Falling Into the Black

by Caitlin Ricci

  I closed my eyes and tried not to care. I didn’t want to feel, didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to see their faces in my mind. I pictured them, though. Against my will I thought about my first months with Bowman, and I pictured another child in my place. I’d be helpless to watch them. They’d scream for someone to come save them, just as I had. And I’d be able to do nothing for them. As long as Bowman was alive, there would be children in Mesa who were in danger.

  The answer was simple. It made perfect sense. I got off the bed, and he smiled at me. “Come to give me a kiss good night?” he teased me. “Just like old times, you and me. I knew it wouldn’t take you long to remember how to be good.”

  I did remember. I remembered the kisses before I could have food. I remembered never being allowed to bathe alone. I remembered getting down on my knees in the dining room and wanting dinner but being denied it because he wanted something else instead. I remembered every horrible vivid detail of my childhood, and I knew that if I didn’t do something to stop it, then the nightmare I had lived through would be someone else’s new reality. He wouldn’t stop. There was no authority that would make him. There would always be children sold into slavery, and there would always be men like him ready to buy them up and destroy them piece by piece until there was nothing left.

  He had a knife on his hip. It was only used for small tasks. It wasn’t even that sharp. But I grabbed it anyway, and I tackled him. Stabbing him was easy. Despite the dull blade, the metal sank into his chest with little effort on my part. All I had to do was remember each time he’d made me feel pain. Every time he’d used me up and tossed me aside even as I’d lain there crying about how much it had hurt and how much I’d hated him for being mean to me.

  Killing him was the easiest thing I’d done in years.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Resan

  I MANAGED to scrape together the money, just barely, but I did get it done. On Friday morning I showed up at Bowman’s house, and I expected him to answer the door. Instead I got Arin, completely dressed in loose clothing.

  “I’m not going with you. Go back to Asiq.” He shut the door in my face.

  “Arin!” I banged on the door. “Arin! Open up this door right now!”

  He did, after a few seconds. “I didn’t stutter. Like I said, go back to Asiq. I’m fine here.”

  I grabbed his face between my hands before he could slam the door on me again. I lifted up his eyelids and checked his pupils. He shoved me away after I’d determined that he wasn’t currently on any drugs.

  “What changed?” I demanded. Three days before and he’d been a slave to be tortured and used at his husband’s decision. Now he was wearing clothing and walking around like everything was fine. I didn’t understand it at all.

  “Nothing.”

  I stopped him so that I could see his neck. He still had every one of his brands, so Bowman hadn’t decided to randomly free him without being paid by me. He pulled away from me, and I was left shaking my head.

  “Arin…. What happened?” Clearly something had. I just wanted to know what it was.

  He leaned against the wall across from me. “You found out I was a slave and then gave me back to my abuser. Do you seriously think I’m ever telling you anything ever again? Next you’ll leave me on a prison planet for stealing a piece of fruit.”

  “If you did something to deserve being put on one of the prison planets, then yes, I would take you there,” I admitted. It would be the right thing to do. But Arin wasn’t a criminal.

  Arin cocked his head to the side. “Go down in the basement, then, if you need to know everything.”

  “Are you coming with me?”

  He nodded. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  The basement door was easy enough to find off the main hallway, and I started heading down the stairs. I wasn’t more than three down, though, before Arin shut the door behind me, and I heard it lock into place.

  “Arin!” I yelled at him. “Let me out of here!”

  “I’m sorry!” he called back to me through the door. “But I’ve been a prisoner already, and I’m tired of it. I won’t die like that. Just let me go.” I heard him running away from the door, and my heart sank as I started to think that maybe I had some idea of what he was getting at.

  I found what I was looking for under a tarp in the corner of the small, dark room. Bowman’s body lay mostly naked, a knife still sticking out of his chest where Arin had stabbed him. He was right. I would take him to a prison planet for this. That was the only course of action left for us now that he’d murdered someone.

  “Dammit, Arin,” I mumbled as I took out my holoscreen and contacted the local authorities. Now I had to report him and what I knew, and he would be a wanted man. Even if I was willing to lie to the peacekeepers for this, there was no way to misconstrue it as an accident. Arin left the knife there in Bowman’s chest for all the world to see. The only question was what had led Arin to snap like that, and why hadn’t he just waited the few days for me to come get him and free him from Bowman? Then this never would have had to happen.

  It took ten minutes for the local peacekeepers to arrive and another fifteen for them to break down the basement door. I gave my statement a few different times to the peacekeepers, and then, three hours after I’d arrived at the house to rescue Arin, I was looking at the space where my shuttle had been, presumably stolen by him.

  “Arin…,” I growled. With a sigh I headed over to the shipyard and spent some of the borrowed money on a new shuttle. Arin had a three-hour lead over me. He could be anywhere in the universe by now. Except, I remembered with a smile, my ship had tracking in it.

  I sent a comcall out to Em.

  “Hello? Did you get him?”

  Sighing, I shook my head and launched my new shuttle. She was newer than my previous one had been, and the controls were unfamiliar, but I didn’t have time to learn them if I was going to find Arin before the Solarium peacekeepers did.

