7. Chapter 7
7
HIM
A t dawn, under the barest glimmers of stars, as I dumped the burner phone in the exact spot I’d planned to dump it all along, I stared up at the red-gold mountains that were at last mine to see up close and thought about how running away wasn’t supposed to feel like this.
It wasn’t supposed to feel like anything.
I’d never told Louisa, but this wasn’t my first plan to run. Like most fifteen-year-olds, I’d been as stupid as I thought I was smart, and almost as soon as I’d won over the farm owner’s wife enough for my liking, I’d started conning her into helping me slip out. Of course I’d gotten my arm nearly lopped off before the plan got very far, and I’d been thankful every day since that I had. I’d have been caught within hours, and if I were lucky , I’d still be at the farm. More likely, I’d be in a mine, or dead, and as terrifying as that was—yes, I admitted it, there were things that scared me, okay?—the worst part of it was that there would be no one here now to rescue Maeve.
Have you ever heard the name Resi? I’d asked Erica Muller when I’d got her on the phone.
Yes, she’d said after a pause.
And? I’d prompted. Is there—?
There have been whispers, she’d said. People talking. But people always talk.
So Maeve was right: there was something happening. But at the same time, Erica was right: there was nothing slaves loved more than talking about freedom while refusing to give up whatever minimal safety and security they’d achieved to try to get it. And the few free people who claimed to want to help us were often even worse: armchair activists who spent their days attacking their pro-slavery opponents in online forums in place of actually doing anything concrete.
Maeve was different. She’d started out a dreamer, sure, but by the time she was eleven, the last time I’d seen her, she’d already started talking more and more about rebellion. Real rebellion. She’d just been sold off and abandoned before she’d had a chance to actually rebel.
And as for me? Well. I’d studied history. I knew what happened. The successful rebellions were outnumbered ten to one by those that had ended with all the rebels’ heads on pikes at the city gates. Forgotten names dying for forgotten causes, the ones you never read about in textbooks. And sure, dying for a cause is inspiring and all, but those who die for a cause are still as dead as anyone else. I would bet that even all those failed SLA bombers—Erica’s friends who had gotten thrown in mines, if any were still alive—would now happily sell out all of what they once believed for one more chance to hold the people they loved, or hell, to see daylight.
So where Maeve had ideals, I had facts and figures. In fact, I’d always thought the goal of a good scientist was to be a force of pure logic, to be above ideals. That way, you could never be compromised. And less likely to ever be wrong.
The problem was that reality had already proven it didn’t work like that. I was already compromised. My mother and Maeve had compromised me. If I hadn’t cared about my mother, maybe I’d still be in Luxembourg. If I hadn’t cared about Maeve, maybe I’d still be in Germany. Or maybe I would have accepted Langer’s offer or someone else’s. Maybe I would have gone on to become a billionaire rocket scientist under some genius’s wing. Maybe in time, I would have even figured out a way to disrupt slavery for real. To free not only Maeve and whoever was trapped with her but myself and every other slave. And all because I wouldn’t be hobbled by feeling anything for any of them. But maybe then, I wouldn’t even care enough to try.
And, of course, if I hadn’t been compromised by someone in the ten-million-dollar mansion I’d just walked away from, I would have been gone from this place hours ago. The girl who had no stake in the revolution. The girl who shouldn’t care, and if by some miracle she ever did, it should be from an armchair like all those other useless so-called activists.
Instead, she did care. She cared so fucking much that it scared me. Because I didn’t know what to do with that. Because I didn’t understand why. Because it felt like a trap. Because no one was supposed to care. And because it wasn’t supposed to feel like this. It wasn’t supposed to feel like anything.
So I was running away to just do everything on my own, like I always did.
Except I wasn’t. Instead, I was hearing Maeve’s voice. A voice I heard a lot, and that I probably would have listened to a lot more often if it weren’t for all the rainbow unicorn stuff.
Our lives are so shit we have to make up happy endings or we’ll never get them, and here you are throwing away your chance for a real one.
So down in the valley on the other side of the pasture, the ever-distant mountains red-gold amid the rising sun, the matching college hat pulled low over my face, the entire desert laid out before me, I did what I should have done a long time ago: I listened, and cursed the fact that sometime in the past few weeks, I had become worse than compromised. I had become human.
HER
When Erica hung up, I turned to the messages. But all I needed to see was the first one from Corey before I shakily bulk-deleted the rest as if they’d been splashed with toxic waste. In the two seconds it took to read it, the idea that I’d once considered dating him had gone from embarrassing to downright sickening.
