Page 37 of Never Broken

“Okay, then,” she said, squinting at me through the haze of sparkling water she’d spritzed about the room in a fine mist.“But I know you’re spending time with someone,” she continued. “I can always tell. Moms can.”

My eyes darted back and forth like a corralled mustang. I was pretty much praying for death at this point, and I couldn’t imagine the boy in the kitchen was in a much more enviable position.

“You’ve been quiet. Secretive.” Mom kept poking me rhythmically with one of her sculpted coral nail tips. “But inside, you’re glowing. I see it.” Poke, poke, poke. “So there’s no use denying it, sweetie. What’s his name?”

“Mom, please!”

This had to end. Anything I said, and he heard, had the chance of destroying any chance of him ever speaking to me again, at least as anything other than an enemy. One ofthem.

“Okay, fiiiine,” Mom murmured, her eyelashes fluttering. “Be like that. Just give me one word. And then I’ll leave you alone.” She set her glass down clumsily on the edge of a coaster on the coffee table, and I pushed it back into place just in time.

“One word?”

“One word. If you had to describe this boy in one word,” my mother said, pleased with herself, her slow, sly grin reappearing in the circle of light the lamp made, cutting through the blanket of darkness that hung over the house, silent except for the mantel clock. “What would it be?”

One word, and this could end. It came to me instantly, of course.

“Brave.”

8

HIM

773496S6

Maeve?

Shit, did that look weird typed out.

Our first master, like Wainwright-Phillips, was old-school. He wouldn’t allow our mother to name us, so to her, we were bothSchatzi,and that only in private. But that’s a name for a pet, not a person, and anyway, we couldn’tbothhave it. So I’d pretty much known my sister her entire life by what she was to me—Schwesterchen—or by her face alone.

But if she had a name now, a real name, I’d have to learn to use it. She deserved it.

The house was quiet now, but I didn’t want to find out whether anyone was still around. Instead, I was in the pantry, as far back as I could go, sitting on the floor with my back against the door, the one that led to the back of the property, with its vast desert gardens surrounding the terrace and pool. Moonlightstruggled through the dusty window above it, offering me a weak halo of light.

Gingerly, I opened up the cheap phone and tried to figure out what to do with the system before me, which looked nothing like the New European one, so no wonder I hadn’t figured it out. My sister spoke minimal English, so I wrote in Luxembourgish, a language I honestly wasn’t sure I’d ever get a chance to use again. Then I waited, the unbearable silence of the cold room pressing in on me from every side. I knew there was a good chance I wouldn’t hear from her tonight; that I’d be left alone and awake, again, with the last companions in the world I wanted right now: my thoughts.

773541N0

I’m here

I dropped the phone clumsily and scrambled to snatch it up and type out a reply.

773541N0

Do you like Maeve? I found it in a book about fairies

773496S6

It’s beautiful, but it’ll take a while to get used to

773541N0

Take all the time you need :)

My sister had gotten luckier than I had at the public auction, which wasn’t surprising given that her file, unlike mine, didn’t state she’d attacked and killed her master’s son mere daysbefore. She’d ended up cleaning stalls and grooming horses at a riding school outside Brussels co-owned by a divorced mother and her three daughters and—best of all in terms of letting me sleep at night—no perv master to hassle her. We sent voice messages on the app as much as we could get away with, which, during my years on the farm, wasn’t often. We spoke more frequently when I was in Heidelberg—at that point, we’d both learned to read and write, and it was easier to keep the conversations private. She’d tell me embellished stories about winged horses, and I’d tease her and try to keep her hopes up that we’d see each other again someday. Because Ididhave hope, despite it all. I shouldn’t have, but I did. Especially when she’d sent me a message saying:They’re freeing all of us here.But the message vanished, and radio silence followed.

For the next year, I asked about her to every slave I met passing through Heidelberg with little success, until I finally bumped into a slave boy who belonged to an American guest lecturer, who told me that two girls around my sister’s age—one a slave and one recently freed, though before the paperwork had been filed—had vanished from Seattle. One of them turned up dead and mutilated in the desert outside Phoenix. Damaged, was the word they used in the news story. The American boy didn’t know the details, and at first, the search for more information proved fruitless.

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