, Annabelle?” she asks, directing this last part to the room at large. “I thought I made it very clear that you and your sisters were to make your own way in the world, not hang around this old place, acting like a lunatic and embarrassing both yourself and me.”

The bonelessly dangling doll flops back into view on the screen, and now Annabelle herself enters the frame; she looks absolutely deranged, pop-eyed and grinning far too widely, her mid-brown skin smeared with white makeup and exaggerated red lipstick in an apparent effort to resemble Little Mabel in macro-scale. The effect is more sickly Victorian orphan by way of Vaudeville, but in the context it’s still fairly chilling. Annabelle speaks in an even more childlike register while she makes her filthy, stained counterpart twirl and cavort. “Annabelle, Annabelle, made for a lark, cut up and dressed up and left in the dark,” she croons. “I was made lovely and pretty and new here, in blood and pain and harshest correction. Of course I came back; this is my cradle, my little Barbie dream house! And I knew you’d return eventually, I knew knew knew! By snuffing you out, I’ll finally be free!”

“What I’m hearing is, you failed at life and had to move back into your parents’ basement,” Amber says derisively, triggering a wordless scream of rage from Annabelle that overloads the speakers for a moment. “She always was a touch unstable,” she says to Christine. “I was surprised when she made it through graduation. A bit of a drama queen, if I’m perfectly honest. Not exactly my best work.”

Amber pulls a stunned Christine along by the hand, navigating turns and switchbacks with a confidence the younger woman wishes she shared, until the pair find themselves facing a dead end. Amber, frowning in the nightmarish red half-light, whips around to face back the way they came, but too late: a section of wall grinds into place behind the sisters, and Annabelle’s unhinged laughter erupts from a nearby speaker.

“We have you now, Mumsie dearest!” she crows; at the far end of the closed section of corridor, a wall drops into the floor, revealing a long, badly corroded metal trough. With a clanking of chains and an excruciating, metallic squeal, this haltingly tips to pour its contents toward the trapped girls. In practice, this turns out to be little more than a small shower of flaky, dark residue, which flutters to the ground almost apologetically.

“You have to replace the acid, Annabelle,” Amber says, sounding more disappointed than anything. “Christine; this way,” she tells her, leading the pair of them in quickly squeezing past the rough, corroded edge of the trough before the trap can reset and the wall rises back into place.

“No, no, naughty Mumsie, there’ll be no scurrying around like a little squeaky rattie-rat. You’re making Little Mabel very, very sad,” Annabelle sing-songs over the PA. Behind the dried-up acid trough is yet another nondescript section of maze, which Amber hurries through, a panting, terrified Christine in her wake, feet feeling very much the worse for Amber’s choice of shoes. Beyond this is another open area, with another spotlight, which activates with a distant bang as the girls approach; this illuminates an identical raised platform, on which sits a copper bowl, and a pair of brass scissors.

“Amber… what the hell did they have to do to open this one?” Christine asks, looking wide-eyed at the maze’s creator.

“Don’t worry about it,” Amber says, evincing precisely zero shame. “This was part of the advanced course; it really shouldn’t be active. She’s just pressing buttons at random up there. However, if I’m right, then I think… yes.” She counts along the panels of the cavernous room’s outer wall with a perfectly manicured nail, muttering under her breath, until she alights on one particular section of maze. She hurries over and starts tapping at the surface with her knuckles. When she finds what she’s looking for, without a moment’s pause she half-turns and jams an elbow hard into the concrete. A small section is exposed as paper-thin, crumbling to reveal a recessed niche containing a keyhole, into which Amber quickly inserts one of her keys and swings the entire segment inward. She displays not even the faintest reaction to her torn-up, bleeding elbow.

“Leftover from the construction. I fitted the door and lock just in case, which seems awfully prescient now, don’t you think?” she says, pushing the wall section back into place behind Christine.

“Mummy, where have you gone? Mumsie! Come back! Don’t you dare leave me again!” Annabelle can still be heard screeching over the intercom, but it’s clear the speakers are confined to the maze area, and the further the pair move down the cramped, unfinished-looking passageway, still marked with incomprehensible chalk shorthand by the builders, the mercifully fainter she becomes.

“There aren’t any cameras back here, darling, so we can speak freely again,” Amber says, tucking an errant lock of that perfectly straight blonde hair behind her ear, seeming to Christine more amused than anything by the whole ordeal.

