CHAPTER TWENTY #2
“There could be other reasons for you to leave,” Aiden said, and that was honestly an idea that hadn’t occurred to me.
Rohinavon could be an escaped prisoner, for example, and was just using the child as an excuse.
Seeing Rohinavon’s sour expression, Aiden said, “The fact that I’m being thorough now is going to annoy you.
But in the long run, it’s going to work in your favour.
Because every detail I double-check is one more issue that isn’t going to come back and bite us when we’re waist-deep in a political cesspool swarming with river-sharks. ”
Rohinavon sighed. Then she very gently reached into the pouch and withdrew the child, turning his naked body over so that Aiden could see his genitals. “Thank you,” he said, after only a brief look, and she put the child away again. “How old is he?”
“Nine days.”
Aiden’s expression sharpened at that. “Cole said you left Vangal only eight days ago. So you gave birth just one day before fleeing?”
“Women routinely give up their male offspring within a couple of days of giving birth. No one wants to have to incubate them for any longer than necessary. We have cargo freighters visiting every city on Vangal almost every day, and plenty of them are equipped to take the male children to Eumad. In my case, I just had to make sure I was delivering him to the right freighter – namely, the one owned by the man I’d paid to smuggle me off the planet. ”
Belatedly, Aiden seemed to realise he was being rude. “Please, sit down,” he said, gesturing to her seat. He took his own seat beside me, while Cole sat between him and Rohinavon. Kade made no complaint about standing, since we only had four chairs in the kitchen.
“How long have you been planning this escape?”
Rohinavon rolled her eyes. “My mother’s been on at me to have a daughter for two years.
I’m only twenty-one. I don’t want to start building a dynasty yet.
It’s all so completely pointless, just pumping out children to make sure there’s someone to inherit all the money and power.
But almost everyone on Vangal has a son first, because then we get twenty-thousand credits for selling them to the Eumadians.
I didn’t need to have a son. My mother has enough money for a dozen lifetimes.
But I said I was going to because… Well, as far as Vangal goes, it was because I was trying to buy some time.
But far more important than that is…” She stopped suddenly, clamping her mouth shut.
“Maybe we should come back to that bit later.” She rubbed her eyes and made an effort to compose herself, and it occurred to me that she must be exhausted.
Nine days of constant alertness, of wondering if she was being followed, of endlessly looking over her shoulder…
“I started reaching out to contacts about a month before I had the fertility treatment. We can select the gender of our children, so I chose a boy. And in the meantime, I found a smuggler with a good reputation and paid him in advance to get me away from Vangal when the time came. Vangravian gestation takes three months, so near as matters, four months of planning.”
Aiden nodded, making notes in his comm, and I was a little surprised that Rohinavon didn’t comment on that. Then again, I supposed that if she was even telling him this, it meant she’d made at least a temporary decision to trust him.
“How much did you pay the smuggler?” Aiden asked next.
Rohinavon snorted. “Am I going to get into trouble for fuelling the smuggling trade?”
“No,” Aiden replied. “But if we end up taking this to the Alliance Parliament, it would help us build a case to show how difficult it was for you to leave in the first place. It lends credibility to your story.”
Rohinavon shrugged, seeming to accept the explanation. “It cost two hundred thousand credits.”
Aiden made a spluttering noise. My master muttered a startled, “Come again?” And Kade and I both stared at her with wide eyes.
“Where the hell did you get that kind of money?” Aiden asked eventually.
“I stole it from my mother,” Rohinavon admitted flippantly.
I huffed out a breath. “I take it she’s not going to be impressed when she finds out?”
“The money’s not an issue. She’d hardly notice it’s missing.
It’s me being missing that she’ll be furious about.
She’s no doubt already furious. We had to shoot eight guards in order to get out of the port.
It would have been all over the news in a matter of minutes.
That’s why we needed the best stealth technology available in the whole galaxy – that’s mostly what I paid for, not just the voyage itself.
Vangal sent out a fleet of fighters the instant they knew what we’d done.
The only thing that was going to save us at that point was to simply disappear. ”
“And then make a number of illegal jumps through other people’s wormholes,” Aiden filled in, which confirmed that my master had told him the rest of the story on the way here.
Rohinavon shrugged. “We did what we had to do.”
“I have a question,” my master said. “You said your son had to stay with you for six months before he could survive on his own. But you also said that male children are sold within a few days of being born. So how do they survive in the freighters? Or on Eumad?”
“In incubators,” Rohinavon and Kade answered at the same time.
Rohinavon looked surprised at his reply, but then the scales across her chest rippled with violet. “Oh. Yes, I suppose you would know about that, wouldn’t you,” she said, embarrassed.
“There are nursery rooms at the training centres,” Kade explained, not at all upset about it.
“The Eumadians are very open about where the younger children come from. Most dimari begin asking questions about it around the time they’re ten years old.
By that point, though, they’ve already started the neuro-engineering process, so we’re too docile to be upset about it. ”
Rohinavon grimaced. “That’s… horrible,” she muttered.
“The entire slave trade is horrible,” Aiden agreed.
“But that’s a big part of why you’re here, isn’t it?
” Rohinavon didn’t reply, but the answer was obvious.
