On a cold midwinter morning, the jaws of defeat finally snapped shut around the Foreign Women’s Legion.

It was not a surprise to the legionnaires, nor to their enemies, and certainly not to Juliet. The writing had been on the wall for some time. By a combination of luck and stubborness, she and her sisters in arms had managed to kick the can down the road for quite a bit.

But, eventually, all roads must end.

She cursed her stupidity. Volunteering as a foreign fighter had seemed like such a high, noble, romantic, grand idea at first. Now, she realised with depressive fatalism that she’d just been a stupid girl playing at war.

To a degree, she’d known this when she’d decided to volunteer. What did a campus girl from Anesidora know about being a foot soldier? And yet, somehow, that didn’t seem to matter, at the time. Surely, she thought, the Insurgency would provide her with everything she needed to become an effective fighter.

That delusion lasted only a couple of days into her stay in Bardela. It was immediately apparent how desperate the Insurgency’s situation was. They didn’t have the women, or the resources, or the time to spare training a bunch of city girls into effective frontline soldiers. When her singular week of basic training was over, Juliet and the rest of the Legion were thrown into combat as — it was increasingly apparent — little more than cannon fodder.

The situation was unspeakably dire, but Juliet still found it in her to have some bitter mirth. She used to laugh at all the guys back in Anesidora that she argued with online, who pretended to know so much about the military just because it was their hyperfixation or something. They always just sounded like professional mansplainers to her.

Maybe one of them now would be able to tell her what the Legion did wrong, to end up in this situation.

After securing their start lines in a village whose name Juliet couldn’t even pronounce, the Legion was supposed to go on the offensive in a north-west direction, but every time they tried, their attack was checked, or had to be abandoned because a new enemy breakthrough took place somewhere else and had to urgently be contained.

Eventually, slowly, gaps between the Legion and other Insurgency units widened. No one was there on their right flank anymore. Then the left. Then, before they knew it, the entire front had gone south, past them by over 100km, and they were surrounded.

At least she consoled herself with the notion that they had kept fighting until they had run out of rations and bullets. Not bad, for a campus girl, was it? But it did not change one fundamental fact.

All roads must end.

The fog clung to the treeline, and Juliet watched the shapes materialise out of it with a numb detachment that was entirely alien to her. She’d always been determined and tenacious, so she had no idea where this sense of defeat was coming from, other than, well... her material defeat itself, she supposed. Still. When had she decided to make peace with the inevitable?

One by one, then in clusters, the Balderan soldiers emerged from the trees, weapons at the ready.

She waited for them with hands above her head. Her female comrades did the same. The whole sorry remnant of the Foreign Women's Legion was lined up in the clearing and disarmed.

She watched the ring of steel and men close tighter and tighter around the Legion, and she thought of home.

Anesidora. Just the name was enough to send pain lancing through her chest. The Anesidoran Reich, the key to the feminist revolution, the wealthiest, most powerful, most advanced nation on the planet. An increasingly women-led nation, from its federal government down to its municipal level.

Under its influence, most countries in the world were following suit. Women finally out-earned men. There were more women than men in positions of economic and social leadership and high-paying jobs. Anesidoran activists like Juliet saw it more and more as their mission to spread the good word to every corner of the planet, and for the most part, they were succeeding.

Of course, there were exceptions. Kovor had recently returned to totalitarian patriarchy after a coup by the military. And here in Baldera, once such a modern, forward-looking democracy, civil war had raged between the sexes for two years now.

Juliet had been so sure that Anesidora would intervene.

When students began to mobilise in support of the Insurgency, the unspoken consensus on campus was that of course Anesidora would be moved by the blatant injustice of Balderan patriarchy.

The mightiest nation on Earth, the beating heart of the feminist revolution, was not going to just sit there and watch while women were brutalised in some civil war.

It wasn’t like Anesidora lacked for tools to employ, either. All that outrageous military expenditure had to be good for something, right? The Reich had the military hardware to arm the Insurgency many times over, not to mention the diplomatic muscle to strangle Baldera's loyalist government with sanctions.

Any day now, Juliet had told herself, back in those early weeks. Any day now, the transports would arrive. Anesidoran rifles and drones, missile systems and self-propelled artillery, tanks perhaps. Maybe even Anesidoran boots on the ground: after all, the Reich’s military had an expeditionary doctrine built around overseas interventions. The Insurgency just had to hold on long enough.

The transports never came.

Oh, there were speeches, but no action in sight.

That was what had convinced her to volunteer. If the Anesidoran government was not going to step in, then Anesidoran women would. Women like Juliet, campus activists and grad students who got on planes with nothing but a backpack and a terrible, shining conviction that they were going to make a difference. The Reich didn't send them, nor did it stop them... It mostly politely pretended they didn’t exist.

