Chapter 8
8
HIM
773496S6
Maeve?
S hit, did that look weird typed out.
Our first master, like Wainwright-Phillips, was old-school. He wouldn’t allow our mother to name us, so to her, we were both Schatzi , and that only in private. But that’s a name for a pet, not a person, and anyway, we couldn’t both have it. So I’d pretty much known my sister her entire life by what she was to me— Schwesterchen —or by her face alone.
But if she had a name now, a real name, I’d have to learn to use it. She deserved it.
The house was quiet now, but I didn’t want to find out whether anyone was still around. Instead, I was in the pantry, as far back as I could go, sitting on the floor with my back against the door, the one that led to the back of the property, with its vast desert gardens surrounding the terrace and pool. Moonlight struggled through the dusty window above it, offering me a weak halo of light.
Gingerly, I opened up the cheap phone and tried to figure out what to do with the system before me, which looked nothing like the New European one, so no wonder I hadn’t figured it out. My sister spoke minimal English, so I wrote in Luxembourgish, a language I honestly wasn’t sure I’d ever get a chance to use again. Then I waited, the unbearable silence of the cold room pressing in on me from every side. I knew there was a good chance I wouldn’t hear from her tonight; that I’d be left alone and awake, again, with the last companions in the world I wanted right now: my thoughts.
773541N0
I’m here
I dropped the phone clumsily and scrambled to snatch it up and type out a reply.
773541N0
Do you like Maeve? I found it in a book about fairies
773496S6
It’s beautiful, but it’ll take a while to get used to
773541N0
Take all the time you need :)
My sister had gotten luckier than I had at the public auction, which wasn’t surprising given that her file, unlike mine, didn’t state she’d attacked and killed her master’s son mere days before. She’d ended up cleaning stalls and grooming horses at a riding school outside Brussels co-owned by a divorced mother and her three daughters and—best of all in terms of letting me sleep at night—no perv master to hassle her. We sent voice messages on the app as much as we could get away with, which, during my years on the farm, wasn’t often. We spoke more frequently when I was in Heidelberg—at that point, we’d both learned to read and write, and it was easier to keep the conversations private. She’d tell me embellished stories about winged horses, and I’d tease her and try to keep her hopes up that we’d see each other again someday. Because I did have hope, despite it all. I shouldn’t have, but I did. Especially when she’d sent me a message saying: They’re freeing all of us here. But the message vanished, and radio silence followed.
For the next year, I asked about her to every slave I met passing through Heidelberg with little success, until I finally bumped into a slave boy who belonged to an American guest lecturer, who told me that two girls around my sister’s age—one a slave and one recently freed, though before the paperwork had been filed—had vanished from Seattle. One of them turned up dead and mutilated in the desert outside Phoenix. Damaged, was the word they used in the news story. The American boy didn’t know the details, and at first, the search for more information proved fruitless.
Gradually, though, one company kept coming up: Langer Enterprises. It was based outside Phoenix, and Max Langer and his executives had been at a conference in Brussels around the same time my sister had disappeared—and in Seattle around the same time the other girls had. From another acquaintance of the professor’s, one who worked at the New European financial regulator—a free man this time, with the kind of peculiar demands I would prefer to block out entirely—I unearthed a pattern: before each girl vanished, Langer Enterprises, under some shadowy subsidiary, had purchased a peculiar set of chemicals and equipment I knew from my time in the lab. Equipment that should never be used on a human, needless to say.
Meanwhile, Professor von Esch may have been a genius, but he was also a hustler—renting me out as a tutor for some of the wealthiest, stupidest students at Heidelberg—and a drunk, meaning I easily skimmed off hundreds of euros, which I used to bribe one of the in-house slaves at Cosgrove’s Human Assets to keep an eye on any clients in Phoenix looking to import a slave.
While all this was going on, and when I wasn’t dragging the professor out of bed every morning and forcibly pouring electrolytes down his gullet to get him to finish his paper on macroscopic molecular wave duality, I used my spare time to keep reading up on Max Langer et al. That’s when Keith Wainwright-Phillips had first come up, in a picture of him and Langer playing golf in some country club charity event, though at the time, I hadn’t targeted him specifically. By that time, the professor was finished—with the paper, with me, and with himself. He was dying, in fact, and I knew Cosgrove’s would jump at the chance to make a high-profile sale to someone interested in a highly educated slave who could also do manual labor — and due to my history, available at a steep discount. The fact that it had turned out to be Wainwright-Phillips was just Lucky Sevens magic, I guess. From there, I only needed to play matchmaker, so to speak. And now here I was. Here she was.
