Archive of Our Own ^beta

Everybody knew about the evening train. It was a standing joke at school; there were even dirty rhymes about it.

None of them were very clever.

Still, lack of poetical flair did not keep those rhymes from running through Isla’s head as she stood on the platform and trapped the folds of her skirt between sweaty fingers, waiting for the train. Was she actually going to do this? She wasn’t sure she wanted to, but it felt wrong to back down from a dare.

Admittedly it hadn’t explicitly been a dare. At least, not exactly. It had been more along the lines of a targeted hint. Dropped, rather than stated outright. The other girls had all been careful not to directly challenge her to do it because they weren’t fucking stupid. If they had told her outright, and she’d gone to any of the teachers about it . . .

But Isla wasn’t like that.

Isla didn’t expect them to know she wasn’t like that. None of them really knew her at all yet. She’d been a late arrival at a time when nobody was expected to arrive, a surprise to everybody. Even the headmaster had seemed a little unsure how, exactly, he’d wound up with Isla in his school.

“Welcome,” he had told her, the air around his head foggy with his own confusion. “We hope you’ll like it here.”

Isla hadn’t hated it anywhere else she’d been, but like was a pretty tall order. When you were moved around that often, you learned not to like anything too much.

Still, that didn’t mean she couldn’t have some fun. Three weeks of keeping a low profile had started to grate on Isla’s patience, so on the fourth she’d shaken it up a little. Made friends with Jojo and Sabra and their circle.

Or, okay, maybe not friends. She had made herself interesting enough that they paid attention. Fiddled with the bounds of her personal damper in such a way that enough of her shone through to catch their notice; make them look twice, get closer, ask questions.

Made them make suggestions.

The suggestions started out small. A minor public humiliation here, a little physical endangerment there. Small flames flared up in the Science lab, panties were slipped off under the lunch table, and blue canaries swarmed the teachers’ lounge. Not real ones, of course; it was a packet illusion. Jojo had pinched it from her granny’s purse, but it was Isla who set it off, and blue canaries had filled the room in a whirling, twittering cloud. They’d dive-bombed the staff with pecks and poo until the lot of them were forced to flee into the hallway and wait for Custodial to come with dispersal charms, much to the vocal amusement of all watching students.

It was all mildly titillating stuff, Isla supposed. If she’d had any notion of staying longer than another month or two she wouldn’t have done it, but Isla never stayed. Isla always moved. So why not take advantage of her own transience to have a little fun?

At least, that’s what she’d told herself as she inched her knickers over her knees in the lunchroom and kicked them across the floor to lie in the middle of the aisle for anyone to see. That this was amusing; diverting. That it was better than waiting quietly and doing nothing at all.

She’d struggled to remember that, however, when Sabra had leaned in today with that deadly fake smile on her perfect face and whispered loudly and transparently about this train and everything that happened on it. Her energy had thrummed with purpose and deception. Isla had been as fascinated by the magnitude of Sabra’s intention as she was the whispered, lurid descriptions themselves. Sabra went on about how few girls were really brave enough to sit in the last car and not say no to whoever asked her to do . . . whatever people asked you to do on the train. Sabra had been pretty vague on that point, and Isla honestly got the impression her new friends had even less of an idea what that was than Isla did, which was really saying something.

But they had heard the rumours, because everybody had heard the rumours, and Isla was bored. Bored of waiting for Mum to finish flirting with the bronzed, muscular men she took up with in Majorca or Capri or wherever she’d stumbled off to now, and jet home for an intensely over-demonstrative week of motherlove before she tired of them again and departed. Bored of waiting for Dad to see her as anything but a problem to contain, to damp and border and bind with whatever new restraint he’d hit on this time, something to make her less of a risk to his work, less of a liability that he needed to keep bouncing all over the country, from school to school, befuddling the Head into taking her on and then leaving her there until she inevitably worked the topmost bindings free and was able to have some real fun before Dad caught on, and moved her again.

So here was Isla on the train platform, trying to talk herself into actually caring enough what Sabra and Jojo and all the rest of them thought long enough to get on the goddamn train and get felt up, or flip her skirt, or whatever else it was you did for the kind of people who rode this thing.

A quick glance around her at the platform was all it took for Isla to get the measure of just about everybody who would be boarding with her. A few folks were clearly travelling on legitimate business, despite the later hour, with the corresponding air of preoccupation. Some couples, or halves of couples, were out on more romantic errands. Homeward bound after a night out, eager to tumble into bed together, but none of them the sort of person who turned up in school doggerel about this conveyance. The ones down the far end of the platform, on the other hand . . . Isla drifted in that direction, curiosity piqued.

These ones impressed her differently than the rest. The energy around them was furtive. Excited, but with the usual air of secrecy overlaying the type of excitement you minded other folks catching wind of. Isla had never personally met someone who was boarding a train in the hopes of copping a feel, but she had to imagine this was exactly like what that sort of person would be.

She took a position near the group on the platform as the first gust of wind and rhythmic echo of the approach churned the air. Her school kilt was too heavy to lift at so slight a provocation, which was a pity; she was pretty sure the guy over by the stairs was looking at her in the specific hope it might stir. Still, she thought, boarding the last car in the middle of the queue that formed for it, there were ways of helping it along.

The last car didn’t look any different than the rest. People didn’t behave any differently. Isla wasn’t sure what folks intending a covert orgy should be doing, but she hadn’t thought it would be something as usual as settling into their seats for the journey. Not wishing to appear too unusually eager, she did the same, and scouted quietly.

