Page 38 of Never Broken

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, undersome 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 anysheinvolved, 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

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