For three days, Juliet’s world narrowed down to a room with a cot and a bucket.

The window was too high up, and too narrow, to see anything through, except a rectangle of grey sky during the day. The room was cold and damp, and the numbness crept into her through every point of contact.

The jailers came twice a day, just to slide a tray through a slot in the door. No one spoke to her.

For a gal used to the comfort and luxury of the modern Anesidoran lifestyle, this was terrible, but it wasn’t exactly hell. It wasn’t what the stories said about places like this detention center… at least, not yet.

The next morning, the door finally opened all the way.

Two soldiers stood at the threshold. One of them gestured with his hand: out.

They walked her up a flight of stairs and down many corridors. The building was institutional in a way that transcended national origin. It could have once been a school, perhaps, she wasn’t sure.

At the moment, it just so happened to be a prison for female enemies of the Balderan government.

They stopped at a door, and one of the soldiers knocked. A voice inside said something in Balderan. The soldier opened the door and stepped aside, and Juliet was ushered through.

It was a doctor’s examination room.

The man behind the desk wore a white coat. He was perhaps fifty. Lean, clean-shaven, with close-cropped grey hair and wire-rimmed glasses that gave him a scholarly appearance. He was writing something when she entered and he finished his sentence before looking up, which struck Juliet as a deliberate performance of unhurriedness. When he did look up, he smiled.

“Please,” he said, in accented but fluent Anesidoran. “Sit.”

She sat in the chair across from his desk. The soldiers withdrew, closing the door behind them. Juliet was alone with him.

He studied her for a moment, the way a veterinarian might look at a new intake. Juliet hated her own mind for choosing the word vet, but she couldn’t help herself. Her capture had felt so dehumanising, so much like an animal’s. It was constantly on her mind.

“Juliet Voss,” he said, reading from a file open on his desk. “University of Valis. Third year, gender studies and political theory.” He looked up. “Is that right?”

She said nothing.

He didn’t seem bothered. “My name is Dr. Marek Šolta. I’m a physician. I’m here to ensure you’re in adequate health after your... ordeal.” The pause before ordeal was pointed. The fucker seemed to find the word charming. “But first... may I ask you something informal? Off the record, as they say.“

She stared at him. His posture was relaxed, but there was something about the way he held himself, some quality of contained discipline that the white coat couldn’t quite disguise. This man was a soldier. Doctor’s coat or not.

“How are things in Anesidora these days?” he asked. “It’s been some years since I visited. I did my residency in Valis, actually, must have been... oh, twenty years ago now. Lovely city. Lovely campus! Has the elm on the north quad survived? There was talk of removing it, back then.”

Juliet’s throat was dry. She hadn’t spoken to another human being in three days. Her voice, when it came, was hoarse and smaller than she wanted it to be. “I don’t know about any elm.”

“Pity.” He seemed genuinely disappointed. “And the countryside here, how do you find it? The mountains, I mean. Are they to your taste?”

“I was in thick woodland most of my time in your country. And as for the ride here, I haven’t seen much of the countryside,” she said, “from the back of a truck.”

“No. I suppose not.” He picked up a pen from his desk, turned it between his fingers. “Let me ask you something else, then. A hypothetical. Indulge me.”

She waited.

“How does one declaw and defang a defeated sex?”

Juliet drew breath.

This was like something out of a war movie. The slow, performative roundabout towards what this man really wanted. She knew she was powerless, here, a foreign fighter captured in combat. The rules of war didn’t extend protection to the likes of her. She kept her face still, and said nothing.

“I ask,” he continued, “because it seems to me a question of some practical relevance. Here in Baldera, I mean. The civil war is nearly over, as you have seen. The Insurgency is finished. What remains is the question of what comes after.” He set the pen down. “What does the postwar order look like? How does the winning side ensure that the losing side never rises again?”

He paused, as if waiting for her to engage. She had no intention of giving him the satisfaction.

“Your country,” he said, “the Anesidoran Reich... you may tell yourselves that what you’re building is about equality. Perhaps you even believe it. But to an outside observer, to someone like me, watching from across the ocean and the mountains, the picture is rather different. What Anesidora is doing, slowly, covertly, with great institutional patience, is subjugating men to female power. Economically, legally, culturally, politically, and to be sure, sexually as well, through new and ever-restrictive sexual mores. You are declawing and defanging the male sex while telling yourselves — and your men — that it’s all in the name of feminism. Of restorative justice.” He smiled. “And it’s very effective. I admire the craftsmanship, truly.“

Juliet’s hands balled into fists.

