Binding Foxgirls III

by Simon Archer

  “So, we were hoping to get a more… intimate Termina experience,” I said after I’d born this uncomfortable silence for a second too long. “We heard you do stuff like that here. Would you be able to do that for us?” The man continued to study me closely.

  “Who are you?” he asked very quietly. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t...” I started. “I mean, like I said, we heard that you...”

  “And why, given all this unrest, would you still want that?” the man asked, spreading his arms as if to indicate the whole state of the world was in disarray. I laughed this off.

  “That shit doesn’t scare me,” I said. “And I’m surprised it would scare you. We’re men, after all. And they’re just, well…”

  “Foxgirls?” the man finished for me.

  “Well, yeah,” I said simply. I hadn’t been sure if we were allowed to give voice to what we were actually doing there.

  “Who told you about us?” the man asked, narrowing his eyes at me. I searched for a name, any name that I recognized from the files we found.

  “Maxwell Hailey,” I said quickly, remembering the name and the face from the first set of files back in Firebend, and the man himself from a binding I had performed nearly two years prior, during Elias Berg’s time.

  “I don’t recognize that name,” the man said coolly.

  “He didn’t get set up here,” I explained. “It was in the Firebend location. I didn’t want to do this close to home, you’ll understand. My wife, I mean my ex-wife... Well, anyway, it’s complicated.”

  “And you want to be put on our waitlist?” the man asked warily. “You understand that it is a waitlist. There are no foxgirl bindings being performed right now in Termina due to the current crisis.”

  “You mean that asshole Nic Joch stopped you from being able to perform them,” I scoffed. “And when exactly are you going to catch him and kill his ass?”

  “Well, why don’t you tell me,” the man said, looking even more closely at me now. I froze. I hadn’t been sure that he suspected us, but now? Well, shit.

  “I… have no idea what you mean,” I stammered, laughing nervously.

  “Of course you don’t,” the man said, rolling his eyes. “Now tell me, Mr... whichever one of those hoodlums you are, how exactly have you managed to disguise yourself so expertly?”

  “I have no idea...” I started, but I realized that we had to get the hell out of there. This had all gone horribly wrong. I grabbed hold of Clem’s wrist and darted for the door, nearly slipping out of that stupid fucking chair and falling flat on my face as I did so. God, I’d always hated that fucking thing.

  But I made it to the door on my own two feet and swung it open, only to find about a dozen of what looked like security guards standing there waiting for us, spread out across the binder desk area, and obstructing our pathway to the elevator.

  “Shit,” Clem cursed. Luckily, I made sure that neither of us ever left the ocean liner cabin without our trusty binder tool belts hidden beneath our clothes and Malthe’s holographic disguises. Plus, we had those guns still that we’d taken from the shippers when we first arrived at the Barrens.

  I whipped out my holo knife and began to fan through the security guards one after another while I shot at the rest of them. They were taken off guard by the appearance of the classic binder weapon, and I realized quickly that these people were even more frightened of us than they had reason to be. We could use that to our advantage.

  Clem quickly followed suit and began to shoot at the guards himself, taking others out with his holo knife. They would have shot at us right back if they’d known what was good for them. But clearly, they didn’t. They were so terrified of our holo knives that we backed them all into a corner in practically an instant.

  I killed three of them with haste, and Clem killed another one. They were all so terrified, staring at our holo knives as if they were going to explode, that they could barely register how they could fight back. It was as if they were afraid that if they did so, something even worse would happen to them.

  Finally, one of the guys began to fumble with his gun and pointed it straight at Clem. That was when I pulled a grenade out of my tool belt and tossed it into the middle of the floor. I supposed we weren’t going to be keeping a low profile after all. Not today, anyway.

  Clem and I ran as fast as we could to the elevator as the grenade ticked off before it exploded. The guards all just stared at it, stony-faced in horror, not registering what they should do about this either.

  “Move!” the old man still cowering in the replica of Elias Berg’s office screamed at them. “Get me out of here, you imbeciles!”

  But it was too late. Just as the elevator doors were closing around us, the grenade exploded, and the entire top floor went up in a giant explosion of smoke.

  “What. The. Fuck,” Clem said as we zoomed back down to the first floor, his jaw slack and his expression vacant. “What. The. Fuck. Just. Happened.”

  “We got very, very lucky is what just happened,” I said, snapping my fingers in his face to get him to wake up. “They’re so damn afraid of us that they did themselves in. But we’re not out of the woods yet. Come on!”

  When the elevators opened on the main floor, there were more security guards there waiting for us, but they were occupied with trying to disperse the panicking crowd out of the area. They must’ve heard—and likely felt—the explosion all the way down there.

  “Run for it,” I hissed to Clem, and we made a beeline for the front doors, hoping to escape undetected.

  And it looked like we just might make it for a minute there, too, but right when we were about to reach the exit, two hulking security guards with guns came rushing out in front of us and pointed them right at each of our heads.

  “Don’t fucking move,” the one across from me growled, the corner of his lip curling menacingly.

  “Okay, okay,” Clem said, holding his hands up in the air, and I followed suit. But I still had something up my sleeve.

