The blast from the airhorn caused Rachel to spasm herself awake, her heart pounding in panic.

Oh, yes, she remembered. That's just how they wake the girls in the morning here.

Sometime during the night she had curled up on the floor of the cell. She didn't remember releasing her new friend's hands, or lying down, but her exhaustion had knocked her out for the entire night, it seemed.

Both holes in her bottom burned and ached, but she thought she might be through the worst of it. It seemed doubtful that all of the guards would want to rape her again tonight. That had just been their way of welcoming her to the cell block. They might not even bother with her at all tonight, perhaps. They had fifteen other girls to choose from.

Rachel's fingertips brushed unintentionally against her mound, and she focused her attention there. Rubbing her fingers lightly across it, she found it was still perfectly smooth, with not a hint of the stubble of pubic hair that should be there, nearly two full days since she'd been depilated. My guess was right, she told herself. I'll never have hair on my legs again. She gritted her teeth as she bemoaned something they had taken away from her forever. Not that she loved the chore of shaving her legs or bush, but if she'd wanted to do something about it she preferred it to have been her decision, not something forced on her without her permission.

The words "two days" stuck in her mind. Oh! she thought, that's right! It's the third day! That had been Rachel's reasoned-out deadline for her country to rescue her from this place: Mandy had surely alerted the embassy two days ago, and after all the discussions, all the phone calls and e-mails halfway around the world, all the negotiations, all the paperwork, surely today had to be the time everything would happen at last. She should be out of here tonight! Soon she would be on a flight home, to resume her life, perhaps as a semi-celebrity.

She reached up, with her chains clinking, to scratch an itch in her scalp. She sucked in a quick breath when she touched her hair, or what was left of it. She hadn't really had a chance to do that before -- certainly not while she'd been bent over the roof of her cell, all day yesterday. Brushing her palm across the top of her head, it felt like the stiff bristles of a toothbrush. It was so strange. She almost felt nauseated. She took a deep breath to steady herself, and sighed it out. I might be facing cameras tonight, she told herself, and this will look pretty weird. But it does support the idea I've been abused. Wait till I tell them about the gang rape, she thought.

Minutes later the food cart came down the aisle, and Rachel eagerly took the opportunity of the first chance she'd had to feed herself in twenty-four hours. Though that had been kind of nice last night, she remembered. Eating from the pixie girl's hand, and the girl smiling at her, was the one and only memory from last night she wanted to hang onto.

Shortly after Rachel finished eating, the guards came down the aisle, unlocking cell doors. She tried to calm down her breathing. They're just going to take me to work somewhere, she told herself. I'm just going to my job, like any responsible adult.

It was easy to know what to do: she just did exactly what she saw the women around her do, which was to form lines in front of the cells. Rachel stood in the line of women on her side of the cell block, facing the front of the room. The pixie girl stood immediately in front of her. Rachel ground her teeth together angrily at the rear view of all of the girl's whip marks, and also the dark bruise on her face from the fight she had "won" against the Amazon, the night before last. Rachel waited, trying to be patient and calm as a guard attached chains to her collar in front and back, connecting her with the woman behind her and the pixie girl in front of her.

A minute later Rachel's line was marched across the drawbridge, her first time out of the room in nearly a full day, and into the corridor outside, led by Boris and two other guards. It seemed odd to Rachel that all three of the guards were wearing warm-looking coats -- the other team's three guards were not, and the cell block and the corridor outside it were well heated.

Rachel, despite having no idea where she and the others were being taken, felt relieved to be away from the scene of her rape. And maybe, she thought excitedly, I'll never be back! She held tightly to the thought that she might well be released before the workday was over.

Taking a quick look behind her, Rachel saw the other team of eight girls turn the other direction after crossing the drawbridge. Working somewhere else, it seemed.

