Page 20 of Never Broken

“Let’s say someone bought me who recognized my ‘potential.’ Someone at the university in Heidelberg.”

“Heidelberg. Is that where you’re from?”

“I’mfromLuxembourg,” he said, with more than a little indignant pride.

Remember that. Get it right.As if I’d ever before cared in my life where a slave came from.

“And he just decided to… teach you quantum chemistry? For fun?”

“Okay, ready for story time?” he said, sliding his chair an inch or so closer to me and leaning forward melodramatically, resting his scarred-but-still-somehow-perfect forearm on the desk. I never wanted it to leave. “When I was thirteen, I got sold to this huge factory farm in Romania. It’s not a high-end gig, to say the least. It’s criminals and chronic runaways and slaves nobody else wanted to buy; ones that would have ended up in a mine otherwise.”

So how hadheended up there? I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get that part of the story. This boy had aseriousknack for withholding absolutely everything but the precise information he wanted to share. It didn’t make me want to know it any less, though. It just made me want to press harder, on places it was dangerous to press.

“When you get sold to one of those places, it’s almost always for life, and by life, I mean until they work you to death, which usually takes a year or two for most people. If you’re strong and you can deal with the punishments and rations and quotas, you can make it longer.”

“How long did you make it?” I asked quietly.

“Three years.”

A brief silence hung over us.

“Then?” I was almost afraid to keep asking.

“I’d got one of the overseers to teach me how to fix the farm machinery, so I could get out of the fields sometimes. It was a privilege, believe it or not. Until I got my arm caught in one of them. Severed it at the shoulder.”

I gasped.

“Almost. Needless to say, I thought the next and last thing I’d see would be the inside of a shotgun barrel. But they decided to try to fix me up, so they had some hired goon do it using instructions he found on the internet.”

I was dumbstruck by the way he shared the abject horror of his past, as casually as I recalled slumber parties and trips to the mall with my friends. “But owners aren’t allowed to kill slaves,” I protested with a gasp. “It’s the law. And you shouldn’t have been sold for farm labor, either. Not at thirteen. My professor?—”

I stopped short, remembering what Erica Muller had said in class last week.If they can do the work of an adult, they’ll be made to do it. It doesn’t matter what the law says.

“Why you?” I finally asked softly.

He smiled and glanced away as if he could see the conflict raging in my head but had decided to let me ride it out alone. “The owner’s wife, well… she liked me, let’s put it that way. I used to talk to her through the fence. She slipped me sweets and stuff sometimes, and I would joke about how she should run away with me,” he said, then added, “Just to make her laugh,” as if somehow that would matter to me. It did, of course.

“What kind of sweets?” Though I instantly hated this woman, Iadoredthat younger, shyer version of him, trying out his charm, maybe blushing exactly like he was blushing—just slightly—now. But then again, it was kind of warm in here.

“Namur pralines,” he replied when a curious expression crossed my face. “It’s a Luxembourgish thing. I asked her forthem. Anyway, she intervened. So by some miracle, it worked, but needless to say, I still can’t rotate that arm all the way,” he said, and oh. He was going to show me because of course he was, pulling up the sleeve of his shirt to show me the long, deep, jagged surgical scar snaking around his shoulder. “After that, they sent me to one of those discount auctions, hoping to make back some of what they spent on me, which wasn’t much. That’s whenhecame in. We were all standing there in pens, and instead of looking in our mouths or feeling up our junk, he walked right down the line and started quizzing all of us. We all thought he was crazy, but he knew what he was doing. Looking for a diamond in the rough. I must have passed the test. He took me to Heidelberg, had the hospital there stitch me up properly, and six months later, I was reading Shakespeare.”

“Sixmonths?”

“I know.Ididn’t even think I could do it that fast, but it turns out anyone can, assuming you just never had the opportunity and don’t have some learning disability. Eventually, he made me take all these tests, including this aptitude test—one that they give to students here. I forget what it’s called.”

I threw out the name.

“That’s the one. I scored in the ninety-ninth percentile. Of course, to send it in, you can’t put a number in the ‘name’ field. He had to make up a fake name for me.”

“What was it?”

He laughed. “Nice try.”

“But I don’t have anything to call you.”

“Not my problem.”

It seemed odd that this should be the first time this particular issue had bothered me, but except for a nanny we’d had for a year or so when I was a kid, I’d never interacted closely enough with a slave tocare. Not that some fake name he’d only usedonce would be better, but it would be something—and illegal. Slaves were kept nameless for a very good reason.

---