Zlata's alarm awakened her at 2 a.m., as it did every third night. It was her turn again to change the feeding bags on the IV.

She pressed her hand to her chest to try to slow her heart. There's no danger, she tried to convince herself. I'm just going to see if Blondie can answer some questions. We owe it to her, Zlata thought. We've been treating her so badly.

Last night, Zlata had complained of a headache after she and Veronika had retrieved Blondie from the president's office and helped her pee. She wanted to take a nap, she told the others, and should be okay after that. Could they just start the girls' IVs now instead of waiting until after their bath? Zlata was sure she'd feel better in a few hours, and she'd help with the bath then.

Tonight, the routine had been back on schedule, except that Zlata, while the attention of the others had been elsewhere, had turned off the drips for the mannequin drugs for both girls. She would restart the drips when she got up to exchange feeding bags in the middle of the night.

Now, at two in the morning, neither girl had been given the mannequin drugs in the last thirty hours -- in giving the drugs early the previous night, Zlata had been trying to maximize the time between doses. The girls should now be recovering some control over their voluntary muscles, at least in the facial area, as they had three nights earlier.

Zlata, her stomach in knots, slipped through the curtains, really bedsheets, around Blondie's and Pixie's bed, and quickly switched out the feeding bag. Then, her fingers shaking, she pulled several sheets of paper out of her pocket and unfolded them. She had promised herself she would stay no more than fifteen minutes in the enclosure, and couldn't be sure how smoothly this would go.

She stood over Blondie, and saw that the girl's eyes were open and following her. So far so good, thought Zlata. She's got that much control. Zlata held the papers up where Blondie could see them. The front sheet, in Zlata's careful writing, read: Blink your eyes slowly, two times.

Blondie's eyebrows furrowed slightly. She gave Zlata a helpless-seeming look.

Zlata frowned. She's moving her eyes now, she told herself. I know she can blink. I saw her do it before. And she's gone longer without the drugs now than she had then.

I could blink for her, Zlata thought, and she could copy that. But that's not getting me where I want to go. I need her to read instructions.

Zlata bit her lip. Could these girls be brain-damaged? she speculated. We have no idea what happened to them before they did this to them. Maybe Blondie was just blinking to try out her eyes. Maybe it was never a signal.

It was worth a try, she told herself. I haven't lost anything. I should get back to bed before this starts to look suspicious.

She was just starting to turn to the IV stand to start the drip of the drugs, but stopped herself. Suddenly Blondie's eyes were darting back and forth. They were looking directly at Zlata's eyes, then looking at Pixie, then back at Zlata, then at Pixie again.

She's not blinking like I told her to, thought Zlata, but it really looks like she's trying to tell me something.

Zlata moved a pace ahead and turned back to look at Pixie -- until now, she'd only been seeing the back of Pixie's head while trying to communicate with Blondie.

Pixie was looking up at Zlata intently. Zlata shrugged, and showed the paper to Pixie. When Pixie squinted at it, Zlata held the paper closer.

Pixie's eyes went wide. Then she squeezed them tightly shut, opened them, squeezed them shut again, and opened them.

Okay! thought Zlata. We're getting somewhere!

Zlata pulled aside the front sheet and put it behind the others, to reveal the second sheet, which read: Blink your right eye two times, and your left eye three times. That is the number 23

She smiled as she watched Pixie follow the instructions.

Zlata revealed the third sheet. On it was the Russian alphabet, each of the thirty-three letters matched with a number. After that was written: Blink both eyes -- space

Zlata pointed to the bottom of the page, where there was one additional sentence: Blink both eyes twice if you understand

Pixie blinked, hard. Twice.

It was so strange, seeing this girl, her chin nestled down in Blondie's cleavage, unable to move any part of her body except her eyes. And now communicating with them.

Zlata took a deep breath. Here was where it would get tricky. She slid the alphabet page down, far enough to reveal the page behind it but keeping the alphabet code in view for reference. With her other hand, she set a blank page down on the bed and held a pen over it, ready to write.

The fourth page read, My name is Zlata Chermanova. Who are you? Zlata would try to find out something about Pixie to begin with, and go from there on another night.

Pixie began blinking, and Zlata, keeping her eyes on Pixie, blindly wrote down the string of numbers indicated by the pattern of Pixie's blinks. Pixie went on longer than Zlata would have expected, and the pattern of numbers included some repetitions. Obviously she was intent on saying something important to her.

