Amy weaved through the tangle of guests and students almost in a dance, seizing Megan's hand when she reached her and giving her a warm kiss. She was glad to see the hanging cage was still empty. She had been told they would wait until all of the students were in the hall to watch, but she'd been worried nevertheless.

Amy looked at her roommate closely. "You look tired, hon. Everything okay?"

Megan sighed and gave Amy a smile. "Oh, no problems. I just haven't done three in the same night before. Why the hell aren't you tired?"

Amy giggled. "It'll catch up with me later. I'm just too pumped right now. I'll tell you all about it later." Amy beamed at Shawna, who was standing nearby. "How'd it go monitoring Lucy?"

Shawna grinned and sighed. "I am so horny right now, watching her for three hours." She was about to go into greater detail, but turned as she saw everyone's attention had been drawn to the entrance to the hall. Amy turned to look, and saw Gail standing in the doorway, her bright red graduate's uniform understood by the guests as a sign that the evening's culminating event was about to begin.

Gail looked over at the entrance to the privacy pavilion, where Karl was standing. She looked at him questioningly. "Everybody out?" She returned his affirmative nod, and looked out among the guests and students. "Does any hostess not see her monitor here?"

Several of the students looked around to confirm that their monitors had indeed arrived. Gwen raised her hand. "Mine was Monique. She's not here yet."

Gail nodded. "She's standing beside me with Sela. Anybody else?"

Amy raised her hand. "I'm not seeing Wendy... Oh, okay." At that moment Wendy had squeezed apologetically past Gail and into the room.

"Is that everybody?" The silence told Amy she must have been the last one out of the pavilion. I could have got done sooner, she thought, if Grace hadn't wrecked my makeup with her juices. Amy spotted Grace at that moment, getting another drink from the bar. Grace noticed Amy at that same time and gave her a friendly wave, but made no move to come over, to Amy's relief. Amy smiled and waved back. Farther to the right, she saw Benjamin. She beamed at him, and held up Megan's hand with her own and pointed to her with the other, rubbing Megan's shoulder with her cheek. Benjamin grinned back and gave Amy a thumbs-up signal. Not at all surprisingly, Andrew seemed to have left.

Megan looked at Amy curiously. "What was that about?"

Amy giggled, "Later. Everything later."

Gail smiled at the assembled crowd. "I know you're all eager to meet our group entertainment for tonight. Academy students and honored guests, please welcome Sela Turner, who will be hanged by her roommate, Monique du Clerq."

From the outer hallway, Sela stepped into the doorway, wearing a long robe -- an ordinary one, in white, not one of the prop robes for the Princess scenario such as Miranda had used. Sela was a cute, rather smallish girl with an angelic, freckled face and red hair combed mostly back behind her ears. She grinned and started to wave to the crowd, then started giggling and put her hands over her face, suddenly self-conscious, as the room burst into applause. Monique, dressed in a form-fitting black leotard representative of the executioner, stepped in from the side to stand beside Sela, her hand on Sela's hip.

In a moment, Monique waved her hands and put one finger to her lips in a shushing gesture. Everyone quieted down.

Sela lowered her hands from her face, took a deep breath and grinned. "I just had a couple of things I wanted to say. I'll really glad all of you could come and watch me die." She suddenly giggled again. "I'm sorry, this is just almost like I always dreamed it. Now please, you've got to promise to remember, I've only been in training for two months, so this won't be anything like a show that a graduate would put on..." She paused as several people offered murmurs of encouragement, one of them close enough to Sela that she grinned and thanked the woman who'd said it.

She continued, "In fact, I'm not going to do any sort of fictional scene to lead into it. They tell me a lot of the girls you've seen here do something like that, to make it more like what a graduate would do, but since I learned just a few days ago I'd be doing this, I've been working on making my technique as good as I could, and there wasn't really time to plan a show or anything like that. Okay?" Sela bit her lip and looked hopefully, as if fearing to see disappointment on the faces turned towards her. She beamed when she detected none.

