The Other Side Of Gravity (Oxygen, #1) (4 page)

“Working here would imply some form of payment, Helga. And payment is something I’ve never received. Just call it what it is.” I turned to look at her again. “You’re the new one here. I’ve been
here
longer than I’ve been free. So don’t tell me what I know and don’t know about this place. It goes with the commons because that’s what it is.” I turned the basket toward her and showed her the goods anyway. “See?” I picked a big chunk up with the magnet hanging on the basket. “All common metals. Now get back to work on your side before Rivers come back.”

She grinned evilly. “You said “work”. I thought we didn’t work here—”

“Just shut up and finish.”

She groaned as she walked over to her side. “I’m so hungry I could eat the tail off of a horsopotomus.”

“Gross. And stop.” My stomach grumbled as she talked about food, even if it was about eating the Militia’s riding units.

I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t complain really. I had it better than other slaves. At least I wasn’t in the mines. They never saw the sun and they never got much food, just enough to keep them going, from what I heard anyway.

At least I got to eat three meals a day. They may not be the meals I wanted to eat, but they were meals. Of sorts. The door slammed upstairs and Helga seized up so violently that her basket spilled.

I rushed over. “Helga,” I hissed. “You can’t do things like this.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, rushing to help me throw the pieces of metal back into her basket. We both knew what it meant to not finish our work, let alone spilling or damaging the goods. My fingers were cutting against the sharp edges of the metal shards, but I kept tossing them in as quickly as I could. The basement door opened and then my heart seized as well. There were still pieces on the floor.

She stood and grabbed my basket, rushing to stand a few feet away in front of her work station. I glared up at her, but she refused to meet my eyes; just looked ahead stoically.

“You know what he’ll do to me,” I whispered as I continued to pick up her pieces.

She kept her eyes forward and whispered back harshly. “Better you than me.”

I’d never been so ashamed of my kind before. Helga had been with us for three weeks now and I’d done nothing but help her and show her all the ways to avoid Rivers’ wrath, and this was how my kindness was repaid? Traitorism?

“There’s a special place for traitors in the underworld,” I hissed before standing and putting my feet over the pieces I could still see on the floor.

Rivers came down and already looked peeved about something as he thumbed through mail on his handheld device. “Junk, junk, junk…” He looked up and saw me out of place, not in my spot in front of the work baskets. “Why are you not working?”

“I was—” I was
going to say ‘picking up the pieces that Helga had dropped’, but once again she was a traitorous little saving-her-own-neck slave.

“She’s trying to hide the iron she dropped, Rivers!”

He looked at her and then down at my feet. His eyes popped up to mine and he looked absolutely murderous. But then he said softly, “I thought I told you not to call me that outside of the bedroom, baby doll.”

Yack, I just threw up in my mouth. I was the only slave he’d kept for so long. I didn’t know why. He always had two girls though, but the other one he rotated out every few months. It made no sense but I wasn’t allowed to ask. And I wasn’t allowed to call him Rivers to his face either. I called him Proprietor because that’s what he was. He was my owner and nothing else.  

I looked over at his stupid, smug face. I’m sure the other girls ate up that expression. He was lean and kind of muscly. He always wore those stupid vintage, hip shirts. In the last few years, our planet had begun to adopt a few rare Earth-cultures with shirts having silly pictures on them and things like that. So brand names and objects that we no longer carried or used, they showcased on their clothes. Rivers was currently sporting a Google shirt. And he grated the nerves even further when he would say the logo name over and over when he thought no one was listening, because he was a big doofus.
“Google, google, google.”
His hair was blond with blue tips and he had tattoos on his hands. Snakes on each finger. I could only imagine the gross things he did and said, the puns alone…

Yeah. Yack.

I looked up to find him watching me. “What’s with the face?”

I grimaced harder. “I’m trying not to puke imagining someone who’ll have coitus with you.”

He raced across the room so fast I barely saw him move. He was wearing his hurtle boots, for people always running late and messengers. Or for jerkfaces who just wanted to be mean and scare people. They cost a pretty silver because they had to be connected to your cerebral or something. It skimmed you across the surface you were on, hovering just slightly. I didn’t know how it worked; I just knew that you thought it and it obeyed. And that Rivers had a pair.

He gripped my chin in his hard fingers, the snakes moved on his skin, hissing from the ends of his fingers and acting as though they’d bite me if they could only get to me. He always treated me like I was more than a slave, like I was
more
than just his property. I never understood it, but Rivers was a strange man. A strange proprietor. I’d stopped trying to understand him long ago.

“Watch your mouth, grub.”

I felt my breath turn shallow. He only called me that when he was really pissed, when he was really trying to piss
me off
. Grub was the dirtiest word for a slave you could speak and he’d only ever called me that six times in the entire time that I’d been with him. Funny that every time had been instigated because of another one of his girls.

“Proprietor,” I said carefully, “Helga is trying to use your balls to her advantage where she knows I have no pull. I have been in your ownership for ten years and have never lied to you. These girls are in and out every few months and apparently think that I’m their scapegoat every time they do something wrong, that you’ll fall for it because you’re having coitus with them. Please don’t be that gullible guy.”

“Who I have coitus with is not your business,” he growled and flicked his eyes to her.

Helga was obviously getting the picture. The big picture. Ding, ding, ding, Helga!

“You mean you have coitus with all the other…slaves,” she whispers, because saying that word aloud was a bit taboo, too. And Rivers having coitus with his slaves was just as bad as outright calling someone a grub, to polite society anyway. The lower level didn’t care, but respectable men bought coitus the old-fashioned way instead of getting it for free from his slaves. What a tangled web we weave.

