The guards brought food. On one hand, it wasn’t much. Two slices of bread. Half an apple.
On the other hand, compared to what growhouses in the VT produced, the sparse meal tasted like something out of a fairy tale. And the irony of feeding apples to people the Covvies called ‘sinners’ was not lost on Buckeye at all.
It was not quite an hour, at her best guess, after the guards had retrieved the last of the empty food trays, that they began removing Vicers from cells.
But not all at once.
They came for the woman in the furthest of the better-appointed cells from Buckeye first. Some of the others began to sit up, to stretch limbs, in anticipation of another mass herding along to god-knew-what new ordeal, but it didn’t come.
The Vicers waited. Many exchanged looks. Shook heads at each other.
After what felt like twenty or thirty minutes, a second set of guards pulled the woman from the cell adjacent to the first empty one. The wait after this was quick.
Within moments, they watched the furthest cell door swing inward, and the grey-clad men returned with the first woman to leave. They shut her inside and the rest of the Vicers stood or turned their heads to stare.
The woman was wet. Shaking.
Her face and chest were red, and she made eye contact with no one. Her arms clutched around her and she shuffled to her thin mattress. Folded herself down into it and turned her back to her fellow captives. The bones of her spine ran in a visible row down her curled back.
The transition happened again; the men bringing a third Vicer out in exchange for the second, who also returned dripping from head to toe and barely able to stand.
Some of her peers began to put heads together on opposite sides of their dividers. Whatever they said to each other was too far away, too muffled by intervening dividers for Buckeye to hear.
Down the row they went like that, some of the former lustworkers beginning to scuttle away from the door when it opened inside their cell. The guards came in and hauled them out with an indifferent grip, all the same.
They’d taken six when Buckeye heard the locks tumbling.
A familiar-faced guard held the metal door to her cell open with a splayed palm. The slightest angle of a brow dared her to make trouble.
“Get up,” he said.
His partner waited in the corridor. Hand near his baton.
She wanted to fight. To run. To do something brave.
Buckeye wanted to ignore the threat of pain and cursed herself for a weakling when she couldn’t.
Who am I s’posed to be? Maggie Fucking Bone? I’m just a goddamn mail carrier!
It was as though she expected to have to regale people back in The Vice about this entire nightmare, and they’d judge her for a coward when they heard she didn’t put up a fight. But that was the joke, wasn’t it?
The guard in the hall cleared his throat.
She’d never be going back to The Vice.
Buckeye let out a breath and made her way to her feet. Outside her cell, they took her by the upper arms anyway. It was not a good sign that she was getting used to people parading her around naked.
As the two men led her, the path seemed to point again to the room from her previous trials. Where they had turned right before, however, the guards now went left at the far end of the crypt. They came to another wood door, much like the one that had led below to where they’d run her into the ground that first day.
This door opened to more stairs, but these ascended. The guard on her right gave up his grip on her arm. Flipped a light switch inside the stairwell, taking for granted again what came as pure luxury back in The Vice. He turned and fixed her with an eye.
“Behave,” he said. Blunt. None of that formal rhetoric she’d heard from Mather. He started up the steps, and other guard moved his hand to the back of her neck. Gave a small push.
There was nothing to do but follow along between them.
They climbed at least a story and exited from another landing into living architecture the likes of which Buckeye had only seen abandoned.
Stone arched everywhere, soaring overhead. Ornate. In the distance, columns marched. Pews rippled away in rows, dim light calling out only their edges like a drawing. The guards didn’t let her gawk, but shored up their grips again, veering her to the left, away from all the classical marvel.