Sasha shuffled down the corridor, her mind mostly occupied with the effort to put one foot in front of the other -- not far, of course, only the distance the hobble chain allowed. All of her chains jingled with each step, a sound mockingly cheerful in this dreary hell.

She was twenty-three years old. She felt eighty. She wished she was. She wouldn't have so much longer to live then.

She'd been expecting another day of hard, oppressive work in the rock cavern, under the threat of whips, but an unfamiliar guard this morning had routed her out of her tiny cell even before breakfast had arrived, clipping a leash to her collar and leading her out of the cell block. Sasha trembled as she walked, having no idea what was going to happen to her but having learned, in her two weeks in this place, never to expect anything good.

Two weeks. Four rapes... no, five, she corrected herself. And her jaw was still tender, probably showing a bruise, from a fist to the face during a staged fight, from a sweet young girl who'd apologized to her all through the next day.

Sasha's mind now, as it had been through the entire two weeks, was occupied with worry about her sister, Tasha. Sasha hated not knowing what had happened to her, if anything. Her fervent hope was that Tasha had been able to explain her way out of trouble. But Sasha had no way to know, one way or the other, whether that was the case.

Sasha, as always, made the effort to dwell on happier times. Tasha, the baby of the family, five years younger than Sasha, had always looked up to, almost worshiped, her older sister. Sasha, for her part, had tried to make Tasha's life a little more tolerable, reassuring Tasha when their parents screamed at her for her failings, real or imagined. Sasha had made it a point, every year on Tasha's birthday, to give Tasha a gift of one of her own possessions that meant something to her -- a favorite doll, say, that she had seen Tasha admiring. Sasha, in spite of herself as she shuffled down the prison corridor now, smiled as she remembered Tasha's huge smiles and tight hugs whenever she opened one of Sasha's gifts to her.

Sasha had avoided saying anything to Tasha about her weight -- certainly their parents harped on the subject enough, accomplishing nothing but to make Tasha feel unattractive and inadequate. Tasha was actually quite a pretty girl, and only a little pudgy. Losing, say, about ten kilos, Sasha felt, would do wonders for her, but Sasha concentrated on making Tasha feel loved, just as she was. Maybe now that Tasha was eighteen, Sasha reasoned, and hoping for more attention from boys, she would do something about it on her own. Certainly Tasha's still-growing breasts should help in the attention department, Sasha suspected.

Sasha tried to keep her mind from going back to that night she'd been arrested at the meeting of her "club," but it went to that memory in spite of her.

At the meeting, Sasha had just volunteered to slip anti-government flyers under the doors in her apartment building. As she thought about whether she should do it in the afternoons, when everyone was at work, or late at night, when everyone was asleep, her sister Tasha had suddenly appeared in the doorway, her eyes sweeping across the room until she spotted Sasha.

Sasha had gasped and hurried over to Tasha, intent on telling her to go home, that it wasn't safe being here. But Tasha, teary-eyed, had spoken first, explaining that their father had managed to extract the information on Sasha's whereabouts from her, and had sent Tasha to beg Sasha to come home immediately. Sasha hesitated, torn between her commitment to her cause and her friends, and her anxiety about Tasha being anywhere near the premises.

The latter won out easily -- she could sneak back out, she'd decided, once Tasha was safely home -- and Sasha had just put her arm across Tasha's shoulder and turned her towards the door, when the police burst in, shouting and waving guns.

Sasha, terrified, had tried to keep hold on Tasha's hand while they and Sasha's dearest friends were rounded up and herded towards waiting vans. Not enough vans, it turned out, and Sasha hadn't been able to cling tightly enough as she was shoved into the last van and Tasha was held back with others to await a return of the vans after they'd taken Sasha wherever it was they were going.

Sasha had been aware of being the subject of a trial, but could barely focus, her mind filled with a desperate need to know where Tasha was and what they were doing to her. She's not even a member! Sasha kept screaming inside her head -- she'd tried to say so out loud to anyone who would listen, but that had only earned her a slap in the face and an order to be silent. And then the trial was over, the men were separated from the women, and Sasha was herded with the women into another van. She didn't remember any of the trip to the prison at all.

The fact Sasha never saw Tasha at the prison she took as a good sign. Tasha had probably been able to explain what she had been doing at the meeting -- the cops would have been able to verify her innocence with Papa -- and she was home now, safe. Sasha felt... well, ninety percent sure that Tasha was all right.

Sasha's mind was yanked back to the present as the guard stopped at a door, beside which a kindly looking bespectacled gray-haired man in a lab coat waited. The old man smiled at Sasha, the first smile from anyone she had seen in her two weeks here. "Ah, Miss Semyonskaya. I'm glad you could come."

