Cracked Porcelain (7 page)

Mataranza was a female saracian
and regular client who was constantly trying to seduce Maximillia. Her persistent wiles weren’t sufficient to capture Maximillia’s heart, but the proper fucking she delivered—via her strap-on member—was sufficient to render the young human exhaustively thrashed.

A particularly quirky kylaxian named Grazzle was a strange gent; he was almost
hilariously loud during sex and was partial to heated, animalistic groans. In his defense, having his sizeable prong buried in her impossibly tight, drippy gash would understandably elicit those noises from any man. Maximillia would sometimes have to turn her head to mask her snickering from him. He also came more than any of her other clients, dependably leaving her bald pussy a glistening, oozing ruin. Her once passive, timid demeanor had largely melted away.

This isn’t to say that Maximillia didn’t have her moments of weakness, when the darkness beckoned her. Vaika noticed the cut marks on Maximillia’s arms and merely bandaged them, not letting on that she knew why they were there. Her only comment was not to let the customers see them. When the mask came off, the house lights went down and she and the other girls retired back to the Bruiser compound, Maximillia would often find a quiet corner and huddle up, crying herself to sleep. Most of the time, Mardo was already passed out drunk, with one of the younger new recruits splayed out in his bed so his concern for her wasn’t as paramount. She often found herself clinging to any available toilet, emptying her stomach into it at the mere thought of her circumstances.

At Xartha’s, painted up like a demure wisp, she’d happily take a hot, steaming load across the face or allow her diminutive holes to be deluged with alien seed. After their hasty departure, she’d purge herself, the disgust overwhelming her. After several extended stays in the bathroom, Vaika began to notice. She questioned Maximillia who blew it off as nerves. The old woman knew better. She administered a test which confirmed her latent disappointment.

Maximillia wandered on weak legs into the Bruiser compound. Finding the strength, she stomped her way past the slack faces of the fellow miscreants, cutting a swath towards Mardo’s bed chamber. Chota stood guard by the door, but she wasn’t having it.

“He’s busy, M,” he uttered passively.

“Not this time, Chota," she pushed past him, shoving the door open. Mardo was laying back on the expansive couch, balls bare to the wind, a hairless petite beauty’s lips affixed to the tip of his cock. The poor girl hopped off of his meat, scurrying away as Maximillia hunted after the tubby messiah.

“What?” Mardo muttered, confused.

She picked up a discarded bath robe from the floor and threw it at him with beastly vigor. “I’m pregnant! I’m pregnant and it’s yours!”

He stood up, yanking up his pants, striding at her. “Pregnant? Pregnant you stupid bitch?!”

“Do you know what I have to do out there?!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Do you know what I have to do for you? For your problem?! Do you have any idea?”

He was an unstoppable mass as he backhanded her, sending her toppling to the floor. The heavy blow rung her bell. She gurgled, trying to stand, her vision blurry and her brain struggling to assume control. Their exchange echoed loudly through the entire Bruiser camp. The gang members could only wander in silence, pretending they weren’t hearing what they were hearing.

Mardo yanked her to her feet as Maximillia spun around and latched onto his face, dragging her nails across his cheek, clawing him. “I hate you! I hate you!” she bellowed.

He swung his meaty fist up into her stomach, folding her in half and knocking the air out of her. She gasped, wincing as he smashed her head into a wall, sending her plopping into a limp heap. He reared back with his foot and kicked her in the head, sending her hair whipping up and cascading down her now bloody face.

Chota inched his way apprehensively into the room. “Boss?” he said, trying to interject as delicately as possible. “Dom. She’s making a lot of money for him. Don’t you think maybe you should reconsider
—”

“Fuck her,” Mardo blubbered through labored breaths, looking down on the messy ball of tussled hair and loose limbs at his feet. “Fuck Dom. If this bitch is going to be making money for anyone it ought to be for me.”

Chota winced at the sacrilegious nature of Mardo’s words. “Why don’t I take her in to see a medic?”