“Who is she?” Christine asks. “I mean, obviously she was one of the ones you brought here, but…”

“If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said she was the first of my successes,” Amber says, tone turning a little maudlin. “I’m starting to re-evaluate that, if I’m honest. I genuinely can’t remember who she was before; they were all much the same. Volunteer this, charity that, you can imagine the sort of thing. It’s incredibly easy to snatch somebody away when they’re so achingly desperate to help.”

“You said first. Amber, how many…?”

“Successes?” Amber says. “Three. Well, three and a half. Or four. Depending on how you count.”

“Out of how many failures? How many washouts?” Christine demands.

“Dorley has washouts too,” Amber says, more than a touch defensively.

“How many, Amber?”

“I mean, the first two intakes were basically practice runs, so they really shouldn’t count against me. Running a Dorley is hard. And then the third, we had that nasty stomach flu, and it all just got so unpleasant I had to call it a write-off and hit the incinerator button, you know? So honestly, I don’t think my success-to-failure ratio is that bad…”

“How many?” Christine repeats, staring daggers through Amber.

“Thirty-eight,” Amber says, as if she isn’t admitting to a war crime.

“Jesus fuck,” Christine breathes, and has to steady herself against the cold concrete wall for a moment before she’s able to continue. When she does, she finds herself looking at Amber in a new light. That feels ridiculous to her somehow; it isn’t as if she didn’t know the woman was a murderer, torturer and extremely unconventional artist. But it’s one thing to read the list of horrors she’s perpetrated, even to have seen the photos; actually being inside the evil reflection of the place Christine herself was traumatically remade - hearing Amber idly dismiss the deaths of dozens of victims who started out just like her, only better, more innocent - is another entirely.

“Now, what did this connect to…?,” Amber says, acting as if absolutely nothing is wrong and swinging open a steel door to her left, noisily upending some sort of metallic piece of furniture and a hail of smaller objects on the other side. “Ah, of course: the surgical suite.”

Christine clenches her fists, driving her nails into her palms in anticipation of some Saw-esque house of horrors, but what she sees under the inconstant fluorescent light is almost worse: a pristine, if slightly cramped, operating room; table, adjustable lights, trays of sparkling implements - scattered everywhere by the opening of the hidden door through which the two women have entered - and dormant, looming pieces of medical machinery in institutional off-white. It’s far too similar to the real Dorley’s setup, and she’s breathing hard at the thought of Amber’s victims being wheeled in here to be cut apart and reassembled to her deranged specifications.

“Wait, did you have a staff here?” Christine asks, her gaze falling on the pair of scrub stations in the corner.

“Oh, haha, no: not really, at least. Beatrice has so much trouble finding and retaining medical staff she trusts. That honestly seemed like far too much of a headache for me. No, some things I muddled my way through - it’s amazing how much you can learn at the library - but for the more complex procedures I enlisted the help of a lovely surgeon named Brenda. She did a marvellous job, which I suppose is a testament to how much she loved her family,” Amber says wistfully. “I really think some people do their best work at knifepoint. It sharpens the mind.”

“You’re talking about her in the past tense,” Christine says, intensely suspicious.

“Yes, I am, aren’t I, darling?” Amber says, smiling, and doesn’t elaborate any further. “I did plan to have the first group of graduates become sponsors, in the Dorley tradition,” she continues, after a few moments’ disinterested poking at the surgical instruments. “But - well - as you can see from dear Annabelle, it wasn’t really on the cards,” she concludes, sighing deeply. “They just didn’t really have the temperament, when all was said and done.”

“So you just… gave up?” Christine asks.

“Would you rather I’d continued?” Amber laughs.

“I just want to understand,” Christine says. “You turned three…ish normal boys into murderous girls, and then that was that? Job done?”

“I realise it doesn’t cast me in the best light, but if I’m being devastatingly honest, I just got bored,” comes the easy reply. “The thought of going through the whole process again was practically enough to make me throw myself in the Punishment Hole. Which, if I felt either of us was in the mood to tackle all the stairs, you would appreciate is not a place anyone would voluntarily go; you’ll just have to take my word for it. No, I love my daughters - even silly Annabelle - but I didn’t feel a need to make any more. They weren’t really what I needed after all. You can’t let yourself become stuck in a new rut while trying to get out of the old one, you know?”

