5. Chapter Five #3
The entertainment quarter opens around us, and my mistake becomes obvious within the first thirty paces. I should have taken the longer route.
A pleasure worker emerges from a private suite to our left, escorted by an attendant whose grip on her elbow is professional and firm. Nyssa.
I know her face before the lighting finds it. She’s been in my operation for three years. Steady contract renewals. Above-average client satisfaction scores. The kind of worker who doesn’t generate incident reports.
Her smile is flawless, polished by training programs I designed myself, but it never reaches her eyes.
Bruising shadows her wrists beneath the translucent sleeves of her working silks.
I register the marks before she’s passed us.
They’re recent, the pattern consistent with a client who ignored the boundaries of his contract.
Nyssa doesn’t look at me. She wouldn’t. But I see the way her jaw sets when she registers who’s standing in the corridor.
The attendant escorting her should have intervened before it reached that point. I file his face away for later and add Nyssa’s contract number to the review queue on my wrist comm without breaking stride. Someone in my operation failed this female tonight, and I’ll find out who.
This is the system I built. Better than Kazren’s operation, where workers have no protections and complaints disappear into administrative silence. Better than the Splits, where a body without House affiliation is a body nobody misses.
I gave my workers contracts, boundaries, medical care, and the right to refuse clients who violated the agreement. It’s the best system I’ve been able to build inside an economy that treats people as inventory. But it still produces bruised wrists and smiles that stop at the mouth.
Miro’s thermal signature drops along my jaw. A cold spike. Revulsion held beneath a surface that doesn’t crack. Her pace doesn’t falter. Her expression doesn’t shift. But the acid bite of her reaction reaches me clearly enough to cut through the ambient pheromone blend.
“Who was she?” She’s still walking, still looking ahead, but the cold in her voice is new.
“Nyssa is an employee of mine.”
Miro says nothing. Then, lower, almost to herself: “Impressive. You even document the damage.”
Ahead, the administrative portal cycles through its display, current contract listings scrolling across the interface.
Her gaze catches on the screen, and her stride shortens by half a step.
A companion’s performance review scrolls between shift rotations.
Renewal pending. Physical metrics. Compliance rating.
Client satisfaction scores. Every entry is formatted to match the inventory software tracking cleaning drones and corridor maintenance agreements two tabs away.
Bodies and equipment sharing the same system.
The auction boards glow at the corridor’s widest point. Contract listings scroll in real time. A pleasure worker’s companionship contract sits between a cleaning drone rental and a maintenance agreement. Duration. Terms. Rates. Availability.
The software doesn’t distinguish between categories because the economy doesn’t distinguish between them. Persons and property occupy the same database, filed under a shared taxonomy and priced by the same algorithm.
Kazren is standing beside the contract boards, one of his workers talking quietly at his shoulder. He doesn’t usually do his own buying. That’s what immediately puts me on edge. If he’d arranged this, I’d know how to respond.
Instead, he’s standing exactly where Miro and I need to pass, and I have no way of knowing whether that’s coincidence or calculation.
The shift in her chemistry reaches me. Anger. Horror. And beneath both, the intense focus I’m beginning to recognize as her way of thinking through a problem. The moment emotion gives way to assessment.
“You sell people.”
She’s facing me now, chin tilted up to bridge the height between us. Anger burns beneath her skin, threaded through a colder, harder note.
“I sell access,” I say. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
For a moment I want to tell her about the workers I pulled out of Kazren’s operation. The contracts I rewrote. The medical care. The protections. The complaints that actually get investigated instead of buried.
The impulse to explain myself irritates me enough that I kill it before it reaches my mouth. Before I took control of the Warrens, people disappeared. I built something better. She doesn’t need to know that.
“On Vahiri, the difference is whether they eat,” I say instead. “You know that.”
The Warrens exist inside an economy built on bodies and information. The contract system feeds, houses, and protects workers in a world where unattached individuals have almost no protection at all.
The alternative isn’t freedom. The alternative is The Splits. She knows that as well as I do.
She doesn’t argue. She doesn’t nod. She simply holds my gaze. Disgust reaches me first. Then understanding. Then the stubborn refusal to grant me absolution for any of it. The space between our worlds opens wider in the glow of the Warrens’ most beautiful corridor.
Finally, she looks away. “Where’s the junction point?”
Kazren looks up from the listings. His gaze moves across the corridor, taking in the crowd. The workers. The buyers. Me.
Then Miro.
I can’t tell whether he pauses.
The distance is wrong. The light is worse. Maybe she’s nothing more than another face in the corridor. Maybe he barely registers her at all.
Or maybe he does.
I shift slightly, putting myself between him and Miro. She doesn’t notice. She’s still angry about the contract floor, still caught up in her own thoughts. The less she knows about Kazren, the better.
Her anger lingers on my tongue as I lead her on. Selin’s death sits heavy in my chest beside every compromise I’ve made to keep this operation running. Somewhere between one step and the next, the distance between us grows.
I shouldn’t care that she’s walking farther away from me.
I shouldn’t be measuring the distance.
And I definitely shouldn’t be wondering whether she was right about more than my network security.