The loyalist soldiers were now close enough that Juliet could make out their faces. Most of them looked young, barely older than her really. Their breath came in white plumes, and their eyes moved over the line of surrendered women with expressions Juliet tried and failed to read.

She found herself looking away.

The calm fatalism she’d felt a moment ago was beginning to falter. After defeat became a foregone conclusion, she’d done all in her power to avoid thinking about what came after. It wasn’t hard to imagine, was it? During the time she’d spent actively fighting, she’d managed to successfully bury these thoughts under adrenaline and necessity, because there was no room for that kind of fear when you were trying to survive until tomorrow.

There was room for it now. Her heart was the hammer and her ribcage the anvil. As men, in all their triumphant patriarchal power, grew closer to their cornered quarry, she felt that surely they must hear the crazy thumping of her heart.  

A man who seemed to be an officer walked slowly down the line of prisoners. He stopped in front of each woman, looked her up and down, and moved on. When he reached Juliet, he paused longer than he had for the others. His gaze dropped to the patch on her sleeve — the Anesidoran flag, stitched there in what now felt like another lifetime.

He said something to the soldier beside him. The soldier laughed.

The officer continued his slow processional down the line, past women who had once called themselves soldiers, and were now hollow-eyed survivors of a lost fight. Juliet tracked him with her peripheral vision, not daring to turn her head. Her arms ached from being held above it. The cold had worked its way through her jacket and into her bones, just like fear was working its way into her heart.

The officer stopped at the end of the line, coming face to face with commander Vasik.

Juliet had come to greatly admire Elara Vasik. Forty-one years old and a former Anesidoran Army Reserve, she’d been the only woman among them who had any real military experience. She was arguably the only reason why the Legion had held together through the grim weeks of retreat and encirclement.

The officer said something. Vasik said nothing.

He spoke again, louder this time. A command, clearly — Juliet could hear the shape of it even without the words. Around them, the ring of Balderan soldiers had gone quiet. Even the wind seemed to still.

Vasik seemed to be bracing herself, and for a lurching moment, Juliet thought she was going to fight. That was dumb, of course. They had already fought, and lost, so if Vasik took a swing at this guy, what good would it do? Well, she supposed it would let her keep believing in the story she had told herself about what kind of women they were.

Vasik, however, did no such thing. Instead, she exhaled tremulously, and began descending to her knees.

It was as if her body had decided to stop defying gravity. There was a deep significance in her gesture, it was laden with so much meaning. Her knees folded and she sank into the frost-hardened earth at the officer's feet, and her hands came to rest on her thighs.

Juliet felt the weight of the entire world crash down upon her.

The officer looked down at Vasik for a long moment. Then, with the same unhurried calm with which he had inspected the line, he unbuckled his belt and freed his cock from his trousers.

With equal nonchalance, Vasik leaned forward, and wrapped her lips around her conqueror’s cock.

The haunting silence of the clearing was now broken by the incongruous, wet slurping sound of a female tongue servicing a cock. Juliet stood frozen in such profound disbelief that she felt disconnected from her own body.

What the fuck?

Vasik in her mind’s eye was a towering example of female martial standing. This was an officer who knew when to let things slide and when to crack the whip. Juliet had followed her with full trust in her leadership. She’d watched her sitting with dying legionnaires, holding their hands.

Now, she was on her knees in the mud.

All nobility and achievement were stripped from her, in this moment. She was just a cocksucker, and not a willing one either. Her head moved slowly back and forth as she sucked the dick of the man who defeated her.

Juliet's mind resorted to its usual refuge, compulsive cognitivisation of every possible facet of life. She could hear Professor Algren's voice in her head: The performative dimension of gendered power reasserts itself most visibly in moments of political rupture.

The semiotics of this act were so crystal clear that it might as well have been a lecture. This was war as rape, but in a way it was more than both war and rape. There was a grammar to it, a subconscious liturgy, and every woman in that line could read it fluently, whether she wanted to or not.

This is what surrender looks like.

Sure, signatures on a piece of paper were important parts of the formalities, but the core of the concept was this: a woman, on her knees, before a man. The commander of the conquered before the representative of the conqueror. Her mouth around his cock was the white flag. Her sexual submission was the treaty.

Throughout all of human history, only one fate had ever befallen any woman who’d been bested or vanquished by a male nemesis. It was this fate.

The Balderan troops stood in their tightening ring with their rifles at rest and their faces blank or satisfied or reverent, and they watched their officer receive what was owed to him, and every one of them understood what was being enacted in that clearing on that cold midwinter morning.

The feminist revolution, kneeling in the mud.