Still shaky but doing my best to shove the messages out of my mind, I headed downstairs. Erica Muller had only been my professor for a few months, but I already knew she was the type where if she said something was important, she wasn’t fucking around. And I’d better not, either.
The maid was clearly aware someone had entered the kitchen, but she didn’t even turn around, which meant she knew it was me and had deemed me beneath her notice. Bitch.
“Hey.” I hated the way that sounded. “Turn around. I need to talk to you.”
She made a big show of violently jamming the knife back into the wooden block before turning to face me, hands clasped like a good little slave, staring down at her scuffed sandals, but even a submissive pose couldn’t hide her disgust as I fired off questions about a certain person’s whereabouts.
“I really don’t know, miss,” the maid replied with that infuriating lopsided little grin of hers. As if this bitch hadn’t caused enough trouble for me today, now she was deceiving me for no good reason. Was that just what slaves learned to do when they knew they’d be punished either way?
In any case, it felt familiar.
“If you’re lying to me—” I didn’t exactly know how to follow through with that. If you weren’t willing to go for the whip, there weren’t a lot of other good options, and she knew it.
“I wouldn’t cover for him, miss,” she said. “The fact is, he still owes me a few favors he hasn’t repaid.”
“For what?”
That lip continued upward. She was enjoying this. “Why, some favors I did for him , miss.” She outright smirked, though her eyes were still trained on the marble tile. “Not that I didn’t enjoy them, too.”
Whore. Humiliation mixed with rage boiled over inside me. If it weren’t bad enough that I might be about to lose him forever, now I had to contend with knowing that .
I had never hurt a slave, ever, but at that moment I was ready to slap the maid’s face so hard it would leave a mark for days. And why shouldn’t I? She deserved it for talking to me like—
No. I took a step back.
Look, either those days were over now, or they weren’t. Either all slaves were human beings who deserved dignity and respect, or none of them were. Either I was the girl who would call her father and accuse my boy of something he hadn’t done, or I wasn’t.
Even if I never saw him again, this was what he would leave me with. This was about my soul, and ironically all because of someone who insisted he didn’t believe in souls.
Instead, I breathed and looked again at the maid.
She wore two items I could vaguely recall owning once upon a time—an oversized oatmeal-colored top with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of faded ripped jeans that had shrunken and conformed perfectly to her body over the years. Since I was curvier, they were one of the few things I’d ever given her that fit her right. No wonder she never seemed to take them off.
I thought back further. The maid had arrived when we both were around fourteen. My family still had money back then, and young, pretty slaves were a must-have status symbol—to touch or just to look at, depending on the owner’s whims. My father, always with an eye toward the bottom line, had decided that a young teen would be a better investment than an older, better-trained slave, so one day, he bought the maid back from a high-end private dealer and set her in the kitchen like a gleaming new appliance: shiny, attractive, and quiet. I had never bothered to ask where she had come from before that. If I thought of her at all, it was to lazily order her around, throw her some of my old clothes, or resent her for her effortlessly smooth, dark, glossy hair, alabaster skin, and slim figure—all so unfair at a time when I had still had baby fat and braces and acne and a wild tornado of curls that I hadn’t yet found the right methods to tame. In fact, at least twice, I had invited crushes over to swim, and instead, they spent the whole time trying to grope the maid. Of course, instead of blaming the boys for being disgusting creeps, I had blamed her, as if she could have done anything about it. But beyond that, I had never asked about her day, solicited her opinion, learned her story, or considered that she must have had someone she had to leave behind. It had never occurred to me that she must have things she hoped for, things she dreamed of. Just like him , she must have seen darkness upon darkness, must spend many nights dwelling on things that had been done to her loved ones and been done to her.
I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
“Excuse me, miss?” The girl looked as bewildered as I felt. The teasing lip had fallen.
“For anything I said or did, or didn’t do—I just, I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t make up for anything. And that you probably hate me.”
“It’s okay, miss. I don’t hate you,” she said, much to my surprise. “You’ve never hurt me or been mean on purpose. You were actually kind of nice to me.” Then her sour expression reappeared momentarily. “Once or twice.”
Okay, so we weren’t exactly BFFs yet. I ran a hand continuously down one of my curls as I continued to speak. “It’s just that things have changed recently, and I—”
“I know, miss,” the maid said.
“You do?”
