Page 2 of Never Broken

It was only later when I’d looked up the brand name that I realized it was meth. He was offering me meth. I didn’t know what was worse: that he’d thought I’d consider taking it, or that I actuallywas.

I dropped the pill and slammed the drawer shut again. I’d rather suffer. The last thing we needed in the Wainwright-Phillips family was another addict: my mother and my brother, Ethan, wherever he’d disappeared to, hadthattaken care of, thank you very much. Instead, my mind drifted down to the kitchen and to the brand-new artisan espresso machine with twenty-seven different settings, the one Daddy had brought home last week, accompanied by a full-color booklet packedwith arty, luscious photos of all the drinks you could make. Lattes, cappuccinos, Americanos … Daddy had explained every single one of them as he unboxed the machine, trying to coax a smile. “Only the best for my Loulou,” he’d said, nice enough not to add:Only the best, as long as it’s cheaper than letting your addiction to daily store-bought espressos keep draining what remains of the puny allowance that’s all I can afford to give you since your brother relapsed, your mom started drinking, and I went off the deep end and flushed away our family fortune.

Ugh. I used to obsess over a perfect cup of espresso, but even that didn’t thrill me anymore. All it did was remind me of how Daddy had made me live at home instead of in Choate Hall, the newest, shiniest dorm on campus, complete with private bathrooms and kitchenettes and even a rooftop pool, situated right next door to the student center and only a block down from Frat Row, and the dorm whose brochure still sat sadly lodged in the rack on my desk. Juliette—who had never been my closest friend, though we’d become closer after learning we’d wound up at the same school—had even spent all summer ordering coordinated pink-and-green furniture to decorate the suite we planned to share. Together, we could see it: late-night streaming TV binges, spa parties, and a revolving door of toned, glistening frat boys chilling on neon floats. For a safety school, it was actually starting to sound pretty great.

Then, with Daddy’s decree, it all went up in smoke. I’d told Juliette that my mom’s recent knee surgery meant someone needed to be there to help her get up and down the stairs. And it was no lie that Mom sometimes needed help navigating steps, though it was usually after one too many vodka martinis. Anyway, Juliette probably already suspected the truth. But if the other members of the Scottsdale glam squad found out my family was having money problems, they’d drop me like a bad stomach virus.

But that didn’t really matter. The only thing that mattered was becoming a successful doctor, at which point I’d be able to get the hell out of here and go somewhere far away from the union, somewhere where I could actually help people and make a difference. And where I wouldn’t have to rely on Daddy or his money—whatever was left of it—any longer.

Sighing, I stuck the phone in a drawer next to the pill and turned back toA Primer on Organic Reactionsby Edgar Malchow, who was lucky I still had eight months to go before I could gleefully toss him on top of a bonfire. No matter how long I stared at his neat little elements and symbols, I never seemed to be able to rearrange them into anything but alphabet soup.

It didn’t seem fair that I should only start flounderingnowwhen the stakes were so high. Over time, I’d learned to expect to do well in school because I always had. Calculus had come just as easily to me as English literature. That’s why my GPA was so high, my teachers all said, because I was smart on both sides of my brain. It seemed perfect. As a doctor, not only would I be able to diagnose people, but I couldexplaineverything to them, too, in a way that wouldn’t leave them feeling hopeless and scared. Thanks to a girls’ summer science camp in Chicago a few years ago—when Daddy could still afford things like that—I fell in love with the idea of helping people that way, and it was why I thought I’d love pre-med. The problem was, pre-med didn’t love me. So far, I’d hired tutors; been to the study sessions; and even searched online homework help boards, hoping for that face-slapping eureka moment. I knew I wasn’t dumb. I knew I had it in me. I just had to study harder, stay up later. I couldn’t afford to let my eyes close for even a second. There was too much at stake.

So that settled that. The winner was Vitamin C: Coffee.

Except it wasn’t. Despite poring over that manual for an hour, the only thing I’d figured out how to make was a mess.Pathetic. No wonder I was flunking o-chem. Some med student I’d make. How was I supposed to understand the inner workings of the human nervous system when I couldn’t even use a simple coffee machine? But I had to stay awakesomehow.

Luckily, I could enlist a slave to figure it out for me. There was always one on call, engaged in busywork while waiting to spring obediently into action when someone buzzed the intercom. Tonight, it would either be Daddy’s old valet or the pretty green-eyed brunette maid. I hoped it would be the valet because the maid was seriously starting to get on my nerves. She had the kind of teasing little wrinkle next to her mouth that guys seemed to love but that I myself could never manage without looking demented, and said “Yes, Miss Louisa” in a way that made it abundantly clear that she thought my orders weren’t worth following. Of course Icouldpunish her. But for what? You couldn’t really punish someone for a look or a tone of voice—well, you could, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t. And I was certain she knew that, which was exactly what made it so aggravating.

