Chapter 3
3
HER
“ C an you believe that crazy bat?” Corey grunted as he and I elbowed our way through the crowds pouring out of the social sciences building. Adding Juliette at the Old Main fountain, we navigated across the grass of the campus mall, dodging frisbee-throwers and sunbathers soaking up an admittedly brilliant late October afternoon in the Valley. We were heading toward the student union because it went without saying that after an Erica Muller lecture, blueberry-raspberry smoothies were in order. Or maybe peanut butter and chocolate, if I really wanted to hate myself. “Standing up there just making up all this shit about Gerhard Langer giving birth to the—what did she call it?”
“Slavery-industrial complex,” I mumbled, parroting the professor for some reason, though this was the last topic I wanted to get into with him right now. Well, next to last.
“Yeah. That.”
“It’s true, though,” I said despite my better judgment. How did Muller’s lectures keep worming their way into my brain like this? Hell, at this rate, I’d be eating vegan and wearing natural fibers before I knew it. “Langer was one of the biggest slave dealers in New North America. Not to mention,” I said, though I now felt like I was giving the lecture, “he was believed to be responsible for the deaths of almost two hundred slaves in the aftermath of the Cebolla Canyon mine uprising?—”
“Langer helped build the world into what it is today,” interrupted Corey. “What you’ll never hear Muller mention is that if he and some of the other early slave barons hadn’t lobbied to institute slavery back in the thirties, who knows what kind of mess this place would be in?”
“I don’t know, but I do know she said that like a lot of government programs, it was only ever supposed to be temporary,” I said softly as we passed two young male uniformed landscaping slaves watering the begonias that edged the mall. They leaped out of our way. “It wasn’t supposed to result in generations of families in slavery.”
“That’s because they declared that the children of slaves were also slaves, which is the most ingenious policy move of the twentieth century as far as I’m concerned,” he said like he’d studied this for years and wasn’t just going off what he’d read yesterday on one of those pro-slavery online forums.
“Why?”
“Hey, it was either that, or we’d all be slaves because we’d have been so broke that we’d have lost the war,” countered Corey. “So take your pick. Which would you prefer?”
I knew which one I’d prefer, of course, but why did my preferences matter more than the slaves’? And why had that never occurred to me before today?
No reason.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter now,” Corey rambled on, oblivious to the morality play going on in my head. “Gerhard Langer’s dead. His era is over. I’m working with Max Langer now, and he got rid of all his slaves long ago. He says as a society we’ve evolved beyond it. He’s disrupting the whole slavery industry.”
I rolled my eyes, not sure I was ready yet to change the subject, but more than ready to call out Corey on having his head permanently stuck up his boss’s ass. Mostly thanks to his family connections, Corey had started interning with Langer last summer, in some super-special position that saw him working with the tech mogul one-on-one. But so far, his sole job description, as far as I could tell, seemed to have been swallowing a bucketload of Langer’s bullshit every damn day. “You know, just because you got a job with him all sewn up after you graduate doesn’t mean you’re required to defend every single thing he does,” I said. “Besides, if you’re now so evolved and all, why haven’t you gotten rid of your slaves?”
Corey laughed. “What am I supposed to do, make my own bed? Sweep my own floor? I don’t have time for that. I have school and work to worry about.”
Of course I didn’t want to do any of that stuff either. Nobody did—just like nobody wanted to flip burgers or pick oranges or dig copper. But someone had to. The whole economy would collapse otherwise, wouldn’t it? That’s what Daddy had always told me, anyway, the few times as a kid I’d been curious enough to ask why I got to go to school and the girl wiping down our table at my favorite fast-food hamburger place didn’t.
“Come to think of it, you’re starting to sound a little bit like Muller yourself.” Corey looked at me sharply, his green eyes boring into me like he thought I might be turning into an enemy of the union. You couldn’t get reported that easily anymore—those days had ended after most of the violent agitators from Muller’s generation had been arrested and enslaved themselves. Like Muller had said, we nominally had free speech. But that didn’t mean I felt like getting rejected from med school for being some kind of crazed radical when I was barely scraping by as it was. Which meant I should probably shut up. I didn’t even believe this stuff, anyway. Did I?
“If you hate her so much, why did you even sign up for that course?” Juliette asked Corey. I hadn’t even known my friend was listening, as rapidly as she was tapping out texts on her pink, blinged-out phone, peering over the gigantic tortoiseshell sunglasses designed to conceal her hangover from last night’s frat mixer.