773496S6
What happened to your owners??
You said they were freeing you and the others
773541N0
They lied
They left us at the riding school and never came back
We had nowhere to go if we didn’t want to be caught by the police and auctioned off
My teeth clenched. In a down economy, this happened a lot. Owners fell on hard times and couldn’t pay the manumission fees or find buyers, so they just fucked off, leaving slaves who’d served them loyally for years to live as fugitives. It was nauseating.
773496S6
Where are you now??
773541N0
I don’t know
We can’t go outside
She said it’s too dangerous, the police here will catch us and the same thing will happen
And they can trace the phones, too
Fuck. Of course they could. But how else was I supposed to communicate with her?
773496S6
But where are you??? And who’s she??
There wasn’t supposed to be any she involved, or anyone helping Maeve, except for me. And how did Max Langer play in? I watched the dots appear and reappear on the screen as Maeve typed, erased, and retyped.
773541N0
Resi
She’s the one helping us
773496S6
Helping you? How?
773541N0
I don’t know, protecting us
I think she works here
And I don’t think they know she’s helping us
That’s all I can figure out without speaking English
I don’t understand anything else
I’m sorry
Text messages you could hear. I was here to save my sister, not make her cry about her shit detective skills. I tried another approach.
773496S6
I’m sorry, Maeve
Look, just tell me what it looks like inside, if you can’t go out
I could almost see her swiping at her eyes, sucking in unshed tears. Fuck, if Louisa thought I was brave, my sister was ten times braver still. She’d endured almost everything I had. The only difference was that she hadn’t done anything to deserve it.
773541N0
It’s a house, a big one
A house? What about the warehouse on Salt River Boulevard? That didn’t add up.
773541N0
We’re only allowed in the upstairs, but I can see out the window
The houses here are really big, and there are pretty red mountains
Okay. At least we were in the right area of the union, probably.
773541N0
The sunrises are all pink and purple and gold, and I can see the Pleiades just before dawn
See? I called them by the right name
I CAN learn ;)
773496S6
I’m glad, Maeve
And you can call them whatever you want
Anything else?
773541N0
I don’t know, some books, but everything’s in English
773496S6
Is anyone else there?
773541N0
A few other girls
773496S6
Slaves?
773541N0
Yes
But Resi said we could choose names, so we did
There was one named Lemaya who was teaching me English
She was nice even though I wasn’t very good
She gave me this phone
But then she left
773496S6
Left for where?
773541N0
I don’t know
But she didn’t come back
I thought of the dead girl in the desert and shivered. Somehow, I didn’t think this Lemaya had left for a week at the health spa.
773496S6
Have you heard the name Max Langer mentioned at all? Or Keith Wainwright-Phillips?
Or about any kind of experiments or research?
773541N0
I don’t think so, but I’m just not sure
I’ll try to find out, I promise I will
She was getting frustrated again, I could tell.
773496S6
Look, try to find out anything else you can
And listen for those names especially
773541N0
I’ll ask Resi if I can figure out the words
I think she used to be a slave
I was glad people were helping her. Really, I was. But by deputizing her, I’d made her even more of a target. And if anything happened, it would be my fault. Again.
773496S6
Just be smart about it, ok?
And be careful
Do what I would do
Bad advice, given recent events, but she knew what I meant.
773496S6
I think I have an idea where you are, and I’m not far
773541N0
But how are you here??
773496S6
What else? Science
I experimented
773541N0
Who’s the girl who messaged me, by the way? ;)
Shit, was she really going to do this to me right now?
773496S6
No one
773541N0
So you have a “no one” already
That was fast, even for you
773496S6
Yeah, but it’s different this time
773541N0
O nee ,? 1 is it that bad?
773496S6
Worse
773541N0
Nondikass ? 2
773496S6
Don’t worry
I told her to stay out of it
She’ll fuck up everything
773541N0
Bass du m?ll?? ? 3 If this girl were a slave that would be one thing
But do you realize what she risked??
