The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Leaning back against the door, I look between Sarah and Lida, feeling absolutely miserable. I should have resisted. I should have fought back sooner. I should have lunged my light out at her like Sarah did to me. I’ve never seen one of the witches force a current back towards me, only sparks. Projectiles are a lot different than a constant flow. She put me in here because I was a threat, not because I was harmless. I slam my head back into the door for the sharp bite of pain it delivers and wince when it hurts more than I expected.

Magical gold is not something I’m used to disliking. Olivia’s gold has come in handy more than once. The difficulty in lifting her up at Pink’s insistence is probably what gave me the time I needed to manifest my light.

“So. Looks like I fucked this one up pretty good. I guess now’s the time where you can take your turns mocking me. Usually when this happens I’m alone, but this time I get another me, and my long lost mom. So come on. Let’s have fun! Hah!” I slam my head back against the door and wince at making the same mistake twice within five minutes.

Sarah sighs, shaking her head before leaning back against the wall opposite from me. “Make that two of us, Lucie. I blew it back there too if you didn’t notice. I don’t think either of us is exactly shining examples of perfection at the moment. Least of all the long lost mother. Just when were you planning on letting me know you and the head of the Nesatealia were fuck buddies? That might have been nice to know. You spent what, almost two years fixing up my head, and you couldn’t spare a moment to mention it? You could apologize for Yanta’s rod a million times, but not mention Red once? Smooth.”

Wow. Am I ever that harsh? I know I’m worse on myself. A part of me is tempted to tell Sarah to shut up and chill out. I probably would, but yelling at myself to relax feels strange. Besides, she does have a point. I feel lied to and I barely even spent any time with Lida compared to Sarah. I can only imagine how she feels.

Lida doesn’t respond, but she does sit up a little straighter in her corner. I don’t want to start jumping to conclusions. It’s not productive. That would be a lot easier to do if Lida would speak.

Frustrated, I turn back to the door, giving it a good, sharp kick. Being that the door is made of solid gold and not gold plated wood, this understandably hurts a lot. Resisting the urge to scream “fuck!” as loud as I can is very difficult; I’m already on the verge of tears, so I feel like retaining some dignity.

I can’t believe my mother was Red’s lover. Then again, is it really that different from The Lady and I? There could be mitigating factors, but lying through omission does not make her look all that good at the moment. Why wasn’t she thinking that during the time I had her memories . . .?

She did feel a lot of guilt for the things she did, and she might have been dodging some of the specifics on purpose. I know that I would in her place. I didn’t leave Olivia’s side for a moment when we were in the hospital waiting for Aurora to be ready to be born. hen Olivia was in labor I never left her side for a moment. All of the things I did wrong working with Chronos did flood through my mind, but I did my best not to think about them. I tried to be in the moment, and for the most part, I was.

I don’t know how I would have reacted if Yanuka had shown up. Screamed? Yes. Been very useful? Probably not.

For the hell of it, I spark up a fist and slam my knuckles into the door as hard as I can. “Fuck!” So much for dignity. Unlike my leg, my arm is too straight when it connects with the door and the resistance shoots pain past my shoulder. “Why won’t you fucking open?! Doors are made to open! Walls are meant to stay sealed. That is why they do not have defining lines; they stay the way they are! Who the hell . . . Who the hell makes a door without a fucking knob?!”

Tears sting in my eyes as I punch the door again. My knuckles burn like nothing else, and the worst part is that it doesn’t even make me feel better. Normally a sharp burst of pain would at least help me feel some relief, but this time it only makes me realize how powerless I am.

“Lucia calm down . . . Maybe the door is sealed shut, and the walls and the floor are sealed up, but there might still be a way out . . .” Sarah’s confidence redoubles my own. The only problem is that my confidence is currently negative. Doubling that doesn’t help at all. We’re stuck in here forever, and there’s nothing we can do to get out. I shove my whole body into the door, and it doesn’t even shake. “You’re just hurting yourself!”

“So?! What does it matter when there’s no way out? Does it really make a difference if I can move to the other side of the room or not? I will open this door, or I’ll crumple up into a bruised mess. I do not see the difference between being bruised and being just fine if we can’t get out of here. It’s not like Olivia will see me like this. . . or even Aurora.” I stop ramming my body into the door for a moment and look back at Sarah with a raised eyebrow. “I know we both totally want in each other’s skirts, but this really isn’t the time. You’ll forgive me if I don’t care about looking my best for you.”