At last Pixie closed her eyes, seeming exhausted. Zlata patted the girl's shoulder, and held up the final page of her papers. I will think of some questions and talk to you again in a few nights. I promise we will always try to take good care of you.

Pixie blinked twice, to say she understood. Then she looked at Blondie, and blinked three times. Blondie returned her own set of three blinks to Pixie.

Maybe Blondie is just copying Pixie, Zlata thought. Yet it really looks like Pixie expects Blondie to understand. How they could have evolved a code while Blondie can't understand simple instructions written on paper is pretty mystifying, she told herself. But maybe I can figure it out eventually.

Zlata folded up the papers and put them back in her pocket. She very nearly left the enclosure without remembering to start the mannequin drug drips for both girls, which had to be done. Shit! she berated herself. If I screw up and they start moving around where the president can see, I'm on my way to prison.

She opened the valves, then pushed aside the curtain and left the enclosure. She made a show of rubbing her eyes and yawning, and went back to her bedroom. She wanted to decode Pixie's message right away, but decided that, for her viewing audience, she'd better go back to sleep now instead.

SEVEN HOURS LATER

Corporal Tilachev signaled to Captain Bolgarin. "Just played back the video from overnight, sir." Watching the eight hours of video was easier than it sounded. The computer was able to flag any movement that went beyond four women simply turning over in their sleep in separate bedrooms, and most nights the only thing to look at turned out to be the wee-hours IV exchange. With the privacy curtain, that exchange no longer occurred in plain sight, but there hadn't been anything remarkable about it until last night. "The nurse was in there behind the curtain about twenty minutes. It never takes anywhere near that long."

"Play it back for me. Fast forward through the part where we can't see her."

"Yes, sir." The video showed the nurse entering the enclosure. Twenty minutes of seeming still photography later, she emerged, yawned, rubbed her eyes, and stumbled to bed.

Captain Bolgarin flashed a rare smile. "Looks like she fell asleep in there. Did the audio flag any sounds while she was in there?"

"None, sir. She didn't say anything. Hard to say who she might have spoken to anyway. Log it?"

The captain scratched his chin, and shook his head. "Don't bother."

Every position, thought Rachel, is worse than the one before.

Rachel was on her back, her knees up and drawn far back. Anya was kneeling above her, facing towards Rachel's feet... and sitting on Rachel's face, her sex pressed firmly down on Rachel's wide-open mouth. Rachel had a very close-up view, just inches away, of her own index finger buried deep in Anya's rectum. Anya was leaning forward slightly, so that while her left hand was squeezing Rachel's breast painfully, her right index finger was hooked in Rachel's anus -- that was why Rachel's legs were upraised, of course: to bring her asshole within easy reach.

They have gotten really focused on anal penetration, thought Rachel bitterly. It so perfectly satisfied the president in so many ways, generating disgust, shame, and pain all at once.

Boiling with anger, Rachel worked hard to take her mind off her entire emotional/physical reaction and thought over what had happened last night. The nurse had communicated with Anya! She'd tried it with Rachel first, obviously not knowing what gibberish the Cyrillic letters were to Rachel. Rachel had nearly panicked at seeing the nurse sighing and starting to walk away, not suspecting that what had failed with Rachel might work with Anya. Desperately Rachel had tried to shift the nurse's attention to Anya, using her eyes, the only part of her body she could move. She'd felt so relieved when the nurse caught on, and minutes later Anya was blinking up a storm.

Rachel wondered at her ability to blink last night, now totally gone again as usual. A few nights earlier it had made sense, given how late they were administering the drugs. But last night the routine had been normal, unlike the night before, when for once the drugs had been given first, before the bath.

Obviously, though, the nurse had known Rachel would have recovered her movement to the extent that she had. The manner in which she'd tried to communicate with Rachel, and succeeded with Anya, making use of the one single thing Rachel and Anya could do...

Rachel felt excited, with a rebirth of hope inside that had previously been extinguished. She did hear the nurses talking on the phone sometimes, so they did have a way they could get a message out. Rachel hoped they would know to be very, very careful about it.

Zlata lay on her bed, a paper full of scribbled numbers, written blindly in crooked lines, in front of her. Underneath each letter she wrote the letter to which the number corresponded.

Halfway through her jaw dropped in utter astonishment. How can this be?? she wondered.

She made herself continue, in hopes that the rest of the message would clear up the mystery. Once finished, she read it over and over, amazed.