“I didn’t want to!” moaned Corey. “It’s all those politically correct abolitionist snowflakes in the dean’s office, always yammering on and on about oppression. It’s part of those new course requirements they put in this year. So now I’m stuck in that bullshit factory twice a week, hearing about how slavery reinforces toxic masculinity, whatever that is.”
“Well, part of it, as you must know,” I said, reciting more of one of Muller’s lectures before I could stop myself, “is that masters rape female slaves all the time. Hell, they rape male slaves all the time. And all with no consequences. But women are barred from even touching male slaves. Even if they own them, it’s considered taboo. Even if they order it. It’s a sexist double standard.”
“Rape? Seriously? Now a guy can’t even have sex with his own property without some social justice warrior calling it rape? Besides, it’s totally different with free women. What if they get pregnant? You know if the mother’s free, the kid is free. We can’t have a bunch of free people walking around with slaves for fathers. They could even inherit property .” He shuddered as if that would somehow lead to the imminent collapse of society.
“Who cares? How would you even know? Do you think they’re different species or something? I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Corey, but slaves and free people, except for the bracelets, look exactly alike.”
Corey jerked backward. Juliette stopped, too. In fact, a chill came over me as I realized that it wasn’t just them. There were other people staring at me. Why?
Because nobody ever pointed out this stuff—especially not in public. Nobody really talked about it at all. Even when my parents had had swanky cocktail parties where they used to discuss business and art, nobody breathed a word to question why there were nameless human beings carrying trays full of prosciutto-wrapped melon balls back and forth for no pay. No wonder Erica Muller, who not only wrote papers on the subject but published them, got a dozen death threats last week.
“Never mind,” I said, my face starting to burn. “Let’s just get our smoothies, okay?”
“You never cared so much about this stuff before, Lou,” needled Corey as we marched up the stairs of the adobe-style structure to the second-floor café and took our places at the back of the smoothie line. “Is there some slave somewhere who’s gotten you all hot and bothered?”
I froze. Then I tried to laugh, but it got stuck in my throat and started to sound like choking. I grabbed the bottle of water from my bag and took a long swig. When I swallowed, everyone was still staring, and water was dripping down my chin. I swiped at it with the back of my arm. “No.”
Smooth. Real smooth.
“Don’t even joke about that,” scolded Juliette. “Remember what happened to”—she dropped her voice—“Rebekah Roth?”
We swallowed awkwardly. Rebekah—red-haired banker’s daughter, champion swimmer, Type A idea girl—had been an integral part of our social circle until we were sixteen. That was when a neighbor had caught her—in her childhood treehouse, of all places—with the slave boy next door. The boy, like most slaves guilty of serious crimes, had been sold to the mines by his owners. Rebekah had had her college admission rescinded and the family, after pleading guilty to exploitation of their minor daughter, had moved somewhere on the East Coast and faded into obscurity. Some people whispered that Rebekah herself had been sold into slavery, which happened to minor girls who got in trouble with slave boys, especially if their parents couldn’t or didn’t pay the fine. I never did find out for sure, though. The only exception, of course, was if rape could be proven. My own parents hadn’t been shy in pointing to Rebekah as an example of someone who had foolishly ruined her life. In any case, like don’t talk to strangers , it was a rule we took for granted: slave boys were simply not to be touched, and that didn’t change when you turned eighteen: it just meant you got charged with a crime instead of your parents and got sentenced to slavery if you couldn’t pay the fine. I, personally—up until recently, maybe—had always wondered why anyone would want to touch a slave boy. After all, you wouldn’t kiss a designer table lamp, any more than you would smash it on the ground and destroy it for no reason.
But now that I thought about it, that sounded just … bad.
Anyway, the mere thought of Rebekah should be enough to wipe all thoughts of last night out of my mind forever. Should be.
Last night. Every single thought of it sent a jolt of electricity through me, as pure as if someone had flicked a goddamn switch. Hell, it was no wonder Corey had said what he had. He must have seen it flashing across my face like a black-and-white slow-motion movie. Everyone must have.
I’d awoken this morning and crept breathlessly into the kitchen, stomach twisting, heart pounding, toes flexing on the cold kitchen floor, curl clamped tight between my teeth. All in anticipation of what— who —I might encounter. But the only slave there was the maid, boiling steel-cut oats and glaring at me to get lost, complete with her usual stuck-up, sexy pout. The guy—the boy—the slave—whoever he was—was nowhere to be found. Was he asleep? Had he left? Or had I conjured him up from the depths of my sex-starved, sleep-deprived brain? I even, for a half-second of insanity, considered dropping down to the slave quarters—an area of the house off-limits to me, not that I’d ever cared—to see if there were any new faces down there.