773496S6
What SHE risked??
What about me??
How the fuck am I supposed to help you if I’m shoveling coal??
773541N0
For someone so smart, how can you be so dumb??
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
773496S6
This story will NOT have a happy ending, Maeve
It’s going to end up with her life ruined and me dead
Which is exactly why I’m ending it now and coming to get you
You’re all that matters
773541N0
But I’m not
Don’t YOU want to be happy?
The simple logic of innocents.
773496S6
Of course I do, but it’s more complicated than that
773541N0
No it isn’t, you stupid tockskapp ? 4 .
O vreck, ? 5 someone’s coming
Left idle, the phone went dark. There was nothing more I could do but wait and pray she’d learned something from me over the years and picked out a hiding spot for the phone in advance.
Meanwhile, the aloe was helping, of course, soothing the lash wounds like a girl’s soft, cool hands. I’d almost prefer it wouldn’t help at all, and then I’d have at least one reason to forget the girl that even Maeve—who didn’t even know her—seemed determined not to let me forget.
Brave. Really? I didn’t feel particularly brave at the moment, given what I was up against, nor did I think I was notably braver than any other slave who had somehow survived a lifetime of the cruelest and most degrading shit imaginable. But to someone like Louisa—whose childhood, from where I stood, seemed to have been made entirely of lollipops and puppies and rainbows and unicorns—I could see why it might seem that way. It didn’t mean she understood anything. It didn’t even mean she cared . It meant I was just a project, a walking, talking charity food drive, one she could and would throw away when the next shiny object came along. Because an object was what I was. Literally.
Still, she hadn’t chosen sad , pitiful , or pathetic . She’d chosen brave .
And nobody had ever called me that before.
Outside, the desert sunrise was starting to brush the fronds of the distant coconut palms with purple. The housekeeper would be in any second to start breakfast.
But all of a sudden, the sound of heavy footsteps coming from the service door—definitely not the housekeeper’s—sent me scrambling to my feet, shoving the phone and aloe into a forgotten bag of semi-rotten potatoes at the back of the shelf, and hastily picking up a broom.
The gardener loomed large in the doorway, shovel in hand, choking off the room with the smell of sweat and dirt and something minty, probably the homemade rotgut alcohol everyone knew he had stashed in various places around the garden. There was no telling how long he’d been standing outside the window, watching me through his yellow-rimmed, squinty eyes.
“Watcha doing in here, boy?” he demanded.
“Just cleaning.”
“The hell you are. You were hiding something,” he accused, beady eyes scanning the room. “Didja forget about our agreement?”
“What agreement?” I asked, though I knew. I also knew that I could deliver an entire flash drive full of hardcore snuff porn to this perv and he still wouldn’t leave me alone. I still had the microcamera, though, hidden as artfully as I could without a lot of good options. “The one where you grow some teeth?”
He slammed the door and stalked toward me. “I know what you’ve been up to, and I know about her little crush. And so will everybody else if ya don’t get me those pictures.”
“Let’s see,” I replied, my voice even. “What did I tell you the last time we had this conversation? Oh, right. Go fuck yourself. Well, consider that still in effect.”
He grabbed me by the arm and yanked me close, his grip tight, his dirty fingernails digging painfully into my skin. He brought the shovel up, pressing its metal edge sharply against my throat like a knife. “Tell me, boy, is a free girl’s pussy as tight as I’ve always heard it is? Or aren’t you her first? Maybe she’s been open for business all along.”
“Say that again, asshole.” I twisted out of his grip, grabbing him by his dirt-encrusted shirt and slamming him up against the opposite shelf, sending jars of sun-dried tomatoes and olives smashing to the floor. I’d been dying to do it since yesterday, and now that I wasn’t bleeding and chained to a post, I saw no reason not to. “I fucking dare you.”
He gurgled, his neck sticky and greasy to the touch, like a pig might feel.
“You’re not as tough without a whip in your hand, are you?”
“Fucking idiot kid, defending that spoiled slut,” he choked out. “For what? You know she doesn’t give a fuck about you, right? She’d sell you out for a pair of fancy new shoes.”
“Thanks for the relationship advice, dickhead. Have you ever even seen a girl naked without having to hide behind a bush?”