Pixie's revelation in response to the simple question "Who are you" was hardly more surprising than the nature of her plea. In very abbreviated spelling and syntax intended to save time -- doing all that blinking took a lot of time and effort -- the message read:

I ANYA SHE IS RCHL SHE AMERICAN PLS STOP HURTING HER PLS STOP HURTING HER PLS PLS

Zlata took the abbreviated word used most often to be "please," and saw that Pixie -- Anya, Zlata now knew her name to be -- had answered the question in two words, and then spent most of the rest of the message begging for mercy, not for herself, but for Blondie. It must be Blondie to whom Anya was referring, though she must have got Blondie's name garbled. Anya hadn't even gone to the trouble of giving her own last name. As an insight into Anya, it was fascinating, but nowhere near as important as the astonishing information about where Blondie was from. That explained the trouble Zlata had had trying to communicate with Blondie to begin with, but didn't explain what an American girl was doing here without being able to read Russian.

Obviously, Zlata thought, I need to find out more about Blondie. That is one thing Anya is telling me -- Blondie is important, much more so than Anya feels herself to be. But I can't talk to Blondie directly. I don't know any... English, right? That's what Americans speak. I have to get the information from Anya.

Zlata wadded the paper into a small ball, and put her head down to look as though she were taking a nap. Inside, her head was spinning. What, she asked herself, do I need to try to find out from Anya first?

Some time later she went into her bathroom. Sitting on her toilet to pee, she let her hand rest between her legs and, careful not to let the act be visible from any angle, dropped the wadded paper into the bowl. Minutes later she flushed it away. She had already disposed, the same way, of the rest of last night's papers, except the one showing the letter code, which she would need again.

TWO DAYS LATER

Anya was furious with the nurse. She had begged her to stop hurting Retchell. And this, thought Anya, is what I got for it.

Retchell was kneeling, sitting back on her heels, facing Anya. The nurses had used the bondage ropes again, on Retchell only: her feet were tied together, her hands tied behind her with wrists crossed, and there was a rope connecting her elbows, pulling them close together and, Anya was sure, hurting Retchell's shoulders. Added to all this pointless restraint on a woman who couldn't move anyway, they had even added a gag, a strip of cloth around her head holding a big wad of cloth inside her mouth. On a woman who couldn't speak.

But that wasn't the part that infuriated Anya.

Anya was sitting cross-legged, holding a device that looked a little like an electric shaver, but with two prongs at its end, and it wasn't an inert prop; it delivered genuine electric shocks. Anya could tell they were real: Retchell's muscles jumped each time it was used, purely in a reflexive action that was unaffected by the drugs that had taken away Retchell's conscious control of her body. The shocks only came about every twenty minutes or so, but between came an agony of waiting, both for Retchell and for Anya herself.

Anya didn't know, at first, what was causing the shocks to happen, but early in the day the president had crouched beside Anya and said something to Retchell, during which he paused at the exact moment one of the shocks came. Anya couldn't see how he was doing it, but she knew he was in control. At that time, the device had been in contact with Retchell's thigh. The president had then, for the first time, moved one of Anya's limbs himself, rather than having one of the nurses do it: her arm, holding the device, which was afterward pressed against Retchell's stomach. And then, he touched the spot on Retchell's stomach where the device was held against her skin, and let his finger trail upward to her left breast. Anya couldn't see a reaction on Retchell's face, of course. But she knew Retchell understood as well as Anya, that that was where the device was going next.

Each shock to Retchell's stomach had an instant effect, causing a ripple of muscular contraction, making her breasts bounce. Retchell's face, of course, showed nothing. But Anya didn't need to see the suffering in Retchell's face. She could feel it inside herself.

Anya kept telling herself it wasn't the nurses' fault. They were being forced to do it, in the same way Anya and Retchell had been forced to do things. But she couldn't help what she was feeling. Anya had asked the nurse for help. And now this.

Zlata had been pleasantly surprised, last night, when Veronika had suggested, on her own, giving the girls their IV drip first and bathing them afterwards. Zlata had wanted to bring that about, and had wondered whether she should use the headache excuse again or come up with another plausible reason. But Veronika had saved her the trouble: she had discovered the advantage of doing the IV early, since it allowed her to do the bag replacement earlier in the night and get a longer night's sleep unbroken.