Sarah laughs in the most desperately pitiful way I’ve ever heard, and I throw myself into the door again. My shoulder already feels pretty damned sore. I’m tempted to walk to the other side of the room and run full force, but the thought of breaking my shoulder isn’t an appealing one.

Even when Yanuka had me cooped up with Dust, it was better than this. For one, I knew she was focusing on me and not on global domination. For another, I didn’t have anyone on the outside to worry about.

Goddess . . . There are so many super heroines and heroes out there in the world, there’s still a chance even if I don’t break out of here that everyone will be okay. I’m not the only one with super powers. There must be another woman able to resist her. Something tells me the number of people who could resist her is much lower than those who couldn’t. If she makes it to Midas, she would have swarms of supers and normals alike following her every whim.

Jade isn’t a pushover, but neither is Red. Nightshade is a powerful woman, but her weakness is desire – I have a feeling that Red would know just how to stimulate that for her own ends. Omega Girl packs a punch, but she’d have to get close enough to deliver. Psyche and I had a run-in, and while we were pretty well matched, I don’t know how that would translate for this situation.

This is the second time the world has depended on me. I could take down The Argentum Project, and I was even fought against a super powered version of myself while depowered. Having my powers back should make taking out a global threat easier.

“You should stop doing that, Lucia. The door isn’t going to open. There’s only one way out of here, and it involves someone being on the other side.” Lida’s voice is not a welcome one to hear. Not only have I started to be more than a little angry with her, but that is not a helpful thing to say under any circumstance. “As you’ve recently learned, I do know a thing or two about this place. I must have spent at least a year straight within this little . . . pocket dimension.”

Sarah makes a sound a lot like a growl and frowns at our mother unhappily. “How about this mom: you start telling us all about that back story you two have and anything that might help, or Lucia and I will extract it our own way. If it comes to that either we can rip it out of your memories and get things you don’t want anyone to know, or we can just spark you up. It’s up to you, Mom.”

I don’t like Sarah sounding like The Domina. The thought of her reformation going right out the window is a disturbing one – especially with the three of us all locked up in Red’s safe. She has plenty of reason to slip a little, and I don’t have many reasons to not worry about what that could mean.

A part of me says I should speak up with my reservations, but more of me wants to know how Lida will respond. If she’ll talk, I think we’d all be happier. Especially if we’re going to be here awhile.

“Fine, fine . . . I’ll tell you everything. You want to know all of my deepest darkest secrets that I barely admit to myself? Fine. You’ll know them. No reason not to tell you, is there? I could hardly put up a fight against either of you, much less both, though I doubt Lucia would be so brutal. I guess I couldn’t help your aggressive tendencies quiet down, after all.” Her voice sounds broken and exhausted, and it makes me feel a little pity for her despite my frustration.

“Much better. It’s not so hard to be honest, is it?” Sarah scowls before moving away from her and settling in the corner opposite. “Go ahead. I’ll ignore the rest until I’ve calmed down a little, so that I don’t act out, mommy dear. I’d hate to be found wanting by such a pillar of morality.”

Do I ever sound that snotty and plain old rude? I really hope not. Hearing only a little of it from Sarah makes me want to slap her. If that’s how I sound with any regularity, I wonder how I’m still breathing.

Lida rolls her eyes but thankfully doesn’t bait her further. I’ve been in the place Sarah is in right now. A poke might be riposted with a spark. “The truth is, I’m not all that good of a LaSilvas. It’s not just the hair, or the dim silver eyes, it’s everything. I’m weak. Your sparks would be stronger than mine no matter what, being the light bearers as you are, but mine are weak.” She holds up her hand and lazily slides a spark from her fingertip to stare at it sadly. “This is the best I can do. My magic is fueled by them, and that isn’t much better. If LaSilvases went to witch school, I would have dropped out in third grade.

“A lot of the reason could be compared to a third grader trying so hard to learn to read, but still getting letters confused. Their poor eyesight didn’t help much either. You’re not supposed to have to mumble under your breath for magic, just so you know. It shouldn’t take a gesture, or a word, or anything besides thought . . . at least the magic in our family line. Children mumble. It’s the equivalent of doing math problems on your hands. It definitely doesn’t apply to calculus. And if you’re wondering what this had to do with anything, I’m getting to that.

