Assigned a Guardian (8 page)

She had hugged him at the entrance to the dorm, and gone up to her room in reasonable confidence that Joe had no reason to punish her. Her confidence proved well-founded, but the day after that second date with James had also seen the beginning of the way she ruined everything, for that was the day she met Melanie.

Melanie Foster was studying in the educational wing, in the upper-division program that corresponded to what Kayla had thought of as graduate school, to become a researcher on economic theory. Melanie was brilliant, and Draco, even Kayla could see, needed women like her very badly, to help build an economy under circumstances that were in some ways an economist’s dream (Draco as a sandbox with lots of toys) and in some ways an economist’s nightmare (Draco as a powder keg with people inside the keg along with the powder).

Melanie seemed to Kayla a beacon of hope, because the research-academic path was the only one that had been designated for women that appeared to give the slightest hope of autonomy. The very fact that fully three-quarters of the female researchers on Draco lived in Lourcy House as permanently single women under the authority of Jane Loggins seemed proof of that. Already, only a month into her new life on Draco, Kayla longed for the day she could ‘declare for Lourcy,’ as it was called. The very thought of it, of being able to honor her own name that way while she reclaimed her identity, made her life in the pre-research training program bearable.

In that program, Kayla had to refresh her memory on basic economic theory, which was frustrating enough in and of itself because her grasp of it had never been very strong in business school. She, also, however had learn all sorts of niggling little details about life on Draco like the approved ratio of compost to acreage for the growing of soy.

Melanie, five years her junior, was five years ahead in the program, and she already got to play with numbers like that, rather than just memorizing them. Kayla found herself idolizing Melanie.

The reason the trouble happened, though, was that Melanie idolized Kayla, too.

“You’re Kayla Lourcy, aren’t you?” Melanie said, the first time Kayla sat down in the cafeteria, hoping just to eat her imitation chicken in peace. Kayla’s first instinct was to be hostile to this second-gen, but the tone in Melanie’s voice seemed so adulatory, so soothing to Kayla’s bruised ego, that she smiled across the table and said with a sigh, “Yes, unfortunately.”

“Oh, my God—not unfortunately! You kept the dream alive after your father died and the government started to persecute you!”

Kayla smiled and laughed ruefully. “And I got my backside paddled as soon as I arrived here.”

“That was terrible!” Melanie said. “I couldn’t believe it! They say it was just because you said something about the Basic Law. Is that true?”

“Well, really it was because I refused to sit down.”

“Exactly, though, right? I mean, does every girl on Draco have to sit down if Marjorie Leary tells them to?”

Kayla felt the excitement rising. This girl seemed like a ray of hope. But maybe she was a trap?

“Apparently,” Kayla said, carefully guarding her tone, making it neutral.

“I’m Melanie Foster,” the girl said, extending her hand.

“Nice to meet you,” Kayla replied, taking it.

It was not a protest movement, Kayla quickly realized. The second-gens had grown up with the idea that their survival depended on order pounded into them day after day. But Melanie and her friends wanted things to change, eventually, she told Kayla.

“When we have a new administration,” she said one day, after they had been having lunch together every day for a week. “The Basic Law can’t hold on forever. Maybe it makes economic sense now, but if we really want the prosperity the Learys keep talking about, women can’t be baby factories. It’s biology, sure, but is it really nature?”

“No!” Kayla said. “No!”

“I want you to meet my friends. We have to start something up, right?”

Kayla hesitated, but only for a brief moment. She nodded. “Can they come to lunch? Or to the admin café?”

Melanie took out her tablet and started
texting with her friends. “The admin café, tomorrow,” she said excitedly. “Two p.m.”

* * *

Kayla almost felt like her old self, crossing the lobby of the admin building, which was trumpeted as the largest enclosed space on Draco except of course for the hydroponics farms with their enormous greenhouses. She was going to a meeting; she would be leading the meeting, putting together a project team. They would start slow—do nothing dangerous, at least at first…

By the time she realized that Marjorie Leary was sitting with Melanie, it was much, much too late.

She tried to run anyway, but Sandra was there behind her, as well as three other second-gen associate matrons, possessed of powerful physiques. Kayla turned back around and completed her walk to the table in the café.