Boris took the lead, ahead of the line, with another of the guards walking beside the line, immediately to Rachel's left. This one had seemed to Rachel a little slow-witted, and he walked with a slight hunch. Rachel decided to assign him the name Igor, which seemed to fit him very well. Trailing behind the women, the third guard somehow reminded Rachel strongly of a boy named Matt she'd known in high school, and she started thinking of him that way. Obviously there was no chance that was actually the guard's name, but, especially since Matt had been something of an asshole, Rachel could think of the guard no other way, and didn't want to assign him a name with any nicer connotations -- "Matt," of course, as had the other five guards in the room, had raped her last night.

The pixie girl was so small that the chain connecting Rachel's collar to hers slanted down steeply. If the woman in front of the girl, and Rachel behind her, were to pull away from her at the same time, they could lift the girl into the air between them and hang her. Rachel made sure to stay close, her thighs not very far behind the girl's butt.

Eventually the group arrived at a wide metal door, which Boris opened, afterward gesturing the women inside.

Even before entering, Rachel could see that the room was brightly lit. Once she was all the way in, she could see why. One entire wall of the room was glass, and the light was sunlight reflecting off the snow on the ground outside. The area immediately beyond the window was heavily-treed and level. Beyond that, the snow-covered ground sloped downward and was lost to view.

Rachel had not forgotten she was up in the mountains -- it was part of the consciousness she had of being very remote from the civilized world and far from any help. But as unpleasant as her stay in the prison had been, she thought this view of the land surrounding the facility was beautiful.

At almost the very instant the line of women saw the window, they issued a collective gasp. Rachel instantly went on guard. She didn't know what she had missed.

Because of the snow, the room was considerably brighter than even a place with a glass wall would normally be. When Rachel had first been escorted from the helicopter that brought her here, there had been a few isolated patches of white on the ground, but clearly there had been new snowfall since then: there was about an inch of powder covering most of the ground. It was interrupted by scrubby bushes, and the ground directly under the trees was mostly clear. The trees were pines, and a heavy clutter of pine straw was visible below them.

At the left end of the glass wall was something resembling a transparent phone booth. It was about that size, at any rate, and had a door in front, with a rubber seal around its edges. Looking through it, Rachel saw that there was another door to the outside on the booth's far side. She could see the knob for it.

Rachel suddenly put it together, and her gasp echoed those of the women several seconds earlier. Oh my God, no! she thought. There was nothing in the room for Rachel and the others to do! The room was completely empty, aside from a cooler along the farther wall that was packed with ice and what appeared to be bottled drinks. The door was for the women to go outside to perform some task. In the freezing cold. Naked.

The rest of the women couldn't have all figured that out that much faster than I did, Rachel told herself. They must have all been here before. What they're reacting to is the snow. It's new snowfall. It must have come down last night, and they hadn't expected to see it. No wonder they were all shocked. They have, Rachel realized, been working here in a little warmer weather, but it looks like summer is officially over. We're in a northern latitude, at a high altitude. It's late August... or wait, early September now.

And it's obviously freezing out there.

All of the women were looking through the window with pained expressions. They directed pleading looks to whichever guard was closest.

The guards took off their coats and hung them on hooks on the wall above the cooler -- at least it was comfortably warm inside the room. Matt then addressed the team briefly, as if in a familiar ritual, pointing at each girl in turn, including Rachel, saying a single word each time he pointed. He was counting off the women in the line, Rachel realized. His voice sounded nothing like the Matt that Rachel had known, even aside from the fact he was speaking Russian, but Rachel still held onto her name for him.

Rachel still didn't know just what it was she was supposed to do out there, in the snow. She had never been so desperate to speak Russian. She pictured herself wandering around outside, freezing her butt, not knowing what she was supposed to be looking for. She'd forgotten Boris spoke English.