“LaSilvas traditions are not all as harmless as the naming convention. All of my childhood the importance of the prophecy was drilled into my head. The LaSilvas Legacy was everything. I didn’t always understand it, but I always understood one thing, and that was that I couldn’t fulfill it. It called on a girl whose hair would turn silver. Mine wouldn’t. Didn’t stop me from trying, but that didn’t make it happen.

“So the only way I could live up to the legacy, was to give birth to the light bearer. In an effort to keep the LaSilvas bloodline pure, and what with magic preventing any consequences . . . this meant that my choices were within my immediate family. It was my mother who initiated the . . . courting.” Lida turns silent, and I bite my lip hard to silence myself. “Yes, Lucia. Yes. About a week after our . . . encounters . . . I realized I’d used so many of the same words my mother had directed towards me. Only my mother wasn’t quite so gentle, and she wouldn’t take ‘no.’ She melted ‘no’ away with silver.”

I guess my suspicions about the LaSilvas family not exactly being made of saints weren’t off the mark. It also means that Yanuka didn’t lie about one thing even if she lied about everything else. Sometimes it sucks to be right, and it sucks to have honest enemies. More than sometimes, but I don’t want to sour the mood any more than it already has been. Sitting down, I lean against the door, slowly crossing my legs. This sounds like a long story, and I might need the strength in my legs en it’s over.

Hope is important to hold onto when you’re sealed away in the magical equivalent of a meat locker.

Lida takes a deep breath before continuing her story. “Sometimes I would wake up, and she would be straddling me. Resisting was so hard when her body was shining and her eyes caught mine. For awhile, I started to like it. She wasn’t programming me or conditioning me, at least not in the sense you would use the term, but after awhile, it just felt better to try to accept what my mother insisted was love. She smiled like it was love, so I smiled back. It felt so good to feel her tear away my apprehension, and in time she got so good at it . . .

“For awhile, a year, two, five, I can’t really be sure, I started to think that might be the rest of my life. She wasn’t always on top of me, but I slept so much in those days. It was easier to sleep. I wasn’t growing up on Earth – not the one you know anyway – and so many things were constant reminders of my inferiority. Sleep, and my mother’s silver touch both melted away the worry and the pain. It wasn’t as pitiful as it might sound. It was like living in a daydream.

“Eventually of course, when her magic wasn’t making me swell and it was clear that some part of me was still resisting her, she started to pull back. It was subtle at first, and she was still loving, she just . . . didn’t have any use for me. I failed the legacy twice. When she finally stopped coming into my room, I left. I pulled on my cloak, and I left.

“I swore to myself I would never forget that day, but looking back I can only remember that it was very dark and I kept tripping. I fell into at least three puddles, but I didn’t stop. I just walked and walked hoping to find something. What, I didn’t know. Purpose, maybe? I’d failed the one my dear mother taught me, and my magic was meager at best. I knew of the world that was tied to ours that hovered within distance of smell and taste but hidden from sight or motion where magic was rare and the smallest of spells was a miracle, but and while crossing between the worlds was common for those of power it wasn’t an easy matter for me. Apparently, it was easy to pass out where Yanuka would find me.”

Of all the people my mother had to run into, it had to be Yanuka, didn’t it? There have to be more than just the Nesatealia, LaSilvas, and Raine witch families, but she had to be found by Yanuka. Even Yunru might have been better to stumble into. I don’t want to interrupt, but hopefully the sorrowful expression on my face conveys to Lida how awful this story makes me feel.

I am very glad that neither of us Silver Girls tried to tear these memories out of her. I wouldn’t be able to stop crying for a week. It would have been . . . overwhelming.

Lida sniffles and rubs her nose on her shirt. She’s very purposefully avoiding eye contact, and I don’t blame her. I almost don’t blame her for not telling us anything until her back was against a golden wall. This is the sort of thing you just don’t talk about. I probably would, but I talk about everything.

“She was a lot younger then, but such things are a little complicated. Let’s just say our ages were comparable. I wasn’t awake when she found me, but I remember waking up in a bed and being afraid that the entire day hadn’t happened. I remembered it so vividly and yet the result didn’t seem to match the events. When I woke up a little more I realized it wasn’t my bed. Shortly after that, I realized a woman was standing over me with flaming red hair. Her eyes were piercing, and her skin glistened . . . but it didn’t glisten like my mother’s. It was more of a natural glow than a magical glow. It drew me in instantly.