"Anyway, to make up for it, I promise to make the hanging really good. I really, really want to thank Megan and Shawna for helping me with that." Amy looked at Megan, who blinked in surprise. Amy knew Megan had stopped by Sela's room a few times in the last few days, though not as many times as Shawna had. Megan clearly hadn't expected any public recognition for it.

Shawna whispered to Amy, "I told Sela she could be the first one to show off some of those new techniques we've all been working on, kind of hint to everybody on the outside what was coming up in the future from Academy girls. She got really excited."

Amy whispered back, "I see that." Sela seemed almost ready to dance, and Amy had been unable to account for how pumped the girl was. Admittedly all of the girls, on considering the possibility that they might be hanged before graduating, expressed a strong preference for doing it at a party rather than a class demo, for the obvious reason that the atmosphere of a party came much closer to what a graduate would experience. Still, being hanged at a party was flunking out. Amy, expecting to see disappointment in Sela's body language, saw none.

Sela went on, "And we have worked out a couple of things to make this a little different. Monique has something special planned for the end. And for me..." Sela giggled once more. "I guess you can figure out I'm not one of the best at hanging, which is why I ended up here tonight. But I've been getting better. I've never gone six minutes before, but I'm going to go for it tonight. Monique is going to count off the minutes for you while I'm hanging. When she gets to six, I want all of you to clap your hands, so I can hear it. I'll be just so happy if that's the last thing I hear. Okay?"

As another round of applause started, and Sela burst out laughing, waving her arms for quiet. "No, no, not now! Do it then!" The applause quickly turned into laughter.

Amy knew that six minutes would be a challenge for a number of the girls. Amy herself had been improving rapidly recently, and routinely went past nine minutes in practice. She didn't know what Megan's upper limit might be. Megan could go twelve minutes without apparent effort, and was satisfied to end a session once she had worked on everything she wanted to.

Sela turned to Monique, her eyes bright, and took a deep breath. "I'm ready."

Monique gave her a quick kiss, then bent down to pick up something from the floor that had been hidden behind the doorway. As Sela walked into the room, towards the cage, Monique following her, Amy saw that Monique was, as one would expect, holding a small coil of rope in one hand and, unexpectedly, a long, thin box with the other. Amy was puzzled for a moment, and then realized what must be inside the box, and what Monique had planned for the end of the event. She gasped and said, "Oh, cool!" Around her, she could hear similar reactions from other students. None of the guests knew what the small commotion among the students was about, and several asked the nearest students about it, but got only smiles and headshakes in reply.

The back side of the cage was a door, which at present stood open. Sela walked proudly, her eyes glowing, to the cage, Monique trailing behind, working hard to keep up with her while holding the awkward box upright to avoid banging it against anyone. Sela entered the cage, leaping up onto the platform in one smooth motion, brushing aside the noose with her shoulder, and Monique set her box down at the side of the cage and waited.

Sela simply stood on the platform for a minute, slowly sweeping her eyes from side to side, her mouth half-open in a grin of wonder, wanting to drink in every sensation as the center of attention in her life's greatest moment. All eyes were on her in a room of dead silence.

At last she reached down to loosen the belt on her robe. Shrugging it off her shoulders in a way she had no doubt practiced, it fell onto the platform around her feet.

Amy couldn't help joining everyone else in a collective gasp, even though she'd known what to expect. The spotlights focused on the cage were more than sufficient to give Sela's now-naked body, liberally coated with cooking oil, the glow that Amy had first seen on Miranda -- no matter how many times you see that, Amy thought, the first sight of it is always breathtaking.

Monique entered the cage at last, stepping onto the platform behind Sela, and let the rope she was holding uncoil. The rope was short; Sela had chosen not to use a crotch rope. Students were not allowed to start using one until the middle of the second year, as the prevailing wisdom held that students should perfect the basic techniques before they started distracting themselves with mid-air masturbation, but of course girls being hanged at a party were not subject to that rule. Amy was looking forward to practicing tying a crotch rope on Linda and Laney, and watching them make use of it from close up. Amy suspected that Sela, for the same reason she had decided not to put on a pre-hanging show, had nixed the idea of a crotch rope -- she wanted to perform the hanging the very best she knew how, and didn't have time to work in something totally new.

