The Third Pill
Esther Harshom

Was her money enough to make him risk losing his freedom? There was only one way to find out...
EXTRACT:
She smiled and removed a small bottle from her bag. It rattled as she tipped its brightly-coloured contents out onto the surface of the table, and positioned them in a row in front of me.
‘Three pills,’ she said at last. ‘One blue, one red, one green. The colour is meaningless, but it’s a good way to distinguish them. We wouldn’t want you to think there was any sleight of hand or trickery involved.’
‘What are they?’
‘Two of them are sugar pills, nothing more.’
‘And the third?’
‘The third is... well, I supposed you’d call it a proprietary formula. Took a great deal of effort to get it working the way I wanted it to – not to mention the expense of it all. But the end result has been worth it, I think.’
‘What does it do?’
‘Hypersuggestibility,’ she said, as though that one word explained everything.
‘I don’t follow.’
‘It makes whoever takes it much more amenable to other people’s instructions,’ she said slowly, making sure it was sinking in. ‘Effectively, it takes away free will – depending on body size, it tends to last between eighteen and twenty-four hours. One little pill, and you become a mindless puppet. A plaything.’
‘And you want me to take it?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, God no. Where’s the fun in that?’ She tapped her long black fingernails against the wood of the table. ‘I want us to play a little game.’