“Yanuka sat beside me, and brushed some of the hair from my face. It wasn’t until her hand touched my face that I realized just how cold I was even under what felt like a thousand silk sheets but had to be a number more around five. For a moment she seemed to hesitate, and then she spoke. ‘When I found you, your clothes were soaked and torn as you lay in the street crying in your sleep. You’re unwell but safe here. My name is Yanuka, and I’m afraid that I don’t recognize yours.’ Her voice was tender, and it was new.

“So long spent in my mother’s home as an only child, my other mother’s whereabouts unknown to me even now, a new voice was an enthralling concept. Yanuka. It was the perfect name for who felt like the perfect woman. I tried to recall anyone with hair like hers from the time before I stopped going outside, but I couldn’t remember a one. She was special. She was different.

“I told her my name, and why I was running. It was a quick enough story to tell. When I said the name ‘LaSilvas’ she rolled her eyes in understanding. She told me that she knew my family, and that hers was a rival one. The Nesatealia, she called her family, had a reputation for not following tradition and instead seeking out the fulfillment of lust and desire. She told me that even though I was a LaSilvas, if I was willing to stay with her, to learn what she had to teach, and to tell her everything I knew, she would let me stay. It took me barely a moment to practically scream my agreement.

“She taught me so much. Her own magic was so much stronger than mine but she quickly taught me it wasn’t the strength that mattered but the use. If I was subtle she assured me that even my lack of magical aptitude could find me success. We soon found that Yanuka was right. Many weeks, maybe months later, dressing me up in red clothing that made me feel so alight, so alive, Yanuka took me out to test my skills.

“At first, it was difficult. Being taught guile is an unusual process. You have to fail to truly learn how to be clever. You need to get caught to learn what signs you should have kept hidden. Yanuka fixed all of my mistakes expertly, and always allowed me the final caress of a woman’s mind. We would bring them home, have our way with their body and mind . . . and often each other . . . and then set them free with no memory of what transpired or memories that were . . . even better. I’ll save you some of the more unsavory details, mostly for my sake.

“Eventually she grew tired of our games. It wasn’t so much growing bored with me, but she had little more to fix. I could make a woman see a speck of dust on a countertop and have her kneeling obediently waiting to be taken home in mere moments with the right tricks. I wasn’t strong, but I was smart. I’d always been smart I realized then, but my intelligence was not an asset to my mother. It took me a long time to stop holding that against her, and at the time I was furious.

“Yanuka told me that it was time for a test. She said that the ultimate test of my skill was not just to make a random woman, or even a woman with a particularly strong will crumble at my feet. I believe the way she phrased it was that I had to ‘confront the woman who drove me from the warmth of my home, into the streets late at night all alone.’ She was very much into rhyming at the time. So I returned to the one place I had avoided for the endless time that Yanuka and I spent seeking out bed partners. I returned home, and I confronted my mother. The details are . . . dark . . . but suffice to say, by the time I was done she hardly remembered her own name much less mine.

“The only word in her mind for me, was ‘owner.’ I tore away all that she was, and I made her a possession. Making the woman who had taken advantage of me for so long helpless was such a powerful thrill that I don’t know how long I spent just pinning her down to my old bed. I just know that when I brought her back home to Yanuka, she said it was time that I finally meet her mother. She had two mothers same as me, but she knew as much about her other as I did about mine. They had existed, and that was all we felt was worth knowing.

“Yanuka told me that her mother was a very powerful woman, and very interested in meeting me. She said that her mother could continue my training to heights she couldn’t, and if all went well I could become a member of the family. I would be her sister, her lover, and she often flirted at the idea of keeping me as her pet. At the time, it was a thrilling thought. I believed if such a thing ever happened she would treat me with the same affection that she did when I had a working mind. I am glad that never occurred.

“A week later we dressed up my mother in as minimal clothing as could be used merely to highlight her unearthly beautiful body, and took her to the Nesatealian shrine. There, we called forth Red, and I offered her my mother in return for the chance Yanuka promised me. Red accepted, and took me to her realm.