Once Matt had finished assigning numbers to the women, if that was what he had done, Boris looked at Rachel. "Work here is pick up..." He hesitated, and drew a tiny book out of his pocket. Flipping through the pages quickly, he at last finished, "pine straw." Obviously he'd hunted down a small Russian/English dictionary. He continued, "One girl go out, she come back, den next go out and come back, den next." Okay, thought Rachel, that was the purpose of the count-off. "You pick up pine straw, and put in box, dere." He pointed outside, and Rachel could see, where he was pointing, an empty metal bin that was just left of the phone booth door, against the wall of solid rock just past where the window-with-door ended. "You put in pine straw until you hear bell," apparently a signal that the bin was sufficiently full, "And den you push red button." She saw the button, on the side of the bin. "Den you come back in."

Rachel moaned. Did that mean she was not allowed back in until the bin was full? She felt sure that must be the case.

But if one girl filled the bin, then what did the others do? It occurred to Rachel that pushing the button probably caused the bin to empty into some storeroom below. She'd seen something similar for trash in an airport once.

Boris continued sternly, "If you not come in, if we come get you, you get bad whip after."

But, Rachel thought, puzzled, why would any of us stay out there? It's not like there's anyplace to escape to. Staying out too long would just be suicide.

Maybe, Rachel thought grimly, that's exactly the idea. She was surrounded by women who gave off an air of intense hopelessness. It seemed entirely possible at least one of them had given thought to that kind of "escape."

Igor began disconnecting the chains joining the girls' collars. Giving them no time to mill around, Boris pointed to the woman who had been in the front of the line, and gave her a brief order in Russian.

The woman pleaded silently with him once more, hesitating, obviously hating being first and wishing to be anywhere but here. Finally, at another word from Boris, she opened the inner door of the "phone booth."

Once inside, she pulled the door closed, and it sealed tight with a whisper of glass sliding across rubber. She looked helplessly at him one more time, and when he glowered menacingly and moved his hand towards his whip, she whimpered, and opened the outer door.

Taking a step outside, she immediately drew her elbows tight against her sides, and hunched her shoulders. The sun was shining, but Rachel had no doubt now that the temperature out there was below freezing.

The outer door swung closed behind her on its own.

The woman moved with a hopping shuffle through the snow, trying to keep her feet out of the snow as much as possible with each step, and headed for the nearest tree, about thirty feet away.

It seemed to Rachel so typical of the cruelty of this place, that the prisoners' chains would not be removed even for this. Obviously the women would all be able to move much faster without the hobble chains. And as the woman outside reached the area under the tree and dropped to her knees, to create some slack in the chain that had held her hands tight against her waist, so she could reach out and scoop up some straw, of course that all would have been so much easier without the chains as well.

Rachel heard a hissing sound of a familiar sort. She saw that Igor had taken a bottle from the cooler and popped it open. Rachel could smell it now: beer. Igor passed the bottle to Matt and reached down for another.

Outside, the woman, with a supply of straw clutched against her stomach, stood and shuffled to the bin, dumping in the straw. Rachel could see goose bumps on the woman's skin from where she was standing. The woman turned away immediately, presumably knowing her first armload was not sufficient. But before returning to the tree, in a burst of intense wishful thinking, she tried the door. Locked.

She shuffled quickly back to the tree, and scooped up another batch of straw, carrying it back to the bin. Still not enough. On her third trip, at last the bell rang. Almost crying in relief, the woman pushed the button, and the straw sank out of sight. Rachel had been correct in guessing what the button did. Afterward, the woman was able to open the door, which clearly had some sort of interlock with the bin: pushing the button unlocked the door as well as disposing of the straw. But not, apparently, until after the bell rang.

The woman reentered the room, shivering violently. Several women immediately converged on her, pressing their bodies against her, surrounding the freezing woman with body heat. They rubbed up and down against her, making an erotic tableau that Rachel was sure the guards enjoyed, but she was also sure the woman getting the attention had no thoughts in terms of sex.

Rachel found the press of bodies very moving, feeling a tear at the corner of her eye. The guards are cruel, but we women all look out for each other.