A few of the men looked promising. One had a deepening quiver in the air around him that Isla registered as sexual energy. Another had the same quiver, but his was underlaid with something thicker, heavier, that made her skin prickle. She wouldn’t be getting off at any stop with somebody who read like that.

Her gaze skipped over a few more, searching. She stopped, considering, and reversed course to follow the sight of a lady of medium build and middle age only just coming on board.

The women was not out of breath, but she walked with the briskness of one who has just been in time. She stopped at the seat diagonal to Isla’s and arranged herself primly by the aisle, leaving the window seat empty beside her. Waiting for someone, maybe? But not at this stop. The train was about to leave.

Physically the woman was quietly well-groomed, with minimal jewelled adornment and makeup discreetly applied. She carried no bag. Her chin-length ash blond hair was that particular shade close enough to colourless that it did not look too unnatural even when it framed an older woman’s face. The qualities Isla was most interested in reading, though, were heavily muted. Damped. The energy equivalent of being glimpsed through a heavy mist, as if . . . Isla searched for a comparison among her own experiences. Suppressed energy like this could be indicative of a private nature, of somebody secretive, but most typically it was the result of embarrassment. When you wanted to do something, but were a little too ashamed of it to directly acknowledge, you could give off the sort of muffled version of yourself that this lady did now.

The most Isla could pick out of her underlying nature was of order and immense authority, which spoke well, Isla thought, to her likely being here to grope rather than be groped. Isla considered, seriously, the appeal of being groped by this woman. There was no denying her own body had definite thoughts about that. A pleasantly anticipatory hum picked up between Isla’s legs. Maybe her school kit would be helpful here. A lady with an air of authority might like the idea of a schoolgirl smiling at her shyly, saying Yes, Miss and No thank you, Miss and letting herself be spanked for saucy remarks.

The hum between Isla’s legs deepened to a distinct, separate pulse. It seemed she wasn’t averse to the notion of that.

She was just on the verge of crossing her legs and working out what best to project to attract this woman’s attention when another figure blocked her view, flopping into the empty aisle seat at Isla’s side.

“Hello.”

This woman, a long-limbed redhead with the kind of ageless angular face that spoke to more than usual quantities of time spent out of doors, was not embarrassed. No muffled energy here: hers pulsed bright and sharp and quick. Sexual excitement, confidence, and a low hum of attraction. Isla, flattered in spite of herself, smiled.

“Hi.”

The train picked up speed. The lighting adjusted in accordance with the time of day, settling into a pleasant half-strength that glowed a soft amber yellow. It was only the thrill of Isla’s own pulse that kept her from quiet restfulness at the change.

Beside her, the stranger with the outdoorsy air draped sinewy arms on both armrests, obliging Isla to either share the middle one or else move her arm entirely. Isla elected to share, and looked up in time to see a wide, easy grin settle on the newcomer’s face.

“You done this before, hon?”

American. That was interesting. Isla shook her head.

“You know what this car is for, though?”

Isla hesitated. She did not do so because she was unsure, though the woman probably mistook it for uncertainty. Rather, Isla was calculating. Assessing risk. She turned her wrist slightly so that her fingertips brushed the woman’s skin, and clarified the impression.

The woman radiated energy and confidence in equal abundance. A spark of attraction was still there, and a little curiosity besides. She wanted Isla, she was interested in her, but nothing more than that. None of the currents and fault lines spoke to predatory intent, unless you counted the sexual excitement itself. Isla supposed anybody who pulsed with sexual excitement at the prospect of an encounter with a schoolgirl might count as a predator, but from where Isla sat, she was on the lookout for a very particular type. Nothing about this woman telegraphed willingness to do her harm. She wanted to enjoy Isla, not hurt her.

Isla smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

The woman nodded, still easy, still confident. She glanced down at Isla’s lap.

“That get-up the real deal?”

Isla nodded.

“Shit,” marvelled her companion. She dug into her battered leather shoulder bag and drew out a compact square of folded cloth, which she chucked at Isla. “You’re chilly, hon. Cover up.”

Isla slowly unfolded the travelling blanket and draped it over her lap. For something so thin and light, it generated surprising heat. Though maybe, Isla thought, that was partly coming from her. The arousal that buzzed between her thighs had not abated with the arrival of this woman, and as her seatmate slid one hand casually under the blanket, fingers playing over the lap of Isla’s kilt, the sweet throb only deepened.

“Unnh,” Isla grunted, soft and quiet, as the woman’s fingertips plucked at the hem of her skirt, grazing her bare thigh. She squirmed.

“Eager little thing, aren’t you.” Her seatmate did not look over as she said this. She’d shifted her shoulder bag so it covered the bottom of her own arm, and hid the point at which she had reached below the blanket. “You don’t have somebody your own age to do this for you, honey? Or is not knowing me that does it for you? The rush of not knowing who the fuck I am; is that what gets you off?”

Isla, distracted though she was by the way the woman was fishing lightly up under her skirt, nevertheless gave the question serious consideration.

“I think,” she said slowly, “it’s mostly that it’s new.”

“Huh.” The hand stilled a moment, then resumed. “Yeah, I get that.” She was running her finger down the plump seam of Isla’s flesh, still covered by the cotton gusset of her underpants, and Isla was doing her level best not to writhe pleasurably at the sensation. “Would it be a mood killer to ask if your parents know where you are?”

Isla shrugged.