“It was decorated more like a castle back in those days . . . I would bore you with the details, but I’m rambling as it is. Yanuka showed me how to embrace the world I knew. Red showed me how to embrace the world of a goddess. She told me that at one point in her life, her skin had been as pale as mine before the use of her magic had slowly enhanced her form with the extra benefits of her wings and tail. I soon learned that the magics Yanuka knew were only a touch, a taste of what Red could share . . .

“But more importantly, I began to fall in love with her. At first, her light spellbound me, but she slowly made me immune to its stronger affects. Slowly, she began to make me feel the same affects without even the aid of magic. We made love, and plotted new additions to her home together. We postulated on how the perfect world would run, on new magics . . . with her, I felt . . . right.

“Then, she showed me the earth you know. We went, and together, we hunted. I helped her chose the first set of eighty eight for her piano. I hand selected the pianist she uses today, and presented her as a gift. My mother is probably still locked away in a toy chest or closet somewhere. I forget where I saw her last. Still, we hunted. We expanded. I learned. Then I saw Yanuka again. Either time flows differently here, or Yanuka had simply gone through more than I can imagine, but she went from being youthful to seeming cold and jaded. She was simply bored by the stories I told her, and it didn’t seem to be that I had her mother’s favor. She just didn’t care like she used to. She seemed to have gained a wicked streak instead, and no longer cared to release her spent catches if they felt . . . interesting enough.

“In a rare day alone, I visited the LaSilvas shrine. I don’t know why. We had no summonings like the Nesatealia had for Red, and it was known what I had done to my mother. None of them had any love for me, and many of them feared me. They knew I’d all but become Red’s wife. Out of that fear, and maybe respect, they allowed me to visit the inner sanctum where I gazed on a statue of Athena for hours.

“Athena, a goddess of the hunt, would she have approved of my hunting down women to melt away their wisdom? What I did next was something Athena would not have approved, though in retrospect I never understood how she could turn a woman into a spider for being better at weaving. Putting that to one side, I used all of the tricks and ingenuity that I learned, and I made the first rod.

“If there was anything that Yanuka and Red had both taught me, it was that you gain respect through cunning uses of your power against those others consider strong. Wanting to take my place in the Nesatealia much the same as I had distanced myself from the LaSilvas family, I slid the rod into the ear of Yacawa’s mother. She was a respected woman in the family, and it only felt right to show my superiority through subterfuge.

“Red wouldn’t have cared all of the many things this could mean, but I cared. I made more of the rods, and drunk with the power of a girl raised to believe she was worth nothing finally becoming something on her own, I decided that I would show my superiority not only over the family that cast me out, but over the family that took me in. The LaSilvas was a weak family then. Having their fear meant nothing. I gave my rods to the enemies of the Nesatealia. They were just metal rods with magic inside that twined around and through a mind, but at the same time, that magic was so many spells thick that separating one from another would be like taking apart a planet one atom at a time. That may be overrating myself, but that was how it felt . . . until the time came when Red came back to fetch me.

“I refused to return to a distant life where I did little but hunt and feel worship. Whether that truly hurt her or not, I’ll never know. It didn’t seem like it then, but maybe that was when I realized how little difference I held from her piano beyond having more use. I would never be a Nesatealia. I was hardly even a LaSilvas anymore. I fled the temple, and retraced the steps I’d taken that day when I first escaped my mother, and collapsed there anew. Sleep didn’t come for me, I screamed until it claimed me. When I woke up, you can guess where fate would find me . . . Yanuka’s bed. This time, I was attended by a woman we once caught together who delivered a message Yanuka had programmed into her supple mind.

“It was a simple message, but it didn’t need to be more. As soon as I woke, I was to clean myself and passage to that not-so mystical Earth awaiting me. Yacawa and many others were not so happy with me. The rods didn’t all work as they were supposed to. Many people I’d sold them to didn’t exactly keep their minds either, but I was young, and the money, the power, the favors some promised made me feel strong . . .

“But it wasn’t safe for me there anymore. Even the ones who owed me their newfound power plotted against me. I was dangerous. Untamed. Though at the time I had no power to find my way back, I knew that I was so much safer taking Yanuka’s gift and getting far away as I could. That was a long time ago. There’s so much more that I’m forgetting. So much more I could say, but . . . that . . . that’s all.”

