Page 6 of Never Broken

Finally, they threw me down like a wet rag to slump against the wall, and I doubled over, trying to quell the pounding inmy head, praying I wouldn’t pass out, vomit, or die. Not here, anyway. I still had things to do.

Actually, I was lucky for another reason: If I’d done what I’d just done to an owner, I’d be flayed alive, if not sold to the mines. But these assholes were just hired goons, here to help close the sale. They wouldn’t risk their paychecks by harming the merchandise. Much. Besides, they probably figured my body was already ripped to shreds enough—from the trip and just in general—that nobody would notice.

ButIwas pretty sure I was fucked.

Meanwhile, the little boy, forgotten by the handlers, was howling again, but the other slaves didn’t react. They barely looked at meorhim, fearing guilt by association. I’d done everything I could do for him. Now, all I could do was strain through my blurred vision to try to see through the chain-link surrounding me and down the harsh, fluorescent-lit corridor, waiting for my number to be called, desperately trying to think up a clever explanation for my new owner that wouldn’t get me sent back. Because Icouldn’tbe sent back.

My sister was depending on me.

“773496S6.”

Called like a dog, I raised my head automatically.Lucky Sevens, they’d sometimes called me ironically at the factory farm in Romania, where I’d spent the three years after being sold away from my sister. It was a nickname I’d hated but couldn’t do much about. A bitter joke, really, though Iwaspraying it would hold today. It was derived from the number that had been etched into my brain as deeply as it had been on the steel chain bracelet I, like all slaves, wore welded tight to my wrist. That number was the closest thing I’d ever had to a realname. Maybe the closest I ever would. Legally, we were supposed to be called either by our numbers or nothing, but many of us were calledsomething,ifonly in private—a birth name if we were born free, a nickname if we weren’t.

But not me.

They tell me I’m not a person. I say, fine. I get away with more that way.

A different handler, also speaking German but with a New North American accent, clanged his unlit cattle prod on the chain-link, the same as he’d done for the others. The only difference was that he was carrying an armful of chains and another muzzle.

My turn, then.

My chest tightened—I couldn’t help it—at the clang of steel as the new handler, Barrett, unlocked the pen again with a ring of keys. Not that I was nervous, of course. I’d done this before, after all. Although granted, never when someone’s life was in the balance: my sister’s.

I stumbled to my feet more unsteadily than I would have liked, squared my shoulders, and made sure to neutralize my face. Behind me, the little boy, abandoned by his tormentors, increased his wails as he realized his protector was about to leave.Get used to it, kid. Everyone who cares leaves.Or dies.Or gets sold.I bent down and spoke low in German. Even if his new master spoke the language, he’d still have to pick up English on the fly—and he’d have to cut out the crying, ASAP.

“Remember Asterix?” I asked. The boy nodded.

“What’s the holdup? Move it, slave!”

I bent down to the boy, who was clearly about to start bawling again. “Quick. What does he say?” I whispered, recalling the one thing I’d told him that I knew Asterix hadactuallysaid.

The kid thought for a second, then twisted his face into a kind of crooked smile. “Them Romans be crazy,” he said in ungrammatical German.

“You know it, kid.” I offered him a fist-bump, which he returned half-heartedly.

Look, aside from the crying, he was a good-looking, well-trained boy, and chances were his owners would treat him right, at least for a while. If I had to guess, he’d go to a rich household much like the one I’d been born in, where they’d want a playmate for their children who could be trained as a valet as he grew. He’d still work twelve-hour days and be whipped or caned for the slightest infraction, but nobody spent thousands importing a foreign slave just to brutally rape, torture, and/or kill them.

Usually.

Turning away from the sniffling little boy like an asshole, I stepped out of the pen, wincing as the door crashed closed behind me.

The New North American sales manager, slick and gelled and different from the one on the plane, raised his manicured eyebrows when he saw the state of my face. “What happened to?—”

“I don’t know, Mr. Harrigan,” lied the handler, Barrett, in English, eyes flicking this way and that as if he were afraidIwould be stupid enough to say something and get him and his buddies in trouble. “I wasn’t there, sir.” Meanwhile, he strapped on my muzzle, pulling the leather straps as tight as if it were a parachute and he was about to push me out of a plane. I’d never bitten, of course, but I was starting to think I should try it one of these days, as long as my mouth was going to be behind bars no matter what. He ordered me to kneel and hold out my hands. My wrists were already throbbing, rubbed red and raw from being restrained for the past eighteen hours. Fuck, I’d rather stick my hands in a piranha tank than be cuffed again. I was used to cuffs and shackles, of course, but they were like cattle prods—they never seemed to hurt any less. Still, there was nothing tobe gained by not cooperating—not at this point, anyway. So I squeezed my eyes shut and did as I was told, hearing the familiar ratcheting as the cool metal again sank its teeth into my already brutalized wrists.

“Jesus, look at him,” exclaimed Harrigan in disgust when I opened them again. “Is this what you—”He groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We never should have outsourced the slave handling. Ah, but it’s too late now. We’re already backed up enough. Up, boy,” he ordered me. “And keep your mouth shut about this. If anybody asks, they loaded you on the plane like that.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, following their lead and switching to English. It was a language I’d learned half from British and North American streaming shows, half from Shakespeare and Dickens, all of which I’d been allowed to consume courtesy of my last master, the Heidelberg professor who’d bought me off the factory farm when I was fifteen. I was nearly twenty now, and in that time, he’d taught me everything I knew. Everything academic, anyway.

My shackles and cuffs rattling with a sick familiarity, I followed exactly three paces behind the two men, just like we were taught, down under the familiar harsh fluorescent lighting of the corridor with its cement floors and cinder block walls, the kind of hard, brutal institutional space that was practically home for me. The kind of space that—given what I’d done—I probably belonged in.

But Keith Wainwright-Phillips knew what I’d done, and he had bought me anyway. Why? I was about to find out—and also whether he was the kind of guy who, when he received a package full of defective merchandise, blamed the merchandise or the company who’d shipped it to him.

A door opened, and I stepped into the incandescent glow of the gallery. Out here, it was all soft lighting, upholsteredfurniture, plush carpeting, and mood music meant to lull rich buyers into forgetting they were trading in human flesh. Hell, it almost mademeforget thatIwas human flesh.

Barrett—with the kind of viciousness I couldn’t explain, even in a handler, given he’d just met me—jerked me to a stop somewhere in the middle of the endlessly long room and pointed to the floor.

“Kneel, boy,” he said, swatting me with the unlit prod, which was totally unnecessary and from him, totally expected. I obeyed immediately, chains clinking, hands folded in my lap. A lock of my golden-blond hair came loose from behind my ear and swung into my face. I wondered whether trying to reach up and replace it would look like insolence and decided not to risk it. I was already fucked up enough from the fight. The littlest thing could cost me the time and resources I needed to find my sister.

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