DAY 10

Amy awoke feeling, for the first time on the island, almost as if she were back at the Academy, with another girl's head between her legs, and her own head between the girl's, the way she had awakened so many times at school. The momentary flash of joy quickly subsided, as she recalled where she was. Some of the feeling hung on, though, and she realized how close to Runner she was beginning to feel.

Runner began stirring, stretched, and separated from Amy, but quickly gave Amy a warm hug as they sat up. "I'll go get some nuts."

She stopped to do something Amy was working hard to get used to: she squatted and began peeing on the ground. Amy had decided to try not to seem uncomfortable with it. She, after all, had found herself needing to do the same in front of Runner over the last few days, as an easier alternative to explaining the tradition of privacy to Runner, knowing it wouldn't make much sense to her. And maybe, thought Amy, it is more a matter of boundaries than privacy. Through their years together, Megan had often come into the bathroom for one reason or another while Amy was using the toilet, and vice versa, and neither of them had given it a thought after the first few times. But with Megan and Amy, or any other roommates at school, that kind of thing was a matter of each accepting the other inside the boundaries that strangers had to stay outside. With Runner, it seemed a matter of never having had the boundaries to begin with, and that concept would be even harder to explain to Runner than the privacy she had never experienced. Amy shuddered at the vision of Runner piddling in the middle of an Academy hallway. There are so many things, Amy thought, that Runner is going to need to learn when we get home.

It occurred to Amy that her thoughts of the Academy, now, always included bringing Runner along when she returned there. It was increasingly hard to imagine leaving her behind.

Minutes later, dropping the last shattered shell on a pile of similar fragments, Runner asked eagerly, "Amy, can I watch you hang now?"

Amy smiled, swallowing the last of her breakfast of nuts. Now that she felt free to hang again, she'd been looking forward to giving another demonstration. She stood and put on the single vine that she had come to think of as her "trap protector," not wanting to walk any distance without it, picked up the braided vines she used for hanging, and began looking for an appropriate fallen-log-and-branch configuration. Finding one, she tied the noose onto the branch.

Standing on the log, adjusting the vine with the noose hanging down at head level, she shook her head when Runner asked if she wanted the short vine tying her hands, as Amy had tied Runner's yesterday. "Not this time, but maybe later. With my hands tied, I'd want you standing next to me to help me when I finish. This time I just want you to stand back so you can see how I do it." Amy still had, would always have, that resistance to directly describing the techniques of hanging to a non-student, but there was no problem involved with anything Runner might pick up simply from watching Amy hang.

As Amy stepped off the log and started her kicking, she could see she'd been right. Runner's concentration was intense, and she was looking exactly where hanging audiences so rarely did. For the most part, people watching a hanging were enthralled by the sexually charged wriggling and kicking of the girl hanging -- even more so since Megan had introduced her special brand of choreography, and Shawna, Jana, Melissa, and Holly had begun adding to it. It was like the way a magician performed tricks, directing the attention of the audience away from the clever sleight-of-hand that left them stumped and amazed afterward. Obviously nothing was really preventing anyone seeing a hanging from watching the girl's head closely. It was just that there were so many other interesting places to be looking.

But here was Runner, her eyes unblinkingly fastened on the movements Amy was making with her head. Not masturbating this time. Runner must have known, after last night's talk, that Amy must have a way of freeing up the windpipe and carotids, and was determined to see what it was. And she had known where she needed to be looking.

About halfway through Amy's performance, Runner's hands suddenly clenched, and a big grin spread across her face. For the rest of Amy's time aloft, she could see Runner, still watching raptly, making tiny, probably unconscious movements of her own head in time with Amy's.

As soon as Amy stepped back onto the log and began taking off the noose, Runner came to her quickly, saying almost breathlessly, "I get it, I get it, Amy! Can I do it now? Let me do it again!"