Igor barked an order, and the woman who had been second in line moaned miserably and opened the inner door.

The pixie girl went fourth, and when she returned Rachel, who had joined in with the body-warming the last two times, tried to return the favor of last night to a small extent. But as she approached the pixie girl, who had already nearly disappeared within the bodies surrounding her, all leaning in to cover her skin from knees to shoulders, Rachel felt a slap on her shoulder, and heard Boris's angry voice say, "You! Go!"

Rachel looked outside and winced. She'd been working at mentally preparing herself for the miserable work outside, but now that the time was upon her, she couldn't make herself move.

She sucked in a panicked breath as a line of searing pain flashed across her back, from just behind her left breast to her right hip. She doubled over, not knowing what was wrong.

Her instincts took over, her brain telling her muscles that if she went to the door, she would escape further pain. She almost tripped over her hobble chain trying to get there, and conscious thought returned, but only to tell her, I've been whipped, I've been whipped! I must have a bright red line across my back now. There, Mister State Department official, is that enough to tell you I've been physically abused?

Rachel had new appreciation for the pain the pixie girl must have been through. This pain was all just from one hit, she reminded herself. Look at all those marks on the pixie.

Rachel threw open the inner door and entered the booth. It was much cooler than the room, though not uncomfortably so. That didn't help at all with the pain across her back, though. Then, her heart pounding, she opened the outer door and stepped outside.

For just an instant she thought, this isn't too bad, I was worried for nothing. And then the full perception of the cold hit her. It took her breath away. The soles of her feet burned, standing in the snow, compacted by now by previous footsteps, and she started shivering instantly. The crisp air seemed to burn her lungs. And the burning sensation from the whip still ached across her back. So much fire, she marveled, in such a cold place!

And Rachel gritted her teeth as a further cruelty made itself apparent: her head was freezing. Until yesterday it would have been protected and warmed by her hair. But that was gone.

Automatically, without thinking of how she was imitating the previous women, Rachel took off in that same hopping shuffle she had seen. Dropping down under the nearest tree, she saw that most of the straw was gone, over a wider area than the four previous women could have covered. So they definitely didn't just start doing this today, Rachel told herself. She managed to get a reasonable armload scooped up, and shuffled as quickly as she could to the bin. Knowing, by having watched the others, that it wasn't enough, she turned without waiting to hear a bell and shuffled back to the trees, stopping under the adjacent tree this time. This time somehow the thump of landing on her knees dislodged some of the snow from the branches overhead and it fell directly on her back. She screamed before realizing what had happened, and shook herself violently to get rid of as much of it as she could. What remained reawakened the pain from the whip, which had just started to fade. Gradually the snow slid off her when she stood again with another armload of straw. She rushed back to the bin, groaning when the bin again received the load in silence. On her third trip, she shouted with joy when she heard the bell, reached for the door and couldn't open it, almost panicked before she remembered to press the button, and finally was able to enter the room. She shivered, her teeth chattering, as the nearest women surrounded her, making a cocoon of soft, warm flesh around her.

They withdrew, after a few minutes, as she got her shivering under control, and she could only think, it's over! I did it and I survived it!

Rachel helped again with warming the last three women, and breathed a sigh of relief at the entire task being done.

And then Matt pointed at the first woman who had gone. Oh shit oh shit oh shit! thought Rachel. We have to keep doing it!

Rachel was surprised to see, this second time through, one of the women take time to drop to the ground in the snow, before reaching the tree, and appear to eat at least two mouthfuls of snow, literally freezing cold though it was. Rachel groaned internally. The guards must not let us have any water here! she decided. They've got their beer, but we're not getting anything to drink from them! We have to get it where we can.

Rachel, on her own second outing, blinked at seeing another girl, inevitably naked and chained, about a hundred yards away along the narrow plateau that skirted the mountain. There is another room over there like this one, another window room, she realized, and another team doing this same job. It wasn't that surprising. They did use a lot of pine straw here. And there was a limit to how much of it they could get from under one set of trees. There might even be other such rooms elsewhere on the periphery.