“Dad doesn’t know. Mum doesn’t care.”

“Ah.” The pressure of her fingertip increased, slightly. Forced her flesh to part, though her underpants still shielded her from actual contact with this woman’s skin. “Funny. I thought usually it was the other way around, when girls . . . well.”

Isla leaned her head back and opened her knees a little wider under the blanket. She focused on the stroke and probe of her seatmate’s touch, and definitely not on the riot act Dad would read her if he was actually home when she finally turned up, well past curfew, smelling of train booze and cigarettes.

That was the problem. Not that Dad didn’t care; the entire opposite. The problem was that he did. He cared, but he stayed in the life all the same, kidding himself that there was some way he could have it all. Job and her and everything. Not Mum, maybe; you couldn’t blame Dad for Mum. But all the rest of it, he thought he could keep. That the cost of him getting everything he wanted should only be Isla’s to pay.

Choose, Isla had willed him so many times. Not that she had impressed him, she couldn’t impress him, he’d made that clear. But she’d wanted so badly. Screamed the words at him inside her head until her ears hummed with them, and she could never imagine how he didn’t hear. Just fucking choose.

Even if he’d sent her away, it would have been something. Some kind of commitment. A destination at last, settled and solid and real. But instead her life was a purgatory of waypoints, schools she stood in like train stations, awaiting the next time of departure.

“Shit.” Her seatmate’s panicked whisper brought her back to herself with a jolt. “Shit, hon, was that too much?”

Isla didn’t understand at first. Not until she registered that her underpants had been pushed to the side and the woman’s long, slender fingers were gliding in and out of her on a wave of thick, slick arousal. She was about to assure the woman it was fine, that it felt wonderful, when she put her hand up, dislodging the blanket, and touched her face.

She was crying.

“Oh. No, it . . . it’s fine.” More than fine. Her mind might have been elsewhere, but her flesh had been extremely present for all of it. A rich, throbbing promise was pulsing between her legs. The woman was stroking deep and sure, curling her fingers sweetly so that Isla’s pussy hummed in delighted response. If Isla had been at home she’d have rolled over onto the nearest pillow to grind the orgasm to immediate fulfillment. Instead she was on a train, crying and about to come, and the combination had clearly terrified her depressingly moral molester into stopping altogether.

“It’s fine,” she repeated.

She tipped her head back, pressing into the seat as the woman’s hand picked up speed. Split her, spread her. Forced her wide, a thumb pressing down at the very top of—

Isla sucked air through her mouth and nose as she came, clenching around the woman’s hand with complete abandon. She doubled over, breathing hard, the fingers still inside her as she coated them with proof of her seatmate’s success.

“Ohmygod,” she mumbled. “Oh my god.”

“Maybe you need a minute?” the lady suggested gently. Isla started to shake her head, to say she was fine, better than fine, but she paused. Nodded, instead, and indicated the WC at the end of the aisle.

“How about I go in there a minute, and then . . . if you want, you join me.”

“If,” hooted her companion, incredulous. She folded her long, skilled, glistening fingers comfortably in her lap. “You just wait and see if there’s any if about me joining you.”

Isla smiled. She stood and edged past the narrow gap created when the lady angled her knees out to the sides, smoothed her skirt, and started down the aisle for the door.

Two of the men reached out to sneak a feel. One of the women, too. Isla didn’t slack her pace but she didn’t swat them away, either, and by the time she shut herself inside the little room at the end, breathing heavily, knuckles digging at her eyes to warn against any more unwanted tears, she had regained some sense of self-control.

She was splashing cold water on her face when the door opened. She mumbled just a moment, groped for the paper towelette peeking out of the dispenser, and blotted dry. Then she looked up into the mirror, and her expression morphed from blotchy but resolute into simple confusion.

The lady who smiled gently back at her in the glass was not Isla’s seatmate. It was the older woman who had boarded just before her, and made Isla wonder if she might like the schoolgirl kit in particular.

Her energy was still muted, but this close Isla was able to make out muddy undercurrents of calm, purpose and confidence. Not at all what you’d expect from somebody who had accidentally walked into an occupied lavatory.

Train or not, Isla was conscious of feeling very much at sea.

“Can . . . can I help you?”

If she’d been more herself she could have made it sound terse; belligerent. Warning. Instead she just sounded young and confused. The woman smiled.

“Yes, I think so.” She stepped forward and flipped Isla’s skirt up in the back. Isla yelped and whirled around, only to catch a cheekful of the woman’s palm as it cracked across her face.

“Don’t make difficulties.” Isla, clutching her smarting cheek, could only stare. The lady’s smile hadn’t even slipped. “This doesn’t have to be painful, Isla. If you cooperate we can get matters sorted quickly, and you can go on your way.”

Isla flicked a fleeting, desperate glance to the door. The intruder followed her gaze, placid smile still perfectly in place.

“You’re expecting somebody,” she said gently. “The very forward woman you sat beside, is that it? Oh my dear, I’m afraid I had to tell her a little fib about your age. Fourteen, I said you were. Slip of a thing that you are, she had no trouble believing me. Do you know she was properly horrified? Once I told her that, and showed her this,” she slipped a neat leather booklet from the pocket of her blazer and flipped it open for the barest second, not quite long enough for Isla to catch more than a hazy impression of what lay beneath, “I would say she was actually repentant. I assured her if she got off the train at the next stop and spoke of this to nobody, we would get you the help you so clearly need.”