Minutes later, watching Runner squirming in midair as the vines held her up by the neck, Amy shook her head in amazement. Runner, of course, had a long way to go, but she was doing things that many of the beginning First Years could only do after Amy or another teacher had given them a week of classroom instruction first. Runner had needed a visual demonstration such as Amy gave the students, but she hadn't needed the verbal explanations, other than those about how the body works. Amy, now, for the first time, thought Runner could bring something very special to the Academy. Like Megan. Like Holly.

Amy let Runner go a full minute. Afterwards, Runner seemed ready to float away with happiness. As soon as Amy untied her hands, Runner threw her arms around Amy and kissed her, a much better, more practiced kiss than her first one yesterday. "I breathed a little, Amy! And I don't feel dizzy like I did last time! Can I try it again?"

Amy couldn't suppress a grin at the girl's excitement. "Runner, we really need to get going. I want to find that trail today. We need to find a way back to the Academy..."

"Yes!! The Academy! Let's go, Amy."

At least Runner didn't try to drag Amy along this time. She immediately began gathering her clothes. As Runner began dressing, Amy noticed, for the first time, the bloodstain on the inside crotch of Runner's shorts. Of course! Amy somehow hadn't thought of periods, not having had one of her own in years, nor knowing any other girl among the Academy students who did -- all of them were using the Academy's contraceptives. Amy stopped Runner before she pulled the shorts on, and indicated the stain. "You bleed sometimes, right?"

Runner looked at her in surprise. "Don't you? Everybody does that when they get old enough."

"Oh, sure." Amy decided the time for explaining the effects of the contraceptives, or why men didn't have periods, would come later, like so many other things. "But I was just going to ask, how many times have you done it, after you ran away?"

Runner bit her lip, thinking back. "Since then? Three times, I think."

Okay, Amy thought. Useful info in a lot of ways. Runner has been out here on her own two to three months, she told herself. To Amy it was encouraging that Runner could survive and keep from getting caught for that long -- Amy had been picturing Runner's time on the loose as being more like a few weeks. And it did pretty much pin down Runner's age as eighteen, to satisfy Amy's curiosity. She realized the girls in the pens weren't taken into servitude exactly on their eighteenth birthdays, if anyone even kept track of when that was. Each age cohort in one of the pens would include girls with several different mothers, born at different times within a period of, probably, a few months. Most likely Runner had escaped within a few months after her eighteenth birthday.

On the other hand, Amy thought, knowing Runner had been out here for years would be nicer still. But three months is very good.

Around late morning, as Amy and Runner were pushing through an especially dense patch of undergrowth, Amy suddenly stopped, squeezed her eyes shut and sighed in exasperation. I've been, she told herself, such a complete idiot!

Just ahead of her, Runner stopped and looked back, then turned to look in all directions, instantly alert, whispering, "What is it?"

Amy shook her head. "No, I didn't see anything. I just thought of how we could make this so much easier. Maybe. We need to get a key."

"What's a key?" The word was a little beyond the range of Runner's vowels, and she pronounced it closer to "kay."

Amy thrust her wrist forward. "These things are called 'padlocks.' The men can take them off, and they use a key to do that." Amy had no idea whether all padlocks on the island were identically keyed, but it seemed a strong possibility. If a farmer found a runaway slavegirl, it would be easier to unlock her hobble chain, which Amy knew they did on occasion, if the farmer already had a key to it. An even better reason -- surely keys were lost sometimes, and it would be so much easier for the farmer who lost one if he could just drop by a central supply and pick up another. Amy had believed from the first that Andrew had obtained authentic Island slaveware for her, which was manufactured on the mainland, and that would include whatever padlocks the farmers used. So it seemed as though there was a very good chance that, if there was a common key, Amy's locks could be opened using the same key as for all of the slavegirls.

If I can get a key for these, Amy told herself, I'm as good as home. I can get out of these cuffs and the collar, Runner can get me some clothes, and then we can just be two teenaged boys off on an adventure, hiking over the mountains and through the countryside to the boat docks on the far side of the island.

