Buckeye’s feet were on the ground, but something dull was cutting under her arms. Her body slumped forward, and the inside of her mouth tasted like dusty upholstery. Moonlight showed her earth and rocks instead of wood or carpet under her shoes.

Metal clanked somewhere close in front of her and she groaned, a thick sound, her tongue filling the back of her throat. The tightness across her chest was her shirt: something held her upright with it.

Someone.

Her head lolled in Buckeye’s best effort to look up and see. It hadn’t been this dark outside The Rose. One of her knees buckled and fabric yanked up into her pits. A fist hoisted her again, and she tried to make words. They came out a sludge of malformed syllables.

“… think it’s wearing off.”

Spiderwebs laid over her hearing, the voice just on some sticky opposite side of clarity. She blinked and flexed her fingers as though she’d just regrown them. Wrong? Yes. This was wrong.

“Then I guess you need to get the fucking door open already.”

Here, this second voice vibrated in a familiar way. It belonged to the person with a grip on the back of her shirt. Deep and male. Handsome.

Buckeye’s heart thudded and more of the fog burned out of her skull.

August.

The dance. The porch.

The sonofa—

She dragged her head up on an uncooperative neck to see wheels. A heavy rear bumper. A rolling cargo door clattering up its track.

Buckeye swayed but got her knees to lock for support. From the maw of the armored hauler, at least a dozen pairs of eyes stared back, glassy from darkened sockets. Every one of them told her the same thing.

Run.

Adrenaline redlined. The purge was violent, systolic.

She dropped. Twisted. Ran.

Clear night air seared her nostrils. Dry earth pounded under her boots. There were lights in the distance and she surged in that direction, the glow from each starring uniformly from the grit watering her eyes.

Male voices swore behind her and the thud of rapid pursuit matched the sound of blood in her ears.

Enforcers? After all this time?

Buckeye lurched forward, remnants of whatever drug keeping her stride sloppy. The footfalls closing the distance behind her were sober and driven. Greed would catch up with her. It always did.

Her breath sawed in and out of her throat. She dodged around small, thorny shrubs in the moonlight. Tore through the barrens, no idea how far she was from The Rose. The lights she ran toward could be anything.

A second set of lungs worked in the night. Her pursuer was close enough for her to hear his breathing.

Fuck!

She pushed harder, muscles on fire to keep up speed. Something batted at her right elbow as it swung back. A hand. Buckeye ripped away with a shout, but it was enough. She wasn’t watching her feet.

Rocks and earth rushed at her face. Drunken reflexes did no more to help than force an awkward yell out of her throat when palms and knees skidded over the ground. She scrabbled to stand, to keep going.

And then a boot kicked the inside of her knee. The sole of another planted squarely on her ass and shoved her forward, off-balance. Her hands weren’t fast enough to break this fall, and Buckeye collapsed face-first onto hard dirt.

“Enough!”

August shifted his boot to the small of her back, pinning her like a bug. She screamed pure rage, abraded palms still trying to pull her body from under his weight.

“Goddamn it, I said enough.”

The boot became a knee and he grappled her arms. Buckeye flailed, but the man wrenched her wrists around to her back. The high of adrenaline bled out from the stalled chase, and her prior state flooded in to fill its place. Her world spun, and she groaned into the dirt, grit sticking to the spittle on one side of her mouth.

More tugging at her right arm, and then the sound of cloth ripping. August yanked the sleeve away while she humped at the ground, straining without effect to right herself up and out of his hold. When Buckeye felt the fabric threading beneath her forearms, she went feral.

“Fuck you! No!” She bucked like he’d struck her with lightning. “They ain’t ever getting’ their money! I ain’t ever gonna have it! Fucking pig!”

“Ain’t nobody wants money from you, woman.” He ignored her writhing, voice resolute while he finished the binding. What was left of her shirtsleeve cinched down tight, and she felt him tie off a knot.

“So what?” Buckeye seethed. “They just gonna have me killed then? One of their little shows? Make a fucking example?”