“Hello, Kayla,” said Marjorie. The worst part about it seemed to Kayla to be that Marjorie didn’t seem angry. Just disappointed, like a mother—a mother with a paddle that had Kayla’s name on it.

“Hi, Marjorie,” Kayla said. She looked at Melanie, who had clearly been crying. Melanie gazed back at her with an apology in her eyes.

“Have a seat, Kayla,” Marjorie said.

“Why? Don’t you just want to paddle me right here?”

“No, I don’t. Though I will if I have to, and that will be in addition to your punishment for encouraging Melanie here to spend her time so terribly unproductively, in trying to spread dissension.”

Kayla sat. “Well,” she said, “do I get sent to the work camp for this?”

Marjorie smiled. “No,” she said. “Not even close. You’re doing very well in your classes, and you’ve shown a little progress in your dating, according to your guardian. We’re going to handle this what I call semi-publicly.”

“What does that mean?” Kayla asked bitterly.

“Your guardian and Bill Hodge, Melanie’s guardian, are going to punish you together, in front of the girls Melanie invited to meet with you.”

“Oh, God. Please…”

“I realize that I could well be making a martyr, but I’m also delivering a stern example.”

“Two martyrs,” Kayla said, extending her hand to squeeze Melanie’s where it lay on the table.

Melanie clearly sensed that Kayla forgave her, and smiled wanly back at her.

“Your guardians have been contacted. You will be punished in the training room tonight at 8 p.m. Also, Kayla, you’ll be entering a special disciplinary program after that. Joe Moscone isn’t the right sort of guardian for that kind of program. After your punishment tonight, you will be going home with Patrick McDowell.”

“What? No—no, you can’t. He was my colleague. You can’t do this.”

“Oh, Kayla,” Marjorie replied. “Don’t be foolish. You know that’s not true.”

* * *

Sandra secured Kayla and Melanie side by side over the whipping benches, fashioned of course, like almost everything else, from wood-composite. They had been made to remove all their clothing in the locker room, and then to walk down the hall naked, trying to cover themselves. When they entered the training room, the five friends Melanie had invited, for whom Kayla felt very sorry now—though not as sorry as she felt for herself and for Melanie—were sitting on the mat, ten feet from the benches.

Upon each bench lay a rolled-up towel, and Sandra instructed the girls to lie so that the towels were under their hips. As she realized how the towel would raise her bottom for Joe’s strap, Kayla thought bitterly that every time she thought life on Draco had found a new depth of humiliation down into which to cast her, it always seemed to do itself one better: being on display for Melanie’s friends, her naked backside raised for discipline… surely there couldn’t be anything more embarrassing? She felt her whole body blush red as Sandra fastened the straps that would hold her down to the bench so that she couldn’t interfere with her punishment.

Melanie had started to cry as soon as Sandra told her to get over the bench, and Kayla’s heart went out to her. She had apparently never received more than a light hand-spanking from her guardian before.

Then the authorities entered. Kayla and Melanie faced the door, where they were bound to their benches, so that Kayla could see Marjorie Leary enter, followed by Joe, carrying his strap, and a grim-faced man carrying a cane, and finally, to Kayla’s horror, Patrick, looking equally grim.

“Patrick!” Kayla couldn’t help shouting.

“Silence!” Joe roared. He walked over to where Kayla lay tied over the bench. She had never seen his face angry, but it was angry now. Without any warning, he snapped the strap down across Kayla’s bottom.

“Ah!” Kayla screamed. “Oh, God, please… oh, I just can’t!”

Joe whipped her again. “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in you, Kayla.” And again. Kayla screamed. Her bottom was an agony of fiery lines, and she writhed against the straps to no avail. She heard a few of Melanie’s friends gasp from behind her.

Joe turned to Marjorie. “I’m sorry, Marjorie,” he said, “for beginning early.”

“That’s quite alright. Bill, why don’t you get started, too. I’m sure Melanie and Kayla want to get it over with.”

Kayla looked at Patrick. He clearly was not enjoying the sight, at least. His face remained grim, with a hint of sadness in his expression, too. What did it mean that she would go home with him?

