Sedition (6 page)

“You took your things out of my bedroom,” I comment, trying not to sound angry. I just want him to talk to me.

“Yes, master.” He doesn’t look at me.

“You didn’t need to do that,” I say, frustrated. “It’s fine, though.”

“Yes, master.”

He keeps washing dishes. I wonder if he’s waiting for me to forgive him or invite him back. I try making the first move. I come closer, standing hip-to-hip with him, and I place my hand on the small of his back. I lean close, whispering, “You are welcome to come back, if you’d like.”

I feel him tense, but he tenses so often. When I hear him say “Okay,” I start rubbing his back slowly. I know he likes this; he always relaxes when I do it.

“I know you were upset,” I whisper, letting my lips brush against ear. “But that doesn’t have to have anything to do with it. Things were good like they were before. I can make you feel good again.”

Sascha carefully sets down the dish he is washing and I start to regain hope that we can fix this.

“If that’s your wish, master, I’ll obey.”

His tone is detached, defeated, and I jerk away in horror. He turns to look at me, and I don’t bother trying to conceal the look on my face. I’m shocked that I’ve made him think I would do that to him.

“Jesus Christ, Sascha!” I snap, retreating away from him. “That wasn’t what I meant!”

He looks at me with hatred in his eyes, something he has never done, not even when I first bought him. I’ve betrayed him, and he’s not going to let me forget it. Where I used to see lust and longing in his eyes, now I just see fear and disgust.

“I didn’t mean…” I start, stepping farther away. But what did I mean? I wanted him to forget it, to go back to being the pleasing little pet he was before the party. “Forget it.”

I storm out, sickened with myself. I try to be angry with him, because I’ve given him everything, but I can’t. I kept him in the dark, it backfired. I should never have gotten involved in the first place, but I can’t bring myself to sell him.

Over the next few days, I make a point of leaving before he awakes, staying late at the office and avoiding Sascha at dinner time. He works hard and keeps the house in perfect order. He acts like the perfect slave, but I don’t want the perfect slave. I want Sascha, the Sascha who was starting to come out of his shell, the Sascha who used to melt under my hands. I watch him at home, when I think he’s not looking, but all I see on his face is hatred and wariness. I ruined it; it is my responsibility to fix it.

After careful planning, I come home from work at a reasonable hour and gather my materials as meticulously as I would for a business meeting. In a way, it is a business meeting, just with a different sort of partner. Sascha’s in his room where he’s been avoiding me lately. I knock on his door.

He takes a few seconds longer than I expect. When he answers, his voice is polite and detached.

“Yes, master?” he calls through the door.

He doesn’t even bother to get up to answer it, which annoys me. “I’m coming in,” I tell him. He doesn’t respond.

When I enter, he’s looking down, trying to hide the glare. He must not realize that the rest of his body is all but telling me to go to hell. But at least he still feels something for me.

“Lose the attitude,” I order. It’s harsh, but I know I risk losing my temper if he gives me attitude. I throw my tablet at him, feeling guilty as he flinches away.

“Read this,” I order. “I’ll answer any questions you have.”

He takes a minute, maybe being scared, maybe being defiant, but he finally begins to read through the page I’ve left open on my tablet. I would have flashed the information over to his as usual, but the information on the screen is so highly and heavily secured that it is only
ever
visible from my tablet. I watch him becoming interested in it as he reads.

The documents tell my whole story, as I told it to the federal and international investigators so many years ago. Sascha seems annoyed as he starts to read it, but he looks up at me with interest as he quickly puts the pieces together.

“This was you?” he asks, shocked.

I nod.

He stares at me for a moment, then looks back to the tablet with renewed interest, studying it intensely. “But, it says your name is Donovan Miller?”

“My first name was Donovan,” I explain, shrugging. “After my father. I’ve gone by my middle name since before I can remember. And my last name
was
Miller. Keep reading. I was disinherited, stripped of my name, and forbidden from discussing ‘trade secrets’—basically, anything about the re-education centers.”

Sascha looks up at me, eyes wide.

“She’s your mother?” he asks, shocked. “Kristine Miller is your mother? That woman who came over here… she is the head of the Miller System?”

“Yes,” I reply. “I was supposed to follow in the family business. I knew it inside and out, all the methods, all the rationale, all the shortcomings.”

“This is your big secret, then,” he says slowly, putting everything together. “I asked about her when you told me about your research. Well, when you told me about half of your research.”

I nod. It is my secret. The one I refused to tell him about, time and again. The one I beat him for. Admitting what I’ve done shouldn’t be this difficult, but as Sascha puts together how often I’ve lied to him, the hurt is evident on his face.

“Your research more than suggests that harsh treatment results in subpar slaves,” he reminds me. “So why did you treat me like that? Sometimes, you’d just ignore me, but other times… it was like being back there. In one of the re-education centers.”

“In my family, slaves were business products, not pets, and they knew their place. A slave like you would have been broken, but I’ve never wanted to break you. I chose to ignore you instead, and perhaps that was crueler. The charges of intellectual property theft and treason taught me that speaking up too soon can be a liability. I thought I was keeping you safe.”

“Safe from what?” Sascha demands. “Obviously not you or your mother.”

I accept his accusations. They are true, even though they are not the biggest concerns we have as we move forward. “It’s bigger than that. Even my initial results could have torn down not only my family’s business, but most re-education center empires in the world. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise. The everyday functioning of society depends on it, and it depends on keeping it the same.”

“If you found something better, why wouldn’t your mother have wanted to use it?” Sascha asks.