“Then what, you left them here? Locked the doors and turned out the lights?” Christine asks, trying and failing to suppress a full-body shiver.

Amber looks momentarily appalled. “Of course not! I gave them the best possible start in life! Money, new identities, some very practical and wholly non-threatening advice, and a promise that I would watch them carve their names into the world’s soft flesh with the utmost pride. It’s hardly my fault that one of them failed to thrive and came scurrying back. Anyway, I was feeling wonderfully refreshed by that point, positively bursting to get back to my real work. So, actually yes, I suppose in a sense I did just leave. Hm. Oopsie.”

“But you brought me here now. Did you know Annabelle had come back?”

“Total surprise, sweetie, I swear. I’d only hoped to gather what evidence remained as to my little creations’ current whereabouts, so we could enjoy some wonderful Sisterly bonding while we tracked them down together.”

“And you really think one of them is murdering Dorley graduates.”

“Regrettably, they do fit the mould,” Amber answers with a light shrug. “They always were a little flighty, especially after we started electroshock-and-peyote Wednesdays. I didn’t ever tell them about our dear alma mater, but they’re such chips off the old block, it’s hardly difficult to imagine them finding out. And if they did become aware…”

“Then maybe their reaction to finding out there’s a Dorley out there that doesn’t have a death-maze or anything called a Punishment Hole would be to start killing its graduates out of spite.”

“It certainly isn’t outside the realm of possibility,” Amber admits. “I’ll confess to not really thinking about it at the time. Again, it was a funny old year.”

“Great stuff, just brilliant,” Christine mutters.

Across another narrow, unfinished corridor from the operating and recovery rooms is a heavy, locked door, to which Amber quickly produces the key, beyond which is an area which clearly connects to the maze and is painted in a similar arterial red. This leads in turn to a much larger, rectangular space in bare concrete, and here Christine’s eye can’t avoid lingering on the profusion of old, brown stains in every imaginable pattern of spatter and spray. There are even discarded weapons lying around: a vicious, serrated knife, a hammer glued to the metal floorplates with a clot of old gore, a cricket bat with nails driven neatly through.

“Hmm. I never did mop up after graduation,” Amber says. “You know how it is: you keep telling yourself you’ll do it tomorrow, and then you just never do. And there’s a certain outsider-art charm to it, don’t you think?”

Before Christine can gather her thoughts enough to assemble any kind of reply, a speaker hidden somewhere in the gloom of the ceiling bursts into life with a squeal of feedback, and a blood-smeared screen on the far wall resolves into an image of the now-familiar gyrations of Little Mabel. “Ahahaha!” Annabelle crows in triumph. “I spy with my beady little eye, you and your pretty little replica. What did you go and do, Mother, set up a new abattoir with a new basement and make a better girl? One who would dance and sing just the way you like? Just like a little pretty birdie?”

“It doesn’t have to be an abattoir, Annabelle, it’s just what happened to be…” Amber begins, before giving up in obvious frustration. “What have you even been eating down here? If you say rats, I’m going to be very cross indeed.”

“The little ones sustained me, Mother. Scurry, scurry, squeak, squeak,” Annabelle replies in a wavering, dreamlike tone, causing Amber to pinch the bridge of her nose in genuine despair.

“God damn it,” she mutters, which strikes Christine as uncharacteristic but honest.

A thought suddenly strikes Christine. “She doesn’t know Dorley exists,” she murmurs to Amber, quietly enough that she hopes the microphones won’t pick it up.

“Well spotted,” Amber whispers back.

“So it can’t have been her, then. Right? The murders?”

“We shall see, I imagine. Either way, we need to deal with her if we’re to get out of here alive,” Amber says, with a fleeting smile. “So, Annabelle, my sweet,” she continues brightly, directed at the screen, “Is this place bringing back any happy memories? Good times under the old concrete sky? Fun and games with your beloved Sisters?”

“You made us fight to the death, Mother! Over and over and over again! And the practice dummies! Under the sackcloth and straw there was flesh and blood and screaming, Mother, always the screaming. Our little friends, our fellow victims, washed out but never wasted, hahaha, never gone! And the metal shoes, the heels and locks, and the hurting, burning floor beneath… the snap and crack of… of the, hahaha, the electricity… oh, I have you now, Mumsie dear!”