She paused as if she expected Isla to thank her, or at least congratulate her on securing such a tidy exit for the redheaded woman. But Isla was staring at the ID holder; at the size and shape and colour. At the imprint of memory in her mind’s eye of the logo that she’d seen when the cover of the case had flipped up.

Isla’s mouth went dry and cottony. She swallowed, trying to work some moisture back into place before she spoke.

“You work with my dad.”

Something tightened in the corners of the lady’s eyes. Her energy flexed and pulsed, and the knuckle of her thumb whitened just slightly before she slipped the badge away.

“Your father worked in my department, yes.”

Past tense. Isla looked up in real panic, searching that pleasant smiling face for some sign that her terror was justified, or not.

“Is he okay?”

“Goodness.” A warm, dry hand came out to cradle Isla’s chin. The lady stared thoughtfully into her face, and all at once Isla felt a working on her. Inside her. Something was raking through her mind, greedy, grabbing, searching—

Isla jerked back with a shriek. The connection between them splintered; shattered like spun glass. Fragments of unspent magic pricked and pierced Isla’s temples, making them throb and prickle. She scratched at her own hairline, whimpering, gasping, trying to scrape away the phantom tendrils of invasion.

“You’re very fond of him.” The woman sounded genuinely surprised. Isla, still scratching her face as the magic subsided, suffered a sudden flare of temper: the sort that often follows pain.

“Of course I am! He’s my dad!”

“Yes. But still.” The woman looked around pointedly, as if to say girls who love their dads don’t recreationally ride the grab-ass train. Which just showed she knew fuck-all about Isla or her dad, whether she had been poking around in Isla’s mind or not.

“So you work with him. My dad. What are you here for? Did you think he’d want you checking up on me? Keeping me out of trouble?” How that goal would square with her having flipped Isla’s skirt, Isla wasn’t sure, but she was still playing catch-up here. “Because if you’d taken the barest second to actually ask him how he felt about keeping me out of trouble, he could have told you he gave up on that little fantasy years ago.”

A placid smile curved the lady’s mouth.

“I’ve no doubt he’d have told me that private matters are exactly that. As to what he’ll say when he learns I’m here, I am sure it will all sound very stern and reasonable. But that won’t matter. What matters, Isla, is that you turn around and put your hands on the sink. I’m going to work you up a little, and I’d like you to keep still when I do.”

“Like hell I will,” Isla decided. The woman gently shook her head.

“He did say you were determined.” Then, quicker than Isla could ever have credited somebody of any age could manage, much less a woman the age of this one, she spun Isla around to face the desired direction and tapped the back of each hand, sharply, once. Both hands were at once affixed palms-down to the microscopic vanity counter, and no amount of struggling on Isla’s part could budge them.

“There we go.” The woman flipped her kilt up again, tucking the hem into the back of the waistband. One tug and she had Isla’s underpants down. Isla was still mute with shock when a purposeful hand slid between her legs, and touched everything that had started to fizzle out after the redhead lady had stoked it so assiduously to thrumming, humming life.

“Goodness, somebody is very wet,” tsked Isla’s replacement molester. She stroked Isla without any of the transparent enjoyment of the first woman. Isla, watching her in the mirror, thought the lady looked focused; as if she were thumbing through a filing cabinet looking for a name she didn’t actually know how to spell.

Isla felt the finger probe deeper, between her lips, into the soft, warm wetness of her centre. She whimpered and shifted, trying to sidle away.

“No you don’t, dear.” The free hand came smacking down on Isla’s backside, wringing a thin shriek from her. “Yes, that’s it. You can let it all out. Nobody can hear us out there right now, nor will they for at least half an hour. But one orgasm isn’t enough. I need to get you nice and worked up, you see, so that the gentleman out there with the affinity for scent will be interested when I invite him in. If,” she added soothingly, “your father makes such a thing necessary.”

Isla struggled to follow this rationale. The man out there . . . if her dad . . . Then the invading hand moved confidently up and any efforts to reason anything to do with this situation were eclipsed by the cruelly perfect pleasure of her touch.

Isla ached. Dripped with need. The fact that the woman who was playing her pussy like it was an instrument she’d studied since her own girlhood was not the woman Isla had looked forward to meeting here made no difference. The heavy, swollen almost of her renewed pleasure could not be denied.

Before she could stop herself, a needy little word leaked out between her lips.

“Please . . .”

“There’s a good girl,” the older lady murmured. “Asking so sweetly for it. That’s the way, you can do it.”

Isla’s head dropped forward in defeat as she came for the second time since boarding the train. The groan that rolled out of her was equal parts pleasure and shame, the clutching throb of her pussy too good not to cry out for, the mortification of coming audibly on her captor’s hand still too painful to lean into fully. The woman who had stroked her past the peak of her arousal stepped back.

“That was very nicely done,” she congratulated Isla. “Now, let’s catch your father up.”

She used Isla’s own phone to call. Video, Isla noted. Not just voice. When her dad’s face resolved on the screen, Isla was mortified to witness her own crinkle dangerously around the eyes in response. Her lower lip threatened to dip until she bit down on it with a vengeance.

“Isla,” Dad looked at her in genuine surprise, mixed with irritation and . . . maybe a little pleasure? Isla wanted to imagine he was still happy to hear from her, even under the look that said this was definitely a bad time. “I’ll need to call you back. We have a situation here that—”

“She is aware of the situation, John. What you are not aware of is the manner in which it has progressed since last we spoke.”