A fist was in her hair. She jerked useless arms against the ties. “Listen,” he said, giving a sharp tug for punctuation, “you ain’t getting’ out of this. Y’hear? You’re still drugged up and I can run faster’n you. Now I’m gonna pull you up. Are you gonna fuckin’ walk back to the truck with me? Or are you gonna be difficult?”

Breath came with effort, the severe angle of her neck crimping her windpipe. Silver lined the side of the bastard’s face, the rest of it silhouetted by the moon where he leaned over her. Buckeye tried to swallow and shake her head.

“No,” she said. “I’ll walk.”

“Good.”

The knee came off her back and the fist moved to her shirt again, gripping as it had when she’d come to, a calf led to slaughter. August hauled her to her feet. She bolted.

Or tried.

“For fuck’s sake!” He spun her into a stumble, a firm hold still on her shirt. “Fine, we’ll do it the hard way.”

For an eyeblink, she was free. Then a shoulder was in her gut and she was rising, feet coming off the ground. Her new view was cracked earth passing under the tall man’s striding boots.

Buckeye tried to rock onto her outer hip, even if it meant falling the long way, getting the wind knocked out of her. There was no way she’d just let this asshole carry her off without a fight.

His arm tightened around her hip.

“Buckeye, I will hurt you.”

She kicked a foot back and connected, probably with his jaw—she couldn’t see. All it earned her was a grunt. Then pain shot up her left leg. Buckeye shrieked.

Something clamped down on her ankle. Through leather and sock and everything. Clamped and held, tighter, tighter. Blue-yellow shock lanced the nerve and her spine arced backward, a mindless response to a blade-sharp stimulus.

He kept hold of her that way, leg pulled diagonal across his chest, for the rest of the walk back to the truck. She squealed and swore the entire time, calling him everything but a fried egg, but the man was unrelenting.

“I warned you,” he said, when he dumped her onto the floor of the cargo box.

“Fuck you!” She spat the words at him, her injured ankle tucking up on instinct, but with bound arms there was no sitting upright. Instead she tried to roll, furious.

Another hand grabbed her under the arm, this one from inside the truck. The male voice she’d heard earlier said to August, “This isn’t going to work.”

No. Nothing was going to work. This is what happened when people had debt with a house of Greed and ran. The enforcers caught up with them.

“Well we’re out of the T-40,” said the blond jackal who’d chased her through the desert, “so you’re gonna have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

She had just enough time for her eyes to open wide before a heavy thing struck behind her ear. The face of the traitor glittered to blackness, and Buckeye Wheeler was gone.

* * *

Everything was wrong. This wasn’t her mail truck. This wasn’t The Rose. This wasn’t any sort of way to wake up from a nap.

The bumping had started it. The jostling, again and again; the snarl of an engine working hard. Some background process in Buckeye’s head decided at last these were not dream noises and stirred her back toward consciousness.

She was lying on her right side, warmth at her front and back. Her body wedged between two others like a single card slid into a deck.

Breathing came first, by instinct, and she swallowed to wet her throat.

There was something between her teeth. Pulling back at the corners of her mouth. It didn’t budge when her tongue went to push it out, and her eyes snapped wide awake with the rest of her.

There was nothing to see but black. Her head whipped to the side, pupils dilating to suck down light, but there was none. Fabric grazed her nose and, with the jerk of her face, she could feel it covering her ears, her hair, tucking down around her neck and into her shirt collar. Something held it in place around her throat and Buckeye decided it was time to panic.

She yelled and launched herself upright, ready to run and fight anyone who stood in her way.

Or at least that’s what her brain told her she was doing.

Her yell dampened into the cloth gag and Buckeye flopped like a fish. The body behind her let out a grunt, deep and male, when her head thudded back and knocked against what might have been a chin.

Her arms and legs did nothing to help her get up. They couldn’t. Something held her ankles together; her boots had no play in any direction. When she made to fling her arms from where they curled under her ribs, all she managed was a banged elbow on the cargo floor beneath her and a sharp tug between her legs.

Straps. The painful coming-up-short was straps. Yanking on both sides of her crotch, circling around her back. Heavy canvas bagged her like an angry cat. This was a straight jacket.