“Oh. Hm. I’d forgotten about the discipline system,” Amber says, seemingly unconcerned, while Christine belatedly realises what Annabelle is implying and desperately searches for something to climb that isn’t in contact with a metallic floor tile. In the control room, Annabelle is audibly stabbing at buttons and switches with the fury of a berserker; wall panels slide aside to reveal rows of stained poles, thankfully devoid of the ‘practice dummies’ Annabelle alluded to, and further racks of weapons and tools along with what appear to be makeup tables and rails of clothing. Finally she erupts in a triumphant shriek, followed by the sound of a heavy switch being thrown, a sharp sizzling crack from the floor beneath both women, and finally the bang of the screen and every light in the long, bare room instantly going dead.

“I expected we’d be fine. Louboutin does make such high-quality soles,” Amber says, critically regarding the red underside of one of her own shoes. “Sadly, the same can’t be said of the wiring. I really am going to write a very pointed letter to that company. Perhaps I should demand a refund. What do you think, my sweet?”

“I think we just almost died,” Christine says, intensely shaken, looking incredulously at her own shoes and the thin wisps of smoke coming from between the floor panels, caught in the stark light from Amber’s phone camera.

“It was only ever meant as an incentive, sweetie,” Amber laughs out loud. “Although we did have one candidate with an undiagnosed heart condition, which was… surprisingly tragic, all told. A terrible waste.”

“Because you couldn’t use him as a training dummy afterwards?” Christine mutters, eyes drawn inexorably back to those rust-spotted poles with their restraints trailing loose.

“Oh, no, I still did, but it wasn’t especially gratifying,” Amber says lightly, stalking over to the door in the far corner and jiggling the key in the lock. “The control room is just through here and up the stairs. I genuinely don’t know what Annabelle will do - it seems my ability to predict her isn’t half as good as I thought - but it might be wise to be ready for anything.”

“Should I… take one of these? Just in case?” Christine asks, unenthusiastically toeing what looks like a spiked mace, which turns out to be welded to the floor with some sort of dessicated residue she chooses not to speculate too hard about.

“If it would make you feel better,” Amber replies with equanimity. “Although I’d advise against appearing too aggressive; I really did teach them well, and Beatrice will persist in refusing to give you girls even the most basic education in violence.”

“Almost like she wants us to live normal, happy lives rather than becoming murderers,” Christine mutters, selecting a simple, straight-bladed knife and weighing it in her hand with obvious discomfort.

“I know, right? The absolute tedium of it,” Amber replies, the light from her phone turning the smirk on her delicate features into a rictus, her razor-straight hair into a shroud. “Squandering so much potential, if you ask me. But I digress. So, my dear Sister,” she says, chivalrously offering Christine an arm, “Shall we?”

***

The door creaks open on a short passageway leading to a set of dusty metal stairs, which zig-zag upward past the ceiling level of the underground rooms, terminating at what must be an interstitial floor between the basement and the main abattoir. Climbing is difficult in the ridiculous heels Amber put Christine in - although she herself seems to have no problem - but the image of stepping barefoot into yet another DIY deathtrap is far too prominent in Christine’s mind to even consider taking them off. At the top of the stairs is another door, and beyond this - standing motionless in a frothy white shift in the centre of the small room beyond, surrounded by dead monitors and banks of switches, lit only by the two women’s phones and a handful of weakly flickering candles - is Annabelle. Christine’s first reaction is shock at just how pretty she is in person, under the painted white doll-face and terrifying pop-eyed stare; Christine doesn’t know what horrors she was expecting, but the woman could easily be a graduate of the real Dorley if she weren’t so obviously completely out to lunch.

“Hello, Mother,” Annabelle croons, in that eerie, wavering voice.

“Annabelle,” Amber acknowledges her, and just as the tension grows so taut that Christine, half-hiding behind Amber with her wholly inadequate knife clutched behind her back, feels she might faint, Amber lunges forward with genuinely astonishing speed. It takes a stunned Christine a moment to realise that instead of doing the girl any kind of violence, she’s gathered Annabelle into a broad, and eagerly reciprocated, hug.

“Oh, darling, I’ve missed you so much! I’m so sorry you’ve been so terribly sad; if I’d known, I never would have stayed away!” Amber gushes while Annabelle bursts into a torrent of messy tears, mixing with white face-paint and grime to run in rivulets down her frilly nightgown.

“Hold on, what? So all this was a set-up? She wasn’t really trying to kill us?” Christine demands, appalled and disturbed by the intensely unhealthy relationship the pair of women clearly share, and beginning to worry that now they’re reunited, the two of them are about to start viewing her as surplus to requirements.