Juliet felt something crack inside her proprioception, something load-bearing. A foundational wall she hadn't even known was there until it gave way, and behind it was a vast dark space full of things she had spent years refusing to look at.

Back in Anesidora, The future is female was an axiomatic thing to say, more than a slogan. She had worked hard to try and personally embody that spirit. She loved roasting misogynists online and dominating campus debates. In every personal conflict of a gendered nature, she'd felt the righteous certainty that history was on her side, that the arc of the moral universe bent toward justice, that women were rising and the world was witnessing the long-coming ascent of the star of female power.

Juliet thought about how none of those noble ideals had sent a single bullet to Baldera.

Vasik was not allowed to suck the officer to completion, else she would have done so, Juliet was sure. Instead, the man took a step back, and his cock slid from Vasik's mouth with a wet pop that sounded like it came straight out of porn. It would have made her laugh, if the situation wasn’t so terrible.

Vasik stayed where she was, maintaining the posture of surrender with utter spontaneity. That alarmed Juliet even more than the cocksucking had, because the commander looked so... resigned. She had come to accept that her fate now rested in the hands of these men, and so this slavish grovelling was no performance. She had simply broken.

The officer tucked himself back in, then he raised one hand and made a sharp gesture.

The Balderan soldiers sprang into motion.

All of a sudden, the men were among the women, moving between them. Juliet felt hands on her wrists before she saw the man they belonged to. Her arms were wrenched down from above her head, which brought a sudden relief to her shoulders. Only a brief respite, though: metal handcuffs snapped shut around her wrists with a click, and then... something went around her neck.

A dog’s collar.

Or maybe a sex collar, the kind used in BDSM. She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t see it after all, only feel it. It was thick and tall, buckled so tight that she couldn’t lower her chin. She felt the tug as something attached to the collar was suddenly yanked forward.

A leash.

She’d just been fucking leashed.

The word detonated in her skull like a flashbang, white and blinding. Leashed. Like a dog. Like a... No. She dared not finish the thought. The sensation was so profoundly dehumanising that for a moment she simply stopped being Juliet. She was just a body. A female body in the fog, collared and cuffed and connected by a leash to a man's fist.

Down the line, the same thing was happening to every woman.

Corralled and herded like troublesome dogs, fit for the kennel.

Sounds rose from the treeline as diesel engines roared to life. Trucks and halftracks soon emerged from the trees, pulling into the clearing one after another and grinding to a halt with their tailgates facing the line of captured women.

While camouflaged, the vehicles were conspicuously deprived of any unit markings.

Juliet noted this with the same numb analytical reflex that had been narrating her own destruction since the surrender began. Unmarked vehicles meant plausible deniability. Whatever was about to happen to them was not going to be documented.

Her heart the hammer, her ribcage the anvil.

The soldier holding her leash pulled. It was a firm and confident yank, and Juliet subconsciously responded, falling in line in the direction dictated by her leash-holder.

She was pulled toward the nearest halftrack along with two other women. She recognised two of them — Kristin, a quiet Anesidoran from the southern provinces who had been a paramedic before volunteering, and a woman whose name Juliet had never learned, a late arrival from the Free Island Republic. They were loaded into the back of the halftrack like cargo. The leashes were looped around a rail that ran the length of the interior.

Tethered.

Through the open back of the halftrack, she watched the rest of it happen.

Other groups of women were being led to other vehicles in separate groups of four or five. If there was a pattern to the sorting, she couldn’t see it, but she did get the impression that women who’d known each other well were being purposefully led to different vehicles.

Vasik was not to be spared this fate, it seemed: Juliet watched her being led toward a truck at the far end of the clearing, still on her feet now but moving with the heavy, somnambulant gait of someone walking through deep water. Two soldiers flanked her. Her leash was held by the commanding male officer himself. He walked ahead of her without looking back, and Vasik followed.

Juliet watched them until the fog swallowed them and they were gone.

The engine beneath Juliet shuddered to life. She stared out the open back of the halftrack as it lurched into motion, watching the clearing recede. The other vehicles fanned out in different directions.

The Legion wasn't just being captured. It was being dissolved. Atomised. Scattered to the winds in groups too small to ever reconstitute.

Juliet didn’t know what would happen to her, or to the others, but she did know, deep in her heart, that the women of the Legion would never all stand together in the same place, ever again.

The Foreign Women's Legion, such as it had ever been, had ceased to exist in that clearing, and the women who had comprised it were now just bodies in transit, moving along separate trajectories toward separate fates, and the distances between them would only grow.

She was still processing this when the blindfold came down over her eyes. She sat still and meek as it slid down her face.

The rest of her trip was spent in darkness.

TO BE CONTINUED…