Until she'd met Runner, Amy had never given a thought to obtaining a key. She couldn't have imagined a way to do so. Now that she had Runner to steal things for her, it had taken this long for her thoughts to shift in that direction.

"I don't know where they would keep their keys. They might carry them around with them, but they don't really need them very often during the day, so they might just leave them in their cabin." Amy knelt on the ground and carefully drew an outline of a generic key in the mud. Drawing it oversized so she could show detail, she said, "It's really a lot smaller than this, probably about this big." She drew a smaller version about two inches long. "It's made of metal, like the padlock," she went on, teaching Runner a new word to replace "the shiny."

Mid-afternoon, Amy spotted Runner returning from raiding the nearest farmhouse. The huge grin on Runner's face needed none of Amy's reading abilities to interpret. Amy jumped up and hugged Runner. "You got one!"

Runner was ecstatic. "I didn't find one in the first cabin, so I went in another. I looked all over. I found this too." She retrieved a girlmeat steak from her bag. Now that Runner had discovered the kinds of places where farmers stored meat in their cabins, Amy suspected there would be a lot more meat in their diet. Runner's grin widened as she reached into the bag again. She had to fumble around for a moment, as the sought-after treasure had apparently settled down below some of the bag's other contents, but at last she found it. "Here's the kay."

Amy took the key and hugged Runner again. The key, she found, was coated in grease and salt from the girlmeat, so she popped in in her mouth to clean in, and rubbed it between her hands to dry it. She raised her left wrist to try the key in the lock, but found her hand was shaking too badly. She sat on the ground, tried to relax, and attempted it again.

Her heart pounded harder as she saw that it did seem to be the right kind of key. Its tip fit perfectly into the keyhole on the padlock. Amy frowned as it slid partway in and stopped.

She pushed harder, and realized something felt wrong. If it was the wrong key, it might go all the way in and fail to turn the tumblers, or it might be blocked by some internal impediment. In the latter case, it should be blocked firmly, not in the mushy way Amy was sensing. Amy continued trying, pushing harder, still meeting with some soft sort of resistance.

Amy withdrew the key and looked at it. Seeing something she couldn't quite account for on its tip, she held it up close to her eye.

There was a tiny glint at the tip that didn't match the rest of the key. It seemed to be a small flake of a different type of metal.

Amy's jaw dropped, her eyes closed, as the puzzle of the key resolved itself in her mind.

The resistance she was encountering was metal shavings jammed well down into the keyhole.

Glumly, she tried the rest of her locks, discovering without surprise that they were all fouled up in the same way. Andrew's last little prank. These locks couldn't be opened.

Amy wondered why she wasn't crying, then told herself, because I knew all along. Among all of Andrew's preparations, this one was kind of a no-brainer.

She heaved a long sigh. Holding the key out to Runner, she said, "It's not going to work. Could you take this back and put it exactly where you found it?" Just in case the locks of the slavegirls were not identically keyed, Amy didn't want any slavegirl to face the same problem of unremovable locks that Amy did.

DAY 12

Amy could read, on Runner's face on her return from her latest cabin raid, a smile that said she had met with partial success.

As they walked back to their small encampment beside the rocky step of the forest/mountain break, Runner showed Amy the latest girlmeat steak, and then held out an implement that glinted in the rare sunlight. "I still didn't find the... boltcutter, but is this the right other thing?"

The idea of finding boltcutters in a cabin seemed an extreme long-shot. Amy strongly suspected that a farmer faced with padlocks he couldn't open on a slave just shrugged and said, well then, I'll leave them as is. It was really just a matter of whether the girl's hobble chain could be removed -- Amy didn't think any of the other hardware ever was taken off anyway. Nevertheless she had had Runner look for boltcutters on each raid in the last couple of days, and would continue to do so. But she wasn't going to delay the mountain crossing for it.