Sasha started to smile back, but her smile froze as she realized he was mocking her. Of course I came, she thought. What choice did I have? Yet he seemed so sincere.

The old man opened the door behind him, and with a courtly gesture signaled to Sasha to enter. She looked at the guard, who detached the leash from her collar, allowing her to move on her own. Again recognizing her lack of options, she followed the old man into the room, and stopped dead, stunned, a meter inside the room.

The room was a little like Sasha's cell block, with sixteen... stations, she supposed they might be called, eight along the wall on each side, with an aisle between them. The stations weren't cells, however. They were stalls.

Each stall housed a female prisoner. Sasha focused her attention on the woman nearest her on the right side. The woman was facing out of the stall on her hands and knees, forced to stay that way, rather than lie down, by leather straps hanging from the ceiling: one strap under each armpit and one under her stomach at the waist. Her standard wrist cuffs were locked to the floor in front of her, and her hands were completely encased in tape for some reason, to the point of making them useless.

The woman had the biggest breasts Sasha had ever seen -- until her eyes took in the next woman in line, whose breasts were equally huge. All sixteen women in the stalls, in fact, were astonishingly endowed.

And the significance of that was made clear by the activities of the four other women in the room, also prisoners. Each of the four was kneeling in front of one of the stalls, squeezing the enormous breasts of the stall's occupant -- milking her, obviously, eliciting a steady stream of white liquid that cascaded down through a hole in the floor, evidently being collected down there underneath somehow.

Sasha's jaw dropped as she suddenly understood. The milk she had been drinking with her food, twice daily, hadn't been goat's milk. It was from humans. These women were providing the liquid portion of every meal the prisoners ate. Sasha herself had been drinking human breast milk.

The light, sounds, and flickers of movement from each stall caught Sasha's attention now. She saw that the sides of each stall were occupied by high-definition television screens, each showing a line of dairy cows, seen from the side, many of them making lowing sounds, some of them being milked by dairy personnel. From the point of view of any women in one of the stalls, it would look and sound as if she was part of the line of cows. Adding to the impression was the hay lining the floor of each stall, consistent with the floors of the televised dairy stalls.

Each woman in the stalls had her identifying tag, normally attached to a prisoner's collar, hanging instead from a small ring piercing her ear, consistent with the tags on the ears of the cows in the television image. Hanging from her collar, rather than the tag, each woman had a cowbell.

A nasty psychological game was being played here: the environment in which the women in the stalls lived was obviously designed to immerse them in the atmosphere of a dairy barn, in an effort to make them feel they were no more than animals, living to provide milk and nothing more.

Sasha realized that the dairy sounds she was hearing weren't all coming from the television speakers. Some of them were from the women themselves. None of them could speak; each had a feeding nipple filling her mouth, held in place by a metal head harness, the nipple connected to a plastic tube that came down from the ceiling, meeting the constant demand for raw materials that the women's bodies steadily turned into milk. They could only make sounds which sounded surprisingly similar to the cow noises coming from the speakers.

An insight struck Sasha: the women whose vocal sounds had the greatest resemblance to the lowing of cows were the ones with the palest skin. They were the ones who had been here the longest. Gradually, over time, the psychological conditioning was working. They really were starting to think of themselves as cows. They might be questioning any memories they had of a human life before they had come here.

The sounds served a purpose: to tell the milkers that their breasts were full, that they needed the internal pressure relieved. Sasha had never lactated, but she knew breasts full of milk can be painful, like a full bladder. As Sasha watched, one of the milkers stopped milking one of the women and moved one stall farther down, to deal with the woman who had been lowing the most insistently. Each milker, it seemed, was assigned to four of the "cows." Sasha wondered whether the milkers got any breaks, or whether they had to keep cycling back to the first "cow" as soon as they finished with the fourth.

None of the women in the stalls was capable of milking herself. That, Sasha realized, was what the hand wraps were for.

The old man apparently saw the direction of Sasha's gaze as she looked up at one of the feeding tubes. "Their feed includes hormones specifically designed to gear their metabolisms towards milk production. They produce far more milk than they could unassisted."

Sasha buried a groan. In a sense, the women were even lower than animals. Their bodies were machines, serving no other purpose than to manufacture milk.

A surge of fear suddenly shot through Sasha. She had been so shocked, during the attempt to process what she was seeing, that she had not until this moment stopped to wonder why she was being shown this room. Was she to be one of the milkers or -- her face broke into a sudden sweat -- one of the cows?

The old man started walking away, and beckoned to Sasha. "Come, let me show you your new permanent assignment." He seemed now to be trying a hide a smile.