On her third trip out, Rachel's own thirst was raging sufficiently that she dropped to the ground and ate and swallowed several mouthfuls of snow. It hurt her mouth and made the shivering even worse, but she just had to have it, and by now it was obvious it was the only way she could get a drink.

Occasionally, Igor, Matt, or Boris individually left the room for a time and returned. All that beer, Rachel thought bitterly.

By the start of her fourth trip, the sun had vanished behind the mountains towering above. Rachel dearly wished for it back; she wasn't sure whether the temperature had actually changed, but it felt much colder without the direct sunlight.

Rachel drank again on her fifth trip. By now all of the girls had to go further for straw, though not much -- there were trees everywhere. But it was so frustrating to have each trip take still more time as the day wore on.

As the women worked through their sixth cycle, disaster hit.

The pixie girl, obviously exhausted, probably even more so than the other women, stumbled to the side partway back from the trees and tripped over a bush, her armload of straw flying out to fall on the ground in front of her. Rachel bit her lip, feeling so sorry to see that the girl was going to have to make an extra trip.

Then she saw that the pixie couldn't get up. It didn't look as if she was injured. But the bush had poked its way up between her legs as she fell over it, and that chain that ran from her hobble chain up to the ring in her waist chain, and slipped through the ring to give her hands some freedom when it had enough slack -- her slipchain, as Rachel had started calling it -- was tangled up within the bush. Lying on her stomach, with her hands pinned underneath her, the girl was unable to pull them away from her waist, and there was nothing the girl could use to push herself up.

Rachel watched in horror as the girl thrashed around in panic, at first trying to raise her lower legs enough to clear the bush, the hobble chain holding her down each time, then twisting to try to roll to the side, and finally just random wild movements accomplishing nothing.

One of the women near the door made a move towards the door, but stopped and listened as Matt made an announcement. Rachel blinked as the woman hesitated, and the other women, who had also started moving, stopped.

Rachel turned to Boris. "Let me go get her!"

Boris shrugged. "You get two times straw, one for you, one for her."

Rachel saw the logic. Trips outside were for the purpose of gathering the straw. Two girls out meant two loads of straw.

So that was what Matt had told the others. Rachel understood their hesitation -- a little bit. Each trip outside took them to the very limits of their ability to handle the job in the freezing cold. They couldn't imagine doubling the work.

But a friend was in serious trouble. Not only had the girl already been out longer than Rachel thought she herself would be able to tolerate, but she was also going to be whipped after one of the guards went to retrieve her.

That poor girl has been whipped enough already, thought Rachel. She has more marks than any other woman I've seen here. And it's so unfair! She didn't do anything wrong! She's not trying to kill herself! She just fell and got trapped.

Rachel turned to Boris again, the words spilling out of her. "You won't whip her? If I get her?" She saw his uncertain look, and realized she'd been speaking too fast for him. She knew she had to make it a little simpler. "No whip? I go, no whip her?"

Boris nodded. "You go, no whip." Clearly the guards, all of whom no doubt looked forward to a good whipping, were nevertheless willing to make a deal if it meant they didn't have to go outside themselves.

Rachel almost tripped again over her hobble chain as she bolted for the door, but recovered her balance without falling.

Outside, she paused as little as possible as the cold slammed into her again, taking her breath away as always, then ran straight for the pixie.

The girl was crying uncontrollably, and so disoriented she tried to squirm away when Rachel started to lift her. Rachel, in her own chains, couldn't separate her hands to get them around the girl's waist, so she went to pick up the girl's feet, lifting them as high as she could manage and pulling to the side. She managed to get the girl's legs clear of the bush, but the slipchain was still tangled, so she had to bend at the stomach to pin the girl's legs against her, to keep them from falling back, and reached down, her fingertips barely able to reach the girl's chain. Finally she worked it loose of the bush, and the girl fell onto her side, free.

