August’s mouth was grim. Wayland was a color of red Buckeye had never seen. The guards stood with tense limbs, waiting for trouble. Mather ignored it all.
“Consider your services rendered,” he said, turning back to the metal doors. “Your pay is at the guard booth on the way out. Should the need arise, we’ll be in contact.” The cassock swirled finality around him.
Buckeye’s head whipped to August, still somehow in disbelief. He gave her a shrug and a guilty cock of his head, as if to say, Sorry, not sorry, and moved off toward the cab of the truck. Wayland was cursing under his breath and hauling down the roll-up door.
Mather passed through the doors and the grey-clad men formed back up around Buckeye and the eleven lustworkers to herd them along. Her heart skittered behind her ribs.
New Covenant. I’m in fucking New Covenant! Sold like a goddamn horse!
It made the idea of Greed enforcers seem like a hot bath and a cold beer.
The broad hallway into which the sliding doors opened was bright and linear and devoid of life. For the first time, Buckeye was glad for the gag: without it, her teeth would have ground to dust.
The corridor Mather led them down ended in another perpendicular hallway of similar width. When he turned right, the guards kept the prisoners in a tight group to follow. There were no windows anywhere, just as there’d been none in the concrete garage. Buckeye got the sense that they were at least one level underground, if not more.
The priest made more turns, threading his way further back into the warren of whatever structure this was, and their surroundings shed some of their newness as they went. The door he brought them to was far humbler than the one from which he’d first appeared, painted wood instead of metal, and a single hinged side instead of smooth, gliding tracks in the floor.
Beside this door stood another clergyman, younger than Mather, wearing a black cassock. He dipped his head to the senior priest as they approached.
“Father.”
“Brother Levi.” The man in white nodded. His subordinate opened the door and held it wide.
Buckeye didn’t know if it was collective fear, shock, or just the rational understanding that they’d get nowhere if they tried to run, but the jacketed Vic
ers clumped together and moved through the new door without any more fuss than wary, darting eyes. The guards closed in behind like sheepdogs.
The space they entered was as far removed from a parking garage as The Vice was from this pristine hellhole they were in now. The concrete cavern and glossy hallway had been linear and devoid of life. This was a masonry beehive of old, a honeycomb of a room stretching away under warm electric lights.
Two rows of columns divided the space, arches connecting them to each other and to the outer walls, creating a series of smaller dome-ceilinged segments within the larger hall.
Hall? Or maybe …
It wasn’t Buckeye’s area of expertise for sure, but she might be looking for the word ‘crypt’. It reeked of religious architecture, whatever it was.
Mather kept walking, familiar and unimpressed. As their group passed under the arches, there were dark shapes of movement on the periphery. Buckeye turned her head enough to see additional black-robed men peeling out from somewhere behind her and falling in at the end of the reluctant captive parade.
The jacket straps were chafing Buckeye’s crotch as she walked. Her mind ran scenarios as fast as it could, but none of them were good, and none of them ended in escape.
Survive, Wheeler. Just survive. It’s what you do.
After a turn to the right side of the Gothic-style hall, Mather approached yet another door and placed his thumb on a pad to the side of the frame. A dull clack came from within an incongruous metal door, and the man turned the handle and opened it into the next room.
Buckeye scowled around the gag. Electric lighting everywhere. Those batons. A fingerprint scanner. These assholes were fully on-grid, just swimming in pre-Delineation tech, and none of them seemed to care. Just another day in the Covenant. All you had to do was give your life to the church.
The guards crowded them through this new door and the line of clergy followed. She heard it shut at their backs with a snick. Her skin prickled.
The room couldn’t have been that big. Maybe forty feet by twenty. It wasn’t columned, but the walls and ceiling were smooth, pale stone, like the previous space. Mather turned to face them and clasped his hands behind his back, waiting.
A jerk on the back of her jacket got Buckeye’s attention. One of the guards was yanking her by the fabric to stand a few steps further into the room, and she could see the same happening to some of her peers, as well. After some more forcible shuffling of bodies, the pattern came out: the guards were arranging them in a line, facing the priest.
No way this ends well. No way at all.
When the four guards stepped back, satisfied with their lineup, the contingent of additional priests took their place, one standing a pace or so behind each poor bastard from The Vice.
Buckeye was cracking under all this, but one of the men broke right in half. The scruffy blond spun on his heel, head down, and charged the closed door with a grunt of rage. What he thought he’d accomplish, she had no idea.
Smooth as glass, a guard stepped near and landed a fist in the captive’s gut. The mad-eyed Vicer buckled, but tried a shoulder check on the way, refusing defeat. Pointless. The baton came out and he made an animal noise, toppling forward on one foot like a drunken stork. While he lay there, panting, his peers agog, the guard dragged him back in front of the black-robed priest. Hauled the man to a stand, though it took several deep breaths before he could maintain it without help.