Amy, always excited to watch a real hanging, felt her heart beating faster as Sela crossed her wrists behind her back, and Monique bound them tightly together.

Everyone in the hall seemed to suspend their breathing as Monique performed her most crucial task: taking hold of the noose, she lifted it and dropped it over Sela's head, tightening it expertly to fit snugly around Sela's neck and positioning it properly -- completely, and forever, taking Sela's control of her life out of her hands.

The onlookers, as it became clear which direction Sela would be facing, redistributed themselves around the cage, each person taking the position he or she favored for watching a hanging. As if to prove that people had a wide variety of tastes, the crowd seemed to arrange itself so that nearly equal numbers stood on all sides of the cage -- some, like Amy and Megan, preferred a frontal view, while a similar number liked watching from the sides, and many enjoyed the view from behind.

Monique squeezed around to stand in front of Sela now, and some in the crowd looked away from this very private moment, which others watched closely, entranced. Since they were not acting out a fictional scenario and had no characters to maintain, they could spend this moment as exactly what they were: two young women, who had shared their lives and bed for two intense months, now saying goodbye. Monique gently rested her hands on either side of Sela's head, careful not to disturb the noose, and put her lips on Sela's for a long, intimate kiss. When they broke it off at last, they said a few words to each other that Amy couldn't hear -- until the very end, when each said, audibly to those standing close enough, "I love you."

As Monique hopped down from the platform, Sela closed her eyes and began breathing slowly and deeply, concentrating on her preparation. Looking closely, Amy could see what most likely only another Hanging Girl would notice: the slight tensing of various groups of muscles, in Sela's legs, shoulders, hips, in sequence, as she mentally rehearsed the moves she wanted to make.

In any case, most of the guests' attention had probably been drawn to Monique at this point. Sela's roommate smoothed out the fallen robe on the surface of the platform, as Sela lifted one foot and then the other to allow the robe to go underneath. They had probably got the idea from watching Amy do the same with Susan's robe during her hanging.

Monique stepped out of the cage, and closed the back side of the cage. For extra dramatic effect, she took the padlock dangling from the latch and thrust it through the latch, clicking it closed to lock Sela in. The key, Amy suspected, was not in the hall at all.

Adding to that same effect, Amy could tell that Sela was standing on a one-way platform. The lever could only lower the surface, not raise it -- once it was lowered, it could only be raised again by partial disassembly that took a good ten or fifteen minutes of work. The guests knew about the platforms, for the most part -- in fact, most probably didn't even realize there was another kind, the two-way platforms that were used for practice.

At last, Monique reached in between the bars and pushed the lever over. The absolute silence of the room was broken only by the faint whirr of the mechanism lowering the surface of the platform.

There were several sighs around the room, and a couple of slight choking sounds in sympathy, as the platform descended below the level Sela's toes could reach and she swung free by the neck, beginning immediately to kick.

After a few seconds, Amy frowned. Sela was kicking more or less randomly with her legs, not using any of the things Shawna must have been showing her. Amy could see that Shawna, standing a few feet in front of Amy and just to the right, had both hands clenched into fists, raised to waist level, and seemed to be mouthing instructions she hoped Sela would hear on a psychic wavelength, looking progressively more frustrated. There was no prohibition against talking to Sela, assuming she could be heard over the growing murmurs that probably accompanied any party hanging, but Amy was sure Shawna wanted Sela to seem to succeed without help.

Sela did, of course, look sensationally sexy even so, with the spotlights picking out the quivering and tensing muscles in her legs, arms, stomach, buttocks, all glowing with the effect of the oil. But the guests must be seeing it as standard fare, the usual semi-panic of any First Year girl being hanged.