“Oh, no, she absolutely was,” Amber says, practically radiating pride. “And she did very, very well, all things considered. It wasn’t your fault this old place is falling apart, was it, dear?” she croons, like a mother comforting an infant.

“But you, uh, don’t want to any more, Annabelle, right?” Christine ventures.

“Oh, no, I still do! So very, very much! Me and Little Mabel both do!” Annabelle sniffles, raising her head to show where tears have left clean tracks on her dirt-smeared face. “But I shan’t, because… because…”

“Come on. You know this,” Amber encourages her.

“Sisters are off-limits, because Sisterhood is sacred,” Annabelle says, with the air of someone reciting a mantra. Christine wonders how many times Amber’s victims were forced to speak those words before they began to sink in. Clearly not enough.

“Good girl,” Amber says, lovingly stroking her creation’s hair. A thought appears to occur to her, and she pulls back slightly, holding Annabelle out to regard her face. “For the record, does the name Dorley Hall mean anything to you, darling?”

“No, Moth… Aunt Amber. Is it like Downton Abbey? I used to quite enjoy that, but there’s no television down here. There’s just time, and the quiet, and the rats. Squeak, scurry, squeak.”

“And you haven’t been anywhere near Leeds in the past week?”

“I haven’t been anywhere, Mother, I promise. I’ve been down here, all alone, in the dark,” Annabelle sniffs. Casting her light around the control room, Christine has to admit that’s plausible, from the sheer odour, the nest of ragged blankets and what, yes, might very well be the gnawed bones of a number of small animals.

“I know, darling, I know. And I love you very much,” Amber says gently. At first Christine thinks Annabelle is crying harder, erupting in huge gasping sobs into Amber’s shoulder, but then she catches the glint of metal in Amber’s right hand and sees the wet, red stain rapidly spreading across the woman’s loose blouse. Annabelle makes another helpless choking sound, and tries to thrash in Amber’s grip, but her maker clutches her tight and continues to gently stroke her hair as she gradually grows weaker and more limp.

“There, there, darling, let it all out,” Amber says softly, and Christine has to look away before she throws up from horror and disgust at the sheer tender sincerity of it.

When it’s over, and Amber has laid her daughter’s motionless body down in the pile of rags she used as a bed, she pats ineffectually at the livid crimson patch on her top with a look of no more than passing displeasure, as if she’s spilled her wine. She pays much more attention to the discarded Little Mabel, lying limp on a nearby board of mechanical switches, who Amber hurries over and arranges in a prim sitting position with exaggerated care.

“Why? She didn’t do it,” is all Christine can manage to say, through tears borne of shock and grief.

“Well, no, but she did try to kill both of us five or six times,” Amber says, casually, and to Christine’s disgust actually starts laughing. “And I wasn’t totally sure she could be persuaded to view you as a Sister. The conditioning I gave them was rather rigid. In any case, she couldn’t have been left unsupervised after I asked her about Dorley; I believe her when she said she didn’t know about it before, but she most definitely would have gotten curious once I’d dropped the name. And really, all she was going to do otherwise was mope around this old heap being offputting and weird; far from the life I had in mind for my girls. No, this was the kinder option, my love.”

“Love. You said you loved her,” Christine murmurs accusingly, too numb to worry about her own safety for the moment.

“Love is not incompatible with a knife to the throat,” Amber says, thoughtfully. “You know, I like that. I should make it my motto. Or a tattoo? Maybe that’s tacky. What do you think?” she asks distractedly, half talking to herself. “Anyway, now we’re here, let’s get down to it, shall we?” she says, tapping uselessly at a dead keyboard, to no avail, before she starts rummaging in the drawers and filing cabinets lining the cramped space. Christine shines her torch unthinkingly around the control room, trying to focus on anything other than the body; briefly she alights on dead switches and buttons, keyboards and monitors, and a mug reading Dress like Bradshaw, Love like Bennett, Live like Bateman, Laugh like Lecter, but even that isn’t enough to distract her.

“What are you doing?” she asks Amber blankly, for want of something to say.

