Falling Into the Black

by Caitlin Ricci

  “He’s my husband. And my master. He has been since I was twelve.”

  And I’d just delivered him right back to a man who had clearly been abusing him for years. Arin looked away, the sadness mixing with shame in his expression as the man, Bowman, dipped his fingers under the waist of Arin’s pants. I wanted to tell Bowman not to touch him. I needed to be able to take my gun out of the holster against my left hip and shoot him.

  But Arin was a slave, and when it came to slaves, marriage was permitted between a master and his slave. I’d known about it, but I’d never seen it for myself, and I would have never expected to have some part in it, even as unknowing as I was.

  “Was there something else?” Bowman asked me. “I don’t have to pay you for finding my runaway slave and returning him to me, do I?”

  I chose my words carefully and did my best to keep my anger in check, despite how much I was seething with hatred for him on the inside. “No. Peacekeepers take nothing for their services but the knowledge that they’ve made the universe a better place.” It was part of our oath, and I had recited it daily before I’d finished my training. “That is what makes us different than a bounty hunter. My best friend is one, and he has none of the restrictions that I do. When he knows about something that upsets him, he is free to take care of it.” I hoped that my threat, as thinly veiled as it was, made it to his ears. Whatever he’d done to Arin in the past, it could not continue now.

  Bowman chuckled. “Well, good luck, then.” He let go of Arin only to spin him around and push him toward the door. “You, it’s time to go.”

  As I watched, Bowman continued to push Arin out of Asiq and down the road. Arin didn’t walk fast enough, he wasn’t keeping to a straight line, he didn’t answer questions as quickly as Bowman wanted him to. I heard each harsh correction, and felt each physical punishment as if I was the one receiving them. And I wished I was. I’d never regretted being a peacekeeper or had second thoughts about what I’d done while I’d had that title, before now.

  As soon as Arin and Bowman were out of view of Asiq’s big tinted windows, I went in search of Emmanuel. He’d know what to do.

  I found him, and Corbin, in Corbin’s office, and for once it looked as if I wasn’t interrupting something between them when I knocked on the office door.

  Emmanuel answered my knock, then stepped back to let me in. “Does Monroe have another assignment for us?”

  I shook my head. “Arin has been returned to his master, a man who married him when he was twelve. I can’t go after him without risking losing my ability to be a peacekeeper, but you can. I know what the law is and what is says, but this isn’t right.”

  There was silence after that, until Corbin decided to break it by coming over and smacking me across my face. I deserved his anger. He’d adored Arin. Most of them had. It was hard not to. Arin had made no trouble for anyone. He’d worked hard, had stayed out of any drama, and hadn’t caused any arguments with anyone there. The only reason I’d noticed him at all was because he’d been trying so hard to avoid me at every turn.

  “I had to do it. He had to be returned. It’s the law,” I tried explaining to him. Corbin threw a book at me before storming away and leaning against the wall, where he only stared coldly at me. I didn’t blame him one bit for his hostility toward me.

  I ignored him in favor of turning to Emmanuel. He’d always had a level head, and I knew I could count on him to be rational about this. I raised my eyebrows at him, waiting for his plan.

  “Monroe would never sanction this type of a mission. It’s an unnecessary risk for something that legally is allowed to happen,” Emmanuel finally said. “And I won’t go alone. I won’t risk myself that way now that Corbin is counting on me to return.”

  I nodded and hoped he would get to the plan, and quickly too. But it seemed that there was nothing else he wanted to say, which was unacceptable to me on multiple levels.

  “So I’m to go alone, then?” I’d done plenty of missions on my own before, but for the past few months, we’d been a team. That’s what we signed on to Asiq to be. Going after Bowman was far safer in numbers, especially since I would be breaking the law no matter what I did.

  “Do you have any way to track them?” Em asked me.

  I had a vague idea. “I have the planet Arin said he was going to, along with the man’s surname. It isn’t much to go on, but it’s better than nothing.”

  Em nodded. “And it will point you in the right direction at the very least.”

  “But you won’t come with me?” I asked him. I caught Corbin watching us. He no longer looked as angry. Now he just appeared worried.

  Em slowly shook his head. “Not to chase him all over the universe. If you find him, then I’ll join you, but one of us needs to stay here until you do. What are you even planning to do about it once you do find him, though? Everything Bowman did was legal. I don’t agree with slavery, but it’s not against the law, and marrying a slave, even one as young as Arin was at the time, isn’t illegal either. Anything short of killing him is completely within Bowman’s right as his master.”

  And I hated that I had given Arin right back to him. If I had known, I liked to think I would have made a different choice, but the truth was that I was tasked with upholding the laws of the universe, even those I didn’t agree with or particularly like. And there were plenty that fell under that category. It wasn’t my job to decide which laws to make people obey. I had to enforce all of them equally.

  “I haven’t decided on that part. I thought maybe if I talked to him… if I could get Bowman to see reason.”

  “You’d have better luck buying Arin off of him, if he was even willing to sell his unwilling piece of ass,” Corbin growled at me from across the room.