“Now,” he said, “what the Reich does within its own borders is no business of Baldera’s. You are a sovereign nation. You may arrange your sexual politics however you like. But you must extend us the same courtesy, yes? Balderans expect the freedom to settle their own affairs.”

“It seems to me,” Juliet said, in defiance of her own fear, “that Balderan women disagree with the way you intend to settle Baldera’s affairs.”

He shrugged. “That may be the case. It’s still a Balderan problem. What gives you the right to intervene?”

Juliet decided to sidestep the question. “You don’t need to ask me how to win the peace,” she said. Her voice was steadier now. “Men have thousands of years of experience keeping women down. It’s called patriarchy. You already know how it works.”

Dr. Šolta chuckled. He seemed so sincerely amused.

“That,” he said, “is manifestly false.”

He stood up and walked to the window. The view was of a courtyard, she could kind of see it from where she sat. Grey flagstones, a marshalling ground, bare trees, and of course the outer wall, topped with razor wire. Mountains beyond, vanishing into the clouds.

“If patriarchy was so effective at keeping women subjugated,” he said, his back to her, “then why did women eventually win emancipation? Why did they win the right to vote? Why did they accumulate enough institutional power to — as you are doing in Anesidora — begin dominating men?” He turned back to face her. “Patriarchy failed. That is the inescapable conclusion. Traditional patriarchy — religion, reproductive control, legal coverture, social norms, all of it — was a containment system, which women eventually broke free of. The pressure inside exceeded the structural tolerances, and the whole edifice cracked, and unfettered female power came pouring through. That is the history of the last two centuries, yes?“

“Fortunately, yes,” Juliet said, marvelling at her own defiance. Or maybe suicidal stupidity, she wasn’t sure. “May it be the history of the next two centuries, too.”

The doctor studiously ignored her jab.

“So,” he said, returning to his chair and folding his hands again. “If one’s goal is to permanently subjugate women — to declaw and defang them, as I said, so thoroughly that they can never again mount the kind of challenge they’ve been mounting to men — then clearly, a simple return to traditional patriarchy will not suffice. It’s insane to try the same approach a second time and expect a different result, yes? One does not rebuild a dam with the same flawed engineering that allowed it to break in the first place.”

He leaned forward, and the scholarly affect was gone. What was underneath was harder, and very certain of itself.

“The civil war in Baldera is almost over,” he said. “The postwar order is being designed as we speak. And I can tell you with some confidence, Miss Voss, that it will not be a return to the way things were.”

He paused, letting the silence do its work.

“It will be much harsher.“

Juliet’s hands were trembling in her lap. She pressed them together, squeezing until the knuckles went white. The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

Dr. Šolta regarded her for a long moment. Then he closed the file on his desk.

“You are aware,” he said, in a tone that had shifted to the flat tone of someone reciting a legal document of some kind, “that as a foreign national bearing arms in an internal conflict, without the sanction of any recognised state or international body, you are not classified as a lawful combatant under any treaty to which Baldera is a signatory.”

Juliet blinked. The pivot was so abrupt that for a second she thought she’d misheard him, or that he was answering a different question than the one she’d asked. But of course, she did know it. She was here as, basically, an illegal mercenary. For a just cause, sure, but... not to this guy and his ilk.

“The laws of war,” he continued, “such as they are — and they are rather more limited than your Anesidoran universities would have you believe — extend protections to soldiers fighting under the flag of a recognised state, or to members of organised resistance movements that meet certain criteria. You meet none of these criteria. The Foreign Women’s Legion was not authorised by the Anesidoran government. It was not recognised by any international body. It was, in the eyes of Balderan law, a criminal enterprise. You are not a prisoner of war, Miss Voss. You are an unlawful enemy combatant.”

This much, unfortunately, she already knew.

“Baldera is under no legal obligation to repatriate you, nor do we have any obligation to grant you consular access or, for that matter... try you before a court.” He took off his glasses, and cleaned them on the hem of his white coat, looking lost in thought. “I am well within my right — the state’s right, which I am authorised to exercise — to have you taken into the courtyard and shot.”

The room around Juliet began to spin, and she had to steady herself to not drop off the chair. Her rational mind was overshadowed by a fear so primitive it bypassed every intellectual faculty she possessed. He remained patient, waiting.