Sasha couldn't make herself move for a moment. The guard, still beside her, stirred, and Sasha told herself she'd better move under her own power before she lost that right. She followed the lab-coated man to a door at the far end of the room.

The room revealed on the other side of the door was surprisingly bright, despite dark curtains hung on the walls. It struck Sasha as being like a photographic studio. Puzzled, she advanced farther.

She saw several cameras ringed around what appeared to be a large glass box, perhaps three meters long, one meter wide, a bit over a meter tall. Inside the enclosure, a woman looked up at Sasha.

Sasha didn't look closely at the woman immediately, but then her hands flew to her mouth. Despite the head harness holding the feeding tube in the mouth, the short prison haircut, and the huge breasts, Sasha recognized her sister Tasha. Tears began flowing from Sasha's eyes.

Rachel stared at the gorgeous woman, thinking she should know the identity of anyone so beautiful. The woman said, "You tell me story later." Then, one eyebrow raised: "Dey already give you wig?"

Rachel automatically reached up to her hair. "Wig? No, this is really mine." She wondered why the woman would assume... Oh yes, she thought. Except for me and her, all the other women here have had their hair cut off.

The woman blinked in surprise, then shrugged, as if understanding Rachel must be a new arrival. She continued staring at Rachel, looking her up and down. "No need for tanning bed right now. In few weeks, maybe. You keep tan lines for now. I t'ink dey will like dat."

A few weeks? thought Rachel. Well, not my concern. I won't be here. But who will care that I have tan lines?

The woman gestured. "Come closer."

Still mystified, Rachel stepped towards her. She frowned when the woman stroked her thigh, upwards, with the tips of her fingers. The only reason Rachel didn't back away was that the woman was not giving off an air of erotic come-on. Her attitude seemed very clinical.

The woman nodded. "Did not cut hair on head, but dey do legs already. And pussy?"

Rachel did at last flinch back when the woman reached out to stroke her mound. "Hey!" She was about to demand to know what was going on, as the woman nodded and went on, "Yes, dey did pussy. But dey know dey want you for dis duty. Dat is why dey did not cut hair."

Rachel's query was stopped by a sudden insight flashing through her mind. That long discussion the guards had yesterday! Looking over her body, judging it. Right after her depilation. They had probably been going to cut her hair then, but had talked it over and decided to keep her blonde locks the way they were, for this "duty," whatever it was. And this morning, rather than join the other girls, Rachel's assignment was... this.

The woman sat back again. "You take shower. Shampoo hair. Do makeup after. Dere is blow dryer." She pointed to her right. "Start now. We must be ready in..." She looked at a clock on a small bedside table. "Seventy minutes."

Her frustration boiling over, Rachel shouted, "Start what? Ready for what?"

The woman gaped. "Dey did not tell you?"

Rachel threw her hands in the air. "None of them can talk to me! They don't speak any English!"

The woman blinked. "You do not speak Russian?" Clearly the mystery as to how an American had turned up here was compounded by the fact of her not even speaking the language.

"Russian? Is that what they're all speaking?"

"Yes. We speak Russian here. Dere is Irkhet language, but only old people speak it." She spoke bitterly. "Only Russian in schools. De Russians try to change us, make us be like dem. Is good dey are gone. Now, hurry!" She made a move-it-along gesture with her hand.

"Please, just tell me what I'm doing here."

The woman sighed. "We are everybody's girlfriend. De men, dey come, one at a time. Dey take turns. Every man, we make love wit' him."

Rachel gasped in horror, taking a step back. "No!!"

The woman looked impatient. "You want to go out dere?" She waved to indicate the lock-up from which Rachel had come. "Is worse, much worse. Did you see it?"

"I -- Yes. I got here last night."

The woman nodded. "Dey decided you for here. You are very pretty, very nice body. You are lucky dey do not put you on..." She paused, as if mentally translating. "...work team."

"Is that what the other girls are doing?"

The woman nodded. "You are very lucky dey pick you for dis, here. Only very most beautiful girls for dis."

Rachel was accustomed to attracting notice for her looks, but was still taken aback that the guards had somehow regarded her as being in the same league as this woman. Maybe being a foreigner adds just a little extra mystique, she decided. And the blonde hair. Not much of that around here. The woman went on, "De girls out dere..." she waved outward again, "Dey work very hard. Dey show me when I first get here." She suddenly shivered violently, then closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Is all very bad, all work teams. And at night, after working..."

It was Rachel's turn to shiver. Her memories of last night's terror were very clear.

The woman nodded. "So you know about dat. Much better in here. Is not rape in here. You are boss in bed here. Just make men happy. You decide how." She gave Rachel a stern look. "Dat girl who was here, she did not make dem happy enough. Now she wish she tried harder." The woman gestured towards the tub area again. "You try hard too. Now get ready. Do what I said."