She was bouncing in the back of a truck like a rag doll. In a hood. And a gag. Wearing a straight jacket.

Buckeye began to throw what her grandmother would have referred to as a ‘wall-eyed fit’.

The gag ate her screams as she thrashed. The floor bruised joints, and the fabric of the hood abraded the tip of her nose. More noises came from the person behind her now, and in front, as well. Their sounds were damp and muffled like hers. The firm line of pressure under her shoulder blades Buckeye now recognized as another set of forearms, restrained the same as she was.

The wheels jolted over some rock or crevice and her knees bashed into the legs in front of her. A feminine yelp came through another gag, and some grumble came from the man at her back. His sound told a brief story of irritation, of wishing Buckeye would just settle and shut up already. Her fellow debtors had given up hope.

After a few more futile grunts and tugs at her bonds, she did settle, however. If from exhaustion over anything else. The air inside whatever crude hood they’d placed on her was humid. Rough fabric sucked against her nose and puffed back out with her breath. It smelled like they’d found it in an abandoned building somewhere, untouched since before the Delineation.

This was what happened to people who owed money to houses of Greed. At least people like Buckeye, who ran. The odds were with a person until they weren’t, but oh god, when Luck smiled … The trouble came when Luck was the only shovel available to dig oneself out of a hole. And the Lady was fickle. Woo her all you want, there was no telling who she’d be in love with the next day. The next hand or roll.

Luck had fallen out of love with Buckeye Wheeler, and the desperate mail carrier had tried to win her back hard. Tried and failed in spectacular fashion. It had come to a point where getting half a continent away had been the only avenue left. Not even to reconciliation, but to mere survival.

All her maneuvering had amounted to stalling, though, and Buckeye was fooling herself to say she hadn’t known this from the day she ran. No one would heed the rules of The Vice if the enforcers just let things go. They never did, and now here she was. Stacked together like cordwood with so many other unlucky sons o’ bitches who’d thought they could outrun Greed.

She let the truck’s sloppy suspension jounce her limp body about in time with the others’. Struggle was pointless. Even the scalding tears she didn’t bother to fight anymore. They just came, making tracks through the dirt on her face, without any squinching of eyes or hiccoughing in her chest. Buckeye let the darkness be a nest of safety, if only for a time, that hid from her whatever unpleasant fate lay at the end of this ride.

* * *

It was hard for her to say how much time had passed when the truck bumped to a stop. Nothing like real sleep had come, but the contrast of rough motion versus stillness was enough to bring her out of something akin to a trance. The arm she was lying on was asleep, so it had been at least long enough to accomplish that.

She made an attempt to stretch her calves by pointing her toes, and found her boots making contact with something shifting and rounded. A surprised grunt from somewhere past her feet had her suspecting it was the top of someone’s head, and Buckeye swallowed down another wave of fear and disgust at the enforcers’ methods.

Voices came from outside the cargo box, but nothing her straining would let her hear. A body to her right coughed through its gag, and she thought some other sounds elsewhere in the container might be sobbing. She shifted, the very beginnings of a full bladder another problem when she was already full up.

Heavy metallic clanking came just before the clatter of a roll-up door. Where there had been black nothing, now there was light-colored fabric, blurry, right in front of her eyes. Buckeye was not the only one to holler and wriggle against restraints. Daylight was close at hand. Freedom, right there. But then that was the joke, wasn’t it?

“You wanna spray this shit before we eat?” said the man who wasn’t August. Unless there were other enforcers who hadn’t said anything yet, Buckeye had decided there were only the two. How long had they been at it, to collect this many debtors in one place?

“Yeah, we might as well.” This was August now. Fucking two-faced cockstain. “Needs to cycle through once before we get there. And I’m not bettin’ our pay they got no way to tell.”

While Buckeye tried to make sense of why an enforcer would be ‘betting their pay’, a new series of sounds painted an equally confusing picture. Bootsteps on sandy dirt outside. Dull thunking and shifting of objects within the cab, which seemed to come from overhead because of the way they’d crammed the debtors in the container. Fluid sloshing from near the open door, and then the clipped report of someone climbing up into the cargo area, getting to their feet.