“So,” he said. “I want to present you with a choice. A genuine one, I am not being rhetorical.”

He folded his hands on the desk again.

“Would you prefer death, or rape?”

In the quiet that descended on the room, Juliet heard the roar of blood in her own ears, and the sound of her breathing, which had gone shallow and fast.

She should say death.

The thought arrived fully formed, like a thesis statement, and it sat there in the centre of her mind: naturally, she should say death. Better to die than to submit.

Better to die than to let a man use her body as a vehicle for his power.

She didn’t just believe that. She embodied that belief, it was the woman she’d built herself into. Perhaps more importantly it was the woman she wanted to be, and that one would undispitably say death. That woman would look this man in the eye and spit in his face and go to the wall with her chin raised.

Besides, while once she might have been only a campus activist, now she was a soldier, too. Briefly and with no proper training, perhaps, but she’d still been in firefights and come out the other side. She knew what it was like to hear bullets fly past your head. She’d stared at human beings down the scope, and pulled the trigger. She’d seen women die. She’d dug into frozen ground with her fingernails and held her position when every synapse in her brain screamed at her to run.

She had, in some small, imperfect way, earned the right to call herself brave.

And yet, now, she found her resolve wavering.

This was a man calmly asking her to choose, and the cold courtyard was right there outside the window. The razor wire glinted on the wall, and she could see the bare tree and the grey flagstones where they would make her kneel. The image was so vivid and so specific that her body revolted against it with a force that obliterated everything else.

Her hands were shaking. There was a high thin ringing in her ears and her vision had narrowed to a tunnel with Dr. Šolta’s calm face at the end of it.

“I don’t—” Her voice broke. She tried again. “I don’t want to die.”

Dr. Šolta nodded. “Then say it. In full. So that we are both clear on what you are choosing.”

Her lips were trembling. Her eyes welled with tears.

“Say: I submit to rape.”

She stared sullenly. The silence stretched, but only for a moment.

“I submit,” Juliet said at last, “to rape.”

She felt herself physically deflate as she said it. Something left her, alongside those words. A kind of resistance, pride, perhaps a conception of self. A kind of strength. A kind of humanity.

Dr. Šolta pushed his chair back and stood, walking around to her side of the desk.

“Stand up.”

She stood, numbly, facing the desk. And then, his hand pressed between her shoulders and pushed.

She found herself bent over the desk, with her cheek pressed flat against the surface. Such an evocative image of prevarication and defeat. Forced down and firmly pinned to a horizontal surface, such that she may better be acted upon.

Juliet exhaled her very resistance as she felt his hand at her waist. He worked down her fatigue trousers, then her underwear, letting them bunch around her knees.

His hand slid between her thighs.

She flinched, but despite her spasm, the hand on her back held her in place.

The doctor wasn’t rough. He started touching her pussy with delicate, probing motions, rubbing it gently, almost like an exploration. He occasionally parted her lips a little, but didn’t push. He switched between using his fingertips and his open palm. He was clearly in no rush.

If he’d been rough, if he’d grabbed and groped her, she could have filed it under the heading she had for such things: male violence, sexual predation, the spoils of the violent victor, the ancestral exercise of prevarication and oppression. She had theoretical frameworks and language to understand such phenomena, under the lens of the theory of patriarchy.

Instead, he was gentle, and that seemed to get to her traitorous, animal body. Juliet was responding.

The involuntary slickness began, the blood rushing to the tissues under his fingertips. Her hips shifted. It was only a tiny, unconscious adjustment, barely noticeable really, but it absolutely mortified her. She clenched her jaw hard, because she was determined that she would not make a sound. She would not give him that.

“The body’s response is autonomic,” Dr. Šolta said. “It does not imply consent. You know this, I’m sure. They must teach it in your gender studies courses. And if not there, well... the Legion must have told you. It’s fairly common to teach soldiers what their bodies might do if subject to rape.”

She said nothing. Her fingers curled against the edge of the desk, knuckles whitening.

“I mention it,” the doctor continued, all the while his fingers kept coaxing defeat from her sex, “because women in your position often experience significant psychological distress when their bodies respond to stimulation during rape. They interpret arousal as complicity. It is not, truthfully, it’s a reflex, more like... say, salivating when you smell food.”

He found her clit.