  I nodded. I was well aware that even if I did find Arin, things wouldn’t necessarily be as easy as I would have liked them to be. “I know. I’ve considered that too. I live cheaply, and I’ve got credits saved up, if he’s willing to sell him. But if he’s not and he won’t release him after we talk about it, then I don’t know what to do.”

  “You won’t make the hard call and kill Bowman. Will you?” Em asked me bluntly.

  “No. He’s done nothing illegal. Until he does, I can’t arrest him. And killing people is more your way of doing things anyway. I only kill people when it’s absolutely necessary out of survival.”

  Em rolled his eyes. “You know he’s being raped, maybe even right this minute. You know he’s been raped for years. Yet you won’t kill his abuser.”

  I couldn’t do much more than glare at him. “No, I won’t kill his husband and the man who legally owns him. Slavery is bullshit, we both know that, but Bowman has the right to do whatever he wants to when it comes to Arin. I can’t kill someone for doing something that is completely legal in every section of the universe. Just because slaves are more often criminals working off their life debt in manual labor and not an extreme case like Arin’s, doesn’t mean I get to pick and choose which laws I want to obey.”

  Em looked disgusted at me as he shook his head. Then he lifted his hand, pointing toward the door. “You know it’s wrong and yet you’ll continue to allow a predator of defenseless children to continue living because of your code. I can’t condone that. If you need help when you find Arin, let me know. But if you end up walking away and leaving him with his abuser because your morals say to, I won’t be able to forgive you for that.”

  I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself for that either. “I’ll talk to you as soon as I find something out.”

  “Be careful. And bring him back to us. We’re his family, and he belongs with us. Not with him,” Corbin said.

  I wished I could promise Corbin that, but it just wasn’t possible. “I’ll do my best,” I said instead. Corbin nodded, then went to Em, who pulled him against his side. As usual, I was jealous of their bond. I felt nothing like that for Arin. Going after him was just a part of easing my own conscience and doing what was righ
t by him. But I did want something similar to what they had for myself.

  “Bye,” I told them, and I got a small wave from Em for it.

  IT DIDN’T take me long to gather up the things I would be taking with me in my shuttle. I sent a message to Monroe as I was leaving, to let him know what I was doing and where I would generally be at. I hoped that Bowman had just taken Arin back to Solarium. It would make things much easier for me. Solarium was still a large enough planet that it would take me a while to find Arin, if he was actually there, but it was a good place to start looking for him.

  An hour after I’d said good-bye to Em and Corbin, I was in my shuttle and heading to the sector’s jump gates so I could cross the universe to hopefully get to Arin and bring him back. Like Corbin had said, he belonged with the aspasians in Asiq. Even if he didn’t want to be one of them anymore, they had been his friends, and they did care about him. And there were always jobs available on Wish that didn’t require he take his clothes off.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Arin

  BOWMAN WAS the same as he’d always been. There was some predictability in that at least. I still had my own room in his house on Solarium. The closet still had all of my old clothes in it, though I doubted any of them would fit me now. I hadn’t been there in years, after all. I was tied down, so even if I had wanted to look at them, I couldn’t reach them.

  And he still drugged me before climbing on top of me. Maybe I’d developed a tolerance to the injection. Or maybe he hadn’t upped the dosage to account for the differences between who I was now and who I had been when I’d run away, because the sedative hardly worked on me. I pretended that it did. I remembered the feeling of emptiness that came with the drug, and I felt a little of it there now. I clung to that feeling as tightly as I could until it was over.

  When he was done with me, he left me alone. Eventually he brought me food, and he injected me again. I was likely to be sedated often now. Maybe it would make this life easier.

  “I’m so glad you’re home now,” he said as he kissed my cheek. “Promise me you’ll never leave me again. You have no idea how worried I’ve been about you.”

  I nodded. Running away wouldn’t do any good. I knew that now, and being tied to the bed was only part of why I couldn’t run. He kissed me again and roughly squeezed my hip. I wasn’t given a sheet, and I couldn’t reach my open windows since I was tied down. I shivered uncontrollably that first night.

  THE MEMORIES were the worst of it, I realized as I lay there shivering in the pale gray light of dawn the next morning. There was no pain from what he did to me anymore. But this was the same bedroom, and the same bed even, that he’d first raped me in. He’d only taken me to his room a few times over the years, mostly when he’d been too drunk to remember his rule about slaves and whores not belonging in their master’s beds. I tried not to remember as I lay there with my hands bound together and then tied to the bedpost.

  Bowman came to me before the sun was much higher in the sky. I had no way to tell what time it actually was. “Are you hungry?”

  I nodded. I was practically starving, and I smelled pancakes from the kitchen below us.

  “If you’re very good, I’ll give you some breakfast,” he promised me.

  I lay there and didn’t struggle at all while he did what he wanted to me. Afterward he washed me clean, and I was calm for that as well. He left me naked, but he did give me a pancake to eat after that. When I kissed him back after he’d pressed his lips against mine, I got a second. I wasn’t willing to do any more than that for a third. I would starve myself first.

  I WASN’T given a blanket the next night either, but I did get a sheet after I said good night to Bowman. I remembered this system well. The nicer I was to him, the more I seemed as if I loved being there and married to him, the more I was given. But it would never result in my freedom.