“So in an ideal world,” Aiden went on, “what happens next? Obviously, you want somewhere safe for your son to grow up, but what about you? Do you actually want to raise him? Or were you just making a political statement?”
Rohinavon laughed, a cold, bitter sound as she shook her head. “Just a political statement? You really have no idea, do you?”
“So enlighten me,” Aiden prompted her. “What am I missing?”
“My mother is on the Vangravian High Council. The positions are appointed by ballot, but they’re assigned for life.
Her mother was on the Council before her, and her mother before that.
I was being groomed to be the next generation of hoity-toity dictators, looking down our noses at the rest of the population and insisting that we knew what was best for them, no matter how many times the issue came up that not all women wanted to abandon their sons to the slave trade.
I’m not the first one to have tried to leave.
I’m just…” She stopped, fixing her eyes on the tabletop while she took a few deep breaths to steady herself.
When she spoke again, her voice was tight.
“I’m just the first one to have succeeded.
And a large amount of that success is due to the fact that I had a literally bottomless pot of money at my fingertips; generations of wealth amassed for no purpose other than proving to the rest of the population how important we were. ”
A heavy silence filled the room. “What do they do with the women who don’t manage to escape?” my master asked.
Rohinavon’s fists clenched in her lap, and rapid waves of colour rippled across her shoulders. “They’re publicly tortured until their bodies give out and they eventually die. That usually takes somewhere between two and four months.”
My master murmured a faint curse. “And you were willing to risk that in order to leave?”
Rohinavon was shaking now, and I suspected that the scale of what she’d done was belatedly catching up with her. “That’s why I paid so much money for a good ship,” she muttered.
“But you chose to have a boy,” Aiden pointed out. “You’ve already said that you didn’t have to, not for the money. So why not just have a girl and avoid the whole problem?”
“I didn’t want to give myself the opportunity to back out,” she admitted.
“I needed something that was going to force me to commit.” I wasn’t sure I understood the twisted logic in that one.
She wasn’t brave enough to leave for her own sake, but she was brave enough to deliberately manufacture a child whose existence would force her to leave?
Perhaps my confusion was because I didn’t understand enough about the Vangravian political system. It all seemed terribly convoluted.
“Why was it so important that you leave in the first place? From the sounds of it, you lived in a gilded cage – yes, it’s still a cage, but likely a very comfortable one.”
Rohinavon’s expression turned instantly from fearful to defiant. “How about you tell me what’s going to happen to my son,” she demanded, “and then I’ll tell you my master plan.”
Aiden shrugged, and I was once again impressed by his patience. “Like I said before, the first question is whether you want to raise him yourself.”
Rohinavon sighed. “If I can, then yes. At the very least, I want him to have a loving and stable family to raise him. But if I can do it myself, that would be preferable.” She stopped again, once more changing the subject.
“If we take this to your Parliament, what are they going to say? Because publicly supporting a refugee from Vangal is effectively a declaration of war. And I highly doubt that the Alliance is going to risk hundreds of thousands of their own lives to protect one child.”
“You keep skirting the issue,” Aiden said, not letting her believe for one moment that she was going to manipulate her way out of this.
“The Alliance as a whole is very much against slavery, and while we’re certainly not going to go and start a war deliberately, it’s entirely possible that the Parliament would decide to take this opportunity to make our feelings known.
We’ve already made a few pointed statements to the Eumadians.
And if you’re worried about your safety, then know that we have a number of treaties with some very powerful species.
The Culrads joined our Alliance a bit over a year ago, and their technology is moving us ahead in leaps and bounds, and a little under a year ago, we signed a peace treaty with the Ranzors. ”
Rohinavon’s jaw dropped. “The Ranzors? Are you insane?”
I couldn’t help but grin at her reaction.
I’d heard the news from the other staff at the hotel, and many of them had had similar reactions.
The Ranzors were a highly aggressive species with some of the most advanced technology in the entire known galaxy, and most species preferred to give them a wide berth.
The fact that the Alliance had managed to successfully negotiate with them was nothing short of a miracle.
“Why would the Ranzors give a shit about Vangal?” she demanded of Aiden.
“Because, surprisingly enough, they’re almost as against slavery as the Alliance is. They have some very strong beliefs about each species, and each individual, having the right to self-determination. I think they’d actually be quite delighted to have a reason to pick a fight with the Vangravians.”
Rohinavon stopped to think about that. “So… you think that the Alliance Parliament might actually be willing to protect us? You think it’s worth asking?”
“I can’t make any guarantees,” Aiden said, steadfastly honest in his reply. “But I think the odds would be in your favour.” A moment of silence followed. “So if the Parliament does vote to assist you, what would you do next? What’s this master plan of yours?”
As she had done several times today, Rohinavon glanced down at her hip.
And now I understood why. “Setting myself and my son free isn’t enough,” she said – a sentiment that wasn’t entirely surprising.
“I want to set every male child free, so that he can live just as fulfilling a life as any female. I want to break the system that keeps all the women on Vangal oppressed and downtrodden for fear of punishment and torture.” She looked up at us, casting her gaze over each of us, her eyes shining bright with anger and ferocity.
“I want to start a revolution that will bring the whole of Vangal to its knees.”