She shrugged. “Well, excuse my saying so, but you’re absolutely shit at hiding it. He’s better, though not nearly as good as he thinks he is.”
I opened my mouth in a silent plea.
“Don’t worry, miss.” She must have seen the tears in my eyes as I ran away from the shed earlier. And she wasn’t totally devoid of compassion, as much as she had the right to be. “I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m not that much of a bitch.”
I closed my eyes.
“Also, that stuff with me and him? It all happened right after he got here. And it was never like that .”
Just think: if I’d given in and slapped her, she wouldn’t be telling me this. “He does owe you favors, though, doesn’t he?”
“A few.” The submissive pose was long gone now. She had crossed her arms casually, absently scratching a scab near her elbow, and for some reason, I was glad.
“Well, maybe I can take on some of his debt. What do you want?” I asked. “Um, from me. So I guess there are some limitations.” Not that I really thought the answer would be “sex,” but who knew?
“Well, I told him I wanted to see the ocean, and I wasn’t kidding.”
“Done,” I said quickly. “Well—”
She rolled her eyes, clearly having expected to be screwed over, although perhaps not this fast.
“Not right away,” I hastily clarified. “I have to finish out the school year. And, uh, get some money. But this summer we’re totally going. I promise.”
“I believe you,” she said. “And for what it’s worth, I saw him put the phone in one of the yard waste bags this morning.”
“Was it still working?”
She shrugged. “And I’m fairly sure he was planning to go out the back way, through the neighbors’ horse corral. After that, I have no idea. He didn’t tell me,” she said. “Really.”
It wasn’t much to go on, but it would have to do. I should have ripped that warehouse map right out of the gardener’s filthy hand, but I’d been an idiot and hadn’t. Nor did I have time to sneak back into my father’s file cabinets and figure it out that way. Besides, even if I did figure it out, it would be too late. It might already be too late. If the phone was still intact, my best hope right now was that he’d left something on it that would help me trace him.
Because the only solution after that would be to call my father, tell him he had run, and get him to trigger his chip.
Better whipped than dead, right? I kept telling myself that.
Meanwhile, she had turned back to her work. I knew she didn’t really believe me because why should a slave ever believe anything she was promised? Not to mention, what the hell were the two of us going to do at the beach? Slather on luminescent mineral sunscreen and commiserate about how the campus smoothie bar kept running out of organic kale?
But I hoped that didn’t matter. I hoped the apology was the key. Frankly, the chances that no free person had ever apologized to her before and actually meant it weren’t zero.
The garden shed was predictably empty. I sank down in the dirt, already weary, in the shadow of the four thick paper yard waste bags that had been lined up next to the shed. I pulled out my phone, aware that it was likely the last time I’d ever dial Albert Einstein—at least with any hope of him answering. Of course no vibration sounded from anywhere, and a monotone voice informed me that the number was no longer in service.
I growled and attacked the first bag, then the second, pawing through cactus stems and paloverde trimmings, their thorns piercing the delicate skin of my fingers until they were almost as bloody as his had been earlier. At last, I found it, a brick of broken plastic that I scooped up, knowing before I even brought it into the light that it was too late. The case, smashed, the guts and wire hanging open like an eviscerated animal. All of Maeve’s messages, and all of mine, gone into the ether.
I sank down into the dirt, too spent even to cry. It didn’t matter how long I kept the cage door open. After what I’d said—after what I’d done—the bird would never fly back.
I picked up my own phone and selected a contact robotically, knowing the only way I could get through this conversation was by dissociating from my body, and hopefully my mind, too. “Hello, Daddy? It’s about the boy.”
But before I could finish, a sound from behind cut me off: sneakers crunching on fallen leaves, and a tall shadow blocked out the afternoon sun. I spun around to see him standing frozen a few steps from the shed, still in his sunset-colored college hat, straightened now. His chest heaving, exhausted golden eyes darting in disbelief between my face and the broken phone in my other hand.
“Louisa? What is it? What about the boy?” My father’s voice crackled through the line again.
I lowered the phone slowly, my mind making a million calculations a second.
“Loulou? Are you there?” His alarmed voice was barely audible now.
I raised the phone again. “Daddy, I … I made a mistake,” I said rapidly. “Everything’s fine. The boy is fine. I’m sorry for bothering you. I gotta go. Love you.” I ended the call before my father could mount any response, shoved the phone shakily into my pocket, and turned.
Even though I knew he was already gone. Again.