Binding Foxgirls III Read online

  Binding Foxgirls III

  Simon Archer

  Contents

  1. Achilles

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  13. Achilles

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  21. Achilles

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Author’s Note

  1

  Achilles

  I awoke to a pulsing in my chest, a pulsing I hadn’t felt for a very long time, not since the device that caused it was first installed all those years ago and many more miles away. But it didn’t alarm me. I’d been expecting it. It was I who called them in the first place, after all.

  So, even though it was painful, I smiled, glad to have been arisen to face a day in which I knew I would be free once again.

  I didn’t let on that anything was amiss. Otherwise, the guards might realize that something was off and thwart the whole plan, not that my rescuers would deign to let them. Instead, I just lay across my thin twin bed, staring at the buzzing virtual bars of my cage that made it so difficult for me to sleep, and waited for them to come.

  The Void was an enormous building, though I hadn’t seen much of it since they brought me here. They dragged me only to my cell and the interrogation room where Nic Joch came to expend his energy, trying and failing to get me to talk. It was ironic, really, that I saw less of it while living here than when I didn’t. I’d built the place, after all, when I’d first come to Termina.

  They sent me here because people like Joch couldn’t see into my mind, not the way they could everyone else’s. I wasn’t immune per se, but I was the closest to it anyone’s ever been able to find. When he tried to look into my soul using his unusual connection to the spirit world, all he could see was the surface, and he could barely scratch even that. It made me psychologically invincible, better than any physical weapon I could ever have.

  Then it happened. The whirring of my virtual prison fell away, and I was free to walk outside my cell. I continued to lay there for a few moments after it happened, just in case. When the bars remained down, I slowly stood up and walked across the bright room… it was always bright, one of the ways they tortured us… to stand right by where the force field stood mere moments before.

  The Void was just one giant circular room, wide open in the middle, kind of like a giant pit with technology that simulated lightning to keep us in check. A large generator in the center powered our virtual chains. And now, that power was receding.

  I watched as one after another, the floors upon floors of other cells all lining the exterior of the wide-open space we called the Void went dark. They built the place that way… or rather, I built the place that way, no matter how much I regretted it now that I was a prisoner myself… in order to deprive every prisoner of privacy, to keep them from feeling secure. Most of all, it ensured that every time a single one of them stepped out of line, everyone that remained would bear witness to the consequences.

  And now, we could all roam free.

  Tentatively, I reached out to where the force field should have been with the tips of my fingers. When I felt no shock, I moved the rest of my body out inch by inch. It would seem that even my short imprisonment had an effect on me, making me nervous, afraid that it was all a mistake, and the force field would reappear to shock me any moment now.

  But it never came.

  When I was outside, I roared with laughter. The whoops and hollers from the surrounding prisoners mingled with my triumphant sound, many of whom had realized their newfound luck by now. Many of them were my employees, thrown in here by Nic Joch like cattle to atone for their supposed sins of keeping this city safe and secure.

  “We’re free, boys,” I called out to them. “Just you wait until you see the rest of the world.”

  As if on cue, several masked men dressed from head to toe in black ran across my floor, and more flooded across the other floors. Our saviors had come to round up the rest of my people and take us home.

  “What about the ones who aren’t with us?” I asked when one of the men grabbed my arm and led me toward the exit. “Won’t they see?”

  “Oh, we’ll deal with them,” the man grunted as he continued walking briskly as he spoke, not missing a beat. “Don’t you worry, sir. Everything’s going according to plan.”

  I smiled and laughed again as he led me out. The only thing I wished was that I could see Nic Joch’s face when he heard about this. I wouldn’t be surprised if he dropped dead on the spot.

  We went all the way down the stairwell since the elevator was inoperational, rendered powerless when the Void itself was curtailed, and out across the small shore. The Void was a tiny island, right off the coast of the larger island of Termina. Nothing else stood on the island aside from the small shipyard right next to it… until now. On that shore, a great wooden ship waited for us in the water, a relic of the past brought forth into the future.

  When I stepped aboard, I felt like I was finally home. It had been so long.

  The man holding my arm led me to the largest cabin at the bottom of the ship while the rest of my fellow Tibor Enterprises prisoners were led onboard after me. A giant bed waited for me alongside a hearty hot meal. I would have expected no less.

  “I wish to speak to the captain after we depart,” I told the man as I sat down to take my meal. “To thank him for his troubles.”

  “I’m sure that can be arranged,” he said before leaving me to my delicious meal and the wonderful thoughts of Nic Joch’s head exploding.

  2

  “They what?!” I screamed into the receiver of my telephone. “Please tell me you’re fucking joking, chief, you can’t be serious.”