Rachel helped her to her feet, and got her stumbling towards the door. As soon as Rachel stopped by the door and let go to reach for the knob, the girl sank onto her knees in a fetal position, shivering, her eyes squeezed shut.

Rachel suddenly realized she couldn't get the girl inside without first gathering the girl's portion of pine straw. Without it, she couldn't open the door. She tried the knob anyway. Locked.

And I'd been hoping maybe she could help me gather the stuff, thought Rachel, but that's not going to happen. She's almost unconscious. Rachel rushed out to the trees as quickly as the hobble chain would let her.

Three trips later, the bin full, Rachel pushed the button that made the bin swallow the straw -- and allowed the door to open. Keeping it open with her butt, Rachel managed to get the girl to her feet and into the booth, then ran back to the trees without watching to see what happened next.

Rachel sank to her knees in exhaustion several times on her last trip -- her sixth since emerging -- to the bin, but desperately held onto her load of straw without dropping it. She almost couldn't remember what the bell signified when it rang, and she barely remembered to push the red button. Her brain seemed to be filling with clouds as she stumbled to the door and pulled it open, and sank down to her knees once more inside the booth.

She felt several girls drag her back into the room, and pile on top of her once she was stretched out on the floor. They rubbed energetically along her body, horizontally, surely even more exciting to the guards. With her head turned to the side, Rachel saw, through half-lidded eyes, a similar pile of moving girlflesh on top of the pixie girl.

By the time the next woman in line was returning, Rachel sat up, still shivering slightly but feeling as if she might survive. She nodded at the women who had piled onto her, said "Spasiba," patted the nearest one on the knee, and stood up.

A few feet away, the pixie girl, looking haggard but almost recovered, was working her way to a standing position as well.

The girl came towards Rachel, squinting uncertainly -- yes, thought Rachel, she really was nearsighted -- and stopped when she had got close enough to be sure it was Rachel. She seemed almost hypnotized with awe, looking up into Rachel's eyes, and said very softly, slowly, and with as much emotion as it was possible to muster, "Spasiba."

Such a useful word.

Rachel smiled at her.

Suddenly the girl started speaking to her again, in quiet, rapid-fire Russian. The guards didn't seem to object, but of course, that would not have been Rachel's biggest problem. Though she had spoken to the girl in English last night, apparently that one single Russian word Rachel had said to her then had convinced the girl Rachel could understand her. Rachel shook her head and sighed. "I'm really sorry. I gave you almost the only Russian word I know last night. Do you speak any English at all?"

The girl looked at her blankly. Then she smiled again, and looked at Rachel shyly. Twisting one hand in her cuffs so she could point a finger at her stomach, the girl said, "Anya."

I don't think she's giving me the word for tummy, thought Rachel. That has to be her name. Rachel smiled again, and twisted her own hand around to point to herself. "Rachel."

Anya nodded, and her smile spread into that sunburst grin from last night. "Pryvet, Retchell."

Rachel had to struggle to keep from laughing, not wanting to seem to be laughing at Anya. That name really does fit me, she thought. I feel like retching. Or completely wretched. Either one works. That first word, "pryvet" -- Rachel had no way to know its meaning for sure, except that "Thank you" had already put in an appearance, so it was probably just a generic greeting. Rachel turned her laugh into a wider smile. "Pryvet, Anya."

With the handcuffs and chains, hugging wasn't possible, and the girl just took a step closer and rested her head briefly against Rachel's upper arm -- as high up Rachel's body as she could manage to get.

Rachel suddenly had a feeling of extreme self-consciousness wash through her. It felt as though she suddenly realized she was naked, as if in one of those dreams where you are walking down the street and it occurs to you that you forgot to dress. Since she had been nude in front of everybody for two days now, she wondered why she was suddenly so uncomfortable.