But Runner had found scissors, on her first attempt. Amy reached for them carefully, avoiding jabbing herself with the sharp point. She smiled. "This is it." She decided not to try to explain to Runner why scissors were somehow plural.

The need for scissors had just occurred to Amy as she watched the slavegirls laboring to push a wagon up the mountain trail, the first she and Runner had seen together. Amy had known there was a good chance of finding scissors, imported from the mainland, in a farmhouse. All of the slavegirls Amy had seen had their hair trimmed very short, and there surely would be tools around to do the trimming much more easily than the stolen knife Runner had used to cut her own hair down to farmer-length. (It had originally hung down a little below her waist, she'd told Amy.) As with the key and boltcutters, Amy had not been able to find a way to describe scissors to Runner in a purely verbal way, and she had drawn outlines of their shape in the mud, both open and closed, again pointing out they were made of metal.

Amy had not given her hair much thought since realizing early on that it neither helped nor hurt her. She was going to look like a runaway slave on sight in any case, and while her hair's length stood out in contrast to local slavegirl styles, it would only mark her as a long-term fugitive rather than an outsider. But with Runner to provide cover as her "owner" as they set out to cross the mountains, Amy had suddenly realized that she needed to look exactly like a slavegirl, in every way, or risk drawing that close attention that traveling with Runner was supposed to avoid.

Amy sat on the ground, holding the scissors, and tried to force herself to start. I have to do this, she told herself, I really have to, and however bad it ends up looking, the salon can fix it when I get home. There were several girls at the Academy, Amy reminded herself, who kept their hair very short, and the salon helped them style it so it looked really cute. Well, Amy thought, maybe not quite as short as mine's about to be. But it'll grow out.

With a sigh, Amy lifted up a handful of hair behind her head and began cutting through it.

Runner was watching intently, and after a few minutes, asked, "Can I do it, Amy?"

Maybe that would actually be better, Amy thought. At least she can see what she's doing, to make it look right. As she handed over the scissors, Amy had Runner touch the point carefully. "Watch out for that, you can really hurt yourself, like the knife. And don't get your fingers in here while you're cutting," she finished, putting one finger between the blades. "I need it to look like the slavegirls we've seen." Runner, frowning in concentration and using both hands to arrange the fingers of her right hand through the handles the way Amy had done, took a large handful of Amy's hair and tried cutting it, unsuccessfully. Amy told her, "Don't try to cut so much at once. Try about this much." She took a strand of her hair between her fingers and held it out towards Runner.

After a few attempts, Runner managed to cut through the strand of hair, and gasped excitedly, "I get it!"

About thirty minutes later, Amy felt her hair with her hand, suppressing a groan. Anybody who knew her, she was sure, was going to say "What the hell??" when they saw this. She walked to a small nearby pond and knelt to take a look. Wincing, she said to herself, yes, this looks really awful. Her hair varied randomly in length, nowhere as long as two inches. And, Amy saw, it was absolutely perfect for her current needs. She looked, in every way, like a Purity Island slavegirl now.

Amy looked, thoughtfully, at the scissors Runner was still holding. She stood and reached for them. "I want to try something."

She inserted one of the blades of the scissors within the shackle of the padlock on her left wrist. Gritting her teeth, she pulled up on the handle, the blade's point aligned along the metal wristcuff for safety. Straining, she tried to lever the padlock open.

With a sudden loud snap, the scissors came free. For just a second, the words Yes! Yes! floated through Amy's mind, until she saw what had broken. The blade itself had snapped, across its width, the last two inches of it missing... there it was, on the ground, about five feet away. The padlock was intact, barely scratched. A burning sensation on her wrist caught her attention. The sharp remaining stub of the scissors blade had scratched the skin on her inner wrist just above the artery, not quite breaking the skin. Just a little deeper and she could be bleeding out from a slit wrist now, leaving Runner to her own devices once more.

Her heart sinking, Amy told herself she was not trying anything like that again. Especially on the lock on her collar. She wasn't about to take a chance on cutting her throat.