  “I… I’m sorry, sir, we really don’t know what happened,” the chief of police stammered on the other line. I stood up and slammed the palm of my hand against my desk, trying to contain my outrage and not take it out on the poor man.

  “How. Did. This. Happen?” I asked through gritted teeth, managing to keep my voice low despite the volcano of anger bubbling inside me.

  “We… we honestly have no idea, Mr. Joch, I’m terribly sorry,” he said, and he really did sound apologetic, to his credit.

  “How can you possibly not know?” I asked, my voice louder this time, though my teeth were still gritted. “Aren’t there records of this shit? Anything? What happened to the security cameras?”

  “They’re fried, sir,” he said. “Pretty much melted, actually. I don’t know how to describe it. It was weird.”

  I froze, remembering that that was exactly what had happened to me when I had tried to look at the security cameras that belonged to a TelCorp client who had worked for Achilles Tibor of Tibor Enterprises one time. After a moment of silence in which I tried very hard to digest this information without exploding all over my office, I continued.

  “Fine. Just try to find something, conduct interviews with the other prisoners, whatever you can manage.”

  “That’s the thing, sir,” the chief said hesitantly. “They’re all dead, and so are all the guards.”

  My mouth dropped open, pretty much all the way down to the top of my desk. “All of them? That must be hundreds of people!”
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br />   “Nearly a thousand,” the chief said, his voice full of melancholy. “Those were some good men we lost who worked in that prison.”

  “You’re telling me.” I sank down into my chair and cradled my already aching head in my free hand. “TelCorp ran that place until a few days ago. We still had a lot of guys there to see out the transition to your department.”

  “I’m as sorry for your losses as I am for my own,” the chief said sincerely before hanging up to go deal with more pressing matters than talking to me.

  “I thought I was done burying employees,” I told my empty office before slamming the phone receiver down on my desk. I sighed and put both my hands on my head then. The phone rang again before I even had a minute to gather my thoughts.

  “What?” I asked sharply, not thinking to look at the caller ID before answering.

  “I can call back at a better time.” The voice on the other end belonged to Termina’s Prime Minister, Lucianus Halit, sounding very, very tired. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Joch, especially at a time like this. It’s just that I just heard about what happened at the Void last night and thought I’d--”

  But I cut him off. “No, it’s okay, Lucianus, you were right to call.” I waved my hand in the air dismissively. “I’m just tired and concerned is all. You caught me at a bad moment.”

  “Understandable, my friend,” Halit said. “I wanted to know if you’ve heard anything more about what happened than I have. The story is just going to the media now.”

  “I don’t think it would be possible for anyone to know less about it than me,” I said simply.

  “I’m afraid I must say the same,” Halit sighed, clearly disappointed. “It seems odd to me that we don’t know more. I was informed that everyone who could have born witness to the incident died! And the security cameras destroyed…” His voice trailed off as he tried to think of something else to say, some kind of explanation. But there wasn’t one. Not that either of us knew of, anyway.

  “I know,” I said, not knowing how else to respond. “I’ll have to call a board meeting, try to get to the bottom of this myself.”

  “Of course, you have more resources at TelCorp than even we do as a government, especially now that the other binding corps are a thing of the past,” Halit said, referring to the civil war we had just won at the company between TelCorp and the other companies that dealt in the spirit world. “We offer to do anything we can do to help, of course.”

  “That’s appreciated, Lucianus,” I sighed. “You should talk to the media. Try to reassure people. You’re the face of Termina, after all. They’ll feel better seeing your face in front of the cameras instead of just pictures of the Void and dead prisoners.”

  “Point taken,” Halit said, though he sounded nervous all of a sudden instead of just tired. “But what do I tell them? What could I possibly say that’s reassuring in the slightest?” My face softened. This was why he’d called. He needed advice. He was scared and confused. Who wasn’t?

  “Just tell them we’re working on it,” I said. “That we have all of our best people working on this thing and trying to get to the bottom of it. Which is true, isn’t it? We’ve gotten through the last few months, haven’t we? We can certainly get through this. We’re in a better position than we were ten days ago.”

  It was true. We’d been through a lot in the past few weeks. Months, even. First, I, just a lowly binder at TelCorp, had realized that the company that my father had founded was taking advantage of the foxgirls, Termina’s underclass of citizens, to put it mildly. Then, I’d worked with the foxgirls I’d fallen in love with and bound my soul to, and some close friends to overthrow the old CEO, Elias Berg, and take control of the company myself, remaking the company and the city to be a better place for everyone.

