Page 28 of Never Broken

In fact, for years, ever since my sister had vanished, the only thing I’d allowed myself to want was to find her and keep her safe, forever. The way any man—even if he was a slave—should do.

It didn’t matter what happened to me after that, and there was never supposed to be anything else involved. Anyoneelse involved.

But fuck it, now there was.

A shaft of white moonlight cut across the locked window of the slave quarters, bisecting my bunk. As spartan as it was, this was the best room I’d ever had, but it didn’t mean that Keith Wainwright-Phillips wasn’t scum. He was like all the rest. Those who had torn away my family, treated me like a farm animal, numbered me and chained me and herded me from pen to pen, forced me to spend my thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth birthdays in shackles, hoeing and harvesting under the lash in a muddy field. Those who had destroyed my mother and stolen my sister. Those who deserved death.

It was a clear night, I noticed, and sleep sure wasn’t working.No plan survives contact with the enemy, boy,the old professor used to tell me, rapping my knuckles over our games of speed chess—one of the many things von Esch had decided I simply had to learn to truly be considered educated. When he first bought me, we’d played on the regular, until I actually started winning and he’d knock the pieces off the board in a tantrum and stalk off to another bottle of Remy Martin. But I’d already learned enough.A good opening only takes you so far.It was time to change up the strategy, as usual. I jumped down from the bunk and grabbed some flip-flops from under the bedframe, right next to the wooden crate where I kept my clothes and other accouterments—I wouldn’t say belongings because legally, nothingcouldbelong to me.

The good thing about sleeping in the morning was that the basement quarters weren’t locked. Slaves—dangerous or otherwise—couldn’t be let out alone at night, you see, unless they were working. The Pleiades would be high by now, and if I was going to be awake anyway, nothing was going to prevent me from seeing it before the sunrise. I was loath to admit there was anything I liked about this place, but the desert was incontrovertibly the best place I’d ever lived for stargazing, and I’d found a spot in the garden right under a mesquite and next to the wind chimes. The housekeeper and maid were already up and over in the main house, and no one else was around to see me quietly latch the door to the room, make my way up the stairs, and head out the separate access door to the basement wing, furiously zeroing in on the garden path ahead of me so I wouldn’t be tempted to head the opposite way to see ifherlight was on. Or whether her blinds were open.

In the garden, I nestled in the cool sand, my back against the bark of a timeless mesquite. Years had passed, but the seven sisters were still as innocent as when I’d first seen them, from the roof of my first master’s country estate in Walferdange. As innocent asIhad once been.

Right. As if slaves ever had the luxury of being innocent.

Therecouldbe death, you know. Did it matter what happened to Louisa? Did I care if she was collateral damage? The world didn’t think I was worthy of touching her, so why should I care? I’d kill Keith Wainwright-Phillips in a second if I had to. But if I put Louisa in danger, I’d just be causing another innocent to suffer, an innocent whose window Icouldbe looking up into right now if I walked around the corner of the house, not that I’d ever paid attention to such a thing, or for that matter, what she might be wearing—or not wearing—while sleeping. A rich and free innocent, granted, but not one who deservedthat.Which in itself took a lot to admit because up until recently, I was convinced theyalldeserved that.

And so did I, probably. After all, my sister wouldn’t need saving if I hadn’t fucked up and put her there to begin with.

I closed my eyes, and the star cluster—Alcyone, Maia, Electra, my constant women—arrayed themselves methodically and logically behind my lids the way they had on the star charts I’d stolen from my master’s son’s textbooks, showing me, as always, the way through darkness, even when I couldn’t see them.

And they told me that the only way to help Louisa was to stay away from her. But the only way to helpmyselfwas to go back.

HER

I sat where I always did on campus when I wanted to eat lunch and think—on a little stone bench in the back of the optics building, where, in the spring, purple-throated hummingbirds gathered to sip on honeysuckle and ocotillo flowers.

But today, I wasn’t alone. An insistent mist on my arm brought my attention to the fact that the bushes were being watered—by a slave girl with sandy hair cropped short, in the same style they all wore. She looked maybe eleven, and her fair skin reddened by exposure under that distinctive dull gray one-piece uniform. She’d rolled the sleeves up, but the fabric was too thick for the desert sun at its zenith, and at her feet was an empty plastic bottle thatmayhave once contained drinking water. I vaguely knew that the slaves who worked on campus were supplied by an outside contractor, though most of them were housed in a forbidding-looking concrete building just off campus, complete with razor wire. Looking at the girl again, I was floored at how young she looked. Did they actually buyslaves her age for this kind of work? Or maybe they owned her mother, and the daughter was just part of the package? Did that happen, ever?

God, there was still so much I didn’t know. And worse, had never thought to find out.

“Hi,” I said.

“Himiss,” she murmured as if it were all one word, staring at her feet. She wasn’t allowed to ignore a free person, but she still used the smallest voice she could muster. She’d clearly hoped to go unnoticed, and I had to admit, a week ago, she probably would have, like one of those dull green compactable trash bins placed everywhere on campus. Now that she was in my crosshairs, though, she was shaking. It was obvious that getting any attention at all from a student had never resulted in anything good for her.

“It’s okay,” I said awkwardly. “I’m just—here.” I held out the mini bag of potato chips that had come with my turkey sandwich. The girl was thin, and though I couldn’t imagine it was in the university’s best interests to starve their slaves, I doubted much junk food was included in whatever they were fed. It could be gruel three times a day, for all I knew. “I don’t want them.” Actually, I did want them, but I didn’tneedthem. I beckoned her closer, still holding out the bag.

But instead of the gratitude I expected to see, her face looked as if I had just pointed a loaded gun at her and ordered her into the back of a van. She was shaking that hard, and the hose was flailing every which way in the small hand that had a shaky grip on it already.

“Okay, maybe not,” I said helplessly. “One?” But the girl took a step back. Jesus, I’d never seen anyone so frightened of potatoes. I held it out ridiculously in my flat palm. I guess in my mind, the slave girl had now evolved from an inanimate object to one of the lower mammals. Erica Muller would be so proud.

Was that what the slave boy—myslave boy—was to me? A mammal? Hadhebeen doing work like this at eleven? And what would he do if I offered him a potato chip? Laugh, probably, and make some sarcastic remark.

Oh wow, a potato chip. I’m moving up in the world. Next maybe I’ll get a crouton.

And maybe take it. My own family’s slaves didn’t get chips, either.

“Or … how about some water?” I unzipped my backpack and uncapped my reusable bottle, thinking I’d found the solution. But it got me nowhere. In the end, I left the chip bag gently on the bench and walked away, glancing back over my shoulder to see the girl still standing there, staring after me, water squirting forlornly out of the hose.

“Well?” Corey demanded later that afternoon as I dashed out of my psychology lecture hall, head down, praying he wouldn’t spot me. My mind was made up about where I was going, and my lunchtime encounter with the slave girl had only cemented it. But he had spotted me, of course, and I was about to pay the price for it.

“Well what?” I responded, hoping that when I didn’t slow down, he’d get the message and fuck off.

“I haven’t seen you in four days, and you’ve barely answered any of my messages.”

“I answered your first message,” I mumbled without looking at him. “I said I was studying for my o-chem midterm. That hasn’t changed. When it does, I’ll let you know.”

“You were supposed to be studying with me!” he exclaimed.

---