  With one quick motion, I turned my holo knife back on, and the short, sharp red blade buzzed to life, pointing at the guard’s abdomen.

  The other guard, the one across from Clem, stared at it with more than a little concern, beads of sweat beginning to drip down his temple and onto his collar.

  “Don’t get peeved, Dev,” the other guard, the one across from me, said in a measured tone. “We’ve got guns. They don’t.”

  “Like hell we don’t,” Clem said, taking advantage of the other guard’s hesitation and pulling his own gun on the guy, knocking the other one to the ground. He shot the guy in the stomach, and at that moment, my guy flinched at the loss of his partner, and I got my opportunity to take advantage, too.

  I barreled my holo knife into his abdomen. He cried out in pain and stumbled backward, allowing me to take his gun from him. And then Clem and I were running as fast as we could down the stairs lining the mountain and back on to the beach.

  I used our bonds to find where the foxgirls were waiting for us. They were tucked behind the side of the mountain, way over on the less populated northern side of the beach. They saw us coming, the foxgirls searching in our bond as well for our location.

  “What happened?” Cindra cried, running up to me and pressing her hands to my chest. “We heard an explosion and some gunshots...” But I cut her off, grabbing her hands and squeezing them, then releasing them and running over to Malthe.

  “No time, we’ll explain later,” I said quickly. “You need to change our faces now!”

  “Okay,” he said, holding out his hands for our bracelets. These weren’t ideal conditions, but we were obscured behind some trees and most of the mountain. We would probably be okay. We just needed to get out of there fast.

  Malthe tinkered with each bracelet and quickly handed them back over. He’d gotten this whole holographic disguise thing down to a science by then. We all put them on and tapped them twice as one, and our faces went back to our normal di
sguises for the ship. We all looked at each other and nodded to make sure each of our appearances was sufficiently changed.

  Then we made a run for the beach where we blended in with some surfers lounging near the waves.

  “Should we go back to the ship?” Malthe whispered as we watched a virtual army of Tibor Enterprises employees make their way down the mountainside to alert everyone else to what had happened.

  “Not yet,” I said, shaking my head. “That would just be more suspicious. We should hang out here and see what they have to say.”

  “Do you all remember your fake names and backstories?” Lin asked, and everyone nodded. We’d constructed them our second night on the ocean liner after doing some research on the outside world, just in case anyone asked. I pretty much had my guy down to a tee by then after repeating my life story over and over again to everyone who tried to strike up a conversation with me on the ship. I guess my holographic face was pretty attractive, though I liked my own better.

  Slowly, the other beach dwellers seemed to realize that something was wrong and began to make their way back to the ocean liner.

  “Okay, I think now’s good,” I whispered. “Before they start asking for everyone’s ID or something. Do they even have that kind of thing here? God, I don’t know. Let’s just go.”

  And so we made our way into the middle of the crowd and lined up to get back to the ocean liner. We were toward the middle of a rapidly growing line to get back on board.

  “God, what if they stop the ship from leaving again?” Clem groaned.

  “What did you guys do?” Cindra hissed, her hands on her hips as she glared at us. And despite her holographic disguise, the look on her face was very distinctively Cindra. I liked that, though not so much when her wrath was directed at me. Even so, I thought it was pretty cute.

  “Shhh,” I shushed her. “Let’s just wait and see.” We could talk about this here. Not now.

  The ocean liner employees seemed to realize something was wrong pretty quick when everyone wanted to get on board early.

  “What’s going on?” I heard one of them ask.

  “I guess there was some kind of explosion at the Tibor Enterprises outlet,” one of the passengers at the front of the line explained. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

  A man I took to be the captain of the ship exchanged a look with the employee. Guards were on the other side of the beach now, rounding people up.

  “We don’t want the trip to get canceled, especially so close to the end when we’d be stranding all of our passengers here,” the employee pleaded with the captain. “Corporate would have our heads.” At that, the captain seemed to make a decision.

  “Alright, let’s go,” he said with a curt nod, and I breathed a sigh of relief, though I didn’t dare think we were out of the woods quite yet.

  The line began to move, and quickly, too. We got to the front in almost no time, had our tickets scanned, and shuffled all the way back up to our top deck cabin.

  “What the fuck happened back there,” Malthe cried, pointing back in the direction of the mountain vigorously. I shook my head at him and knelt down on a bench surrounding the top deck awning, holding on to the side railing until my knuckles went white.

  The rest of my team hesitated but followed suit, and we sat quietly, watching smoke stream out of that distant mountain top and up into the sky.

  Sirens wailed, and soon a whole host of policemen were lined across the beach, trying to gain access to the ocean liner. But everyone was on board by then, and the captain had already given the signal to depart.

  Finally, we began to move. The small specks that I knew to be law enforcement officials on the shore screamed and hollered after the ship, but the almighty dollar prevailed, and the crew decided that keeping the journey alive was more important than appeasing law enforcement. I imagined there would be a lot of disgruntled passengers if this thing went south. But then again, it had already gone south, hadn’t it?