Isla watched the change flicker over her father’s face. Saw his gaze dart past her to rest on the woman at her back. She couldn’t usually read energy through video, but she didn’t need to take Dad’s impression to know he was surprised. Then annoyed. Then . . .

Isla couldn’t read the next look on his face. She didn’t think she’d seen it before. But it didn’t matter anyway, because the woman at her back was talking again.

“You’re all very confused over there, I should imagine.”

“Oh, we’ve worked a good deal of it out already.”

“I’m sure you have.” Isla’s uninvited travelling companion looked almost indulgent. “But you’re being retasked tonight, John. I have an assignment for you.”

“For God’s sake, Ruth, I don’t know what you hope to accomplish, but—”

“John.” A new note entered Ruth’s voice. Isla thought she sounded very like the Head at her fourth school, whenever the Head was telling you something everybody knew should not have been new information. “You must stop interrupting me. Our time is short, and although I would take very little pleasure in it, if you will insist on straying off course I’m not above using your daughter to sharpen your focus.” So saying, she slipped her hand into the other pocket of her blazer, the one that had not held her ID badge, and drew forth a pretty mint-green stick. It looked, Isla thought, like a pack of chewing gum that had melted slightly in the heat. Ruth put her thumb to some part of the little object, and a clean white ceramic blade snicked forth.

Isla sucked in her breath.

Dad, on the other end of the video call, was very quiet.

“Now, John.” Ruth put the tip of her knife gently, pointedly, to the topmost button of Isla’s school blouse. She gave the tiniest whisker of a twitch, and the button clattered into the basin.

“Christ, Ruth.” Dad looked as shaken as Isla had ever seen him. “What is this?”

“You’ll sort that out in your own time, after I’ve gone. At present, it’s only important that you gain access to the man who was brought in this afternoon. He’ll have been placed in the interrogation queue, probably scheduled for tomorrow morning. You are to release him. After you have done so, and I receive his confirmation that he is safely away, you’ll hear the same from Isla.”

“There’s no way I could—”

A second button was snicked off. The collar of Isla’s school blouse fell open.

“You’ll find a way.”

Isla, the point of the little ceramic knife resting just between her collarbones, did not move. For a moment she fancied she’d forgotten to breathe. Dad was looking at her, with . . . an expression. Of some sort. She dared give it no particular name beyond that; it frightened her too much.

With the greatest, visible effort, he tore his gaze from Isla and looked over her shoulder, back to Ruth.

“This man. Who is he? To you.”

“He’s somebody I need released. That’s all you need to know. Now let’s focus on the task at hand, so that I do not need to give your pretty girl anything else to be sorry about tonight. Do you know, this is not a very nice train? A very undesirable sort of commuter traffic. There’s a man out there, for example, whose metaphysical talent is scent, and who unfortunately has chosen to chase scents of a particular type that . . . well. I am sure he’d find your lovely girl very intriguing right about now, is all I can say. I am afraid, John, that he is not the sort of man any loving father would want intrigued by his daughter.”

Dad might have looked back to Isla when this was said; an involuntary movement on the screen suggested as much, but Isla didn’t dare look at his face to verify. It was too much to bear. She understood what Ruth was doing: she was showing Dad that the usual metaphysical checks and balances on people leaving the country, the ones that were supposed to register if you’d killed somebody lately, or stolen something, hurt someone very badly, would not hold Ruth. Ruth would not kill Isla; she only meant to make an offering of her so that other people would hurt her if Dad did not do as he was told.

Isla understood, which meant Dad would understand too, which meant Isla couldn’t look at his face.

Instead she looked at her hands, pinned as they were against the vanity counter. The valley of the sink bowl was centimetres away, yet Isla could not have touched it if she’d tried. The spell on her hands held fast, and it was not in her skillset to break the binding. Even if Dad hadn’t damped her six ways from Sunday, breaking another metaphysic’s working was something that took years of training, and all Isla had got to show for her ability was years of Dad keeping her from doing a single damn thing.

All right, when she was little she’d been in the usual sort of school. There had been lessons of the normal kind, under properly controlled circumstances, and she’d done very well. But it had gotten to not be enough for her, because really, what was the point in it? With Dad and Mum away doing their own thing, performing for herself had been insufficiently gratifying. So she’d taken to . . . well. Messing about. Made rather a big mess, in the end: the fire, flood and fireworks sort. It had given her a nice little thrill, and an even bigger one when she realised she’d actually done something big enough for Dad to take notice. He had hit the roof, pulled her out, put the dampers on and they’d had almost a week at home together before he sent her to the First Alternate Location.

And so the caravan of schools had begun, with some really lovely intervals in between where it would be just the two of them, and sometimes Mum too, if the timing was right. But because of all that, here Isla was with no real training to speak of, and for the first time she had genuine, selfish cause to regret the path she’d chosen.

Much good it would do her now.

“—minutes.”

Ruth, Isla realised, was speaking. She had been speaking this whole time, giving Dad his orders. Telling him how to rescue her. Belatedly, with the notion this might be important to hear, Isla tuned in.

“In that time, I will do everything in my power to make Isla as irresistible to the gentleman at the back of the car as I possibly can. If I get the confirmation I require by the time we reach the junction, I will take her off the train with me, under my protection, and release her in a place where no harm will come to her. If I do not . . . well.” The pretty knife gave a casual flick; a utilitarian shrug. “I will leave her here to be found by whoever walks in next.”