He twisted his face into some ghastly bastardization of a smile. “Oh, I got a mind to do a lot more than see.”
Revulsion hit me like a punch to the stomach. To think of that—to think of her —the perfect, glossy pink lips and huge gray eyes, full of confusion and compassion and curiosity even as I was shoving her away like an asshole—made me want to either vomit or slit his throat. Instead, I had to settle for watching him squirm as I squeezed tighter. “You do and you die. And after I kill you, I’ll rip all your extremities off and throw them to the coyotes to play tug-of-war with.”
“That’s real funny, boy,” he managed to gasp. “I figured your killing days was over, since from what I hear, you seen enough cages for a lifetime.”
Fuck. Was that all over the house now, too? I tried to keep my voice even. “For killing you ? They wouldn’t cage me for that. They’d throw me a fucking ticker-tape parade.”
In a flash, the gardener growled, reached over his head, and grabbed a jar of pickles from the pantry shelf behind him, then hurled it at me with all his strength. I ducked just in time, and the jar smashed against the opposite shelf, sending brine and shards of glass flying everywhere.
“And just what is going on in here?!” the housekeeper demanded as she threw open the door from the kitchen, flicking her careworn eyes, behind her bifocals, from him to me to the puddle of pickle juice spreading rapidly over the floor.
“Crazy kid just hauled off and attacked me!” he said, his voice rising in pitch.
“And may I ask why he had the opportunity to do that? You have no reason to be in here.”
“But I ran out of … salt,” he said. “To, uh, kill the slugs.”
The lie was painfully bad and I rolled my eyes, saying nothing, content in the knowledge that the housekeeper was the only one here who loathed this motherfucker more than I did. Ten years of ass pinching would do that to a woman.
“Quiet,” she said firmly. “I don’t have the patience for this nonsense on a day when the master has a dinner party planned. I want both of you out. If I see any trace of either of you in here again before noon, the master will hear about it. I’ll get the maid to clean this up,” she continued. “Since you’ve already drunk your breakfast”—this to the gardener—“I’ll assume you don’t need any food, so out with you, now. As for you”—she turned to me—“I’ll have breakfast ready in a minute, and then you can start on cleaning the guest bathrooms, the dining room, the entrance hall, and putting the extra wings on the table settings. Oh, and all the silverware and crystal need polishing. And don’t forget, we’re all wearing uniforms tonight. I hung up yours downstairs. Do not get it dirty.” She glared at the gardener again. “ You are not to set foot in the house all evening, much to the relief of us all.”
His face turned purple with rage, but he had no choice. He snatched up his shovel and slinked out of the room, muttering about how he should have slit my throat with a pickle jar shard.
Meanwhile, the gears in my head were turning as I choked down a bowl of lumpy reheated oatmeal, the housekeeper clearly keen to expend zero effort to feed us slaves on a day when she had important people to cook for. She would be watching the pantry with laser eyes for the rest of the day, but I felt confident that she wasn’t going to rummage around any more than she had to. The gardener, on the other hand, would no doubt be back to sniff around for the phone the second he thought he could get away with it. And if he found it, he wouldn’t bother with blackmail this time. He’d take it straight to Wainwright-Phillips, guaranteed.
That, I couldn’t let happen. The earlier computer printout, I could maybe be clever enough to explain away, but not the phone with Maeve’s messages. That was as good as evidence that I planned to take off. And if my master was involved with Max Langer’s plot, I might find myself accused of even worse.
And Louisa couldn’t help me anymore. That thought put a strange lump in my throat, and it wasn’t the oatmeal.
Under normal circumstances, I could sometimes get away with using the early morning hours to go downstairs and catch a few hours’ sleep. Not to mention, I wanted a glimpse of whatever ridiculous outfit I’d be stuck wearing tonight during my first face-to-face encounter with Max Langer, and to figure out how to face the guy down without killing him on sight. But exhausted as I was, it was time to turn on the charm again, whether I wanted to or not.
I found the maid at the sink, rinsing pickle brine off her hands. Sliding casually into her line of sight, I flashed her the kind of smile that never failed me. “Just who I was looking for.”
HER
I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d managed to go from the miracle of being nestled in his arms to being ordered to get out of his life in the course of a night, but, like the absolute ace I was, I continued to outdo myself.