Suddenly Sela seemed to relax for an instant, her body swinging to and fro -- and then her body bucked in a long ripple from head to toe that included a sensuous forward thrust with her hips, afterwards swinging her legs out wide and towards the front in that hugging-her-lover move that had so stunned Amy the first time she had seen Megan do it. Around the room, Amy could hear the breath whoosh out of several of the guests, as if they'd each been kicked in the stomach. She saw jaws dropping all around her. In the awed silence, all could clearly hear Monique, down on one knee at the side of the cage, careful not to obstruct anyone's view, say, "One minute."

As Sela continued her performance, Amy could see a number of hands around her moving to crotches, both men and women becoming absorbed and aroused. For the guests, it was like nothing they had ever seen. With all her experience watching Megan hang, it was easy for Amy to judge that Sela was not up to Megan's level, but even she felt a tingling between her legs and a strong need to be alone with Megan. She gripped her roommate's hand more tightly.

At about the three-minute mark, Sela began mixing her sexual thrusts with desperate-seeming attempts to reach a solid surface, holding her body perfectly straight and straining downward, every muscle in her legs taut with effort, her feet pointed straight downward and moving with tiny kicks, her toes wriggling -- relaxing for a moment as if giving up, then resuming the effort even more desperately. This was, of course, Shawna's own contribution to the new hanging choreography. As suddenly as the downward stretches had begun, they then segued into a wriggling and thrusting that commenced a renewed simulation of vertical intercourse.

The undercurrent of conversation was entirely different from its original character. It appeared as if many of the guests were whispering only to themselves, lost in the fascination inspired by Sela's performance.

Just before Monique called out "Five minutes," Sela seemed clearly to tire. Her movements became more random, as they had been for a time in the first minute, and more jerky. She had spent little time, up to this point, trying to free her hands, but she did try now, her forearm muscles straining, her body instinctively fighting for life. Streams of sweat were rolling down her body.

For Amy, it was probably partly a residual thrill from her session with Andrew, partly a sense of the feeling that was running through the watching guests, partly having seen a reflection of Megan in Sela's movements, partly pride that Megan had imparted this much of her ability to another student, partly awareness of the euphoria Sela must be feeling that she was ending her life this way... All of that contributed to a level of excitement Amy couldn't remember reaching during any other hanging. She was pounding her hip with her fist, her lips silently moving in a repetition of "Come on, come on..." Six minutes, Sela wanted. She was getting so close!

The room seemed suddenly to grow silent, and it looked to Amy as if most people were, in fact, holding their breaths, their attention divided between Sela, now kicking weakly and spastically, and Monique beside the cage, her eyes on her stopwatch.

Monique suddenly thrust her fist above her head and shouted, "SIX!" The audience, with no preliminaries, erupted into applause louder than Amy thought that number of people could produce, punctuated by exclamations of "Great!" and "Good girl, Sela."

Amy saw that Sela's eyes, which had been looking glazed and barely functioning, lit up suddenly, her lips twisting into a happy grin. She made several quick short kicks with her right leg, easily understood as an expression of the joy she was feeling.

That was her last burst of energy, and she fainted at last and hung limp. Her body swayed and twisted as the rope swung her lightly back and forth, but no longer moved on its own. As in every hanging Amy had seen, Sela's bladder emptied, the shower of urine falling between and running down her legs to soak into the folds of the robe bunched up on the platform below her.

Monique stood and looked towards the side of the room, and Amy, following her gaze, saw Gail there, intently watching the heart monitor she was holding. The applause was beginning to die down, and Amy, knowing Sela was still alive and might at some level still be conscious, waved her fist in a circle over her head and shouted, "She can still hear you!" Amy wasn't really sure whether Sela actually was aware, but if there was any chance that she was, Amy wanted her to hear that applause for the rest of her life. The sound from the crowd burst forth with renewed energy.

At last, Amy saw Gail nod her head and point at Monique. Monique reached in between the bars of the cage and steadied Sela, arresting the residual swinging motion of her roommate's body to leave Sela hanging as motionless as a sculpture of a hanged woman. Monique then bent down to open the long, thin box she had brought in with her and withdrew its contents.

