Page 9 of Never Broken

“We’ll find you some clothes as soon as we get back,” murmured the housekeeper, indicating that I should slide in next to her in the back seat.Find, not buy. She herself was dressed neatly in a pink blouse, black skirt, and sandals, but they were probably secondhand from her mistress. I took that to mean there wouldn’t be any lavish shopping trips in my future. Was Wainwright-Phillips on a budget or something? If so, how and why had he bought me at all? I still hadn’t figured that out, and it bothered me. My background may have made me a bargain, but I sure as hell wasn’t cheap. “We’ve got a bunk inthe slave quarters made up for you, and you’ve already been worked into the rotation. You’ll be on the night shift tonight—the low man on the totem pole always gets it. Don’t worry, though,” she said, touching my arm lightly, “it’s just light cleaning and waiting around in case something comes up. Hardly anything ever does.”

Her eyes shifted to my electrical burns, and I squirmed in the leather seat like a kid getting a booster shot.

“Poor boy. Look at those,” she said softly, flicking aside a longer lock of my hair to examine my neck. “How did—never mind.” I appreciated her discretion, given our master’s presence. “We’ll get you some ice, too.” She gave me another small smile. “It always takes a day or two to settle in, and this is not only a new household, but a new continent.”

I didn’t answer because I was suddenly, for some reason, thinking of my mother. The care in the housekeeper’s voice—care I’d long ago stopped expecting—must have reminded me of hers somehow. The difference was that my mother had been young and beautiful, all light and laughter and energy, barely more than a girl even when I was a teen. But thinking about her and what our world had done to her was a shortcut to wanting to break things, so I stopped. Instead, I sank into the seat, trying to enjoy the softness of the leather after twelve hours of hard steel.

“Your most recent master educated you, then, boy?” Master Wainwright-Phillips spoke up.

Shit, I guess we were chitchatting instead. I straightened up, careful to avert my eyes as he peered at me through the rearview mirror. “Yes, sir. Professor von Esch, in Heidelberg. He taught me to read and write and to speak English.” I left it there. Icouldbe modest when I really tried. Or at least fool people into thinking I was.

“Your file said he taught you engineering, physics, and chemistry, too, and that you even helped him with his research,”he pushed. “That’s not exactly a common skillset for a slave. Is it useful?”

I paused, trying to read the car. “I’ll never make enough money to pay my student loans back, sir.”

It was a bold reply—maybe even stupid. But my master chuckled, and even the housekeeper hid a smile. Good, she was under my spell already—for me, it usually didn’t take long with women. Even no-nonsense, middle-aged housekeeping slaves. And itneverhurt.

I breathed—really breathed—for the first time in over two days.

Then Wainwright-Phillips added, “My daughter, Louisa, is about your age. She’s pre-med at the university here.”

A daughter. I filed that away. It might be helpful. I was bound to come across her soon, and knowing something about her might help win her support. Knowing what turned her on might help win even more of it. I’d learned young that charming (read: manipulating) my way into eating chocolate truffles out of the hand of a hot, lonely girl was a hell of a lot more fun than scrubbing baseboards and that I had all the tools to make it happen. Of course slave boys weren’t allowed to even touch free women unless they were their mistresses, and even that usually had to be hidden away like a filthy secret. In the back of my head, always, was the all-powerful weapon free women had against me. Rejecting a come-on from the wrong girl could be as dangerous as accepting it because a slave was always guilty until proven innocent. Onthatcharge, anyway.

So I’d have to be smart about it. But I wouldn’t have survived this long if I weren’t.

Meanwhile, the housekeeper was massaging my wrist in a motherly way. I raised my eyes and smiled, then lowered them again.

That was it, then. I’d get in good with the spoiled princess of the household; chances were she had her father wrapped around her finger.

And her father would lead me to Max Langer, and Max Langer would lead me to my sister.

3

HER

“Can you believe that crazy bat?” Corey grunted as he and I elbowed our way through the crowds pouring out of the social sciences building. Adding Juliette at the Old Main fountain, we navigated across the grass of the campus mall, dodging frisbee-throwers and sunbathers soaking up an admittedly brilliant late October afternoon in the Valley. We were heading toward the student union because it went without saying that after an Erica Muller lecture, blueberry-raspberry smoothies were in order. Or maybe peanut butter and chocolate, if I really wanted to hate myself. “Standing up there just making up all this shit about Gerhard Langer giving birth to the—what did she call it?”

“Slavery-industrial complex,” I mumbled, parroting the professor for some reason, though this was the last topic I wanted to get into with him right now. Well, next to last.

“Yeah. That.”

“It’s true, though,” I said despite my better judgment. How did Muller’s lectures keep worming their way into my brain likethis? Hell, at this rate, I’d be eating vegan and wearing natural fibers before I knew it. “Langer was one of the biggest slave dealers in New North America. Not to mention,” I said, though I now felt likeIwas giving the lecture, “he was believed to be responsible for the deaths of almost two hundred slaves in the aftermath of the Cebolla Canyon mine uprising?—”

“Langer helped build the world into what it is today,” interrupted Corey. “What you’ll never hear Muller mention is that if he and some of the other early slave barons hadn’t lobbied to institute slavery back in the thirties, who knows what kind of mess this place would be in?”

“I don’t know, but I do know she said that like a lot of government programs, it was only ever supposed to be temporary,” I said softly as we passed two young male uniformed landscaping slaves watering the begonias that edged the mall. They leaped out of our way. “It wasn’t supposed to result in generations of families in slavery.”

“That’s because they declared that the children of slaves were also slaves, which is the most ingenious policy move of the twentieth century as far as I’m concerned,” he said like he’d studied this for years and wasn’t just going off what he’d read yesterday on one of those pro-slavery online forums.

“Why?”

“Hey, it was either that, or we’d all be slaves because we’d have been so broke that we’d have lost the war,” countered Corey. “So take your pick. Which would you prefer?”

I knew which one I’d prefer, of course, but why didmypreferences matter more than the slaves’? And why had that never occurred to me before today?

No reason.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter now,” Corey rambled on, oblivious to the morality play going on in my head. “Gerhard Langer’s dead. His era is over. I’m working with Max Langernow, and he got rid of all his slaves long ago. He says as a society we’ve evolved beyond it. He’s disrupting the whole slavery industry.”

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