Breathing a sigh of relief that at least she hadn't managed to kill herself, Amy sighed, kissed Runner, and said, "Thank you for finding that. Now let's eat some of that meat."

DAY 14

Runner rose up on her knees briefly to see over the rock wall, through the light rainfall, then sat down and shook her head. She and Amy took turns occasionally watching for approaching wagons.

Amy continued surveying the game board, frowning. She couldn't seem to make a move without Runner winning some rocks, either on this turn or the next.

Amy thought of the playing surface, mud with a light coating of standing rainwater, as a "board" out of habit, remembering the board games of her childhood, though in this case she was simply looking at a half-dozen finger-drawn rings in the mud, arranged in a circle, some of them containing marble-sized pebbles and some pebble-free. Yesterday Runner had eagerly introduced the game to Amy, to fill the time between watching the occasional small groups of men and slavegirls traveling up or down the mountain trail.

Runner had loved the game, growing up in the pen, though in recent years she couldn't often find another girl willing to play it with her. She always won. Other than saying she'd learned the game when she was "a little," Runner was unable to tell Amy how old she'd been when she had first persuaded one of the bigger girls to let her play. Knowing how children are, Amy guessed that by the time Runner was five or six and the bigger girls thirteen or fourteen, the older girls might have trusted her to be serious about the game and not simply throw the rocks playfully at other girls. In any case, Runner said that after a time, she had regularly been beating the Big Girls. And she'd never lost to any girl her own age.

Amy sat hunched over, the fingers of both hands pressed against the sides of her head as if she could goose her brain into working harder. I'm a professional school graduate, she told herself. I was number two in my class. I got all A's in high school. I should be able to beat her, at least once anyway. Okay, okay, Runner has had years of practice at this. But it's such a simple game.

It was indeed simple, in the sense that Runner had explained the rules yesterday in five minutes. But strategically it was deceptively complex, like checkers. Amy couldn't see how to set the kinds of traps that Runner kept making her fall into.

A sound made Amy look up, and she rose to her knees. She gestured for Runner to join her. Side by side, they watched from behind the tangle of shrubbery they had set up atop the three-foot step. From the trail, Amy believed, it looked like a normal bush grown up from below, and it gave them sufficient cover to watch the trail without being observed.

Approaching them from beyond the farm co-op that sat directly across from the beginning of the trail, a teenaged boy, judging from his lack of facial hair, was walking, followed by a slavegirl and, trotting behind her, a doggirl on all fours, presumably on guard for any false move by the slave. The boy was using a long, straight tree branch as a walking stick, and carrying what might be a whip wrapped around his other arm. The slavegirl was the beast of burden for the trip, not surprisingly. She had a bag slung over her shoulder by its strap, of the same type Runner used to carry the various items stolen in raids -- Runner's bag, of course, itself being one of the earliest such stolen items, along with her clothes -- and she was pulling a wheeled cart behind her at the end of a long handle. The cart could better be described as an open basket, and was filled with peaches.

As they drew closer, Amy could see that the girl's wrist cuffs were fastened by chains to the handles of the cart. Unlike the teams of slavegirls pushing the larger wagons, this girl sported a hobble chain.

In nearly four days of watching, this was the second such group Amy had seen, the other having come down the trail from the other side of the mountains. Amy could tell this was a different group, not the same boy and slave as before.

All of the other expeditions had consisted of an older man driving a six-girl wagon, with one or two doggirls riding along or trotting alongside.

Possibly, Amy thought, the larger groups were meeting periodic supply needs for an entire co-op, traveling to one of the trading posts and back to exchange farm products for the supplies. The boy-and-slave groups might be from a single farm, perhaps in quest of a needed farm implement that the co-op lacked and wasn't planning to obtain soon enough. It seemed to make sense that the farmer would send a boy out on the trip rather than leaving his farm leaderless.

