Page 5 of Never Broken

My new owner’s name was Keith Wainwright-Phillips. I knew because I picked him out myself.

I didn’t know too much abouthim, though. He was the ex-CEO of a company that sold insurance to corporations that used slave labor, he lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and he knew where to find my sister. Beyond that, he could be a rapist, he could be a sadist, he could be a psychopath. Hell, I hoped he was all three because it would make it easier for me to kill him when and if the time came. But all that mattered to me right now was making sure he wouldn’t send me back. Because Icouldn’tbe sent back. I needed to be in Phoenix because Phoenix was where my sister was. And Keith Wainwright-Phillips, before I killed him, was going to help me find her—whether he liked it or not.

So for the past forty-eight hours, I’d tried to be good. I’d tried to be a helpful, polite, obedient little slave, the kind that when I was a kid, everyone thought—briefly—I would grow up to be.Yes, sir, no, sir, whatever pleases you, sir.Hell, I even spent a large portion of the flights from Berlin to New York to Phoenix trying to tell stories to a red-faced, sobbing little boy, mostly for the sake of the eardrums of the other slaves chained in the cargo hold with us, just so they wouldn’t riot out of sheer annoyance and force the handlers to come down and start whaling on all of us.

With a book, it would be easy, because, unlike most slaves, I could read. But we weren’t allowed any books on the flight, so to tell stories, I’d have to be like my sister and make them up. The problem was, I couldn’t. I was the logician of the family, the same wayshewas the storyteller. Which made sense, since our mother had been smart enough—in a different universe—to have been both. The ironic thing was, our mistress used to cane my sister all the time for lying, though she’d never lied in her life. She didn’t knowhowto lie. All she’d been doing, by claiming that she hadn’t swept the bedrooms because she’d followed a unicorn through a portal in search of the gnomes who had hidden her dustpan in a dragon’s cave, was making up her own truth, a truth that was so much sweeter and more beautiful than life had ever given her.

As for me? When I was twelve or so, I ripped a star chart out of one of our master’s kids’ textbooks. I couldn’t read the names, but I was trying to learn all the planets and constellations by color and shape because I wanted to beright.And she was the only one who’d sit out on the roof of our master’s Luxembourg City townhouse and stargaze with me, late at night when we were supposed to be in bed.

Butshedidn’t care about being right. She’d just make everything up to suit her. Everything was a fairy or a mermaid or a unicorn. And then to really get me going, she’d throw an elephant or a pig or something in there. Then she’d tell crazy stories about them that had no logic, except to her, I guess, andinsist they were true. And I’d just get fed up and call her a stupid idiot who didn’t understand science, and go inside.

Needless to say, I regretted that a year later when my last glimpse of her tear-streaked, terrified face was from separate pens as we were sold apart, punished for something I alone had done. And then I didn’t see the stars for three years.

But I kept on hearing her voice—in the fields, on the whipping post, in the punishment cage.Who cares if they’re not right?She’d demand.What is “right,” anyway? No one owns the sky. In my stories, no one owns anything or anyone.

It was a nice thought. Really nice. Problem was, I wasn’t like her. I couldn’t tell stories, nor did I really believe in them. But I could lie. Holy shit, could I lie. The same muscle that made me logical helped me manipulate logic—which I did, often, to protect my sister at the price of my own skin.

And I could steal. Hell, it was how I’d gotten where I was right now—stealing and lying and scheming and bribing and calling in favors from everyone I knew, slave and free, to get myself sold to where I needed to be. And here I was, scheming and lying and stealing again because if I got beaten up, deemed trouble, and sent back because of this screeching little kid next to me, I’d fail.

And I’d already failed with my mother. I could not,would not, fail with my sister. I’d make up for what I’d done and make sure freedom, for her, would be more than just a story. And if the only freedomIever found was dying doing that,well, it would still be a happier ending than most of us get.

So instead of making up stories for this kid, I stole them. From memory, out of the only comic book I’d ever been able to call my own, one my old master’s son had left out in the rain and then decided it had been rendered suitable only for a slave to have. I’d treasured it. Of course, I’d been illiterate, too, then, so as near as I could figure it, the bad guys were the ancientRomans trying to invade Gaul and boss everybody around, and the good guy, Asterix, fought back using his brainsandhis fists. And if my master’s son hadn’t been too stupid to realize how much a slave could relate to that, he never would have given me the comic.