A truncated liquid hiss came from somewhere below her tied ankles, a muffled yelp right on its heels. The soles of shoes shuffled, and the other sounds repeated, one body over. Buckeye’s pulse leapt like a rabbit at the undefined new threat.

Spray? What are they spraying? What the fuck is this shit?

By the whimpers coming from all sides of her, the shift of limbs at her front and back, the mail carrier wasn’t the only one chewing on fear. Half a dozen more quick streams of some liquid against what she could now guess was fabric happened before Buckeye felt a boot wedging between her legs and those of the woman in front of her. Another strong spritz had the woman squealing, more in surprise than anything else, it sounded.

Reality set in when the boots shifted. Now there was one both in front of and behind her thighs. A hand gripped the top of her head through the hood and Buckeye squeaked, even knowing something was coming. Fingers and thumb swiveled her face toward the ceiling and ssplt!

Liquid splattered the outside of the hood. When her breath sucked fabric in again, everywhere around her mouth and nose was soaked. The scent of pupil-dilating mint and something acrid she couldn’t put name to overwhelmed, and Buckeye coughed into her gag. Others around her did the same, but the boots were moving on. Another spray behind her and the bound man snorted in protest.

In her new panic, there was no stopping her breath coming quick. Whatever they’d doused her with, Buckeye was inhaling by the deep, rapid lungful. No doubt this had been the plan, but what was her other option? Hold her breath until she passed out and it happened anyway?

She was too lost in her own distress to count how many more sprays before the boots moved back to the door. The grind of a chain signaled the sealing of their box, and darkness fermented collective fear all over again.

At least two or three people were crying. Outside, voices moved around the truck, sounding casual and unconcerned. Her own eyes watered, but this time it was from the sharp odor building inside the hood. The horror stories she’d heard about enforcer raids never mentioned anything like this, but in what couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes, the stories no longer mattered.

It started like a buzz. That warmth, low down, past her navel. Buckeye shifted against the jacket straps, where they ran between her thighs, more noticeable now. Itchy.

The buzz opened up to a tingle. She felt loose. Some of her nerves bled away, and her tongue tried the texture of fabric where it wedged between her teeth like a rope. The woman in front of her made a noise. It was only small, and quiet, but something in it had Buckeye taking note of the curve of an ass spooning into her hips.

Her nipples dragged against canvas.

What did they do?

Behind her, an erection nudged.

What the fuck did they do?

A single, hot trickle beaded past the lips of her pussy. A receding part of her knew terror, but now, first and foremost, Buckeye Wheeler was looking to get fucked.

So was everyone else lying bound in the back of the truck.

When the man at her back pressed his cock to her cheeks, Buckeye found herself pushing to meet him, lending friction. The enforcers had stuffed her into the jacket over top of her clothes. Britches still barred the way, but without the intervening fabric, she knew her hips would’ve been angling to get him inside, to reach where she couldn’t scratch.

Her breath came heavy now, and she could hear the same from lungs all around her. A warm backside pressed heavily into her groin, and Buckeye humped at it, mindless, seeking. The man wriggled closer, grinding and grunting, and all she could think of was cock. Holes stretching. Fluids sluicing.

Someone needed to fuck her, and right this goddamn minute.

The dark space was humid with groans. Writhing, restrained bodies. Buckeye saw pink and red and purple behind sticky eyelids. Sweat pooled and fear escalated, along with the need for anyone, anything to ravage her swollen cunt and just get her off already.

It went on, maddening, never enough friction. Not even from her pants, no matter how she tried to rub the seam along her clit. She came to a place of pure delirium, endless tears begging for release that wouldn’t come for who knew how long.

Somewhere in the midst of it, the door rolled up again. Buckeye didn’t care. None of them did. She worked her hips, bearing down on the woman in front of her. The man at her back jerked and hissed through his gag, rutting the heat of his bulge into her crack as though if clothing weren’t in the way, he would’ve had her pregnant already.