The boys' fathers might have insisted on the accompanying doggirl. The slavegirls were hobbled, so escape wouldn't be easy, but in both cases the slavegirl had been bigger than the boy. They might not be afraid of the boys, and like nearly all of the slavegirls Amy had seen, these looked to have the strength that came from years of hard work. But Amy's observations had suggested all of the slaves were afraid of doggirls.

As an alternative explanation, maybe every boy here had a pet doggirl, and wouldn't think of going on a trip without her.

Runner, her forearms crossed atop the step and her chin resting on them, whispered, "We could be like them. I can get one of those... what do you call it? What that girl is pulling?" She pointed at the trio now making progress up the trail.

"A cart."

"Cart. I can get one. Men leave them next to the cabins. We can take one and fill it with peaches, and then we can go up the trail."

Amy hadn't been ready to suggest that when she'd watched the first such group yesterday, but seeing a second one confirmed that it wasn't unusual for a boy and slave to travel together. She bit her lip and whispered back, "Except it looks like we'd need a doggirl too. Every group we've seen always has doggirls, even little groups like this." Amy knew she and Runner couldn't afford to attract any undue attention. If the lack of a doggirl in a traveling party raised eyebrows...

"Doggirls like me."

"Because you're wearing clothes. But even if they like you, I don't think you could get one to leave the farm for you."

Runner was silent for a time, then shifted gears. "That one wagon yesterday had an empty space."

Amy nodded. She knew Runner meant that she could approach another such wagon and volunteer Amy's services to help push.

One of the previous day's wagons had indeed had just five girls pushing instead of the full complement of six. It seemed to be a temporary condition. There was a sixth slavegirl trailing behind the wagon -- very unhappily. Her wristcuffs were joined behind her, and a chain was attached to them that ran through her legs and was secured to the back of the wagon. Any failure on her part to keep up with the wagon would result in the chain pulling painfully taut through her crotch. She was managing to keep pace, despite wearing a hobble chain the other girls didn't have, which forced her to take quick, short steps, lifting her feet high on each step so the chain wouldn't snag on any uneven portion of ground. She was winded, and crying. It was obvious she was being punished for something, most likely not trying hard enough. The other slavegirls looked back to glare at her periodically -- her absence from her post was making all of them work harder.

Amy shook her head slightly. "They might let me push for awhile. Maybe until we could get to the other side of the mountains. But the man would ask you a lot of questions you don't know the answers to. Things I don't know the answers to. Like, you can say we want to get to the trading post, but I'm not sure if they call it that. Oh, and he'd want to get my chain off if I'm going to push." She reached down and jingled it.

"We can say we lost the key."

"It's probably pretty easy to get another. He'd know that. And he'd probably still wonder where our doggirl was."

"So let's go get one."

Amy closed her eyes. "Runner, it's not like taking a piece of meat. You can't just stuff a doggirl in your bag, or expect her to stay quiet while you're leading her away."

Runner turned her head slowly to look at Amy. "Amy, do you want to get back to the Academy?"

Amy gasped, stung. She wanted to return to the Academy so badly that the thought of it occupied every waking second, no matter what else she was doing. But here was Runner questioning her will, questioning her desire to return, as if Runner wanted it more than Amy did.

Amy saw, then, how scared she was. Terrified of making a false move that would lead to her permanent captivity on the island. I'm so afraid of being caught, Amy told herself, that I'm freezing up, just when I need to start taking action.

I may have to take some big chances, she informed herself. The time is getting closer when I have to make some dangerous moves. Either that or get used to spending the rest of my life here.

Taking a deep breath, Amy said, "I want to get home. More than anything I've ever wanted in my life."

Runner simply nodded, and waited expectantly.

Amy closed her eyes and breathed deeply again. As self-sufficient as Runner was, Amy knew the girl was still looking to Amy for leadership.

Amy put her arm across Runner's shoulder, pulled her closer and rubbed her cheek against Runner's. "Okay." She turned and sank down to sit with her back leaning against the rocky wall. "Let's start talking about doggirls. How we can get one."