Zlata, this evening, had said she wanted to get the bathing out of the way, and really didn't mind getting up at 2 a.m. for the bag exchange. As before, she turned off the mannequin drug unnoticed, so that by the middle of the night, the girls' facial muscles would once again have recovered a very limited mobility.

Now, again a little nervous, she entered the enclosure at two o'clock, and again pulled sheets of folded paper out of her pocket. The first sheet contained no instructions, simply an apology, which she held close to Anya's face, having learned Anya was nearsighted:

Anya, I am so sorry. I know you asked me not to hurt Rchl. We have to. He makes us do it. But I am very very sorry. Zlata was hoping that, as garbled as it must have been, Anya would recognize the name she had given for Blondie three nights ago.

As little as Anya could use her face, she was still managing to give Zlata a very hurt expression. Zlata kept her eyes on Anya's, taking her reproachful look without flinching. At last Anya blinked twice: message understood.

Zlata now held the sheet with the alphabet code, and behind and above it, another sheet with the question: Anya, is there any other American nearby who knows Rchl? Someone who might help her if they knew where Rchl was? Zlata had spent hours trying to decide what direction to go with her questioning. The best idea she had come up with was that Blondie might be part of some delegation, or tour group, who had somehow -- it was so easy to do this in Irkhetnia -- run afoul of the law and ended up in the prison. Zlata pictured Blondie's friends shuttling around from one bureaucrat to another, trying to find out information on her whereabouts and what they could do to get her back. Zlata had not, as yet, come up with a way to contact any such people. But she and the other nurses did at least have access to a phone. Maybe Zlata could give her family an innocent-sounding message that would get them to make contact with Blondie's group. She didn't know how, but if she found out more to begin with about exactly who might be looking for Blondie, that might help with ideas.

Holding the papers in one hand, Zlata scribbled down the numbers as Anya blinked them.

The answer now was shorter than the one Anya had given her three nights earlier. Rather than wait three more nights to follow up, Zlata decided she could decode it now. She was much more familiar now with how the numbers and letters matched up, after her earlier practice. It would only take a minute. She found that Anya had said:

THERE WAS AMERICAN MAN AT PARTY

Zlata frowned. That made no sense. She quickly wrote, What party?

Again the response was short: WHEN YOU PAINT US WHITE

Zlata stifled a gasp, not wanting even to make that much sound. Oh, she thought. That party.

When we all worked so hard to make Anya and Blondie look like statues. When we were told specifically to make sure they would not be recognized as living women.

It had been because there was going to be an American there! Someone who would have known who Blondie was! And I was only hoping there was someone in the city we could contact by phone somehow! I never imagined someone like that had stood just three meters away from her!

Concentrating on making her quick scribble readable despite her shaking hand, Zlata wrote, Who was he?

The answer came quickly. DONT KNOW ASK RCHL

I am SO close, Zlata thought, to knowing something really crucial. But now I have to find a way for Anya to pass questions along to Blondie, purely by blinking, and then pass Blondie's translated answers back to me. That will take forever.

Zlata wrote, I need you to talk to Rchl. Let me work out a way.

Anya started blinking before Zlata could turn away, and Zlata hurriedly wrote the numbers down. NOT KNOW LANGUAGE

Zlata almost broke the pen. How in the hell, she wondered, did they work out that three-blink code between them? Neither one speaks the other's language!

This is not Anya's fault, Zlata reminded herself. It is what it is. But I have to figure out what to do with this. Zlata leaned down, stroked Anya's hair and kissed her forehead, then did the same to Blondie. She wrote quickly, I will come back in a few nights, and showed it to Anya. She turned on the IV drip, folded up the papers, pocketed them, and left the enclosure, remembering to yawn hugely and stagger a little as if half asleep on the way to her room.

At lunchtime, Ivan arrived with two other men, laborer-types, carrying a wooden crate with them. He had them leave it in the hallway just outside the door, where they couldn't get any revealing view into the ward, and said to Larisa, "Your order from last week."

Larisa gasped. "Already? Great!" She asked Raisa, closest to the door, to help her bring it into the room. Behind her, Ivan wheeled in the lunches.

Zlata, her heart fluttering, waited until she thought she could speak without her voice trembling. "Ivan, when you come back later, could you bring me a copy of the book, 'The Hunger Games'? I've heard people talk so much about that. Oh, an English language version, please. I've always thought literature should be read in the language in which it was written." Veronika and Larisa had done most of the requesting of reading material -- Larisa mainly art magazines, Veronika books of fiction. Raisa preferred watching television, as did Zlata, until now.