Not-August whistled. “Damn, son. Stuff gets right to work.”

Why is this idiot talking? He needs to get in here and help!

“You think they could tell if we, uh … pulled one or two of ‘em out? You know, for ‘personal use’?”

Buckeye groaned the instant she took his meaning and started hollering for his attention around the gag.

Yes. YES. Personal use. Use me. Fuck me, oh god ohgod!

“Don’t be fucking stupid,” said August. “We take ‘em, we get paid, then you can find something to stick your dick in.”

No! Now! Dick, NOW!

The other man grumbled something, but she could only hear August negating him. “Yeah, well I’m gonna need you to keep it together and ride back here anyway. We’re close enough and they’re expecting one driver.”

More muttered complaints, but the door clattered shut. A minute later, the truck rumbled back to life. They were moving. To where, it didn’t matter. No one around her had paused in their striving for relief, and neither had Buckeye. The bounce of wheels over rough terrain made the only difference.

After a time, there was a new struggle of sounds. Somewhere over the general chorus of moaning and teeming flesh, she heard a hurried song of profanity. No gag muffled this tongue, and there was slapping. Flesh on flesh. Dull cries of satisfaction came from under a hood.

Not-August had ignored the other man’s instructions just as soon as he thought the boss was looking the other way. A spike of envy, fueled by mystery drugs, had Buckeye wishing it was her getting pounded, getting the itch scratched.

The only way out was exhaustion, and by the time it came, the smallest chunk of her humanity had gone missing. She didn’t have the presence of mind, there in the humid black cargo box of a truck bound for god-knew-where, to wonder if she’d ever able to get it back.

* * *

With a boom and a lurch, Buckeye came gasping out of a ragged sleep. Similar cries went up from the bodies around her. Not-August swore, his voice moving toward the cab.

Her britches were clammy up under the jacket straps and the burn in her bladder was gone. At some point, she’d lost control, but that was the least of her problems.

Two more loud cracks, from outside, closer.

Gunfire?

“The fuck is going on?” the enforcer hollered.

Her eyes popped open when August’s voice came back, raised over engine noise. “Pirates. Pretty sure,” he said. “Probably think we got fuel.”

“Sshhit!”

Other people were coming? Buckeye wriggled, testing the bonds at her ankles. Deals could be made with thieves. If they took out the enforcers.

“I need you up top,” August yelled. “Keep ‘em off our ass. We’re fucking close already, they’ll turn back.”

“Christ.” The other man sounded about as sour as could be on that idea.

“Wayland! Get the fuck up there!”

What in The Vice would make pirates turn away?

More swearing and now grunting as the no-longer-anonymous Wayland either ascended through some opening in the top of the cargo box, or climbed through a window into the cab. She’d never seen more than a darkened square cave in the middle of the night; her assumptions were all she had.

In seconds, another series of cracks assaulted the air. The last two snapped loud and metallic, from the sound of it punching through the roll-up door.

Yes! Yes! Fucking take ‘em down!

August seemed to be aiming for every huge rock and fissure in the ground. The truck canted to one side, and Buckeye’s stomach dropped at the idea of flipping on their side, momentum throwing all those bodies against metal, against each other. No limbs free to brace for impact.

From overhead, a sizzle.

BOOM.

The truck careened.

“Fucking drive! Go! Go!” Wayland’s muffled call came from above the cab.

“I am going! Pay attention!”

What kind of goddamn firepower did they have on this thing? Every one of her muscles clenched tight. Teeth bit into her gag. If she hadn’t already pissed herself in her sleep, it would have happened right then anyway. This shit was why people didn’t drive off into the unpopulated parts of the VT. Where the fuck were they going?

Another rattle of bullets. At least four more struck the cargo box. For the first time, Buckeye was grateful to be lying on the floor.

Then a crash.

Outside, behind them. A rending screech of metal. No more shots.

“Keep going!” Wayland’s voice was closer, but not in the back with the debtors. In the cab again then?

“Who hit ‘em?” August said.