The guests saw, and knew now what Amy had known at the start. A collective, appreciative gasp spread across the room. As Monique walked outward from the front of the cage, she was clearly anticipating a need to ask guests politely to step aside to give her room, but without a word, the onlookers standing in front of the cage backed to either side to clear an aisle leading straight out from the cage. Monique, looking serious and dignified, walked down the impromptu aisle and turned to face the cage.

Many years before, in the early days of erotic hanging, the art had been plagued with fakery -- hangings that gave the appearance of being authentic, but in which the girl survived to perpetrate further fraudulent performances. The Academy had been instrumental in restoring integrity to the art form, and no hanging of an Academy Girl left any doubt in the end that she was dead. Nevertheless, at every public hanging staged by the Academy, a tradition remained of offering "proof" of the obvious. Amy had first seen it at Miranda's hanging, at the end of which Miranda's father had been given the honor of laying her chest open with a sword, a somewhat romantic alternative to the knife that was more often used.

Still more romantic, though, was the instrument Sela and Monique had chosen.

Every girl in the First Year class knew that Monique had been on her high school archery team. Her bow was one of the few personal possessions she had brought with her to the Academy, and she often relaxed from the tensions of her studies by practicing with it in the courtyard, using targets and arrows she ordered through the student store. Tonight the students had all instantly recognized what must be in the box Monique was carrying, and why she had brought it.

As Monique faced the cage from about twenty feet away, it occurred to the guests behind the cage belatedly to clear a path in line with Monique and the cage, in case Monique was not quite as accurate as she would need to be.

Everyone watched as Monique took her stance, her left hand steadying the bow, the fingers of her right hand holding the arrow firmly, and in an absolute silence more profound than at any time during the night, one could easily hear the faint crackles of tension as the bow bent. Monique seemed to hold the bow cocked forever, aiming for just the right spot.

Monique released the arrow at last, and new sounds followed in rapid succession -- the twang of the bowstring, the faint, brief hiss of the arrow flying through the air, and a solid "Thhhckkk," like a fist pounding a wet sandbag, the sound of the arrow striking and penetrating Sela's stomach just below her ribs and slightly to the right of center, after passing between the bars of the cage. The impact knocked Sela's body back and set it in renewed motion swinging back and forth like a pendulum at the end of the rope, slowly twisting now because of the off-center hit. The twisting motion brought Sela's back into Amy's view, before Sela began twisting the other direction, showing Amy her front again. Amy could see that the head of the arrow had emerged from Sela's back, between her arms still bound at the wrists behind her, while the feathered tail still protruded from her stomach.

A cascade of blood flowed down from both of Sela's wounds, running down her stomach, back, and legs, splattering onto the robe below -- as always, not as much of it as one might expect, propelled only by gravity without the pressure from a pumping heart.

The crowd let out a delighted "Ahhh," and began applauding again, this time for Monique, who blushed, smiled, and bit her lip, sighing in what appeared to be utter relief that the arrow had found its mark. As the applause wound down, excited conversations began in all parts of the room.

Amy reached out to tap Shawna on the shoulder, and exclaimed, "Sela was fantastic! You did such a great job with her!"

Shawna's face almost couldn't contain her open-mouthed grin. "I got so worried at the start! But it wasn't me, Sela just worked so hard."

"Monique was really wonderful too! That was a great shot, only a few inches off target."

Shawna shook her head. "Not even that much. She hit exactly where she was aiming. That was Sela's idea. As soon as Monique told her the head of the arrow would probably go completely through her, Sela told her to try to hit a little off-center. She even showed her where on her stomach she wanted Monique to hit, so it wouldn't be stopped by her ribs or spine or anything. Hitting her there would make her body spin like it did. She thought it'd be really cool if everybody could see the arrowhead sticking out of her back, so she wanted to twist to give everybody a view. It really worked great!"