“You know what Asterix told those Roman bullies when they tried to push him around?” I said to the boy in German because it was all he understood, putting on my best storytelling voice, likeher. Curious, he sniffled and wriggled a bit closer, though, like all of us, the chains on his ankles bolted him to the bulkhead. Unlike me and a few others onboard who couldn’t be trusted, though, he didn’t have a muzzle fastened to his head with leather straps. Luckily, the wire cage over my mouth only prevented me from biting, not from talking. “He looked them right in the eye and said, ‘You might be bigger, but I’ve got friends and a whole lot of smarts. And that beats muscle any day of the week.’”

Yeah, Asterix never actually said that. But the kid didn’t know that. He was illiterate, same as I’d once been. Plus, itfeltright. And it seemed to do the trick. The kid’s eyes got all wide, like for a second, he actually forgot he was helpless and chained in a dark cargo hold on his way to be sold to some possibly psychotic stranger who held his very life in their hands. I’d call that a win.

Actually, now that I could read, I wished I still had the comic. It was the only thing besides dense physics and chemistry texts I think I’d actually enjoy. Hell, maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe it would turn out that the story was completely different than I’d imagined. Maybe the Romans were actually the good guys. But at least I would finally be able to find out for myself.

After landing, we were loaded with cattle prods into a van to the distribution center for Cosgrove’s Human Assets, the private dealer who’d handled my sale. There, my cuffs and shackles and muzzle were finally removed. My old clothes were taken fromme, and I was shoved into a cold shower, deloused, and given a pair of khaki scrubs to wear, identical to the eighteen male slaves standing around me and the dozen more female slaves in a separate pen. Every so often, the sales manager would appear outside the pen, calling out our numbers one by one as our owners arrived.

So this was Phoenix, a place I knew nothing about except that it was in the middle of a goddamn desert somewhere to the west of New North America, it was home to one of the largest mirror telescopes in the world, and that I wasn’t impressed.

We’d now been here for three hours. I hadn’t slept in almost eighteen, and since we’d arrived, nobody had offered me so much as a morsel of food, a gulp of water, or ice for the electrical burns still sizzling on my torso. Not that I’d expected it. But the little boy evidently had because he kept tugging at my arm as if he’d decided I must have a stash of lollipops somewhere that I just wasn’t telling him about for some reason.

From behind me, the chain-link pen clattered open as Weiss, a walking meat cube of a handler who’d come all the way with us from Germany, entered with a set of keys. Feeding time, I hoped, if only because it would get this kid off my case.

No such luck. From behind me came a wail.

I groaned. “Look, kid, I told you, I’m really sorry, but I?—”

But the kid wasn’t there. He had been yanked backward and onto the ground, cowering now behind the handler’s legs. “Back off, slave,” the handler said to me in German. “This one said he was hungry. So I’m gonna shove a gourmet meal down his throat.” Smiling like his birthday had come early, the handler prodded the kid up and started dragging him toward the gate again.

But the boy’s number hadn’t been called. The sales manager wasn’t waiting outside the pen. My heart dropped. Bygourmet meal,did he mean?—

The boy’s eyes, when they met mine, were two petrified saucers, though he didn’t struggle or even, for once, start screaming. He’d been trained better than that. If it happened, he’d just … let it happen.

But I knew why he was looking at me. What he was pleading for. The same thing we were all pleading for, all the time. Even if we never said it out loud.

I glanced around in horror at the blank, emotionless faces of my fellow slaves. Seriously?Nobodywas going to do anything about this?

I mean, I knew why—because it was suicide—but that didn’t make it right.

My sister, when I got myself killed saving this kid before I could saveher, might feel otherwise. But knowing what we’d both been through, I think she’d also understand why I lunged for the guy anyway.

Luckily for me, he must have been on steroids or something because his muscles deflated like balloons when I grabbed him—my own muscles forged on the handles of hoes and pickaxes—and hurled him against the concrete wall, hard enough to crack his skull if I had only aimed him right. As it was, it only bent his nose at a forty-five-degree angle, blood gushing out of it like a broken hose.

I would have tried again, but a second later, thugs outnumbered me four to one. Two of them held me down while the third laid into me with one of their standard-issue cattle prods, all over my neck, jaw, and torso—prods that, strangely, never seemed to hurt any less, no matter how many times I’d been zapped with them. The fourth thug just stood by forebodingly until the end, when he clobbered me right in the eye as a parting gift.

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