“She’s been taking my loads for free and Dom gets to charge some slimy fuckin’
pad-hoppers and pond swimmers to let them cum on her face?” Mardo protested, his chest still heaving. He delivered several more kicks to her inert, semi-conscious body, finally spitting on her. “Bitch. Oughta just take her out into the desert and bury her ass out there.”

“Boss, we can’t do that,” Chota reminded. “Dom is expecting her to show up at the club. If we don’t get her fixed up, he’s going to come down on all of us.”

Mardo pondered Chota’s words.

***

Maximillia awoke to find her head pounding. As the world came into focus she found herself staring up at a pristine, eggshell-colored ceiling, a white sheet strung tight across her chest, keeping her bound gently to the bed beneath her. She saw the smart-glass assemblies built into the far wall and the radiant pictographic real-time data crawling along it: her vital signs, blood pressure, brain activity, metabolic condition. The smart-glass emitted a low, audible ping which whispered in a harmonized frequency.

The hospital room was disturbingly serene; sterile and quiet, a heavenly scent hung in the light air. For a moment she thought herself dead.

She felt a strange tickle on her side and reached up under her hospital gown to touch it. It was a small, cauterized incision on the right side of her hip which had already nearly healed over.

A medroid wheeled in. “According to your stress level readings, I was led to believe you were in need of assistance.”

She cleared her throat, still terribly weak. “I’m pregnant, and—”

“Negative,” the medroid interrupted. “Upon your admission into emergency, your injuries left the fetus inviable and it was safely extracted.”

Her eyes glassed over. “What? What do you mean "inviable"?”

“The fetus’s life functions terminated in vivo and it was removed to ensure your safety.”

Maximillia couldn’t say anything. She laid back, eyes fixed on the ceiling as tears trickled down her cheeks.

“Your neural activity is unusually erratic, indicating possible post-traumatic stress. Would you like to talk to the on-site psychotherapist AI?”

She shook her head, completely debilitated. “No.”

The medroid turned to leave.

“Wait!” she called out. The medroid spun back around. Maximillia fought through the tears and contained herself. “The sex of the fetus. What was it?”

“It was female.”

The words struck her dead in the chest. She couldn’t breathe. “Fe—female. My baby,” she whispered.

“Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

She gently shook her head, her throat seemingly swelling shut. “No. Thank you.”

Maximillia laid still, her body drained of the will to move. She could only stare blankly at the ceiling, tears pooling on top of her pillow. The devastation was impossible to conceal.

Maximillia’s wheelchair carted her out through the sliding hospital doors and into the unforgiving Arcean daylight. The light blasted her in the face, forcing her to wince. It was too bright. She’d grown used to false, gaudy neon lights slicing through the dark, musty corridors of Xartha’s and the muddy, rusty confines of the Bruiser compound. The hospital’s sterile, angular, minimalist facade and its finely landscaped complex floor was far more alien to her than any of her clients.

A suspicious
, black stretched limo hovered next to the sidewalk. The rear passenger door swept open. Dom was sitting in the backseat, coated in his perpetual finish of passively smug confidence. Her wheelchair rolled to a stop at the edge of the sidewalk. She stared at him, blank-faced.

He held out a plated claw. “Come. Unless you’re walking home.”

“I think I should walk home.”

“What home?” he chuckled. “That glorified
shantytown where the Bruisers hang their hats? That home? Or maybe the streets? A back alley? Under a bridge? You don‘t have a home.”

Maximillia pushed herself up and out of the wheelchair, preparing to walk off.

“Who do you think arranged for your hospital stay?”

She stopped dead in place and turned back to him. “You?”

“Some of your Bruiser brothers and sisters aren’t as dumb as I expected. They told me what happened.”

“And you came in to save the day. How noble,” she muttered, joylessly glaring at him. The sarcasm in her words were baldly apparent.

“I couldn’t have my star player benched, now could I? I consider you an investment. All of the time and money that’s been put into training you? You’re my thoroughbred. C’mon. Have a seat.”