“Fucking vores, man.”

“Fffuuck.”

“Better them than us.”

Buckeye shuddered in the dark. There were reasons she stayed near what counted as civilization in the The Vice. Crossing into those barren stretches of no water, no food … People were made out of meat, too. Just ask the vores.

“One driver,” said August. “I’m still gonna need you in the back.”

“Yeah, let’s just get there already. Fucking alive.”

She could hear Wayland climbing through what she was now positive was some hatch between cab and cargo area. Then the sound of it sliding shut.

Her limbs were rubbery, aching. A knot formed in her throat.

Pirates. Vores. Nothing had stopped the enforcers. Wherever they were taking her, whatever they had in mind, there was no way out.

All she’d wanted to do was go into The Rose for a drink.

* * *

The mayhem left Buckeye wide awake to feel the truck rolling to a stop some time later. Thirty minutes? An hour? She was losing her grip on reality, immobilized in the dark like this.

There were voices outside again, but since Wayland had retreated to the cargo box, August must have been talking to someone else, but it was just a garble of tones through layers of metal. A brief exchange before the engine shook itself back to life.

One axle after another, after another, the wheels hit a bump that jolted her already sore right arm and hip against the floor. It felt like the truck was aiming downward, as though driving down a hill, but then it leveled out. And a few minutes later … uphill?

Buckeye searched mental maps of The Vice trying to figure out where they were. Not being able to see daylight the whole time had fucked with her sense of direction.

A final time, the truck made it onto level ground and kept rolling. In the end, it wasn’t any further disturbance that made Buckeye’s fine hairs stand on end. It was the lack.

There was no crunching of rocks under tires. No bouncing floorboards. No low-gear struggle over terrain. They drove, slowed for more stops here and there. Made a few turns. It was the smoothest ride she’d ever felt, and that included some of the highways that were still in fair shape in what was left of Austin. Or Phoenix.

Where in the fuck are we?

Another stop. More downhill. A turn. Down. Turn. Down.

What is this, the seventh circle of hell? Come on!

This time when the wheels stopped, so did the motor. There was quiet. A weird, echoing quiet. Her skin might have crawled right off her bones if it wasn’t for her clothes being in the way. The cab door slammed shut. A few breaths later, someone was working the latch to the roll-up door.

Dim light came through the hood. Buckeye’s pulse sped.

As the door rose, something subtle changed in the air. Even through her britches, she could feel it. August’s voice broke into her welling panic.

“All right, time to listen,” he said, projecting to fill the space. “You’re about to move out of this truck, and we need you to walk down the ramp and go where you’re told without trippin’ and killin’ yourself.”

Rummaging noises clunked near the open end of the box, something Wayland was doing, she guessed. Sweat popped out on her lower back, under her pits.

“We’re gonna come around,” August went on, “and cut you loose at the ankles. Take off those hoods.” Muffled sounds of reaction came from a few of the captives.

“You will cooperate,” he said, words shifting forward and up, probably climbing in to help Wayland. “Or there will be consequences.”

The two men made more small noises. Shuffling of boots. Buckeye existed in a state of static agitation: vibrating in place, her thoughts unable to latch onto any one worry or question.

“You take the feet, I’ll take the heads?” Wayland said.

The only response after a few seconds was a dull clicking sound. A rasp of fabric. A grunt from a gagged mouth.

“All right, get up,” said August.

Quiet.

“I said, get up.”

An oof of wind from lungs and Buckeye heard limbs rearranging themselves. A new set of unsteady footsteps. August addressed them all a second time.

“When I say ‘get up’, I mean get up. Do not make me ask you twice.”

Ask. Pff.

The next few debtors got up, mostly by stumbling, but they managed. It was only minutes before the enforcers started work on the man at her back, various limbs and joints bumping her as he struggled to his feet.

When it was her turn, it took all she had not to buck and flail. To cause even some superficial amount of trouble or pain for these assholes. Her breath hissed through the gag as she felt jostling at her ankles. Eyes had to squint tight as the hood jerked past her ears, over the top of her head.