Ivan looked at her curiously. "You know English?"

Zlata felt her heart nearly pounding out of her chest now. "Oh, well, it's been awhile since school. I think I've probably forgotten some." She hoped to God he didn't make her prove she could speak it. She had decided she might be able to get away with saying that she had a reading knowledge but that her teacher had despaired of her ear for the spoken word. She hoped it wouldn't come to that. "In case I have trouble, could you also bring me an English/Russian dictionary?"

Ivan simply shrugged and said he'd see if either requested book was available in the mansion's library. She might need to wait until tomorrow if they weren't.

Zlata gave him a grin, fueled by genuine relief. "Thank you so much." Then her eyes widened as she saw what was in the crate Larisa had opened. "Larisa -- what is that?" Ivan departed while all the nurses were goggling at the contents of the box.

Larisa laughed. "What's it look like? It's a dog."

"You ordered a stuffed dog? What for?" It was a large dog, with an odd look to it. Stuffed dogs didn't usually have their tongues stuck out, as if panting.

Larisa had knelt down beside the dog to get a closer look. "What do you think? It adds some new poses for Blondie and Pixie."

Anya, Zlata said in her head, and almost aloud, stopping herself just in time. She didn't want to have to explain how she knew Pixie's real name.

Raisa crouched down on the other side of the dog. Suddenly her hands flew to her mouth, her face behind them turning red.

Zlata looked at Raisa. "What?" She had a sudden awful thought. "It's not alive, is it?" The dog wasn't any less active than Blondie or Anya.

Larisa rolled her eyes. "Of course it's not alive. It's a real dog, though. One of the dogs from the prison. The doctor there used a chemical preservative, and it won't decay. He stiffened the joints, like he did with the girls, so we can pose him."

Zlata bent down to see what Raisa had reacted to, then stood up immediately, wide-eyed.

Larisa was certainly correct in calling the dog "him." Underneath his stomach he had a fully erect penis.

Zlata had to choke back a wild laugh when Veronika emerged from her bedroom and asked, "What's up?"

Zlata watched, frowning, as Larisa tested the dog's joints. Back at the prison, Larisa had convinced Zlata and the others that the well-being of Blondie and Pixie -- Anya -- was her top priority, had made them promise to make the girls' lives better. But something had happened to Larisa, and Zlata had sensed it when they had all watched that video of scenes from the prison. Zlata and the other nurses were seriously frightened by the threat of prison, but Larisa seemed almost unhinged, and in her creation of poses for the girls, she seemed to want to stay one step ahead of the president, giving him things he hadn't asked for and causing more pain than she needed to. The electrical shocks, for example.

Zlata shook her head. She still had no idea how to get the girls out of this place. But her need to do so was growing. She foresaw very bad things happening to Blondie and Anya.

One good thing about yesterday, Rachel thought, was that at least Anya had a day free of pain. As far as I know. But Rachel knew that at some point Anya would get the electric shocks. And she knew exactly how that would feel. The long waiting, not knowing when the next would come, and then the sudden convulsion of pain ricocheting through her body. Please, she had wished without real hope, please don't ever do this to Anya.

Today was infuriatingly disgusting, and a hateful sign of potential things to come. Where, Rachel wondered, did they come up with this dog?

Rachel had seen the shockingly large penis before the nurses had eased it slowly into Anya's sex. Anya was on her knees and elbows, being taken from behind in typical canine fashion. If there was pain today, it was Anya's -- Rachel knew very well how it felt to be invaded in a completely dry vagina. Rachel was sitting upright on the floor in front of Anya and the dog. She was holding the back and side of the dog's head with her left and right hand respectively, her head tilted, looking exactly as if she were passionately kissing a lover, in this case the dog, whose protruding tongue was deep in Rachel's open mouth. Down below, Anya's head was down, her mouth wide open and covering Rachel's sex.

Rachel had briefly wondered if the dog was still alive, but decided immediately she would have felt its breath in her face if it were. She also wondered, this time with no way to answer, whether the dog was one of those that had patrolled her cell block at night.

The president had come over to them, and laughed delightedly, clapping his hands in glee. "You always make new friends so quickly, Miss Preston."

Rachel found herself unable to wish the president could be here in her place. She couldn't wish this on anyone. She satisfied herself with merely wishing he was dead.