Isla did not know the sob was coming until it had escaped her. More of a wet gasp, really, but isolated as it was in the confines of the lav, it sounded very much like crying.

She made the mistake of glancing at Dad right after, to see if it had sounded like anything to him. At once the entirety of Isla’s soul and being cringed back from the sight, the knowing, that it all too clearly had.

“There now,” soothed Ruth, clearly the only one of the three who was pleased with this artistic touch. “Nothing to worry about. He’ll do as he’s told. Won’t you, John?” Her smile in the mirror over the sink, a large-as-life version of the smile in the tiny video inset on the screen, was beautifully self-assured. “And quickly.”

Dad’s feed cut out.

For a moment panic churned waves of nausea in Isla’s gut. Had Dad just left her to be . . ? But Ruth didn’t seem bothered. She simply nodded, as if she had expected as much.

“He can’t take the phone into certain parts of the building.” Her hand was already behind Isla again, up under her skirt, and . . . oh, not again. Isla trembled as Ruth slid her finger in easily up to the third knuckle, encountering no resistance whatsoever from Isla’s traitorously needy cunt.

“No, please,” she whispered, and Ruth clucked her tongue in disappointment.

“You mustn’t tell me no, Isla. I would not like to have anything questionable about this to bring detection on me at the border. You are of age, if only just, so there’s no difficulty about that, but there’s something of a grey area when it comes to . . . well.” She drew her finger out and pressed the pads of her first, second and third fingers firmly to the swollen, throbbing little spot just at the top of Isla’s pussy. “I do not like to rely overmuch on the detectors being as old fashioned as they traditionally are. They might not have been set exactly to catch this sort of thing, but if there’s any hint of real unwillingness down here, you will make it rather difficult for me to breeze by.”

Isla twisted her hips in an effort to elude the gentle, steady rhythm of Ruth rubbing at the plump flesh that failed to shroud her painfully erect clitoris. The greedy little bud stood up in wistful search of the attention Isla had boarded the train to give it, only now she was trying to dance this way and that, tears falling again as she fought so desperately, if vainly, to stave off her third orgasm of the evening.

“There’s a pet,” Ruth murmured. “You mustn’t fight it, Isla. It won’t do any good. Why don’t you ask for it nicely, as you did before?”

Isla sobbed. Really sobbed this time, like she had managed not to when Dad was on the call. Sobbed in fury and despair and helplessness in the face of her own cruelly mounting pleasure. She stumbled to the side and Ruth’s hand followed, steady, relentless, remorseless.

“Say please, Isla.”

Isla danced on her toes, longing to kick back, to give Ruth a really fantastic knock to the teeth, wishing the knife weren’t such a present threat, wishing the man with the impression that made her skin prickle were not directly outside the door.

Wishing she had never gotten on the train.

Instead she leaned forward over her trapped hands, the edge of the vanity digging into her tummy as she went up on her toes, legs apart, Ruth’s hand stroking between her thighs with supreme self-assurance as something that might have been metaphysical or maybe just too entirely physical took over Isla’s entire self.

“Please,” she wept, “please, please—”

She had thought she meant to say please stop but somehow it was only please. Like the please got stuck on loop and kept falling from her mouth, spilling into the sink like water, until Ruth’s thumb slipped inside and two fingers hooked firmly around Isla’s pubic bone and Ruth squeezed her flesh and maybe, just maybe, squeezed a little magic into her too, because all at once Isla’s legs gave out and she was coming, convulsing really, collapsing on the edge of the vanity and trusting it to bear her up as her cunt twitched and clutched greedily, gratefully, Ruth’s invading hand.

Still Isla was coming. It had to be magic, pouring into her from Ruth’s hand so that each successive climax seemed to spring from the last, until Isla was sobbing, still saying please like she could never stop begging for the thing Ruth was already letting her have.

Then, through the blaring noise and colour of it all, the begging she didn’t mean to do and the orgasms she didn’t want, into the middle of the noise that crowded her head came a kind of opening. A path. A place in the middle of the racket where it was quiet and calm. Isla, still pinned to and dangling over the vanity, saw the little path quite clearly in her mind. She stepped onto it.

At once everything went fuzzy and soft around the edges, like a blanket had been drawn up and the lights dimmed in preparation for evening travel.

Hello, pet.

It had been so long since Isla heard the voice, she took a distant, dazed minute to even recognise it.

Mum?

Mmm. Hold everything in here still a moment, won’t you? There’s a love. Mummy just needs to . . . oh honestly, Isla. As another orgasm shook Isla’s body, the languid drawl in her mind sharpened a little into exasperation. Mum always did have the shortest temper. If you can’t focus for even a moment, I can’t possibly help you. This is the most enormous strain on me, you can’t imagine . . . there. That’s better.

The orgasm seemed suddenly to not be happening. At least, it was definitely happening, Isla could feel it, but suddenly it did not seem to have the hold on her attention that it had previously done.

Mum, how did you even—

Your father called. He said you need your dampers off, and he can’t do distances, so it had to be me. I told him the dampers were a silly idea in the first place. I mean, what girl doesn’t like to have a little—

The rest of the sentence disappeared into a kind of yawning chasm that opened on what felt like the left side of Isla’s mind. Something bright and sharp lit her up painfully all down that side, and she yowled in the bathroom, writhing in something entirely unlike forced pleasure. If Ruth registered the difference, however, she paid it no mind, and kept squeezing magic back into Isla.