She had no say in the spasm that followed. His fingers kept working her, kneading her into submission. Steady, and devastatingly competent. She knew his were fingers that had already mastered many cunts. What hope did hers have?

Then, his other hand withdrew from the small of her back. She heard the sound, incongruously loud, of his zipper being pulled down.

Then, his cock lined up with her cunt, and just like that, without further preamble, the doctor pushed himself inside and she let him in with a soft, wet, yielding sound.

She thought of Vasik, then. The semiotics of surrender to male power. She wasn’t on her knees, and she was no commander… but her surrender was just as potent.

He was warm.

What a stupid thought to have, in the middle of her own rape. But it just... came to her. The room was cold and the desk was cold, but her rapist was warm inside her. Her cunt clenched around his cock.

His fingers didn’t stop. They kept working her clit, like he was trying to physically erode her sexual resistance, as he began to thrust his hips, fucking her.

“This,” he said, “is precisely the point I was making earlier. About the insufficiency of traditional patriarchal tools.”

The sound of flesh slapping against flesh filled the room, growing louder.

“For millennia,” he said, “men used sex as an instrument of control over women. Rape as conquest. Rape as punishment. Rape as shame. Rape as social regulation. The threat of it, the actuality of it, woven into every civilisation that has ever existed.”

The dual stimulation of his fingers and his cock was doing something to Juliet’s nervous system that she couldn’t intellectualise fast enough to neutralise.

“You can rape a woman,” he said. “You can even make her enjoy it. In the moment, at least, as I am doing with you, now. But it’s not enough to ensure that woman’s permanent subjugation.”

Her hips bucked back, seeking friction. A sound came out of her mouth that she would have done anything to take back.

“Rape alone has never been sufficient to truly declaw and defang women. History proves this conclusively. You can brutalise a woman’s body and she will still, in the privacy of her own mind, resist you. She will still hate you. She will still plot against you. She will bide her time and she will wait and eventually, she will rise. You understand.”

She understood nothing. She was losing the thread of his words because the sensation between her legs had crossed some threshold and was building with a momentum that felt tidal and geological, like something that could not be reasoned with or argued away. His cock filled her and his fingers played her and the combination was — she couldn’t — she was —

He fucked her harder. Juliet’s fingers gripped the edge of the desk even tighter, and she didn’t know anymore if she was holding on to resist the pleasure or to anchor herself against it.

She could feel her own wetness on his hand and on his cock, and the sheer annihilating humiliation of being wet for this man was somehow not killing the arousal but feeding it, as though the shame itself had become fuel.

She was going to come.

She was going to come on this rapist’s cock. She was going to come bent over a desk in a Balderan detention facility with her face unceremoniously tucked out of the way and pressed into a desk by a strong masculine hand. Her cunt was acknowledging the sexual authority of a man who had just given her the choice between this and a bullet.

She could no longer stop herself from crying out.

The orgasm broke over her in waves. It started with a quiver in her thighs and her abdomen, and then exploded outwards, like a detonation. It pulled sounds from her throat that were animal and strangled. She tried to rein them back in, but they were utterly beyond her control. Her back arched, because she was folding like a picnic table before the power of her conqueror. She felt her cunt tighten around him in rhythmic spasms and she heard herself moan like a stupid bitch in heat.

The hungry, milking contraction of her pussy walls was what sent him tumbling over the edge, in turn. He came inside her, spurting rope after rope of cum with a series of satisfied, understated grunts.

He wasn’t wearing protection… he’d just cum inside her…

She thought those two thoughts on repeat as she was lying there, panting and shattered on his desk, with tears running sideways across her face.

“Good,” he said. Just that. Good. Then, he withdrew his cock with a wet plop.

“Now,” he said. “Where was I. Ah, yes.”

A sharp, bright sting, deep in the right side of her neck. It punched through skin and muscle.

A needle.

Juliet screamed.

It was the scream of a small animal that has been grabbed by a predator and knows, in the wordless, total way that animals know things, that something irrevocable has just happened to it. She lurched sideways off the desk and she went down hard, slamming into the floor on her side.

She rolled, thrashing, her hands going to her neck where the needle had stung her.

“What did you — what the fuck did you —”

“Breathe,” Dr. Šolta said.

He was standing above her, holding the empty syringe between his thumb and forefinger. He set it down on the desk, carefully, beside the open file.