  Then Achilles Tibor showed up. Or better to say that his secret organization housed in abandoned train tunnels beneath the city showed up to make our lives hell. They hated the changes we were making to the government and the economy, and they were there to attempt to undo it all for some reason that still wasn’t entirely clear to us. Tibor’s group united all the other binding corps under one banner to fight us, try to take us down once and for all.

  But that didn’t work. We were too powerful for that. We destroyed the other binding corps, busted down into the tunnels, killed and arrested most of Achilles’ people, and then arrested their dear leader himself.

  Not that I’d managed to get any information out of him in the days since. He was somehow immune to everything I tried on him. I couldn’t look into his soul, I couldn’t bind his spirit to mine to make him do what I wanted, nothing. It was frustrating, to say the least, and unusual. In all my experience as the top binder in Termina, I had never met anyone like that before.

  It was weird, and I didn’t like it.

  “I suppose that’s true, we are better off than we were last week,” Halit finally admitted, “although that is a low bar.”

  I laughed, though it came out hollow. “You could say that again. Anyway, I’ll convene a board meeting, and you talk to the media. The chief’s sending more people down to the crime scene. We’ll talk soon, okay?”

  “Of course, Mr. Joch,” Halit said. “I really am sorry about all this.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I assured him. Not this time, at least.

  I trusted Halit now, I’d performed a soul gaze on everyone after the fact just to make sure, but Achilles had managed to blackmail the Prime Minister into working against me before. It was still a sore spot, but Achilles had managed to blackmail pretty much everyone in the city just the same, so it would be hard to hold a grudge long term.

  I pulled out my E-pad and swiped to another screen until I got to the TelCorp board group message chain. I sent out a call for a meeting at the top of the hour and then shut the damn thing off. A number of my colleagues had already messaged in frantically in the past minute or so, asking about the prison break. The story must’ve hit the news media by now, but we’d talk soon. I didn’t want to do anything over tech where our correspondence could conceivably be monitored, though I did have the best tech security guy in the world.

  In the meantime, I ordered some food for the meeting. We might as well get some breakfast while we were there. Then I turned on the holovision in my office to get a feel for how the media was handling the story. The holovision came sliding out of the wall in a slick black holder, and the holographic images popped up in front of me across the whole opposite wall of my office.

  “It’s just… so strange that the chief doesn’t have any more information for us,” one of the ever-present talking heads on the news channel was saying. “I don’t understand it. Shouldn’t he have something to report? He is the head of law enforcement in the city, after all. If anyone should know what’s going on, it’s him, right?”

  “One would think,” another talking head huffed. “A truly disappointing lack of leadership, I must say.”

  I put my head in my hands again. It was too damn early in the morning to want a drink already, but here I was. The chief must’ve just been on and told the people of Termina exactly what he’d been able to tell me: absolutely nothing. Nothing other than the most dangerous man in the city had just broken out of prison along with all of his goons, that is.

  Then Halit appeared on the screen, absolutely surrounded by a throng of reporters. I knew that feeling well, unfortunately. He wasn’t looking too hot, either. His usually slicked-back prematurely white hair was sticking out haphazardly in several directions, and his glasses were knocked eschew. It sounded like all of the reporters were talking at once.

  “What do you know about what happened early this morning at the Void?” the one closest to him asked, louder than all the others.

  “I’m afraid not much,” he said regretfully, straightening his glasses, though they remained a bit out of place. “I know everything that you know: what the chief of police told me. But I assure you that we are utilizing every resource at our disposa
l here in Termina to get to the bottom of this mystery and find the criminals in question. We will stop at nothing to put them back where they belong: in the Void, the most secure prison in the world.”

  “It can’t be that secure if they broke out, can it?” another reporter asked.

  Well, that was an obvious question. Halit was off his game, saying that to a rabid crowd like this one.

  “Well, the fact remains that the Void is the most secure prison in the world,” Halit said, his eyes darting around nervously. “If this man broke out of this prison, he would’ve broken out of any prison.”

  I groaned audibly. Halit had been through more than he’d been prepared for the last few weeks, and this was clearly no exception. This was not helping.

  I pulled out my buzzing E-pad as I watched the reporters continue to pester Halit. My notifications were lighting up with media requests and friends and employees asking me what was going on and what I was going to do about it. No doubt, reporters had already swarmed the outside of TelCorp headquarters looking for me.

  I figured I might as well go down and try to clear up some of this confusion for myself, given how Halit managed to fuck everything up in five minutes flat.

  3

  I turned off the holovision in an angry huff and made my way out of my office to the main binders’ office area. Translucent desks lined the vast room, but they were empty. None of the binders had gotten into the office yet, though I imagined they were well on their way, given the situation, at least those that were awake at this early hour. We tended to be night owls, though I’d admittedly been far better with that since becoming CEO.