If the maid answered, I’d pretend I’d rung by accident.

Mind made up, I reached for the intercom. Just before my finger pushed the button, though, I stopped when the words of Erica Muller, my Slavery Studies 101 professor—whose paper, I remembered with a groan, I was also supposed to have started on tonight—echoed somewhere in the back of my somnambulating brain.

“Federal regulations require that each slave receive at minimum four hours of sleep a night, and studies show that two-thirds of slaves receive considerably less than that. And yet lawmakers, terrified of losing campaign contributions from the pro-slavery lobby that put them in office, have voted fifteen times in a row to keep?—”

But God, that triple macchiato was sounding better and better the more I thought about it. Besides, could the averageslave be any less sleep-deprived than the average college student? Talk about unfair. Where were the activists lobbying forme?

I hadn’t even wanted to take that class, anyway. Everybody knew that Erica Muller had been a wanted fugitive decades ago for planting bombs under police cars as a member of the Slave Liberation Army. Nobody was exactly sure how she’d managed to get the charges dropped. Most of her compatriots had been arrested and sent to the mines. But there seemed to be somebody trying to get her fired and/or arrested every few months or so for being an enemy of the union. Up until he’d died, it had usually been one of Daddy’s old golf buddies, Gerhard Langer. A German-born, copper-mining magnate, he was a member of that very same pro-slavery lobby Muller railed against—and a member of one of my university’s Board of Regents, like his tech-mogul son, Max, was now.

For now, the progressive majority on the board protected her, but Professor Muller herself had stated in class that it was probably only a matter of time before she got ousted. “Luckily, we still technically have free speech in the union. I plan to enjoy it while it lasts,” she’d said, standing at the front of the lecture hall that morning in her loose, oatmeal-colored natural-fiber shirt and pants, frizzy graying hair falling across the frames of her wire-rimmed glasses. Why did it seem like hopeless frumpiness was somehow a key requirement in the fight for social justice? Another good reason to keep away from the anti-slavery crowd. Muller might have had relatively free rein in progressive academia, but in more conservative circles like medicine, views like hers could still get you fired, expelled, blacklisted, ostracized—hell, Daddy himself would disown me instantly.

Besides, ultimately, Muller was just a kook. Slavery had been here for a century, and it wasn’t going anywhere. It wasall in that week’s lecture notes, sitting patiently unopened in the corner of my desk. When the hard times of the 1930s had dragged on for two decades, hitting the middle classes as badly as the poor, somebody got the bright idea to start emptying out the prisons, then letting people sell their children temporarily, either to pay off debt or just to keep them from starving.

In a few years, nobody was starving. We and our allies had won a would-be world war with barely a shot fired. Then the boom times came, and New North America decided slavery should be more than temporary. The New European Union and all the allied regimes followed suit. Not to mention, those first slaves had started breeding more slaves, and by now, in 2025, they’d swelled to a third of the world population, a figure I’d memorized because Professor Muller had helpfully informed us it would be on the exam.

So theymusthave been happy. They were housed and fed, which had to beat starving or dealing drugs to survive. Sure, there were some low-class sadists out there who tortured them—they still made the news every now and then—but respectable people like my parents weren’t among them. Our housekeeper had belonged to Mom’s family since both were children, and I’d grown up among other loyal and affectionate slaves I knew for sure hadneverbeen tortured or sleep-deprived.

Hmm. Maybethatcould be the topic for my paper.

I pressed the button.

“Hey.”

I snapped my finger back as if I’d been burned.

The fuck? It was aboy. Well, a young man, to be more precise. In any case, definitely not the maidorthe valet.

But that made no sense. Our former army of slaves had dwindled. As far as I knew, my parents now only owned four. Two females: the housekeeper—who also cooked and managedthe others—and the maid. And two males: the old valet and the creepy gardener that I avoided like rush-hour traffic.

Not only did this bold, flippant voice clearly not belong to any of them, but it barely sounded like a slave at all. He could be new, I supposed, but Daddy couldn’t even afford my daily espresso anymore. How the fuck could he afford an entire human being? On the other hand, who else would be answering the slave intercom this time of night, but a slave? And there weren’t any other men in this house, unless?—

Oh.Of course.The suit. He must have stayed later than I’d thought. What was his name again? Benji? Bennett? I chuckled a little at my own sleep-deprived stupidity. Well, if he was in his cups and wanted to have a little fun, no reason I couldn’t toss the ball back. So what if he was a bit … mature?

Cautiously, I pressed the talk button again. “Hello?”

“Didn’t we do this already?” The reply came instantly. Okay, he had a good voice. Kind of low and slow, but nottoomuch of either. The kind of voice that made my insides feel all soft and deep and velvety. And with a lilt—no, not a lilt. Anaccent. A New European accent, from the sound of it, though not from any country I recognized, and?—

Wait. Benny was from New York, wasn’t he?

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