  When he came to me in the middle of the night, I kissed him as much as I could force myself to. I tasted the alcohol on his breath, and he was too rough with me as he pinched me and held me down. But when he was done, I could tell that he was happy.

  “Can you close the window? I’m cold,” I told him.

  He pursed his lips. “I suppose you’ve been good enough for that.” A few minutes later, my room was warm again. “Better?”

  I nodded and lay back down on my side, much in the same position I’d been before he’d come in and woken me up. Only now I was wide awake and watching him. “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Good. Be nice to me and I can make this a lot easier on you. Remember that.”

  I did. I was quickly remembering how to stand, how to walk, and how to have sex with him in all the ways that pleased him best. They were memories I’d tried to push back and ignore for years, but it seemed that now I would need them again.

  “Get some rest,” he said.

  I was exhausted, and some rest sounded great. As horrible as Bowman had ever been to me, I knew what to expect with him. Once he’d started bringing his friends around me, all that had changed. I was sure that practice would be starting up again with me soon enough.

  “Bowman?” I called out to him before he could leave my room.

  “Yes?”

  I swallowed back my pain to be able to get the words out without me struggling over every single syllable. “Could I be just yours this time? I’ll be better. I promise.”

  “No.”

  He left me alone after that, and I tried not to cry. Bowman was bad, but his friends could be even worse, and I was sure they’d have something to say about me running away for a few years. I was already tense just thinking about being reunited with the worst of his friends again.

  I knew that worrying about what was coming wouldn’t do any good, but my mind still went there all on its own anyway. I remembered the pain and the fear. Not knowing what was coming or what would be done to me had always been hard for me. I’d hated working in the camps, and I’d hated mining when I’d been forced to do that too. But being at the mercy of someone so much bigger than me and not being able to do anything about it, had always been the worst of it. Crying hadn’t done any good. Screaming and begging had only made things more painful for me. They had seemed to get off on my pain, enjoying it as only monsters could.

  And now I was back with Bowman, and soon enough he would give me to his friends again. It didn’t matter if I was twenty or twelve. I was still terrified of what was to come, and I couldn’t stop crying.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Resan

  IT TOOK me three days to get to Solarium, and by the time I did, I was hungry, tired, and my lower back was killing me from how I’d been sitting in my shuttle. I really needed to get that chair adjusted.

  I got permission to land in Solarium’s capitol city, Mesa, and found myself settling my shuttle between two large cruisers that were likely there to ferry tourists around Solarium’s many resort destinations.

  Mesa felt like a tourist spot to me far more than Wish ever had. Wish was an entire pleasure planet made for tourists to come frolic on. Mesa was a veil of perfection with barely hidden pockets of the poor and decrepit kept off the main streets. But they were there, those people with their wide eyes and hungry looks as they watched me walk down a well-kept street.

  When needing to find out information, the best place to go was generally where everyone got drunk.

  I pulled out the profile that I still had of Arin and kept it up on my holoscreen as I went up to the bartender. “Have you seen him?” I showed him my holoscreen, as well as my credentials as a peacekeeper.

  The man looked between my face and Arin’s, then shook his head. “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. I just want to talk to him.” I’d found that it was best to play casual with people, especially when I was in a crowded bar, potentially surrounded by people Bowman trusted. I didn’t know if he was a big deal on Solarium, but just in case he was, I didn’t want to piss anyone off. I did want to get his attention, though. “He’s a slave. His
master’s name is Bowman. Do you know him by any chance?”

  I saw a few people glance my way. Then they quickly looked away again. That was the kind of attention I needed. If people knew him, then hopefully they’d tell him I was looking for him. If people did that, then the next step would be for him to contact me to set up a meeting. That’s what I was counting on.

  The bartender gave me a shrewd look. “What does a peacekeeper want with Bowman and his slave?”

  It seemed I had come to the right place after all. That was excellent, and it took a lot of work off my end. “Like I said, I just want to talk to him. If you see him, let him know I’m looking for him, please.” I slid a credit chip across the bar top toward him, just to make it worth his while. It wasn’t much, but it would be a little extra incentive.

  The bartender put the chip into his pocket. “Sure. If I see Bowman, I’ll let him know a peacekeeper’s looking for him. I haven’t seen the other one around before. If he’s a slave, though, can’t see any reason he’d be out much. Slaves are common in these parts, but they don’t come out very often at all. It keeps those sensitive travelers happy.”

  Yes, those people who likely wouldn’t come back to Solarium if they knew half of what was actually legal and sanctioned in most of the spots they frequented.

  I rapped my knuckles on top of the bar. “Thanks.”

  The bartender shrugged. “Sure.”

  I caught a few people watching me as I left, and I made sure to walk slowly so that they could see me travel the whole distance back to my shuttle. Then they could tell Bowman where to find me when they ran back to him.

  IT TOOK another two days, but finally I got a vidcall from Bowman himself.

  “I hear you’ve been looking for me,” he started off by saying as soon as the vid had been connected and we could see each other clearly.