She started to walk away, moving down the sidewalk. The limo rolled along beside her, the door still open. “You really want to spend the rest of your life in a condemned molecular assembly plant? You want to roll with two-bit thieves and lowlifes who haven’t met a bad decision they didn’t like? They live in the muck. That’s not freedom. That’s misery.”

“And what I do at Xartha’s isn’t?”

“We all gotta pay our debts. You joined up with a dipshit crew. Their debts became yours. A shitty hand, yes, but you asked for the cards. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about where you go once you’ve cleared the slate.”

“What about it?”

“I like you, Maximillia. You remind me a lot of myself. You’ve got this fire burning away inside you but you keep it hidden away. You contain it. I want you to let it out. I want to see it. I want to see all of you.”

“Like my clients?”

“I can’t have the car keep floating along like this,” he said. “Get in. Let’s talk like two civilized adults.”

Her boldness grew. “Neither one of us is civilized.”

“Then let’s start being civilized. Get in. Listen to what I have to say. If you’re not interested then I’ll accept that. Just an exchange of words. Consider it a business meeting. I want to sell you something. Whether or not you buy is up to you.”

Maximillia stopped, tilting her head back and sighing. He wouldn’t relent. Her legs were heavy and the road ahead agonizingly long. The cushy limo seats beckoned her. She gave in, stepping inside and plopping down in the seat across from Dom as the door swept down, locking shut. The limo sped off. Dom’s grin revealed a man who rarely suffered a verbal defeat.

He reached towards a small compartment beside his seat. The compartment door slid open revealing a glass filled with Eloquis, a dark brown liquor.

“Have a drink with me.”

Her face remained slack, uninterested. “I thought this was a negotiation. You’re trying to sell me something.”

“Well, I like to get a little lubricated before business. Loosens me up. Helps me think better, to be quite honest.”

“I’ll stay dry, thanks.”

Dom nodded in acceptance, sipping at the Eloquis.

He watched her look unintentionally adorable; a delicate, callow babe who fidgeted in her seat, her eyes curling skeptically around the insides of the limo. There was a precious vulnerability to her.

“You don’t trust me, do you?” Dom asked.

She began to sink back into that sheepish young girl. “Not really.”

“You know, girls like you really are rare. I mean that. I’ll bet you had a rare upbringing, too. Your parents, did they enter into a Covenant? That’s what you humans do, isn’t it?”

After moments of hesitation, she shook her head. “My father wanted to. She didn‘t want it. She didn’t even want me.”

“Father is an old-fashioned idealist, huh? Who makes that investment anymore? Talk about the gamble of a lifetime,” he chuckled.

“Lots of people do.”

“Really? Where?”

She couldn’t field that question with an honest answer. The Covenant had grown out of the ancient human tribal rites of matrimony and was largely a cultural relic; a trait of a bygone age when social dependence, a fragile physiology, crippled medical technologies and depressingly short life spans required voluntary
—and sometimes involuntary—unions to ensure the proliferation of the species. The human race outgrew the need for the social coercion of forced pairings for the sake of procreation when science provided the tools necessary for the first man to set foot on an alien world tens of light-years away. The progressive subsequent technologies granted true freedom, freeing them of the social and cultural trappings that had limited the human race's reach for enlightenment.

Even then, Man was a social animal and intuitively craved the convenience and emotional quickening that a pair bonding provided. The post-modern neurosciences melded with the quaint mechanisms of human tradition and allowed for those who volunteered to be joined into Covenants to do so with a transcendently technological flair. The process yielded a neuronal merging of the two minds via tools of a nearly esoteric substrate of engineering, creating an empathic hivemind between them. After the procedure, to a degree, what one of them felt, so did the other, creating the ideal platform for an enduring social harmony. This was an especially grave commitment considering that the bonds generated via the process were so strong and irreversible that, should one of the parties involved die, then invariably so would the other. Because of this, few couples sought to pursue this endeavor.