Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 68525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Light had poured in from outside. I hadn’t known how we could tell, but I felt certain that every one of us figured it out in a microsecond: this light didn’t belong to Kamnos’ sun. We had all realized at the same moment that we had fallen asleep on our own planet, and what felt like only an instant later, we had awoken on Vion Prime.
The capital of the empire. Where we would be sold to important, wealthy men or women, who would do with us exactly as they pleased.
Already. I’m already here. I had thought it then, and I thought it now as I stood in the cage, watching the feet go by. Feet in shoes: brightly colored shoes, some of them decorated with what must actually be gemstones. I had never seen an actual gem, or a piece of jewelry, but surely the glittering stones on those high-heeled shoes—I had never seen those before, either, of course—must be the precious stones the Vionians wore as a sign of their prosperity.
They brought us through space, and we didn’t even see the stars. It simply didn’t seem real.
“Wetquim?” said a woman’s voice. “Did they really… Oh, that’s just too…” Her voice broke off into a titter.
I felt the comforting sense of unreality begin to slip away, because as much as I didn’t want to remember it, I could hear Agent Delvik’s voice saying the terrible word that I scarcely understood.
My service name. My new name. Wetquim, because I got so wet when he put his hand down there, and made me…
I bit my lip, thinking about it and trying not to think about it at the same time.
“Wetquim, you may look at me,” a masculine voice said, from right in front of my cage.
For the first time, I paid attention to the feet and the lower legs on which my eyes had focused, on the shoes and the trousers and the dress, the light robes whose lower hems hung around them. They belonged to actual people: the ones who had just spoken.
“It says she had to be severely disciplined,” the woman said, her voice so disapproving that it penetrated my feeling of unreality in an instant and sent the hot blood rushing to my face. “But… she is quite lovely, isn’t she?”
She was speaking to her male companion. Not to me: about me. Her voice changed, became more authoritative. A shiver of memory, of the basement room and the man in red, went up my spine at her next words.
“Wetquim, look up, please. We don’t want to have to call an agent over, especially when we know you’ve been punished already.”
Please. Had I just imagined that the woman’s silvery, impossibly elegant—though I couldn’t even have said what made it sound that way to me—voice had spoken with that modicum of politeness? But I couldn’t have imagined it, because it made no sense at all. Wetquim, look up, please. The words seemed to battle one another, to fall apart.
“Is she giving you trouble, milady?” another voice asked, masculine, dripping with obsequiousness. Then, rougher, louder: “Wetquim, you don’t want the punisher, do you?”
Shiny black boots below a red uniform had appeared. The very sight brought a shudder, from the memory of Agent Delvik.
He’s half a galaxy away, the logical part of my brain tried to reassure the rest of my whirling thoughts. That agent is a completely different man, in the same boots and trousers but maybe without the same cruelty—if you don’t provoke it.
That idea—the hope that I might avoid more useless punishment—finally helped me collect myself enough to do as they had ordered me. I looked up, despite how what I saw pierced the comforting sense of detachment and unreality that had engulfed me. The numbness that had cushioned me since the bottom of the drop ship had opened and the robots had started to pick up our cages and carry them here vanished. I heard and saw the reaction to the agent’s words that traveled through the crowd of gorgeously dressed Vionians walking up and down the long row of cages.
The men laughed. Some of the women giggled. Vionians of both sexes drifted towards the little scene the couple right in front of my cage had created, with my help, as involuntary as my contribution to it had seemed.
“Oh, and now you’re looking up,” the agent said. His voice terrified me, because in it I heard so very clearly what he would do, and then he did it. I screamed as the cage sent the terrible burning pain to my pussy. I bent at the knees and waist, about to sink to the floor, my eyes closing as I tried to show that I hadn’t meant any disobedience.
“Wait,” the woman in front of the cage said, though she spoke with no urgency. “We told her to look at us.”