“Well, before I let my sweet birdies fly free, I implanted a sneaky little something in the small of their backs,” Amber says, sounding distinctly proud of herself. “It works off of mobile phone towers, so we should be able to locate the other girls to a reasonable degree of accuracy, as long as they’ve not spent the last two years living in a cave or something. All I need is… ah! Here we are! The list of the specific frequencies and device IDs. Thank goodness I kept a hard copy, or we’d have been fiddling about with the wiring all night.”

“And then, what, you’re going to kill the others too?” Christine asks.

“I sincerely hope not!” Amber says, to all appearances genuinely shocked by the idea. “If they’re as much of a write-off as poor Annabelle I should be quite upset.”

“And you really don’t know what they’ve been doing all this time.”

“I wanted them to surprise me,” Amber replies. “That was the point, from a certain perspective.”

“What about if one of them really is murdering Dorley girls?” Christine demands, suddenly flushed with anger at the woman’s sheer reckless evil. “Wouldn’t that be a surprise?”

“Not all surprises are nice ones, I suppose,” Amber muses, neatly folding the papers and sliding them into her chic little shoulder-bag. “Either way, that’s us,” she says, conclusively, and turns to leave. “You know, I’m almost inclined to toss a match into the place on our way out. Draw a line under the whole thing. Hmm, but then, I suppose it would only serve to attract attention. Better to leave it as-is. And who knows when I’ll be struck by inspiration for a new use for the old pile, eh?”

Christine shudders deeply, imagining the tiny cells with their chained collars filled once more with screaming innocents, forced to run the maze with its acid and flames and doors which open only for self-mutilation. “I think you should burn it,” she says, with feeling, but nonetheless she follows Amber back down the stairs, because she can’t see anything else she can do. She still has the knife, but something about Amber’s carefree reaction to her picking it up, and subsequent lack of hesitation in turning her back, makes her sincerely doubt there’s the slightest chance she could use it.

***

By the light of their phones’ torches the pair make their way back across the bloodstained practice room, where Amber has Christine hold up her light while she flips critically through the rack of clothes her creations were provided, shaking out and sniffing item after item before somewhat grudgingly selecting a loose, patterned top to replace her blood-soaked blouse. She changes without a hint of self-consciousness, exposing milk-white shoulderblades and a tautly muscled back, and drops the drenched rag amid the implements and stains of her past sins with no reverence whatsoever.

Through the darkened, silent turns of the maze and back along the eerily familiar basement corridor the pair walk together in silence, and it’s only when there’s a soft ping from her bag that Amber finally speaks up. Christine wonders if somewhere in the haunted labyrinth of the woman’s mind she’s more affected by Annabelle’s death than she lets on, but she sounds entirely her blithely cheerful self when she does.

“Ah! There we are; I’ve got a signal,” she says brightly. Christine ascends the final flight of stairs to the surface behind her, and then waits awkwardly in the late-afternoon light filtering through the abattoir’s high, slotted windows while she fiddles with phone and papers, tapping numbers into some sort of mapping app. Eventually Amber shatters the quiet by bursting suddenly into raucous laughter, which causes Christine to jump halfway out of her skin in surprise.

“What is it?” Christine asks, trying and failing to catch her breath while Amber repeatedly almost gets a grip on herself, then collapses back into fits of giggling.

“I’ll… aha, no, you know what? I’m going to keep that close to my chest for a little longer,” Amber manages, eventually. “I think the surprise will be worth the wait. Now, come along, my sweet: the next step in our investigation awaits!”

Christine, confused, angry and still shellshocked from witnessing a murder barely ten feet in front of her, not to mention the intensely sore feet, trudges along after Amber as she deftly navigates the wreckage cluttering the abattoir floor. She unlocks the main door with a cheery jingle of the keys, still grinning about whatever has tickled her so much, and turns to address Christine as she backs out into the last blush of daylight.

“So what are we thinking for dinner? I don’t know about you, but I must confess I’m absolutely wiped out after the day we’ve had. Perhaps something simple, like-“

As she reaches the corner of the main abattoir’s exterior, still turned to face Christine as she talks, there’s an abrupt crackling buzz and Amber suddenly goes rigid midsentence. Her eyes open very wide and her mouth makes a perfect, heretofore unseen ‘o’ of genuine surprise. She crumples almost delicately to the ground, revealing, standing half-hidden by the crumbling brick of the edge of the building, just about the last person Christine ever expected to see here.

“Hi, Teenie,” Indira says, giving her a crooked half-smile, a black Dorley-issue taser hanging slack in her shaking hand.