  “No. It’s a long story, though. The short version is that Arin killed Bowman, locked me in a basement with his body, and then took off with my ship. Can you locate her for me?”

  “If I do this for you, I need you to promise me that you’ll take it easy on Arin when you arrest him for murder.”

  If? There was no if in this situation. He was the only one with the codes to my ship, and I needed to have her tracked down. But I could see where he was coming from too. “That depends on Arin. If he runs again or tries to fight me, I won’t be able to be as lenient with him as I would like to be. You know that. He has to come willingly for this to all work out for the best for both of us.”

  “I know. Okay. I’ve got your ship. She’s docked at Catia. Do you know where that is?”

  I did. Smallest moon of the planet Fenra. There were supposedly beaches there and a whole lot of water. I knew the coordinates but not much more than that. “I’ve got it. Thanks.” I hung up on Em and set a course for Catia. If he was still there, I’d take him in carefully and quietly. But he would be going to a prison planet. There was nothing else for him now.

  AFTER THREE jump gates, I was on Catia. It was pretty enough. Lots of beaches, mostly water, though. And no one was fishing in it. Catia was one of those useless planets that had been terraformed just to give people somewhere to go when they got bored. It was small enough that finding Arin wasn’t hard to do. He was lying at the edge of the water with the surf coming up to his hips as he stared up at the sky.

  “Please don’t try to run again,” I said as I stood over him and blocked his sunlight.

  Arin nodded and stood up. He brushed the sand off of himself. “I have a hotel room. Can we talk for a little while?”

  I’d been running around so much lately that, even though I knew I should have just taken him directly to a prison planet, I decided to take a break first instead. “Sure. Lead the way.” I had the proof that he’d killed Bowman. I knew his reasons, and I knew he had plenty of opportunity to do it. And I did
n’t blame him for doing it either. But because I knew what I did, there was no need for anyone to hear him plead his case. He was guilty. As a peacekeeper I could decide that, and I knew he was. He would simply be taken to a prison planet, signed in, given another brand to mark him as a murderer in case he ever escaped, and then he’d be let loose to run around with the other monsters of the universe.

  Only Arin wasn’t like them. He’d killed a man, but he hadn’t done it for no reason. He probably had a million different reasons to put that knife into Bowman’s chest. Each time Bowman had hurt him or allowed someone else to do so. Each time he’d put his hands on Arin and forced him into being with him. Thinking about it disgusted me, especially when I considered how young Arin had been when he’d been raped the first time and how much it must have hurt for him to have his tail removed then as well.

  “I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I told him as we entered his hotel room. “But that doesn’t change what has been done now and what you did. Murdering people isn’t exactly something I can just brush aside.”

  Arin sat down on the bed, and I sat down beside him. “I’m not asking you to forgive me for what I’ve done. I know killing him was a big deal. But it had to be done. I don’t expect you to understand, or even believe me when I say that, though. You see the world in terms of black and white. I murdered him, so I should be punished.”

  I nodded. I was glad he understood. “Yes. You should be.”

  Arin rolled his eyes. “That’s what you think. I killed him to protect other children from going through what I did. But you don’t care about something like that. Because I’m a slave, and they would have been too.”

  “I can’t change how the universe is.”

  He sighed and lay back on the bed. “I know you can’t. You’re just one person. But blaming what’s wrong in this situation on the universe doesn’t exactly work either. You blindly follow laws just because you swore to. You give no thought to what it actually means when you turn away from something horrible and cruel in the world just because it’s within the law. I was sold for fifty credits as a child. Ten credits per year that I’d been alive. That’s the usual going rate for children who have no skills or special talents to speak of. Think of how many children Bowman could have destroyed with that three hundred thousand he asked for. You’d have been keeping him in victims for the rest of his life.”

  I didn’t want to think about that reality, but I knew I had to, because if I didn’t, I was simply ignoring the problems like he’d accused me of doing. “As soon as slavery becomes illegal, I’ll get rid of every single person like him, and they’ll be locked up with the other rapists. But until then….” I shook my head. He already knew what I was going to say, and it wouldn’t do any good to say it again.

  “Slavery will never be illegal. Too much of the universe’s commerce relies on it for that to ever be a reality. Marriage to your slave, though, that has the potential to go away. The slavery part isn’t the impossible life it seems. After ten years I would have been free. And there are systems in place to make sure people don’t lock their slaves up so that they can’t get away. People came to Bowman’s house when I was fifteen to see that he was properly letting me go like he should have. But a piece of paper saying we were married changed all of that. As a married slave, I couldn’t leave him, and my slavery had no end date except for in death. That’s why marriage to slaves needs to be outlawed.”

  I could agree with him there. “If you hadn’t killed him, you would be able to fight those laws. But now you won’t be able to do much about them. There was no reason for you to have been so stupid and killed him now.”