Sascha is bright, but he is young, like I was when I first started researching the topic. He still things can be fixed cooperatively. “My mother saw exactly one way to get results—her way. She knew exactly how to cause the most intense and terrible pain while still keeping a slave conscious. She knew exactly how many days one could starve before suffering physical ailments. And she made
certain
that every one of her trainers and guards knew as well and followed her protocols. Her re-education centers rose to prominence due to her bloodthirstiness and exacting standards; once she expanded, her methods caught on here and in dozens of other countries. Her system worked. Adopting a new one would mean admitting that she was wrong, admitting that she had steered entire nations in the wrong direction.”

Sascha’s eyes go wide. I can see him begin to understand the implications of all this.

“I didn’t just attack her system; I attacked the entire way of thinking,” I explain. “And I never took into account the big players—money, finance, legal influence. I was naïve enough to think I was doing a good thing.”

“Since the first people were Demoted a few hundred years ago, the re-education centers have always focused on control,” Sascha recalls, thinking aloud. “The Miller System made some improvements; it got rid of most of the physically disabling technologies, but made discipline and systematic terror even more important. You aren’t just going to destroy your mother’s system, you’re trying to turn everything upside down. All the laws, all the policies, all the recommendations—every part of our society that deals with the Demoted would have to be reconsidered. And in the mean time, everyone would realize they had failed for so long… someone would have to be held responsible.”

He’s starting to see it, now. The cold, hard truth that I discovered from the inside of a locked cell. “My results could have changed the state of the world, but I never considered how much I would be hated for revealing them. The second I let word slip at the company holiday party, I found myself arrested and locked away and accused of being a threat to national security, of all goddamn things.”

Sascha looks stunned.

“Didn’t you know?” I reply, a bitter smile on my face. “Trying to overthrow the Demoted system is a matter of national security. And my family has considerable sway with law enforcement. Donations, partnerships—law enforcement and re-education center developers are in bed together. A lot of medical research, too, but I didn’t find that out until later.”

“How did you get out of the charges?” he asks.

“My mother arranged for me to get out of jail once she felt I had learned my lesson,” I admit. Everything she gave, she could have so easily taken away again. “In exchange for my silence, I was set up with a bank account large enough to support me for a lifetime, and a lucrative position with Dean & Chanu. I disappeared, and I wasn’t supposed to come back. A cordial parting of ways, if you could call it that.”

Sascha gives me a hopeful look. “But you didn’t stay away?”

I shake my head. “I was planning to try again from the moment I was released from jail. It sounds rather nice—not the Miller System anymore, but the Michaud System. I’m in a position now where I can start over, if I have enough support and insider information, but I also need to find the exact right people. And I need extensive funds to do so. Funding the project entirely on my own makes the results look less legitimate. I need backers, industry stakeholders who lend credibility.”

“Oliver Torenze?” Sascha asks. I nod. He deserves to know.

It’s been almost twenty years, but I still remember visiting the re-education centers with Oliver Torenze. He was a close family friend, active in the business, and he had taken me to many work-related events, priming me, even as a teenager, for my future in the family business.

He also supervised the week when my mother sent me there as punishment.

“What the hell did I do?” I snapped, glaring at him indignantly as he ordered two of the guards to hold me while another beat me. “I’ve done everything you told me to since you brought me here!”

My requests were met with silence, then another sharp slapping noise as the leather made contact with my skin. I tried not to cry out, not to add to the wails of the Demoted who surrounded me.

“You’re still fighting,” Oliver commented, a slight smile on his face. I couldn’t tell if he was proud or disappointed. “Another dozen.”

He never held the strap himself, but he ordered it to be used, and he watched while it was. He held back the food I wasn’t allowed and he ordered the restraints that forced me into painful positions on the cold concrete floor that reeked of blood and bodily fluids, even through the stench of disinfectant. While I cried and screamed, he supervised and smiled. The guards were the ones who hit me, but he was the one who leaned in and whispered threats in my ear when I was so sleep deprived that I was hallucinating.

Oliver was acting on my mother’s orders, but he embraced my torture happily. He had been told to make an impression on me and he did.

I realized that there were no lengths he wouldn’t go to in order to succeed.

Chapter 6
Partnership

It makes sense all of a sudden. The insistence on decorum, the mingling at slaveholder events. Me. I had tried to justify it by telling myself that my master was keeping up appearances, that he was working on his current research project, but that was never enough. It never explained why he was so harsh, why he demanded so much of me, or why he was so uncomfortable around certain people.

“I take it Torenze is more than just a wealthy business man?” I ask.

“Yes,” Cash explains. “He was once my mother’s closest business associate and family friend. He trained me, I used to confide in him; he was my inside connection in the business. He was there when I slipped and exposed my plans. After everything happened, I didn’t think I’d see him again, but my mother fired him. Word is that he wanted more control than she was allowing him, so she cut him loose. When he started his own business, the acquisition of his business was one of my new company’s top goals.”

“But you want him on your side for more than official business. Why is he so cruel to you? He’s constantly cutting you down, threatening you—” I think of all the hints at Cash’s family. “He threatens to expose you! Why would you want him working with you?”

Cash smiles. “Torenze was to be my other half at one point; I was going to handle advertising and research and development, he was going to handle the practical side. He enjoyed that sort of thing. He was my mentor, for a while, it’s so hard to believe that now. But then I stumbled upon this other research—you know, when I first started it, I thought it would be welcomed, applauded. It was only after the fact that I realized how ignorant that was. As it stands, the Demoted system isn’t about efficiency or success. It’s about brutality.”