Lida pulls her knees to her chest and stares down at the floor. “I helped her seal a trouble woman in here once, just to test how long it would take with the right spells for her mind to snap into compliance. I know how impossible it would be to get out. It would take a magic powerful enough to counter hers, and some sort of focusing agent, a catalyst for a magical reaction . . . but something like that, we don’t have.”

Sarah is speechless. I can’t quite say that I blame her. Lida learned seduction and magic from Yanuka, and then learned to hunt minds from a self-styled goddess, Red. She must know things that I would never want to know. She gave her own mother to Red . . .

The rods . . . I don’t, and yet I do, understand. When I was with The Lady, I experienced my control in every way I could. If I’d learned how to make sparks move into objects, I would have made Dust’s clothes spark her up deeper and brighter than anything imaginable. I would have probably eventually even slipped some sparks into The Lady’s Newton’s cradle . . .

The silence is nearly painful. All right, the silence is painful knowing what I know. Anything I could say would be cheap. I have questions, but I don’t want to ask them.

My other self takes a deep breath and sighs as she glances up from the floor to Lida’s eyes. “I’m . . . I’m really sorry. I can imagine how after that, you started slowly cleaning up, shaping up . . . Here I thought you were an awful mother for abandoning me, and then I know you did all of that and . . . You told me how hard you worked to try to fight away from that temptation and . . . Wow. I feel like a bitch.”

“Don’t. You had every right to be upset.” Lida sniffles hard, wiping her wet face off on her sleeve. “You still do . . . If I’d never . . .”

“If you’d never been a horrible person, we never would have been born because you never would have met Susan . . . There are a bunch of questions I could ask, about the witch-world, about Red, about Yanuka, about . . . Honestly, how you seem to have been so important and why it took you so long to be hunted down . . . how you got the pendant . . .” Sarah wraps her arms around herself and slowly shakes her head. “It’s all a little much.”

Sounding exhausted emotionally and physically, Lida laughs. “Oh, there is more to tell. No, I wouldn’t have met Susan. And to be honest, I’m probably remembering things more grand than they were. Red had a way of making events seem more powerful, and Yanuka well . . . was Yanuka. She wasn’t like she is now, it’s . . . hard to describe. Nothing seems like it was then, and to be honest, describing the world I grew up in wouldn’t do you much good. To make the long story I was told as a child short, a long time ago our ancestors who have become quite proficient in the art of magic felt a realm resonating just beyond their senses. Though it was fully separate, it existed within the same place and time as if it were another world though it was merely another facet. Our kind fled to this world to escape those who were as likely to kill us in our sleep as worship us. It seemed a sensible choice in the story, but it is a very long story I never cared about.”

Sarah and I share a glance, and then it hits me. I move over to Lida, pulling out the metal eye left over from when I burned that magic book. I never knew why that little hunk of metal struck me as special.

“Lida, I know this is crazy and can’t be right, but tell me, could this be used as a magical catalyst? Yanuka had me burn a book of magic that was made by some other light bearing family if I remember correctly, and this was all that remained. I sort of held onto it on her advice, thinking that it might have a purpose . . .” Taking a deep breath, I hold out the piece of metal and cross my fingers.

“Lucia . . .” Lida looks up into my eyes, and blinks as all of her tears seem to fade away. Her silver eyes still look a little red, but they look invigorated. “That is an Eye of Athena. They were placed inside of magic books so that if one focused their willpower on the eye in the book, the truth in the magic would become clear, effectively guiding a path to the strongest way to focus the . . . you’ve had that for over a year?”

How could a little hunk of metal be that powerful? No wonder it didn’t burnt or tarnish, if it holds that much magic! It could have accelerated the flame and left itself unburned. After all, what good would something like that be if it only worked once? Not very good, unless they’re easy to make as sandwiches.

This is one of those moments where laughter both feels ridiculous, and ridiculous to fight. I’m not sure which of us starts laughing first, or when I fall to the floor from laughing so hard, but it feels so good to know. We have a way of getting out and . . .

“If we just . . .” It’s hard to talk through laughter this hard and relieved, but it feels so good. “Channel . . . your silver, and our light through it . . . we could totally bust that door open!”

Sarah laughs harder with such a wide grin, and it’s so beautiful to see. “You bet! Told you that you should have stopped slamming into that door quicker . . .!” She’s right, and it feels good to know that she was right then, too. We have a way out of here. Even if that’s not victory, it feels damned close enough.