  Arin kicked me off the bed, and I went to go sit on the nearby couch and give him some space. “He was going to go after children again. He wouldn’t have ever stopped, and his abuse is actually sanctioned by every government in the universe. Twelve is the age of consent on Solarium. Having sex with someone, even a slave, under that age is illegal. You know that. I don’t know why you can’t see how absolutely wrong it is. He was choosing his victims and talking about the different children that would be up for auction soon. I was getting too old for him, but with your money, he had three picked out. He said he would get multiples this time so that they would last longer. I broke too easily as a child for him. You allow his kind of abuse to continue because not only do you do absolutely nothing to stop it, you practically encourage it by saying nothing against it. You want to know what my problem with you is? That’s it. You may not force children to fuck you, but you don’t condemn the ones who do. You’re as much of a monster as every man who ever raped me ever was.”

  I was off the couch and on top of him within seconds. My hand was balled into a fist at my side, and I was shocked at how much I wanted to punch him for what he’d said about me. He was absolutely wrong.

  He stared up at me with an expression full of contempt and loathing. “If you’re going to hit me, go ahead. You think I haven’t been hit before for less reasons than calling a man out on his own hypocrisy? I’ll even close my eyes to make it easier on you. Then maybe you can rape me too.”

  I forced myself to take one deep breath after another as I backed away from him. I went to the other side of the room as he sat up in bed. “I’m sorry,” I said as I crossed my arms over my chest.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Are you done killing people? Or was Bowman only the start of your serial-killer ways?” I had to know.

  He shook his head. “I’m done. I honestly only want to be left alone now. I would love to go back to Asiq, but while I still have these brands on my neck, that won’t be possible. Maybe I’ll find someone to remove them for me someday. Maybe they’ll even be able to get me a false report that says I’m free now so that I can show people if anyone ever asks. I doubt anyone would, and I can’t imagine anyone doing that actually, but I would feel better if I had something clearing me from my past as a slave completely. Barring those two things, though, I just want to be able to have a peaceful life now.”

  And part of me wanted that for him. “You would go back to Asiq?”

  “Yes. It may sound strange to want to have sex with strangers after what I’ve been through, but I still like sex. I just prefer to be able to choose when I have it and who I’m with.”

  Which made perfect sense. I leaned back against the wall and looked at him. He was a murderer. I should be taking him to a prison planet. But he’d killed to keep others from being a victim like himself. And he was done now.

  “If I help you, I’ll need you to go back to Asiq with me. And you’ll never be able to tell anyone what you’ve done or that I helped you in any way. We’ll say I paid Bowman’s price for you and that was the end of it, and you were freed.”

  Arin just stared at me. “Why would you help me, though? Doesn’t that violate some major rules in your peacekeeper code to help a murderer hide away?”

  It did, and I was trying not to think about what would happen to me if anyone ever found out. At the very least, I would be disgraced, and I would be stripped of my peacekeeper title. “Lay down on your back and turn your head to the right.”

  “Why?”

  I sighed. “Just do it. Please?”

  Arin slowly did as he was told, though he gave me a suspicious look the whole time. I took my holoscreen out and held it up to his brands so that the machine could read them. His information popped right up.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Altering your information. It can only be done by a peacekeeper,” I replied. I owed him this. My code was one thing, and I would always be loyal to the peacekeepers, but what I’d done in handing Arin back to Bowman wasn’t right either. He didn’t deserve the life he’d been given, and he didn’t deserve to die on some prison planet for it now either. I thought about what I would have done in his situation, and I knew I would have killed Bowman too.

  I changed his slave status and entered in the explanation that he had been freed based on my agreeme
nt with Bowman. Adding my information to his profile, since I was his new master, was the next step on the road to my demise as a peacekeeper. Because the brand was made with nanobots and not anything actually permanently tattooed onto his skin, it changed easily seconds after I’d finalized the information on my holoscreen. He was still a slave, but he was mine. The other brands were gone, leaving only a small one right against his hairline. I’d been able to choose the size of the mark on his skin, and I’d gone with the smallest option.

  “It’s done,” I told him. He was off the bed within seconds and in front of the mirror.

  “It’s gone.”

  He sounded so relieved. I hated to tell him the truth. “Not entirely.” I got off the bed as well so that I could show him. I touched his neck as little as possible. The mark was barely visible, but it was there against his pale skin. “You’re still a slave, but now you’re mine. It was the only way to make it plausible for why you no longer belong to Bowman. Remember the lie just in case anyone ever asks you. Bowman sold you to me for three hundred thousand. That’s it. You don’t have to explain more than that.”

  Arin stepped away from me. He was looking at the floor. “As your slave, what do you expect from me?”

  “I already told you. Come back to Asiq with me so that I can keep an eye on you and know that you’re safe. More than that isn’t going to happen. I own you in name only. It’s just words in your file and a lie in case anyone ever asks what happened and why you’re no longer with Bowman. The secret to a good lie is to stay as close to the truth as possible. I borrowed credits from people for the purpose of purchasing you from him. That lie is close to the truth. Now, get your things together, and we’ll sell the shuttle you made me buy when you stole mine. Then we can go back to Wish and relax and pretend this whole ordeal was extremely easy. And I’ll figure out a lie for why I was trapped in a room with the dead body of your former master.”