The weather suddenly changed, and more people started taking the bus. As such, the young woman in her pink raincoat managed to blend in quite easily. She had been sitting on the seat in the bus shelter, swinging her legs, making herself look a lot younger than she was.

Getting on, she held her phone in front of her face to show the driver her ticket, so he didn’t notice anything unusual.

Upstairs was practically empty; the woman snuggled down in a seat and settled back to watch the world go by. Maybe because she forgot, or maybe on purpose, she pushed the hood of her raincoat back as she was getting warm…

Further down the bus, Barbara gasped. The young woman was wearing a hood! She saw the laces running down the back of her head. She gasped again as she saw the metal collar and the padlock swinging from it…

Suddenly self-conscious and realising what she had done, the woman pulled the hood of her raincoat back up. Barbara could see she was doing up the drawstrings, as the hood pulled tight round her head. The raincoat also completely obscured the view of the hood, so everything looked perfectly normal…

Barbara then saw the woman’s bag. It had ‘hello kitty’ logos on it. She suddenly realised there were also the same logos on her raincoat. How old was this woman, anyway?

Every now and again, the woman’s hands reached round to the back of her neck, and she gave the padlock a small tug through the raincoat. She definitely didn’t appear to be happy having to wear the collar, or the hood…

Slowly moving forward on the bus, Barbara pulled out her warrant card, to show she wasn’t just ‘being nosy’, and sat down next to the woman, showing it to her.

“Are you alright?”, she asked.

The woman ignored her, looking at her phone.

Barbara tried again, this time tapping the woman on the shoulder.

This time, the response was electric. The woman suddenly got up, barged past her, and raced down the stairs of the bus. Before Barbara could catch up with her, the bus had stopped, and the woman had jumped off and disappeared into the backstreets.

Barbara thought that was the end of it. She would still have to report it when she got back to the station tomorrow, though; perhaps somebody else knew what was going on…

What Barbara hadn’t realised was everything that had happened was being monitored, through a camera built into the woman’s collar. This camera had taken a photo of Barbara’s warrant card, and one of the organisation’s hackers had already got her home address…

That night, they came for her. She was grabbed, thrown out of bed, stunned and forced into a transparent latex bodysuit before she could stop them. She was then hooded up the same as the other woman and dressed in the same raincoat. She screamed into the gag built into the hood as the padlock clicked shut…

The men left her there, then, sobbing, on the floor. The raincoat was sealed shut; she couldn’t tear it, the fasteners were all locked and there was a strap between her legs stopping her pulling it off. She could raise and lower the hood of the raincoat, but that was all.

The bodysuit was so tight it was like pinching her own skin, and the pink leather hood was so tight it hurt, as was the metal collar round her neck. She stared at herself in a mirror with horror and, at the same time, saw the little light by the built in camera go on…