Was it so crazy that I’d taken it upon myself to track down Maeve? Did I really have zero chance of ever understanding what he’d been through? Sure, the teddy bears and gumdrops of my childhood had been supplanted in his by shackles and whips, but we weren’t really so far apart, right? And yeah, I hadn’t actually thought of him as a person up until about a week ago, but why wouldn’t he instantly trust me with his and his family’s very survival?
Stupid, stupid, stupid girl. No wonder that poor slave working on campus had looked at me like she had. She wasn’t scared of me. She was just astonished that anyone on the planet could be that fucking clueless.
I wanted to sleep. I’d safely escorted my mother up the stairs and tucked her in bed with another glass of water and some ibuprofen. But I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to peacefully sleep in my bed again, knowing he’d been in it. And if I couldn’t sleep, what was the point of lying there and tormenting myself?
So it wasn’t as if I were trying to clumsily re-inject myself into his affairs. I was well aware that I had dug half my own grave and that it was time to stop. But four in the morning found me traipsing in my glasses, camisole, pajama pants, and flip-flops through the gardens, silent except for the strange hollow call of the nightjars flitting in front of the moon, and when I passed the narrow door leading to the pantry and kitchen, voices and shattering glass greeted me. It didn’t take too much deductive reasoning to figure out who they belonged to.
No, dig up, stupid. Up.
I kneeled and put my ear to the door.
The house had thick walls and good insulation, so I didn’t hear everything. I heard the accusation of hiding something. I heard about an agreement. I heard go fuck yourself . And I thought I heard something about me. But before I had time to contemplate any of this, the voices got louder and more forceful—the housekeeper’s, too, now—and I leaped out of the way at the abrupt turn of the knob, tripping backward over an ornamental boulder, landing with a thud, hands scraping painfully against the lava rocks. I lay there for a few moments, frozen in fear, sweat trickling down my neck and back. The desert heat, even this early, was already strong enough to start roasting me inside my pink unicorn pajama pants.
The door was flung open, and I scrambled backward, catching my arm painfully on a barrel cactus spine, my legs barely escaping the semicircle of light emanating from the pantry as the gardener stalked out, eyes scanning the ground. He must have heard something.
It had been a while since I’d been this close to the perverted creep. When I was twelve, I’d caught him watching me undress in the poolhouse, and he’d threatened to chop me up with his chainsaw and bury me in the garden if I told Daddy. Being a stupid, weak, compliant kid, I believed him. From then on, I always undressed in my room and literally jumped in front of a moving car to avoid him on at least one occasion. But now, here, at first light, he was even worse than I remembered: the size of a bulldozer, dirt lodged in the spaces where his teeth should be, carrying a metal shovel covered with what I was pretty sure was dried blood—human, animal, or both. I tried to quiet even my heartbeat, not even daring to breathe.
At last, he snorted and turned away, heading toward the shed. He hadn’t seen me.
I scrambled to my feet. I had two minutes, at best.
HIM
“I need to borrow something of yours.”
The maid’s green eyes widened with interest. She probably thought I was about to request her “services,” especially since I hadn’t been able to reach everywhere with the aloe. A few days ago, I might have asked. Maybe later, I still would. Nothing was holding me back.
Right?
“Oh? What’s that?” she asked neutrally, turning around and slowly, sensually wiping her hands on a towel.
“Your brilliant skills as an actress, to keep the housekeeper busy for a few minutes while I grab something from the pantry.”
She frowned, clearly disappointed, and threw down the towel. “I don’t know,” she said, chewing on her bottom lip. “She’s in a mood today, what with company and everything. Plus, she was all pissed about this huge mess this morning. It wouldn’t be wise to push her.”
She was right. It wouldn’t be wise at all, but neither was anything else I’d done in the last twelve hours, so why worry about it now? “Look, I promise this is nothing that will make her mood worse than it already is. And I’ll owe you one, too,” I promised.
“Anything?”
“Anything. Just name it.”
She hesitated for a moment before nodding. Fellow slaves—especially lonely, attention-starved girls—rarely if ever forgot to call in their favors; it was one of the only forms of currency we could trade freely. Which meant I’d be fucked later, but at least I wouldn’t be fucked now. And why did my life always seem to come down to exactly that choice?
A high-pitched shriek left her mouth, so loud I had to back away to preserve my eardrums.