Then I came to my senses. Better to forget it ever happened. If he existed, he clearly had forgotten it, too. I’d been sleep-deprived and delirious last night. I had not, repeat not , been flirting with a slave, let alone one whose face I couldn’t even see, let alone one living in my own house.
Okay, maybe I had. But I wouldn’t do it again . What if Daddy found out?
“Lou?”
I whirled around. “ What ?”
Juliette held out her hands. “Whoa, relax. I was just saying, I’m sick of talking about this stuff. Want to check out Fig and Firkin tonight? Atlas from the mixer last night is deejaying.”
“Who, Ping Pong Man?”
She fluttered her eyelashes modestly. “He invited me. Anyway, I feel bad that I kept bugging you last night when you couldn’t be there. But you really do need to have some fun, instead of rehashing all this boring history shit.”
“History shit?” I couldn’t help but protest. “These are current events, Jules. Hell, there are slaves working at Fig and Firkin. Who do you think cleans the toilets and washes the glasses?” In fact, one-third of the people on our very campus were slaves—virtually all of the grounds and cleaning crews and most of the service workers, too. There was one over in the corner mopping the floor right now.
“I know, but who cares? All that matters is that they don’t look very hard at phony IDs. Come on, Lou. You deserve it. You’ve been thinking too hard.”
That was for sure. For a moment, I actually thought about it—at the very least, it would be a way to let down my guard, meet some cute (free) guys, and forget about my exceedingly strange night—and day. Juliette seemed sincere, and I knew I should take her up on it. But for some reason, in the face of that , and rape and war and mining disasters, my problems from last night—stressed, flailing, undercaffeinated, missing out on life—already felt like a million years ago. Plus, I couldn’t afford it.
“Forget it,” I said as I finally accepted my smoothie: peanut butter, of course. The slave girl behind the counter handed over the tiny cup, and I sloshed the thick straw up and down nervously as I looked at my receipt. Seven dollars for this ? And they said slave labor kept prices down. “I’m in class until three, then I have to go home and study.”
And absolutely, positively nothing else.
“That’s all you ever do anymore,” broke in Corey, grabbing my arm and pulling me toward him so I could smell the bodywash he used. Something like Infatuation or Captivation. I was not captivated, especially with the way he felt entitled to touch me. Just because he wasn’t a slave didn’t mean I had to like it. Unfortunately, though the Erica Muller types might rail against toxic masculinity, most of my male classmates seemed to think they had a right to touch whoever and whatever they wanted. Slave girls, free girls, everyone. The only difference was that free girls were allowed to fight back. “Don’t you want to have some fun?”
I untangled firmly from his grasp. I knew I shouldn’t be blowing off Corey. Half the girls on campus wanted him for his money; the other half wanted him for his softly curled dark brown hair, piercing green eyes, and golden-brown tennis biceps rippling under his polo shirts. My father had already indicated I’d have his approval to date him, and my mother—an old classmate of his mother’s—seemed convinced we’d been written in the stars since preschool.
Lately, she’d been putting it even more bluntly. “You know, plenty of girls still get their MRS degree. It’s hard to find a job these days, and there’s no shame in it,” she’d slurred affectionately during cocktail hour the other night—not that cocktail hour wasn’t every hour for her. In any case, I’d slammed down the dirty martini she’d given me—which I hadn’t wanted anyway—and stalked out of the room.
So that’s what they thought. That I couldn’t make it; that I should take the easy way out and become just another gold-digging bimbo. Not me, I’d thought. But that was back at the start of the semester, when I’d still been pulling a B-plus in o-chem.
Now, I eyed Corey as he confidently popped the plastic top of his smoothie, removed the straw, and poured it down his throat, wondering what it would be like to be joined at the hip as his girlfriend. I’d longed for college to be about exploration; about pushing the limits and growing in every possible way. That’s what I’d always heard it should be about. But I had plenty of friends from school who were coupled up; some were even discussing marriage. All of them, without exception, spent Saturdays in their dorms, watching streaming shows and drinking canned cocktails. But at least they seemed happy—unlike me, they weren’t contemplating popping meth to stay awake and scrambling to find the least objectionable way to put food on the table. And none of them were failing a required course for their major or watching their fathers’ finances going belly-up before their eyes. I could do much worse than them, and if I continued down my current path, I would .
But I wasn’t ready yet for Corey.
