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The room and its pale stone was a blur of sameness. Breath became an abrading fire in her throat. She stumbled. Ran on for a moment at a weird, gravity-defying forward lurch. Then fell.

She managed to twist at the waist at the last second, landing on the meat of her hip rather than busting open kneecaps on the stone. The heels of her palms had no such luck, taking the abrasion when she braced against hitting her head.

Buckeye coughed, throat constricting in waves as it tried to work saliva up from some reserves it no longer had. She sat there heaving while a crushing weight of masonry closed in, unchecked.

No. No, you fucking bastards!

With a groan, she rolled onto her knees. Got her feet under her ass and stood, swaying in place. Thirsty.

The ceiling might have been a foot overhead.

Buckeye fell into a drunken jog. Ruin stopped where it was, for now, but claustrophobia was there, bearing down.

Wind sawed in and out of her. The edges of her vision fuzzed to a red-speckled grey. Blood rushing in her ears cocooned her in a pocket of warm bankruptcy.

When she collapsed again, there was no pushing herself up.

Her arms tried to drag her along like some primordial thing slithering two-legged out of the sea. There was no moisture left in her for tears. The ceiling closed in, the lid to a rotating coffin.

She let everything be. Rolled her upper body to watch the descent. If she blacked out before the end, would it still hurt? When the room crushed her flat like a bug?

In her delirium, her surrender, Buckeye thought of Scylla.

Shoulda just gone upstairs. Probably wouldn’t be here.

Everything stopped.

The ceiling kissed her hip. She was too limp to even blink, and then it reversed direction.

Stone twisted up and away, and Buckeye was a puddle. Dull sounds joined her in the space. A guard’s features blotting out overhead light. Arms gathered her. Lifted. She had no ability to care.

Stairs, crypt, door, and bodies, backwards everything went.

Standing priests in black lined one of the short walls of the room. Vicers, stripped bare now, knelt at their feet. Buckeye’s head lolled, her eyes rolled in their sockets on the way down, the guard spilling her onto the floor like so much soiled laundry.

The hem of a white cassock drifted into view, just above the horizon of the floor. Brusque hands tugged at her clothes. Her limbs flopped, joints banged against stone.

Buckeye had nothing left.

Someone turned her with about as much sympathy as they’d show a bad mattress, until she was fully prone. The floor was cool and hard, and squished her ear to the side of her skull. Mashed her naked tits flat beneath her. Bruised her knees and hips.

She wasn’t running. She didn’t care.

Limbs caged her hips. Fabric chafed. Where her ass met her thighs, something rooted, blunt and hot. A body. A cock.

She stared at the white hem, muscles slack.

Just like pirates. Crush the defenses; take what was valuable.

Rigid flesh nudged, pushed. Sweat was a halting lubricant where arousal couldn’t grow. Another human being was inside her. More. More, until open trousers met her cheeks. Thrusting began, mechanical.

Somewhere overhead, Mather spoke.

“Service to the Church in New Covenant is the will of the Lord,” he said, cassock dusting the ground as it floated around her head and out of sight. “The will of the Lord is not a choice made by men. By sinners.” The stiff prick worked in and out of Buckeye. “This lesson will be repeated as often as necessary.”

A faceless priest rode her limp body. Stone ground her skin over her cheekbone, the knuckles of her big toes. Grunting came, and more force behind the snapping of hips. There was no sound in the room now but the slapping of flesh, the rasp of breath.

A palm splayed between her shoulder blades, pressing her further to the floor. Male groin humped at her, two, three, a half a dozen more times. Then there was the kick, familiar. Unstoppable.