“What did you put in me?” She was hyperventilating, scrabbling backwards in a stupid attempt to get away from him. Her back hit the wall.

“What the fuck did you put in me?”

“I was explaining,” he said, “the insufficiency of traditional measures. Rape. Legal subjugation. Social control. Religion. All the tools of classical patriarchy.”

“These tools failed. They failed because they left the fundamental architecture of female existence intact. So, if one wishes to build a postwar order in which women are truly and permanently disarmed — not merely oppressed, not merely subjugated, but fundamentally incapable of resistance — one must go further than tradition ever dared.” He smiled at her. “Try to stand up.”

Juliet stared at him.

“Go on,” he said. “Try.”

She didn’t want to try. Every instinct she had was telling her not to try, because trying would confirm whatever it was she could already feel happening inside her skull, and as long as she didn’t try, she could still pretend it wasn’t real.

Still, in a way, she couldn’t stop herself from trying. She got her hands under her, and pushed herself up to her knees.

The room tilted.

Juliet’s inner ear sent a screaming signal to her brain that she was falling, and her legs buckled and she went down on her hands and knees with a crack.

She tried again.

One foot. Push. Nause and vertigo overtook her again, and she grabbed the edge of the desk to steady herself. She got halfway upright… and then, dizziness swept her feet from under her.

She tried again and again, but up was a direction her body was no longer permitted to go. Standing was now beyond her reach. It was simply impossible.

“No,” she said. She was on all fours, hair hanging loose in front of her eyes. Cum was still leaking down her inner thigh. “No, no, no, no—”

“The compound targets the inner ear,” Dr. Šolta said. He had returned to his chair. He was sitting behind his desk, watching her with dispassionate interest. “The mechanism is, in layman’s terms, a permanent recalibration of the body’s sense of gravitational orientation. The brain is told, continuously and irrevocably, that any posture above a certain height is a fall in progress. The result is what you’re experiencing now.”

Juliet was not listening. Juliet was trying to stand up again, and failing again. She was crying again, now, sobbing uncontrollably.

“The effect,” Dr. Šolta said, “is permanent.”

She tried to process that word.

Permanent. Permanent meant forever. Permanent meant she would never stand upright again. Permanent meant—

“You will spend the rest of your life either kneeling, sitting, or on all fours,” he said. “Any attempt to assume an upright posture will produce the symptoms you’ve just experienced. Vertigo, nausea. Loss of motor control. The body will not permit it. It is not a matter of willpower. You cannot overcome it through determination any more than you can overcome the need to breathe.”

He paused, letting the words settle. And then, with a little smirk...

“Like a dog,” he said.

At this point, Juliet was wailing. She was experiencing defeat in a totalising way that even her rape hadn’t been able to drive home this deep. She was going to spend the rest of her life crawling…

Dr. Šolta stood up. He walked around the desk again, stopping in front of her. She was on her hands and knees. She couldn’t be anywhere else. Her face was level with his waist.

He was still hanging out of his trousers. His cock was half-hard, glistening with the residue of the rape — his cum and her cunt juices. He took it in one hand, angling it towards her face, mere inches away from her mouth.

“Since you’re already down there,” he said, “do something useful and clean it, slut.”

Juliet stared at the cock in front of her face. This avatar of male victory. This instrument of rape and colonisation. The woman she used to be would never, in a million years, acknowledge the cock’s mastery over her, especially after being raped and suffering a life-altering medical procedure against her consent.

But the woman she used to be could stand up.

And to her horror — to her absolute, marrow-deep, soul-destroying horror — she felt herself leaning forward.

She let her lips bloom and part in physical defeat around the head of his cock. She let her tongue flick timidly against the tip. Declawed and defanged, Juliet began to suckle, cleaning cock, paying dues to it, servicing it, submitting to it... ultimately, doing what she’d been told to do.

She was down here now and she was going to be down here forever and there was nothing, nothing in her personal growth, or academic background, or her direct experience with combat, for that matter, nothing in the entire feminist revolution, that could lift her back up.

Dr. Šolta rested one hand on top of her head. Gently.

“Good,” he said. “I’m happy to see you’re taking to this so well. After all, this procedure is not the end of your journey.”

She made eye contact with him, keeping her lips glued to his cock. Her enemy. Her oppressor. Her conqueror. Her tamer.

“My dear Juliet, we’re only getting started…”

TO BE CONTINUED…