  I breathed a sigh of relief and released the railing once we were about a mile from the shore. My fingers and knuckles were stiff from clenching so damn hard. I closed my eyes and breathed in and out deeply, letting the ocean breeze and small droplets of water pass over my face and give me life again.

  “What happened?” Cindra asked quietly, pressing her shoulder against mine beside me.

  “They knew it was us,” I said, opening my eyes and then squinting them because of the bright sunlight. “I don’t know how, but they knew.”

  “What?” she asked, taken aback. “But… but...” But she didn’t seem to have any other words.

  “Somehow, they’ve figured out we’ve been going to these places and gathering intel,” I said quietly. “But they still don’t know how we’ve managed to disguise ourselves, so it shouldn’t matter. We can still go forward as planned. We have to. There’s no turning back now.”

  “You really think we should keep going?” Clem asked, wincing at the very thought. “They’ll have people waiting for us when we disembark.”

  “Probably,” I admitted. “But you saw what happened back there, Clem. They all clammed up the second we started fighting them. These people feared us, even more than they should be, and that’s an even better weapon than any holo knife, or gun, or even a combat drone or a tank. We can use that. We have to use that. Plus, that’s exactly the point: they’ll be waiting for us. So, where else are we going to go?”

  “I guess so,” Clem relented with a low whistle. “This is gonna be interesting, that’s for sure.”

  “Wait, what do you mean they ‘clammed up?’” Malthe asked. “What happened? What did they do?”

  “The second they saw our holo knives, saw that we were binders, they freaked the fuck out,” I explained. “There were way more of them than there were of us, but they hesitated, and that cost them.”

  “Then we blew up the top floor,” Clem said sheepishly. We could still see a small but steady stream of smoke billowing out from the mountain, now far and distant from us.

  “Interesting,” Malthe said quietly, considering this. “Very interesting...”

  “Why?” I asked, suddenly alert. “Do you think you can use this somehow? I mean, we can definitely use it in that we have the element of surprise, even if they know we’re coming, since they’re so freaked out, but do you have another idea?”

  “I think so...” Malthe said, staring off into the distance, and I could practically see the wheels turning in his head as he thought through all the different possibilities. “I’ve been planning on doing a holographic army of tanks and drones. But I think we can do more than that. Way more.”

  “You don’t think those will freak them out enough?” Clem scoffed, shaking his head.

  “No, they definitely will,” Malthe said. “But we don’t know exactly what weapons they have at their disposal. Our research hasn’t turned up much about that. So that could be familiar to them, for all we know... If I make a holographic army of binders, however, that could be a whole other story.”

  “Excellent,” I said, a grin spreading across my face. “They call it the Great Binder War, after all. It’s what they’re most afraid of. So why not bring it to them? Or at least make them think we’re bringing it to them...”

  “It could work,” Malthe said, standing up and beginning to pace around the top deck awning, the gears still practically cranking in his head. “After all, there’s no news from Termina. So for all these people know, we could’ve snuck a whole army of binders off the island and brought them here.”

  “In such a short time, though?” Lin asked. “None of it adds up if you really think about it.”

  “But we know that,” I explained. “They don’t. They don’t really know anything about us. That’s our greatest advantage, after all. They spend all this time watching us, but they’re drop-dead terrified of us. They’d believe we were capable of anything, I think.”

  “And they still don’t know we’re using holographic technology,”
Malthe continued. “Meaning they most likely won’t anticipate this kind of tactic. It could work. It could really work...” He resumed his pacing.

  “So, we’re doing this thing?” Clem asked, turning back to me with his eyes as big as saucers. “We’re really doing this thing?”

  “We’re really doing this thing,” I confirmed, and I was afraid he might faint. But he didn’t. None of them did. They all just stared resolutely back at me.

  “Well, we arrive in a week,” Lin said simply.

  “We arrive in a week,” I repeated, staring out at the open ocean in front of me.

  24

  We watched the TV more incessantly than we ever had before in the week leading up to our docking in Direfall. On top of that, Malthe meticulously did his work on making the holographic army, and Lin memorized directions to all kinds of places in Direfall, chief among them the Tibor Enterprises headquarters and the government building holding the mayoral offices.

  “If these people just knew what Achilles was doing, they would get out of bed with him in an instant,” I muttered for the millionth time the morning of our anticipated arrival. “We just need to show them that, to prove it to them.”

  “We will,” Cindra said, squeezing my hand reassuringly. “We will.”

  “And what about this whole soul gaze thing?” Clem asked, almost seemingly for the millionth time. “Our main advantage once we get in that building is that we can perform bindings when they can’t. We can look into people’s souls and see their true intentions. But we can’t do that with Achilles. What about with the rest of these people?”

  “No, it wouldn’t make sense if we couldn’t,” I said, also for the millionth time, shaking my head. “Achilles has to be unique that way, he has to. Otherwise, why would they be so damn afraid of us? Plus, when I’ve looked at people here, I’ve been able to see into the surface of their soul. Like that clerk back at the motel. I didn’t try to dig too deep, but I got a decent read on him.”