Rachel made a helpless soft whimpering sound. The clock was ticking. Unless she was released in the next seventy minutes, which seemed increasingly unlikely as the clock moved on, she would have to start working as a prison whore. She couldn't talk her way out of it, she couldn't postpone it. She would have to do it.

If she refused, it was back to the tiny cell in the lock-up, where she couldn't possibly escape notice as she had last night. In fact, last night they had probably intentionally overlooked her, she realized. They were saving her for this. Almost certainly they had put Rachel in the cells for the night only so she could see what life was like there. As a very unpleasant alternative to what she would be doing here.

As such, her trip to the cells had served its purpose. Rachel couldn't bear the thought of what would happen to her, what would be done to her, what she would be made to do, if she was unable or unwilling to serve the guards' sexual needs in this room. She judged she had no way to count on being released before at least one more night had gone by. A full night in the cells was an appalling prospect, almost certainly full of sexual abuse, humiliation and, at worst but very possible, torture. If she failed here and was returned to the cells, the guards would have no reason to hold back tonight as they had last night.

Her bowels seemed to turn to water all at once. She rushed over to the toilet, and dumped her load almost as soon as she sat. She had never, within her memory, defecated in front of anyone, but she barely gave that a thought. She was just grateful there was toilet paper.

Yelena sat in the chair in front of the makeup table, pencil in hand, trying to think.

The room was sparsely furnished. There was a bed with only a mattress, nothing covering it, and no pillow. Dimitri, she thought bitterly, wanted to watch her huddled in her naked misery. Bedsheets covering her would make it appear her life was normal.

She had spotted the cameras in every corner of the room, and knew Dimitri would check his video feed occasionally to see how Yelena was doing. He might be watching her now. She believed he probably was. She could feel those vicious animal eyes on her.

There were other items in the room, giving her the feeling that the room might be here for the purpose of housing visiting VIPs. Such as her husband. No doubt it was more completely furnished in such cases.

The table at which she sat offered a full array of cosmetic products, and she wondered how they had come up with a supply so quickly. Surely those were not something kept in stock for Dimitri.

There was a dresser with several drawers, mostly empty at present, the ones not empty containing a few odds and ends, primarily sex toys. Nothing in the way of clothing. Though all of her metalware had been removed, she had been given to understand she would remain completely nude at all times.

Even the shower, in a smaller attached room off to the side, made that rule clear: though it contained standard amenities such as soap, shampoo, comb, and blowdryer, there were no towels. In their place was a pile of small washcloths, which would be replaced daily. After a shower she could dry herself with those, but they were completely useless as any form of clothing.

The guard at her door had brought her a tray of food an hour ago. A paper plate bearing a cut of some unidentified meat, a baked potato, still hot, a tomato, whole. A paper cup held somewhat cool milk. No utensils -- as unlikely as it was that she would attack the huge, muscular guard no matter how she was armed, they obviously wanted her to have no weapons on any kind. Even the tray, of pressed paper of the sort used for egg cartons, was useless for any hypothetical combat. She had taken a few bites of each item and, not hungry at all, had not protested when the guard re-entered the cell to take it away.

They can't make me do this, she thought over and over. They can't make any mother do this.

But her mind kept coming back to what would happen if she didn't. The alternative. Marya suffering excruciating torture, day after day, unable to protest or plead with her teeth cemented together, her lips sewn shut. Unable to open her eyes, the whip always striking her without warning. And Yelena forced to watch closely, to focus all her attention on Marya's agony, because she would only add to the agony if she looked away.

And it was not a bluff. She had seen them doing it to that other girl. And all because the girl had tried to set her country free of the monster controlling it -- the last scales of delusion concerning Dimitri's character had fallen from Yelena's eyes. She knew him for what he was.

Okay, Yelena thought, struggling to bring her attention to the situation back under control. I have to do it. I told them I needed a day to prepare. To understand my role, to get into my character. I need to start doing that now.

At least she had been entrusted with a potentially deadly pencil.

Yelena began writing notes to herself -- her character's background, motivations, bits of a script. She hadn't done it for twenty years, but it came back to her easily. She had won a lot of praise as an actress. She would have to reach beyond herself now, bury herself within a character as never before. But it's for Marya, she reminded herself. I can do it for her.

An odd idea suddenly came into her head: a possible overall background story to give to Marya in explanation of what she was going to be put through. A premise from which the script would flow.

Yelena considered her idea from many angles. She hated it. But then she hated the entire situation. The idea at least had the advantage of portraying Yelena's actions with Marya as a self-consistent insanity.

Yelena sighed and made some more notes.