“My parents need me at home tonight,” I said vaguely.
“You know, your dad might want to talk to Langer about a partnership,” Corey suggested. “He’s always looking for new ventures.”
I wondered what Corey had heard to make him suggest such a thing. “Why? He doesn’t need his help. He doesn’t need anyone’s help.”
“But—”
“He’s fine. We’re fine. Have fun at Fig and Firkin,” I said, hurling my empty cup into a nearby trash bin. The comment had made me more determined than ever to pass o-chem. If I could just manage a C, I’d be fine. I’d keep my academic scholarship. I wouldn’t be broke on the street, or ruined, or selling myself into slavery. This would all feel like a bad dream when I was successful, rich, and actually making a difference in the world instead of being buried beneath it. “I’m hitting the books.”
“But wait?—”
“Corey, what is your problem?” I turned back in exasperation. “Just because you’re acing college doesn’t mean the rest of us are. I’ve got a D going in this course. My scholarship?—”
“Okay, okay,” he cut me off. “It’s important to you. I get it.”
Well, no, he didn’t. Not really. I’d let him think it was out of pure vanity that I wanted to hang onto my scholarship, which I’d been awarded by merit, based on my high grades and exam scores. I didn’t have an inkling that without it, I’d be stuck rolling burritos or something—assuming fast-food restaurants had any jobs left that hadn’t been filled by slaves.
“Did you even try the pills?” he demanded.
“No, I did not try the pills, and I’m not going to.” I crossed my arms. I’d never acknowledge to him that my family had an unfortunate tendency to not know when to stop when it came to substances; getting hooked on uppers was the last thing I needed on top of having no money.
“Okay,” he said finally, smiling beatifically as if he were descending from his lofty perch to do me some grand favor. It made me slightly ill. “How about I come over tonight and help you? I know a few tricks. I’ve got calc now, but I’ll stop by around four-thirty, okay?”
I frowned.
“I’ll bring burritos.”
I shook my head. “Pizza, and it’s a deal.”
HIM
As I rifled through Keith Wainwright-Phillips’s file cabinet, I held an ice pack up to my singed eye and considered that the fact that anybody here had bothered to treat my wounds was almost enough to make me feel guilty about what I was doing. Almost.
In fact, at the Wainwright-Phillips house, they’d done more than treat my wounds. As soon as we’d arrived here yesterday, the housekeeper had whisked me to the kitchen and given me a meal of chicken and rice, an ice pack, and three ibuprofen, then handed me a thin, soft T-shirt and a pair of cut-off khaki shorts from a box of clothes cast off from my master’s family and other slaves, along with some flip-flops and a few other items that looked like they might fit. A skinny, full-lipped maid that I knew I’d be nailing within the week had even brought me half a broken chocolate cupcake from a fresh batch she’d baked, which I’d inhaled shamelessly after almost a week of gruel and worse. Finally, I’d been directed to a bunk in the basement slave quarters and allowed to sleep for two hours, which was way less than I needed but way more than I expected, and it almost made up for having the night shift.
The night shift. The princess. That voice . Fuck me. My plan had been to feel her out, soften her up, and if she was receptive, have a little fun with her in anticipation of getting what I needed—not to let her voice cast some bizarre hex on me where I couldn’t chase it out of my head no matter what I did. Besides, I don’t know if she thought I was someone else or what, but the fact that Daddy’s little angel had even stooped to humor me for more than a few seconds was kind of blowing my mind. Bottom line, so much for the “good slave” act. I shouldn’t have said any of it, and I shouldn’t have done any of it.
But every single part of me wanted to do it again.
Well. Despite that unfortunate little blip, Lucky Sevens were still paying out. Today, nobody threw cold water on me, screamed in my ear, or kicked me awake. When I woke up again around nine, as the other slaves went about their chores, I sat in the slaves’ common area—small and cluttered with household knickknacks and sewing projects, but still comfortable, with a small, sunny window—with the housekeeper. We drank cups of weak coffee from an industrial drum (I tried to forget about last night’s Ecuadorian roast), and swapped the usual stories. The housekeeper had come from New York, bought sight unseen at nine years old by my new mistress’s parents. “Mistress Wainwright-Phillips had married by then and they were both working long hours, so off to them I went. I looked after Miss Louisa and Master Ethan for a few years before they bought a nanny, while my partner was the gardener. Then I became the cook and housekeeper.”