Ah, she thought, I know what it is. It was all so completely impersonal until this minute. Rachel had not known anyone here, nor even been able to speak the same language. The seven other women here in the room, all naked themselves, had all been strangers... but Rachel and the pixie girl -- Anya -- had shared an intense experience now. More than one, actually, starting last night, but this last one had obliterated any separation between them. And now Rachel was standing with a female friend, both of them naked, and it felt strange to Rachel in a way it hadn't before.

Get over it, Rachel, she told herself. You'll be gone from here soon. Any friends made here are not permanent. Though I hope I can do something to get these women out of here. In particular, to get Anya out of here.

Anya looked up and smiled at Rachel one more time, then turned to watch the progress of the latest woman taking a turn outside.

After nine trips outside, Rachel felt so glad it was over. She walked in line with the others, ahead of Anya this time -- they'd been lined up in reverse order from this morning -- their collars all connected by a series of chains again.

Rachel actually had a feeling of accomplishment. They really did use the pine straw here, she reminded herself, as part of the system of sanitation, such as it was. And it wasn't going to gather itself -- though Rachel, if asked earlier, would have guessed the prison bought it inexpensively from a forest supplier. Rachel had made a contribution to the system of these women's lives.

She suspected her team would all have the same assignment tomorrow, and it might be harder. They had recovered a lot of the nearest straw, and would have to go a little farther out tomorrow. Rachel held onto her hope, which still seemed reasonable, that she would be released before then. She was disappointed it hadn't happened before she'd finished a whole day freezing her butt off, and fretted that the evening rapes were getting closer. But she felt optimistic. After all she'd been through, she had to have some luck now. Maybe she'd be released just as she was finishing dinner. A meal would be very welcome.

Rachel was surprised when they passed by the corridor she recognized as the one where her cell block was located, and kept going. She hoped there wasn't some other job they had to do now.

She started recognizing the area... oh, of course, she thought. That place where they had cut her hair. The place which had also contained showers. She sighed. A shower would be very nice, but Rachel was sure the reason for it was that the guards wanted clean girls to play with.

They did, indeed. After passing through the swinging double doors into the shower room, the woman leading the line, obviously familiar with the ritual, led the line straight to the shallow trough, just as the water started pouring from the overhead faucets. Beside the trough, four women stood with mops, their handles just a foot or so long, next to buckets of soapy water.

As Rachel should have expected, in this place where dehumanization of the inmates was the rule, the entire procedure was very much like a car wash. The line of women, Rachel included, went straight down the trough, under the series of shower heads spewing water, while the women on duty ran the mops up and down the showerees' bodies -- stomachs, backs, breasts, heads, arms, legs, the insides of the legs up to the crotch. When Rachel herself reached the water, she cringed -- it was cold, more damn cold, just like the water sprayed on her yesterday from the hose by the cleaning girls, though actually not quite as cold as that had been, and certainly not freezing. Rachel knew exactly what freezing felt like now. The shower water was no doubt snowmelt, like the water from the hose yesterday, but Rachel suspected that the water took longer to reach this room, or perhaps had stayed in a holding tank longer. For whatever reason, it was more tolerable than the water yesterday. Or maybe Rachel only thought that, in comparison with what she'd been through today. Rachel realized she could tolerate it, though she couldn't breathe until she was halfway through it, and was shivering, but not as bad as she had earlier. You can, she guessed, get used to almost anything. It was very strange having the girls along the sides mop her all over, including between her buttocks, but she was glad there was some sort of attention to hygiene.

At the side of the room, another team of women was on the benches there, getting their hair trimmed. Rachel supposed that there was a regular rotation for teams to be trimmed. Based on the women she had seen, Rachel thought it seemed unlikely that any of the inmates went more than a week between haircuts.

There were no towels, hot air dryers, or any other method for drying the women after the shower. They simply marched out of the room, still shivering and gradually drying as they went.

Of course, thought Rachel bitterly, it's not like I need a hair dryer.