“There was a mouse !” she squealed to the housekeeper when she burst in. “It ran right into the powder room!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” the housekeeper replied, throwing her hands in the air. “That’s just what we need: rodents running around everywhere while the master has guests.”
The maid grabbed a broom. “This way. Come on.” They both dashed out again, but not before she shot me one last “you owe me” look.
I didn’t wait for more than a few seconds before throwing open the door to the pantry and immediately upending the bag of potatoes, scattering them across the floor. They rolled out in all directions, their pale flesh exposed to the air—but no phone or aloe bottle rolled out beside them.
Don’t panic. It had to be here. But my hands were cold and clammy in the temperature-controlled room, my fingers slipping on the skins as I tried to gather them up, praying they’d be hidden under this or that one. Nothing. I scanned the shelves frantically, trying to spot any sign of them in the jumbled mess I’d made. In a panic now, I began tearing the whole thing apart, throwing all the carefully-replaced boxes and jars aside all over again. What if the gardener had discovered them first? What if they were already on their way to Master Wainwright-Phillips’s brand-new desk, all laid out like a charcuterie platter?
My fear was tangible now, a dull tightness in my chest. My eyes darted from shelf to shelf to shelf, but it was too late. All I could do now was pace back and forth in terror.
In my life so far, I’d been lucky and good more often than not. But I had nothing left in my arsenal that could fix this, and now here was Maeve, the purest and most beautiful spirit I’d ever known—a girl only just learning her own name—ripped apart and destroyed because I’d failed, again , to save her. Like my mother. Like before. Like always.
And now here was the door opening again, as if the world hadn’t fucked me over enough already just today .
“I thought you might have left it in here, so I went inside the pantry and dialed your number,” Louisa said, staring at the cereal shelf instead of at me. “I heard it vibrate from behind the potatoes,” she added softly.
Well, shit, this girl. There hadn’t been very many times in my life when I wanted to sink to my knees without someone ordering me to, but this was one.
Honestly, there wasn’t a single part of her I couldn’t stare at for hours, and secretly—or maybe not so secretly—I had. In an endless series of stolen moments, I had cataloged and memorized—in a highly orderly and scientific way, of course—her endlessly soft spirals of hair, rose-kissed porcelain skin, pillowy lips, breasts and hips flowing like sand in some gilded medieval hourglass. But now, all haloed by the dusky swirls of light in the room, it wasn’t any of those features that I saw. It was somehow, now, the soul of her; though it was crazy to think that was something I could ever believe in.
I hoped the panic from moments ago didn’t show as I held out my hand, and she placed the phone and the bottle in it. A very proper, contactless exchange.
“I won’t do this again,” she said.
It wasn’t a warning. It wasn’t a threat. It was a promise. One to follow the directive I had given her. One responsible, I was pretty sure, for the shimmer of a tear in her eye behind those cute, clunky glasses, one she wasn’t fast enough to hide before she turned.
Instead of in my hand, the phone could have been in her father’s. It should be in her father’s, after the way I’d treated her. What was any of it to her, now? I, just like the phone, should no longer be anything more to her than a throwaway thing. It was what I’d demanded to be. It was, I feared, all I knew how to be.
But this girl wasn’t having it. This girl knew nothing, had been taught all the wrong things, had been spoiled beyond measure. And yet she was trying. And she got tears for her efforts?
Well, there went the lollipops and rainbows melting into nothing. Realistically, the most a slave could ever expect was a matter of degree: the bigger portion of food, the not-so-backbreaking duties, the less-sadistic owner. A short message every now and then from the only family you were fortunate enough to still know. You could have all of that if you were both lucky and good. And in reality, since you rarely got lucky, you had to be really good.
Up till now, I had been.
But this—this, now—was one of Maeve’s fairy tales; her bedtime stories. It was beautiful to believe in, but I knew better. The unicorns didn’t charge forward; the shackle key didn’t magically appear; the hand didn’t reach out through the iron bars. And yet now, after twenty years, I was seeing it all happen.
And maybe Maeve was right. Maybe it really was as simple as that.
“Louisa, wait.”
1 ? Oh no.
2 ? Goddammit.
3 ? Are you crazy?
4 ? Stubborn person.
5 ? Oh, shit.