“Up,” August said.

They’d never mentioned anything about the straight jacket. She was going to have to do this without arms.

Buckeye wanted to just lie there. To get used to the light. To stretch, to let feeling come back into her shoulder. But there were ‘consequences’. Whatever was coming next, she needed the least number of additional handicaps while facing it.

She flopped onto her back, then to her left side. Bent her knees up. Staggered her feet apart like a newborn colt, lurching to get them under her and sit up without hands to brace herself. It happened, but with the opposite of finesse.

The open roll-up door was a blinding rectangle. She widened her stance for balance, eyes watering against the glare, but a hand in her lower back was already herding her toward the edge. Toward a ramp.

When her pupils contracted enough for her to begin making out shapes, absorbing surroundings, the first thing she saw was wrong. And the second thing. And the third.

All wrong.

At the head of the ramp leading down from the truck, another man stood with a hand out, ready to guide. To prod her along like livestock. He wore some uniform of solid grey, crisp and immaculate, a silver cross patched onto the upper sleeve.

At his hip was a weapon. Odd-looking. Not quite a baton, something more complicated. Something with a business end she had no interest in meeting.

No one dressed like this. No one had clothes this nice. Or clean.

She pitched toward the ramp, legs still trying to remember what sturdy was. A woman lumped down ahead of her, and behind her she could hear more faltering steps. The uniformed man swept her past with a distracted hand, his focus on the cargo area behind her.

A strong smell of unwashed body, of failed bladder, hit her the moment she left the truck proper. Or rather, the violent sterility of the air outside made the contrast bitter and sharp.

Four more men—guards?—in the same grey uniform blocked out an area to the side of the ramp where the unfortunates were accumulating. As she’d guessed, everyone stumbling out of the truck had done so in a jacket like hers. Some of them looked ill. Others had wild eyes. A few looked like the dead, standing.

Buckeye joined them, too lost for anything else. She turned to watch the rest come down the ramp, but found herself scanning their surroundings, instead.

Almost everything was grey here. Walls, ceiling, floor: all concrete, but in far better shape than the mail carrier had seen in any part of The Vice. Banks of lights marched away along the ceiling, which wasn’t much higher than the top of the truck. Other vehicles sat parked at a distance, glossy under the lights like malicious insects. Entirely free of rust.

It was neither hot nor cold in this place.

It was wrong.

She might have called it a parking garage, but again … way too clean. And no one appeared to be living here.

A loud squawk came through a gag, and Buckeye’s attention ripped from sterile concrete. On the way down the ramp, a dark-haired woman put her foot at an odd angle on the lip at the edge. Ankle turned, limbs twisted, and she fell, shoulder hitting the ground to knock out a grunt of pain.

The guard at the top of the ramp jumped down, bending and reaching to help. Buckeye saw the fire flash in the woman’s eyes and cringed for what would come next.

The woman hauled a knee to her chest and kicked out with whatever was left of her strength, her foot landing square on the guard’s shin. Flipped to her belly with some last reserve of dexterity and tried to get her feet while the man clutched his smarting leg.

It was over in a second.

The weird baton came out. He thrust it against the back of the woman’s thigh. Her spine jerked backward, and she made a feral noise, nostrils flaring and the whites of her eyes showing all around. When he took the weapon away, she went limp. Sides heaving to get air.

“I see our work is cut out for us.”

The new voice sliced through everything. Heads turned, and brushed metal doors slid back into place behind a man dressed head-to-toe in white. But not just britches and a shirt, no. A long cassock so clean and blinding nothing could ever have touched it and lived.

Buckeye’s blood ran cold.

The only people who dressed this way were Covvies, but no one sneaking into the VT managed to stay so pristine. And this man didn’t look like he was sneaking anywhere.

Every eye was on him. August and Wayland. The guards. The captives. They all stared, silenced. His mouth turned up on one side with that terrifying satisfaction that can only come from zealotry.

Wrong. Wrong!

This was not about debt.

“Hello, sinners,” he said.

They were not in The Vice Territories.

“Welcome to New Covenant.”