Because it was definitely magic. Isla could feel it now: sharpish, blue and icy, working a kind of loop inside her so that the orgasms and the please could not stop until Ruth willed it.

Mum—

Not now, Isla, you really must let me focus. He’s done this in the most exasperating . . . oh! There you go, darling. All better, now.

And she really was.

This was nothing like working the topmost spell or two free and regaining just enough control of herself to wreak a little havoc on elderly ductwork at school. This was like forcing a lid on a jam jar but not knowing you’d got it off until the moment after it happened. One minute the happy little pop, and the next . . . jam. Everywhere. The lid seemed to fly off Isla’s mind and things went roiling around inside her, splashing out a little here and there, but mostly staying quite contained as they ordered themselves better in her understanding of them. The orgasm and the please that kept spilling from her mouth were her, but not her really, because Ruth had locked her inside that moment of time so she kept living the same moment even as all the moments went on around her.

And how the hell, Isla wondered vaguely, did I even know that?

She hadn’t meant it as a question to her mother, but she did pause to see if her mother would take it as such. Only it seemed Mum was gone, swanned off again, content to leave Isla alone with more than a decade and a half’s worth of raw, homegrown magic and only a five year old’s understanding of how to use it. Which was Mum’s parenting style all over, come to think of it.

That was not really the most pressing consideration of the moment, though. The first priority was to get out of the time loop. Isla poked around the edges of that, and quite accidentally seemed to shove a finger through the stuff of whatever made it. Once her finger was through, the rest of her followed. Her cunt clenched just once more in overworked desperation at Ruth’s still-inserted thumb, and then fluttered down into stasis at last.

Isla, entirely in charge of her own mind and orgasm once more, braced herself on her trapped hands and lifted up to look in the mirror.

She was sweat-damped and panting. Tendrils of hair were plastered down all around her face, springing up at her temples, stuck to her flushed cheeks. She looked like she had just run a country mile on Ruth’s hand. Ruth, behind her, frowned. Her thumb and fingers pressed a little, and Isla felt the magic there, but she was too swollen and sore to even flutter in response.

“Oh,” said Isla, with all the overripe scorn that a girl her age could muster, “do fuck off.”

And she put her magic into it.

If she had swung a piece of lumber at Ruth’s midsection she could not possibly have knocked the woman back against the wall with even half as much efficiency. Ruth went back with a terrible thump, and Isla turned her attention to her hands. How did this . . .

They seemed to have been attached with some kind of spell that created a glue effect at the point of contact. There was probably a way to conjure a corresponding solvent, but Isla hadn’t time to work it out. Instead, with great effort, she peeled them off one at a time, like you did your tongue off an ice cube. It hurt like hell, and her palms tingled in a way that made her eyes water afterward, but at least she was free.

Free, she turned to face Ruth, whose expression of blank shock was already darkening to mottled fury.

“Your father will regret that.”

“Probably,” Isla agreed. “But not the way you mean it.”

She considered Ruth anew, with the benefit of the enhanced understanding her undamped magic seemed to give her. Whereas before she’d only been able to perceive rudimentary energy, now she could see the magic too. She saw how Ruth had damped her ill intent with magic, so that Isla could not have hoped to read her true purpose until they were alone together. She saw, too, the stains of previous workings that Ruth must have crafted to conceal herself from her coworkers. Isla wondered what it meant that these had been sloughed off, then decided she didn’t want to know.

What she did need to know was how to get past the man in the carriage.

“You told Dad if he did as you said, you’d take me off the train with you.”

“Yes. And I warned him what would happen if he didn’t, too.” Something was coiling thick and smoky along Ruth’s arms. Probably best, Isla thought, that it not be given any chance to develop further. So she sent what she thought would be a small, clarifying gust of wind in its direction, but she miscalculated pretty badly, and the whole wall blew off the lav.

Not the door.

The wall.

One moment Ruth had been there, her back to it, and the next she fell away with the flying train wall as the muddled green-and-grey of a smallish town blurred past. Isla stared a moment at the place the wall had been before slowly, with great care, she felt behind her for the latch.

The door slid open. She backed out through it, took an uncertain look around, and caught sight of a guard just stepping through the connecting door. Isla put up her hand, then snatched it back down again, feeling foolish. This wasn’t school.

“Excuse me?” She gave a little wave instead. “Excuse me, but I’m afraid the wall’s gone out.” A pause. “And a passenger, too.”

Innumerable orgasms notwithstanding, Isla thought that the look of shock on the guard’s face was the most satisfying part of her day so far.

~*~

Dad was supposed to meet her at the station, but of course, true to form, he was running behind. He’d at least managed to find the right person to get all the railway people to leave off pestering her with questions, and she supposed she should be glad of that, but as she sank into the booth with a cup of disappointing hot chocolate a flicker of the old resentment made itself known.

He’d put the dampers back on, probably. Might take him a while—it felt as if Mum had stripped off actual years’ worth of shingles from the roof of her mind back there—but he couldn’t let her walk around like this. Not blowing walls off trains like that. Not even if it was mostly an accident. Actually, probably especially because it was mostly an accident. After all, if Isla could accidentally blow a wall off a train, what else could she do?

That question curled up comfortably in her head, inviting her admiration.

What else could she do?

Isla’s gaze slid over the other occupants of the station cafe, most of them in as much of a hurry to get moving as she wished she could be. What else could she . . .

“Hello.”

