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“What? Fuck that shit! Are you kidding me?” The woman in the cell adjacent to Buckeye’s thumped at the transparent dividing wall with an angry heel. Buckeye jumped, but the woman was pacing again. “They wanna bring us here and screw us, and then tell us a buncha horseshit that didn’t even happen?”

“Shut up!” Someone further down the row of cells hollered—and it had to have been a holler, because the dividers were thick. The woman yelling from the next cell sounded muffled as it was.

The pair volleyed a brief round of insults, a vent to fears over which they had no control, but Buckeye quit paying attention. She was busy trying to untangle the knots of reality.

Had that rag been soaked in mint? Like Mather said?

She picked at a hangnail on her thumb, wincing when it went just past ‘too far’.

But then what about August and Wayland spraying their hoods in the truck? Was that the real deal? The Song? Why would those two assholes stand around debating it if it was fake?

There was no way her arousal had been natural. Not crammed in there with a dozen people, stinking and sweating and bound. Arm dead asleep.

“… brief time of upheaval in the mid-twenty-fifties, when popular sentiment called to forgive the Sinners in the Territories …”

Buckeye grimaced and balled her hands into fists.

But if Mather was telling the truth? Was that enough? Just standing there watching people fuck?

But she hadn’t been just standing there. She’d been restrained. And those weren’t just ‘people’ on the red mats. Those were Covvie priests rutting a bunch of VT prisoners.

There was no way it was a good sign that the memory alone made her more aware of the warmth between her legs.

You loved it. When he had his cock in you. Couldn’t get enough.

“… the second bombing of the original wall in twenty-sixty-one led to the construction of …”

Or was Mather lying about the drug to demoralize her? He’d said a lot of quiet things to Vicers all along that row, and she’d heard none but the words directed at her. Maybe he’d told all of them it was a placebo.

She pressed her knees together as though she could somehow create a diamond of truth out of any of this if she did it hard enough.

Her head came to rest on her upper arm, face turned to the row of cells. There were four better-appointed units, now. To reward the four most recent volunteers.

A man in the nearest one had an erection in hand, head thrown back against the divider, stroking, unashamed. Another woman closer to Buckeye huddled against the back of her door and held her knees to her chest. She was rocking, the movement tiny, but consistent.

They’re gonna break us all. Volunteers or not.

“… sending out task forces to investigate reports of illegal communication networks

as recently as twenty-eighty-two …”

And if she could do what? Manage to disarm a guard as he came to retrieve her? Somehow evade any other guards and run naked through corridors and a parking garage, and then what? Right out into the middle of Virtue?

She snorted.

Yeah, that would totally work.

Buckeye closed her eyes against the soft lights the guards never shut off. At least the people with simple mattresses had a sheet they could pull over their heads.

‘You did not disappoint me.’

Her teeth ground. She could not make that voice go away. And those eyes were there to pierce and judge, every time she let her lids black out her surroundings. Blue-grey like forty days of rain, those eyes delved to the very marrow of who she was.

‘You will open yourself in any way they ask, Sinner, because you are a servant now.’

With or without the drugs, Buckeye Wheeler was afraid.

Many hours passed. Buckeye slept. It could have been the next morning, but there was no way for her to tell.