Amy laughed. "I've been telling people those physics classes would pay off! That twisting really added a lot." She looked at Shawna. "Are you going to move in with Monique?" Shawna was the natural person to room with Monique, so that Jackie and Erin could recover the privacy they'd sacrificed to make room for Shawna.

"We talked about it. I know I'm staying with her tonight, and we're going to try it for a few days at least, and see how it goes."

Amy nodded, understanding fully Shawna's hesitation to commit to a new rooming arrangement until she was sure of being able to get along with her new partner. Amy looked over towards Monique, now surrounded by guests who seemed to be new admirers of both herself and of the late Sela. To Shawna, Amy said, "I was going to try to get to her, but it's a little busy over there. Tell her later she did a wonderful job, and give her a kiss for me, okay?"

"Sure."

Aware of someone standing to her right, Amy turned and discovered Benjamin. She smiled in delight. "Hi!" She put her arm around Megan's waist. "I guess you already could tell, this is Megan. Megan, this is Benjamin, one of my privates tonight."

Megan smiled and shook hands with him. "Nice to meet you, Benjamin. Amy hasn't had time to tell me anything, but I can tell she likes you."

Benjamin beamed at her. "By coincidence, I was going to tell you that Amy obviously loves you very much, in case you weren't aware. I can see now you feel the same about her."

Both girls laughed, and Megan said, "Well, now we know," and kissed Amy.

Amy, grinning, turned to Benjamin to speak, but he spoke first. "Amy, I just have to ask someone who might know..." He shook his head slightly in a wondering way. "The girl tonight, Sela..." For the first time, Amy saw him struggle for words. "WHY would they hang her now, so early in her training? I don't mean to criticize the Academy, as they must have a reason, but think of the show she could have put on after three more years of practice! I've never seen anything like what she was doing tonight! Surely the administration must have recognized her unique talents."

Amy rubbed Megan's hip and grinned. She noticed, suddenly, that all around the room, guests could be seen in intense conversations with students, and from their gestures towards the cage and its still gently swinging, arrow-pierced occupant, it was obvious they were talking about Sela. The word, Amy realized, was officially out now. "Benjamin, I'm so glad you felt that way, and Sela would be so proud to hear you say that. But the truth is, she wasn't the only one doing that kind of thing now. We all are. Or we're learning, that is. From Megan." She gave Megan's waist another squeeze.

Benjamin's eyes widened. "The girl did thank Megan, didn't she? I remember that now." He turned to Megan. "Do you mean to say this is something you're passing on to all of the other students?"

Megan nodded. "Yes, sir, I'm working on it."

"Benjamin."

Megan smiled. "Benjamin."

Benjamin looked around, as if he were considering the number of students visible in the room and what sort of performances would be coming out of the Academy when they graduated. "Well, well, well..." he breathed softly on a descending scale.

He turned back to Megan. "Well, one reason I came over was to thank Amy once more for the part she played in an enchanting evening. It appears I need to thank you too, Megan." He smiled and offered his hand again. "Thank you very much."

"You're welcome, s... Benjamin."

"And thank you, Amy." He shook her hand as well. "And now I'm afraid I must go. It's getting a little late for me. Megan, I trust you and I will get to know each other better at a later date."

Megan looked at Amy, and laughed when Amy nodded her head forcefully and enthusiastically. "I'm sure I'd enjoy that, Benjamin. Amy says so."

With a final wave, returned by both girls, he turned and headed for the door.

Amy sighed, and said quietly to Megan, "Wish we could leave." They would be free to go once all of the guests with whom they had shared a private party had left. Andrew, of course, was long gone, and a number of other guests had departed by this time, but Grace was nearby, one of several guests around the cage admiring Sela's body, now swinging just barely perceptibly, like a mobile in a very gentle breeze. Amy also saw at least one of the guests to whom she had seen Megan give a chit, talking to Monique. "How's your energy?"

"Getting a second wind."

"No classes tomorrow. Want to make love all night?" Amy gave her a hungry grin.

Megan returned the grin. "Thinking about that is what's keeping me going."