Somehow she’d missed seeing him approach. Maybe he’d done it that way on purpose: certainly she hadn’t noticed him at all until he appeared standing beside her. At the sound of his voice Isla looked up into a man whose face she was never going to remember, because the only thing she could see was the energy around his face. It looked like claws, filthy and sharp, snatching and clutching at the air around him. They reached out snaky, smoky tendril arms to pick and poke at her arms, her face, her neck.

No wonder seeing him on the platform had made her skin itch.

Isla stared, heart pounding, all of Ruth’s casual little asides resurrecting in her mind as a cacophony of latent menace.

A man out there . . . whose metaphysical talent is scent . . . I am sure he’d find your lovely girl very intriguing . . . not the sort of man any loving father would want intrigued by his daughter.

Isla, staring at the man, saw Ruth had not exaggerated.

“Travelling alone again?” he asked softly.

One of the tendrils thickened, solidifying and reaching out for her cheek. Isla, without thinking, slapped it away. The tendril leaped, recoiled and cringed, and a look of shock brightened the man’s face. Isla, heart thudding, looked around the cafe.

No Dad. Not yet. He’d only just updated his department before she came in here; he could be ages yet. And nobody she could see here looked like any kind of likely help to her, either. She conjured half an uncertain breeze in the palm of her hand, then let it die down. Sure she could try to blow another hole in the wall, but since they weren’t on a train it didn’t seem a likely solution. More probably he’d just thank her for the new way out, haul her along through it and then . . .

Isla didn’t like to think about and then.

“I’m waiting for someone,” she whispered. It was a strange kind of refuge, the truth. She tried to conjure impressions of Dad to fill the words of her answer, the weight of the department and the things they did, the things they could do to this man, if he hurt her. But somehow, she felt, the effort fell short. Because he was still smiling at her, only now he put out his hand. Like he expected her to simply take it.

Like he thought she’d go with him without a fight.

Isla looked up at him, bewildered by her own indecision. What to do? Maybe she could stop him. Maybe she could use her magic. But the problem was, she didn’t really know how. She could guess, and try, but what if she guessed wrong? She was completely at a disadvantage here, and she knew it. Worse still, the man with the twitching nose and clutching claws of smoke seemed to know it, too.

He smiled.

“Let’s go somewhere quiet, why don’t we.”

She wouldn’t. She couldn’t possibly. But to her horror, she watched her own hand rise as if it belonged to somebody else entirely and cross the space between them, heading toward his palm. It was so close she could feel the heat radiating from his skin. In another moment she’d have touched him, and he’d take her away, and Isla didn’t even want to go. But it seemed she had no—

“You okay here, hon?”

The voice that cut between them was like its own kind of magic, simply by virtue of having no magic at all. It was clean and simple and utterly ordinary. At the sound of it, the air around her shivered and splintered so that Isla could see she’d been wrapped in a cloud of smoky tendrils without even registering their hold on her. The tendrils had been ever so much longer than she’d realised, and she’d been caught up in them completely.

Now the voice split their grip, and when it did her hand jerked back with all the force she had not even known she was exerting in an effort to break free. She cracked it on the table beside her, yelped in pain, and then, in a rush of latent fury, pushed so that the man flew back and stumbled over a different table, bringing the whole thing down on top of him, piping hot soup and tea and all.

His screams as the liquid splashed his face calmed Isla’s racing heart. His tendrils and claws thinned, and ran wet and liquid down his face. She considered the coursing rivulets of magic, the places they parted here and there, and left him defenceless. She judged the best possible place to strike a metaphysic whose talent was apparently scent. Then she thrust out a clumsy, clublike limb of power and cracked him soundly across the nose.

Whatever she hit there seemed to do the trick: at least he stopped screaming and reeled backward, insensate. Isla sank back down into the booth, her heart racing, and turned to look fully on the person who had first asked her if she was okay. The angular redhead from the train was staring down at her, a cautious mix of reserve and warm concern and—Isla was deeply pleased to note—grudging notes of attraction and arousal still.

But no magic.

Isla nodded. “I’m fine, thanks.”

The woman’s face relaxed a little, and she stepped back as if to take her leave. But Isla called out before she could:

“I’m also not fourteen.”

The woman’s mouth pulled down at one side in transparent disbelief, but her energy betrayed her. It prickled and fizzed with interest and hope. Isla smiled.

“She only said that so you’d leave me alone. She wanted—” Lord. No sense getting into all that right now. “She wanted me for herself.”

Still the woman hesitated. But that was all right. Isla did not try to force the issue by impressing her. Not like the man had done to Isla, forcing false beliefs into her head, and not even like she half thought she might want to do to the lady, forcing true understanding so she could see that Isla was not lying. It felt important, somehow, that she do this part all on her own. No magic.

“That so,” said the lady.

Isla sat up straight and tidy, and slowly, deliberately, crossed her legs at the ankle. She folded her hands in her lap, and looked up through her eyelashes.

“Yes, Miss.”

The woman’s mouth pulled in a different direction now.

“Well.” She looked around. The man had not yet come to himself and a crowd was gathering around where he lay. “I suppose, if you were interested in taking a short walk . . .”

Isla’s face lit up. “I’d love a walk.” She contemplated, pleasurably, the various alcoves along the platform and the shrubbery that lay beyond. Dad would still be ages arriving; she knew that much for sure. And even if for once in his life he did turn up early, what of it? He should know better than to leave her alone by now.

“Well then,” said the woman. She cleared her throat. “Coming?”

And in very short order, Isla was.