“Not me.” I wrenched my face away from his hand. “Just get on with it. We both know that I wasn’t the one who dropped the slivers of tin on the floor, we both know that you aren’t going to punish her for it because you’re sleeping with her, and we both know that you don’t give a crap about any of it.”

He stood straighter and lifted his chin. “I dislike it so much when your backbone starts showing. It just means that I have to beat it back down.”

And right then I knew what I had to do. I didn’t want to... I hoped my mother wasn’t listening…

“You just go have dirty sex with your slaves and let me be—”

The slap across my face hurt, but him grabbing my hair hurt worse. I heard the alarm go off and the scanner’s red laser light tried to scan me but couldn’t find my face, so Rivers leaned back, still holding my hair, let it scan me, and then slammed my body against the wall as the speaker blared, telling me about my fine.

“Not only did you just cost me money, but I will not allow filth talk like that in my place and presence, do you understand me, grub? Your dead mother would be ashamed of you.”

He was probably right, but I was getting out of here tonight so I hoped she would forgive me.

He took me over to the list on the wall, the list the Militia put on all the walls, of unacceptable words and behaviors. Among the list of words were sex and hate. Tons of emotional expressions, racial terms, any type of curse words or slang for it we weren’t allowed to utter, even in the privacy of our homes, or the sensors and scanners would pick up on it and we would be fined. Everyone had to speak the same language. English. When the world leaders came together and made Congress, they decided that English was the most widely known language and it was the only language spoken, the only language allowed.

“Look at this list and know that it’s here to help us, to keep us from going back to where we were. It’s here to—”

“It’s a world with no freedom. It’s here for people like you, people at the top of the food chain,” I groaned against his hold. “In a real world, the word
slave
would be up there, the word
grub
would be up there. In a real world, you wouldn’t be about to take me for a beating that I didn’t deserve because a girl that you’re having coitus with dropped your tin shavings and blamed me.”

He jerked me from the wall without a word and took me upstairs to his shop. I looked around at the people who were shopping, all knowing by the way he was holding me what was about to happen. It wasn’t my first beating, but it would be my last. Those ropes, as they tied around my wrist, felt like the most freedom I’d had in the last ten years of my life. He looked down at me with a sadness that I wasn’t sure was real or not as he took his belt from his pants. It was such an
Earth
thing, he had always told me. He read in our history books that the old slave-owners on Earth used to beat their slaves and children with their belts. So he wore one just in case he ever needed it, even though our pants were fitted to us biometrically. He moved around to my back. I waited, knowing this was what had to happen for my freedom.

I gripped that pole in the middle of the shop. The shoppers who had stopped looking for random metal items had stopped to watch—to watch the slave get hers, get what she deserved, because why else would her proprietor beat her?

When the first lash of metal and leather hit across my back, I gritted my teeth and told myself not to cry out, that this was what I needed to do to leave him forever, this was what my mother would want, that I was about to be reunited with her and my father, in my own way.

The second one hit and I hissed, couldn’t be helped. He always used the end of the belt with the metal latch, so it bit into your flesh with every lash. I saw a man sneer in the back of the small crowd that had gathered to watch me take my licks. It wasn’t the first time I’d been watched get a beating, people were fascinated by it, but the sickos that acted like I deserved it?

The third lash hit and I couldn’t stop the small moan of pain that escaped. Rivers pressed his mouth to my ear from behind. “There’s a crowd. Denying me the painful moans won’t do you any good. I’ll keep at it until you give in. I won’t be embarrassed. Just give it to me and I’ll make it quick. Cry and I’ll even give you the salve.”

I gasped. He’d never given me the salve in all my time with him. The salve could practically numb you, and by the next day, you’d think you hadn’t been beaten at all. It was a miracle salve. Why was he willing to give it to me?

I looked over my shoulder at him, saw nothing but ego. He wasn’t trying to help me. He just wanted a good show. Well, this one time I was willing to give them one. Because I wanted to be done with this and go to the hole faster.

The next lash, I cried out harder. The last I cried actual tears and sobbed, letting the restraints on my wrists be the only thing holding me up. I let all my emotion bubble to the top for my mom and how I hated this man and this life and how I was so close to being done with it. The scream that erupted from me was primal and angry and sad and anguished. When I looked up, you would have thought they were watching their favorite play, they looked so enthralled.

“Is this what you want?” I rasped and jerked against my restraints. “Is this what you want to see? The slave beaten down and fighting for her life? The grub getting hers?”

Rivers looped his belt around his neck and roughly unclasped my hands as the onlookers watched me, saying nothing. He yanked me through to the side door, taking me to the back room, what Rivers called his ‘dungeon’, and tossed me unceremoniously inside.

“When will you learn that we all have our place, our parts to play?”

I scoffed, wincing as the slices on my back pulled. “When will you learn that it’s up to you if you play those parts or not?”

He looked even more peeved, if that was possible, as he shut the door and locked it with the thumbprint scanner. I knew I wasn’t getting any salve.

I moved swiftly, knowing that every second counted. I discounted the aching and hurting in my body. That didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things right now. I had seven lashes total and that wasn’t as bad as I could have gotten or had before. I’d gotten off lucky this time.

I moved swiftly, making sure the baggy of shavings was tucked securely in the bindings I’d tied around my breasts—since slaves didn’t get fancy things like bras—before I began, and then I started to wiggle loose the old bars of the room he always made sure to leave me in. Every time he did, I made sure to work them until they came free, one at a time. It may have been one at a time, it may have been slow-going, it may have been agonizing waiting and biding my time, but this was the night.