I just looked down at my rough hands curled around the chipped mug, hoping my face hadn’t given away my reaction to her name. Which annoyed me because I wasn’t supposed to have a reaction. I was supposed to use her to curry favor with her father, forget about her, and go get a blow job from the maid. That was the way I had operated for years, and there was a reason for that: it was safe, and it worked. And so it was really fucking inconvenient that my dick had decided to start twitching instead. To get rid of it, I decided Louisa was a spoiled brat and probably only looked good in dim lighting. Of course this approach could only work for so long, since I’d already noticed from the hallway that there were pictures of her and her brother on the living room mantel. So far, I’d managed to avoid going in there.
As the housekeeper bustled maternally back upstairs, I thought about how she’d mentioned a partner. With slaves, that usually indicated children, though none of them seemed to be around, and the current gardener definitely wasn’t the same guy. I wouldn’t ask about them, of course—why cause the woman to mourn all over again? Still, it was another reason to dismiss Louisa. She’d been partially raised by a woman who’d likely had her own children ripped out of her arms so she could care for her master’s babies.
Yeah. Louisa was like all the rest of them. She was tainted by the original sin of slavery, and there was nothing she could do to erase it.
She didn’t have any say in it. She hadn’t chosen to be born rich and free, just as I hadn’t chosen to be born a slave. Not like I was defending her. Why was I defending her?
Anyway, it soon wouldn’t matter. When I was told the chore I’d been assigned that afternoon — helping the housekeeper with the heavy lifting as she helped clean and rearrange Wainwright-Phillips’s home office—I resolved that I wouldn’t be seeing Louisa much longer anyway. Not once I used whatever was in there to figure out where my sister was, and, even more challenging, get to her. And then, most challenging of all, figure out a place to hide her where she couldn’t be tracked down, even though currently, all four slavery-free countries in the world were islands in the South Pacific. Besides, to save her, I might have to kill Louisa’s dad, and then whatever fucked-up connection I’d apparently made with Louisa would be as good as dead anyway—and so would I.
They were swapping out some of the old furniture in the office for a more modern theme, the housekeeper told me. “The master said he wants this to look more like a startup,” she explained with a shrug. “Any idea what he means by that?”
Not much, aside from a few photos I’d seen in my old master’s magazines and a few internet sites I’d glimpsed whenever I could sneak online. But I could sure bullshit it. “Of course. My old master owned one. Just relax and leave it to me. Will Master Wainwright-Phillips be overseeing this operation personally?” I asked slyly.
“No. He trusts my good taste.”
“Smart guy,” I said with my most charming smile, and she preened. Too easy. It got even easier twenty minutes later, when the maid burst in, hysterical, saying the motor on the stand mixer had blown out and she couldn’t find the handheld beaters anywhere, and the housekeeper ran off. If there was a god for slaves somewhere—or a god at all, which, logical as I was, I had rather confidently doubted for some time—he was smiling down right now as I triumphantly rolled open the top drawer of the file cabinet.
The files were mostly old as if my master had let filing fall by the wayside recently, and after ten minutes of digging, I’d seen mostly tax returns and folders and folders of receipts for office supplies and construction equipment. Nothing in the least bit useful, and I was already down to the innermost reaches of the bottommost cabinet when I spotted a thin file labeled “Langer.” Inside was a copy of a reference letter Wainwright-Phillips had written for some guy named Corey Killeen for a position as Langer’s intern. I have known Corey on a personal basis for nearly two decades, and during that time, I’ve found him to be a conscientious, ambitious, and industrious young man, it read.
In other words, a complete douchebag. I tossed it aside.
The only other thing in the file was a sealed manila envelope with the Langer Enterprises return address. Bingo. Wainwright-Phillips could pretend to be Man of the Year all he wanted, but if he was in any way in cahoots with the guy who’d stolen my sister, he was a scumbag, and he deserved to die. And if I had to, I’d be the one to kill him. I wouldn’t even think twice about it.
In the meantime, time to steam open this envelope. The trick would be to get it unsealed and resealed, then back into the file before anybody noticed it missing. I already had an idea how, if I could find an unoccupied bathroom somewhere, which shouldn’t be hard—I’d already passed about thirty of them. Footsteps pounded in the hall, and I muttered a curse in Luxembourgish, shoving the envelope under my T-shirt and down the waistband of my cutoff shorts.
“I think I can take this from here. You’re needed out in the yard. The gardener needs all the palo verde trimmings bagged up and removed. Move it,” the housekeeper said, swatting me lightly on the arm. It wasn’t her fault really, but it looked like the honeymoon was over and I was back to being treated like livestock.
Business as usual.