Suddenly Joe began to strap her again, and she felt her body squirming with the agony of it. To her right, she heard the swish of Bill’s cane. Then Melanie started to scream.

One of Melanie’s friends started to sob audibly.

“Girls,” said Marjorie from behind Kayla, where she had presumably gone to stand and address the audience with the two victims framing her dramatically. “I don’t think I need to add much to what you’re seeing here.”

Kayla screamed and screamed, and Joe just kept whipping her with the strap: in the middle, on each cheek, on her thighs, methodically and quickly, up and down.

“All I wish you to remember, girls, is that this is what happens when young women decide they want to try to bring change too quickly. Conduct unbecoming a young woman, is what we call it. It’s not a crime, but, as you can see, your guardians, who are responsible for you, will not take kindly to it.” Marjorie’s voice was hardly audible now to Kayla, over Melanie’s cries of agony and her own.

All Kayla could see was the door, and Patrick standing next to it, his back against the wall, not taking his eyes from the spectacle, but clearly not enjoying it. Kayla wanted to cry, “Help me, Patrick!” but she knew it would only do harm.

Joe stopped striking her at last, and the swishing of Bill’s cane fell silent.

She heard Bill say, “Melanie, have you learned your lesson?”

“Yes, sir,” Melanie sobbed.

“Kayla?” asked Joe. “How about you?”

“Yes, sir,” Kayla managed to get out, through her own tears.

It was over. Or that part was, at least. Kayla had never imagined anything could feel this bad, that was supposed to be for her own good.

Chapter Eight

“Alright, girls,” Marjorie said to the terrified little audience. “You may go.”

Patrick watched them file out, huddling together. Two of them were weeping uncontrollably, and the other three had tear-stained cheeks. He questioned the wisdom of Marjorie so brazenly challenging them to lionize Kayla and Melanie, but he had begun to sense in the senior matron a sort of deeper strategy than the simple application of force. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it seemed to Patrick to have to do with making corporal punishment so essential an element of Draconian female life that a girl…

Wait. Was that it? That a girl actually felt she needed it?
Realized
she needed it? He felt his brow furrow at the thought.

Well, he would certainly get the chance to put that idea to the test now.

“Bill,” Marjorie said. “Thank you for coming. You too, Joe.” Sandra began to unstrap the weeping, penitent girls on the benches. Melanie’s backside, from waist to knees, was striped by cruel red lines that grew in intensity from right to left; Bill had been standing over her on her right side. Kayla’s rear end had a different pattern: angry red curls over the same area that looked just as painful.

Bill helped Melanie to her feet.

“Melanie,” Marjorie said, looking into her puffy eyes, where the tears fell unabated at the pain of having to move after her harsh chastisement, “you have a brilliant future. We need you. But we need you to be a good girl, okay?”

Melanie only nodded in reply. Marjorie looked at Bill. “Take her back to her room and comfort her, Bill,” she said.

“I will.”

He put his arm around his charge, and led her to the door and through it.

Kayla was still lying face down on the bench. Now Joe helped her up, as she winced at the pain. He gave her a bear hug, though she did not return it, and kept her hands clasped in front of her.

“I guess this is good-bye, sweetie,” Joe said. “I’m sorry I had to punish you that way. I know you’re going to benefit from it and learn your lesson. I know Patrick isn’t going to go easy on you, but I’m sure that after a few weeks with him you’ll be right back on track.” He kissed the top of her head. “I know you probably don’t believe me right now, but I think you’re a terrific young lady.”

Joe released her from his arms.

“Thanks, Joe,” Marjorie said.

Joe shook Patrick’s hand and said, “Good luck. I think you’ll do great.” Then he left, too. Only Marjorie, Sandra, Patrick, and Kayla remained in the room. Kayla looked terribly vulnerable, standing trying to cover herself, her face nearly as red as her backside at having to be naked in front of him, Patrick was sure.

“Kayla,” he said gently, “stop trying to cover yourself, please.”

She looked at him with wild eyes.

Marjorie gave Patrick an approving glance. “Do as your new guardian says, Kayla,” she said sternly.

Kayla looked at Marjorie. “I don’t understand! Why is he my guardian now?!”